diff --git a/PENDING.md b/PENDING.md
index f80df1e..334127e 100644
--- a/PENDING.md
+++ b/PENDING.md
@@ -3281,3 +3281,76 @@ The third is the sharpest: **both halves are in the same document**, so this is
 **Awaiting:** Steward. The jurist ruling above needs placement in `~/REVIEWED.md` by the steward's hand.
 
 ---
+## PENDING-143 — CARRIER: PENDING-121 is held open by its own ruling and cannot be shown by the instrument that lists open items
+**Date:** 2026-08-17
+**Tag:** [FIX]
+**Summary:** Executes REVIEWED-122 condition 7 — restore PENDING-121 to the open list by hand, at once, rather than when the mechanism lands. This entry is the carrier; it retires when PENDING-142 is built.
+
+**The item being carried.** `PENDING-121 — engine_source_binding: prose → declared surfaces, and the fingerprint specified but never recorded`. Its ruling, `REVIEWED-110`, reads verbatim: **`DESIGN GATE PASSED WITH CONDITIONS (1-4), then HELD OPEN for a redraft of Part IV.2 after substrate`**. Held open by the ruling itself, and invisible in `governance_state()` since that ruling was placed, because the suppression rule asks only whether a REVIEWED header names the id — never what the ruling decided.
+
+**Why a carrier rather than a direct restoration.** Restoring PENDING-121 itself requires one of three acts, and the executor may do none of them: editing `~/REVIEWED.md` so `REVIEWED-110` stops naming the id (forbidden — Constitutional Constraint #1, and forbidden again by REVIEWED-122 condition 5, which rules that placed records are not to be amended to satisfy the parser); renaming PENDING-121's own header to evade the regex (a Class-A defect deliberately induced — the item would then become permanently unclosable, trading a hidden item for an unclosable one); or changing the parser, which is the gated work that conditions 1–2 place behind a pre-registered answer key. **A carrier item is the only honest lever left**, and it is disclosed as a proxy: what appears in the open list is this entry, not PENDING-121.
+
+⚠ **Stated as a limit rather than glossed:** this does not restore PENDING-121. It makes the *fact of its being held open* visible in the surface where a reader looks for open work — which is the parent item's whole finding applied to itself. The steward may prefer a different lever; this one is reversible by deleting this entry.
+
+**What is actually owed on PENDING-121:** the Part IV.2 redraft that REVIEWED-110 held it open for. Not carried here; read REVIEWED-110 and PENDING-121 directly.
+
+**Not asserted:** PENDING-124 (REVIEWED-106) and PENDING-128 (REVIEWED-111) are the other two design-gate items in the same class. REVIEWED-122 condition 7 preserves the parent item's refusal to claim their status. They are **UNDETERMINED pending a steward read** and are deliberately NOT carried here — carrying them would assert what the ruling declined to resolve.
+**Files affected:** none — this entry is the mechanism.
+**Awaiting:** Retires when PENDING-142 lands and PENDING-121 becomes visible on its own. Until then, this is the record that it is open.
+
+---
+## PENDING-144 — Substrate claims inside the governance scripts are checked by nothing, including the script that checks for substrate claims
+**Date:** 2026-08-17
+**Tag:** [HARDENING]
+**Summary:** Filed separately per REVIEWED-122 condition 11, which ruled this out of PENDING-142 rather than folded into it. `governance-drift-check.py`'s subject is exactly one file; the scripts implementing the governance checks make substrate claims of their own, and nothing reads them.
+
+**Verified:** `governance-drift-check.py` reads `CLAUDE_MD = HOME / "dotfiles" / "CLAUDE.md"` and nothing else. Its own summary line — *"governance drift-check: CLAUDE.md clean (29/29 controls passed, 4 paths verified)"* — is accurate about its subject and is read, at every wake, as a verdict on governance state.
+
+**The confirmed occupant.** `ruled_pendings`'s docstring asserted that REVIEWED-78/-81/-82 were *"like-numbered rulings … concerning other matters"* which had *"falsely hidden"* three items. The substrate says the opposite in its own words, and the false claim sat inside the instrument that reports governance state, for weeks, until a jurist relay asked the parser why it disagreed with itself. **That is the exact class `governance-drift-check.py` exists to catch, one layer in, where it cannot see.**
+
+⚠ **Not asserted: the size of the population.** No census of factual claims in `scripts/` has been run, and its cost is unknown. The claim here is that the coverage gap is real and has one confirmed occupant — not that there are many, and not that there are few. Anyone acting on this should size it first; the temptation to infer a population from one vivid instance is the same error the parent item is about.
