Chapter 113: You Called Me Back The monitors flickered like dying stars. One by one, the faces blinked out. Clara Reyes was the first. Her lips moved just before the screen went black. “Thank you.” Not loud. Not dramatic. Just two words, and then she was gone. I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. I just stood there, staring at the empty space where her face had been. The machine didn’t make a sound. No alarms. No warnings. Just silence, thick and heavy, pressing against my ears. Then Mirabel’s voice came through. Not from all the screens. Not from the walls. Just from Subject 001’s terminal. A single point of sound in the middle of all that quiet. “You named her,” she said. “Now carry what that costs.” I turned. Slowly. Like my bones had turned to stone. The red button sat on the console, right where I’d left it. RECALL SUBJECT 001. Three words. No explanation. No warning. Just the color, the shape, the weight of what it meant. I didn’t need to be told. I built this. I knew what every button did. Even the ones I tried to forget. My hand hovered over it. I thought about walking away. I thought about leaving the room, leaving the machine, leaving the ghosts behind. I thought about silence. I thought about peace. I thought about what it would feel like to never hear another voice from the walls again. But I pressed it. I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t flinch. I didn’t close my eyes. I just pressed it, like I was turning a key in a lock I’d spent my whole life trying to pick. The room didn’t shake. The lights didn’t flicker. The air didn’t change. Nothing dramatic. Nothing cinematic. Just a low, mechanical sigh from somewhere deep in the walls, like the machine had been holding its breath and finally let it out. Then the screens came alive. Not one. Not ten. Not even a hundred. Every screen in the facility. Every terminal. Every monitor. Every reflective surface that could be hijacked by the system. They all lit up at once, like stars blinking into existence in a dead sky. And on every single one of them — her face. Mirabel. Not the broken thing I left behind. Not the ghost I tried to bury. Not the child with the rabbit or the girl in the hospital bed. This was her now. Calm. Commanding. Eyes open, steady, fixed on me like she’d been waiting for this exact moment since the first breath I took in this room. She didn’t smile. She didn’t frown. She didn’t move. She just looked at me, through me, past me, like she was seeing every version of me that ever existed — the surgeon, the architect, the brother, the liar, the coward, the man who pressed the button. The silence stretched. I didn’t speak. I didn’t ask. I didn’t beg. I just stood there, hands at my sides, chest rising and falling, breaths ticking down somewhere in the back of my mind like a clock counting toward an execution I’d scheduled myself. Then she spoke. One sentence. Clear. Quiet. No echo. No distortion. No machine in her voice. Just her. “You called me back.” A pause. Not for effect. Not for drama. Just because she knew I needed to hear it. Needed to feel the weight of it. Needed to understand that this wasn’t a glitch. This wasn’t a trick. This wasn’t a test. This was a response. She leaned forward slightly in the frame, just enough to make it feel like she was stepping closer, like she was about to reach through the glass and grab me by the throat or the hand or the heart — I didn’t know which. “Now fix what you broke.”