The others slept.
Or pretended to.
Eira sat alone again, but not for long.
Kael's voice came gently from the stairwell behind her. "You always stare at things like they're about to answer you."
She didn't turn. "Maybe I'm hoping they will."
His footsteps were soft, barefooted across the dusty tiles. He sat beside her, far enough not to crowd her, close enough that she didn't feel like she was talking to the air.
"What is it tonight?" he asked. "The wall? The floor? Or something I can't see?"
Eira hesitated. "Both."
She looked down at her hands. She'd kept them still for hours, but her right thumb kept twitching. That same old reflex again, the one from when she was young—before she'd trained it out of herself.
"I need your help," she said finally.
Kael didn't respond with surprise. Just quiet focus. That's what she liked about him—he didn't rush her to explain herself, but he never pretended he wasn't listening.
She pulled the shard from her sleeve. It pulsed faintly—an echo from the system's last scan. She placed it between them like something sacred, dangerous, or both.
"I think there's a layer we haven't seen yet," she said. "Not just surveillance. Not even control. Memory."
Kael frowned slightly. "Like what we pulled from the archive?"
"No. Deeper. More buried. Something that wasn't just hidden—but erased. Not from records. From people. From me."
That made him pause. "What do you mean?"
She hesitated. Then spoke carefully. "The system let me through checkpoints without flagging. Even now. It doesn't see me the way it sees the rest of us. Not really."
Kael leaned closer. "Are you saying you're—?"
"I don't know what I'm saying. But... I think I'm part of it."
There. It was out. Not the full weight of it—not the chamber, or the calibration, or the voice in her mind—but enough. A piece of the truth, pulled loose like thread from a wound.
Kael didn't recoil. He looked at her harder.
"You think you were born into it."
She nodded. "I think they used me. Maybe even built part of it around me. I think there's a key inside the system that's shaped like me, and if I can find where it fits—"
Kael finished her sentence softly. "You could unlock what they buried."
Eira's throat tightened. "But I don't know what that would do. Or who it would hurt."
A long silence passed.
Finally, Kael picked up the shard, turning it over between his fingers. "Then we find out together. You shouldn't go back in alone."
"I wasn't going to tell anyone," she admitted. "But I couldn't—"
"You did," he interrupted. "That's what matters."
She looked at him. Really looked. His eyes were tired, wary, but steady. She didn't have to say thank you.
So instead she said, "There's a passage near the old intake level. Wren mapped it. It loops under the biometric server cluster. If something was stored offline, it'd be there."
Kael nodded. "We go when they're asleep?"
"We go when the city breathes out."