All inputs verified against the current revision (137 lines; the chapter has changed materially since Round 3 via the positive-prose and characters-wrong repairs). The mechanical sweeps come back clean: zero `load-bearing` hits, zero diagnosis-adjacent strings. The audit below is my full response.

# Dialogue Doctor — Chapter 09 ("Local Work") — Round 4 Final Verification

Read cold against: `output/chapters/chapter_09.md` (current revision, post prose/character repairs), the three prior Dialogue Doctor audits, the repair-causing audits (`chapter_09.positive_prose_round3.md`, `chapter_09.characters_wrong_round2.md`), voice cards (June, Asha, Nia; global voice rules), `premise/READING_GUIDE.md` §2 (plain-speech floor; zero-tolerance dialogue diagnosis) and §6, `premise/patterns/reading_guide_bans.tsv`, the dialogue scene manifest (one scene), and the mechanical gate report (0 open findings; the "load-bearing" ban re-swept by regex against the current text — no hits).

**Diff since Round 3, documented before re-pressing, because several lines Round 3's verdicts cited no longer exist:** (a) the lunch close was rebuilt per positive-prose Round 2/3 — the "city growing a handle" interiority paragraph is gone, replaced by "June laughed, and the laugh came late. Asha's peeled label was still stuck to the bucket between them." (line 99) plus the single-statement inventory paragraph ending "Neither one was nothing." (line 101); (b) Asha's "I've said yes to stable things… hated myself by Tuesday. That's not advice." was replaced by the card-sanctioned recommendation line plus the re-aimed 2019 anecdote (line 105); (c) June's pity-misread was installed at lines 69 and 135 per characters-wrong Round 1; (d) "That's rude even when everyone is broke." became "Once it posts, she's calling whoever answers first." (line 133); (e) Kessler moved from the loading door into the lunch (line 97), with both contacts still texted at the door (line 129); (f) the vouch retargeted from "real paycheck" to "decent" (line 83); (g) the Round 1 interiority repair at the test-square beat ("The cover had not worked. Asha had seen the wrong square and chosen the elevator anyway.") was cut, leaving "Asha looked at the middle square, and at the run beneath it, and went to pad the elevator. June set the foamcore face-down on the crate dolly before she could make another mark." (line 55) — pressed hard under mode 3 below, because Round 2 ordered that repair preserved. Plain-speech floor re-verified on current evidence: June's "I don't know." / "My lease is up in December either way." (line 87) and Asha's want stated as fact, "If you pass, send her my name. I can do the boring parts and still paint at night." (line 105); every exchange remains followable as text without decoding.

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## SCENE 01 (lines 2–137; gallery project room → loading dock; speakers: June, Asha, Nia [text], incoming artist, Marisol, driver [indirect])

**1. VOICE CONVERGENCE: CLEAN** — re-ran the blind test on the rebuilt lunch, where the risk is highest: both speakers now hold short clipped questions ("Renewal odds?", "You'd actually go?" Asha; "How cheap is forgive?", "What does Dana need?" June). They still separate: Asha's questions are network-vetting shorthand off her card's invoice/rate lane, June's are word-pickup and object-vetting ("How cheap is forgive?" reuses Asha's own "cheap enough to forgive" the way June reuses a pigment name). June keeps the chapter's only standalone epigram ("The wall's been here. The wall wins.", line 27); Asha's new lines are want-statements and anecdote, not maxims. Strongest counter-candidate: the "at night" echo — June's "The math here is a hobby I do at night." (line 87) against Asha's "I can do the boring parts and still paint at night." (line 105). It survives because the second is Asha's voice-card example line verbatim, the two sit eighteen lines apart with different work (June self-deprecating about her finances; Asha stating a want), and shared vocabulary between two artists discussing the same constraint is responsive echo, not rhythm convergence — same verdict as Asha's "The math here is bad," *agreed* (line 89), which picks up June's word in explicit agreement.

**2. MONOTONE Q/A RHYTHM: CLEAN** — the rebuilt lunch sequence pressed in full ("Keys to what?", "Renewal odds?", "You'd actually go?", "How cheap is forgive?", "What does Dana need?", "You'd take Philadelphia?"). Strongest counter-candidate: the open, two short-question/short-answer volleys back to back ("Keys to what?" → three fragments, lines 77–79; "Renewal odds?" → two sentences, lines 81–83) — survives because the third beat breaks the meter (Asha's two-sentence advice, the phone put down, line 85), the masses swing hard around the middle (Asha's ninety-word Dana paragraph at line 89; June's inventory paragraph at line 101), and the physical beats (chewing, the label pressed to the bucket, the balled sandwich paper, crumbs brushed onto the drop cloth) keep interrupting. The walk-through's three-line exchange (lines 117–121) is functional and broken by narration. No new symmetry.

