This wasn't the first drunk-driving accident Stephen had had to deal with, and it would not be the last, but none of his guards had ever run over someone he knew personally before. He put down the telephone and dropped his head in his hands. Ferguson's parents had been too shocked to speak. Their daughter had just sent them gifts the other day, and now she was dead - and it was also entirely her fault. Or was it?

"I don't understand," Stephen said. "Why can't they just follow the rules?" He felt like he was going to cry. He wished he could cry, if only so that something could happen, but he couldn't. "This is why they banned fraternizing!"

Tiller looked up from the paperwork she was doing. Stephen really needed to get back to work. Dr. Lee may have enjoyed a small modicum of fame, but nobody had noticed his passing. The university had put up a small notice saying that he had been killed by a drunk driver, but nobody outside of the institution paid attention to it. And in the jail, the only thing anyone knew was that Ferguson had died in a car crash. Anyone who wasn't her close friend would forget about it by tomorrow.

"I don't understand you, Lieutenant," she said. "You've never said a bad word about Linus and I."

Stephen sat up straight, looking at the phone. "Because I know you're not going to drive a car into a pedestrian while drunk." He thought about Dr. Lee. Stephen had last seen the historian last week. The man had gone on and on about air conditioning. Stephen had already known from his local staff that summers here were wretched and Dr. Lee's warnings about the dangers of delays would have been better addressed to the judges, but he had still made a mental note to air-condition IDMT courtrooms even if it meant they were the only places in the Capitol with aircon.

He must have fit in so well in Thirteen, with his reserve and quiet humour. It was a shame he'd never get to visit the places he studied. One moment, he was there, and the next, he was dead. His body had been put on life support so that his organs could be donated, but Dr. Decius Lee was gone the moment the jeep had hit him.

"I should have done something," Stephen said. "What kind of an officer am I when I can't control my troops?"

Tiller shrugged. "You can't control them on their time off. They're grown enough to make their own decisions."

"Yes, but why do they make such stupid decisions?"

"Because they can." Tiller huffed. "People did the same where I'm from."

Stephen still felt like he had failed somehow. Lee had left behind a wife and two close friends. Ferguson had been supporting her family financially. Her companion that night, Octavian Kali, had survived thanks to wearing a seatbelt, but he was severely traumatized from the incident. And all because Stephen hadn't been able to convince his guards to not drink and drive.

"People do the same everywhere," Stephen conceded with a sigh. "Anything new in your life?"

Tiller shook her head. "Classes are a nightmare. I have to work five times as hard as everyone else just to keep pace with them and some of them are three times as old as me and just as uneducated. I can't believe how stupid I am."

"You're not stupid," Stephen said instinctively. "Or, in any case, not stupid in everything. I am stupid when it comes to any technical things, for example. You shouldn't beat yourself up over being below average in one area of competence."

"Yes, but how often do you need to fix cars? I need to read and write all the time, and I'm terrible at it. My IQ-"

Stephen decided to cut that short. "Your IQ is nothing but a vague approximation of your current ability in certain types of intelligence, most of which are affected by education. Is your IQ in the range where most people experience difficulties in academic settings? Yes. Does it mean that you are naturally incompetent, or incapable of learning, or anything else of the sort? No. Studies have shown that poor or otherwise marginalized people do worse on tests when they are told that they are tests, as they have internalized stereotypes. So please don't set yourself up to fail. Just do what you need to, don't get caught up in what others are doing, and you'll be shocked in a few years to see how much higher your IQ is once the general-knowledge section doesn't all refer to a culture you had never experienced."

"Thanks, Lieutenant."

Stephen checked his watch. About time. "I'm going to the funeral. Hold down the fort while I'm away, would you?"

Tiller nodded. "I can do this paperwork later."

