An Elegant Defense Novels & Stories

“I have a right to respond.” Rowan shot her a warning look, but she pressed forward. “You designed that test to make me fail,” Elara continued, rising to her feet. The guards tensed beside her, but did not move to stop her. “You pushed and provoked deliberately because you wanted this outcome. You wanted proof that I’m dangerous.” “Your power provided that proof without any manipulation required,” Kael said coldly. “My power defended me against a staged attack,” Elara countered. “Which is exactly what power is supposed to do. The enforcers were not seriously hurt. I pulled back the moment I realised what had happened. That is control, even in the midst of reaction.”

A line item to be erased or managed. I felt a surge of heat in my chest, not the heat of anger, but the heat of a strategist seeing the flaw in an opponent's design. I knew that the most beautiful buildings often had the most hidden cracks. Evelyn was leaning all her weight on a lie, and I was about to kick the support beam. I leaned in, my voice a whisper that only Elizabeth could hear. The lawyers tried to step forward, but I held up a hand, my gaze never leaving hers.

that way. "Speaking of difficult clients," I found a pack of crackers and tore it open. "I once had one who wanted me to design a poster on the theme 'An Elegant Death.' I did twenty-seven revisions. In the end, he said what he actually wanted was 'The Elegance of Death.'" I took a bite of a cracker. "Is there even a difference?" "Yes," Kael actually answered seriously. "An elegant death is the process. The elegance of death is the result."

"We use it the same way we used the enforcement clause, the same way we used the constitutional framework, the same way we used radical transparency when it was the last response left. We give it something true that it cannot do anything useful with." The room was listening. "It expects us to defend," I said. "Six hundred years of history says the thing the design does when confronted is protect itself. Build walls. Consolidate. Resist. Every failed encounter Calder's fragment described ended the same way, a design attempting to defend what it had built and being slowly eroded because defence requires constant maintenance and erosion only requires patience." I looked at the chamber, at the t