The words landed with no rise in her voice at all. That was always her way. No heat. No cover either.

Across the table, Jonas rubbed a thumb along the stem of his glass. “Amara.”

“She came to discuss his credibility,” Amara said. “That is the point under all this food.”

Elias put down his knife before his hand could tighten around it. The room sharpened. Light reflected off the black prototype surface just beyond the plates, a dark second table waiting for its turn. “No,” he said. “The point is whether the work is sound.”

Amara looked at him fully then. “Those are not separate questions anymore.”

He knew that. Of course he knew that. Every interview after the accident, every board session, every article with his face pulled from better years and placed beside the name of a dead man had taught him the same lesson. Still, the answer rose in him from an older place, the place that cared less for reputations than for whether the shape of the world had been seen clearly. “You are all treating sequence as if it were holy,” he said. “As if time itself were a courtroom line you stand in and wait your turn. It isn’t. Fixed time is a superstition. It only feels fixed because we are badly built for seeing it.”

Silence sharpened around the table.

Jonas leaned back first. “All right,” he said quietly. “There’s the opening statement.”

Liora let out a small breath through her nose, half uneasy, half amused. “And here I was hoping for dessert before metaphysics.”

“It’s not metaphysics,” Elias said. “It’s geometry with consequences.”

Dev’s brows lifted. “Geometry with a body count.”