The Association's formal chamber was below street level.
Not in the way that basements were below street level. In the way that things were below street level when they had been placed there deliberately, long before the streets above them existed, with the specific intention of creating something that the world above it would never accidentally stumble into.
Three flights of stairs from the building's ground floor. Stone getting older and heavier with each flight, the air changing in the way air changed in sealed spaces, denser, carrying the accumulated weight of every significant conversation that had ever happened here.
Vanir had walked the route himself that morning, as he'd said he would. Every door, every corridor, every approach. He'd found three things he didn't like and arranged six corps officers in positions that addressed two of them and accepted the third as an acceptable variable.
