CHAPTER 128 — THE COST OF STANDING ALONE
The system did not stabilize after the backlash.
It sharpened.
That was the miscalculation nearly everyone made—believing resistance was the peak, believing exposure would burn itself out into calm. People mistook revelation for resolution. They assumed that once the truth surfaced, the pressure would ease, the chaos would settle, and authority would quietly reassemble itself into something familiar.
They were wrong.
Exposure did not heal the system. It stripped it.
Illusion was the anesthetic. Once removed, pain returned—clean, raw, unavoidable.
What followed was not relief.
It was choice.
Elena sensed it in the hours after the suspension order rippled through the network. It wasn't panic that spread through institutions, nor was it gratitude. It was something far more unstable.
Defiance.
