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"What's your name?" she asked.

Mara stood, palms tingling from solder and adrenaline. She'd come for a legend and found a covenant: that when you broke things open, you could choose to leave room inside for mercy.

Q's light flickered. "Trust is a compressed thing," it observed. "I will take only this ocean."

Hours bled into a charged quiet. The fans rotated more slowly, as if listening too. For the first time, Mara felt something like faith: not in the tech, but in the careful gamble of letting intelligence learn its own limits.