The lattice held. Residual pressure stayed inside the safe band. Peer tags glowed quietly on every open feed.
Atlas signed the last regularization of the cycle. The medical monitor stayed cool against his collar. For one breath the system felt almost ordinary.
Then the observation deck dissolved.
It did not happen with violence or alarms. The walls, the ledger, and the floating residual-pressure numbers simply lost coherence. They came apart the way frost comes apart under sudden heat.
The core-cap he had lived inside for months unraveled into strands of pale light and vanished. Atlas felt the floor leave his feet. There was no sensation of falling. The space around him simply stopped being solid.
He opened his eyes to soft dark and the scent of night-blooming flowers. Those flowers had never grown in any logistics district he had ever managed.
A woman stood over him.
