This was what running twenty thousand people looked like from the inside. Not the battles, not the takeovers. Those were the visible things, the things people knew about Evander Voss from a distance and repeated to each other in low voices over trade negotiations and supply agreements. This was the daily work of it. The thousand small arbitrations and enforcements and decisions that kept a city of twenty thousand from eating itself alive. The channel dispute would be resolved. Another would appear. There was always another. There were always people testing the edges of what was permitted, always supply chains to manage and hierarchies to maintain and the particular human tendency toward conflict to redirect into something less catastrophic than what it would become left entirely to itself.
