"About the split? Of course. We keep your food warm, your water clean, your gardens trimmed, your waste moving, your songs on schedule, your lights soft. The upper world sleeps at the center and calls itself the whole body." She glanced back. "You lot always do that."

Elias said, "I am not one of 'you lot.'"

Mara glanced back at him. "You came from a machine with enough power to punch a hole through time and landed in the pleasure tier. That sounds expensive."

There was no clean answer to that. Niall's face came and went in his mind with the old speed of guilt, not memory exactly, more the outline left when someone should still be standing beside you and is not. Elias swallowed once and tasted metal.

"The machine was mine," he said. "The money around it wasn't."

Mara slowed by a junction where strips of reflective tape marked one route dead and the other merely dangerous. She studied him a beat longer than before. That was the first change.

"Stolen landing site," she said. "What did you mean?"

Elias steadied himself against the tunnel wall and said, "The place where I arrived is built around my crash without understanding it. Or hiding that understanding. The machine should have been impossible to ignore. Instead people glanced at it and moved on. The systems folded it into the landscape. It was absorbed. That means control. Deliberate control."

Mara said, "Or training so deep they don't see what's not meant for them."

Elias said, "That's still control."

Mara said, "Everything is control down here too. Difference is, ours leaves bruises where you can point to them."