1807 A.N. — Vasanta Moon, Day 31 (dawn → last-bell) & Day 32 (pre-dawn)
Sundara-Ghāṭ Ashram, Bangla Delta (Mandal jurisdiction)
The bell spoke first.
Not the conch by the door, nor the thin brass that marked mealtimes, but the hidden thing Rakhal had set behind the lintel: a tuned leaf with its own opinion of intent. It gave a whisper of acknowledgement—more felt in the gums than heard—then settled into the low room-tone that had become part of mornings here, a steady hum that braided with the river and the stir of brooms. The coil was holding its note after last night's adjustments. Good.
He checked the scratch-pad by the jamb. "Half-breath holds. Hitch plate clean." His thumb came away resin-scented. The house remembered it was a house, not a barricade. Good, again.
On the table, the Ledger Division's last acknowledgement lay open like a polite mouth waiting for a spoon. Mandira Pal's notice—ink still oily—sat beside it: Demonstrations that touch public safety must be declared in advance and logged with a clerk. She had signed it with beautiful cruelty.
Janardan, passing with a basket of reed strips, saw where his son's eyes had gone. "Market after breakfast," he said. "Salt and linen. The tithe carts are early this week; Chatterji wants to count before the heat."
Rakhal nodded. Outside, a novice asked Piya if the "new door" could stop thieves. Piya said, "Doors don't stop thieves. Neighbors do." Rakhal added, because the boy deserved a true thing, "This one takes half a breath from the wrong foot. That buys a shout."
The boy grinned. "Half a breath is a lot."
"It is," Rakhal said. "Especially if it's the one you needed."
He wrote the date at the top of a clean page and underlined it twice. Days had begun to matter as measures, not as ornaments.
The market was already a conversation of colors: turmeric, new fish, indigo under cloth. A crier pasted over yesterday's announcements with a fresh sheet. Royal Academy entrance examinations—again. Someone read the fee aloud like a curse. "Fifty rūpa," a man spat, half awe, half laughter. "For the privilege of being told we are too ordinary."
Rakhal bought a mān of coarse salt for a quarter rūpa and then another—two sacks total, half a rūpa out of the little pouch Meghla kept fastened under her sari. He counted the pāna and kāshi carefully—no flourish, no shame, just math that would become rice. The salt seller gave him a thin reed notebook at two kāshi out of habit; everyone knew the ashram wrote things down.
A street-scribe grumbled on his stool about stamp rates, then grumbled louder when a courier in a fine shawl posted a new notice by the well: Demonstrations involving public safety must be declared and witnessed. The capital's language smelled of Mandira's perfume. Rukmini's name was not on it.
Rakhal spent a pāna on a small bundle of linen. On the way back he gave a kāshi to the ferry boy because the tide was turning and small boys remember fairness longer than men remember gratitude.
Back at the ashram, he logged the expenditures in Janardan's hand—salt: 0.5 rūpa; linen: 0.25; reed notebook: 0.125; ferry: 0.0625—in the blunt little notation his father liked: "rūpa.pāna|kāshi" once, for neatness, then prose thereafter. Cost was not shame; it was clarity.
Elsewhere, under a ceiling carved with seed-syllables that made light behave, a council sat.
Akṣara Māṭh was not grand to strangers. You could walk past its outer courtyard twice and swear it was a school for scribes who preferred quiet. Inside, the geometry was not for strangers. Lines were arguments; curves were verbs. The youngest daughter stood at attention like a word placed exactly where it belonged: Jashodhara Sen, sharp as a new edge, eyes that did not ask for a second reading.
"Keep her here until she is older," said one aunt, her wrists ringing with copper. "The world eats adjectives. We need our verbs."
"Connection precedes command," said Mahācharya Sen mildly, a smile not far from their voice. "The Academy takes its own measure. We can either leave a blank there or we can write."
Arguments went around the ring. In the end the instructions were simple because good engineering always looks like simple mercy after the work is done.
"You will go under a name that is not ours," said the Mahācharya. "Incognito, with a merchant caravan. Observe a provincial ashram being pressed by Ledger and Guild. Note what holds. Note what fails. Do not show a seal; do not trade a verb. If you can, sit the Academy's preliminaries in Navadvīpa-pura. If a sponsor serves your purpose, accept without debt. If a fee is demanded, you will not pay fifty. You will pay with time."
