Chapter 14 - Echoes of Authority
The corridor into the research wing ran in a straight, cool line, pale lamps throwing a soft sheen across lacquered stone. It felt less like a hall of ceremony and more like part of a patient body: air scrubbed too clean, machinery humming behind the walls, silence organised with clinical care.
Security stood at the threshold in a neat file. Their uniforms were immaculate, their hands fixed at the small of the back, their gazes straight ahead. Every breath looked measured. The quiet around them seemed not just deliberate but fragile, as if a raised voice might crack it.
Then Olivia came.
She moved as if the building were a familiar garden. There was a spring to her step, a brightness in her smile, and an easy tilt of the head that made the corridor feel briefly human. The guards did not soften. If anything, their shoulders drew tighter, like her lightness heightened their sense of duty.
Sarah's pulse quickened. Rob kept close, watching the guards out of the corner of his eye, uncertain which version of the room to believe: the cheerful girl gliding towards them, or the steel at her back.
"This isn't properly Bamboo territory," Olivia said as she reached them, voice warm, almost conspiratorial. "Bear land. Engines, grids, riverworks — all the heavy bones. We only borrow this corner for our fiddly bits." She wiggled her fingers as if casting a tiny spell. "Nerves and tissues. Medicine, biotech, simulated care. Muscle and sinew. One without the other and the Republic limps."
She set off down the corridor without waiting for permission, and the twins fell in beside her. The guards shadowed at a measured distance, boots in disciplined rhythm, faces unreadable.
"The equipment they're taking us to," Rob ventured carefully, "is it better than what we had?"
Olivia's laugh was light, almost musical. "Better? Oh, that's putting it mildly. What you were running on was archaeology. Functional archaeology, I'll grant you, but still. We have Bear House primary-grade systems here. Full neural mapping capability, quantum processing cores, biometric safety nets that would have prevented..." She paused, glancing at Sarah. "Well. What happened to young Nathan."
Sarah swallowed and bowed from the waist. "This foolish one wishes to know the name of the one who grants us this grace."
"Olivia," she said, beaming. "Granddaughter of one patriarch, niece to another, and entirely too young to sound that serious. Mostly I stop people tripping over their own shoelaces — a quiet nudge here, a paperwork knot there, and occasionally a laboratory that needs minding. Today it's you."
Rob and Sarah bowed deeper. "Forgive us, your highness."
Olivia laughed, light and quick. "No crowns, please. I'd look dreadful in one. We are not royalty; this is not a court. Call us 'highness' and we'll start believing it, and once we believe it everything goes sideways. We are custodians on licence. That's the only title worth keeping."
They passed a security checkpoint where two more guards snapped to attention. Olivia nodded acknowledgment without breaking stride, but Sarah noticed how their eyes tracked her movement with something approaching reverence.
Rob kept his head lowered. "With respect, Auntie Olivia, is that how the world sees you? The Four Pillars run the lifelines. To everyone else you must look untouchable."
Her smile stayed, though something steadied behind it. "They're not wrong. If Bamboo lets a medical protocol fail, hospitals dim across continents. If Sky slips in logistics, the seas clog with ships that go nowhere. If Bear falters in energy, cities stutter into darkness. We don't frighten people with parades. We frighten them with the thought of silence — the kind that arrives when the thing you rely on most simply stops."
They reached a junction where the main corridor split into three branches. Olivia chose the centre path without hesitation, leading them deeper into the research complex.
"That sort of fear is dangerous," she went on, still bright, as if reciting a story for children on a long train. "Because the moment a Pillar treats audit as insult and oversight as humiliation, the contract breaks. And when the contract breaks the Republic does not shout. It edits."
She slowed, turning to them with a playful cant of the head. "Would you like a cautionary tale?"
Sarah nodded before she could think. Rob's hands tightened at his sides.
"Once there was a Fifth Pillar, the House of the River," Olivia said, eyes dancing as if she were sharing a secret. "They didn't manage hospitals or grids or freight. They managed flow — money, licences, contracts, inheritance trails — all the rails that say who is allowed to do what and when. If the Republic is a body, they weren't veins." She tapped the air. "They were the heartbeat."
"The financial centre," Sarah murmured. "Like a central bank?"
"More complete," Olivia chirped. "They designed the paths as well as running them. Every credit transfer, every patent filing, every inheritance claim flowed through River systems. They knew who owed what to whom, who was rising, who was falling. Information is power, and they had all of it."
