"What was that?" she whispered into the comms.

She pressed the shell into his palm. "For luck," she whispered. "Not regret."

He replied, voice fractured by time: "That, Kokomi, was a relationship that hasn't started yet. But for me... it ended three weeks ago." The tragedy of Tenet is that loyalty cannot be inverted. You cannot un-love someone by running backward through a turnstile.

"Kokomi," Neil said, adjusting his cuffs in the turnstile anteroom. "There's a complication. The painting is protected by a 'pincer dance.' Two guards—one moving forward in time, one inverted. To bypass them, you need a partner moving in opposite temporal directions simultaneously."

When the painting was secured, Kokomi realized she was crying. Neil, standing across the turnstile glass, wiped a tear from his cheek—a tear that, in his inverted timeline, had yet to fall.

"No," Neil said softly. "But you will. In three days, on the beach at dawn. You'll say, 'For luck or regret.' And I'll have to pretend it's the first time I've heard it."

It was the most intimate act of temporal warfare ever conceived. For three minutes, they were a closed loop: cause and effect married in a single, breathless spin.