She shook her head. “Not for us.”

Elias asked, “Who is us?”

Her eyes came back to him, wide and tired with effort. He had pushed her too far, too fast. The game behind them burst into laughter. One ring rolled to her feet. She picked it up by instinct and turned it in her fingers.

Elias said, “Lina.”

She flinched at his tone, not from anger, more from weight. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “It feels wrong. Dark in there.”

Then the others called again, and habit won. She ran the ring back with a smile that looked borrowed, and within moments she was moving with them, still glancing at Elias as if she had left a door open somewhere she should not have.

He stayed on the terrace a while after they drifted off, taking the measure of the place and of his own mistake. He had spent half the day treating these people as withheld data, as if the right question would pry open a locked drawer. But most of the drawers were gone. Or had never been built in them at all. Whatever this society had done to survive, comfort had not come free. It had shaved away strain, memory, and the habit of asking why.