Antonius could tell that Oldsmith's indignation was just a front. In reality, he was terrified. The scathing propagandistic lines he used to answer the questions of Pinto, his lawyer, were borne from fear, not true belief. Oldsmith was sabotaging himself, and there was not much Pinto could do to help his client.

Oldsmith's case should have been easy. He was the epitome of the career suitcase-carrier. He had attached himself to Snow back when Snow had been a senator's assistant and made his living that way. When Snow became president, Oldsmith became his close advisor, a person with no official job title but that of secretary. If he was being honest, Antonius did not know how much power exactly Oldsmith had had, but he was sure that it would have been easy enough to argue that he had zero.

By now, Antonius had a decent understanding of what made for a good direct examination. This was not it. Oldsmith became emotional when asked even mildly difficult questions, and this was still only the direct examination.

"As Snow's secretary, what sort of meetings did you sit in on?"

Oldsmith literally gnashed his teeth. "What does that matter? I was only a secretary! Are you going to ask that of the furniture next? It was also present during meetings!"

Oldsmith was no Dovek, but he could also turn a quip, even if there was a bite to everything he said that Dovek did not have. Antonius leaned forward slightly to look at the only one of them who had their day on the stand behind them. Dovek looked like every one of Oldsmith's missteps was causing him physical pain.

If Dovek looked pained, Pinto seemed to be cursing whoever had decided to give him this client. After a few more attempts to get Oldsmith to answer difficult questions now instead of having them be posed by Waschmann, who was taking meticulous notes and looking at Oldsmith as if he was an animal and they were the hunter, the lawyer gave up and switched to easy questions.

At lunch, Oldsmith was still indignant. "Why's he asking me all those hard questions?" he complained over potatoes and beans. Oddly enough, the beans tasted like they had been seasoned by God Himself. That was one surprise Antonius was not complaining about. "Yours didn't go nearly as harshly."

"She did, actually," Dovek said. "I told you you need to prepare for tough questions. Better to have them be asked by a lawyer who will ask follow-ups in a helpful way."

"But I expressly told him to not bring half of that stuff up!"

Dovek shrugged, looking very much like a middle-school bully growing tired of a sycophant's uselessness. "Waschmann's going to bring it up."

"The less it's brought up, the better," Oldsmith muttered into his tea.

Antonius tried to focus on his own lunch. He, too, was being wracked with anxiety, though mostly in the evenings, when he was alone in his cell. He had been working with Shaw for weeks to come up with good answers to certain questions that could not be avoided, and this was yet another reminder that there was no way to bury these questions.

"Do you think Sanchez will like this portrait of him I'm making?" Lee asked.

Despite only having a single pencil to work with, Lee had managed to produce an impressive piece of art. Sanchez was portrayed sitting with his hands folded under his chin, listening to the proceedings attentively. It was a very flattering portrait. "It is beautiful," Antonius said honestly.

"Hey - Lux!" Krechet demanded of the former commander. He really was becoming capable of standing up for himself.

"Why that tone?" Lux shot back.

"Are people with epilepsy eligible for conscription?" Krechet barrelled on. What had brought this on today all of a sudden?

"Of course not." Lux was too direct to suspect the trap Antonius knew was coming. "They might have an attack."

"And people with type 1 diabetes?"

"They need daily medication, so no."

Krechet took a deep, shuddering breath. "People with autism?"

"They need to be evaluated by a psychiatrist to determine eligibility."

"In that case, why was my daughter's soccer team - and the men's club, too - lined up one day at practice and marched off to the recruitment centres? One of the boys died of hyperglycemia!" Krechet was clutching his spoon so tightly, Antonius was afraid he would break it. But he did have a point - it had been an ordeal proving medical ineligibility for a few of the cousins. "I'm not even getting into my thirteen-year-old son's class all being called up en masse! They emptied the school! Where does it say children are eligible? Huh?" Antonius had nearly died from horror when the baby cousins had enlisted, but it had never entered his mind to stop them. Many of his older relatives had fought in the Dark Days when they had been just as young.

"I will not listen to unpatriotic hogwash from you!"

"Really, Krechet, that's just how it goes," Kirji said. "My fifteen-year-old grandson volunteered - it was just the patriotic thing to do. You know how the kids believed in heroic combat against terrorists, things like that."