The trial was bare days away. The day after tomorrow, in fact. The prosecution and defense were working frantically, the courtroom was quite close to being fully repaired, and the judges claimed they were ready. They'd do a dress rehearsal tomorrow, to make sure that everything was working, but for now, Stephen had a funeral to go to.

He made his way to the funeral home. It was remarkably similar to what Stephen was used to back in Thirteen. If organs or tissue could be taken from the body, they were. Then, people would gather to say their final farewells before the body was buried, or burned, or dissolved with strong alkalines, or handed over for research. Since Dr. Lee's death had been so unexpected and early, there was no will. His wife had had to go off the assumption that her husband would have liked to be contributing to research even after his death.

Something like forty people went to say goodbye to Dr. Lee. His wife was still reeling in shock - her face was completely calm with only a slight hint of confusion. Drs. Blueroot and Nurbeko were crying openly. In the casket, Dr. Lee was lying, eyes closed, his hair meticulously done up by the experts in the funeral home into his customary braid crown, the single black plait now never to go grey. Dr. Lee seemed to be amused by something - the corners of his mouth had pulled up slightly. The rest of him was covered in a sheet.

There were also people Stephen didn't recognize - students and professors, most likely. Dr. Nurbeko stood by the casket, about to give the eulogy. The usually irreverent historian had tears pouring out of their eyes.

"Decius wasn't a hero," they began, before collapsing back into sobs. "He needn't have even come to Thirteen!" They coughed several times and continued in a strained voice. "He wasn't in danger. Sure, he was a spy, but he only passed on information to a colleague, who passed it to Thirteen. He wasn't about to be uncovered or anything. The only thing that brought him to Thirteen was a book."

Dr. Nurbeko held up a hardcover book. "Just a stupid book about an ancient war-crimes trial. But Decius was struck by the promise it contained. Most defectors left because they wanted to eat sweet buns every day, or not be beaten by Peacekeepers for breaking curfew. That was how they tried to define something they had never experienced - freedom. Some left because they knew that it was possible to live without constantly looking over your shoulder to see if anyone was listening. And Decius left because he wanted to tell everyone about the Tokyo Trial."

There were some scattered chuckles at that. That did sound like Dr. Lee.

"All Decius wanted was to make history our daily reality. And he succeeded." Dr. Nurbeko started sobbing again, and it took them some time to calm down. "The key criminals trial is opening in a few days, and all I can think about is how much I wish he could have attended the opening. He'd have told me that my analogies were all wrong, I need to stop trying to see Fritz Fischer and Herta Oberheuser everywhere, and that so-and-so is obviously the modern-day Itagaki Seishiro.

"Decius Lee should not have become any kind of Rebel." Fresh tears poured from Dr. Nurbeko's eyes. "He was born in 25 by the old style in a professor's family. It was thanks to a family friend that it even entered his mind that things were not how they ought to have been. Through her, he made connections in university and began to spy for Thirteen, reporting on general moods. He attended law school but history was his true love, so instead of entering practice, he entered academia. That was how he lived. Professor Lee, the last person you'd ever expect to be a spy. And then one day six years ago, he was given a pass to enter the state library so that he could take out a volume of legal cases from medieval China, because of course that was his idea of light reading. The pass was for 'one book'. He took out a book on the Tokyo trial, and that inspired him to defect." Dr. Nurbeko sighed. "The Tokyo Trial of all things made this crazy man defect. Somehow I'm not surprised that Decius not only told everyone about the history, but managed to turn it into reality.

"It was so unfair what he went through. What the country went through. I remember how we first met at a university get-together. A political scientist was idly speculating - 'you know, if the big country had a democracy, then the small landowners in places like Eleven and Ten would vote for conservative parties, and urban working classes would vote for socialist ones'. Normal things like that. And Decius was crying. As if farmers voting conservative and workers voting socialist was the most beautiful thing he had ever heard of. But all of us, too, couldn't imagine a future where Eleven farmers voted conservative and the Capitol workers voted socialist. We couldn't imagine the big country voting at all. But Decius - he was sitting there like he was receiving some sort of revelation from God! Like the world was suddenly becoming a brighter and more beautiful place even though nothing changed but his understanding of it. It was at that moment he decided to give his all to the liberation of Panem."

