All inputs read and the verification re-run is complete. The full audit follows as my final answer.

---

# Plain-Translation Audit — Chapter 08 "Social Debt" — ROUND 2 (repair verification)

audited text: `output/chapters/chapter_08.md` (revised after round-1 orders)
prior: `output/critiques/claude/chapter_08.plain_translation_round1.md` — DRIFT-FOUND, 6 orders (5 REPLACE: ll. 43, 49, 75, 77, 101; 1 VARY: l. 109)
stance: skeptical editor; generative-not-evaluative; no praise
calibration samples used by name: **Theo voice-card operation snapshot + Dialogue Spec** (`output/style_and_voice.md`), **Ch06 "Sightlines" narrator sample**, **Ch04 Sonia's-table dialogue sample**, **Ch06 bodega cortado exchange**, **Odile / Mara / Luis / Priya / Ben / June Dialogue Specs**
locked text: chapter title; Week 3 study, red folder, Sonia envelope, faced-to-wall storage — all verified untouched by every repair
mechanical gate cross-check: `chapter_08_quality_gate.md` on the revised text — 0 open findings, 0 allowlisted, 64 WATCH (down from 65; the two "somehow" cuts and the l. 109 VARY account for the delta; the new `watch-qs-and-but-start` at l. 109 is the pre-existing "And the stance" opener, non-blocking)
summary verdict (formal verdict at end): **REGISTER-HOLDS — 0 orders**

Input note (snapshot staleness, same class as round 1's): `chapter_08.dialogue_doctor_round2.md` quotes "Somehow it took up more room" (l. 49), "the hinge sentences survive verbatim" (l. 77), and an l. 75 wording ("noticing had become the problem") that predate the round-1 plain-translation repairs; `chapter_08.narrator_publicist_round2.md` verified the same intermediate l. 75 wording. Those audits ran on a pre-repair snapshot. Their findings are checked below against the *current* wording rather than carried on trust: in every case the plain-translation replacement is equal or safer on the axis those audits guard (see per-order verification). The comedy round-2 inventory cites two phrases the repairs have since removed ("required nothing further," item 24; "was still a door," item 47); both removals are examined below for mechanism loss. Nothing in any clean audit is contradicted by the current text in a way that reopens a finding.

---

## Round-1 order execution — verified against quoted current text

**Order 1 (l. 43, REPLACE) — EXECUTED, with one examined deviation.** Current text: *"That was the whole transaction. Theo waited for the follow-up question, and there was not one. No one else at the table had even looked at it. The folder lay on the bench taking up the width of a small guest."* The four-verb analytic caption ("had clocked the folder, identified the contents... issued the relevant material fact, and required nothing further") is gone in full. Deviation: the order wrote "there wasn't one"; the text reads "there was not one" — checked against the chapter's narration norm ("arms did not do," "could not explain"), which the genericization round-2 audit verified as Theo's steadier-syntax register; the full form is the consistent choice, not new drift. Mechanism-loss check on the comedy inventory's item 24: the cut phrase "required nothing further" was the gloss half of that item; Luis's quoted lines (the hyper-competent minimalism) survive untouched, and the no-questions beat now plays as scene (Theo braced, nothing came) instead of summary. No density lost — Luis's inference is recoverable from "Radiator's behind that panel."

**Order 2 (l. 49, REPLACE) — EXECUTED.** Current text: *"The folder stayed exactly where it was. It took up more room."* The "Somehow" hedge is cut; the contradiction now stands unassisted, which was the order's point. The personification family stays at its 4/4 hard cap (small guest, more room, invited too, insulted) — the repair added no fifth instance.

