The chain had seven links.
Cole mapped it on the drive back — Priya's recruiter, their recruiter, the person above them, and so on. Seven people, seven territories, the informal network spreading outward from the founding ideology the way water spread from a source. Not organized. Not coordinated. Just people who believed what they had been told and passed it forward.
At the seventh link, the chain stopped.
Not because they had reached the founding period — Callum Greaves was the founder, and Callum Greaves was cooperating with the board. The chain stopped because the seventh name was someone who had received the ideology directly from a founding-period contact and had been the primary distributor for this branch of the network for fifteen years.
The seventh name was someone we had alr
