Elias leaned over the dead screen, fingers flying over a cracked manual panel below it. "It's in fire-loss mode. Damage control. It would rather erase than leak." He found a buried menu, then another, old enough to still use plain words. MEMORY HYGIENE CASCADE ACTIVE. SOURCE SANITIZE QUEUED. "Of course it would call it hygiene."

Mara looked at the warning on the panel. "Can you stop it?"

"Not stop. Delay." He keyed in a maintenance override from the corroded strip he had carried through half the buried world. For one blessed second the panel accepted it. Then a new lockout flashed. AUTHORITY REVOKED.

"Someone live is doing that," he said.

Mara glanced at him. "Meaning?"

Elias stared at the lockout message. "Meaning there are operators upstream or a central process with current command rights. The system isn't just dying. It's defending policy."

She gave a small, bitter breath through her nose and shoved another packet through. On the screen, a progress bar crawled to nine percent, froze, then jumped to twenty-one.

Elias ran to the next cabinet, found a manual bypass plate, tore it open, and fed power around a dead smart switch. Sparks nipped his knuckles. He jerked back, swore under his breath, then forced the bridge with a strip of wire from the satchel. Two more screens flared awake. File clusters blossomed across them, then began to blink out as source erase routines chased them.

"Take doctrine first," he said. "Then intake logs, then labor transfer lists. Doctrine tells people what this was. Names tell them who paid for it."

Mara shoved another packet through the relay queue. "I'm already doing that."