They placed a sealed letter on the table in neutral guild parchment—no Māṭh stamp. "This opens doors that require etiquette," said the parent, voice low. "Not fealty."
"For defense," added an elder, sliding across a thin chime and a nonlethal ward. "The chime listens differently than you do. If anyone attempts a Sequence step within a short field, it will tell you so, once. Do not trust it twice in a day."
Mahācharya Sen set their palm over Jashodhara's head—no pomp, just a wire laid where a wire needed to be. "Hold the verb steady," they said. "Let the nouns move."
Jashodhara bowed, the kind of bow that did not waste the angle, and left with a bag that held only what writing hands needed.
By late afternoon at Sundara-Ghāṭ, Rukmini's paper had appeared on the neem. The letter was neat and unlovely, like a rule carved onto stone you would rather not need: Rakhal's methods reserved for review by my office. A narrow shield. The Mandal clerk, poor Chatterji, looked relieved to be instructed toward fairness by a woman whose fairness did not care if he slept well.
Mandira Pal arrived in a shawl that pretended to be modest. Behind her trailed two clerks with slates, and behind them two guards in a temperate mood. She greeted Kumkum as if the ashram were a cousin she did not like but would not insult in public.
"New declaration," she said brightly, tapping the notice. "Public safety and all that. I must log the settings of your door."
"Settings?" Rakhal asked, innocent as starch.
"The coil," she said, and did not hide her hunger well. "For the record."
Rukmini spoke before Kumkum could. "You may log the fact of a coil," she said. "But not its mind. A demonstration at second bell will satisfy the declaration and the gods. If it does not, we will argue then." She did not smile. She did not need to.
Mandira inclined her head because in games like this you never say no to a fair rule if you can twist it later. "Second bell," she agreed, and wrote it down as if she had invented clocks.
Rakhal said, "We'll show a door behaving like a door." He kept his voice clean of triumph. His hand itched for the coil.
They made it a lesson because lessons are what the ashram had to give.
The elders placed the crowd where eyes would not cause harm. Janardan stood near the rope that could cut the stammer field to idle if a child ran where children run. Meghla kept the boiling pot steaming near the viewing spot out of habit and strategy; steam veils well. The Frame-Ring slept in low burr, waiting to be offended.
"This is not a wall," Rakhal told the clerks. "It is a polite correction. It takes half a breath from edged intent and then gives it back. It does not throw; it does not burn. Stand here." He placed the younger clerk where the floor would not lie to him. He set Mandira where the copper's click would sound like etiquette, not magic. Rukmini stood where the ground told her the truth.
He tapped the code: four, pause, two. The hitch leaf woke. People never hear the first moment; they feel the hairs rise along their forearms and wonder if a distant ferry has sounded.
Piya took the edge, the way a woman in grief takes a knife to a rope between her and the river. Her step crossed the sill. The lintel sighed as if remembering something rude. The tuned leaf pecked the pad—click—and the pulse ran the frame, fast as a snake that disliked attention. Piya's foot paused the width of a hair. She did not stumble. She merely chose to continue. That choice cost her.
The young clerk jumped as if stung by a story, then wrote the result so quickly he misspelled relief.
"It is effective," Mandira allowed, generosity like vinegar. "We will schedule an audit of replicability."
"You will schedule an audit of storage," Rukmini corrected, pleasant as a granite bowl. "So the clerk may sleep without dreaming of splinters under his lid."
The crowd laughed because laughter is sometimes a safety valve; even Mandira did not dare dislike relief in front of children.
When it was done, Meghla fed puffed rice and peanuts as if skill were a holiday. Rakhal logged settings. Janardan oiled the resin grooves because care given before failure is how men live.
At home, the little ledger came out, the one Janardan kept for rice and cloth and the art of years. They put the salt and linen on the page and their hope beside it: the Academy.
"Fifty rūpa," Janardan said without drama. "A number that can buy a cow, a good boat, or a year's patience. We have…not fifty."
"Nor should we pay it," Kumkum said, gentle but unshakable. "If the Academy wants our boy, let them prove it by waiver. Or let a sponsor put their ink where their praise sits. Otherwise, we buy rice."
Meghla looked at Rakhal. "Do you want it?" she asked. Not the degree. The work.
