Lenora's POV
The successor network's formal dismantling took three months.
Not dramatically — there was no single moment of collapse, no dramatic confrontation. The nodes fell one by one as cooperation spread through the membership, each person making the same calculation that had proven accurate in every case: the ledger was real, the documentation was complete, cooperation produced better outcomes than denial.
Twelve of the fourteen nodes produced full cooperation. One produced partial cooperation. One — the last one, a small group in the southern territories who had ideological rather than pragmatic commitment — refused entirely and was taken into formal investigation under the oversight body's expanded authority.
The capital's investigative process worked cleanly, without Ellina ma
