clean up edits and chapter 15 done, 16 in draft

chapters/book2/ch01-final.md

@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 
 Godsday mornings had a particular quality at Chandler's Row — the absence of routine rather than the presence of leisure. It had been three months since the Floundry case, and the rhythm had settled into something that almost passed for permanence. No sixth-bell training, no guild correspondence, no Thresholds opening at seventh bell. Just the tallow-and-cold-stone smell of the building settling into its day off, the muted sounds of Drenwick doing the same, and the specific silence of a home where two people were awake but hadn't yet needed to speak.
 
-Mere was at the kitchen table. Her hair was loose — a Godsday concession that lasted until approximately the moment she found something worth focusing on, at which point the ponytail would reappear with the mechanical precision of a woman arming herself for intellectual combat. She had a cup of tea, a pen, and a ledger she'd acquired from somewhere. The ledger was not new. It had the particular rigidity of a book that had been opened, used for exactly its intended purpose, and closed with the care of someone who believed that stationery deserved the same respect as structural engineering.
+Mere was at the kitchen table. Her hair was loose — a Godsday concession that lasted until approximately the moment she found something worth focusing on, at which point the ponytail would reappear with the mechanical precision of a woman arming herself for intellectual combat. She had a cup of tea, a pen, and a ledger she'd acquired from somewhere. The ledger was not new. Its spine held stiff — opened, used for exactly its intended purpose, and closed with care that suggested stationery deserved the same respect as structural engineering.
 
 (*Morning. Late winter. The pewter light through the west-facing kitchen window — noted, filed, not mentioned. Reserves: ninety-one percent. Bracelet: warm amber, resting. Sniff in his corner, doing what Sniff did on mornings when no one had dropped food yet, which was existing with the focused patience of a dog who understood probability.*)
 
@@ -72,7 +72,7 @@ Not her way. My way. The noise way — branching scenarios, edge cases, continge
 
 (*The food line needs seasonal adjustment — winter produce costs more because supply shrinks and preservation adds margin. Summer surplus offsets but you can't eat a surplus in February. And the workshop supplies — she's listed Mere's moss materials at current prices but dried silverthorn has increased eleven percent in the last six months and if Gavren's supplier adjusts — Gavren would know, I should ask Gavren — no, focus, the line item is two silvers but the trailing average suggests two and a quarter, which across twelve months is three additional silvers which isn't nothing when you're—*)
 
-Two hours later, Mere came back into the kitchen. She'd put her hair up at some point. The ponytail was back. She'd been reading, or preparing, or solving something in the other room with the focused absence that was her version of giving me space.
+Two hours later, Mere came back into the kitchen. She'd put her hair up at some point. The ponytail was back. She'd been reading, or preparing, or solving something in the other room — her version of giving me space, which looked identical to ignoring me and worked better than most people's active effort.
 
 She looked at my work. Pages of it. Branching diagrams. Notes in margins of notes. Thirteen scenarios with probability weightings that I'd assigned based on instinct rather than data because the data didn't exist for half of them and the noise had filled the gaps with educated paranoia.
 
@@ -92,7 +92,7 @@ Not smug. Not triumphant. Not even satisfied. The flat delivery of a woman who h
 
 I looked at the house plans on the wall. East-facing kitchen. Two sets of annotations. Two methods for reaching the same number. I could work with that.
 
-The surplus, for the record, was eight and a half silvers per month at conservative estimate. At that rate, the house was fifty-one months away if nothing changed. Four years and three months. I'd calculated six scenarios where it was faster and four where it was slower and three where it was significantly slower, and the median of all thirteen still rounded to Mere's number.
+The surplus, for the record, was eight and a half silvers per month, conservatively. At that rate, the house was fifty-one months away if nothing changed. Four years and three months. I'd calculated six scenarios where it was faster and four where it was slower and three where it was significantly slower, and the median of all thirteen still rounded to Mere's number.
 
 Different method. Same answer.
 
@@ -144,7 +144,7 @@ We trained for another twenty minutes. Easy rhythm. The back-and-forth of two pe
 
 Normal. Comfortable. Two people riffing the way people riffed when the shared language had enough vocabulary to be interesting and not enough to be boring.
 
-The light was fading by the time we finished. Winter afternoons in Drenwick surrendered early, the grey sky compressing toward a horizon that was already dark by fifth bell. Leon put his coat back on, brushed soot from the collar, and made his standard departure. A nod, a half-wave, and the exit of a man who'd given an hour of his Godsday to standing in the cold getting scorched and called it leisure.
+The light was fading by the time we finished. Winter afternoons in Drenwick surrendered early, the grey sky compressing toward a horizon that was already dark by fifth bell. Leon put his coat back on, brushed soot from the collar, and made his standard departure. A nod, a half-wave, gone — an hour of his Godsday spent standing in the cold getting scorched, and he'd call it leisure.
 
