Catherine POV
The room was built to reassure.
That was its first function, and its most dangerous one.
Soft light. No sharp corners. The kind of architecture that implied deliberation even when decisions had already been made elsewhere. Transparency Councils preferred rooms like these spaces that suggested nothing could happen too quickly inside them.
I chose it deliberately.
Not because I needed comfort, but because everyone else did.
They were already seated when I arrived. Twelve members tonight, a full quorum, faces composed into variations of calm attentiveness. No agitation. No fear. That mattered. Panic makes people sloppy. Fear makes them moral.
Neither could be afforded.
I took my place without ceremony.
"Let's begin," I said.
No gavel. No formal invocation. We'd abandoned those weeks ago, quietly, after we realized that ritual slowed throughput without improving outcomes. No one had objected. That, too, mattered.
The first report came from Eastern Oversight.
