KIERAN - THE JUDGE
The Apex’s seat was empty.
I had been attending council sessions for nineteen years. Had watched four Apexes occupy that chair – three before Gideon, and then Gideon himself, from the day he took his father’s place at twenty three and made it immediately, irrevocably his own.
In nineteen years, the seat had never been empty.
We had started without him twice; once during a border crisis that required his personal presence, once when his father died and the transition period created a forty-eight-hour gap. Both times there had been an explanation. Protocol. The machinery of succession moving correctly.
This time Kael had simply appeared in the doorway twenty minutes before the session and said: “He’s with his mate. We proceed without him.”
And that was it.
I sat at
