He listened until the sound of her faded into the deeper hum below. Then he turned back to the machine and forced his hands to steady.

The return date sat in his head with painful clarity. Jonas's sitting room. The cut glass. Dev's suspicion. Liora's tablet half raised. Amara's face when she stopped being angry long enough to be afraid. Home, if he could still call it that. The machine had brought him here. It could bring him back once. Maybe. One surviving window before the field tore itself open or closed forever.

He stripped the jump profile down to the frame: return interval, narrow arrival band, evidence mass only. The numbers held there, spare and brutal. The instant he added a second body, even with no satchel, even with a shaved buffer and a suicidal surge, the spread blew apart.

The door boomed again. Then came the sound under it, more chilling than noise: tools. A saw or spreader biting metal in patient bursts.

Not shadows, not tunnel stories. A team.

Elias keyed the chamber display to local systems. Map lines opened in pale bands across the wall: core room, archive stem, server galleries, service ladders. Red blocks moved one level at a time toward them, sealing behind themselves as they came. Containment force. Organized entrants closing section by section.

He stared at the pattern. For one beat, all he saw was design: routing, pressure, control. The same clean hand he had seen in the records above. Even their violence was managed.

He snatched up the satchel, shoved the original pages and a polymer sheet inside, then limped to the rear access to follow Mara's route.