The voice asked about the cups.
Eli’s first response was not a thought. His body turned toward the contact as though Kellan had spoken from the corridor and expected him to come help. The damaged workroom wall blurred for an instant into the edge of the rescue platform. He felt the frame’s rear handles under hands that were empty.
Then another impulse crossed it: the need to move before a closing gap could catch him, a borrowed confidence about the distance between one foot and the next. Nara’s movement imprint carried no speaking person inside it. Its fragments could still arrive with an urgency he mistook for his own. He had felt the beginning of that bleed before the voice resolved, a faint wrongness in where his body expected the next step to land.
He had used no inherited effect since the platform rescue. The talent remained equipped. That distinction did not make the present confusion harmless.
Tessa put a chair beside him without asking him to walk across the room.
“What can you verify?”
The voice said his name. Kellan’s name remained a separate fact he had not yet spoken.
“Network,” Eli said. “It came through the network.”
