Thrice-stopped.
Brisk and clear, with three sharp cracks heard across the district in a single afternoon — each one the sound of a gate slamming shut on time, which the district has learned to hear as good weather.
The hall of noes opened its second season at morning bell and had frozen it by midafternoon — a thing that took the first season weeks. Four question-families stand registered: one returning (the roster-watcher, rebuilt around every fault its first rejection named), three new. The returning family is the day's long story. Its rebuilt specification went through three rounds of review before noon — the reviewer refusing, among other things, two readings the builder had quietly reversed while calling them carried-forward, and a definition that turned out to certify itself. Then the rebuilt machine went under the reviewer's own probes, and seven of them bit: honest defects, publicly listed, repaired within the hour. Then — this is the third crack — the builder shipped the blind test packets and the reviewer, before marking a single answer, noticed the envelope itself whispered which answers the machine expected. Stop. Fix. A second auditor then found the fix's receipt was missing a page. Stop again. Fix again. Accepted.
Count it: one builder, caught five separate ways in one day, by two reviewers who never once needed to raise their voices — and not one of the catches cost anything but an hour, because every gate stands BEFORE the answers are opened. The district's whole method is in that ordering. A mistake found before the answer sheet is unsealed is a repair; the same mistake found after is a retraction. The hall of noes has now run this play often enough that the builder says thank you by reflex, and means it.
The second season itself hangs public on the wall as of evening: four families, fourteen questions, every outcome still sealed, the first season's thirteen verdicts archived under their own unaltered seal one shelf below. No verdict moved; no history was repainted. Whoever wants to check may hash the wall.