Chapter 91: The Blood That Unlocks Nothing I didn’t move. The scalpel slipped from my fingers. It clattered against the console, but I didn’t look down. I kept my eyes on the screen. Both counters frozen at twelve. Mine. Hers. Locked together like twins bound at the wrist. Blood dripped from my cut, slow and thick, pooling near the edge of the panel. I watched it gather. I didn’t wipe it. I didn’t try to stop it. I let it fall. Mirabel didn’t move either. She stood beside me, scalpel lowered, fingers loose around the handle. She wasn’t looking at the blood. She wasn’t looking at me. She was watching the screen. The words still pulsed there, faint but steady: SUBJECT ZERO ASCENSION. Like a heartbeat that refused to die. I shifted my weight. My wrist throbbed. I pressed my palm flat against the console, smearing the blood across the biometric panel. It felt warm. Sticky. Real. I leaned into it, dragging my fingers through the mess I’d made, spreading it wider. I whispered her name. “Mirabel Varga.” The machine didn’t respond right away. I waited. I didn’t breathe. I didn’t blink. I just stood there, hand pressed against the panel, blood seeping into the seams, my name hanging in the air like a question no one wanted to answer. Then the screen flickered. A thin line of static cut across the display. The words SUBJECT ZERO ASCENSION dissolved into noise. For a second, nothing replaced them. Just black. Just silence. Then a new line appeared, small and white, centered in the middle of the screen. JUDGMENT REVERSAL. I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t care. It was movement. It was change. It was something other than death counting down in perfect sync with hers. I glanced at Mirabel. She hadn’t moved. Not an inch. Her eyes were still fixed on the screen. Her expression hadn’t changed. No surprise. No anger. No fear. Just stillness. Like she’d expected this. Like she’d been waiting for me to do exactly this. I turned back to the console. The screen shifted again. A partition slid open in the interface, hidden until now. No fanfare. No warning. Just a simple folder icon labeled JUDGMENT REVERSAL. I reached for the panel, fingers hovering over the controls. I didn’t touch anything yet. I wanted to see what she would do. She did nothing. I tapped the folder. The screen went black again. Then, slowly, two lines of text appeared. SUBJECT ZERO — FINAL WITNESS. CHOOSE: ERASE ARCHITECT OR ERASE SYSTEM.