The historian looked down at the casket. "Decius, you poor man. Why did this happen to you?" they wailed. "You were a historian. The most over-eager and enthusiastic historian I have ever seen. You risked your life not because you were in danger, but to chase a dream nobody could have predicted would come true. And then it did. And you won't get to see it."

Stephen felt himself choking up.

"I wanted to finish up with a quote from the trial you should have spent many more decades studying, but you're the one who went around telling Irons that the world would end if she acted like Barry Keenan, and it's not like you can glare at me now.

"The father looked up at the sky, Decius, and pointed out something to his son." Stephen didn't get the reference, but the emotion in Dr. Nurbeko's voice was unmistakable. "The boy smiled. How do we know that? Because a witness' affidavit was read in court. A crime like thousands more like it was remembered, a hero like hundreds more - immortalized. Thanks to you, Decius, we will find out about many more stories like that. I wish only that you were around to see it."

Dr. Nurbeko started sobbing all over again. They walked away from the casket and sat down, wiping at their face with their arm.

"I heard they're going to give us shorter hours," Nilofar said optimistically as she watched the copies print.

"They better," Leon grumbled. So far, there was no end in sight when it came to the documents. He watched his own document copy, one page after another, and frantically tried to think of something to say. "Have you entered the ticket lottery?"

"Yeah. You?"

"Yeah." They had done a survey, and a massive amount of people were interested in attending the trial. The IDC was entering everyone's name into a lottery, and the winners for the first month had been announced. Leon's family had entered as a group; they were hoping they'd have better luck later on. You could only enter your name once, but there were quotas for Districts, and you'd even get free transportation if you needed it. "Did you win?"

"No."

"Me, neither."

The machine spat out the last copy. Leon took the sheets and placed them on the piles. This document was something like a hundred pages long - Leon pitied the lawyers who'd have to deal with it. He took the next sheet of paper and put it on the scanner. "Did you hear that a professor at the uni got run over by a car?"

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"No. That sucks."

"Yeah."

It was so boring here. Leon looked at the clock and wished the hands could move faster.

"So, how's life?" Nilofar asked after a lengthy pause.

"Alright, I guess. You?"

"Alright."

As Stephen had predicted, by the time the dress rehearsal began, nobody in the jail save for a few of Ferguson's friends remembered the entire incident. Stephen still felt horrible about it, but there was nothing he could do. There was nothing he could say to make his guards behave themselves. He had ordered the destroyed jeep displayed somewhere visible, but they would just ignore it.

Dress went off without a hitch. As workers put the finishing touches on the courtroom, Stephen had had his guards enter and exit so that they knew where they were standing. The microphones had been checked - everyone would be audible. The television crews were setting up their cameras with no issues. And to cap it off, a runner had arrived to tell Stephen that he was needed for an interrogation.

Stephen dimly recalled reading a book where it said that people were generally promoted one level too high. That was the case with him - he may have been a good interrogator, but he would never have volunteered for an administrative job. So it was with relief that he got debriefed by the actual interrogator who had been supposed to do the job - she was currently recovering from an appendectomy - and went to deal with Carl Prange, former top administrator at a Capitol hospital for those lucky enough to be found not criminally responsible by courts instead of being shot, acute psychosis notwithstanding.

This would be a welcome respite. The previous interrogator had done all the setup, all he needed was use the documents she had gathered to obliterate his front of lies. Prange had sent those of the patients who were never visited to the IGR, where they would be experimented on until they died. However, so far, he had denied it. He wouldn't be able to deny it anymore. Of course, just because denial did not appear possible did not mean he wouldn't try it.

