The Grand Hall of the Mechanist Academy had been designed for lectures, not trials. The acoustics carried a raised voice to the back row without distortion, but they also carried silence — the specific, weighted silence of two hundred people choosing not to speak — with a clarity that made Meren Thornwick's sternum ache.
He sat at the respondent's table. Left side of the hall, facing the audience. A carafe of water he hadn't touched. His notes — three pages, handwritten, the margins dense with corrections from six rewrites over two weeks — lay flat in front of him. Page one: trial methodology. Page two: results summary. Page three: the conclusion he'd published in the pamphlet, restated in language stripped of every qualifying clause he'd originally used to make it sound less dangerous.
