Jiang selected `ALLOW` with one tap.
Choice text vanished from his sight. Beneath his breast, the black-gold mark stayed cold while it waited for a human hand to complete what a System choice had permitted.
Nerea kept her scarred hand on the reflector. "Last withdrawal check."
Lucia held the court door. Matthews stood beside her with his face turned away from the covered stole. Devika's fingers rested on the towel near Jiang's chest, and Aylin kept her compass lowered outside every lamp line.
Nobody had drifted toward the relics. Jiang pressed one webbed foot into the towel and gave Nerea the single tap they had agreed upon.
She moved the reflector by the width of her palm.
Daylight left the rod's aperture.
Dark silver drank Jiang's shadow from the padded table. His emperor-penguin outline appeared on the bare testing wall, low and broad, with the damaged flipper held close and the tail ending unevenly behind him.
His projected body received no mercy.
Black-gold light opened beneath the projected breast. Pressure slipped behind Jiang's breastbone and spread down the stiff shafts of his belly feathers. He clenched his toes against the towel. The aperture turned through him without touching skin, found the mark, and pressed vision along the narrow bargain he had carried from the white prison.
White swallowed the testing wall.
Far inside it stood a solid human figure, bound by twelve moving golden roads. Across throat, wrists, chest, waist, and legs, the restraints shifted independently whenever the figure leaned toward the sight line.
No door formed around the prisoner. No hand reached through. Plaster remained beneath the image, cold and solid when Nerea tested it with the padded fork.
She dragged the fork across the nearest golden road. Felt struck stone while the image passed over the cloth padding without a tremor. When Matthews shifted behind the screen, the prison ignored him. When Jiang tilted his beak, every restraint turned with the sight and held its place around the figure.
"It is showing through him," Nerea said. "It is not taking orders from the room."
Devika laid two fingers against the pulse below Jiang's jaw. She watched him instead of the apparition. "His pulse decides when the look ends. I close it the instant he strains."
"Did that figure mark him?" Devika asked.
"It presents itself as the source," Aylin said. "I believe the restraints. I reserve judgment on the story."
Slowly, the prisoner's head turned toward Jiang.
Across Jiang's breast, the mark carried no sentence.
Jiang had expected relief from seeing the bargain obeyed. Instead, true sight felt like somebody leafing through a body he was still learning to own. The rod found the human habits inside his penguin stance: hands he remembered having, a phone he could no longer hold, his mother's unanswered calls.
His damaged shoulder twitched against the sling. Devika's fingers tightened, ready to close the reflector herself. Needing help inside his own skin scraped at Jiang's pride; serving that pride to Gredudande would hurt worse.
He wanted to close the look before the aperture found anything else.
Gredudande remained ahead. Jiang lowered his beak and held still, choosing the pain of being seen over the comfort of leaving the false story intact.
A second line appeared beside the white image.
This one was black without gold. It ran from the covered stole, passed beside the prison without touching it, and descended through the conservation floor. The thread tightened each time the bundle shifted under its wraps.
Nerea crossed the fork through the gap between both routes. Neither line bent toward the other. Aylin moved her lowered compass near the black thread, and its needle shivered toward the floor. Near the golden prison, the needle returned to Jiang. Two tests, two answers, and no convenient captive tying them together.
"Two occupants," Nerea said.
"Two routes," Aylin corrected. "The white prison follows Jiang's mark. The black one belongs to the thing wearing the stole."
Father Matthews looked at the thread rather than the human figure. "Then Elias is not trapped in that prison."
"The rod has shown separation," Lucia said. "Keep the rest of your hope under your own name."
Beyond the wall image, the black thread descended. Far below, it bent sideways as if something heavy dragged it under the city.
Jiang studied the covered stand.
Its stolen-name shadow was a coat tied to Gredudande's line. Destroying the coat might deny a body while leaving the core alive beneath them. Mistaking one for the other would waste their only sight and perhaps free the wearer.
Aylin followed his attention. "The vessel is false. The route below is real."
One tap confirmed the distinction.
Both relationships stayed visible in the sight rod, indifferent to their fear.
"It only shows," Nerea said, and eased the reflector back toward the aperture.
"Then the burden is ours," Aylin answered. "We choose what to strike, protect, or distrust."
White drained from the wall without an opening. Golden roads, restrained figure, and black thread flattened into Jiang's low shadow. His one permitted look ended where it had begun, on the padded table.
Synchronization stayed at fifty-two percent.
Beneath Jiang's feathers, the mark remained dormant. A thin silver ring now circled its black-gold curve, proof that this rod would recognize it again. Permission had ended; recognition had not. Anyone who claimed the rod later might find Jiang without asking for another look.
"Light closed," Nerea said.
Inside the covered stand, cloth tore.
Cotton split from top to knot. A black arm drove through the outer cover and caught the edge of the white screen separating the bundle from the cradle. Its impact jolted the testing table. Jiang spread both feet, but his bad shoulder rolled before Devika steadied his towel.
Lucia killed the work lamp.
The stolen arm remained in the daylight leaking under the court door.
Nerea stared at the connection she had missed. Her screens divided the people, the rod, and the stole inside the room. Under the door, an open line joined all of them to the same sun. A harmless strip of brightness had become a bridge because every careful barrier ended an inch too high.
"I gave it a cleaner shadow," she said.
The admission arrived without self-pity. She seized the reflector and turned its bright face toward the floor.
The black arm climbed the screen.
Aylin drew a cool green loop around its wrist. The shape thinned where Natural Essence pressed, then split into fingers that crawled along separate seams.
"Burning ends this faster," she said.
Jiang struck the towel twice. Fire would consume the physical stole while giving its shadow every lit wall in the room. The visible core thread would vanish in the scramble, and Aylin had already accepted that his safety required more than the fastest ending.
She closed her empty hand. "Containment first."
Matthews pulled the second white screen across the torn cover. Lucia caught Nerea by the apron and moved her toward the sunlit workroom exit as her stated choice required.
Nerea resisted for one step. "The rod--"
"Remains an object," Lucia said. "Move your body."
That broke the hesitation. Nerea crossed into the workroom while her shadow stayed behind the reflector.
Devika gathered the near edge of Jiang's towel without lifting him. "Alert?"
Jiang answered with one firm tap, then leaned his warm side against her wrist before the shaking in his injured shoulder could argue with him.
"Breathing is fast. We stay until it changes or the room forces us."
The black arm reached the top of the screen and unfolded into a shoulder. Another shoulder followed. Human height pressed against the white cloth while the original bundle sagged around the empty stole.
Gredudande was pulling the stolen-name vessel out of containment.
Jiang could see the false body now because the rod had taught his mark where to look. A black thread ran from its spine into the floor, separate from every living shadow in the room.
The borrowed sight made one fact impossible to mistake: the rising body was bait with teeth, while Gredudande's deeper route remained under the floor. Jiang still had to survive one to pursue the other.
Aylin braced the screen with both hands. Matthews took the other edge. Lucia returned from Nerea's exit and reached for the reflector rather than the rod.
The human silhouette pushed its face through the cloth.
Features gathered from names it had heard: Elias's bowed brow, Lucia's narrow jaw, Matthews's tired mouth. They shifted too quickly to belong together.
Then the face settled into a shape Jiang knew without seeing a mirror.
It used the mouth he remembered from his human body.
"Jiang," the counterfeit said in his lost voice.