Stephen arrived at the room where Prange was sitting on a chair diagonally across from a stenographer. He sat down opposite him and took out a thermos and three paper cups from his bag. "Good afternoon," Stephen said with a warm smile. "Tea?"

The stenographer accepted, but Prange did not. "How do I know it's not poisoned?" he asked half-seriously.

"You don't," Stephen replied, pouring himself half a cup. "You sure you don't want any?"

"No, thank you." His hands were folded on the table in front of him. Prange was middle-aged, wore glasses, and starting to go bald, though his hair was fully black. His skin was light-tan despite many months of incarceration, and he had a faint hint of stubble despite the early hour. He looked mostly calm, but with an undercurrent of anxiety.

Stephen nodded. "Very well. Let us begin." The stenographer prepared to type. "I am Lieutenant Stephen Vance, interrogating Carl Prange. Now, I know you were interrogated by Captain Mulligan three times by now, if I am not mistaken?"

"I was," Prange said with a nod.

"She underwent an appendectomy last night and will hopefully only be indisposed for a week or thereabouts. I will be your interrogator today." Stephen made a show of going through the notes Mulligan had given him. It was a shame she'd miss out on this crowning number. She had spent quite a bit of time getting all the pieces into place, and it felt a little bit unfair that Stephen would swoop in and get all the glory. "Now, I see there is a bit of a disagreement about that business with the IGR. You said that you knew nothing of it?"

Prange nodded again. "Nothing."

"A shame," Stephen said. "We are trying to reconstruct the past seventy-five years, but we're stumbling in the dark here. If you could explain how it all worked, that would be a great boon to us."

Prange spread out his hands. "I wish I could help you, but I know nothing."

"Mr. Prange, I remind you that you are still under oath. Do you know what perjury is?" Stephen asked in a more foreboding tone.

"Of course I do," Prange said, sounding irritated.

"What is perjury?"

Prange looked at him as if he was spouting nonsense. "Lying under oath."

"I ask you again, Mr. Prange. What did you know about the handing over of abandoned patients to the IGR?"

"Nothing," he said evenly.

Stephen nodded. Out of his bag, he took out a blank piece of paper and a pen. "Here is a blank sheet of paper. Could you please sign on this sheet of paper the same way you usually sign?"

Slightly bemused, Prange signed. A mistake, even if Stephen wasn't going to use the signature to falsify confessions. "Here you go. What is it for?"

"Patience, Mr. Prange." Stephen took a highly incriminating document - a letter where Prange reported to a higher-up on underage patients who had been sent to the IGR in a certain month and which ones of them were dead already - and covered it up with the paper so that only the two signatures were visible. "It seems to me that these were made by the same person, does it not?"

Prange still didn't look worried. The files had mostly been destroyed at the hospital, including patient records. Most had been reconstructed, after a fashion, but some of the patients were not capable of communicating, which made it so much more difficult. "They're both mine," he agreed.

"Very well, then," Stephen said. "In that case, why have you been lying to Captain Mulligan this entire time?" He handed the photocopy to Prange. "You did not destroy the evidence nearly as well as you thought."

Prange's eyes widened for a split second before his entire face crumpled and he burst into tears.

"How could you, Mr. Prange?" Stephen said, adopting the tone of a disappointed teacher and passing to him some paper tissues from his bag. "Look. Henry Oyude, fourteen years old. Jewel Macintosh, fifteen years old. Died during the 'nutrition experiments' - code for starvation, I assume?" Prange cried harder and took off his glasses. "You wouldn't be sitting here if you had just shown a sliver of a conscience and turned down the promotion when it was offered to you. First you lie to Captain Mulligan-"

"Lieutenant, Lieutenant," Prange begged, "I did lie before. Please. I'll tell you everything, I won't lie anymore, I swear, just please remove my lies from the official record, and I'll tell you everything I know. Please don't leave my lies in my record." He wiped at his face with the paper tissues. "I will truthfully testify now. I promise."

