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“It only brought me to the threshold.”

“Maybe,” she whispers.

“I walked through.”

Her mouth trembles, but she smiles anyway. “Yeah, you did.”

Rolaev laughs behind us.

The sound is quieter than before, and far worse. I turn. She stands near a fractured wall with one hand braced against it, staring at Echo as if it has taken even her despair and made it uncertain.

“All this time,” she says. “All this blood. I thought I was protecting the galaxy from the proof that meaning was dead.”

Echo’s expression dims. “Meaning was not dead.”

Rolaev ’s face twists. “Do not speak to me as if you understand what your absence made.”

“I do not.”

“You left fragments like disease in the walls of reality. The Precursors lied over them. Civilizations prayed over the lies. I tried to bury the infection, and now you tell me it was not infection. It was incompletion.”

Echo considers this. “That is closer.”

Her hand curls against the wall until claws crack stone. “I killed for closer.”

The confession hangs in the collapsing air.

No one answers quickly. Even Brakk, who has opinions about everything and the survival instinct of a cornered fuel rat, remains silent.

Anita’s voice softens. “Rolaev .”

“Do not pity me,” Rolaev snaps.

“I wasn’t going to.”

The priestess looks at her.

Anita holds her gaze. “I was going to say you still have choices.”

Rolaev ’s eyes flash with old fury. “You think choice redeems what I have done?”

“No,” Anita says. “I think it determines what you do next. Redemption is above my pay grade, and frankly I am not sure the universe has a department for it.”

Echo brightens faintly. “It does not.”

“Thank you, deeply unhelpful cosmic clarification.”

Brakk points toward the escape route. “As fascinating as the group therapy has become, the corridor is liquefying.”

He is right.

The passage behind Echo folds inward, and the pale seam begins to fray. The final archive chamber beyond it tears open again, releasing a violent wave of white light. Choir bodies, weapons, and stone fragments spin inside the rupture like debris in a gravity well. The chamber’s rings have lost alignment. Each rotation peels another layer from the surrounding ruins.

Echo raises one translucent hand. “Contact must end.”

I look at it. “One more answer.”

Anita gives me a look that says I am choosing a dramatic moment to become academically greedy, which is rich coming from her.