The others had retired. Alias remained in the great room alone, a glass of brandy rested near his notes.

The day’s discussions still hovered in his mind — Sofia’s insistence on anchors, Chang’s precision, Amara’s field pragmatism. He admired how fast and harmoniously they had found the rhythm to function as a team notwithstanding the wild variety of their characters, backgrounds and skills.

“Le hasard fait bien les choses”, he mumbled. But this very rumination in this very setting stirred up thought: They were still reasoning in English, except for Raj - maybe.

He took a sip, letting the heat spread slowly through him. The idea returned — that word again, the one English refused to grasp. Hasard.

He remembered the evening weeks earlier, in this same room, with Ava. She had been startled by what had just said matter of factly. “Pegged reinstates chance as the neutral medium of fairness.”

She had looked up. “Why chance? It feels too light. Like dice in a cup.”

Alias had smiled then, patient. “Because your language has no better word.”

“Then make one.”

“I can’t. What I mean is older than your language allows.”

He had explained — or tried to. How hasard once meant both the throw and the outcome, the risk and its realization, inseparable. In English, all the cognates had fractured: accident moralized, fortune personified, randomness quantified, contingency sterilized. Each severed from the original unity — the fusion of act and consequence.

“English cuts the mystery into digestible pieces,” he’d said. “The French left it whole. That’s why hasard could still be poetry and philosophy – all at once.”

Ava had smirked. “And you want to rebuild a civilization on that word?”

“No,” Alias had answered quietly. “I want to remind it what fairness sounds like before management took over its vocabulary.”

Now, alone, he looked into the dying fire and felt that same melancholy.

Managerialism — the faith that everything, given enough method, could be adjusted.

Pegged was the opposite. Its beauty lay in its refusal to adjust.

He imagined Ava’s face across the firelight again. Her half-smile. Her calm impatience with abstraction.

“You mistake control for safety,” he’d once told her.

“And you mistake indifference for justice,” she had replied.

Perhaps both were true.

He raised his glass slightly, as if to her absent presence. “Here’s to hasard,” he murmured. “The only fairness left that doesn’t lie.”

The brandy caught the firelight, then stilled. Upstairs, a floorboard creaked — a reminder of life returning with the morning.

Alias set the glass down, reached for his notes, and wrote down the line Ava had once highlighted:

Pegged reinstates chance as the neutral medium of fairness.

Then, in the margin, he added in French:

Le hasard ne corrige rien — il révèle.

(Hazard corrects nothing — it reveals.)