The family did not return from the doorway together.
One woman came back to the table while the older man remained looking down the passage. Ilyan waited where they could call him. The sealed inputs lay untouched, their numbers visible beneath the lamp. Eli could see the edges of the packets from his chair but none of the protected words inside.
“We need to ask something again,” the woman said.
Tessa set down the timer she had been checking. “Of course.”
“If it responds, does that mean there is someone we can get back?”
“No,” Tessa said. “A response won’t establish that. It may be an archived pattern. It may tell us something about a connection we don’t understand. We don’t have a way to promise restoration.”
The woman glanced toward the man in the passage.
“He thinks we should leave it alone. I think if the words matter, we should know that they matter.”
