That is the thing people misunderstand about a collapse like this — they imagine it as an explosion, wild and indiscriminate, when in fact it is the most orderly thing in the world.

It is simply the law, applied.

Once the license was revoked and the audit opened, everything that followed ran on rails that had been laid down years before, by legislators and courts and the plain machinery of contract, waiting for someone to trip the switch.

The penalties Kestrel Worldwide owed were not invented by me; they were written into the licensing agreements Marius had signed with his own gold pen, terms he’d never bothered to read closely because he’d never imagined the licensor would one day be his enemy.

The patent violations at Dalloway Logistics were not my accusation; they were a fact, discoverable by any auditor, that I had merely been the first to point an auditor at.

The fraud charges against Marius grew from the forged psychiatric evaluation he himself had commissioned.