The negotiations happened in a windowless conference room at the Singapore facility, deliberately out of camera range. After the council chamber's public collapse, both sides had agreed on one thing without needing to discuss it: whatever came next couldn't be a broadcast.
Timeline 48 represented the fifty-eight percent of the council still backing cooperation. Volkov brought two senior Champions, both graduated in the 1980s, both veterans of forty years' service. Rodriguez sat between them as mediator, saying almost nothing, making sure both sides got heard.
Six hours. No breaks longer than ten minutes. By the end of it, everyone in the room looked like they'd been through a battle, because in every way that mattered, they had.
