The Manhattan winter was beginning to exhale, its sharp, icy teeth softening into the first tentative dampness of a New York spring. High above the silver-grey grid of Park Avenue, the eighty-eighth floor of the Arcadia Global Headquarters remained a temple of crystalline clarity. Inside their penthouse suite, which occupied the apex of the tower, the silence was not empty; it was a rhythmic, living thing, vibrating with the muffled hum of a city that never truly slept.
Hana Wijaya-Raka stood by the floor-to-ceiling glass, her fingers curled around a single ceramic mug. The steam from her Sumatran coffee rose in a slow, steady column, a quiet defiance against the frantic world eighty floors below. She was no longer looking for variances in a projection model or ghosts in a regional logist