Rob looked up, sensing where this was heading. "What happened?"
"They forgot that knowledge is a tool, not a crown," Olivia said, her voice maintaining its cheerful cadence even as the words grew darker. "Renewal applications began to favour River allies. Ownership records developed convenient gaps. Patent filings from rival Houses suffered mysterious delays. They stopped being the Republic's memory and started editing it."
They walked past a series of laboratory windows, each one showing researchers in clean white coats working with equipment that hummed with quiet authority. Sarah caught glimpses of neural interface arrays more sophisticated than anything she'd seen in university textbooks.
"The Tribunal took it away?" Rob asked.
"Almost all of it," Olivia confirmed. "But here's the clever bit — they didn't give it to us, or to Bear, or to Sky or Dawn. That would have created a new River by accident. Instead, the big pieces were broken up and scattered among the thirteen lesser Houses. Not as reward, but as responsibility. And the banking rails the River once controlled? Split nineteen ways: eighteen House banks and one Federal Government system."
Sarah's voice was tight with understanding. "Balance over efficiency."
"Exactly. Resilience over elegance. Pride over convenience." Olivia's smile turned slightly sad. "The River remains, of course. Diminished. Their taxes capped at levels that ensure survival but not growth. Their territorial claims reduced to agricultural zones and small trade ports. Their voice in the Council reduced to observer status."
"Why not dissolve them altogether?" Rob asked.
"Because a foundation needs all its stones," Olivia replied, bright again. "Even the small ones prevent shifting. The River's exile serves as education for the rest of us. Everyone can see what happens when custodianship becomes ownership. It's a gentler lesson than war, but more permanent than execution."
They reached another security door, this one requiring Olivia's palm print and retinal scan. The recognition was instant, the door sliding open with barely a whisper.
"The leaders responsible?" Sarah asked as they stepped through.
"Some were punished," Olivia said matter-of-factly. "Public disgrace, exile from the Republic, financial ruin. But most were simply... removed from influence. The House itself was left to learn from the scars. Exile inside the Republic is harsher than exile beyond it, because every day you see what you lost."
The corridor beyond was different — warmer lighting, organic curves instead of military angles. This felt more like Bamboo territory, though the Bear House efficiency was still evident in every detail.
"When leaders beyond our borders look at us," Olivia continued, her voice dropping slightly, "they don't see negotiators or trading partners. They see risk assessment walking on two legs. They count how we fail, not how we speak. The Federation watches how we handle internal dissent. The Southern Commonwealth studies our economic stability. The Gaule Republic measures our military restraint."
She paused at an observation window overlooking a vast laboratory space where dozens of researchers worked at stations that seemed to blend Bear House computational power with Bamboo House biological expertise.
"If you ever stand where I stand," she said, and for the first time her voice carried weight that matched her authority, "you'll be weighed the same way. Not by your intentions, but by your consequences. Not by your promises, but by your scars."
Rob stared at the laboratory below. "Is that what we're becoming part of? That kind of responsibility?"
Olivia's smile returned, warm and somehow reassuring. "What you're becoming part of is bigger than responsibility. You're joining the work itself. The real work of keeping civilisation functional." She gestured to the researchers below. "Those people down there? They're developing neural interfaces that will help stroke victims relearn movement. Trauma therapy protocols that can isolate and treat specific memory damage. Sensory replacement systems for people born blind or deaf."
Sarah felt her breath catch. "Our simulation technology..."
"Could revolutionise therapeutic intervention," Olivia finished. "Imagine helping veterans process combat trauma by allowing them to experience victory instead of defeat. Imagine letting people with mobility limitations experience full physical capability in ways that support rather than replace their actual bodies."
She brightened again, that playful energy returning. "So we smile first. It makes the fear easier to carry, and the work easier to explain. Because what we do matters too much for grimness, and serves too many people for arrogance."
The doors to the main laboratory opened without sound. Olivia stepped through with the same lightness she had brought to the corridor. The guards followed like moving stone. Rob and Sarah exchanged a glance that carried new understanding, then followed her into a space that would reshape everything they thought they knew about the boundaries between technology and human experience.
Behind them, the corridor returned to its clinical quiet, bearing no trace of the conversation that had just revealed how thin the line was between custodianship and control, between service and sovereignty, between the Republic's bright promises and its darker necessities.