He should have. He knew that even as his eyes slid to a hardened storage cluster marked OFFLINE AUDIT CORE. Proof core. Immutable copies. If he could pull that and the doctrine files, then even if the machine failed later, the truth would exist somewhere outside this tower's soft lies.

His hand moved before the argument inside him was done. "Buy me six minutes."

Mara made a sharp sound through her nose, anger and disbelief packed tight together. Then she nodded once, because she had already measured him correctly and had planned around his failure before he spoke it. "I'm setting relays. If a door closes, I want one more way to kick it." She pointed at him. "Six minutes means six. Not scientist minutes."

She peeled away toward a side bank of maintenance trunks, pulling panels with brutal speed and feeding stolen fragments into relay slots. Elias dropped into the control chair before the cage. It molded itself to him as if it remembered human shape. He hated that. He loved that he understood it.

Pain made his hands shake. He locked his wrist against the console until the shake eased enough to work. Copy first: audit core, governance charter set, memory management logs, intake records, labor visibility directives, ancestral conflict filters. The progress bars crept. Too slow. He diverted cooling from two nonessential sensor pylons. The chamber answered with a warning tone and a rise in temperature under the cage floor.

"What did you do?" Mara called from the trunk bank.

Elias called back, "Borrowed time."

Mara said, "That usually means stole danger."

He almost smiled, and the almost hurt worse than the ribs.