She grounded the numbers in the earth. In the price per tree, triangulated with the long lives cut short, the promising futures extinguished. Her short history of the deforestation of the hemisphere made you feel the fire and hear the chainsaws. She nailed the connections between wars that were fought before they were born and the massive crop failures they had witnessed just as they were coming into adulthood. She explained how the wars against the guerrilla armies of the hemispheric south were just extensions of the much longer war against nature. And she built a model that showed how much of the damage to the environment could be attributed to Promethean Resources and its predecessors. It was tiny as a percentage of the total—mere basis points. But the number that translated into in dollars, when she flashed it on her screen for all to read, was bigger than the numbers they were talking about in Washington as reparations for slavery.

The amounts known to be in Heather’s diversified trust were a fraction of that, and only a smaller fraction could be traced back to the bulldozers and Titan Jelly. It almost seemed small, until Percy showed what that would translate to in real profit per tree, and what it would be if you divided it up among every member of the community to invest in their restoration efforts.

This didn’t even count the value of her ownership stake in Tripto Labs, which may have been conceived by Helen as a different way to compensate for the damage her family business had caused, but also profited from that damage.

It was hard to read a crowd that big, even as you knew the biases they had coming in. Donny had plenty of experience arguing to the mob—during the emergency, making your case to the cameras outside the courtroom was usually a more effective way to get justice for a political dissident than the rigged game they played inside. But he didn’t even know the rules that applied in this courtroom, and what rules they had they seemed to be making up as they went along, with an unstructured informality that was like a classroom without the teacher. He was pretty sure they didn’t really understand the stakes. The message from Carol he picked up the night before included a warning, relayed from a reliable source Donny trusted. Lecker was already preparing his backup plan: a rescue op that could reignite the fratricidal war that had ruined this city and taken down most of the nation with it. Donny’s debts and Carol’s imminent eviction were the least of their problems now. So Donny watched how Percy did it, and tried to focus on the faces in the crowd that he actually knew.