And it is almost entirely wrong, because performed power is fragile; it depends on an audience, and on the other person’s willingness to be intimidated, and it evaporates the instant it meets a power of a different kind.

The power I had learned to wield was not performed at all.

It made no impression in a room.

It delivered no cutting lines.

It sat in folders, in filings, in the careful accumulation of documented fact, and it was, for exactly that reason, immune to everything Marcus’s kind of power could bring against it.

You cannot out-charm a paper trail.

You cannot intimidate a filing.