CHAPTER 4 — Underway
Maintenance Ring / Beneath Vesper Arcology
The Civic District Court sat above the city like a polished tooth. Wide glass frontage. White stone lattice. A dozen flags that fluttered in artificial wind. The building was a theater where Vesper performed justice for the rest of the world.
Rio hated theaters.
They arrived to a scene already being rewritten.
Authority drones hovered in a tight halo around the court’s east wing. Their lenses were pointed inward, not outward. The street below was empty—not because nothing had happened, but because the city had decided nobody should be there to remember it.
A thin cordon of local police stood at the perimeter, shoulders tense, hands idle. Their job tonight was to witness something they wouldn’t be allowed to testify about
