The setting was a long hall with a steeply pitched roof of western red cedar, supported by columns of the same: whole tree trunks felled from the surrounding forest. They were in a resort in Desolation Sound, between Vancouver Island and the mainland of British Columbia. The architecture was meant to evoke the longhouses once built here by First Nations people, but everything was state-of-the-art, energy-efficient, buttoned up. The fireplace ran on natural gas, and a little plaque next to it explained that the Desolation Lodge, as this place was called, was atoning for its sins against the climate by growing trees elsewhere, pulling more carbon out of the atmosphere than this appliance was putting into it. An autumnal gale was flinging rain against the thermal-pane windows and making the post-and-beam structure creak, but the three dozen people in the hall were comfortable in their fleece vests, artisanal sweaters, and high-dollar hoodies. Most had woken up this morning in homes or hotel rooms in Seattle. A few had chosen to take early-morning flights from the Bay Area, or red-eyes from the East Coast. All had made their way down to the Lake Union waterfront, where float planes were loading and departing every half hour. A ninety-minute flight took them across the international border and up the Strait of Georgia to Desolation Sound. The planes pulled up to a rambling complex of piers founded on massive rocks that shouldered above the high-tide mark. From there a boardwalk strode across a pebbled beach littered with the age-silvered trunks and roots of ancient trees. Rambling switchbacks took them to the conference center—an old-time resort that had been fixed up with some unholy combination of tech money and cruise industry investment. They’d checked into their apartments and cabins, which were spattered across a few acres of rain forest, and had had a couple of hours to freshen up before the opening session had commenced at one o’clock in the afternoon.

Zula had arranged more conferences than she could count. The seeming informality of this setting belied all of the premeditation that had gone into it, and the long experience of her staff. The trip from the city was just long enough to reset the mind and instill a sense of having gone somewhere special, but not enough to deter people from coming. The midday start time enabled people to ease into it. She’d federated the guest list, handing out some slots to the Waterhouse people, some to ONE. Some she’d handed off to Sinjin Kerr, trusting him to sort out the Gordian knot of Elmo Shepherd’s network. Others had gone to Solly Pesador, and of course she’d reserved a bloc for the Forthrast Family Foundation. She had only sent out her invitations after the others had made their picks, and she’d chosen with an eye toward balancing the slate if need be.