He stepped to the control wall as if drawn. His fingers hovered over the diagrams. Brake isolation. Mass lock. Temporal drift cage. He saw at once that they had never solved full command authority. Their notes circled around containment and induced stall, not stable navigation. They had caged the machine the way people cage a fire they cannot extinguish.

"Can you open it?" Mara asked.

"Yes." He was already reading deeper. "No. Not simply."

A release tree unfolded under his touch. Every path ran through archive security. Containment had been tied into memory servers and allocation control, the same core systems they had used to guide the city. If the field cage tripped wrong, doctrine files would wipe and local mirrors would deadlock. If the archive entered panic seal, the platform would sink into a hard vault below the floor.

Mara saw his face. "Say it plain."

"I can pull the machine free quickly and risk losing all of this, or I can do it carefully through system handshakes, which takes longer and leaves us here while the tower notices." He swallowed. "If I brute-force the cage, we may never prove what this place is."

Mara said, "If you do it slowly, we may not leave alive."

He looked at the machine. Then at the control lattice tied to the records. Then at the machine again.

Mara's voice dropped. "Elias. Pick the living thing."