# Codex-Tic Audit — Chapter 13 (Codex parallel draft)

id: codex_tic_audit | auditor: Claude | material: `output/drafts/codex/chapter_13.md` (audited in full; nothing outside it)
Stance: skeptical professional editor. Findings convert to synthesis orders. Line numbers refer to the Codex draft file.

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## Tic 1 — Arrangement-coded prose

FOUND — tic 1 arrangement-coded prose — 2 instances:

- FOUND — tic 1 arrangement-coded prose — "Each set of easels stood spine to spine, close enough that the partners could hear each other's jars and far enough that no one could check whether they were being handled correctly. It was an Odile arrangement: logistical on paper, indecent in practice." (line 9, studio opening) — The room is delivered as a curated installation: layout, spec, then a curator's wall text. June never moves through the arrangement or pays its cost; the sentence order serves the display ("here is the system, here is what it means"), not a woman about to paint an entrusted memory three feet from its owner. — ORDER: REWRITE: June must discover the arrangement through her own easel — she hears Theo's jars before she understands why, and the indecency registers as a specific physical fact (his sounds arriving at her back while she cannot check his face), not as a delivered verdict. Cut the "logistical on paper, indecent in practice" caption entirely.

- FOUND — tic 1 arrangement-coded prose — "He had painted the wall halfway gone: green underpainting spread across the left, orange interval down the right, primer dragged over both… The outlet plate was on the floor in the lower right, two screws beside it… No ladder. No noble figure. No woman looking at her own erased work with whatever expression a better book would have assigned her." (line 77, Theo-canvas reveal) — June catalogs the entire composition in gallery-label order — left, right, lower right, then an itemized list of absences — and only after the exhibit is complete does the personal hit arrive (line 79, the tray lip and roller: "Her tool. Her job."). This is the chapter's most dangerous moment for her and she reads it like a condition report. Worse, "whatever expression a better book would have assigned her" is the narrator stepping outside the scene to display its own restraint — meta-commentary, flatly off-register for this book. — ORDER: REPLACE-WITH-CLAUDE-BASE (the initial assessment confirms Claude's canvas reveal obeys Ch12 with plate/screws foregrounded and no noble figure). If any Codex text is retained in synthesis, the tray lip must interrupt the inventory rather than cap it, the three absences must collapse into the one absence that matters (her), and the "better book" aside must be cut without replacement.

## Tic 2 — Taxonomies disguised as narration

FOUND — tic 2 taxonomies disguised as narration — 2 instances:

- FOUND — tic 2 taxonomies disguised as narration — "Priya looked at Ben; Ben looked at the taped edge of his panel as if numbers might be hiding there. Mara said, 'Oh good,' in the tone of a person already assigning napkins to a future event. Ruth wrote nothing down and somehow looked more prepared than anyone." (line 107, showcase announcement) — A reaction census: every cohort member filed with one characterizing beat, in sequence, each captioned. This is a cast tour wearing scene clothing — June, under her own pressure (the showcase is a clock on her lie), would not have the attention budget to collect four labeled specimens. — ORDER: REWRITE: keep at most one reaction, the one that raises June's stakes (Mara, who will drive the flyer photos, is the obvious candidate); the rest of the room stays peripheral noise. The announcement should land on June, not be refracted through a roll call.

- FOUND — tic 2 taxonomies disguised as narration — "The first pairs made it look harmless. Mara and Luis stood by the windows… Priya and Ben took three attempts… Ruth and Sam stood at angles that made no public sense until Sam said, 'Rail behind you,' and Ruth moved without asking, and the photo became a room built for two people who did not owe anyone the diagram." (line 159, flyer photos) — Topic sentence announcing the category, then each couple demonstrated as a specimen of real-coupledom, the last one closed with a thesis caption. The scene purpose is correct — the packet wants social proof that makes June and Theo look false beside real pairs — but the execution is a guided tour through three exhibits, complete before June's turn arrives. — ORDER: REWRITE: collapse to one pair observed closely through June's rising dread, with her attention on the queue shortening rather than on completing the set. The Ruth/Sam beat may survive as the single observed pair (it carries the most contrast), but its closing caption must go; what June takes from it should be felt as her own deficit, not stated as the photo's meaning.

