The old Supreme Court building had been abandoned for twenty-three years, its neoclassical façade crumbling into the weeds that had overtaken Justice Square. The portico, once guarded by marble statues of blindfolded figures holding scales, was now shrouded in scaffolding and tarpaulin, the remnants of a renovation project that had run out of funding before it had run out of ambition. But tonight, the building was alive with light.
Voss arrived at eleven o'clock, an hour before the appointed midnight, and the scene before her was like something from a fever dream. The square had been transformed into an amphitheater. Portable floodlights had been erected around the perimeter, their beams angled to illuminate the courthouse steps with the harsh clarity of a surgical theater. Cables snaked across the cracked pavement, feeding power to cameras positioned at strategic angles. And on the steps themselves, where Aldous Vexley had been displayed only weeks ago, a new tableau was being prepared.
She had spent the previous forty hours in a desperate search for Leda Croft, chasing leads that evaporated as quickly as they appeared. Mira Venn's old apartment had been stripped clean, the servers removed, the monitors gone. The Dorvan industrial zone had yielded nothing but abandoned buildings and the distant cry of gulls. The Lysander Institute had no record of any recent contact with its former patient. And Croft's security teams had been equally unsuccessful, their high-tech surveillance systems proving useless against an adversary who had spent years learning to operate in the spaces between the digital cracks.
Now, with the hour of reckoning approaching, Voss had decided that the only way to find the girl was to attend the trial itself. Draven had invited her, after all. She was a witness. A juror. Perhaps even a participant, if the scalpel in her coat pocket meant what she thought it meant.
The crowd that had gathered at the square's edge was larger than any she had seen since the beginning of the investigation. Thousands of citizens had come, drawn by the summons that had been broadcast across the Republic, their faces illuminated by the glow of their phones as they streamed the scene to friends and followers. Some carried signs—JUSTICE IS BLIND NO LONGER, THE ANATOMIST PROTECTS, FREE THE TRUTH—while others stood in silence, their expressions a mixture of fear and anticipation and something darker that Voss recognized as the hunger for spectacle.
Koss met her at the perimeter, his face drawn with exhaustion. "I've been here for two hours. No sign of Draven, no sign of the girl. But the cameras are live. The feeds are being routed through a dozen different networks. Whatever happens here tonight, the whole Republic is going to see it."
"Has Croft arrived?"
"Not yet. But his security teams are in the crowd, or what's left of them. Half his contractors quit when they saw the summons. The other half are here, but they're not trying to stop Draven. They're trying to find the girl before the broadcast starts."
Voss looked up at the courthouse, at the darkened windows and the sagging portico and the single light that burned in the main chamber on the second floor. "He's already inside, isn't he?"
"We think so. But no one's been able to get close. Every entrance is wired with—something. Explosives, maybe. Sensors, certainly. Anyone who tries to breach the perimeter gets a warning message on their phone. Draven's been planning this for years, Inspector. The building is a fortress."
"It's not a fortress. It's a theater." Voss began walking toward the courthouse steps, ignoring Koss's protest. "He invited me. He gave me a scalpel. I'm on the guest list."
The crowd parted as she approached, whispers rippling outward like waves from a stone dropped in water. She heard her name—Voss, the detective, the one who was suspended, the one who's been hunting him—and she felt the weight of a thousand eyes on her back. But she did not stop. She climbed the steps, past the floodlights and the cameras and the cables, until she reached the great bronze doors that had once admitted lawyers and judges and defendants into the halls of justice.
The doors swung open at her touch, unlocked and waiting.
The interior of the courthouse had been stripped of its former dignity. The marble floors were cracked and stained, the chandeliers had been torn from the ceilings, and the walls were covered in a century of graffiti that had accumulated like geological strata. But the main corridor had been cleared, and a path of surgical lamps had been arranged to lead her toward the central chamber. She followed the lights, her footsteps echoing against the marble, until she reached the great oak doors of the courtroom.
They too were unlocked. They too swung open at her touch.
