Chapter 87: Blood on the Panel I lunged for the console again, ignoring the sting in my arm where I’d cut myself before. The red glow pulsed like a heartbeat, thick and slow, filling the room with its weight. Mirabel didn’t move. She just stood there, scalpel resting against her thigh, watching me like I was part of the machine’s display. The screens behind her showed faces—dozens of them, maybe hundreds—each breathing steady, each alive because of the blood I spilled. My blood. My mistake. My design. I didn’t think. I didn’t plan. I just moved. My fingers slapped against the console’s surface, smearing the wet red streak across the biometric panel. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t precise. It was desperate. The machine hissed, a low mechanical groan, like it recognized the intrusion but didn’t know how to respond. Lights flickered. The red dimmed for half a second, then surged back, angrier. A voice crackled through the speakers, flat and synthetic. “Emergency architect protocol activated. Voice confirmation required.” I froze. My hand hovered over the panel, sticky with my own blood. The machine waited. Mirabel waited. The faces on the screens kept breathing. “Terminate Subject Zero?” the voice asked. Subject Zero. Mirabel. I looked at her. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t speak. Didn’t even tilt her head. Her eyes stayed on me, steady, empty, like she already knew what I would do. Like she’d seen this moment a thousand times before, in every loop, in every version of me that came before. I opened my mouth. I meant to say “Confirm.” I meant to end it. I meant to take the only power left and use it the way I was built to use it—to decide who lives, who dies, who gets erased. But her name came out instead. “Mirabel.” The word was quiet. Barely a whisper. But the machine heard it. Every screen flickered at once. The red glow stuttered. The hum of the system dipped, then rose again, uneven, confused. The voice didn’t respond. The prompt didn’t change. The machine didn’t know what to do with a name instead of a command. Mirabel moved. She turned fully toward me, slow and deliberate, like she was unwinding from a long sleep. The scalpel in her hand didn’t rise. Didn’t point. Didn’t threaten. She just held it, loose, like it was nothing more than a pen she’d forgotten to put down. Her expression didn’t change. I couldn’t read it. Not anger. Not relief. Not satisfaction. Just… stillness. Like she was waiting for the next line in a script only she had memorized. The screens behind her shifted. The faces of the restored subjects blurred, replaced by a single line of text, glowing white against the red: “ASK HER WHY SHE LET YOU LIVE.” I didn’t move. I didn’t speak. I just stood there, blood drying on my fingers, heart hammering in my chest, staring at Mirabel as the words burned into the air between us. She lowered the scalpel.