+
+**Why this is not simply "extend the drift-check."** The drift-check works because `~/CLAUDE.md`'s claims are *structured enough to be checkable* — paths that resolve or don't, tools configured or not, dates past or future. A docstring's claim that three rulings "concern other matters" is prose about the meaning of governance records. Building a parser to infer truth from prose that was never constrained to carry it is the trap PENDING-142 is about, one level up.
+
+**Options:**
+- **(i) Extend the drift-check's subject to script docstrings.** Rejected on the reasoning above unless someone can name the checkable sub-class.
+- **(ii) Require a checkable claim to carry its check.** Where a docstring asserts something about the substrate that *could* be verified, the assertion moves into the selftest, where it is executed rather than narrated. The selftest already does this for behaviour; this extends the same practice to provenance. Bounded, incremental, no new machinery.
+- **(iii) Disclose the gap and stop there.** The drift-check's clean line states what it does **not** cover, so a clean result is never read as "no false claims in governance tooling."
+
+**Recommendation: (iii) immediately, (ii) as standing practice, (i) only if a checkable sub-class is named.** (iii) costs one line and removes the overstatement at the surface where it is read; (ii) converts the class from narrated to executed wherever it can be, at the moment a claim is written rather than in a sweep afterwards. ⚠ Note that (ii) is the same shape as REVIEWED-122 condition 1 — a claim is worth more when the check precedes it than when it is composed alongside.
+**Files affected:** `~/dotfiles/scripts/governance-drift-check.py` (output line for (iii)); authoring practice for (ii).
+**Awaiting:** Steward authorization.
+
+---
+## PENDING-145 — A ruling claims a NUMBER, not an item: every addendum filed after it is suppressed on arrival, and the pulling thread has been invisible since 2026-08-10
+**Date:** 2026-08-17
+**Tag:** [HARDENING]
+**Summary:** Filed as a new item rather than as PENDING-142 ADDENDUM 4 **because that addendum would have been hidden the moment it was written** — which is the defect being reported. Found by watching REVIEWED-122's own placement.
+
+**The mechanism.** `ruled_pendings` builds a set of id *strings*; `sec_pending` skips any item whose header parses to an id in that set. Nothing compares dates, and nothing distinguishes a parent from its addenda. So **one ruling claims the number for all time**, and every record later filed under that number is suppressed on arrival, whatever it says and whoever it awaits.
+
+**Demonstrated on this session's own ruling.** REVIEWED-122 names PENDING-142. All four PENDING-142 records — the parent and ADDENDA 1, 2 and 3 — went hidden in one act. Here that is roughly right, since REVIEWED-122's conditions 2, 6, 9 and 11 do dispose of the addenda's contents. **But the mechanism did not check that, and would have hidden them identically had the ruling not touched them.**
+
+⚠ **Where it is not roughly right, and this is the finding.** `REVIEWED-115` (2026-08-10) rules on PENDING-131 — *"AUTHORIZED in part; one authorization VOIDED the same day; one conditional authorization LAPSED on its own condition."* It puts `131` in the ruled set. **All five PENDING-131 records are consequently hidden**, including:
+- **ADDENDUM 2** — `**Awaiting:** Steward authorization on (b), **(c)-as-PROPOSAL**, and §6.`
+- **ADDENDUM 4**, dated **2026-08-13 — filed three days AFTER the ruling that suppresses it.** `**Awaiting:** Steward direction on Move 1 … and Move 2 …`
+
+**PENDING-131 (c) is the unbuilt fence.** It is the pulling thread of every session since 2026-08-10, and `REVIEWED-121` made seeking it a **condition of the doctrine it ratified** — not a wish. **It has never once appeared in the list of items awaiting authorization.** A ruling placed before it existed had already claimed its number.
+
+⚠ **What this does NOT mean.** The work was not lost. The steward has been tracking it through `MEMORY.md`, the session records and the trackers, which is why it is the live thread rather than a forgotten one. **The harm is not that the fence was forgotten; it is that the parallel human system is the only reason it wasn't** — and the instrument whose stated job is to report what awaits authorization has been silent about the most load-bearing open item in the corpus for a week. A backstop that only works because someone is also holding it by hand is not a backstop.
