Truth was not there to clear him. It was there because lies built systems, and those systems took children, memory, and labor and called the theft kindness. If he had any use left at all, it was not to stand above history as the man who mastered time. It was to drag what he had seen into the open while there were still living ears to hear it.

The machine clicked behind him.

A sharp, ugly sound. Metal slipping against metal.

Elias turned at once. The outer ring had lost its smooth rhythm. It shuddered, caught, then jumped ahead with a jerk that made the whole frame wobble on its supports. A thin thread of smoke rose from one housing seam.

"No," he said, and the word came out dry.

He limped back fast as he could, one hand clamped to his side. The control face flickered. Two indicator lines that should have held steady were wandering apart. The brake linkage, already delayed before, now answered his touch with a slack, gummy resistance. Deep-time strain. Material fatigue. Field drift. He did not need a full instrument panel to read disaster.

For one brief, ruinous instant he looked past the controls to the dead horizon and felt the pull again. Keep going. See the final dark. See the last heat fail. Finish the question.

He shut that part of himself down by force.

His hand tightened on the reverse settings. Home was no longer home in the old sense. It was the place where warning might still matter.

He threw the machine into return.