Amara did not reach for them. “And they survived occupied transit.”

“They survived more than that.” He tucked the flowers down on the nearest clean section of bench as carefully as if he were setting down bone. Then he yanked the satchel loose, almost dropped it when his side seized, and forced it onto the table. “Here. Audit core. Offline. Hardened. Pulled from the archive before containment sealed. If the casing still lives, it has policy records, intake logs, labor directives, memory management files.”

Jonas flinched at the word containment. “You brought stolen material through an unlicensed temporal event into my building.”

Elias shot back, “Your building already had the machine under it.”

Jonas dragged a hand over his face. “My legal exposure keeps widening every time you open your mouth.”

Amara ignored both of them. “Set it down flat.”

Elias steadied the core with both hands. “It is flat.”

Amara didn’t look up from the bench. “Don’t argue with me while you sway.”

She slid a field reader from the bench, snapped a line into the cracked side port, and watched for current. The core sat there in its dull casing, ugly and plain, nothing like the stories Elias had almost died to drag back. He hated it for that. He hated how small proof looked when laid on a table.

Amara’s jaw tightened as the reader woke. “Unknown file tree.”

Jonas moved around the bench, keeping one eye on Elias. “Could be garbage. Could be heat damage. Could be something your machine wrote in a feedback loop.”