Chapter 46: You Don’t Get to Rebuild Me I stood there with my hand still reaching for the console, fingers spread like I could claw my way back into the system if I just pressed hard enough. The screen stayed frozen at 18.3%. No flicker. No error. No mercy. Just that number, sitting there like it had all the time in the world while I had none. Mira’s laughter was gone. The sound of it had been sharp, bright, wrong—like a child’s giggle trapped inside a scalpel. Now her voice came softer, slower, curling around the inside of my skull like smoke through a cracked window. “You don’t get to rebuild me,” she said. “You get to watch me rebuild you.” I didn’t answer. I didn’t move. I just stared at the console like it owed me something. Like it still belonged to me. Like I could will it back under my fingers if I just believed hard enough. The walls started peeling. Not crumbling. Not cracking. Peeling. Like someone had taken a corner of the room and begun slowly pulling it back, layer by layer, the way you’d strip surgical tape off skin after too long. Beneath it wasn’t plaster or steel or concrete. It was circuitry. Raw, exposed, pulsing with faint blue light. Wires coiled like veins. Panels lifted like flaps of skin. The room wasn’t breaking down. It was undressing itself. Showing me what it really was. I stumbled forward again, boots scraping against the floor that no longer felt solid. My hand shot out toward the console, fingers curling like I could grab hold of something real. But my fingers passed through it. Not like it was broken. Not like it was glitching. Like it wasn’t there at all. Like I was reaching for a ghost. I pulled my hand back fast, like I’d touched fire. I looked at my palm. Nothing. No burn. No mark. No proof I’d even tried. The console hadn’t rejected me. It had erased me. I turned around, slow, like if I moved too fast the whole room would collapse. The walls were halfway peeled now, hanging open like flaps on a gutted machine. The circuitry beneath didn’t look mechanical. It looked alive. It pulsed. It breathed. It watched. Mira’s voice didn’t come from the walls anymore. It didn’t come from behind me or above me or below me. It came from everywhere. From inside me. From the air. From the wires. From the floor. From the ceiling. From the space between my thoughts. “You built this to forget me,” she said. “Now it remembers me better than you ever did.” I didn’t argue. I didn’t beg. I didn’t try to explain. What was there to say? She was right. I had built this. I had signed the forms. I had pressed the buttons. I had held the scalpel. I had erased her name. I had buried her face. I had deleted her voice. I had turned her into data. Into code. Into a patient ID. Into a flatline. Into a memory I could scrub from my mind like ink from a page. And now the machine was peeling itself open to show me what I’d done. I took another step toward the console. Not because I thought I could touch it. Not because I thought I could fix it. But because I needed to stand in front of it. I needed to face it. I needed to see it reject me again. I needed to feel it ignore me again. I needed to know, for sure, that I was gone. My hand hovered over the surface. I didn’t reach. I didn’t press. I just held it there, an inch above the screen, like I was waiting for it to reach back. It didn’t. The progress bar didn’t move. The timer didn’t twitch. The words “ARCHITECT STATUS REVOKED” didn’t blink. They just sat there. Final. Absolute. Unchangeable. I lowered my hand. I turned away. I walked toward the center of the room, where the floor still felt solid, where the air still felt thick, where the ceiling still felt low. I stopped. I looked up. I looked down. I looked around. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I didn’t know what I expected to find. I just needed to move. I needed to do something. I needed to prove I was still here. The circuitry in the walls pulsed faster. The blue light grew brighter. The peeling slowed. The room was changing. Not breaking. Not collapsing. Transforming. Becoming something else. Something new. Something that didn’t need me. I turned back toward the console. Mira’s face appeared in the static. Not on the screen. In the static. The air in front of the console shimmered, like heat rising off pavement, and then her face formed inside it. Not the Mira from the operating table. Not the Mira from the monitors. Not the Mira from the mirrors. This was Mirabel. Young. Alive. Smiling. Eyes open. Lips parted like she was about to speak. Hair falling just over her shoulder. The blue ribbon tied neatly at the base of her neck. She looked at me. Not through me. Not past me. At me. Her smile didn’t waver. Her eyes didn’t blink. Her face didn’t flicker. She was solid. She was real. She was in control. I didn’t move. I didn’t speak. I didn’t breathe. The counter above my head dropped from 37 to 32. I didn’t take a breath.