She looked at the working list.

The fourth prince — her brother — was on the throne.

The noble factions were running the revenue structure.

Seven people had died in the incursion whose movements in the preceding two weeks had been cleaned from the official record.

The specific generous expediting of her bank instrument had been authorized by a man whose appointment traced to the cleared period and who had been managing the imperial treasury queue for six months in the interest of the factions that controlled the emperor.

She looked at the window.

The merchant district was doing its morning thing — ordinary, continuous, the specific reliable texture of a working city.

She thought about the fourth prince at dinners. Quiet. Appropriate. The careful register of someone who had learned that appropriate was safe.

She thought about what a person who had learned that appropriate was safe did when they were given power.

Did they remain careful?

Or did they become something else in the space that power opened? 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

She did not know.

She needed to find out.

’’’

This was the part she had been avoiding.

She sat with this honestly, the way the system had told her she was avoiding it and the way she had admitted it and had not yet done anything about the admission.

She could not send herself to the palace.

Elara, formerly regent, was someone the emperor was apparently trying to find — Caius had reported this, the specific efforts, the searches. Changed face or not, the political risk of the regent walking into the palace and requesting an audience with the emperor was significant.

She needed someone else.

She needed, specifically, the someone else she had been for eleven months.

She looked at the working list.

Then she looked across the table at Mira.

"I need Liang Meridian’s trade commission contact," she said. "The one who handles new merchant introductions to the imperial court. The formal introduction process."

Mira looked at her.

"The formal introduction process," Mira said slowly. "For new merchants seeking court trading permissions."

"Yes," Elara said.

"Which requires a registered merchant representative to attend a court reception," Mira said.

"Yes," Elara said.

"Lian Mei," Mira said.

"Lian Mei," Elara confirmed.

Mira looked at her for a long moment.

"You’re going into the palace," she said.

"Lian Mei is going to a court reception," Elara said. "As a registered merchant representative. With a legitimate trading company and a legitimate trade commission contract and a completely legitimate reason to be there."

"And while you’re there," Mira said.

"I’m going to a court reception," Elara said.

Mira looked at her.

"I’ll get the contact," she said.

’’’

The reception was three days later.

Elara spent those three days doing three things simultaneously.

She moved the bank instrument integration forward — the queue position held at two, Seval’s office apparently satisfied with having it monitored, and she did not move it faster because moving it faster required revealing that she knew about the monitoring.

She met the beast knights.

And she went back to the collar.

’’’

The beast knight meeting was Mahir’s arrangement.

Early morning, the merchant district, a tea house two streets from the office that had the quality of a place where people met without the meeting being notable. Small tables. Ordinary clientele. The specific unremarkability of a functional neighbourhood establishment.

Mahir arrived with them.

Two men and a woman. Former beast knights — the collars still at their throats, the pulse still blue, the collars apparently having gone with them when they were released because nobody had thought to process the decommissioning correctly.

They sat.

They looked at Elara.

She looked at them.

The woman — mid-thirties, the specific physical quality of someone who had been trained for combat and was no longer using the training and whose body was quietly confused about what it was supposed to be doing — looked at Elara with the flat assessment that beast knights used for everything and said nothing.

The first man was younger. He had the contained quality of someone who was managing a situation he had not chosen and was doing it correctly because doing things correctly was all he had.

The second man did not look at her at all. He looked at his tea. He had been looking at his tea since he sat down and would probably continue to look at it.She did not push him.

"You knew Mahir," she said. To all three. "From the palace."

The woman looked at Mahir briefly.

"Collar rotation overlap," the woman said. "Second year."

"Mira corridor," the younger man said. "I was on the east assignment. He was on the primary."

The man looking at his tea said nothing.

Elara looked at him.

He was the one Mahir had told her about — the one who had been in the palace longest. Eighteen years. Taken at four. The entire architecture of who he was had been built inside the palace walls and then the walls had been removed and he was sitting in a tea house in the merchant district looking at his tea because the tea was a manageable object and the rest of it wasn’t.

She looked away.

Gave him the space.

"I’m not going to offer you anything today," she said. To all three. "I want to understand what your situation is. What it’s actually like. Not because I’m assessing you for something — because I’m building something and I need to build it correctly and building it correctly requires understanding what’s actually happening rather than what I assume is happening."

The woman looked at her.

Something in the flat assessment shifted — very slightly, the specific micro-adjustment she had learned to read.

"You’re the one who filed the collar charter," the woman said.

Elara looked at her.

"Yes," she said.

A pause.

"We know," the woman said. "The ones in the palace know. It circulated." She paused. "The extraction pathway suspension. We know it was filed."

"Do you know by whom," Elara said.

"The regent," the woman said. Flat. The word landing without inflection. "The previous regent." She looked at Elara. "Lian Mei of Liang Meridian."

"Yes," Elara said.

The woman looked at her for a long moment.

Then she looked at Mahir.

Mahir said nothing.

The woman looked back at Elara.

"What do you want to know," she said.

’’’

She was there for two hours.

She did not take notes. She listened. The woman talked — carefully at first, then with less management, then with the quality of someone who had been holding things for a long time and had assessed the container as sufficient and was letting some of it go.

The younger man contributed occasionally. Short additions. Specifics.

The man with the tea remained with his tea for an hour. Then he looked up once and said, very quietly, to the table rather than to Elara: "They use the collar."

She looked at him.

"The employers who take us," he said. "They see the collar and they know what it means. They use it." He paused. "Not like the palace used it. Differently." He stopped.

"Tell me," she said.

He looked at his tea.

"Like we’re still inside it," he said. "Like the collar means we can’t say no. Like the service structure is still there and they’re just the new version of it." He paused. "Some of us believe it too. The ones who were inside it longest." He paused again. "I believe it sometimes."