The four days between the balcony encounter and the scheduled meeting with Marcus passed with a deliberate, manufactured normalcy.Elara maintained her routine. She pushed the open-source release preparation forward. She finalized the ethics board framework. The work carried its own momentum, providing a reliable structure to anchor the hours. But the impending meeting sat underneath everything else, a heavy, unignorable variable in the equation of her week.Victoria Thorne arrived for their regular Thursday lunch and read the atmosphere in the laboratory in approximately three seconds."You are about to do something difficult," Victoria stated, setting her bag on a stool."I am meeting with Marcus tomorrow," Elara replied, not looking up from the chromatography readout on her monitor. "One hour. He is going to explain everything."Victoria’s expression shifted—protective, complicated, and then deliberately neutral. "How do you feel about that?""Like I am handling hazardous material,
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