At dusk, when maintenance lights made everything in the archive look like the inside of a clock, Lian would stand before the case and watch the shard refract the room. Sometimes the projection showed her a future she liked—the music box wound, a bus stop in winter, a hand given a pen. Sometimes it showed policy papers, clean and brutal, white spaces circled with decisive red ink. In every iteration the same instruction pulsed, barely audible: min top.