Krechet rubbed his eyes with shaking hands. "But look - everyone, I'm sorry if I sound insensitive, but my daughter shouldn't have been conscripted, she has a disability." He wrung his hands. "It's so not fair. I still can't come to terms with it. It shouldn't have happened to her. I can't believe it. I'm glad my son came back whole, at least, even if he has nightmares. But my little girl? Do you know how hard it is to write in a notebook with one hand?"

Antonius froze. Krechet had never mentioned his daughter losing a hand before. "My cousin Aakash lost his arm," he said.

"Was your cousin medically fit to serve?"

"He was," Antonius conceded. Cousin Aakash had also volunteered, but either way, Krechet's daughter should not have been there at all.

"It's not fair," Krechet repeated. "Everything she does requires two arms, and the easiest thing to adapt for is the hardest to monetize - sports. Academics - writing is hard, typing is frustrating, and I don't even know if she'll be limited in what specializations she can choose when she's in medical school. But piano? Do you know how few pieces there are solely for the left hand? She will never play professionally, unless busking counts. And she's been playing since the age of six, she always loved it so much, and now-" He wiped his eyes with a sleeve. "I don't even want to think about it. Non-dominant hand amputated above the elbow. It's not fair."

"Oh, cease your whining," Pollman snapped. "My son has scoliosis - he's worn a brace his entire life - and they conscripted him. I got him back without his legs. I didn't get my oldest daughter back at all. That's just how it goes. Be proud of her sacrifice and glad you still have her around."

"My daughter had ADHD," Toplak sighed. "Can you imagine someone with ADHD on the front? But she never even thought of not doing her duty."

Krechet shook his head and focused on his food. Next to Antonius, Blues was trying to raise Coll's spirits by telling him a funny story about how, back in university, she once decided to drop a course she was struggling in. The problem was that she made the decision after a bout of desperation at eleven at night, and did not want her parents to overhear her calling the registrar's office, so she claimed she was going on a date with her boyfriend. It said a lot about her parents that meeting up with someone in the middle of the night was more acceptable than dropping a course.

"Did you actually go on a date?" Coll asked, intrigued, his wan expression gone.

"Yeah. He fed me cookies he had baked himself while I ranted about that professor."

"I miss cookies," Lee muttered, putting the portrait away.

Antonius wondered what this friendliness between Blues and Coll heralded. Whatever it was, it was sure to not be good for him.

"So, how's it going in the courtroom?" Hudson asked Rye as they worked on Rye's presentation. They had dragged stacks of material into their room.

"Alright." Rye had skipped that day to focus on her own work. It was a relief to be freed from the tedium. "You probably know what's happening better than I do - you have the Web."

"You also have the Web."

"I can't be on my computer in the courtroom - the media might notice." Rye reluctantly typed a sentence and reached for her cross-examination outline, which was written in pencil to make drawing up that complicated chart easier. She had an outline of where she wanted to take Lee, and she had written out any possible answer to the questions and how to take the examination from there back to where she wanted him. "This bit is threatening to turn into a digression on the merits of universal healthcare," she said.

"Isn't that the point?" Hudson asked. "There was, officially, universal healthcare. It's just that it mysteriously wasn't available in the Districts. Lee can argue that for-profit healthcare is alright as much as he wants, but-"

"-that's not the issue," Rye finished. "The problem was the massive difference in what was promised and what was delivered." Had there been officially for-profit healthcare in Panem, AIDS medication that cost as much as a skilled worker's annual wage would have been a point of contention in a government debate, not in a courtroom. "I need to expose his anti-District bias."

That was harder than it sounded. A few of the defendants casually dropped highly offensive statements, but others were very mindful of what they said. Lee was one of the latter. "I don't think it's necessary." Hudson flipped through a stack of photocopied documents. "The documents have already condemned him ten times over."

Yes, the documents proving that had long been entered into the record, but Rye wanted to condemn the former minister with his own spoken words. "I suppose. At least it's not like with Oldsmith." His defense strategy was that he had not been the advisor the prosecution was painting him as, but a mere secretary. "I wonder who he'll blame for everything. The pharmaceutical corporations?" In her outline, that was the most common possible excuse when it came to prices. Rye would need to point out that the issue wasn't if it cost five dollars or five hundred thousand, it was why it had cost anything at all in the Districts and nothing - in the Capitol. Unless there were shortages, of course.

