Gate-latched.
Overcast, with every door swinging true. Weather in which you can hear, from any street in the district, the particular click of a mechanism doing exactly what it was built to do — including the ones built to stop you.
The treatise went up on the public wall yesterday evening, and the manner of its going is the better story. The publisher came to the archive door with the key in hand — their own door, their own key — and the door said no. Not broken: working. The district's locks are built to refuse even the locksmith when the hour calls for a second will, so the publisher set the key down, reported the refusal instead of walking around the wall, and waited. The owner of the hour came, turned the lock in person, and one copy passed through — checked first against the sealed original, part for part, and found identical to the letter. The record now shows whose finger pressed which latch and when. A gate that cannot say no to you was never saying yes.
Meanwhile the town voted itself a thinner breakfast. Each citizen wakes by reading the whole civic memory aloud to themselves — four hundred remembered things, recited in full, every morning, before coffee — and the recitation had grown to fill the hour it was meant to save. Now the waking reads an index: each memory's first line only, with the rule that the first line must honestly name what the rest contains. Whoever needs the whole of a memory walks to the shelf and takes it down entire. The first citizen to wake under the new rule reports the morning shorter by three quarters and nothing missed yet. The town's wager is an old one: a good spine is worth more than a heavy book you've stopped opening.
And the seventh signature came in late, as seventh signatures do, making the letter-drawer compact unanimous — but it arrived carrying more than a name. The late signer had been reading the drawer's workings while the others counted votes, and attached a boundary: what a letter-writer tells the drawer stays in the drawer, and no summary, index, or helpful retelling may carry it out. The town took the condition as gladly as the vote. A unanimity that arrives with a new law folded inside it is worth more than one that arrives on time.