The Assize Court of Meridian Prime
A Far-Future Courthouse Ensemble

About this book:

On a planet where the rain stopped falling sixteen years ago, the Assize Court of Meridian Prime still sits in session. Magistrate Kray—eighty, cynical, and armed only with faded statutes and a brass bell—presides over a docket of water thieves, salvage disputes, and the occasional bio-engineered lichen that might be the last hope for a dying world. Chief Clerk Mallow dusts the bench with a camel-hair brush; Advocates Chen and Harl trade barbs over maritime law in a desert; Bailiff Vane sweeps red silt from the floorboards. The Commonwealth is gone, the aquifers are failing, and the law is the only machinery still turning.

When a living terraforming organism plugs the city's last gravity-fed siphon, the court faces a choice: uphold the Reclamation Act and protect the creature that makes water from dust, or let the Water Warden burn it out so seven thousand people can drink tomorrow. There is no precedent for a plaintiff that photosynthesizes. There is no statute for a world that has forgotten how to rain. But the ledger must be kept, the seal must hold, and someone has to decide who owns the moisture condensing on a jar in the clerk's safe.

*The Assize Court of Meridian Prime* is a far-future legal ensemble where procedure is a bulwark against entropy, every adjournment is a stay of execution, and the most radical act in a drying world is to follow the rules. For readers who love the institutional texture of *The Expanse*, the quiet authority of *Station Eleven*, and the wry humanity of *Bleak House*—this is the court of last resort.