He looked out over the bright terraces, the pools, the gliding people with nothing to carry and nowhere urgent to be. "That is exactly the question."

They spent the rest of the morning following the mural line and the broken signs built into the spine. Elias found icons cut into rail posts, half-worn civic stamps near lift points, and old direction plates whose wording had rotted down to arrows and repeating symbols. Rings. Storage. Rest. Flow. Return. None of it gave him a clean answer, but the same relationship kept surfacing: authority or origin marked above, transfer marked below, comfort marked here.

By midday the light had gone hard. Elias's scraped cheek felt hot. Every deep breath rubbed his injured ribs raw. Lina noticed when he paused too often and silently steered him toward shade under a ribbed overhang beside a junction. She crouched, studying a floor medallion worn smooth by generations of feet.

"There is a hall near the dark tower," she said. "People go there when they remember old names. Quiet place. Nice place. Maybe your answer is there."

Elias glanced toward the dark tower. "A memorial?"

She tipped one hand. "Holding place. Looking place."

It fit too neatly with the idea already in his head. Archive, storage, sealed monument. Something official but passive. Something that might hold records and nothing more. Elias hated how relieved he felt at the thought. If the tower was only a vault, then the uglier parts of his theory could wait. He could go back to a problem with edges.

"Show me," he said.