Amara came in behind him from the outer worktable, where Jonas had put her the moment Elias vanished off the chamber clock and she had stayed to shut the machine down if it tried anything else. She wasn't running, but her quick, controlled stride said she was already breaking the disaster into parts. Her eyes moved over the machine, the scorched track, Elias’s soot-black shirt, the cut on his cheek, the wrap on his hand, and then to the satchel and the fist he would not open.

“You were gone less than three hours,” she said. “The chamber clock never lost sync.”

“It wasn’t three hours there.” Elias dragged air in, straightened by degrees, and nearly failed. Jonas caught his elbow. He shook him off on instinct, then regretted it at once when the room tilted. “Don’t— just listen. Both of you. We don’t have time to make this into procedure first.”

“That ship sailed when you built a full-scale illegal machine under a residential block,” Jonas said, but his voice had gone thin under the smoothness. He looked at the carriage. “Can you walk?”

“I've walked farther than this.” Elias put one foot down, then the next. His knees held. Barely. “I made it forward. Much farther. There’s a surface city still— gardens, towers, guided populations, total behavioral management hidden inside comfort systems. Underground labor, child intake, memory smoothing, removal channels. It’s all real. I have records. I have physical samples. Mara got me to the archive. Lina—”

The name stopped him. Nothing followed it.

Amara heard the break and did not touch it. “Who is Mara?”