Sera arrived with a folded copy of the human contract and refused to unfold it until the treaty keeper had decided where people could sit.
The keeper’s room was smaller than the workroom. A heat pipe ran close to one wall, and the best light fell across a place already occupied by sewing. The keeper moved the sewing basket herself. Eli watched her put a needle into a scrap of cloth before lifting the basket, preserving an ordinary unfinished task while they prepared to examine an unfinished promise.
The envoy laid out the treaty fragments. They recorded obligations between dungeon communities, with later marks that appeared to carry part of the agreement forward. The human contract belonged to the period after the gates opened, when names from those records had been copied into a different system. No document supplied the clean continuity Eli wanted. There were missing edges, differing dates of copy, and an annotation whose placement made its purpose uncertain.
“The word here isn’t a second individual,” the envoy said, pointing beside the anchor label. “At least, in this convention it isn’t. It can mark a community relationship.”
Sera placed the contract beside it. “And this entry gives a personal name under a human registry form.”