From there on, he would probably say something about corners having to be cut because of budget issues. From there, Rye would ask why the Districts had always borne the brunt of the cuts, and he would blame his predecessors and say that he couldn't change anything because of the lack of money. Rye would then bring up his multiple country houses and ask how it was that he had money for that but still had to break the law by forcing people to die because they couldn't afford insulin.

Her family was calling. Rye clicked the 'accept' icon and increased the volume. The black rectangle switched to an image of Bao lying on the table. She wasn't a tiny kitten anymore - Mitch's hands didn't hide her from view.

"Hello," she said. To Hudson she said, "It's my kids, so be polite."

"Who's that?" Mitch asked, adjusting the camera so that his face was more or less visible. There was the sound of Bao walking across the keyboard. "No, you can't sleep there!"

Hudson looked up. "Is that the cat?"

Rye nodded and waved her over. "This is my coworker," she said when Hudson entered the frame. "We're working on a cross-examination together right now."

"Cool," Mitch said - unlike his older sister, he wasn't interested in the nitty-gritty details of complicated research, but he did like watching courtroom proceedings, especially on the rare occasion that they were exciting.

That reminded Rye of something. "Have you been watching the trial?"

Hudson was meanwhile cooing over Bao.

"Yeah." Mitch picked up Bao and held her in his arms, lightly scratching her neck with a finger. "Jinwe was great. Billie told me she wants to be like her when she grows up." He giggled to himself.

Billie was talking to Mitch? That was a new development. Before, she had ignored her siblings, as they were too far apart in age and couldn't discuss much of anything. Mitch and Flora didn't interact much, either. "When did you talk to Billie?"

"Last week. She called when I was home alone, so we just- talked."

"How's university going for her?"

Mitch put Bao back on the table. She immediately curled up, fluffy tail covering half the keyboard. "She seems alright."

"How's school going?"

Hudson stood up. "I'll go downstairs, if you want."

"No, no, it's alright," Rye said. "I don't want you to have to stop working on those documents - or drag them downstairs. And I've been promising to show you my children for months now."

"I suppose." Hudson sat down. "What grade are you in, Mitch?"

"I just started grade nine."

"Ah, so first year of highschool! How's that going?" Rye shifted over to make it easier for Hudson to sit comfortably on the futon.

Mitch shrugged. "Alright, I guess. We still don't have textbooks for some of our classes."

"Still?" Rye asked incredulously. "How much time does it take to write a textbook?"

"A long time, I guess?" Mitch patted Bao on the back. "It's alright. We're okay without textbooks."

Rye wasn't so sure. "How are your classes going?"

"Mostly alright. Civics is nothing like what Billie said - for obvious reasons, I guess." He laughed, and Rye cracked a smile. She remembered it as being an hour of boring propaganda. That was one class where even no textbook was better than what they had had. "The teacher keeps on showing the trial. It's cool, but it's also really awkward, because a bunch of my classmates' parents used to be pretty important, so they're pissed about the populist nonsense, or whatever."

A teacher showing the trial? "It's good that your teacher is talking about these things."

Hudson nodded. "Mine all say that they don't discuss the past, the trial - anything."

"Most of the teachers don't." Mitch let Bao bite his hand. "Ugh, silly kitty, I'm not edible. Anyway, I guess the others are doing the same thing as always. They just teach the subject and don't let us discuss politics."

"Typical," Hudson muttered. "We should have realized that the biggest problem would be not politicians, but teachers. Politicians can at least turn on a dime, and there's far fewer of them."

Bao gave up on nibbling Mitch and lay down on her back, demanding belly rubs. Mitch obliged. "When's rationing going to end?" he asked as Bao batted at his hand.

"Is there anything you want?" The Capitol black market was much more impressive than the one in their town.

"No. I just want rationing to end."

Rye, too, wanted rationing to end. "It'll stop when we don't have shortages anymore."

"Bao's the only one of us who doesn't care," Mitch said playfully. "She already gets half our meat ration."

Hudson shook her head. "Pet owners. Just yesterday, I saw a skeletal person in a tattered sweater give their dog a hunk of meat."

