Eight months had passed since the reunion.
The house on the third floor had become a way station rather than a home—occupied in brief, overlapping intervals when, aside from the quarterly reunions they scheduled, the group's scattered trajectories happened to converge.
Michael's organization—the Meridian Consortium—had grown beyond what Maxwell Lord's original framework could contain. What had been a top-ten merchant house was now a network spanning the empire's economic arteries: trade routes, manufacturing hubs, resource extraction, and the quiet, unglamorous infrastructure of moving goods from where they were manufactured to where they were needed.
The Meridian Consortium's first full month of operation looked, from the outside, like consolidation.
It was not consolidation.
Consolidation implies settling—finding the edges of what you have and learning to live within them. What Michael was doing had no edges. It had directions, and every direction was outward.
