The second fluctuation was smaller.
That made it worse.
It originated in volatility dispersion trades.
A modest rebalance.
Routine.
Except routine presumes stable geometry.
This was not stable geometry.
Jasmine mapped stress propagation as a branching process.
Variance of connectivity had widened.
Highly connected nodes were becoming more dominant.
Fat-tailed influence.
Keith watched as a minor vol spike forced delta hedging.
Dealers sold futures.
Futures impacted index ETFs.
ETFs pressured underlying baskets.
Credit widened in sympathy.
The loop completed in under three seconds.
Maya wrote the reproduction condition.
"If R₀ exceeds one," she said calmly, "shocks reproduce."
Jasmine checked.
"It's at 1.08."
Keith didn't blink.
"That's enough."
In Chicago, futures depth evaporated ahead of program sells.
In New York City, ETF arbitrage bands widened beyond historical error margins.
In London, structured desks halted optionality quotes temporarily.
Liquidity was no longer continuous.
It was pulsed.
The geometry shifted again.
Clusters tightened internally.
Inter-cluster bridges weakened.
Jasmine visualized the adjacency matrix fragmentation.
Edges were disappearing.
Not by deletion—
By avoidance.
Maya tracked percolation threshold.
Connectivity probability was approaching critical.
Below that level, the giant component fractures.
Above it, everything touches.
They were oscillating around the boundary.
Keith exhaled slowly.
"This is self-exciting."
"Yes," Maya replied.
"Hawkes-like."
She didn't write it down.
They all understood.
A third disturbance—barely measurable—hit credit.
Under normal synchronization, it would dissipate.
Instead, it branched.
Equities reacted before spreads fully moved.
Volatility reacted before equities confirmed.
FX anticipated both.
Time ordering collapsed.
In Frankfurt, bunds rallied preemptively.
In Tokyo, yen strength overshot statistical bands.
In Singapore, systematic volatility targeting cut exposure across unrelated asset classes.
Branching.
Replication.
Propagation.
Jasmine updated the cascade map.
Small nodes were stable.
Large hubs were unstable.
Hubs amplify.
Leaves absorb.
But leaves do not determine structure.
Hubs do.
Maya spoke softly.
"Cascades don't require a crash."
Keith nodded.
"They require geometry."
R₀ ticked to 1.12.
Not explosive.
Persistent.
That was worse.
Persistent cascades erode structure quietly.
Amplification without spectacle.
Instability without headlines.
In Zurich, capital preservation mandates tightened.
In Hong Kong, liquidity provision shifted from continuous to conditional.
In Washington, D.C., dashboards showed no singular breach—only rising interconnected sensitivity.
No lever to pull.
No single failure to isolate.
Just geometry reorganizing.
The cascade did not accelerate dramatically.
It broadened.
Each small shock spawned slightly more than one successor.
Enough to sustain motion.
Not enough to explode.
Yet.
Keith watched spreads oscillate unnaturally.
Maya monitored coherence.
Jasmine tracked branching.
The market was not collapsing.
It was reproducing disturbance.
And when disturbance reproduces—
Stability becomes arithmetic.
Not intuition.
R₀ remained above one.
That was the number that mattered.