#Chapter 32: Redacted Entries

Richard The inner chamber was colder than I remembered. Not by temperature—by energy. These men and women had built kingdoms with their silence, and today they brought that silence to me in layers. Folded, intentional, sharpened. I took my seat at the head of the long oak table. Every page in the packet before me had been vetted, revised, combed for missteps. Every policy line was technically sound. That didn’t mean it would survive the room. “Shall we begin?” Elder Thorne asked, his voice gravel and suspicion. We began. For the first forty-five minutes, the discussion stayed where I expected: tax reform, pack subsidy ceilings, border security updates. But David was waiting. I could see it in how still he sat, how he only flipped pages he already knew by heart. He struck just after a round of proposed adjustments to the southern territory patrol budget. “There’s a growing concern,” David said, “about internal bias within your administration. Namely, the influence of your