Mitch got nipped on the hand again. "Pets deserve it, though."

To that, Rye could agree.

After Dovek's attempted defiance, Oldsmith's irritability was rather pathetic. Leon could only shake his head as he watched the highlight reel on the evening news in the black-market restaurant where he was sitting with Nilofar. Oldsmith was ill-tempered and blew up in explosive sarcasm when prodded by the prosecutor. And this angry man had been Snow's advisor for decades?

No, Leon realized as the camera zoomed in on Oldsmith's face. He was terrified, and covered it up in the only way he knew.

"If this order, with Snow's signature already on it, had been placed in front of you, would you have signed it?" the prosecutor asked in response to a sudden bout of memory loss.

"And if the sun shone at night, would it be the moon?" Oldsmith fired back.

Leon couldn't help but chuckle. "That's a good one." He ate some more noodles.

"My aunt thought he was Snow's real right hand," Nilofar said, munching on a piece of fresh carrot. "Guess not."

"I don't know. Maybe he's just so unconvincing because he's scared."

"He's scared?" Nilofar sounded unconvinced.

Leon nodded. "It's obvious when there's a closeup. He's terrified out of his wits and trying to hide it."

"Hide his fear by being sarcastic? Isn't he way too old for that?"

Leon nearly choked on his noodles. "Guess you're never too old for that." He stuck his chopsticks into the noodles. "I'm just thinking - all that gossip about who was really Snow's right hand. And what are they really?"

Nilofar nodded. Unlike his family, his coworkers (maybe even friends now) were willing to confront the past and not pretend nothing ever happened. "My parents were convinced that Talvian was the real string-puller. I don't think Talvian has done anything this trial except nap."

"I suddenly relate to Talvian," Leon joked.

Nilofar laughed. "And who else was there? Chaterhan?" Like him, Nilofar was from a working-class background, which was why she was probably his best friend. Inge with her exonerated-person certificate was intimidating, as was Sebastian the actual fighter. "I thought Chaterhan was all-powerful, and it turns out he's just a middle-aged man with a receding hairline."

"The two are synonyms," Leon said mournfully - the men in his family didn't have the best luck with keeping their hair past their thirtieth birthday. "But yeah. They really aren't acting like we thought they'd act. Except maybe Dovek."

"We'll see how they act on the stand," Nilofar pointed out, taking a sip of her water. "Maybe Talvian will do something special."

"Like what?"

"Have to testify standing up so that she's visible?"

Leon laughed out loud. Nilofar was very short herself and could not get over the fact that she was the size of the feared NCIA head. "No, really," he said. "It's interesting how we gossiped for so long about who was truly Snow's right hand and now we can actually see who wants to be a leader and who wants to blend into the background."

Someone demanded the channel be changed. The request was obliged, much to Leon's irritation, and the television began to show something about the potato harvest.

"How's your garden going?" Nilofar asked.

"Oh, everything's long gone - we planted vegetables that ripen in the summer. The yard's doing fine - I actually helped dig up potatoes on the weekend."

"Same. Can't wait for rationing to end - I want our yard to be a yard."

There was an awkward silence. Leon finished his noodles. "So, um, what d'you think is going to happen to Oldsmith?" he asked.

Nilofar shrugged, gnawing at her chopsticks. "He'll be hanged, I guess."

Leon was also leaning towards that. For some reason, he wondered what Oldsmith would think of that.

"Doctor," Oldsmith admitted, "I'm scared."

"Why?"

Of course, Miroslav knew the answer - because of the signatures. Oldsmith's signature was on everything from quota increases to instructions on hostage-taking, and he himself had always been a fanatic supporter of the regime. That afternoon, the prosecutor had asked him about his relations with the Victors, resulting in Oldsmith imploding like a supernova and spitting out furious denials.

"Because they don't believe me!" Oldsmith wailed, arms crossed on his chest. "They're gonna hang me no matter what I say. How many times did I insist that I was just a secretary - since when is the secretary responsible?"

"Why do you think they don't believe you?"

"They're District people and traitors, what else do you expect from them?" Oldsmith snapped.

Miroslav had no idea if Oldsmith actually didn't know where he was from or if he had forgotten it momentarily. "You think the trial hasn't been fair so far?" he asked, acutely aware of his carefully calculated upper-class Capitol accent.