"I want methods," he said. "And time. If the Academy gives both without taking the verb out of my hand, then yes. If not, I already live in a school I can touch."
"Then we seek a letter," Janardan said. "Or an invitation that pays for itself."
"Rukmini," Piya offered. "She writes her name like a door that opens only if it is good for the house."
"Perhaps," Kumkum said. "But we do not borrow her teeth unless we plan to chew her food."
They smiled at that. The house breathed, a house again, not a problem.
Night gives men ideas they would not trust in daylight. Rakhal waited until the courtyard quieted to the sound of pot lids and little jokes in the kitchen. Then he took a palm-sized leaf of copper, a coil of silk thread, the dew the boys had caught at first light off the mangrove fronds, and went to the eave where the lintel had once creaked in the old way.
Sequence Nineteen, the Notator, is not a storm. It is an inscription. It is the moment you stop borrowing other people's maps and start drawing the road as you walk. He did not expect to cross the line tonight. He expected to find it without lying to himself.
He placed the dew on the copper. He set the silk. He listened until listening became a place you could stand.
The hum came up from the earth in a slow, honest way. He bent his breath around it without force and without asking the world to love him for doing so. The coil in the jamb answered. The tuned leaf held its tongue. Somewhere—miles away—a little chime in a caravan sounded a single, very soft note. A young woman tilted her head, then smiled into the dark like someone who had just met luck on a road and decided to trust it only as far as the next milestone.
Rakhal stopped. On purpose. He wrote his notes under the eave by oil light: Objective: approach Nineteen threshold (Notator) without damage. Materials: copper leaf (score: 12 lines); dew (spring memory); silk (no dye). Observation: hum thickened; field amenable; risk of overwrite in spine if pushed. Action: halt at "almost." Next: stabilize with passive before attempt (Lipi coin with counter-spiral?).
He found himself smiling, which had been scarce this month. "Not by force," he told the quiet wall. "By measure."
The wall, being a student of good methods, said nothing and learned.
She came in the morning with the caravans and did not look like a problem.
Incognito is a gear if you wear it right. Jashodhara Sen wore it like a plain cotton kurta, eyes lowered, hands free. Her hair did not announce anything. The caravan leader introduced her as a cousin's daughter bound for preliminaries in Navadvīpa-pura, good at copying ledgers, quiet, knows her vowels and how to keep her mouth off them.
On the way past the ghat, a stray wind lifted a notice out of a clerk's folder. It described the audit Mandira had pressed Chatterji into scheduling and would have made a home in the river if someone's hand hadn't caught it by the lower corner with a reflex that belongs more to engineers than to scribes. Rakhal took the paper without flourish and handed it back to the clerk. The clerk looked at his own fingers like a witness.
"Thank you," said the young woman who had been walking beside the clerk, her tone even, her eyes noting the half-breath between the lintel's hum and the small knot that kept the gate rope honest. "Do all your doors speak?"
"Only the ones that have been taught words worth keeping," Rakhal said, because something in her made him answer with accuracy. "You are…?"
"Jasha," she said easily, choosing the nickname that concealed her surname while telling a kind of truth. "I copy. I watch. I don't stand in thresholds if someone is teaching them to be stubborn."
He caught himself liking the way she put things. "We have stubborn thresholds," he admitted. "Today they will perform for a ledger."
"Performance is a verb men misunderstand," she said, and smiled once, quickly, so that he would not grow comfortable.
"Welcome," he managed. "There is shade in the courtyard. The clay carts are due at first bell, the inspection at second."
Her gaze shifted to the coil's recess for a single precise quarter-breath, then away. "Your coil hums with the river," she said, as if greeting a polite neighbor. "That was a compliment."
"Then I accept it," he said, and did not ask more. There would be time for questions. Or there would not, and he would have to build time.
She passed under the stammer field without tripping anything because her intent was the kind that notices stairs but does not test them yet. He logged that, too, inside the quiet book of his skull.
News traveled faster than the river when men wanted it to. By the time second bell approached, Mandira's notice was arched on the neem and the clerks had chalked lines on the ground to mark where witnesses could stand "safely." The guards looked bored in the particular manner of guards who, if ordered, would be very busy later.
Rakhal declared the procedure in plain language. "You will see a door keep its manners under attention. We will declare the timing aloud. The person crossing will be trained. No one else will test the house."
