The next hours wore the room thin. She checked file integrity, compared architecture strings to Elias’s early code, isolated timestamp patterns, scanned material traces off the clear wrapping around the flowers. Once, when Jonas crossed to the kitchen and Amara bent over the reader, Elias steadied himself on the table and quietly palmed one fresh copy drive from the edge of the stack into his coat pocket before either of them looked up. Jonas built a containment plan in parallel and hated himself for how quickly his mind went there: who had to know, who absolutely could not know yet, what legal shell might hold the evidence for twelve hours, which networks would seize it, bury it, weaponize it, or sell it if it moved too soon. Elias answered until his answers blurred. Sometimes he gave a theory before the question finished. Sometimes he stopped halfway through a sentence because Lina’s face rose in the gap, or Mara’s voice did.

Near dawn-gray, with the room blurring at the edges, his body made the choice for him. He sat back to finish one more detail about maintenance relays and simply slid sideways into sleep.

He woke under a blanket Jonas must have thrown over him. The lamps were lower. His neck ached. Something warm had dried at the corner of his mouth. For one loose second he did not know where he was, and grief came in before memory arranged itself. Not as a cry. Not as some sharp drama. Just absence, plain and final. Mara below. Lina in the fire. A garden that would go on opening doors for people who did not know what held it up.