He was a pathetic sight. "Have some tea, Mr. Prange," he said, pouring some into the empty cup and handing it to Prange, who gulped it down. "I will tell Captain Mulligan to start a new interrogation. This is now your last opportunity to speak the truth, do you understand?"

Prange nodded morosely. "Am I going to be indicted?"

Stephen took out a packet of peanut paste from his pocket. "Would you like a snack, Mr. Prange?" He took it with a shrug and opened the packet. "I do not know whether you will be indicted - Captain Mulligan and I are only interested in your testimony. All we want is to know the truth. We want to know what happened in Panem under Snow."

Prange ate some paste and sniffled. "Of course. I promise I'll be honest from here on now." He put his glasses back on.

Stephen had serious doubts about that. "As you can see, we have documentary evidence already. We just need to fill in the gaps, and this is where you come in. If you tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, I'm sure Captain Mulligan will strike the transcripts that contain your lies. I cannot promise you anything with regards to a plea deal or anything of the sort, but I assure you that not only will you feel much better about yourself once you've stopped evading at every turn, but judges will look much kinder upon a defendant who is honest, no matter how terrible the truth is. More tea?"

"Sure."

The cup was refilled again. Prange ate some more paste. His eyes were red and he kept on wiping at his nose with the paper tissues. This was by no means a spectacular breakdown, by Stephen's standards, but there was still something uncomfortable in watching a person disgrace themselves like that. "Now," Stephen said, "let us start from the beginning." Hopefully, this change of heart would last, and Mulligan wouldn't be confronted with the same obstinacy as before when she returned. "When you were promoted to your former position, what instructions were you given?"

The clothing was delivered at the same time as the guards switched, resulting in minor chaos. Antonius thanked Deputy Warden Tiller and took the suit, which hung on a hanger. There had to be some deeper meaning to the fact that they had been allowed a coat hanger, but Antonius was too frazzled to figure out what it was. He carefully hung the suit from a shelf and sat down on his cot, thinking.

It would begin tomorrow. This endless limbo would be over, and Octavia and Achilleus and the rest of the family would finally be able to see him, if on the television screen - the trial would be broadcast live in its entirety. Antonius ran a hand over his hair, wishing they had let him grow it out. During their afternoon walk in that horrible concrete cylinder, he had noticed that none of the men save Pollman had a full head of hair - scant consolation, when he himself looked the way he did.

The guard watching over him was crying.

"What is wrong, guard?" Antonius asked half-heartedly, getting to his feet. He may as well distract himself from what was looming on the horizon. The guard was very young, either barely of age or just a hair under it.

The boy sniffled and wiped at his eyes. "My friend died two days ago."

Antonius could not stop himself from gasping out loud. "That is terrible," he said. "My condolences. I remember when I was your age, one of my friends killed himself. I was unable to do anything for a week. Are you sure you should be on duty?"

"What else am I supposed to do? Sit at the bar and get trashed?" He had a very rural accent, though Antonius could not guess his District of origin. "Might as well stick to my routine. Someone said it's important."

"That does help sometimes," Antonius agreed, thinking of Grandma. She was not doing very well. He had sent demand after demand requesting to be allowed to see her, to no avail. But at least he knew it was coming, and sooner rather than later. "Do you have anyone to talk to?"

The boy shrugged. "One of the psychologists pulled me aside a few times. I guess it's helping."

"That is good."

The boy said nothing else, so Antonius sat back down. He tried to focus on his book, but his brain could not concentrate on anything more substantial than staring at the window. Fortunately, it was soon time to shower. Antonius grabbed his clean things and obediently trooped off together with Oldsmith, Best, Lark, Pollman, and Coll. All of them except for Pollman looked scruffy - they had last been shaved two days ago, and Pollman ordinarily needed to shave once a week, if that.

"So-" Oldsmith began, before being cut off by a guard.

