Elias wiped black grit from his mouth with the back of his wrapped hand and bent over the control rail. The brake lever still lagged, just as Amara had warned him long ago, back when this was still theory and pride instead of a machine buried under a stolen future. He ran his fingers over heat-scarred switches, checked the interval wheel, then started a new calculation on the side slate. Mass, field drag, return vector, surviving charge. Every number closed like a trap.

"If I shave the buffer and cut the stabilization tail," he said, more to the machine than to Mara, "I can widen the carriage envelope by twelve percent. Maybe a little more if the field takes the load in surge rather than—"

Mara said, "No." Mara crouched by the hatch and fed the relay wire through. "Don't start."

"You haven't seen the spread if I move the anchor point. The problem isn't seat space. It's the return burn. If I offset the—" Elias said.

"Elias." She said his name flat and hard, and he stopped because there was no room in it for argument. "You are hiding in numbers again."

He looked up. The chamber was too bright in places, too dark in others. White wall strips blinked in broken sections. Behind Mara, the maintenance trunk was a square throat of shadow with ladder rungs and cable bundles dropping away. The smell coming from it was hot dust, old plastic, damp metal.

"This isn't hiding," he said.