She frowned at him, then at the wall, trying to explain a thing that lived below words. "Because it says stay. Soft stay."

He almost dismissed it. Then he stopped himself. That was the error he kept making here: throwing out anything that did not arrive in a form he respected. He stepped back and looked again, this time not for language in the broken captions but for pattern in the pictures themselves.

The smiling figures were not random. Neither were the ring signs. In panel after panel, the orbital rings were paired with streams moving downward, while darker channels ran under the feet of the surface people and led toward storage pits, tables, bathing pools, garden beds. Above and below. Source and flow. A surface life arranged as receipt.

Farther down the wall, one damaged section had lost nearly all its faces. The only clear shapes left were the ring overhead, a set of lines dropping from it, and under the ground a web of dark pipes or tunnels feeding several districts at once. Another panel showed cargo marks rising again, not from the gardens to the ring, but from deep shafts below the gardens. Elias stood very still.

"There," he said.

Lina leaned in. "What?"

Elias traced the painted lines with two fingers. "They paired them. Every time. Orbit and under-service. Not orbit and surface. The story they paint for daily life is gentle, but the movement isn't. The surface is the middle layer, not the center."

Lina looked up at him. "Middle of what?"