Elias did not move. His mouth had gone dry. He watched the numbers to make sure they held, to make sure he had not just made himself ridiculous with some hidden software error a first-year student could expose. But the figures stayed. Clean. Repeatable looking. Real enough to hurt.

“Well,” Liora said at last, but the word came out thin.

Dev walked around the table and crouched, peering under the frame. “Magnetic track?”

Elias looked down at Dev crouched by the table. “There is no track.”

Dev stayed crouched under the frame, frowning. “Micro-arm, then. Optical cover. You blank the image, remove the object, heat a duplicate, return it on cue.”

Jonas looked from the token to Elias, and for one dangerous second hope almost broke through his caution. Then it closed again under something heavier. “Did you automate part of this?” he asked. “Be honest with me. If there’s hidden hardware, say it now before anyone else does.”

Elias met Jonas’s gaze. “There isn’t.”

Jonas kept looking at him. “Elias.”

The old friendship in his voice made it worse, not better.

Amara reached into the field ring only after the system went dark. She picked up the token between finger and thumb, turned it over, checked the chip stamp, then set it down with care. Her face had changed less than anyone else’s, but that made the change clearer. It was not disbelief. It was dread sharpened by professional respect.

“That discrepancy is real,” she said.

Dev straightened. “Or planted.”

Amara ignored him. “The heat drift is real too. But your return edge was rough. I saw the image split. You did not have full control of the reentry.”