“We need out.” Mara flipped to the back pages, then froze. For the first time since he had met her, fear touched her face not as caution but as memory. “I know this format.”

She held out a form with child intake boxes, score fields, revision marks. One section had been blacked out by hand long ago.

“My first clear memory is a room with blue walls and a speaker tone every time someone cried,” she said. Her voice had gone thin and dangerous. “I remember a bracelet. I remember forgetting my mother’s face for one whole day and thinking that was normal. Then I remember the lower stacks.”

Lina looked at her with open hurt, as if the page itself had struck. “They can take that away?”

Mara folded the document once, too carefully. “They can try.”

The tapping sounded again, closer. Somewhere off to the right a side light died with a soft click. Darkness swallowed one whole aisle of trunks.

Elias dropped to one knee beside the open box, pulled a polymer sheet from his satchel, and laid a page beneath it. “One minute. We need proof we can carry.”

Mara rounded on him. “One minute gets you boxed.”

Elias kept his hands inside the open box as he argued, “One page gets dismissed as forgery. We need protocol language, charts, identifiers—”

Mara jabbed a finger down the dark route. “We need breathing room.”