The stock dropped forty-one points by noon.
Aria watched it from her desk — the live ticker on her secondary screen, the number moving in the particular lurching way of a market processing unexpected information. Clara had predicted it. Had built the response strategy around it. Had told Ethan at eight this morning that the drop was inevitable and temporary and that how they handled the next seventy-two hours would determine which of those two words mattered more.
Ethan was on calls from eleven straight through to three.
Aria managed the floor — fielding press inquiries, routing investor calls to Clara's team, maintaining the ordinary architecture of a working day around the extraordinary thing happening inside it. She did it the way she did everything: precisely, completely, without sh
