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Sira looks at me sharply. “Then why did it open for you?”

The silver threads still hang from my hands.

I stare at them and feel cold in a way the chamber’s air cannot explain. “Because I brought enough fragments together to satisfy the access sequence. Because the system is damaged. Because maybe the safeguards interpreted the Choir’s attack as preservation failure. Because I am very good at making bad doors open.”

“Anita,” Ghar says.

The way he says my name makes the chamber recede. Not because his voice is louder than the archive. It is not. But because it is real and present and human-adjacent in a universe currently committed to being absurdly impersonal.

I turn to him.

His eyes are open again. Pain sits in them without disguise. He looks older than he did minutes ago, though that is ridiculous. Nobody should age from information. Then again, nobody should learn that reality began as recreational modeling by cosmic toddlers, so maybe my standards are lagging.

“This is not your fault,” he says.

I bark out a laugh that scrapes my throat raw. “That is generous, but wildly unsupported by evidence.”

“You did not create the truth.”

“No, I just dug it up, activated it, dragged everyone I care about into it, and handed it a microphone.”

Brakk points at me with the cutter. “For what it is worth, I was dragged by circumstances and poor judgment, not by you personally.”

“Brakk.”

“What? I am trying to help.”

“You are not good at it.”

“No one is good at this!”

His voice cracks, and the anger drains out of the chamber for half a breath. Brakk looks suddenly smaller, his grease-streaked fur bristling, his broad hands tight around the tool that cannot possibly help him. He is not a philosopher. He is not a priest. He is a mechanic who wanted hazard pay, a functioning shuttle, and the chance to complain his way through survival. Now he is standing before proof that existence was never meant to mean anything.

I did this to him too.

The thought lands hard.

Sira steps closer to Brakk and touches his arm. “You are still here.”

“Don’t make that sound profound.”

“It is profound.”

“It is inconvenient.”

“Sometimes those overlap.”

Brakk glares at her, but his eyes glisten. “Pi’Rell are exhausting.”

Sira smiles faintly through her tears. “So I have been told.”

The archive shifts again, and Rolaev ’s arguments crawl back through my memory with poisonous clarity. Truth is not harmless because it is accurate. Revelation is not virtue when given to people who cannot survive it. Civilization is made of shared meanings, and shared meanings can fracture.

I hate her for being right enough to matter.

I hate myself for finally understanding why she would kill to bury this.

The Precursor records continue unfolding. There are suppression directives encoded into religious systems, symbolic distortions seeded into multiple traditions, deliberate mythopoetic structures designed to transform unbearable absurdity into emotionally sustainable purpose. The Precursors did not merely erase evidence. They replaced it. They gave younger civilizations stories that could hold grief, love, sacrifice, and mortality without requiring every sapient mind to stare into the undignified machinery beneath reality.