Power did not disappear after the vote.
It settled.
That was the difference, and the danger.
In the hours following the referendum, the estate entered a state Aria had never witnessed before. Not lockdown. Not alert. Not even heightened security. The systems ran smoothly, almost gently, as though relieved of a burden they had carried too long.
The architecture had crossed its threshold.
And now it waited.
Dante stood alone in the observation gallery long after Victor and the analysts had dispersed. The operations floor below no longer buzzed with urgency. There were no emergency overlays, no red-tier escalations. Just stabilized streams of data flowing into place, institutions onboarding, governance layers activating, transparency protocols executing without resistance.
It should have felt like victory.
Instead, it felt like exposure.
