Chapter 14 · free to read
Four minutes. Not a threat, not a demonstration, not a block of four thousand windows. One delivery, to one address, at point-blank range.
First person. It had gone into four thousand tenants that way, and into Vale that way, and it went into the Chair of the Memory Curation Board exactly the same way, because the lattice has only ever had the one setting.
The Consolidation ran on one continuous authority: a composite that had never once been uncertain in forty-four years. It could not issue an instruction and grieve at the same time, and it had just started grieving.
Two hundred officers on the crown galleries. Every one of them took the file at the same instant the Chair did, because they were all standing in the same broadcast, and not one of them had a native layer to refuse it with either.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.