THE LEDGER Transcribed entire, this twenty-fourth day, exactly as it now stands in his own hand. Rules One through Ten omitted here as already known to whoever reads this wall and lives near enough to need them.
RULE ELEVEN. Restated this day, upon further accounting.
A cell that has taken a life is generally slower to take a second one, for a stretch that has usually run somewhere near eleven Turns. This has mostly held, across the cells it's been watched in, closely enough to be worth marking.
Based on the pattern of loss recorded here, it has always been understood that the count was a guide to caution, not a clock to set a watch by. Use whatever stands in such a cell with the eleventh Turn in mind — not as a promise the room keeps, but as a rough sense of how long grief tends to sit quiet in a place before it moves again. A debt allowed to run past its due date does not always stay simple. It can compound.
This was never claimed as certainty. Several cells have followed something close to the shape of it. Anyone who remembers it as a promise has misremembered what was written.
Mark it, and weigh it. Most cells that have held to it have fared better than those that ignored it entirely. That is as much as anyone can honestly claim of any rule in this room.
— G.W. DAY 24