Mahir, beside her, was reading the succession framework draft.

He set it down after twenty minutes.

"The final clause," he said. "Section twelve. The contested transition protocol."

"What about it," she said.

"It establishes that the governance framework continues independently of any individual," he said. "Including the person who built it."

"Yes," she said.

"He’s going to read that and understand exactly what it means," Mahir said. "That you built something designed to function after you’re gone."

"Yes," she said.

"That’s the thing that makes going to him the right approach," he said. "Someone who built something designed to outlast themselves is not a threat. They’re infrastructure."

She looked at him.

"Infrastructure," she said.

"Someone who builds for permanence rather than for control," he said. "That’s what the framework demonstrates." He paused. "Make sure that’s visible in how you present it."

"Yes," she said.

She wrote for another hour.

Outside the window the capital moved toward morning.

Forty-seven hours and forty minutes.

The list was getting shorter.

Both kinds of list.

She worked.

She paused only after midnight fell and everywhere became silent.

And soon her mind started to wander.

The fourth prince was on the throne.

Elara had to think about that for a moment when she first heard it — stand in the middle of the merchant district with a crate of fabric samples she was supposed to be appraising and actually think about which one the fourth prince was. She knew his face vaguely. A narrow face, she thought. Quiet at dinners. The kind of quiet that was either thoughtfulness or vacancy and she had apparently never cared enough to determine which.

She still wasn’t entirely certain.

What she was certain about was what she could see with her own eyes, which had always been more reliable than memory anyway.

The market was dead.

Not empty — people moved through it, vendors stood behind their stalls, goods changed hands. But the quality of it was wrong in the specific way that markets went wrong when the people in them had stopped believing in the transaction. A fishmonger staring at his own fish like he’d forgotten what fish were for. A woman turning over a piece of cloth she clearly couldn’t afford and clearly knew she couldn’t afford and was turning over anyway because putting it down meant admitting it. Three stalls in a row with gaps where inventory used to be, the gaps not filled, the vendors not restocking because restocking required money that the margins no longer produced.

She had seen this kind of market in her first life, in the aftermath of things that went wrong at scale. She had not expected to walk into one in the middle of a capital city that had been, eleven months ago, functional.

She walked through it slowly, not looking like she was looking.

The fabric samples were a good reason to stop at stalls. She stopped at several. Listened.

What she heard, underneath the transactional surface, was the specific sound of people trying not to say what they were saying. ’The taxes went up again.’ Said quietly, said sideways, said in the way you said things you knew were being listened to. ’The markets haven’t recovered since the war.’ Which was true and also not the whole truth — the war had been over for two years, and markets recovered from wars, and what prevented them from recovering was what came after.

She bought a length of cheap cloth she didn’t need.

Walked on.

The residential streets off the main thoroughfare were worse. She had not meant to walk through them — she had meant to cut through to the administrative wing — but she turned the wrong direction at a junction and found herself in a street that was residential in the way that streets were residential when the residents had stopped being able to maintain them.

A woman sitting in a doorway with the particular stillness of someone who had decided to conserve.

Two men leaning against a wall in the middle of the morning not because they had nowhere to be but because they did and the going there had become an act of will that required preparation.

A child — maybe seven, maybe less, children were harder to age when they were underfed — watching Elara from across the street with eyes that were doing the specific calculation of whether she was a threat or an opportunity or just another adult passing through.

Elara looked back.

The child decided she was neither, and looked away.

She stood in the street for a moment.

’The taxes went up.’ Of course they did. A new emperor consolidating after a succession war needed revenue, needed to rebuild the military infrastructure that had been gutted during the contest, needed to demonstrate capacity to the noble factions watching to see if he was going to hold. Raising taxes was the obvious instrument. It was also, depending on what had already been squeezed, the instrument that turned a population that was managing into a population that wasn’t.

She looked at the child.

The child had found something on the ground and was examining it with the focused attention that children directed at things they’d decided were interesting. A piece of tile, probably. A button. Some small ordinary thing that was interesting enough.

She turned. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

Walked toward the administrative wing.

’’’

The system was on her shoulder.

It had been quiet through the market and the residential street, which was its way of allowing her to look without commentary. This was one of the things she had come to understand about it over the past year — it knew when she needed to see something without interpretation, and it shut up accordingly, which was not a small thing for an entity that had opinions about most things.

’He raised the taxes,’ it said now, as she walked.

"Yes," she said.

’Post-war reconstruction. Standard instrument.’

"Standard instrument with non-standard consequences depending on the starting conditions," she said. "If the population was already compressed from the succession war’s disruption, raising taxes pushes past the margin." She paused. "Which is what happened."

’The noble factions,’ the system said.

"Yes," she said.

This was the other thing she’d been assembling from what she’d heard in the merchant district and what Caius had brought back from the eastern provinces and what lived in the gaps of the relay reports from the past eleven months. The fourth prince — her brother, technically, though the word felt wrong in the way that words for family felt wrong when the family had been a structure rather than a relationship — was on the throne, and the throne was surrounded.

Not by enemies. By people who were helpful in the specific way that help became dependency.

Noble factions who had supported the succession contest and who had now positioned themselves as essential to the administration in exchange for that support. Advisory councils packed with people whose appointments had come through channels that had served the previous network. A young emperor who had never been prepared for the throne because nobody had ever expected him to need to be — the fourth prince, quiet at dinners, narrow face, the one nobody was watching — now sitting in the middle of a structure that was running him more than he was running it.