At 5:42 in the morning, the money stopped coming home.
Helena Voss noticed it the way a person notices a missing stair on a staircase they have climbed every day for thirty years. Not with alarm. With the body first, and the mind a half-second after.
She was standing at the window of her office on the ninety-first floor of the Auristrade Spire, coffee untouched, watching the overnight settlement flows crawl across the glass. Every morning they looked the same. Thousands of gold threads converging on Avalon from every corner of the Empire: payroll from the eastern foundries, tariffs from the southern ports, tuition from three hundred academies, the quiet deposits of noble houses who trusted no one with their fortunes except her. Every thread passed through Auristrade before it arrived anywhere else. Every thread paused there, for a few hours, a day, sometimes three.
That pause was her empire.
This morning, eleven threads were missing.