The chamber beyond was a masterpiece of dark theater. The judge's bench, where Aldous Vexley had once presided, had been transformed into a surgical platform. Overhead lights blazed down on a steel operating table, upon which a figure was restrained—a man in his forties, dark-haired, his face contorted in terror, his hands and feet bound with leather straps. Elias Korr, the invisible hand, the architect of the forfeiture scheme, the man who had signed the papers that destroyed Lukas Draven's life.
Surrounding the bench, arranged in the jury box and the spectator galleries, were figures that made Voss's stomach turn. They were not human. They were mannequins, assembled from medical supply catalogs and draped in the robes of judges and lawyers. Their faces were featureless, smooth plastic ovals, and their hands had been positioned to hold legal documents and anatomical diagrams. They were the jury of the Court of the Anatomist, a silent tribunal of the inhuman, waiting to render a verdict that had already been decided.
And at the center of the room, standing behind the operating table with a scalpel in his trembling hand, was Lukas Draven.
He looked worse than Voss had imagined. The disease that Dr. Hesse had identified in the autopsy reports was now visible in every movement. His right hand shook with a constant tremor, and his face was gaunt, the skin stretched tight over the bones beneath. But his eyes were bright with a feverish intensity, and his voice, when he spoke, was calm and steady.
"Inspector Voss. You came."
"Where is the girl, Draven? Where is Leda Croft?"
"Safe. Unharmed. She is in a room in this building, guarded by my associate. When the trial is concluded, and Croft has answered for his crimes, she will be released. That is the bargain I have offered. That is the bargain he has refused." Draven gestured toward the empty defendant's table. "Croft was summoned. He was given the opportunity to defend himself, to present evidence, to call witnesses. He chose instead to flee. He chose to send his mercenaries rather than face the court. He chose to abandon his daughter rather than answer for his sins."
"That's not justice. That's coercion."
"It is habeas corpus. You have the body. Produce it, or the court will produce it for you." Draven smiled, a thin, humorless expression. "You know the law, Inspector. You have spent seventeen years enforcing it. And in all those years, how many times have you seen the guilty escape because they had the resources to manipulate the system? How many times have you seen the innocent suffer because they could not afford a lawyer, could not post bail, could not get a hearing? The law is a machine that protects the powerful and grinds up the weak. I am simply applying the same standard to the powerful that they have always applied to the weak."
Elias Korr let out a strangled sob from the operating table. "Please—I was just following orders—I didn't know about the wife—I didn't know she was pregnant—"
"You knew the patents were valuable. You knew the forfeiture would destroy the research. You knew the man whose work you were stealing had a family." Draven turned to face his prisoner, and his voice dropped to a whisper. "You knew enough, Elias. You knew that the machine would chew him up and spit him out. You simply did not care. And that is the crime for which you will now answer."
Voss took a step forward, her hand moving instinctively toward the scalpel in her coat. "Draven, if you kill him now, Croft will use it as a justification to never appear. He'll say you're a murderer who can't be bargained with. He'll let his daughter die rather than face you."
"Croft will appear. He has no choice. The cameras are live, Inspector. The broadcast is being streamed to every screen in the Republic. Croft's own network is carrying the feed. He can run to the Vallish border, but he cannot escape the narrative. Every moment that he hides, the public will see him for what he is: a coward who abandoned his child to save himself." Draven raised the scalpel, and the lights caught the blade, sending a flash of brilliance through the chamber. "Now, let the trial begin. The defendant, Elias Korr, is charged with the crime of willful destruction for profit. The evidence will be presented. The testimony will be heard. And the verdict will be rendered by the only court that has never been corrupted."
Voss looked at the cameras, at the red recording lights that blinked steadily in the darkness, at the millions of unseen eyes that were watching through their screens. And she understood that Draven had trapped them all—Croft, Korr, the Ministry, the public—in a performance that none of them could escape. The trial was not about Korr. It was about the machine itself, and the machine was being forced to broadcast its own dissection.
The scalpel descended. The testimony began. And in a hidden room somewhere in the building, a twelve-year-old girl waited for a father who had chosen his empire over her life.
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