He set the Frame-Ring to active. He let the coil breathe. He let Rukmini hear everything the ground had to say and nothing the ground did not wish to say in front of Mandira. He asked Piya for her edge and received it like a loan you plan to repay before dinner.
The demonstration behaved. A polite pulse; a half-breath pause; a harmless laugh. Mandira conceded "effective" and announced the formal audit date with a voice that pretended fairness. Rukmini murmured, "Storage, not seizure," and the clerk scratched out "inventory of coils" and replaced it with "inventory of doors."
Jashodhara—Jasha—watched without asking the wrong questions. At the end, when the crowd thinned, she said to Rakhal, "Your window for half a breath is clean. Your return to idle is dirtier than it needs to be."
He blinked. "Because?"
"You put the counter-spiral in copper. Copper remembers affectionately," she said. "Try a thinner memory. Let the resin forget on purpose; make the copper ask it to remember only when sung to."
He did not pretend she was wrong. "We are learning to sing without making a chorus where we don't want one," he said. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me," she said, not unkindly. "Thank the house if it likes the advice."
"Jasha," he repeated, to hear the weight of the name in his mouth. "Will you be in the city long?"
"Long enough to learn whether the Academy believes in verbs," she said. "Long enough to see whether men who build doors remember to leave rooms behind them."
He would have asked more, but Mandira's clerk returned with a stamped sheet, looking apologetic and obedient at once.
"Advance audit summons," the clerk said. "The schedule has…moved. This evening at last bell, a pre-examination of storage to verify your declaration." He swallowed. "Madam Pal insisted. Adept Rukmini countersigned for the limited scope."
Kumkum, reading over Rakhal's shoulder, said, "Last bell is not a time for clerk's eyes."
"Tonight, then," Mandira said, smoothly materializing like the answer to an unhelpful prayer. "We begin politely. No one hides a door from an audit."
Rukmini stepped beside her, quiet as a ledger balanced to the last kāshi. "We begin within my scope," she said. "Your men will not so much as name a coil without my hand over theirs."
"Of course," Mandira said, and lied by omission like a professional.
Rakhal could feel the coil under his palm like a cat aware of a guest who smells of dogs. He glanced once toward the neem. The copper bowl on the bench there was empty and cool; the Ledger moths slept their hot sleep back under a weighted saucer in the store-room where Gopal could eye them without courage. The half-coin in his pocket was warm only with body heat. Disaster had the decency to wait for evening.
He bought himself a sliver of afternoon with chores and a walk. The caravan had set camp by the canal willows. He found Jasha arranging pages to dry—beautiful copies of dull letters, each line absolutely as it should be. She looked up once, measuring him against the hum of the place.
"Do you plan to sit preliminaries?" he asked, as if asking about rain on market day.
"If the proctors permit," she said. "If a sponsor offers behind a veil, I may allow the veil to lift. If not, fifty rūpa is a number that can keep a family dry for a monsoon."
He nodded, liking the arithmetic. "We have thought of the Academy as a shield," he said. "We are learning how shields become cages."
"Cages are excellent at teaching you the size of your wings," she said. "But there are cheaper ways to learn geometry."
He laughed before he could refuse himself the pleasure. She smiled once and returned to her sheets. "Your coil hums," she said without looking. "Even when it is asleep."
"It dreams," he said.
"Then don't let it breed," she murmured, tone dry, as if repeating a rule given to her by someone who expected obedience because the rule was good.
He left before his mouth betrayed the questions his hands wanted to ask.
Sundown brought the tithe carts back across the yard, wheels with the exact wrong number of spokes for silence. Chatterji arrived looking honest and doomed. Mandira arrived smelling like a ledger that had been rubbed with cloves. Rukmini arrived with the kind of quiet that makes unkind men speak more softly. Two guards stood aside with the indifference of men who would keep your house safe if paid and take your spoons if not.
The pre-examination was meant to be storage only. "Doors, not minds," Rukmini said as if reading a grammar rule to an old student. "Scope is agreed."
They began at the main hall. Janardan had already placed the rope in the scent-blind knot Nalin had taught them last week when he left a clerk's Gandha puzzle in an unguarded minute. Meghla stood where her hand could find the switch in less than a breath. Piya and two seniors watched the children watch the adults. Bhadra leaned like a man who had nothing to do with anything and could prove it on paper and in court.
