The legislative oversight hearing occupied an old chamber with dark wooden benches and microphones that clicked whenever a speaker leaned too close. It lacked the glitter of the waterfront conference, but Sera found its imperfections reassuring. The room smelled faintly of paper and wet coats. No one had arranged the seating to suggest that wealth was authority. Every witness approached the same narrow table, placed a name card before the microphone, and spoke into the public record.
Inês testified first, explaining the engineering design and the significance of the altered fail-safe language. June followed with the flooding model and the social consequences of diverting water toward low-lying residential zones. Mateo described test thirteen, the warnings he had entered, and the management instruction to reclassify a failure. His voice caught when a legislator asked whether he had expected anyone to be hurt. He said he had expected the system to be fixed. The distinction silenced the room.
Beatriz spoke about translation quality assurance and the moment she refused to certify the substituted text. She explained that professional interpreters could disagree about style but not legitimately remove an authorization requirement. The committee asked whether the Portuguese delegates had understood the English documents they were expected to sign. She answered that they had relied on negotiated bilingual materials, then discovered late modifications in one version. A legislator asked whether this was unusual. 'International projects are difficult,' Beatriz said. 'Difficulty does not excuse deception.'
Sera was last. She described the caption system, the security key, and the procedures that should have protected the public feed against unauthorized edits. When a member of the committee asked why she had saved the recording, she said she had been responsible for caption reliability. 'If a sentence changes during my shift, I need to know why.' The questioner wanted to discuss her education and her employment history. She answered both, then returned to the evidence. She had decided not to compete with Voss on personality. The recording would be more durable than her biography.
Daniel proposed that the school teach students how to read emergency instructions critically without turning the curriculum into a political argument. He showed them two sample notices, one vague and one precise, and asked which would help them get home safely. The students immediately identified missing addresses, unclear times, and instructions that assumed every family owned a car. Their responses were practical rather than partisan. Sera visited the class to thank them for their comments. She left with three pages of corrections, several difficult questions, and renewed confidence that careful reading could be taught as a civic skill.
Roland Voss appeared with two attorneys. He acknowledged that mistakes had been made but denied directing any unlawful action. He said the company had pursued a complex public-interest partnership in good faith. One legislator asked why Meridian had valued industrial priority rights before approval. Voss said financing models often depended on assumptions. Another asked why the public summary described municipal approval when the annex granted the company emergency discretion. Voss said lawyers could debate wording indefinitely. The chair interrupted him. 'We are asking about the power to close a gate, Mr. Voss. Not a literary preference.'
Then Harriet introduced the executive meeting notes. Voss questioned their interpretation. He did not recognize the phrase 'we control the story' as a complete account of his remarks. The chair asked whether he had attended the meeting. Yes. Had he been warned about residential overflow? He recalled a discussion of contingency planning. Had the company decided to proceed without a completed retest? He said that operational matters were delegated. Each answer narrowed the distance between the reported warning and his responsibility, even when he refused to close it.
After the committee adjourned, a staff member escorted witnesses to a small room where they could collect their belongings without passing through the press crowd. Mateo sat with his hands clasped, staring at the floor. Beatriz offered him a packet of crackers. June was already making a list of follow-up engineering questions. Sera watched how differently each person responded to the same public ordeal. Some needed silence, some needed work, some needed to speak. She asked no one to pose for a photograph. Instead they spent twenty minutes checking that each witness had a safe route home. Ada reviewed the limits of what could be said publicly while investigations continued. It felt like a strangely anticlimactic end to a seven-hour hearing, yet Sera trusted it more than applause. Daniel called from the shelter to report that the children had watched part of the testimony with their teachers. They had asked why the engineers disagreed and why the documents had been hidden. He was proud of the questions. Sera told him to remind them that public truth was not achieved by memorizing the answer that sounded most confident. It was achieved by comparing evidence, inviting challenge, and correcting mistakes when they were found.
The hearing lasted nearly seven hours. By the end the committee had voted to recommend independent review of the procurement process, emergency funding for existing flood infrastructure, and statutory standards for multilingual public contracts. These were recommendations, not laws. Sera knew that headlines might portray them as triumphs too soon. Yet for the first time the record included everyone who had been excluded from the ceremony: a technician, an interpreter, a mechanic, an engineer, a clerk, and residents who understood what the word emergency would mean at their own front doors.
Outside the chamber, reporters asked Voss whether he planned to resign. He gave no answer. When Sera emerged, they asked whether she wanted revenge. She looked at the rain collecting on the courthouse steps. 'I want a system that does what it says it will do,' she replied. Her phone vibrated with a message from Evelyn: the school shelter was closing because the water had finally receded. For the first time in days, her mother was going home.