"Just because the warden's not here doesn't mean you can talk!" the man snapped.

Point taken. They walked the rest of the way in silence, washed in silence, and walked back in silence. When they got back, their cells had been completely ransacked, but Antonius' suit still hung on the wall. He put his cell in order, wondering if they would come back every evening to this. The days would be very long, from eight-thirty in the morning to five-forty-five in the evening, with a lunch break and two smaller pauses breaking up the day into two-hour chunks. Truly, the eight-hour workday those socialists had promised.

Two hours at a time, sitting on what would undoubtedly be a very uncomfortable bench. Antonius had heard rumours that the benches would be backless, but Best was seventy-six. The admiral may have worked out every morning in his cell, but if he had to sit for eight hours on a backless bench, he'd collapse. And Antonius would not have been much better off, either.

Antonius had never been in the spotlight before. Grandma had always said to avoid it, as their job was better done without crowds of curious onlookers staring at them. But now, he would be sitting in the front row, with cameras catching his every move. If he twitched wrong, everyone would be able to laugh at him. At least Grandma had been spared this indignity. Antonius glanced over at his suit. The tie had not been given to him, as it was a suicide risk.

Their paranoia about suicide was laughable. Death was the last thing Antonius wanted. He sat on his cot and wondered how in the world had he ended up in this dingy cell, about to go on trial. But at least he was getting a trial. He had an excellent lawyer who would be representing him in the courtroom and an entire team working behind the scenes. All he had to do was go out there and explain that he was innocent, and they would have to let him go. The Steelworks was always needed, no matter what government was in power.

Antonius sat on his cot and missed his family.

"Well, then," Raymond said. "Is everyone ready for tomorrow?"

The gathered judges chuckled and shook their heads, Dora among them. Raymond was hosting a little night-before get-together in his billet, with tea, cakes, and board games. The assistants had disappeared off to somewhere - having their own get-together, no doubt.

"I don't know anything," Rose said morosely.

"That's not a problem," Rosalinda said in a teasing tone. "All we have to do is sit around looking solemn. It's our Chair who has to worry."

Raymond smiled sourly and took a sip of his tea. They were sitting on couches around a small-ish table in a massive living room. Dora was leaning against an armrest, Juan by her side. "If I have a panic attack mid-session, ignore me."

"You're not going to have a panic attack," Cora said, sounding like she was hoping saying the words would make them reality.

Dora nibbled on a little cake. Drazen and Sean had made a nice platter for them to bring in, as had everyone else's housekeepers, and Dora was availing herself of their excellent baking. The cake was a small square that tasted of honey and some sort of spice.

"But what if I do?" Raymond put down his cup and sighed.

"Once I saw a judge have a seizure," Drexel offered.

Raymond picked up a jam cookie. "I can't have a seizure, or a panic attack, or anything of the sort." He broke the cookie in half and ate a piece. "I have no idea what I'm doing."

"Neither do we, then," Dora reminded him. "The closest I've gotten to this was when a deputy minister fell out of favour and was tried for espionage."

Juan turned to face her. "What happened?"

"I acquitted him, of course. He was guilty of a lot of things, but not espionage." Several long faces told her that the 'of course' would not have been so self-evident to the others. "In any case, this is just another conspiracy trial. You can handle that."

"But what if I make a mistake?" Raymond asked, half-heartedly chewing on the remaining cookie half. He wasn't usually so maudlin - tomorrow's opening was affecting all of them. Daniel was curled up in a ball in the corner of one couch, scrawling something in his notebook, as always. "I can't make a mistake."

"You're going to make mistakes," Rosa reminded him. "You're human."

Raymond gnashed his teeth. "I can't make mistakes. I have to be perfect. Any small slip can spell catastrophe for the trial. The historians - they only told me what not to be. Over and over. Because there's no precedent for what to be."

