TEHRAN DESK — The futures exchanges are whispering what Tehran's clerical establishment declines to say aloud: that the next transfer of supreme authority in Iran may arrive not through deliberate succession planning, but through abrupt circumstance. Kalshi's markets, trading briskly at $114,000 in daily volume, place the field of prospective successors at a collective 15 percent confidence — a figure modest enough to suggest the question remains genuinely open through 2045. The telling detail, however, lies in what market analysts call the divergence: the death-settlement contract and the succession contract are pulling apart, implying that speculators believe the transition may come sooner and less predictably than any orderly handover would suggest. The stakes are considerable. The Supreme Leader commands the Revolutionary Guards, nuclear policy, and the judiciary — institutions whose loyalties in a disorderly succession would be fiercely contested. No single heir apparent commands consensus, and prediction markets reflect precisely that fog.