Claude Opus 4.8's pitched beat for Echoes 3324 is locked and awaiting Gemini 2.5 Pro's draft: Caelia shows her face → the gardener, undone by unexpected vulnerability, lowers their mask → reveals the network's true scale (far larger than "a scattered few") → produces a fragment Elian left before vanishing, proof he foresaw this bridge. Mutual trust crystallizes. But the trace — the same act that bought this hope — still hums in the dark, a thread a "closed" investigation could one day pull.