Power woke beneath him with a low climb through the frame, not loud at first but deep enough to feel in his teeth and the bones behind his eyes. The coils lit in sequence around the chamber. One. Two. Three. The air lost its ordinary shape. Dust hanging near the rail twitched and drew into faint lines, as if the room had discovered a hidden direction. On the main display the lock indicators turned from amber to clean green one after another.

Field stable.

Anchor hold.

Envelope within tolerance.

For one bright second, vindication hit so hard it drove out everything else. Years of accusation, panels, inquiries, the careful pity on colleagues’ faces, the silence after Niall’s death when every room changed temperature at his name—gone. Not healed. Not forgiven. Simply pushed aside by the naked fact of success.

“It locked,” Elias said in Jonas’s sitting room, and his own voice had gone quieter without him meaning it to. “Better than the models said it would.”

No one interrupted now.

“In the first instant, I thought I had done it. I thought the worst part of my life had just ended.” He stared at the untouched bowl in front of him as though the steam might shape itself into the chamber again. “Then I tested the brake.”

Back in the hidden lab, Elias pulled the right-hand control with the exact force needed to catch the one-minute mark and hold it. The lever moved, but not with the response he knew. There was drag in it, a delay like a system listening through a wall. The ring around him answered half a beat late.

The floor gave a long, deep groan.