"You say that like it's rude." She jammed a thin shard of salvaged memory crystal from her pocket into the port and watched transfer bars crawl. "If you get lost in reading, I still want a story that can travel."

He almost said he was not lost. The lie died before it reached his mouth.

On the far side of the chamber, another screen flared as if responding to his search history. A diagram turned in the air: central archive, behavior servers, resource gates, intake clinics, district guidance network, allocation engines. At the bottom of the web, nearly hidden among service nodes, was a marked containment vault with a word that made his skin go cold.

ANOMALOUS CHRONOMETRIC DEVICE.

He was moving before he spoke. "There."

Mara yanked the crystal free and followed. "Good. Find your machine. Then we leave."

The containment levels sat below the server galleries behind two sealed rings of doors. The first opened when Elias fed the corroded maintenance strip into a hidden slot beside the frame. The system paused, judged the relic in his hand, and accepted it with a low click that felt like mockery. The second did not care about old metal. It wanted active authority.

He found a service panel under the wall skin and pried it open with his taped fingers and a snapped piece of trim. The edge bit into his wrapped palm. By the time he bridged two contacts with stripped wire from his satchel, sweat had broken across his back despite the cold air. Mara kept watch over his shoulder, listening to the hall.

"Faster," she said.