# Claude-Tic Audit - Chapter 09 Final

Target: `output/chapters/chapter_09.md` after synthesis and audit-driven repairs. Raw blocker preserved at `output/critiques/codex/chapter_09.claude_tic_audit_round1.md`.

WATCH-count input from final gate: repeated descriptor 42; heading 1; eyes 3; trailing participle 11; steel/texture 1; hands/body 6; meets 1; raw 1; from-x-to-y 1; cold 1; for-a-moment 1; sensory checklist 1; transition verbs 1. Open findings: 0.

- CLEAR - tic 1 em-dash overuse - final scan found no em dashes; raw dash clusters were converted.
- CLEAR - tic 2 shimmer prose - nearest miss: "a warm drift toward parchment" (line 19). It is paint-aging evidence later tested by a swatch and the incoming artist's complaint, not atmosphere drift.
- CLEAR - tic 3 sentence-mood verbs - raw "mattered" opening removed; final opening is procedural: "The blade had to stay sharp" (line 3).
- CLEAR - tic 4 default-elegant noun phrases - nearest miss: "smallest crumb of raw umber" (line 41). Literal pigment amount; not an elegant filler phrase.
- CLEAR - tic 5 habitual qualifiers / softeners - raw "briefly and against her own policy," "with some effort," and "apparently" are gone. Nearest miss: "for a moment" (line 89) is a concrete eating pause in Asha's lunch beat.
- CLEAR - tic 6 narrator-philosopher intrusion - raw "You could not fail to move into..." removed. Final equivalent is material and short: "New York had been her old room and overdue invoices. Now it had a corner..." (line 101).
- CLEAR - tic 7 theme explanation after beat - raw "job working as designed" cut. The wall erasure now lands through consequence: "nobody... would be able to stand in this room and prove she had been in it" (line 113).
- CLEAR - tic 8 recursive negation - nearest miss: "Neither one was nothing" (line 101). It is a single litotes carrying the two-path pressure, not a not-X/not-Y cascade.
- CLEAR - tic 9 self-aware meta-clause - no "if that was the word" family found.
- CLEAR - tic 10 over-balanced structures - raw two-shapes thesis paragraph broken; final lunch turn uses a short object paragraph and a four-sentence inventory (lines 99-101).
- CLEAR - tic 11 profundity-stamp ending - final line is object/action: "The corner of the foamcore stuck up... and she did not push it down" (line 137).
- CLEAR - tic 12 default lovely/quiet/small register - the chapter's dominant register is worksite material and money pressure. Nearest miss: "good kind of terrible jacket" (line 115), a local comic observation.
- CLEAR - tic 13 physical reaction defaults - no heartbeat/throat/breath/jaw default. "tightened one hand on the rail" (line 123) is tied to ladder/invoice staging.

Book-specific additions:
- CLEAR - formatting artifact: raw bold `Nia Torres` removed.
- CLEAR - dialogue diagnosis: final Dialogue Doctor Round 4 found zero instances; "No speech required" is about Dana's low-ceremony ask, not language diagnosis.
- CLEAR - Ch08 carryover object/personification: raw wall/phone personification removed; final phone simply buzzes (lines 57, 129).
- CLEAR - mechanical gate: final `chapter_09_quality_gate.md` reports PASS open=0, allowlisted=0.

Chapter verdict: TICS-CLEAR. No revision orders.