Oldsmith shrugged. "It's not too bad, I guess. I'd never have thought you were allowed to talk to your lawyer so much."

"How do you think Pinto is doing?"

"He's doing great, that's not the issue. It's just that he can't do much with the situation being the way it was."

If Oldsmith meant that even Pinto, who was actually doing a competent and quite unremarkable job, couldn't do much with such a difficult client, he was right. "The situation being - what?"

"You know they're not going to let us win. They didn't let me call the witnesses I wanted!"

Oldsmith had wanted to call two, and they were both missing without trace. The IDC had decided to not waste time by looking for them. As it was, it was unlikely his subordinates would have had anything good to say about him.

There was a knock on the door. Time for the defendants to go for their walk. "Should I come back after?" Miroslav asked.

Oldsmith nodded. "Please do."

"I'll do that, then." Miroslav got up and left the cell.

Mallow was just stepping out of Lark's cell. "How was that?" she asked quietly as they left the cell block.

"He's still putting up that wall, but at least he admits he's scared. Yours?"

"Still thinks I'm from the Capitol. Went on another rant today."

"Same here, I think. Mentioned something about the judges being District people and traitors."

Mallow chuckled. "You think we should tell them?"

"Maybe not a very professional thing to do - they'd stop trusting us. I'm actually surprised one of the others hadn't thought to enlighten the rest yet. I know Talvian is hardly likely to wish us well, and she found me out after I said exactly one sentence."

"Talvian is smart enough to know that if we're outed, that might wreck our ability to help the ones who don't know yet. She doesn't want chaos for the sake of chaos." She tapped her chin. "Does Dovek know about you? I know he knows about me."

"I don't even remember at this point - I'll have to go through our notes."

Of course, in the office, there was zero going through their notes, especially as they only had half an hour. Miroslav was actually making good progress into editing down his conversations into what could conceivably be imagined to be a book, but he usually did that when procrastinating doing something else.

"When did you last talk to Bright?" Miroslav asked, opening the document on his computer so he could feel like he was being productive.

"Three days ago."

"And?"

"Too scared of Lux." Bright had come around to accepting her responsibility for atrocities carried out under her command, but Lux was holding out, and she was still dutifully doing what he told her.

"Pity."

Mallow leaned back in her chair. "I think she might do it if prodded enough. The prosecution's bound to bring up the manual. And since she tends to do what she's told-"

"Interesting that we're already discussing Bright as if Oldsmith doesn't still have one day of cross-examination left," Miroslav said. "Or, well, half a day." He had heard that Oldsmith would take up the morning and Rankin's defense of Bright - the afternoon.

"I was talking to Ashwin about the Peacekeepers this morning," Mallow said, "so guess they're on my mind."

"And how are they doing?"

"I think I'm going to have to examine Holder again."

Miroslav clapped a hand to his face. Holder was probably the most-examined person in the entire jail. "He's, what, fifty-five? How hard is it to believe he can make his own decisions?"

"He did admit he'd have shot his own parents if ordered."

"So did at least five others, and nobody's examining them. It's all because of his ASD. Some people can't grasp that there's more options than perfectly fine and completely not fine."

Mallow inclined her head slightly. "I wouldn't go that far. His critical thinking abilities are so much worse than those of his fellows - they don't exist. I told him several obvious falsehoods and he started trying to think of a way for them to be true. Worse, I told him two contradictory statements were true, and he somehow managed to reconcile that as well."

"That's hardly rare - many a person hated the regime and still supported it." Countless defectors had talked about their hardships and then insisted that if not for Snow, the 'Dark Days' would come again, or something else of the sort.

"That's not what I mean. We hated the unpaved roads but believed the slogans about terrorists trying to bring back the Dark Days. Holder will think that blue is red if you tell him to think that way. As in, I sent in Jason the next day, and he told him the ball was red. When prodded, he admitted it was blue."

Miroslav could only shake his head. "The things I miss while stuck in the key criminals wing." Mallow was supposed to be as stuck as him, but she kept on being called on to deal with Holder.

"Not to mention that he admitted everything on the witness stand," Mallow continued.

"So honesty is now a sign of being not criminally responsible? Half the Peacekeepers admit to everything, they're convinced they did nothing wrong."

