the A.F.R. search the Antitoi shop (p. 723)
But Fortier, he rarely wore the prostheses, not in U.S.A., and never for public transit. He preferred the condescension, the pretense of institutional ‘sensitivity’ to his ‘right’ of the ‘equal access’; it honed the edge of his senses of purpose.
Context
The A.F.R. leader weaponizes his real disability into a disguise. Fortier owns "attachable legs of flesh-tone polymer resins" but declines them in America, because "[t]he nation U.S.A. treated wheelchaired persons with the solicitude that the weak substitute for respect" — buses kneel, attendants push, and nobody watches "a sickly child." He "preferred the condescension" precisely because American pity is a blind spot an operative can vanish into: the wheelchair is the perfect cover in a country whose sensitivity is a form of not-seeing. (dd took the wheelchaired bodies; this is the tradecraft the plan routes here — disability worn as camouflage.)