He looked back at the pages. She was right, but the records kept dragging his mind toward pattern because pattern was the only way he had ever known to get his hands around horror. Piece by piece, the tower gave up its shape. Orbital governance rings had kept real authority overhead, thin enough to survive, distant enough to stay clean. Surface districts had been turned into gentle consumers with narrow memory and endless supply. The undercity had become workforce, waste sink, and fear reservoir all at once: hidden, blamed, used.

One log carried a familiar sentence from the fragment he had copied earlier. Not all truth serves life equally in the recovery era.

Below it, in a later hand: retention of full ancestral conflict data increases unrest markers in dependent populations by 41%.

Another file tracked labor visibility events. When surface residents saw transfer crews or intake removals too often, comfort compliance fell. So the routes had been shifted into dark places, under gardens, behind walls that opened only on guided tones. Not just hidden labor. Hidden sight.

Mara moved along the gallery fast now, first shoving the folded child-intake page deep into an inner jacket pocket with a flat press of her palm, then pulling chunks of data onto a portable relay slate fixed to the wall. The thing was old, wired in place. She ripped the tether panel open with her knife, exposing braided leads and a local port. "I need something that survives if they burn this room."

Elias said, "You're stealing live copies?"