The apartment door opened before Elias reached for the panel. Warm light spilled into the hall, along with the smell of toasted bread, broth, and coffee gone too long on a hot plate. Jonas stood there with his tie loose and his sleeves rolled, tired enough to stop pretending this was a social call.

“Good God,” Jonas said, stepping aside. “You look like you lost a fight with your own house.”

Inside, the gathering was smaller than the dinner the night before and somehow harder for that. No long table. No glasses laid out to soften the edges. Just Jonas’s sitting room, low lamps, rain-muted windows, and three people who had come because they had not managed to leave the thing alone.

Amara stood by the shelf near the far wall, arms folded, her attention sharp and still. Dev sat in a chair angled toward the door, one ankle on one knee, legal calm wrapped around obvious alarm. Liora was at the window with a tablet in her lap she had stopped looking at when the door opened. All three saw the same thing at once: the dirt, the shaking, the stare that passed over them, then snapped back as if part of him were still somewhere else.

Jonas shut the door. “Sit down first.” He pointed Elias toward the couch, then toward the sideboard. “Water. Food. Then I call a doctor.”

“No.” Elias stripped off his damp coat and missed the chair with it. He did not bother picking it up. “No doctor.”