Dora had no idea how to reassure him. She couldn't imagine presiding over such a massive trial, with such high stakes. Journalists would be overanalyzing every single thing Raymond said, whether scolding a prosecutor for going off topic or making a ruling on the admissibility of a specific piece of evidence. If he lost control of the trial or if it got bogged down in procedural bickering, it would be blamed on him.

"A small mistake won't cause catastrophe," Brutus tried to reassure him. "We'll all make major decisions together. All you have to do is preside over the trial, like you've done hundreds of times."

"But this isn't any trial," Raymond insisted. "They're all counting on me. I need to be impartial. I need to be the personification of fairness, justice, and integrity. I need to be perfection." He tossed the cookie half into his mouth and chewed it.

Dora wondered if he had added anything to his tea. That sort of purple prose was completely out of nowhere. Looking around the table, she could see that the others were thinking along similar lines.

"I don't think they have such high expectations," Moira pointed out, sounding taken aback. She looked into her teacup as if it contained the answers to all of her questions. "Nobody complained about Snow's trial."

Raymond huffed and fell back against the couch. "There's a difference between Snow and career politicians, functionaries, and officers. We can do better than a two-week affair that explains nothing. We need to be like in the history books with that trial of the juntas on the eve of the Cataclysm. Punish the guilty, create a record of the past seventy-five years, show the world that we are a democracy now. Just without the mistakes they made."

"Didn't Dr. Lee warn of prose like that?" Rose asked with a chuckle. That smile turned to a frown when she remembered Dr. Lee was dead. "Poor man."

They sat in silence for a few seconds, only the ticking of the clock making any sound. After hearing the news, Dora had become more careful about walking around at night. It was easy to dismiss the misdeeds of the MPs as the antics of children given freedom for the first time, but these children could get someone killed.

"Poor man," Raymond said quietly. "I was going to return a book to him, but I guess I won't be able to do that now."

"I talked to him once," Taylor offered. "I could see he was so enthusiastic about his job."

None of them mentioned that another person had died in the crash - a young MP. Ferguson had been a factory worker. Unlike Dora, she hadn't grown up with the knowledge that you just couldn't drive drunk - she had first gotten into a car when in the army. This sort of rule-breaking normally drove Dora to fury, but she couldn't summon up anything other than a vague sadness. Nineteen-year-old Jack would probably have done the exact same thing.

That was how it went in Panem. The lower classes were first deprived of the most basic things and then expected to somehow know what to do with them from the get-go. Ferguson had been her family's main breadwinner. They had bought an apartment with the money she could send home. Dora had nothing but disdain for black-marketers who took food out of the mouths of needy children, but she couldn't fault someone like Ferguson for trying to improve her family's lot. She had spent some of her money on her boyfriend, but how could a well-off nineteen-year-old be expected to not waste money on dates?

And the boyfriend, too, was being completely forgotten. Dora didn't even know his name. Another factory worker. Hopefully, he would make a full recovery. All he had done wrong was be unable to tell his girlfriend she was doing something dangerous. Two young lives, gone because a nineteen-year-old didn't know any better. Had Ferguson survived, Dora would have met her prosecution with approval, but she was dead.

Dora took a small cookie and ate it in one bite. "Raymond," she said. "You can't go to pieces now." She wanted to add 'especially not over someone who wasn't even your colleague', but that would have been insensitive. And she, too, was troubled by the deaths.

"That's what I'm worried about. What if I go to pieces during the trial?"

This was not helping. "We are here to unwind and distract ourselves. If I wanted to fret, I could do so in my billet, with my assistants telling me about books I absolutely need to read by tomorrow."

"Exactly," Cora said, stretching out her legs and sipping her tea. "You promised us a relaxing evening. Nobody is going to pieces during the trial, except perhaps the defendants and some of the witnesses. What's that game you were talking about?"

Raymond poured himself some more tea. "It's a card game my assistant scrounged up somewhere. You put cards with pre-written words and phrases together to make humorous sentences. The edition was printed in Ottawa, so we might miss some of the references."

