"It's an annoyingly complicated process," he had to concede. "There's... something in peoples' heads that stops them from looking at themselves. Really seeing themselves. Some internal blockage, like a river that's been stopped by debris piling up at a bend. Then the water, instead of flowing freely, builds up behind it and stagnates. Most people have something like that, the overwhelming majority. You get a Palace when it's something twisted and deep enough to have its own sort of... We're in the realm of metaphor here, but when the water being held back starts to fuck with the local cognitive ecosystem."

He leaned back, considering his words carefully... and withdrew from an unseen pocket- a simple black card, blank, bearing an emblem, a nautilus shell in violet and an embossed gold 'N'. "You've seen these. Or something like them, anyway. The calling card is the trick. Let them know you're coming, and convince them that that blockage- the load-bearing root of their distorted worldview- is a physical object that can be stolen. They don't have to consciously believe it. Their Shadow knows. And then... you make good on the threat. Within a day or so, you break in, you steal what is now the Treasure. And suddenly... for the first time they see themselves for who they really are, without any of the filters of delusion, without the self-justification, without anything they were previously using to be able to think that all of this... was fine."

He thought, suddenly, of Stella. Who'd been... happy. Not just happy, not in the way Maruki had wanted, but... able to grow. "... I admit, I used to see it as nothing more than brainwashing. Replacing a real bastard with someone who was less of a fucking problem. But I've spent a lot of time around someone who's been subjected to it and it's... different. She describes it as having... sudden, perfect clarity, for the first time. In a lot of cases of the absolute worst people humanity has to offer... maybe that's enough to destroy them. And maybe killing them would be more merciful. But I think what Ren was trying to get me to understand, before the end, was... it's not about punishment. Punitive Justice does not work. True Justice is found in Restoration, in making the victims whole. In undoing the damage you've done, and if you can't do that, in working to make sure that others don't suffer the same way. And you can't get that from a corpse. Sometimes a corpse really is the better solution, but that's where it gets a bit complicated, and nobody ever said moral philosophy was simple."