The docket was fourteen pages and Rix had read it twice before the Crucible's chairs were full.
Fourteen pages. Four months of labour history compressed into administrative formatting — incident reports, injury tallies, wage discrepancies broken down by season and species and district, all of it organised according to the Ordinator's Code Section 9 procedural template because Dorren Kael had insisted that the format itself was part of the argument. If the data fit the institutional framework, the institution had to process it. If the institution processed it, it had to respond.
The institution was responding. That was why they were here.
