Chapter 14: The Chancellor's Address and the Standing Ovation Kael Leads

The dress uniform had been pressed by someone else.

Kael noticed this in the anteroom beneath the Confederation's Grand Convocation Hall, forty minutes before the address — the crease in his left sleeve running two millimeters higher than he would have placed it himself, a slight deviation from his own particular geometry that he could not correct without a full iron and fifteen minutes he did not have. He adjusted the sleeve cuff instead, pulling it fractionally downward to compensate, and the crease remained wrong and invisible to everyone but himself, which was, he recognized, a reasonable description of several things about this morning.

The anteroom held nine people: himself, four of his father's senior communications staff, two Chancellery security officers in plain clothes, a ceremonial aide responsible for the address timing, and Syndra Mault, who had arrived before anyone else and chosen the chair nearest the door with the instinctive positioning of someone who had spent thirty years in rooms where the exit mattered. She was reviewing a physical document — a habit he had noticed in her, the preference for paper over screen in rooms where she was uncertain of the surveillance architecture. She looked up when he entered, offered a nod that communicated acknowledgment without warmth, and returned to her document.