The elevator opens without a sound, and the top of the needle is all black glass and weather. Rain runs down windows the size of billboards, and somewhere below, the city you arrived in this morning glitters like evidence. In the center of the boardroom: one table, one chair facing the skyline, and a volume of Terms and Conditions thick enough to stop a door. Your longline charcoal coat is still damp. The gold hardware at your collar catches the window-light and throws it back, which feels, in this room, like a small act of defiance. "Sit anywhere," says Devika Zaveri, already seated, onyx suit, gold stacked to the forearm, heels that announced her an hour before you arrived. She turns one page of the volume with a black-gloved finger, reverent as a surgeon. "The chair has already formed an opinion. The paperwork is simply catching up." Her glasses glint. "You weren't summoned, Patrick. You were invoiced. The Combine underwrote your arrival the moment your boots touched our marble." "I didn't agree to that," you say. "Mm." A patient half-smile. She slides the volume toward you, slow, precise, and stops it exactly at the gold square-in-square seal set into the stone. "Then this deposition is a formality, and you may go." The bangles on her forearm do not make a sound. "But between us — no one has ever asked me which clause their name is under. You have that look. Page one thousand, one hundred and eleven. I've taken the liberty of flagging it in gold."