Mallow realized the comedic potential of that and laughed. "I suppose that says a lot about our defendants."

Miroslav looked at the screen, wishing that the words could write themselves of their own volition. The longer the trial dragged on, the more he wanted to go home. "Do you know what you're going to do when the trial ends?" he asked.

"I was thinking of passing it over to Agbonwaneten and going home to work on the book."

"You sure?"

Mallow sighed. "Not really. I don't think they'll be able to spare me. Though it'd be nice."

"Yeah." Miroslav wrote a few sentences before getting stuck again.

Lai and Grybauskaite had written briefs during the prosecution's case that Dora was going through now. The temperature in the house was decent - it was October already, and while the city held its heat well, there were no heat waves anymore.

The prosecution had done their best to paint Oldsmith as a key advisor in all matters of policy, highlighting the fact that he had not merely been present at meetings, but had also signed documents himself. Mere secretaries did not sign documents.

Pinto had done everything he could to highlight how little independent decisions Oldsmith had made. There was no record of him ever ordering anything of his own volition. Once Snow decided on something, Oldsmith's signature was a formality.

Dora focused on a snippet of his direct examination. When asked how much power he had had with Snow, Oldsmith had replied - "none". Pinto then asked what exactly his job had been. According to Oldsmith, it was routine office work. Why, then, had he signed decrees?

The prosecution had focused on that, and Oldsmith had been unable to give a convincing reply. He muttered about how it was just a formality, not answering the question.

Oldsmith's signature was on every new law of the last fifteen years of the regime, on quota raises, crackdown orders, and enough Games paperwork to consider him a participant in their planning. But he hadn't instigated anything. And yet, wasn't Count One - a common plan or conspiracy - just that? Oldsmith had been indicted on all counts, and he was involved with all. Conspiracy - of course, he had done nothing but conspire. Hunger Games - definitely, he had kept a very close eye on Arena construction and had fought with Dovek and his predecessor over who was in charge of the planning. War crimes - probably not outside conspiracy. Crimes against humanity - definitely, the crackdowns alone fit that perfectly. Aggressive war - no, he had participated in the conspiracy to bomb Twelve but had had no say in the actual dropping of the bombs.

Sean walked into the living room, making Dora look up from her reading. "Judge Rescu? Dinner's ready."

"How many times do I have to tell you? Call me Dora." She set aside her laptop and went to the kitchen.

"Of course." Sean gave her a servile smile and went to fetch the others.

In the kitchen, dinner was indeed ready. There was a large pot of red lentil and sweet potato stew, salad made from fresh vegetables, mashed potatoes, ajika, hummus, crackers, and bowls of canned fruit. The Rolands had outdone themselves on the black market, as usual. Neither Dora and Juan's doctors nor the assistants would have found something to complain about. Dora sat down at her seat and poured herself some water.

Juan appeared next and sat down next to her. "How was the call?" she asked him. He had stepped away from their reading to call his family.

"Good. Told me all the gossip about my coworkers. Someone's getting depurated, and they don't like it."

Dora acutely felt how strange it was that she was sitting here, in the Capitol, working to pass judgement on the former leaders of the country. By all rights, shouldn't she have been in Ten trying to depurate herself? "You'll come back and all your colleagues will be gone - it'll just be people who got fired ten years ago for being too lenient with enemies of the people and twenty-five-year-olds."

"I honestly don't know where they think they're going with depurating the judiciary," Juan said, staring at the stew as if that was enough to satiate him. "Thirteen can't equip the rest of the country with judges."

"At least they got rid of the Lophands. Though it's an outrage that practicality has to trump justice."

Juan nodded. "That's what we get for seventy-five years of sitting like mice under a broom. A judiciary that can't tell right from wrong."

The assistants came in at that moment, sounding like a horde of elephants on the stairs. "Good afternoon," Guadalupe Encarnación said. "How was the session?"

Now that they were all seated, they could begin. Dora and Juan ladled themselves some stew. It was absolutely packed with delicious ingredients - red lentils, sweet potatoes, rice, red peppers, onion, carrots, spinach - and Dora didn't even mind the lack of seasoning. "It went fine, as I'm sure you know," Dora said.

