She had seen this before too.
Not in her first life. In the months before she left the palace — the specific architecture of control that looked like service and felt like management and was actually capture. The Empress Dowager had been very good at it.
Apparently the noble factions had learned from the same school.
"He's a puppet," she said. Not with contempt. Just with accuracy.
'Partially,' the system said. 'He makes decisions. They're just decisions from a menu that was curated for him.'
"Which makes him dangerous in a different way than someone who knows they're being managed," she said.
'Yes,' the system said. 'A puppet who believes he's autonomous is harder to work with than one who knows.'
She turned a corner.
The administrative wing entrance was ahead — the working entrance, not the ceremonial one. She had been using it for six weeks with the specific unremarkability of a consultant whose face nobody had examined closely enough to place.