**Order 3 (l. 75, REPLACE) — EXECUTED.** Current text: *"Her fingers folded the corner of her napkin once, a small pleat. He saw it, filed it, and had no right to ask what it meant."* The self-summarizing caption "noticing had become the problem" is gone, which also resolves the round-1 "the problem" echo chain (see Verbatim-Echo Gate). Cross-checked against the narrator-publicist round-2 markers, since that audit verified the intermediate wording: the current version is strictly safer — still zero content asserted to the pleat, perceiver still named and self-indicted ("had no right"), and it no longer even presupposes his noticing as a theme. "Filed" was weighed as a possible reopening of the comedy doctor's closed legal-clerical register and cleared: the closed family is legal (police, evidence, lease); "filed" is Theo's literal flat-file vocabulary (ll. 107, 113), the archive-mind texture the genericization round-1 audit explicitly wanted restored. June's pleat remains a pure voice-card plant ("folds paper corners"), uncashed.

**Order 4 (l. 77, REPLACE) — EXECUTED, with one examined deviation, an improvement.** Current text: *"Sitting here, the math stopped helping. The painting had already happened; the bin only meant June would never get a vote on it. That was the arrangement he was already ashamed of, with the panel removed."* The portable maxim ("You could not make a lie smaller by doing one more thing in secret") and the recursive-negation pair ("The bin was not honesty. The bin was just...") are gone in full. Deviation: the order's wording was "with the evidence removed"; the text reads "with the panel removed." Examined and ruled correct: a second narration "evidence" would have pushed the legal-clerical register to 2 and reopened the family the comedy round-2 audit verified closed at exactly 1 ("become evidence," l. 13). "Panel" is more concrete and keeps the register closed. Recognition-content check against the order's preservation requirements: the decision hinge survives (binning is not subtraction — it forecloses June's say), it is *more* specific than the original (names June and the vote), and the chapter card's "one direct recognition" license is now used once, not three times. The paragraph's opening sentences (Mara planning December, the folder "as if it had been invited too") are unchanged, as ordered.

**Order 5 (l. 101, REPLACE) — EXECUTED.** Current text: *"That was the whole goodbye, and it was the most expensive part of the night."* The chapter's second "somehow" is cut; the title cash-out now lands flush. This also executes the narrator-publicist's twice-carried polish note. Comedy item 44's cost-inversion mechanism is intact without the hedge.

**Order 6 (l. 109, VARY) — EXECUTED to the letter.** Current text: *"Still not good. The arm was still wrong. The brown door was a door. The scarf knot held the bottom of the picture together like it had been hired to. And the stance was still exactly, indefensibly right: toward and away at once."* Exactly the three "still"s the order specified survive (the opener, the arm, the stance); the door and scarf sentences are de-adverbed in the order's own wording. Both jokes land without the adverb — "The brown door was a door" is, if anything, a cleaner deadpan than the anaphoric version. The balanced closing fragments ("Not the part he had gotten. The part he had not") are untouched, per the codex tic-10 preservation.

---

## High-risk paragraph comparisons — re-run on revised text

**HOLDS** — "The study was where he had left it..." (l. 5) — **HIGH-RISK 1 of 5** — sample compared: Ch06 narrator sample (clipboard-by-the-desk logistics). Untouched by the repairs; the round-1 rewrite test was re-pressed (*"From across the room it looked like cleanup: paper, palettes, the bristle brushes nobody had claimed in three weeks. That was the idea."*) and still loses: "the small graveyard" is the unclaimed-things-accumulate logic that makes "That was the idea" earn its deadpan, and it is studio vernacular, not mood. HOLDS as printed.

**HOLDS** — "He had the trash bag open... Odile came up the way she did everything in the building..." (l. 15) — **HIGH-RISK 2 of 5** — sample compared: Odile voice-card ("render through action and timing") + Theo relationship register ("filial irritation and awe"). Untouched. The rewrite without "as if the building should be grateful" still arrives at "Nothing stays up here that isn't on the rack" unweighted; the narrator-publicist round-2 re-test independently confirmed the clause is cashed within five sentences by imperatives and pre-staged props. Worse on dramatic content; HOLDS.