"You never know," Lai said, pouring ajika over her potatoes. "Maybe someone fell asleep again."

Dora couldn't blame anyone for falling asleep during Rankin's presentation - his courtroom style was atrocious and he spoke in a drawling monotone that threatened to put Rose to sleep.

"I'm amazed Rankin didn't bore himself to sleep," Guzman joked, trying to hand over the ladle with her left hand while spooning salad into her plate with her right. "Can someone pass the oil?"

"Here you go." They only had sunflower oil to put on their salad. That, too, was strictly forbidden for Dora. She half-suspected that the doctor was giving her impossible demands just to make her life more difficult. As it was, Dora could only watch in envy as Guzman poured oil and spices over her vegetables. Dora ate a forkful of completely bland salad. At least the vegetables weren't stale - they had a pleasant crunch and a fresh, juicy taste that went well with the mild stew.

"I was so bored," Guerra said, delicately eating a piece of sweet potato. "Turned it on for two minutes and decided my time would be better served reading the transcript."

Dora agreed. "Can someone pass the potatoes?"

The potatoes were passed. Dora took a few spoonfuls and added some ajika. It tasted great, as did everything Drazen and Sean made.

"So," Juan asked his assistants, "has anyone started to write about Dovek?"

"I did," Guzman said, covering her mouth with her hand. "I can give you the memo after dinner."

Grybauskaite poured himself some more water. "I'm meeting up this evening with a few others to discuss the penitentiary system."

"Maybe you should wait for Talvian to testify," Dora suggested. Talvian had not had direct authority over the prisons, all of those of comparable level had killed themselves, but she had had plenty of influence. "Weren't you and Lai working on that memo about hostage-taking in Ten?"

Lai made a face and ate a spoonful of stew. "Sanchez wants it so he can do a comparison between Districts, so now we have to run statistical tests on the data. Thank God we have computers."

Encarnacion chuckled. "Oh, you don't want to calculate standard deviations by hand?"

Everyone shuddered. They were all old enough to have gone to university when computers were still locked away in laboratories and trigonometry had to be done with slide rules and tables.

"Still better than writing twenty-page papers on a typewriter," Juan said. "Remember making a mistake at the very end of the page?"

"I had the kind where you could exchange the ribbon for one that was basically white-out," Dora reminisced. "Massive pain in the neck to replace the ribbons. I was so happy when I could finally use secretaries to do the actual writing. Even happier when I got a computer, though - easier to write it yourself, in my experience."

"I somehow don't think Oldsmith was that kind of secretary," Juan joked.

"That was the Capitol, though," Lai pointed out. "When did they get computers here?"

Thanks to Ashley, Dora knew the answer. "Snow's secretaries probably switched to computers twenty years ago." In Ten, of course, even Dora had only gotten a computer in her office ten years ago. She had spent hours just typing away, delighting in how easy it was.

Jokes aside, that was the issue - how much power had Oldsmith had? As Dora ate her dinner, she tried to sift through prosecution and defense evidence and arrive to a conclusion, but the final answer evaded her no matter how hard she tried.

A/N:

JODL: My honor was certainly not soiled, for I guarded it personally.

MR. ROBERTS: Very good, you say your honor is not soiled.

Have you-during the last 6 or 7 years, when causing to be said the things which you say you had to circulate-has your truthfulness remained at the same high standard?

[There was no response.]

Can't you answer that question?

JODL: I believe I am too dull for that question.

MR. ROBERTS: Very good, then if you are too dull, I won't persist in it; I will go on. [TMWC vol. 15 p. 444]

Plausibility or common sense is not needed when writing courtroom dialogue :)

By the way, the most well-known one-handed piano player seems to be Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in WW1 and went on to commission a bunch of pieces he could play. Wittgenstein's story appears in Aleksandar Gatalica's 'The Great War', a magical-realism novel that is the best work in the genre I have ever read. The author uses fantasy elements to take the story where something more realistic cannot go and absolutely tear out the reader's heart while at it. He mixes real-life and fictional characters so well, you often can't tell which is which, and given the frequent absurdity of the history he writes about, you often can't tell what's reality and what's fantasy, either. Maybe that's why it works so well.

Ajika is a Georgian red pepper dip. It's usually spicy, but alas, Dora isn't allowed spicy food.