"Summon me? I guess?"

Nod.

"If Minor'd answered his summons, do you honestly think you'd have sorted it out and sent him home, or do you think someone would've confidently told the judge 'we checked, he's lying' and then kept a fourteen year old kid unable to talk for the next eighty years -"

"The charge wasn't lying, it was encouragement to suicide, he might've been cleared even if the court determined his allegation was false if they thought he'd added enough disclaimers... it's still illegal to encourage people to commit suicide even if they turn into daeva. I can try to have it reviewed as a noncircling offense."

"That would be useful. See, he doesn't object in principle to showing up, but the GCP has not so far demonstrated particular capacity to arrive at the correct conclusion on important questions, and that's something one looks for in people who want to try you."

"Are there other questions I should be reexamining -?"

"I mean, he's also telling the truth about the souls thing but that one I don't have handy forensic evidence on."

"I'll play it safe on that then."

"And daeva have basically human-range psychology and hobbies and so on and prefer the pronouns associated with their appearance in the case of every single one I've talked to and you could give the demons in Ganymede the option to select a preferred pronoun instead of being called 'it'."

"...I can email the prison people but they don't have to listen to me."

"Clearly not. But Minor's not going to show up to be tried by people who call him 'it' and keep him silenced so he can't correct them."

"...criminal justice isn't really supposed to be optional."

"When you have just courts other people are less motivated to help their loved ones evade it. When you have blindingly incompetent courts that do not recognize the personhood of their defendants or offer them humane conditions, you get people who don't want to subject their little brother to that."

"People help their loved ones escape all the time with human defendants too."

"Well, we'd encourage Minor to turn himself in if we thought you guys were competent enough to solve an eight-piece plastic puzzle and decent enough to let a fourteen-year-old attend school or write home or request to be called by his name."

"I'm not prison staff, okay?"

"Oh, we've said all this to them, too. I do think people are at least a little bit accountable for the work they enthusiastically defend on social media."

"What do you want me to do, quit?"

"If I found myself getting paychecks from your employers somehow I'd resign immediately. But I'm not the keeper of your conscience. And Timothy'd stay, try to make them better."

"If I quit whatever ability I have to get them to listen to me evaporates and you have to convince somebody else to come out on their lunch break to entertain your hypothesis."

"Point taken but you do realize that that is indicative of a system not very good at responding to evidence, right?"

"The forensics is usually really good and I don't know what happened and you can stop being a twit about it any time now."

"Sorry." He waves.

It's Minor. He's not winged at the moment. "We going home?"

"Unless you have somewhere else to be."

...the GCP guy squints warily at him.