Report written to `output/critiques/claude/book.world_coherence.md`. Here is the verdict.

## World-Coherence Audit — *Eight Tuesdays* (draft0_20260705)

**Calibration:** chamber autofiction with two POV characters (June, Theo). I scaled the location list to what the book establishes; struck one-off locations still count. "Right now" = Dec 8 showcase night (Ch24).

### Per location (departed-location test)
- **MARCHETTI ROOMS: ALIVE** — "Theo hands the Halloran collectors their drawings after class": ch24 *"I come back and hand two rich people some drawings. That's it."*
- **TASKER / PHILADELPHIA: ALIVE** — "it hired someone else": ch23 *"Tasker flew her out Friday. They offered her the keys I turned down."* (Strongest world-alive evidence: the protagonist vanishes from it and it staffs itself.)
- **SUFFOLK APARTMENT: ALIVE** — ch11 *"the application window went on closing whether anyone applied or not"*; resolves offscreen, ch23 *"We passed. For now."*
- **RIDGEWOOD / DANA'S: ALIVE** — ch22 *"Dana had cleared the north wall before she arrived"*; six-painter floor (ch09).
- **KESSLER ARMORY: ALIVE (thin)** — ch15 *"Don't give it to Dario. He overtightens everything."*
- **PROJECT ROOM / MARISOL (Ch09): ALIVE-ON-EXIT, dark at Dec 8** — ch09 *"Could this one be warmer?... It reads cold to me. Almost blue."*
- **SONIA'S DINER: ALIVE, w/ abandoned internal thread** — ch22 *"a coffee ring... somebody else's morning"*; but its one owned plot (ch08 *"the answer is still no but I'm thinking about it"*) is never paid.
- **AIELLO FRAME & GLASS (Ch11): DEAD-ON-EXIT** — "NO IDEA"; vivid pre-existence, struck after one scene.
- **Ch06 GALLERY-WALK VENUES: DEAD-ON-EXIT** — "NO IDEA"; single-night backdrops (co-op print show, Vestibule, bodega).

**Tally: 7 ALIVE / 2 DEAD-ON-EXIT — not majority-dead.**

### Per actor/faction (vanishing-protagonist test)
- **ODILE: SELF-PROPELLED** — ch24 *"I ran a class... I wanted to know what you'd make if I made you. I'm retiring, not dead."*
- **THEO: PARTIALLY SELF-PROPELLED (co-POV, reactive-leaning)** — ch21 *"I'm done being the route... You don't get to send me with a box again."* Most on-page texture is June-service; clears the bar only via this arc.
- **MARA & LUIS: SELF-PROPELLED** — ch03 *"He does that everywhere. Restaurants. Weddings."*; ch08 *"I've decided we're keeping Tuesdays."*
- **PRIYA & BEN: SELF-PROPELLED** — ch23 *"we look again in April when it's not rent doing the talking."*
- **RUTH & SAM: SELF-PROPELLED** — ch11 *"Last March, Ruth had her gallbladder out. I sat in the waiting room for six hours..."*
- **ASHA: SELF-PROPELLED** — ch09 *"If you pass, send her my name. I can do the boring parts and still paint at night."*
- **NIA: SELF-PROPELLED** — ch15 *"I'm offering you work, June, not a rescue."*
- **SONIA / DANA: SELF-PROPELLED (minor).**

**Essentially the entire recurring cast is self-propelled; none is purely protagonist-reactive.**

### Pre-existence test
- **MARCHETTI ROOMS: WAS-RUNNING** — ch01 *"I've watched it run, year after year"*; ch03 doorstop strata *"A cobalt era. A long teal period."*
- **PROJECT ROOM: WAS-RUNNING** — ch09 *"The outgoing show had been Marta Oduya's shelf pieces... The deinstall yesterday had gone clean."*
- **TASKER: WAS-RUNNING** — ch09 *"The printshop on Tasker is restructuring."*
- **AIELLO: WAS-RUNNING** — ch11 *"It was older than Dom."*
- **COHORT COUPLES: WAS-RUNNING** — arrive with intact histories (surgery, marriage, apartment hunt).
- No location reads SPAWNED-ON-ARRIVAL. Pre-existence is the manuscript's strongest muscle.

### Cross-audit synthesis
Codex siblings are uniformly green (`meanwhile_24` HOLDS, `npc_goals_24` MOVE, `zoom_out_24` PROMISE-KEPT, `ripple_24` ARRIVE) — **no repeated FROZEN/STAGE-PLAY/DEAD-JUMP/FORGOTTEN** finding. Two disciplines the trackers under-report: (1) **over-telemetry** — much "now" reaches us as texts/calls to June's phone, not dramatized simultaneity (saved by ch19's June-absent class and ch18's group chat); (2) **second-POV dependency** — "world runs without June" leans on Theo-POV. Net-new findings the trackers missed: the dropped Sonia/Odile thread and the struck one-off locations.

---

### 1. Book verdict: **WORLD-ALIVE** (qualified)
Passes on the page, not just in trackers: 7/9 locations continue independently, the whole cast is self-propelled, pre-existence is dramatized throughout, and Ch19 stages the hardest test — a full session with the protagonist gone. Not WORLD-HOLLOW (quotes corroborate the trackers), not STAGE-PLAY (Suffolk, Tasker/Asha, the group chat show life where neither lead stands). The qualifier: aliveness leans on a second POV and on June's phone, and a few well-built rooms/threads are alive only in the past tense.

### 2. Revision orders (ranked by cost, cheapest retrofit first)
1. **Close the Sonia/Odile thread** (1 line, ch24) — land Sonia's answer to Odile so the diner's one owned plot resolves instead of evaporating.
2. **Give Aiello a "right now"** (1 line, ch23/24) — a Dom callback or the walnut frame on the check-out sheet, so the shop isn't struck after ch11.
3. **Re-check the ch09 labor world** (1 beat, back half) — cash June's own hook *"ask Chelsea office re: December crating"* so her paid-work world exists in the present, not only as January's future.
4. **De-telemetry one world beat** — convert the Tasker-hires-Asha report (currently one line of June's dialogue) into a dramatized fragment; rebalance toward ch19-style un-narrated simultaneity.
5. **Ch06 walk venues** (low priority) — recur one (the Clinton sublet card / the co-op show) or accept as calibrated closed-world texture.
6. **Texture Theo's life outside June** — one concrete beat (Eileen/Sunday dinner/income) so the only reactive-leaning figure gets a life of his own.

One note on scope: I wrote the report to the spec's output path (`output/critiques/claude/book.world_coherence.md`), which per your memory convention is a git-ignored base audit file that's safe to overwrite. I did **not** touch the manuscript or trackers — the revision orders are queued, not applied.