**HOLDS** — "Sonia's at nine-fifteen on a class Tuesday..." (l. 31) — **HIGH-RISK 3 of 5** — sample compared: Theo voice-card ("a habit of cataloguing what people need"). Untouched. Re-tested the generic-you-adjacent typology ("sitting the way people sit when they have announced they are only staying for one coffee and are on their second") against the flat-facts rewrite: the rewrite keeps the data and loses the announced-versus-actual gap that is both the joke and a rhyme with the panel's toward-and-away thesis. Typing behavior is the card's cataloguing habit. HOLDS, narrowly, as in round 1.

**HOLDS** — "Theo laughed, and meant it, and did the inventory under the table..." (l. 63) — **HIGH-RISK 4 of 5** — sample compared: Theo voice-card ("mental inventories... must vary and not become catalog prose"). Untouched. The dissolve-into-beats rewrite still orphans the l. 77 turn, which now reads "the math stopped helping" against precisely this priced ledger ("which cost nothing to give"); cutting the catalog would cut the thing the repaired hinge refers back to. Single inventory in the chapter; ends on June; phone-checking simile keeps it behavior. HOLDS.

**HOLDS** — "Still not good. The arm was still wrong..." (l. 109) — **HIGH-RISK 5 of 5** — sample compared: Theo voice-card + the l. 9 defect inventory it reprises. Re-run *post-VARY*: the fresh-worded re-assessment rewrite (*"Nothing had improved on the walk..."*) is still worse, because the item-by-item re-run of scene one's bin-list as a keep-list is the decision dramatized, ending on the white wedge forward hook. The thinned drumbeat (three "still"s) preserves the structure while removing the patterned rhythm; the paragraph now does what round 1 said it did, minus the gate hit. HOLDS.

## Repaired-site paragraph verdicts (re-audited as paragraphs, not just as orders)

**HOLDS** — "Theo moved it. Luis nodded once..." (l. 43) — sample compared: Ch04 Sonia's-table sample + Theo voice-card. The binding-register version *is* now what is printed; a further plain pass could only cut "taking up the width of a small guest," which is the capped personification family doing the chapter's debt work — a drama loss with no density gain.

**HOLDS** — "Theo watched June look at the plate..." (l. 49) — sample compared: Theo voice-card. Two declarative sentences, object-as-feeling with no hedge left to remove. Nothing to translate.

**HOLDS** — "Her fingers folded the corner of her napkin once..." (l. 75) — sample compared: June voice-card (stress tell) rendered through Theo's card lexicon ("filed"). A plainer version ("He saw it and didn't ask") loses "filed" — the involuntary-archivist beat that ties the pleat to the flat-file ending — and loses "no right," the lie's price. Worse on fidelity and drama.

**HOLDS** — "Mara was planning Tuesdays into December..." (l. 77) — sample compared: Theo voice-card ("practical-to-emotional; then goes very plain"). The paragraph now runs evidence → arithmetic failing → one recognition, in scene nouns. The only further cut available is the recognition itself, which the chapter card requires. Nothing portable remains (gate analysis below).

**HOLDS** — "They broke up the way the group broke up now, with logistics." (l. 101) — sample compared: Ch06 narrator sample + Theo voice-card. With the hedge gone the sentence is logistics pricing a feeling, his mandated channel. The generic-you in "the wave you give someone you will see Tuesday because there is a table now" was re-weighed and re-cleared: anchored to Tuesday and the table, it is the plot stated as a gesture.

**LOCKED** — title; Week 3 study (l. 9), red folder + SONIA envelope (l. 23), faced-to-wall storage (l. 113) — re-verified present and byte-identical in function; no repair touched any locked element.

---

## Aphorism Gate (zero tolerance) — re-run on full revised text

**Round-1 failure (l. 77) — RESOLVED.** The maxim and the recursive-negation pair are gone. The replacement sentences were tested for inherited pull-quote shape: "The painting had already happened; the bin only meant June would never get a vote on it" fails portability — it requires the painting, the bin, and June; lifted out of context it is not a claim about anything. "That was the arrangement he was already ashamed of, with the panel removed" is anchored to the arrangement and the panel. Neither is epigraph-shaped. No re-failure.