 "Same time tomorrow," he said.
 
@@ -152,11 +152,11 @@ The light was fading by the time we finished. Winter afternoons in Drenwick surr
 
 "Fourth bell. No Godsday rules."
 
-I watched him go. Filed the training data the way I always did — reserve cost, technique assessment, the slow and measurable accretion of capability that passed for progress when you were rebuilding something that should never have been allowed to atrophy. The noise processed it. The noise processed everything.
+I watched him go. Filed the training data the way I always did — reserve cost, technique assessment, slow progress measured in half-seconds and corrections that shouldn't have been necessary if I hadn't let the skills atrophy. The noise processed it. The noise processed everything.
 
 * * *
 
-Devod arrived at Chandler's Row roughly an hour after I got back, carrying a rolled sheet of paper and the particular energy of a man who had been thinking about something for several days and had reached the point where not sharing it constituted a medical emergency.
+Devod arrived at Chandler's Row roughly an hour after I got back, carrying a rolled sheet of paper and vibrating with the unmistakable need to share something he'd been thinking about for several days — the point where not saying it constituted a medical emergency.
 
 "Pilings," he said, before the door had fully closed behind him.
 
@@ -166,11 +166,11 @@ Devod arrived at Chandler's Row roughly an hour after I got back, carrying a rol
 
 (*There wasn't a drainage problem. There was a drainage question, which I'd raised two weeks ago in the context of the house plans and which Devod had apparently absorbed, incubated, and returned to me in the form of a fully developed theory that covered six scenarios, five of which were wrong, and one of which—*)
 
-"The problem," Devod continued, gesturing at his sketch with the enthusiasm of a man presenting a battle plan, "is that everyone puts the drainage outside the foundation. Outside. Like an afterthought. But if you route it through the pilings themselves — hollow pilings, I'm talking about, bored through the centre — you get structural support and water management in one system. One system."
+"The problem," Devod continued, gesturing at his sketch like he was presenting a battle plan, "is that everyone puts the drainage outside the foundation. Outside. Like an afterthought. But if you route it through the pilings themselves — hollow pilings, I'm talking about, bored through the centre — you get structural support and water management in one system. One system."
 
 He looked at me as though he'd just solved something that had been troubling the construction industry for centuries.
 
-Sniff, who had emerged from his corner at the sound of a familiar visitor, investigated Devod's boots with the thorough attention of a dog who catalogued people by their footwear. Devod reached down and scratched behind Sniff's ears without breaking his monologue. Practised. Automatic. The hands of a man who'd learned that the dog's affection was freely available and required only a minimum investment of contact.
+Sniff, who had emerged from his corner at the sound of a familiar visitor, investigated Devod's boots thoroughly — his personal filing system ran on scent and leather. Devod reached down and scratched behind Sniff's ears without breaking his monologue. Practised. Automatic. The hands of a man who'd learned that the dog's affection was freely available and required only a minimum investment of contact.
 
 "Hollow pilings would compromise the load-bearing capacity," I said.
 
@@ -208,7 +208,7 @@ Mere had been reading in the sitting room throughout this exchange. She appeared
 
 Devod looked down. "Sorry." He moved his paper. The ledger reappeared, unharmed. "I brought apples. From Henwick's orchard. The farmer there, he gives me the windfalls when I do the Thursday route. Good for cooking."
 
-He produced a cloth bag from his coat. Six apples, slightly bruised. He set them on the counter with the careful placement of a man contributing to a household he wasn't sure he belonged in.
+He produced a cloth bag from his coat. Six apples, slightly bruised. He set them on the counter carefully, one at a time — contributing to a household he wasn't sure he belonged in.
 
 Mere took one, examined it, and put it back. "These need another week."
 
@@ -218,19 +218,19 @@ Mere took one, examined it, and put it back. "These need another week."
 
 Devod's face did the thing it did when Mere engaged with him directly — a barely-contained brightness that he immediately dampened, as though joy required the same strategic management as every other emotion. "I'll bring sugar next time."
 
-He stayed for another twenty minutes. Talked about his delivery routes — the Thursday run to Henwick's yard, a new contract he was negotiating with a warehouse on the canal. Asked about the training with Leon, listened to my answer with the attention of a man who was gathering data about the people in his daughter's life without quite admitting that was what he was doing. Offered three more ideas about the house, two of which were impractical and one of which — about timber sourcing from a yard he knew on the eastern road — was worth investigating.
+He stayed for another twenty minutes. Talked about his delivery routes — the Thursday run to Henwick's yard, a new contract he was negotiating with a warehouse on the canal. Asked about the training with Leon, listened to my answer the way he listened to everything about Mere's life — gathering data without quite admitting that was what he was doing. Offered three more ideas about the house, two of which were impractical and one of which — about timber sourcing from a yard he knew on the eastern road — was worth investigating.
 
