They packed in forty minutes.
Not because forty minutes was enough.
Because forty minutes was what they had.
Drives first, wrapped in clean laundry bags the way the first crates had been wrapped, back when Site B was just a rumor and a daughter's whispered report about rats and flour and rust.
Then Rin's recorder backups, four of them now, distributed between four different bags so that no single loss would be a total loss.
Then Rell's lists, the handwritten ones, folded into the lining of his jacket the way he'd been folding important things into jacket linings since the first week, when Aiden had shown him how.
The rest they left.
The console stayed.
The cabled tangle of jury-rigged comms stayed.
The stolen electric kettle stayed, still faintly warm from the morning's last use.
Nobody said anything about leaving these things.
There was nothing to say.
You didn't mourn what you left behind until you were somewhere else, and they weren't somewhere else yet.
* * *
