“They are watching us to see if we continue pursuing the truth behind Brio’s disappearance and the attack on this house,” Lexi explains. “That’s what they expect. What they want, no doubt, is for me to continue fighting futilely with the bureaucracy to preserve our Gen’s franchise. Seeing that won’t alarm them, or cause them to act.”

“Then which shall you choose to do?”

“Oh, we are going to do both,” Lexi proclaims. “What the Ministry agents won’t recognize is that we are doing both at the same time. They will only see me making a last desperate attempt to preserve these crumbling little towers of ours. And, hopefully, that is exactly what they will report to their superiors.”

Lexi signs her name at the bottom of the document she’s just drafted. She underlines the signature with a flourish of her heron quill before sheathing the quill in a small glass inkwell.

Taru is left puzzling over the plan behind Lexi’s brash words. What that plan could possibly be eludes the retainer.

“How will we accomplish this, Te-Gen?” Taru asks, watching Lexi emboss the document with her Gen’s state-issued seal.

“I am going to do what I should have done months ago.”

“What is that?”

“Ascend,” Lexi says.

The pleading floor of the Spectrum is much different from the private chambers of ruling bodies like the Gen Franchise Council. Here there are no ascending steps engineered to make petitioners feel like supplicants, no plateaus like false horizons giving them heights to which they might delude themselves into aspiring. The pleading floor is smooth and level, just two stone altars separating pleaders from the half dozen Capitol Arbiters that preside over all matters involving and facing the various small hamlets and economies and communities that make up Crache’s Capitol city.

The true difference is the galleries. Any resident of or visitor to the Capitol may attend the open sessions, and they do, every day, dozens and dozens of them filling the ingrained stone benches surrounding the pleading floor. Many come to attend matters relating to their particular section of the city, but many more come simply to have a place to go during the day or to have someone representing the Spectrum at whom to yell at about any number of issues afflicting them or their homes.

Crache knows what its long-ago predecessors forgot, and to their total erasure from known history; the angry people in the galleries far outnumber those who rule, therefore it behooves those who rule to see them appeased. Making those perpetually discontent people believe they’re allowed to argue on a level field, both figuratively and literally, is perhaps the subtlest and most effective form of control.