Phase drift is survivable.
Cascade is not.
The first break was statistical.
Not visible on price.
Visible in variance clustering.
Jasmine overlaid rolling conditional volatility.
Shock absorption had slowed.
Reaction time dispersion widened.
Maya mapped the energy transfer across assets.
"When coupling terms weaken," she said,
"energy localizes."
Keith finished the thought.
"And localized energy spikes faster."
In New York City, options skew steepened before underlying volatility moved.
In London, credit spreads widened independent of equity flow.
In Tokyo, safe-haven demand triggered ahead of macro releases.
The order of response inverted.
Not catastrophic.
But unstable.
Jasmine computed dispersion acceleration.
The dispersion term expanded faster than aggregate volatility.
"That's not normal," Keith said.
"No," she replied.
"It's precursor behavior."
Systems cascade when timing divergence exceeds damping capacity.
Maya wrote the instability condition.
"Drift time now exceeds damping time," she said quietly.
Keith looked at the live feed.
"So the system can't re-synchronize fast enough."
"Exactly."
The next shock was minor.
A routine macro revision.
Yet reaction sequencing fractured.
• Equities dipped
• FX spiked late
• Credit froze briefly
• Volatility products surged prematurely
Instead of oscillation—
There were pockets.
Each asset class reacting to its own internal clock.
In Frankfurt, bond desks hedged before equity desks repositioned.
In Chicago, futures led cash by anomalous intervals.
In Singapore, systematic funds cut exposure ahead of discretionary funds.
Coordination degraded by milliseconds.
But milliseconds compound.
Jasmine visualized coherence decay rate.
The order parameter was trending down.
Not collapsing.
Eroding.
Maya crossed her arms.
"This isn't a crash."
Keith nodded.
"It's fragmentation."
Fragmentation is subtler than collapse.
Collapse is singular.
Fragmentation is distributed.
When distributed systems lose synchronization—
Each node self-protects.
Liquidity thins in pulses.
Confidence becomes asynchronous.
A major liquidity provider widened spreads by two basis points.
No headline.
But others followed.
Micro-hesitation propagated.
Maya recalculated effective coupling.
"We're below critical threshold," she said.
"Fully?" Keith asked.
"Not yet."
"But trending."
In Hong Kong, macro volatility funds reduced gross exposure.
In Zurich, private banks shifted allocations defensive.
In Washington, D.C., central monitoring systems flagged cross-asset desynchronization—but no intervention triggered.
Because nothing had broken.
Yet.
Jasmine leaned back.
"It's not magnitude risk."
"It's timing risk," Keith said.
Maya nodded.
"And timing cascades faster than leverage."
Chapter 208 does not explode.
It separates.
Coherence decays.
Energy localizes.
Drift outruns damping.
The system still stands—
But no longer moves as one.
And when systems cease moving together,
They do not require a large shock.
They require only—
One mistimed one.