Chapter 24: The Senator's Assassin and Sidious Moves His Pieces

The Senate galleries smelled of stone and ambition and something underneath both that Arthur had learned, in thirty years of court, to identify before he could name: the particular staleness of air that had been breathed too many times by people unwilling to open a window.

He sat in the diplomatic observer's gallery on Padmé's right, three rows above the senatorial floor, and catalogued the chamber the way he had been cataloguing everything since Coruscant — not because the information was immediately useful, but because a king who stopped reading rooms was a king who died surprised. The Senate rotunda fell away beneath them in concentric rings of floating platforms, twelve hundred delegations arranged in the precise geometry of a civilization that had mistaken complexity for wisdom and procedure for justice. The amphitheater of it was familiar enough. The floating was not.

He had stopped noticing the floating, he realized. That itself was information about how long he had been here.