Chapter 116

Aria's POV

Venn's draft arrived in April.

Forty-three pages. She'd titled it *Positional Resistance and Cultural Resistance: A Practitioner's Framework for Distinguishing Between Them.* The title was exact and the document honored it — every section doing the work the title promised, no page wasted.

She'd built the argument in three parts. The first established the theoretical distinction through historical examples from both the alliance record and the confederation materials Rendell had provided. The second applied the framework to six documented cases, the Eastern school among them, demonstrating how the diagnostic would have worked in each. The third offered a practical decision guide — not a rigid protocol,...