Thorne posted the transmission format on the Academic District board at the seventh hour.
Vane read it from the back of the crowd before the queue formed, filed what mattered, and went to breakfast.
The format was clear. Output measurement in three bands — base, sustained, peak — across a thirty-second ring window. The ring floor would record the full chain rather than just the endpoint. Which meant Thorne was not measuring how much you could produce. He was measuring how the production arrived.
He told Mara.
She wrote something in the other ledger without explaining what.
"You are not sleeping enough," she said.
"I'm sleeping fine."
She looked at him with the flat inventory expression. "Four hours two nights ago. I hear the kettle when it is being filled at the second hour as opposed to the third." She turned a page. "Two nights ago it was the second hour."
He looked at the bird. The bird looked at the garden.
She made another entry. He did not ask what she was writing.
