She had a memory — sharp and specific, the way her memories tended to be — of sitting in a boardroom very early in her previous life, in the first weeks after she had taken over a company that had been badly run for a long time, watching the inherited staff perform exactly this kind of chaos for her benefit. Different words, different faces, same fundamental dynamic: people who had been allowed to operate without real oversight for too long, who had learned that noise was a form of power, who had decided collectively and without coordinating it that the best response to new authority was to demonstrate how ungovernable they were.
She had handled it then.
She sat on the throne now and she listened.
