"If I move faster, I may lock it." He twisted the lead. A spark jumped. The panel darkened, then the ring door rolled aside six inches and stopped. "Help me."

They widened the gap by hand. Mara got her fingers into the seam and put her weight into it, boots slipping once on the polished floor. Elias shoved with his shoulder and nearly blacked out from the burst of pain in his side, but the door gave enough to let them turn through.

The chamber beyond was dark except for one circle of white light.

His machine stood inside it.

For one second he saw not the archive around it but his own workshop, the buried lab, the frame under tarps, Niall leaning in with a wrench between his teeth. Then the present slammed back. The machine sat on a raised platform behind a clear field cage laced with gold-thin conductors. New housing had been built around his old design, not to improve it but to trap it. Sensor pylons ringed the dais. Cooling trunks fed into the floor. A wall of control glass beyond the cage carried fault trees in a language descended from his own notation badly enough to make his stomach turn.

They had understood enough to fear it.

Mara let out a short breath. "So they found your monster and built a kennel."