The machine room looked smaller now, as if the walls had crept inward while they were gone. One strip of ceiling light was dead. Another stuttered in weak bursts. Smoke from somewhere deeper in the system had begun to thread through the vent slots. Elias staggered to the rail, brought up the final calibration, and fed in fresh timing from the relay delays and chamber drift.

The answer came back in clean numbers.

Window viable: 4.8 seconds. Maximum rider mass: one adult, narrow tolerance. Field collapse probability under doubled load: catastrophic.

He stared at it anyway, then changed one value and reran it. Then another.

Mara came straight from the trunk with the audit core still clutched to her chest, dropped it onto the machine cradle with a heavy thud, and caught his wrist before he could start a fourth pass. Her hand was slick with someone else's blood or hers. Maybe both.

Mara caught his wrist tighter. "Enough."

Elias tried again. "If I cut the evidence load by half and hold only the originals—"

Mara said, "No."

Elias pushed on anyway. "There may be a way to stage the return in two linked bursts if you board at phase rise and I—"

"Elias." She stepped close enough that he had to look at her. There was dirt on her face, a cut over one brow, and in her eyes a kind of exhausted fury that did not hide the softer thing under it. "Stop trying to make the wall turn into a door because you don't want to hit it."

The chamber entrance boomed. Voices now. Real voices, muffled by metal and distance.