**New-material sweep (all six repair sites):** "He saw it, filed it, and had no right to ask what it meant" — triadic cadence, but every clause hangs on an antecedent pleat; not portable. "Theo waited for the follow-up question, and there was not one" — narrative fact. "The brown door was a door" — tested as tautology-aphorism shape ("X was X" is a quotable form); cleared because it is a defect verdict about a specific failed booth, comic only inside the l. 9 inventory it reprises. No repair installed a quotable shape.

**Re-confirmed passes from round 1 (strongest candidates, work shown):** "People come back to warm rooms." (l. 99) — still PASS: Luis's spec licenses the gnomic-concrete fragment ("Paint has weight."), the room is literally warm (his own radiator line at l. 41), and it is his single scene line carrying usable December information. "He set the alarm and went home owing everyone." (l. 117) — still PASS: fails portability ("everyone" has no external referent), makes no general claim, sits flush against the concrete closing checklist. Cleared counter-candidates re-verified in place: "I rank everything. I just usually don't read out the results" (self-disclosure, June's card); "Different disease. Same drawer." (Ben's self-aimed diagnosis, at his cap); "the only way to lose was to ask a follow-up question" (house-specific Odile rule, not portable). The two raw-draft maxims confirmed cut in round 1 ("Trash kept secrets...", the deposits/false-name line) have not resurfaced anywhere in the revised text.

**APHORISM-GATE: PASS — zero failures.**

## Verbatim-Echo Gate — re-run on full revised text

**Round-1 finding 1 ("still" ×5, l. 109) — RESOLVED.** Now ×3, exactly the survivors the VARY order specified; the drumbeat reads as opener-plus-confirmation, not pattern. Adjacent check: l. 111's "The math still worked" was re-weighed as a possible fourth beat in proximity and cleared — it belongs to the math triplet (transformative: works → stops helping → works and is disobeyed), not to the assessment anaphora.

**Round-1 finding 2 ("the problem" chain) — RESOLVED.** The l. 75 instance is gone with the REPLACE; the remaining two (l. 11 "The problem was the stance," l. 31 "which was itself the new problem") name different, concrete problems and are spaced. No order.

**New echo introduced by repair 1, weighed:** "follow-up question" now appears twice — l. 27 ("the only way to lose was to ask a follow-up question") and l. 43 ("Theo waited for the follow-up question, and there was not one"). CLEARED as transformative: the referent and position both move — at l. 27 Theo is the one who refuses to ask Odile; at l. 43 he braces to receive the question and the cohort extends him the same no-questions courtesy. The repetition tracks the house etiquette across rooms and inverts Theo from withholder to beneficiary; it is the tie the round-1 order deliberately built, doing argument work, not echo poetics.

**Other candidates re-checked:** "taking up the width of a small guest" (l. 43) / "It took up more room" (l. 49) — the capped personification family's deliberate escalation, transformative (size asserted → size growing). "the arrangement" (ll. 13, 77) — transformative: the repetition is the recognition (binning is the same arrangement again); standing deal vocabulary per the genericization audit. "exactly" ×4 in narration (ll. 23, 49, 63, 109) — spaced, each modifying different content; repeated-descriptor pressure is the gate's WATCH business, not a verbatim echo. The "lives" volley (ll. 85–89) and "heard himself not use it" inversion — unchanged, cleared as in round 1.

**VERBATIM-ECHO: PASS — both round-1 findings resolved, no new echo failures.**

---

## Chapter verdict

All six round-1 orders are verified executed against quoted current text, two with deviations that were examined and ruled improvements ("was not one" matches the chapter's narration register; "panel" for "evidence" keeps the legal-clerical register closed at 1, which the ordered wording would have breached). The five high-risk paragraphs re-ran and HOLD against their named samples; all five repaired sites HOLD as paragraphs in their own right; the Aphorism and Verbatim-Echo Gates pass with the round-1 failures resolved and the one repair-introduced repetition cleared as transformative. No locked text was touched. No replacement introduced new drift, and no order this audit could issue would remove anything but working material.

**REGISTER-HOLDS — 0 orders.**
