Silence.

The fluorescent lights of the arbitration chamber hummed a low, sterile note. Across the mahogany table, the fund manager’s lawyer pushed a single sheet of paper toward Elena. At the top, two words:

The lawyer gasped. Elena didn’t. She had seen this before—the quiet confession, the refusal to let the algorithm become a lie. Outside, snow began to fall on the Houston skyline, dusting the pipelines and storage tanks that still held the real oil, the real heat, the real world that the premium had only ever pretended to touch.