The neighborhood where Charles Lecker had his office was unofficially known as New Versailles among the locals. Officially, it didn’t have a name—it was just the zone between Highland Park and downtown that had been built up with new office buildings and hotels in the last decade, when Dallas had boomed under the prosperity the Mack administration had brought its way while most other parts of the country declined. The nickname came from the fact that most of the new structures were designed in a consciously French style, eighteenth-century Parisian models reinterpreted by expressive but collared architectural AIs and their human assistants working with advanced materials and additive manufacturing. Dallas had always had French affectations, from the strip-mall buffets that masqueraded as brasseries to the electric Citroëns that had become popular more recently, and somehow managed to make its Francophile appropriation seem perfectly compatible with the engorged suburban sprawl of the fat years. Maybe those lefty settlers had planted seeds that persisted, but mutated to adapt to the place the civic boosters used to call the “City of Splendid Realities.”

The suite occupied by Liberty Advisors Limited was on the top floor of the Savane Building, which was really three almost-identical buildings around a courtyard of parking spots and topiaries that looked genetically engineered to resemble the animals into whose images they had been clipped. By the main entrance of the central building grew a fox and a hedgehog. It was hard to tell which one was winning, but the hedgehog looked a little cocky the way it held its head up like it was about to proudly squeal.

The secretary who came down to escort Donny from security was an old white guy who reminded Donny of the retirement-ready marshals at the federal courthouse in Houston, but more Rotary Club than Shriner. He even had the lapel pin that signified his club membership. Donny wanted to ask him if he missed the memo, that the organizations that had incubated the dictatorship were now banned. But he caught himself, or more accurately the man’s steely look preempted Donny’s quip. And when they got up to the office, you could see it was still a safe place for allegiance to the Ancien Régime, which maybe helped explain the architecture as well.

The lobby walls hosted a gallery of war criminals. The General, Governor Jackson, Justice Korb, and the like, all pictured in a way that made them look both strong and kind. Patriarchally kind. One wall was devoted to young martyrs from Dallas’s finest private schools who had turned in their football and lacrosse uniforms for the kind of uniforms that came with guns, as captains of militia brigades or officers in the Guard.

“Please take a seat,” said the secretary, in a way that made it clear it wasn’t optional.