A Faithful Rendering

For two years the world has been quietly coming apart — not in explosions, but in closed corridors and emptying silos and rooms full of people who are so very sorry. Mira renders that fraying for a living. From a glass booth she carries other people's hardest words across into her own language, faithful to one law: say exactly what is meant. No more. No less.

Then the parties who never speak agree to sit in a single room, and a man the world has simply started calling the Speaker rises to end it all — and Mira is chosen to be one of the voices he is heard in. For the length of one speech she will be his voice to millions, and her only law is fidelity.

And somewhere inside the most beautiful words the world has ever heard, her trained ear catches a hairline where the meaning will not sit.