They would have made it through the first page of Mandira's form if the building had not decided to become a character.
The tuned leaf clicked twice without being asked. The coil heard something that was not a step and hummed like a tooth deciding whether to ache. The cache stone under the ink-house gave a bass hello from a conversation no one else wanted. The half-coin in Rakhal's pocket grew warm in a way he had not taught it, and the little hairs on Gopal's arm stood up even though he was three courtyards away.
Rukmini's head came up before anyone else's. "Show me your lullabies," she said, not as challenge but as diagnosis.
Rakhal, because he had promised himself never to lie to a doctor, set the half-coin on the table like a sin and slid the copper bowl a handspan toward Rukmini. The moths were asleep. The coin was not. The room tilted the width of a vowel and then stopped. Mandira said, "What is happening," not as a question but as a complaint.
Rukmini did three things as easily as breathing. She lifted one palm and pressed it down an inch in the air, and the floor forgot to wobble. She put her other palm over the coin and listened, and its heat admitted a shame it had not known it had. She looked at Chatterji with pity and said, "You will record nothing for two minutes."
He very nearly obeyed.
"You're not here to seize," Kumkum said, gently reminding the scene of its manners.
"I am here to verify," Rukmini said. "To verify we are not all fools."
She turned her hand and the copper warmed her skin. "This is a lullaby written by someone who understands kindness as a method," she said. "And three Ledger moths are asleep in there wishing to eat it."
Nalin had the indecency to look interested. "Ledger moths?" he said, as if the phrase were a joke he had written.
Rukmini made a face that did not quite smile.
"Clerks' tricks," Bhadra murmured from the shade, saving her the explanation; Rakhal could have kissed him for it. The bowl remained shut. The coin breathed. The floor behaved like a floor.
"Scope," Mandira began, and Rukmini overrode her with the kind of politeness men remember as fear.
"Storage," she said. "The door is well. The lintel hums under control. The house is under Mandal observation. We will postpone deeper inspection pending resolution of an anomalous signal under my hand. We will not perform surgery on a child for a cough."
It was a verdict. Chatterji wrote it down like a reprieve. Mandira swallowed a frustrated condiment and smoothed her shawl like someone polishing a failed plan.
Rukmini closed her fingers around the coin, then opened them and set it back on the table with her own impression recorded: a gentle press, a warning. "These things breed if you hum them wrong," she said to Rakhal, low. "Do not teach this lullaby to anything that writes in walls. Put it to proper sleep or give it a counter-song. And never make two in the same house unless you wish to live with twins."
"Yes, Adept," Rakhal said, accepting instruction the way good students must. "May I—"
"You may bring me a sealed synopsis at dawn," she said. "Boundaries, not method. If I decide you are a liar, I will ruin you. If I decide you are a student, I will keep you alive long enough to pay back the debt."
"I prefer the second," he said.
"Then behave like it," she said, and let a corner of her mouth admit a secret: she liked boys who kept their verbs.
Mandira was forced to leave with the form only half full and her appetite nowhere near sated. Chatterji bowed toward the neem as if trees could forgive men for being employed. The guards yawned the way wolves do when they decide not to chase a deer in front of shepherds.
When the gate closed and the scent-blind knot held, Rakhal finally let his shoulders remember gravity. Jasha took a step from the shade, face level, eyes curious and not intrusive.
"You did not push," she said. "You measured."
"I am trying to make that a habit," he said.
"Good," she said, and then, very quietly, "If you need a shape that remembers a note after your breath runs out, there is a way to draw it so the wood thinks the sound is its own. I would not tell you how; I am not that generous. But I would tell you where to look," and she tapped his copybook where he had sketched a coil with the wrong thickness at the wrong place.
He looked. He saw. He heard the change the drawing asked for. He wanted to ask her where she had learned to see like that. He wanted to ask her name again, in the kind of voice men use when they are measuring trouble and finding themselves willing to pay.
"Thank you," he said instead. "You should keep away from our door this week."
"I know," she said, and it was a kind of promise.
They ate late. Food tasted like a house again. He wrote until the oil burned low.
— Frame-Ring v1.2 holds under observation.
— Coin v0.1: leaky; will decompile or counter-spiral before dawn.
— Storage pre-exam: recessed scope guaranteed by Adept.
