The witness was sitting right there in the first row behind the defense table, a twitch in his eye as he inadvertently caught Donny’s gaze. Behind him was the lone reporter who had shown up for the show, if you could call her that—a blogger who had been covering the case from the beginning. The only other people in the gallery were two unfamiliar faces in the back row, a man and a woman who could have passed for feds but for the architect glasses the guy wore. Maybe they were real journalists. Or maybe that was wishful thinking. The time when Donny could command mainstream press attention for his cases had passed with the prior regime, and his last big criminal case had made him a different kind of news.

The fasces embossed on the wall behind them was a good reminder of whom the 299th District Court really served, even if it was the minor leagues, and an unlikely place to seek justice for war crimes. It was a state civil court, normally the venue for small-time business disputes, divorces, and personal-injury cases. And it looked the part—a small, drab courtroom, the kind of setup that county bureaucrats had deemed nice enough back in the days when most of the budget went to locking up unruly refugee kids from more climate-ravaged states, locals who violated the emergency restrictions on public assembly, and the people from both groups that managed to get classified as domestic insurgents. Maybe it was Donny’s memories of handling those cases that made the courtroom seem so claustrophobic as he pulled out his files and took his place at the plaintiff’s table.

Donny looked back up at Judge Larriva, who was watching him attempt to get organized while the clock ticked.

“We’re ready,” he said, even though the “we” was just him, and the main evidence of his preparation was a dog-eared yellow pad on which he had overwritten layers of notes in three different colors, most of the pages embellished with bold geometric doodles.

“All right,” said the judge. “We are back for another installment in Harrison v. AMR, case number 12–247893. And hopefully getting close to the finish line. Trial is set for one month from today. I have Mr. Kimoe’s amended complaint—this is the fifth amended complaint, I believe—”

“That’s correct, Your Honor,” said Donny. “We uncovered new facts that required us to add additional claims.”

“Some rather incendiary claims, if I may say so,” said the judge. “You’ve gone from saying people died under the defendant’s care due to negligence to saying they were murdered.”

“That has always been our belief, Your Honor,” said Donny. “That the resettlement farms were used as cover for a secret program to disappear opponents of the regime. But we had not wanted to state our claim in those terms until we had the evidence to back it up.”