She put Bram to bed at eight and started pulling files at eight thirty.
Not because she didn't know what she was going to decide. She had known since she closed the folder across from Aldous, since the roof, since longer than that probably — since the elevator, since the south corridor, since a night five years ago when she had gotten into a cab and made the first in a series of decisions that had led to this floor. She pulled the files anyway. Because she did not make decisions without looking at the whole of them first. She never had.
The apartment floor became a table.
She arranged things by category first, then by consequence. Pack documents on the left — formation records, membership roster, territorial claims, the infrastructure she had built over four weeks from a base that had e
