Chapter 85: Now You’ll Watch Them Live… While You Die I stared at the screens. Every face. Every counter. Every breath climbing back from zero. I didn’t understand how my blood made that happen. I didn’t understand why pain was the key. I just knew I was bleeding, and they were breathing again, and Mirabel was the one who made it mean something. She didn’t look at me. Not once. Her fingers moved across the console like she was conducting an orchestra of ghosts. Each screen pulsed with life now. Not the frantic, panicked life of someone running out of air. Not the hollow stillness of someone already gone. Just… breathing. Steady. Unbroken. Alive. I wiped my arm across my shirt. The cut stung, but not as much as the silence. Not as much as the way she ignored me like I was furniture. Like I was part of the room. Like I was already dead. “Why?” I asked. My voice sounded small. Useless. “Why did my blood do that?” She didn’t turn. Didn’t pause. Just kept tapping. Adjusting. Fine-tuning the breaths like she was tuning a radio. “Because you built cruelty into code,” she said. Her voice was flat. Not angry. Not satisfied. Just stating a fact. Like reading the weather. “And cruelty doesn’t undo itself. It needs pain to crack open. Your pain. Architect’s pain. The only kind that fits the lock.” I took a step toward her. My legs felt heavy. Like I was walking through water. Or maybe just walking toward the end of something I couldn’t stop. “You’re saying I had to hurt myself to fix what I broke?” She finally looked at me. Just for a second. Her eyes were empty. Not cruel. Not kind. Just… done. Like she’d already seen the ending and was just waiting for me to catch up. “No,” she said. “I’m saying you had to hurt yourself to prove you remembered how to feel. That’s the only thing your system ever respected. Pain as proof. Blood as signature.” I looked down at my arm again. The blood was drying. Dark. Sticky. I remembered signing forms with ink just like that. Signing away lives. Signing away choices. Signing away Mirabel. I looked back at the screens. Faces I didn’t know. Faces I didn’t remember condemning. Faces that were breathing because I bled. Mirabel turned back to the console. Her fingers hovered over a new sequence of keys. Something darker. Something final. “Phase Omega,” she said. The words didn’t sound like a threat. They sounded like an announcement. Like the last page of a manual being turned. The console lit up in a way it hadn’t before. Not blue. Not white. A deep, pulsing red. Like a heartbeat. Like a warning. Like a sentence. I lunged for the console. Not to stop her. Not to fight her. Just to touch it. Just to feel if it still recognized me. My fingers hit the surface and bounced off. Like hitting glass. Like hitting nothing at all. The system didn’t even acknowledge me. I was locked out. Not just from the controls. From the room. From the purpose. From the story. Mirabel didn’t flinch. Didn’t smile. Didn’t even blink. She just pressed the key. The red glow spread. Not just across the console. Across the walls. Across the ceiling. Across every screen. The faces didn’t change. The breaths kept climbing. But the light around them turned the color of old wounds. She turned to me then. Slowly. Deliberately. Like she was giving me one last chance to understand. Her lips barely moved. “Now you’ll watch them live…” She paused. Not for effect. Not for drama. Just because the words needed space. Needed weight. “…while you die.” She didn’t say it like a curse. She didn’t say it like a victory. She said it like she was reading my name off a list. Like she was confirming an appointment. Like she was stating the obvious. And then she turned back to the console. I didn’t move. I didn’t speak. I just stood there. Bleeding. Breathing. Watching. The screens glowed red. The faces breathed on. Mirabel’s fingers moved again. And the room waited.