The room was smaller than the one in Basel. No map. No projection. Just a plain table, a steel carafe of coffee, and four men who would never appear in any document together.

Steenberg sat at the head. His tie was off. His tone was unchanged.

“Disrupt hasn’t failed,” he said. “It’s simply found its limits.”

Across from him, the man with the slicked-back hair—older, leaner, expensive suit creased at the cuffs—said nothing. He hadn’t moved since sitting down.

Another man, younger, tapped an encrypted tablet.

“PEG is holding. Lottery draw velocity dropped five percent after the last relay seizures. But node proliferation has increased. We froze funds in Singapore. They replaced them in Ghana.”

Steenberg nodded.

“And the DAO?”

“Unusable. Toxic. Dead in governance terms.”

“Then we stop targeting what’s already decaying.”

He pushed a folder forward. The paper inside was thick, off-white, real.

“We go after the trust carriers.”

The men didn’t need clarification.

Later that night, in a different part of the city, Boris lit a cigarette on the balcony of a safehouse apartment. He didn’t smoke. He just liked the time it gave people to underestimate him.

A file was open on the table behind him. Faces. Movements. Habits.

Not just the team.

Messengers. Distributors. Couriers. An activist in Marseille. A lawyer in Lagos. A translator in Barranquilla. All flagged. None visible.

He exhaled smoke that never touched his lungs.

“Let’s see how trustless they are without a pulse.”

In Dakar, a man who had delivered wallets for Buba was pulled from a moto by three silent men and never seen again.

In Berlin, Amara’s old roommate received a message: “She’s gone. Don’t ask.”

In Madrid, Ava crossed the street and noticed a figure in a shop window mirror—still, just watching.

Back in Geneva, Steenberg signed the last authorization.

“This isn’t monetary,” he said. “It’s narrative asymmetry. And we’re going to make it symmetrical again.”