 He left the way he always left: slightly too many words at the door, a careful not-quite-look at Mere, and the posture of a man walking away from something he wanted to stay near. Sniff watched him go from the window and then returned to his corner, satisfied that the familiar boots would return again soon.
 
 * * *
 
-Evening settled over Chandler's Row with the quiet compression of a winter Godsday — the streets emptying as the cold deepened, lamplight appearing in windows up and down the row, the sounds of the city pulling inward. I sat at the kitchen table with the house plans spread in front of me. Revision ten. East-facing kitchen. Mere's annotations in blue, mine in black. The question mark on the workshop's east wall that I still hadn't asked about. Devod's integration concept — structure and drainage as one system — sitting in the back of my mind, not quite a plan yet but shaping into something that would eventually appear on the drawings as a revision eleven note.
+Evening settled over Chandler's Row with the quiet compression of a winter Godsday — the streets emptying as the cold deepened, lamplight appearing in windows up and down the row, the sounds of the city pulling inward. I sat at the kitchen table with the house plans spread in front of me. The same drawings, the same question mark on the workshop's east wall that I still hadn't asked about. Devod's integration concept — structure and drainage as one system — sitting in the back of my mind, not quite a plan yet but shaping into something that would eventually appear on the drawings as a revision eleven note.
 
 The budget ledger was beside the plans. Mere's columns, my branching scenarios folded beneath. Eight and a half silvers monthly surplus. Fifty-one months at conservative estimate. The same number regardless of method. I was going to have to get used to that.
 
-Mere was in the sitting room with a book on herbalism preparation techniques that she'd been working through for a week. Sniff was in his corner, asleep, breathing the deep and regular rhythm of a dog whose world contained exactly the right number of people and exactly the right amount of food. The bracelet pulsed warm amber against my wrist — resting, full, the autonomous patience of pre-Compact engineering doing what it did when nothing demanded otherwise.
+Mere was in the sitting room with a book on herbalism preparation techniques that she'd been working through for a week. Sniff was in his corner, asleep, breathing the deep and regular rhythm of a dog whose world contained exactly the right number of people and exactly the right amount of food. The bracelet pulsed warm amber against my wrist — resting, full, pre-Compact engineering idling with nothing to demand otherwise.
 
-(*Quiet. The good kind. The kind that comes after a Godsday where the training went well and the budget adds up and the house plans gained something useful from a man who delivers it wrapped in nine wrong ideas. The kind of quiet that Phelan Varrant is supposed to be suspicious of because quiet doesn't last and good things are just the pause between complications. Except.*)
+(*Quiet. The good kind — training went well, budget adds up, house plans gained something useful from a man who delivers it wrapped in nine wrong ideas. The kind Phelan Varrant is supposed to be suspicious of because it doesn't last and good things are just the pause between complications. Except.*)
 
 (*Except the surplus is real. And the training ceiling moved half a second. And Devod's integration concept is genuinely useful. And Mere's budget method works, even though it doesn't work the way mine works, and the fact that both methods produce the same number is—*)
 
@@ -238,13 +238,13 @@ Mere was in the sitting room with a book on herbalism preparation techniques tha
 
 The knock came at the door just past eighth bell.
 
-Not loud. Not urgent. A guild knock — two measured strikes, a pause, a third. The rhythm that meant business, not emergency. Sniff raised his head, assessed the sound with the professional evaluation of a dog who had opinions about visitors, and settled back down when the knock didn't repeat. Guild knocks were familiar now. Guild knocks meant work. Sniff had learned that work meant Phelan leaving, not strangers entering, and had adjusted his threat assessment accordingly.
+Not loud. Not urgent. A guild knock — two measured strikes, a pause, a third. The rhythm that meant business, not emergency. Sniff raised his head, assessed the sound — he had opinions about visitors — and settled back down when the knock didn't repeat. Guild knocks were familiar now. Guild knocks meant work. Sniff had learned that work meant Phelan leaving, not strangers entering, and had adjusted his threat assessment accordingly.
 
 I opened the door. A guild runner — young, cold, wearing the deliberately unremarkable clothing that the guild preferred for its messengers. She held a folded note sealed with the guild's wax stamp.
 
 "From Master Ledger," she said. "He requests your attendance at the hall tomorrow. Eighth bell. He said to tell you it's not the kind of thing that waits."
 
-I took the note. The runner left with the efficient departure of someone who had more deliveries to make and a Godsday evening she'd rather be spending elsewhere.
+I took the note. The runner left quickly — more deliveries to make, a Godsday evening she'd rather be spending elsewhere.
 
 The note was brief. Ledger's handwriting — precise, angular, the penmanship of a man who treated communication as engineering. No case number. No classification. No client summary, no fee schedule, none of the structured formatting that case briefs arrived in — the ones that had been landing on this same kitchen table for weeks. This wasn't an assignment. This was something else. Just a time, a location, and a single line: