He looked past her to the bright commons, to the easy movement of people toward supper, music, sleep. Then back to the dead wall that had refused every direct approach he knew.

His first instinct had been the formal one: find the entrance, use the interface, force the system to answer in its own language. It was the kind of mistake he had made before in cleaner rooms with polished floors and men who mistook gates for truth. The evidence had been there from the start, all around the door. He had kept looking at the door itself.

“I’ll stay near the paths,” he said, though they both knew he was already lying to make departure easier.

Lina did not call him on it. She only stepped in, touched his uninjured arm with cool fingers, and then pulled back as if she had already risked enough. “If you hear the ground,” she said, “do not stand on the dark places.”

He opened his mouth to ask what that meant, but she had already turned. She walked fast at first, then faster, pale wrap bright between the trees until the gardens took her back.

Silence settled after she was gone. Not true silence. This place was never that. Air moved through hidden channels. Water ran somewhere under stone. Far off, people called to one another in the easy tones of an endless holiday. But around the tower, the human layer thinned, and the machinery under it came forward.

Elias started over, this time not at the wall but beyond it.