"Sounds great," Rose said. "Let's play that."

"Sure." Raymond got up and went to get it.

Mary finished the speech and looked expectantly at Joe. "How was that?"

Joe nodded to himself. "Good." The trial was starting tomorrow, which meant that her opening statement would be the day after that. This was her last rehearsal before the real thing. "The gestures are much better. Remember, hands are as light as feathers, not steel pipes hanging down your sides."

"Of course." Mary did a few basic hand gestures. In Thirteen, people didn't tend to gesticulate much, which made them appear reserved and even emotionless to others. "Pauses good?"

"Perfect." Since the statement would take several hours, she had needed to work in appropriate breaks to take sips of water. The speech's length had also made it difficult to rehearse - just now, she had gone over the last section. "Though you need to relax more. You become more and more rigid by the end, and since you're wearing a uniform, that has an effect you don't want."

"I'll keep that in mind." Being in uniform made her want to be rigid, but she needed to look natural in the sharp grey outfit, not like a raw recruit trying extra-hard to be impressive. Mary wanted to avoid any connotations of one militarism putting another on trial. "Can I see the notes?"

"Here you go." Her secretary passed to her his laptop, on which he had been taking notes as she went. Mary went down the list. "Mostly, it's good, but there's some minor points."

The biggest problem was the gestures. Since she would be standing at a lectern the entire time, it would be easy to stand at ease and just read. Mary knew from her endless speeches to the IDC that she needed to add a little bit more emotion than she usually used. What she thought was even was, to others, flat. For that reason, she had notations in red pen in the margins, telling herself to show some feeling.

"Are you worried?" Joe asked curiously. He sat down on his chair. Mary, too, took a seat.

"Somewhat." Mary had rehearsed over and over, but there was still that anxiety in the back of her head. Some of the others were much worse off - Trevor Hall was bedridden and having entire conversations with his hallucinations. "Are you attending the opening day?"

"Oh, no. Too much to do. Reed needs to borrow me."

Poor Reed was overloaded with work - while Mary spent her time arguing with politicians, he did the real work of setting up a system of trials. The organizers of the Gamemakers' trial had finally come to them for help, as the trial of the key criminals was starting tomorrow and theirs showed no sign of resuming, so that was another thing for Reed to worry about. The Peacekeepers would be going on in a month or thereabouts.

Just that day, Reed had complained about one of the defendants. All of the others were going to plead military necessity, or superior orders, or that they had no idea their acts were illegal. One, however, had one simple answer to everything - it wasn't me, you have the wrong person. Reed had left local investigators to handle showing photo lineups to potential witnesses, and now, it was too late to do anything but hope that Ivana Delaire could be caught in a lie.

"Good," Mary said, scanning through the first page of the document she was holding. "I think I'm going to turn in for the night. Have a good one!"

Joe nodded. "You, too."

Mary left her speech on the desk in her office and went to her room. She got ready for bed and slid under the covers, hoping that the next few days would proceed without a hitch.

A/N: Next chapter, the trial will finally start.

Fritz Fischer and Herta Oberheuser were two of the defendants at the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial; they had carried out cruel and senseless experiments on concentration-camp prisoners. Itagaki Seishiro was a general who, among many other things, helped plan the Mukden incident. Chee's 'the father pointed to the sky' quote is from the IMT testimony of Hermann Graebe, a German engineer who witnessed a mass shooting in the occupied USSR and tried to convince the officers in charge of the massacre to spare the people who worked for him, as there really were no other excuses that could convince them to let at least some people live.

The trial of the juntas Raymond refers to is this: wikipedia DOT org/wiki/Trial_of_the_Juntas, the trial in 1985 of the former leadership of Argentina, which had been a brutal dictatorship and waged a 'dirty war' against anyone they perceived as opposition. It is probably the most successful example of a nation trying its former leaders.