Article M-501 - Capture of a Wanted Citizen
"You were apprehended upon the open road by the watch, wanted under outstanding warrants recorded against your name. A citizen who carries a price on their head and rides through the lands that set it forfeits their liberty until the matter is answered."
M-501 is the article of the road. It is not invoked at the scene of the original crime - those offenses are answered under their own articles - but at the moment the watch of an aggrieved power finally lays hands on a citizen who has been carrying the warrant and crossing the territory all the same. The journey ends, the citizen is brought to the nearest holding of that power, and the bench records the term.
The article is described in full in The Roads and the Watch.
A Term Measured by the Name
Most articles open with a fixed term and lengthen only for repeat offenders. M-501 is different: the weight of the citizen's notoriety at the moment of capture sets the term directly. A traveler taken with a light record answers for it briefly; one taken at the height of their infamy is held far longer. The reasoning is plain - the State does not measure a road capture by the single act of being caught, but by the whole standing the citizen had let accumulate against that power before the watch closed in.
The article carries its own ceiling, beyond which even the most notorious capture will not extend. The road can cost a citizen a great deal of time, but never an unbounded amount.
Escalation Under the Recidivism Clause
A citizen taken once and taken again within thirty days finds the second term doubled, and a third doubled again, under the Recidivism Clause that governs the Code at large. A traveler who treats capture as a routine cost of doing business learns otherwise quickly.
On Bail
M-501 admits bail. A captured citizen may pay a fine at the bench and walk free without serving the term - the State would rather collect the fine and return the citizen to public life than keep a road offender idle in a cell. The fine is not fixed: it rises with the same recidivism weight that lengthens the sentence, so that a habitual offender buys their freedom at a steep price while a first capture is settled cheaply.
A point that catches many citizens out: paying bail does not clear the warrant. The fine answers the capture, not the notoriety that caused it. A citizen who buys their way out at the bench walks back onto the very roads that had them wanted, still wanted, and may be taken again before they reach the city gate. Only quiet living - or a deliberate settling of the underlying offenses - wears the name clean.