“A woman from below. Undercity. She saved my life twice.” He swallowed against the burned ache in his throat. “Lina was from the surface level. She brought me in. They aren’t theories. They’re people.”

Jonas stared at him. “You come back half dead and your first line is that you met two centuries of strangers and one of them gave you an archive?”

“My first line,” Elias said, too loud, “is that this ends where we are standing if we do what we have always done and try to manage it into something comfortable.”

Silence hit the room. A loose panel ticked as it cooled. Somewhere inside the machine a relay clicked and failed to catch.

Amara stepped closer to the carriage. “Open your hand.”

He looked at her, not understanding for a beat.

Lina nodded toward his clenched hand. “The one you haven’t let go of.”

Slowly, Elias uncurlled his fingers. Two white flowers lay crushed across his soot-streaked palm, their stems wrapped in a strip of thin clear film. They were small and star-shaped, almost colorless against his skin except for the deep green at the cut ends. They should have browned. They should have wilted to paste. Instead they held their shape as if they had been plucked minutes ago.

Jonas let out a short breath that sounded nothing like relief. “What the hell are those?”

“From the garden.” Elias looked at them and the room blurred for a different reason. “She gave them to me before the tower. For luck, I think. Or because they used to leave flowers for people who went somewhere dangerous. I never got the whole custom.”