He drew the flowers closer and set them on top of the printed records where no one could avoid seeing them. “I have spent years treating systems as if they were cleaner than the people inside them,” he said. His voice was low now, the speed burned out of it. “Maybe that's only vanity in a lab coat. You start thinking if you map the field, you understand the cost. You don’t. You only understand the machine.”

Amara watched him without interruption.

“Mara stayed because there was one return window and because I had built a thing that still thought in tolerances before lives. Lina followed me because I made danger sound like knowledge. Niall…” He stopped, swallowed, and began again. “Niall died trusting my confidence. I cannot ask either of you to clean that for me. I am not asking for my name back.”

Jonas sat up straighter, all sleep gone from his face now.

“I am asking something worse,” Elias said. “Don’t defend me. Decide what your work serves. If these records are the child of our ideas, then this doesn’t begin in that tower. It begins here, in all the places where comfort sounds wiser than truth and control sounds kinder than risk.”

Amara’s gaze dropped to the flowers. When she spoke, her voice had lost its edge without losing its shape. “You should have said that first.”

Elias looked at the flowers and said, “I know.”