polishing, getting ready for export

chapters/book1/ch17-final.md

@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ The floor rose up to meet me, or I went down to meet the floor. There was no pra
 
 I woke up to a headache that had opinions about my continued existence.
 
-Not a headache. A migraine. The kind that starts behind your eyes and works its way into the bones of your skull with the systematic thoroughness of a man dismantling a house he's been hired to demolish. Every heartbeat was a hammer strike. Every breath was a concession to biology that the migraine considered optional.
+A migraine. The kind that starts behind your eyes and works its way into the bones of your skull with the systematic thoroughness of a man dismantling a house he's been hired to demolish. Every heartbeat was a hammer strike. Every breath was a concession to biology that the migraine considered optional.
 
 (*Inventory. Slow. Ceiling — guild planning room. Same stains. Horizontal. Floor, not chair. Blanket. Two blankets. Pillow that isn't a pillow — folded jacket.*)
 
@@ -40,7 +40,7 @@ I turned my head. This was a mistake. The migraine punished the movement with a
 
 Something was on the floor beside me, within arm's reach.
 
-A cup of water. A wrapped bundle of food — bread, dried meat, an apple, the kind of efficient provisions assembled by someone who understood that recovery required calories, not presentation. A folded piece of paper.
+A cup of water. A wrapped bundle of food — bread, dried meat, an apple, provisions assembled with the understanding that recovery required calories, not presentation. A folded piece of paper.
 
 And a small ceramic bowl with ground root in it, measured to the quarter-grain, ready to steep.
 
@@ -50,7 +50,7 @@ Thornwell root. Ground specifically for migraine dosing — not the rough chop y
 
 (*The dog crash. Migraine at second bell. Gavren's stock — stolen, rough-ground, too much, slept until noon. She was there the next morning. She saw the state of me and she filed it. Not the emotion. The data. And the solution is sitting on the floor next to my head.*)
 
-I reached for the water first. My hand was shaking — not the fine tremor from the Barrows, the kind of whole-arm instability that meant my reserves were somewhere below functional. Drank. Reached for the thornwell root. Added it to the water. Drank that too.
+I reached for the water first. My hand was shaking — not the fine tremor from the Barrows, whole-arm instability — reserves somewhere below functional. Drank. Reached for the thornwell root. Added it to the water. Drank that too.
 
 The migraine didn't vanish. Thornwell root doesn't work that way. But after two minutes the hammer strikes softened from demolition to renovation, and the light from the windows stopped feeling like a personal attack.
 
@@ -68,7 +68,7 @@ I ate the bread. Slowly. The dried meat was tougher on my jaw than I'd have like
 
 The bracelet.
 
-I looked at my wrist. The stone was — different. Not the warm amber-red I'd grown used to, and not the deep black of full depletion. Something between. A dark, tired colour that was slowly — visibly slowly, if I watched for thirty seconds — warming back toward amber. Faint heat against my skin. Not the burn from last night. A trickle. A recovery.
+I looked at my wrist. The stone was — different. Neither the warm amber-red I'd grown used to, nor the deep black of full depletion. Something between. A dark, tired colour that was slowly — visibly slowly, if I watched for thirty seconds — warming back toward amber. Faint heat against my skin. Not the burn from last night. A trickle. A recovery.
 
 (*Wellspring. Same as the mine — reserves dropping past threshold, flow reversed. It happened again. The bracelet drained itself to keep me — what? Alive? Conscious longer than I should have been? Both? Mere's question: "What happens when it's full?" It saves for you. Repeating behaviour. Not one-time. The bracelet is running a programme older than the Compact and it's running it for me.*)
 
@@ -106,7 +106,7 @@ I looked at the diagrams again. The notation was Leon's but the architecture was
 
 "Anything happened with the Compact?"
 
-Leon set down his tea. His expression changed — not concern, exactly. The flat, factual face he wore when he was about to deliver information he'd already processed and filed under *problems that need addressing*.
+Leon set down his tea. His jaw tightened. The flat, factual face he wore when he was about to deliver information he'd already processed and filed under *problems that need addressing*.
 
 "Ledger came by. Last night, around tenth bell — four hours after you went down." He counted the items on his fingers. "One: formal motion from the Compact to transfer Ned Floundry to their medical supervision. 'For his own safety.' Guild blocked it. Ledger said it wasn't even close — guild charter gives the contracted practitioner primacy during an active engagement, and your engagement contract is clean."
 
@@ -154,7 +154,7 @@ I looked at the bracelet. The stone was still that tired, warming colour. If I n
 
 "Where is she?"
 
