The reprieve was a wary one. The foreclosure was stalled, but the shadow of Silverport did not lift. It changed shape. News, filtered through Kaeli's cautious contacts, spoke of a new kind of silence in the financial district. Not confusion, but calculation. Finnian was not a man who accepted a stalemate.
Elara felt it first as a change in the quality of the air. It was not the oppressive, witnessing weight of the Auditors. This was different. It was an absence. A thinning. It began as a faint chill at the edge of perception, a note missing from the city's harmonic hum.
Three days after the Coalition's lawyers departed, a single figure walked through the northern gate.
