Late at night in City Hall, only the lights in the third-floor Mayor’s Office were still on.

Leo sat behind his desk, on which mountains of paper were piled high.

The Pittsburgh City Charter, the City Council Rules of Procedure, the Municipal Finance Management Ordinance, the Public Works Maintenance Act... These thick, tedious tomes were now spread open before Leo.

The strong scent of coffee filled the air.

Leo was exhausted, but his mind was in a state of extreme agitation.

His eyes were bloodshot.

Whenever he closed his eyes, the image of Margaret’s worn-out wheelchair stuck in the doorway would flash through his mind.

That small strip of wood hadn’t just blocked Margaret; it had blocked him, too.

Moretti had locked the main gate with the chains of procedure, but Leo refused to believe this building had no windows.

"Mr. President, I have an idea."

Leo stared at the lines of text on the documents, his voice hoarse and his words coming in a rapid-fire torrent.

"Bureaucracies have an inherent weakness: laziness and shirking responsibility. To keep the system running, they usually build a ’default clause’ into the law."

Leo stood up and paced back and forth in his office, brandishing the pen in his hand.

"For example, if the Mayor submits an emergency repair request to the council for under five thousand US Dollars, and the city council fails to provide a clear reason for rejection within thirty days of receiving the request, then according to the principle of administrative efficiency, the request is to be considered automatically approved."

"I want to exploit that mechanism."

Leo’s gaze grew sharp.

"Since Moretti wants to block my major projects, I’ll just break ’Revitalization Plan, Phase Two’ into tiny pieces. I’ll turn ’repair one road’ into ’patch one hundred potholes.’ I’ll turn ’renovate one school’ into ’replace one thousand lightbulbs and fix five hundred faucets.’"

"I’m going to break that twenty-million-US-Dollar project down into four thousand separate five-thousand-US-Dollar requests."

"In a single day, I’m going to dump all four thousand of those requests on Moretti’s desk. I’m going to drown him in an avalanche of paper and force his Budget and Finance Committee to a grinding halt."

"As long as they can’t review them all in time, as long as they miss the deadline—even if only one request triggers that ’automatic approval mechanism’—we’ll have torn open a breach."

"The so-called ’Cloward-Piven strategy,’" Roosevelt said slowly. "Although that’s a theory proposed by two sociologists twenty years after my death, I’m all too familiar with the core of this tactic."

"Manufacture a crisis, don’t wait for one."

"You mobilize thousands of people from the lower classes and have them simultaneously file legitimate claims for their rights with a rigid bureaucratic system. You make the system, which was originally designed to ’deny’ and ’delay,’ completely collapse because it can’t handle such a massive data stream."

Roosevelt paused, seemingly lost in memory.

"In 1933, when I first took charge of this country, I faced just such a collapse."

"Though it wasn’t deliberately orchestrated—it was the natural consequence of the Great Depression."

"Tens of thousands of unemployed workers flooded relief stations, and countless depositors swarmed the banks."

"Why did the Hoover administration fall back then? It wasn’t because they didn’t want to act. It was because their administrative system was completely paralyzed in the face of a tsunami of public demand."

"When a system can no longer absorb pressure through normal processes, those in power have only two choices: either use violent suppression and trigger a revolution, or be forced to reform and accept new rules."

"Hoover chose the former, and so I won."

"And now, you want to do the same thing to Moretti. You want to create an artificial administrative jam on his desk and, at the same time, use a loophole in the regulations to pry the money right out of his hands."

"It sounds like a genius plan," Roosevelt commented. "On one condition: you actually have to find the legal clause you’ve imagined."

"Leo, you need to understand that American law, especially a city charter like this that deals with the division of power, was never a commandment from God carved in stone."

"These laws are cobbled together by a group of shrewd politicians in smoke-filled rooms, through endless arguments, compromises, and backroom deals."

"Learning to find your own way out of the legal labyrinth is the first step to becoming a mature statesman."

"Go find it, Leo. Search through those millions of tedious words for the key that will unlock Moretti’s vault."

Leo sat back down in his chair and took a deep breath.

’I will find it.’

He opened the first codex.

Time began to slip by.

At 9:00 PM, Leo finished the first volume of the Administrative Code. He found a description of the Mayor’s emergency powers, but it was immediately followed by the phrase, "subject to review by a special committee of the City Council."

A dead end.

At 12:00 AM, Leo saw a glimmer of hope in Chapter Seventeen of the Financial Management Ordinance. There was, indeed, a simplified process for the use of "minor maintenance funds."

He read on excitedly until he saw the glaring clause: "and the use of said funds may not cover capital expenditures arising from infrastructure improvements."

Another dead end.

At 2:00 AM, the coffee in the machine was nearly gone.

Leo’s eyes began to ache, the words dancing before them.

Pittsburgh’s legal system was suffocatingly airtight. Behind every seemingly lenient clause was a cold, hard "but."

All power was meticulously locked away in a series of interlocking cages.