He walked a little, because standing still in that silence felt like giving in. The ground was hard and fine with dust. In one shallow basin lay a rim of black crust around a patch of thicker dark water. Nothing moved in it. Nothing hunted along its edge. He crouched, then had to catch himself with a hiss when pain stabbed under his ribs. The effort left him light-headed. He stayed there, one hand on his thigh, looking at a world from which argument had drained away.

He saw Niall then, not as a ghost but as memory sharpened by emptiness: Niall leaning over the calibration cage, trusting the timing, trusting him. He heard Amara's voice cutting clean through excuses. He saw the upper gardens, their soft food and hidden slots, Lina's face turned up in honest wonder, Mara standing in the archive with her jaw locked as old crimes opened under her hands. He saw all of it at once against this mute shoreless age where no witness remained to sort the decent from the monstrous.

His name. His reputation. The bitter need to be proved right in the eyes of people who had laughed him out of rooms and signed funding away with polite mouths. All of that shrank so fast it almost made him sick.

Not because it had never mattered. Because it had mattered too much to him for too long.