## Tic 3 — Three-item catalogs

FOUND — tic 3 three-item catalogs — 9 instances — the tricolon is this draft's default rhythm, roughly one per 350 words:

- "KEY FOOD CIRCULAR. RICCIS' SCREEN. SIX OR SEVEN CLOTHESPINS." (line 7)
- "She heard the caps come off his tubes in order, heard him pause over one, heard the small give of a palette knife against paint." (line 19)
- "She counted space, counted sag, counted what a nine-year-old could have counted before the paper under his hand buckled." (line 55)
- "the painting looked narrow and airless and exact" (line 71)
- "No ladder. No noble figure. No woman looking at her own erased work…" (line 77)
- "Fine was going into the group thread. Fine was going onto a flyer by the front desk. Fine was going to sit above the class roster…" (line 175)
- "no wet panel on the train, no careful square of cardboard, no evidence to carry except the umber on her cuff and the card in the roll" (line 219)
- "June looked at that, at him, at the light going red across the avenue." (line 237)
- "His airshaft, her offer, the scarf's orange edge, all riding together…" (line 251)

ORDER: REWRITE: a global de-tricolon pass at synthesis. Vary list lengths to the actual count of things in the scene — two items, four items, or one item dwelt on. A triple may survive only where three is the literal count (line 7's card excerpt and line 55's counting beat have the strongest claim; line 55's third clause genuinely lands the nine-year-old). "narrow and airless and exact," "at that, at him, at the light," and the line-251 bag inventory are pure rhythm filler and must be broken. The line-175 "Fine was going…" anaphora is the kiss trigger and currently reads as a rehearsed rhetorical set piece; panic does not scan — rebuild it as escalation with changed syntax or cut to two beats. (Note: Odile's "Three pieces of business" at line 101 is exempt — there really are three, and the list is diegetic.)

## Tic 4 — Thesis closers

FOUND — tic 4 thesis closers — 11 instances — the draft files its own conclusions habitually; primary instances:

- "It was an Odile arrangement: logistical on paper, indecent in practice." (line 9) — paragraph closes by grading itself. ORDER: REWRITE: cut (see tic 1 order).
- "Sad would have been a theft too." (line 71) — states the point of the entire painting sequence; the theft logic is already in the epigraph and in her choices on the canvas. ORDER: REWRITE: cut the sentence; "It did not look sad. She was glad." can stand alone.
- "June went because not going would have been a statement. Theo came because coming was what he did when a room needed a thing done." (line 163) — both characters' motives explained in matched clauses before they act. ORDER: REWRITE: keep the actions, delete the because-clauses; the reader has fourteen chapters of evidence for both motives.
- "June fixed paintings for a living. She knew the moment before a bad passage dried." (line 177) — a thesis delivered *before* the kiss, explaining it in advance. The packet is explicit that the kiss becomes real because her action outruns her explanation; here the explanation arrives first and the action merely executes it. ORDER: REWRITE: cut the rationale; the kiss must arrive unexplained, and the restoration logic may surface only afterward, as her failed attempt to account for what she did.
- "That should have made it funny. It made it worse." (line 183) — captions the beat the previous paragraph already built. ORDER: REWRITE: cut; the loaded brush held away from Mara's scarf does this work by itself.
- "That was mercy. June hated needing it." (line 205) — names Mara's move and June's feeling in one filing motion. ORDER: REWRITE: cut "That was mercy."; if the remaining clause cannot stand, the action above needs sharpening, not a summary.
- "carrying nothing in her hands and too much in the bag." (line 257, final line) — a balanced aphorism close, in direct violation of the packet's closing instruction ("End on concrete phone/object/action, not a single profundity sentence. … No aphorism close."). ORDER: REWRITE: end on the concrete — the step off the curb, the phone face-down against the roll — with no antithetical summary attached.

Lesser instances of the same disease, all ORDER: REWRITE (cut the caption, keep the action): "Mara had a silence that handed the question back with a napkin around it." (line 25); "That was considerate of him and, tonight, unhelpful." (line 113); "The second picture looked worse because it showed effort." (line 169); "That helped and did not help." (line 189).

## Tic 5 — Em-dash interruptions as emotional substitute

CLEAR — tic 5 em-dash interruptions — checked: full text scanned mechanically for em-dashes, en-dashes, and double hyphens (zero occurrences in 257 lines), then manually for dash-equivalent interruptive punctuation — colon breaks, comma stubs, sentence fragments performing unbuilt intensity. — nearest miss: "Theo went still, then not still." (line 181) — a punctuation-shaped intensity stub of exactly the kind a dash usually carries. It passes because the un-stillness is cashed out immediately in observable content: the lifted arm, the loaded brush, the paint kept off Mara's scarf. The beat is built, not gestured at. (Synthesis note: the ", then" construction is on the packet's mid-draft flag list and should be checked by the pattern gate regardless; it is outside this tic's scope.)

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## Verdict

CODEX-TICS-FOUND (4)

Tics 1, 2, 3, and 4 found; tic 5 clear. The draft's continuity is sound and its kiss mechanism obeys the packet, but its connective tissue is Codex throughout: rooms and canvases delivered as exhibits, the cohort toured as a taxonomy, triples as the default pulse, and conclusions filed at the end of nearly every unit. Synthesis should take the Claude base for the canvas reveal, apply the rewrite orders above to everything retained from this draft, and run the de-tricolon and de-caption passes across the full merged text.