-"Thresholds. Back room. She left about an hour ago — said the preparation needs monitoring at specific intervals. She'll be back." Leon's expression did something complicated. "Devod's been running between here and there. Carrying things. He doesn't know what half of it is, but he carries it carefully."
+"Thresholds. Back room. She left about an hour ago — said the preparation needs monitoring at specific intervals. She'll be back." Something crossed Leon's face that he didn't bother naming. "Devod's been running between here and there. Carrying things. He doesn't know what half of it is, but he carries it carefully."
 
 I looked around the room again with eyes that were starting to process properly. The chairs pushed to the walls. The blanket arrangement — not thrown, placed. The pillow that was a folded jacket. My right hand, resting on my chest, was positioned palm-up, fingers slightly curled. That wasn't how I fall. When I go down, my hands close — defensive reflex, fingers in, protecting the joints. Someone had moved my hand. Opened it. Held it, maybe, and then placed it back in a position that was comfortable rather than defensive.
 
@@ -176,7 +176,7 @@ I took the scrap. Carter's observation was about the bracelet's post-stress harm
 
 Filed it. Looked at Devod.
 
-He was looking at the blankets. Then at Mere's note. Then at the food arranged on the floor. Then at a point in the middle distance that wasn't in the room at all.
+His gaze moved — blankets, Mere's note, the food arranged on the floor — and then settled on a point in the middle distance that wasn't in the room at all.
 
 "She stayed," Devod said. Quiet. Not to me — to the room, or to himself, or to twelve years of distance and a lie he didn't know how to unmake. "After everyone else went home for a few hours. She stayed."
 
@@ -194,7 +194,9 @@ Devod blinked. Came back. "She also said — and I'm quoting because she was ver
 
 "She was very specific about the eating."
 
-The door opened again and Mere walked in carrying a leather satchel and wearing the expression of a woman who had been working for fourteen hours and considered this a normal Tuesday.
+I drank the rest of the water. Morning light had shifted across the floorboards while we talked — brighter now, the east windows losing their advantage to the climbing sun. My hands were steadier than they'd been ten minutes ago. The thornwell root, the bread, the water — small repairs, adding up. Not ready. But closer.
+
+The door opened and Mere walked in carrying a leather satchel and wearing the expression of a woman who had been working for fourteen hours and considered this a normal Tuesday.
 
 She looked at me. Her eyes did the scan — the systematic assessment that started at the top and worked down, cataloguing data points the way other people catalogue emotions. Skin colour. Eye clarity. Posture. Tremor. The cup of water, half-empty. The thornwell root bowl, used. The bread, mostly eaten.
 
@@ -202,15 +204,15 @@ She looked at me. Her eyes did the scan — the systematic assessment that start
 
 "You prepared it."
 
-"Gavren gave you some when you left. Your dosage was wrong — you slept through the morning. I fixed that."
+"You stole some of Gavren's stock after the dog. Your dosage was wrong — you slept through the morning. I fixed that."
 
-(*She remembered the dosage. Not the fact that I stole it, not the guilt, not the moral dimension — the practical failure. I took too much because my hands were shaking and I ground it rough and I overslept and she filed that under 'inefficiency' and corrected it. Quarter-grain measure. Fine grind. Precise.*)
+(*She'd bypassed the theft, the guilt, the moral dimension — filed straight to the practical failure. I took too much because my hands were shaking and I ground it rough and I overslept and she filed that under 'inefficiency' and corrected it. Quarter-grain measure. Fine grind. Precise.*)
 
 "This time was better," I said.
 
 "I measured it."
 
-She set the satchel on the table and began unpacking — glass jars, sealed, each labelled in her handwriting. The moss preparations. Standard concentration in one set, the in-progress altered preparation materials in another. She moved with the economy of someone who'd done this particular unpacking sequence enough times in the last fourteen hours that it had become muscle memory.
+She set the satchel on the table and began unpacking — glass jars, sealed, each labelled in her handwriting. The moss preparations. Standard concentration in one set, the in-progress altered preparation materials in another. She moved economically — fourteen hours of repetition had made the unpacking sequence muscle memory.
 
 "The standard preparation is complete," she said. "Dampening field strength consistent with the Layer 1 requirements from your architecture. I tested the suppression threshold against three control samples." She placed the jars in a specific order. "The altered concentration for Layer 3 is at seventy percent. I need the anchor's resonance characteristics — recalibration speed, grip tolerance, the bond weakness threshold. Without those numbers, I'm estimating the suppression band, and an estimate isn't sufficient for a preparation that has to target a specific frequency."