His shoulders slammed the harness. A bad taste filled his mouth. The display washed white and came back with nonsense values, numbers rolling so fast they turned into lines. He heard his own voice, flat and exact because panic had stripped it down to function.

Elias heard himself say, "Delay on mechanical brake, field not syncing. Manual authority is chasing the event instead of leading it. Anchor drift increasing. Good. Very good. Idiot."

Niall used to hate it when Elias narrated to empty rooms. Said it was either arrogance or fear, and with Elias it was usually both.

That thought cut through him sharper than the harness. For one breath he saw not the machine but the old calibration bay, the flash, Amara's face after, and the place where Niall should have still been. Then the lab was gone again and time opened wider.

The city outside became a film run at impossible speed. Storm years tore over it first. Elias watched whole seasons of rain throw themselves against the skyline. Water climbed district by district. Streets he knew turned into dark channels. A tower line failed and vanished in one blur of collapse, only to return in another shape, built back heavier, wider at the base, linked by raised transit spines that glowed at night and threw clean threads of light through the wet. There were years of brown floodwater and stripped concrete, then green years where roofs turned into terraces and hanging gardens poured down the sides of new structures.

It was beautiful the way disaster can look beautiful from a safe distance.