+
+**And it fails in the other direction in the same place.** `REVIEWED-116`'s header reads `## REVIEWED-116 — PENDING-131/132/133/134 — …`. The regex captures the single token `131/132/133/134`, which equals no real id, so **that ruling suppresses nothing at all** — a four-item design-gate ruling with no effect on the open list. Over-suppression and under-suppression, in the two rulings covering one item.
+
+**Relation to PENDING-142.** This is a *fifth* class, not covered by that item's options: (a) title-matching, (b) decision-reading and (d) three-valued reporting all still resolve **id → ruled**, so all three inherit this. Any of them, built as specified, would keep every PENDING-131 record hidden.
+
+**Options:**
+- **(i) Match records, not numbers.** A ruling disposes of the specific record it names; an addendum filed later is a new record and starts open. Requires ruling headers to name what they rule more precisely than a bare number — which REVIEWED-116 shows they already sometimes try to do, and the parser already fails to read.
+- **(ii) Date-bound suppression.** A ruling suppresses only records existing at its date; anything filed later stays open until separately ruled. Cheap, needs no change to how rulings are written, and directly fixes the ADDENDUM-4 case. ⚠ But `**Date:**` is self-reported prose in both files, so this makes an unchecked field load-bearing — the *rank-on-fields-you-actually-write* hazard.
+- **(iii) Addenda are their own items.** Number them independently (`PENDING-146` rather than `PENDING-131 ADDENDUM 4`) and let the existing mechanism work. Costs the visible parent-child relation, which is real information.
+- **(iv) Explicit disposition.** A ruling lists the records it disposes of; anything unlisted stays open. Most honest, most burden on the jurist and steward at ruling time.
+
+**Recommendation: (ii) as the immediate stop-gap, (iv) as the durable answer, and neither before PENDING-142's answer key exists.** (ii) unhides the addenda now and its weakness is disclosed; (iv) is where this should land, because the underlying error is that closure is inferred from a number when it is a *judgment about a record*. ⚠ **This must be inside PENDING-142's pre-registered key, not bolted on after** — the key is a hand-read disposition for all filtered items, and if it is written against the id→ruled model it will encode this defect as correct and pass by construction. REVIEWED-122 condition 1 exists precisely to stop that, and this item is the reason it will be tested.
+**Files affected:** `~/dotfiles/scripts/wake-digest.py` (`ruled_pendings`, `sec_pending`).
+**Awaiting:** Steward authorization. ⚠ **Independently of the mechanism: PENDING-131 ADDENDA 2 and 4 await steward action now** and have been unable to say so since they were filed.
+
+---
diff --git a/scripts/wake-digest.py b/scripts/wake-digest.py
index 361fceb..85b8d0b 100755
--- a/scripts/wake-digest.py
+++ b/scripts/wake-digest.py
@@ -862,6 +862,16 @@ def selftest():
         ruled_pendings("## REVIEWED-84 — PENDING-87 — Order attestation") == {"87"})
     chk("ruled_pendings does NOT suppress the like-numbered item  [the 2026-08-01 bug]",
         "84" not in ruled_pendings("## REVIEWED-84 — PENDING-87 — Order attestation"))
+    # ⚠ RELIANCE ON THE DISCARDED READING — reported under REVIEWED-122 cond. 6,
+    # NOT repaired here (the repair is inside the gated mechanism; see PENDING-142
+    # ADDENDUM 1). The assertion is mechanically TRUE and will stay true. What is
+    # wrong is the fixture and what the name implies: `REVIEWED-82` is not a
+    # ruling-about-something-else, it is the AUTHORIZED ruling on PENDING-82, and
+    # this line therefore presents the false-open class as intended behaviour.
+    # Whoever builds PENDING-142 will see this check fail, or be tempted to keep it
+    # passing. Failing is the fix working. Re-derive the fixture from the property
+    # ("does this ruling dispose of that item?") using two genuinely unrelated
+    # documents, per REVIEWED-122 cond. 2.
     chk("ruled_pendings ignores a ruling that names no PENDING",
         ruled_pendings("## REVIEWED-82 — Read-only MCP server: eyes on the substrate") == set())
     chk("ruled_pendings handles non-numeric families",