The witness entered the chamber at 09:47 hours, as recorded in the docket. The fluorescent tubes above cast no shadows, only a uniform pallor that flattened every surface into a single plane of interrogation. The clerk noted the time. The stenographer began. What followed was not a conversation but an extraction, a systematic removal of narrative from the marrow of memory. The witness spoke in fragments at first, each phrase a shard of something larger, something that had been whole before the subpoena arrived. The facts assembled themselves not in chronological order but in order of weight, the heaviest settling first into the transcript like sediment in still water. There was no dramaturgy here, no rising action, no climax. The testimony proceeded as architecture proceeds: load-bearing statements supporting derivative conclusions, each dependent on the structural integrity of what came before. The tribunal listened with the patience of concrete. When the witness paused, the silence was not empty but pressurized, containing within it every word that had been considered and rejected, every truth that was technically accurate but strategically withheld. The cross-examination began without preamble. Each question was a bore drill, narrow and precise, seeking not the surface but the rebar beneath it. The witness understood, as all witnesses eventually understand, that testimony is not the telling of truth but the construction of a record, and records are built to bear inspection, not to comfort those who build them.