He could not argue with her. The hall was no memorial in the human sense. It was a place where memory had been turned into managed ritual while the machinery behind it kept regulating bodies, movement, intake, waste, calm. The old explanation did not break all at once. It came apart piece by piece, and with each one Elias had to admit how badly he had wanted a clean archive instead of a live control point.

They left through a side passage and circled wide rather than returning to the open avenues. Elias wanted the edges now, the parts of a city planners never meant to be admired. Behind pleasure courts and garden walls he found service margins disguised as landscaping: narrow strips of gravel, locked grilles under vine runs, low hums under decorative berms, warmth leaking through seams in the ground. What looked from the front like ornamental design became, from the side and back, a map of access.