The secondary chamber had been cleaned since the emergency session.
Someone had matched the chairs. The lighting had been standardized. The communication array on the far wall had been replaced entirely. There were new units, tested and functional with a correction that happened when an institution was embarrassed by its own infrastructure and had the resources to fix the embarrassment before anyone could photograph it. The Republic's Senate, when it decided to present itself, presented itself completely.
Valla Crane arrived seven minutes early and used the time to read the briefing document a second time, which she had read once at midnight and once at four in the morning and was now reading again not because she expected to find something new but because the practice of re-reading under different conditions was how she caught the things that felt different than they looked.
The document was seventy-three pages. She had flagged eleven sections.
