Chapter 22: Anakin's Training and Arthur's Vigil

The shell corporations took three days to map completely.

Padmé's documentation was precise and devastating in the way that only financial evidence can be: not the sudden clarity of a confession but the slow, accumulating weight of a pattern that had been designed to look like noise and had failed, in the end, to look like anything but intention. Three separate legal entities, all incorporated in jurisdictions where disclosure requirements were minimal and enforceable only in theory. A decade of small transfers, each individually defensible, collectively pointing in one direction with the persistence of water finding its level.

Arthur sat with the documents each morning before the others were fully awake, reading them in the clean early light that came through the chamber's east window. He had no framework for the specific instruments involved — shell corporations were not a technology available in Britain, though the underlying mechanism, the use of legal distance to obscure the movement of wealth and obligation, was older than Rome. He understood what he was looking at. He did not always understand the precise mechanism by which it had been accomplished. He made a note each time he encountered something that required explanation and brought the notes to Padmé, who answered them without ceremony and without condescension, which he found he appreciated more than he would have predicted.