**3. MISSING INTERIORITY: CLEAN, with the regression pressed hardest** — the Round 1 repair sentence ("The cover had not worked…") was cut by a later repair despite Round 2's preservation directive. The question is whether the current beat fails rule 9, not whether the old text survived, and it does not fail: June's POV tracks Asha's gaze precisely — "Asha looked at the middle square, *and at the run beneath it*" (line 55) — which is the registration that the cover failed, rendered as perception per the global rule (feeling through attention before naming), and it converts immediately to self-arresting action ("face-down… before she could make another mark"), which carries her judgment of her own compulsion. The exchange it caps is three lines of motivated deflection sitting directly on a hundred-plus words of valve/Theo/Tuesday interiority (lines 43–45). The mind is leaner here than in Rounds 1–3 but not dark. Elsewhere the focalizer is fully present: the swatch-reading of *keys* and *after hours* (line 71), the flinch-then-correction at line 69, the laugh-came-late beat plus inventory (lines 99–101), the six-years-not-catching-up cost (line 107), the rail-tighten at the walk-through (line 123), and the blocked reply at clock-out (line 135). Strongest counter-candidate remains "It's a test." / "Of what?" with no interiority between lines — survives as before: short, motivated, cost landing immediately after.

**4. QUESTIONS-AS-STATEMENTS: CLEAN** — every question re-checked, including the new "Renewal odds?" (line 81; genuine term-vetting, answered with substance) and the artist's "Could this one be warmer?" (line 117; a real perceptual complaint, sincerely answered and sincerely wrong). Strongest counter-candidate: "You'd take Philadelphia?" … "If it were you." (line 103) — June soliciting a verdict could be a position in question costume; it survives because she genuinely doesn't have the answer ("I don't know," sixteen lines earlier), and Asha answers it as asked, with a hedge and a disclosure, not portent. No speaker delivers a verdict as a question.

**5. FAKE-McCARTHY MINIMALISM: CLEAN** — the chapter's most clipped runs re-pressed: "Truck." (line 109) and "Before Friday." (line 131) are schedule-true fragments, attributed and blocked (Asha checking the time; the scarf-wrapping exit). "Studio rent on the first." / "No fish in the microwave." (line 97) is a requirements list answering a direct question, carrying its own "Asha said." Strongest counter-candidate: the new "Six weeks. Pays late. Pays real." inside line 97 — three two-word fragments could perform starkness, but they are Asha's card register built on her example line "The install pays late, but it pays," embedded in a longer turn with full attribution, and immediately deflated by the practical "I can send both."

**6. JARGON-TRADING WITHOUT TRANSLATION: CLEAN** — trade terms re-verified through the changed lines. Spot-prime/feather/flash is translated in the same breath ("it'll look like the wall has a rash," line 31); keys/W-2/after-hours cash out through June's swatch-reading (line 71: "A door you could open at night… Regular money arriving on a schedule"); "armory build-out… if you can show up with a level" (line 97) is weighable on contact. Strongest counter-candidate: Nia's "Programs + fabrication role" (line 63) — survives because the second text and June's reading convert it to "run a job and fix the press," concrete on arrival.

**7. ATTRIBUTION OPACITY: CLEAN** — read with attributions covered. The lunch two-hander alternates strictly with beat-anchors every second or third turn (chewed/label, line 81; phone down, line 85; cup turned, line 87; agreed, line 89; sandwich paper, line 93; "Asha said," line 97; "she asked," line 103; stood, line 105). Strongest counter-candidate: the unattributed "Before Friday." (line 131) — survives because Asha has just spoken and speaks next with a blocking tag ("Asha lifted a hand"), so the echo can only be June. The three-speaker walk-through stays legible: "It doesn't read the same." (line 121) can only be the artist.

**FAKE-SHARP: CLEAN** — the three changed lines named for focused verification, each pressed against the full cut-list:
- *"If you pass, send her my name. I can do the boring parts and still paint at night."* (line 105) — this is Asha's voice-card example line nearly verbatim, a want stated as a request, dependent on its referents ("her," "pass") and worthless detached from this lunch. The boring-parts/paint-at-night contrast has shape, but it is her sanctioned vocabulary doing plain-speech-floor work, spoken while standing up to leave — speakable, not quotable. It also re-arms the Ch 22 seed (see notes).
- *"I took a museum prep job in 2019 for health insurance, didn't stretch a canvas until May, and caught up. You catch up."* (line 105) — the closing two words are the test: a generalization tacked to an anecdote could be a compact aphorism. It survives because it is the exact reassurance people actually say (repeats her own verb plainly rather than coining an image), it arrives where Asha should be ordinary and confident, and the book immediately prices it as wrong — "did not say that she had spent six years not catching up" (line 107). A maxim the narrative undercuts at the focalizer's expense is the characters-wrong field operating ("assumes everyone can survive on the same hustle math"), not polish; per rule 7 the line lands as projection, not revelation.
- *"Don't make her chase you. Once it posts, she's calling whoever answers first."* (line 133) — replaced Round 2's capper-shaped "That's rude even when everyone is broke." The replacement is strictly better: a literal, situation-bound prediction of Nia's hiring behavior, consistent with Asha's earlier network mechanics ("People tell three people before they post," line 85), speakable at a loading door, zero abstraction.
Also re-pressed and surviving: "I'd call. I don't know if I'd go." (hedged, self-implicating); the lie-down-in-the-loading-dock hyperbole (line 37); Nia's typed "You'd be good at the parts nobody romanticizes." and "You're the shortest list I have." (lines 63–67 — composition is world-true in a typed recruiting message, and both sit in her card's no-mystification lane); "The math here is a hobby I do at night." (line 87, sanctioned since Round 2); Marisol's "It's perfect, thank you, send me the hours tonight." (line 125, overheard-true). The strongest counter-candidate in the chapter is now narration, not dialogue: "Neither one was nothing." (line 101) — litotes with shape, but it is the positive-prose audit's ordered single-statement landing, interiority not speech, and it adds the judgment no line of dialogue carries.

**INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION: CLEAN** — rule 9's second direction tested on every changed beat. The focused check on June's typed/deleted reply: at line 69 the sequence is flat declaratives in her card rhythm (perception, judgment, self-correction) — "June read it once and got mad… She deleted it. Nia had not written charity. She had written *run a job*, *fix the press*, *shortest list*." — the re-quoted words are evidence in her self-correction, not a caption on Nia's text; nothing is explained twice. At line 135, "Wrong, and still the only sentence she had." is the most composed sentence in the close — it survives because it is particular (this sentence, this thread), it is judgment-plus-self-rebuke per her card's interiority rhythm, and it rates the truth of her own unsent claim, adding the cost the blank reply field cannot show. The cuts since Round 3 (the "cover had not worked" sentence, the "city growing a handle" paragraph) thinned the scene without darkening it — the remaining anchors (lines 69, 71, 99–101, 107, 123, 135) keep the focalizer's lived relation to every exchange on the page.

**DIALOGUE-DIAGNOSIS (reading guide §2, zero tolerance): CLEAN** — full re-sweep of the current text, including the specifically named Dana/No-speech area. "No speech required." (line 93) still survives: it sizes the ask (Dana's requirements turn out to be rent, a house rule, maybe a photo — literally no speech), characterizing nobody's language; nothing in lines 89–97 comments on how Dana communicates. Other candidates pressed: "She said decent. Knowing her, she means it." (line 83) — the person-targeting vouch sanctioned since Round 1, retargeted to a new word, still rating Nia's sincerity, not her phrasing. "Wrong, and still the only sentence she had." (line 135) — rates the truth-content of June's own unsent claim; §2 bans commenting on "language, phrasing, rhythm, or delivery," and truth-content is none of these (concurring with characters-wrong Round 2's clearance on independent reading). "Nia had not written charity. She had written *run a job*…" (line 69) — restates content as evidence. "a thumbs-up June had treated like a PAID stamp" (line 61) — June's own treatment of a reaction, action simile. "You'd be good at the parts nobody romanticizes." (line 63) — "romanticizes" rates attitudes toward work, not anyone's speech. "which Asha noted aloud, to the driver, with the date" (line 111) — reports that she said it, not how it sounded. "which was the highest review the wall could receive" (line 115) — rates a non-action against the wall, no language involved. Zero instances. The "load-bearing" ban: regex re-swept this session, no hits ("loading dock/door/dock light" do not match the pattern).

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## REVISION ORDERS

None. No FAIL verdicts this round.

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**Non-blocking notes for the orchestrator:**
1. **The Round 2/3 continuity note is now CLOSED:** the relocated "send Nia my name" seed (Asha's card payoff; chapter card's "Asha for Ch 22") is restored at line 105 in its card-sanctioned form. No further continuity action needed before Ch 22.
2. **Bookkeeping:** `output/critiques/claude/chapter_09.dialogue_doctor.md` currently contains the Round 3 audit text, not Round 1 — the round-1 file appears to have been overwritten. The manifest's coverage column also reads "missing" for chapter 09 and its line range (2–131) is stale against the current 137-line revision (still one scene; no headings or scene breaks were added). Worth regenerating the manifest and restoring the round-1 artifact if the archive matters.
3. **For the record:** the Round 1 interiority repair sentence at the test-square beat was replaced, not preserved, by a later repair (mode 3 above explains why the leaner version still passes). If any future pass reopens lines 47–55, re-check rule 9 there first — it is the thinnest interiority in the chapter.

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**OVERALL: CLEAN** — all seven failure modes plus FAKE-SHARP and INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION re-verified against the post-repair text with counter-candidates shown for every verdict. The three changed Asha lines are speakable, card-true, and let her be wrong about June's math at June's silent expense; June's typed/deleted reply stays flat and priced; the Dana/No-speech beat remains diagnosis-free, and the full diagnosis sweep finds zero instances. The mechanical gate stands at 0 open findings and the book-specific ban has no hits. Chapter 09 dialogue passes final (Round 4) verification with no open orders.
