The flowers sat on the table in front of him beside three copied drives and a stack of printed sheets Amara had pulled from the core. Someone had placed them in the center of the cleared space as if they were evidence in a trial or offerings at a grave.

Jonas was asleep in a chair by the window, one arm over his face. Amara stood at the work island reading, still in the same clothes, her hair pulled back again with a pen through it. She noticed him awake without turning.

“You were out forty-one minutes,” she said.

Elias pushed himself upright. Every joint argued. “That long?”

“Long enough for the file checks to stop being hypothetical.” She came over with a few printed pages and set them down near the flowers. “The records are real enough to frighten me.”

Jonas lowered his arm. “That’s her version of a speech.”

Elias looked at the pages. Intake routing. Labor transfers. Calm window directives. One line from a governance memo sat in the middle of the top sheet, plain and bloodless: Not all truth serves life equally in the recovery era.

He touched the edge of the paper, then the clear wrap around the flowers. “I thought bringing proof back would be the hard part.”

Jonas gave a tired sound that almost counted as a laugh. “No. The hard part is people.”

This time Elias listened to that.