The path back did not feel like survival. It felt like exile. Mira drifted through the thin, unstable space between the sealed deeper layer and the distant network with no secondary link to orient her, no matched will to share the residual strain of existence after so long as half of a lattice. The deeper layer lay behind her in wounded stillness — a vast, scarred presence folded around the permanent fact Ethan had driven into its core. It no longer pressed outward. It no longer tried to reconstitute. It simply remained, damaged beyond recovery, locked around the continuous decision that had once been the center of the Long Watch. She did not look back. Looking back would have undone the little coherence she still possessed. Ahead, the original network flickered like a half-remembered structure. The bridge. The sealed populations. The remnants of everything they had spent the Long Watch protecting. Mira pulled herself toward it with the last disciplined fragments of her will