He took a step toward them. They took one back, still smiling, already ready to let the moment dissolve. Social pressure here worked without force. It was all invitation and gentle refusal, all turn away, don’t dwell, come back to the light. Elias saw how easy it would be to be lulled by it if he were tired enough, hungry enough, lonely enough.

He was all three. He went anyway.

Lina stayed as the others drifted off down the path. She twisted her hands once, then stilled them. “People don’t go there.”

Elias said, “Then I’ll have the place to myself.”

Lina said, “That is not a good joke.”

“It wasn’t a joke.” He softened his voice when he saw her draw in. “Lina, if they took my machine, that tower is the first honest thing I’ve seen all day. It admits there’s a locked door somewhere in this world.”

She looked over her shoulder at her friends, already halfway to the lower lawns, calling to her in easy voices. Then she looked at the tower, and her shoulders tightened. “I don’t know what it is,” she said. “Only that we stay away.”

Elias asked, “Who tells you that?”

A pause. “No one.”

That answer chilled him more than a direct lie would have. Conditioning so deep it no longer needed a speaker.

He climbed down from the empty pedestal and wiped his bleeding knuckle against the borrowed wrap. The fabric took the stain at once. Every step toward the tower sent a complaint through his battered side, but pain, at least, was clear. It asked nothing except that he account for it.