— Jasha: sees thickness/frequency mapping without asking to own it.
— Academy fee: fifty. Sponsor or waiver only.
— Sequence 19: approach viable; halt threshold. Need Lipi passive to stabilize field.
He closed the book.
Outside, the river made its old, honest noise. Across the canal, the caravan folk smothered their last flame. Somewhere in the city a clerk dreamed of a door that coughed at exactly the wrong time and ruined a bribe.
Sleep took him by the throat like a friend.
He woke to the sound of a chime that was not in his house.
Just one ping, far and thin, from the road, like a coin struck in another room.
He went to the eave and looked at the sky. It did not answer. He put his hand over the half-coin and felt it cool at once, as if a teacher had entered and the class had remembered its posture.
At first light he would take the coin apart or teach it to forget. At first light he would write the synopsis Rukmini had demanded. At first light he would ask the house for enough luck to live like a student under observation.
He did not get first light.
Three knocks rang at the gate—not a scrape, not a thread pulled tight, but three precise, polite knuckles that understood rules and used them like a rope.
Piya reached the rope knot. Janardan reached the conch. Kumkum's hand hovered over the switch. Rakhal felt the coil answer like an animal recognizing a collar.
"By order of the Mandal," said a voice that had never wasted a syllable, "open for a messenger bearing a sealed letter from Navadvīpa-pura for one Rakhal Janardans-son."
He took a breath he had not planned to take, stepped to the threshold, and signaled for the knot to loosen.
The Frame-Ring hummed in warning, not anger. The door swung.
On the step stood a runner in a dust-paled shawl. In his hand, a neutral guild packet: no seal of Māṭh, no scent of Mandira, but weight, a certain balance of paper that told men their lives might get larger or smaller by a paragraph.
Rakhal broke the twine.
Inside, folded crisply, sat a letter stamped with the Academy's night-blue: an appointment to present for preliminary seatings at Navadvīpa-pura within twelve days, fee—waived by special recommendation; sponsor—none declared; verification—pending demonstration of original method under independent conditions.
Under the blue sat a small card that smelled faintly of oil and river clay, embossed not with a crest but with three thin lines crossing at an angle that made engineers itch to straighten it and then, finding they could not, wonder why.
On its back, seven words in a precise hand:
Hold the verb steady. Let the nouns move.
No signature.
He looked toward the canal. The caravan's camp was already packing. A young woman in plain cotton, hair tied without poetry, tucked something small and round into a pouch and lifted a bundle as if it weighed nothing more than decision.
"Who—" he began, but the question had no place to land.
"Rakhal?" Meghla asked, reading his face the way mothers read storms. "What is it?"
"An invitation," he said, voice low, the word tasting like a tool that might break or save. "And a demand."
"From whom?" Kumkum asked, already warding the house with a look.
He turned the card to show the three lines.
Rukmini's bell sounded from the yard—one firm note, not a summons, a tempo.
"Dawn," came her voice from beyond the neem. "Bring your synopsis. And whatever you just opened."
He looked at the letter. He looked at the card. He looked toward the road where a plain girl could be a door.
"Ma," he said, quietly, "we need to pack two bags. One for a day at the clay. And one for a road that is not a road yet."
Gopal's bangle sparked once, small and hopeful.
The coil under the lintel changed its hum by the width of a smile.
And on the far bank, Jashodhara Sen—the name he did not know yet—paused in the act of tying a knot, because her listening chime had answered a note in a house she had not entered.
She put the sponsor letter deeper into her bag. She did not look back.
At the gate, Adept Rukmini lifted a sealed pouch of her own and set it on the step without crossing. "Two invitations," she said. "Choose which one you answer first. Choose poorly, and I take your doors apart until they learn silence."
Rakhal reached for the pouch—then froze. The tuned leaf clicked, once. The cache stone answered, very soft. And from the store-room, beneath the weighted saucer, came a pepper-paper scent no one had planned, as if something written in hair-fine strokes had just woken up to the idea of eating verbs.
—
(Continuity anchors from the prior chapter: the Ledger moths, the coin's kitten-note, and the tilt under inspection, which triggered Rukmini's intervention and her "boundaries, not method" rule, are carried forward here. The logbook notes on v1.2 and the coin's leak set up the morning stakes and Rukmini's warning.)