• “When steel bleeds, the blade chooses its master.”

Chapter 14 — Final Extension

The silence lingered longer than it should have.

Not oppressive now—just present, like the room was holding its breath along with them. Eli slowly straightened, forcing the tension down his spine to settle. The dark felt less hostile than before, but not harmless. More like a creature retreating, watching from the edges, waiting to see what he would do next.

Maren exhaled shakily. The sound was small but grounding.

“We need to leave,” she said. “Before the grid reboots or someone checks the logs.”

Eli nodded, but he didn’t move yet.

His eyes drifted around the quiet chamber—its dormant consoles, faint etchings in the metal, the memory of the beam that had risen like a spine of light. Everything had fallen still again, yet he couldn’t shake the sense that the silence wasn't an ending—but a pause. A deliberate pause.

A breath before something else.

He ran a hand along the console one last time. Cold now. Unresponsive. Whatever intelligence—or echo of intelligence—had awakened inside this room had already receded. But it had left trails. Impressions. Questions shaped like fingerprints pressed into the air.

And that single line still rang in his mind, sharp as a warning:

THE FIRST ERROR WAS NOT A MALFUNCTION.

If that was true, then every assumption they’d built around the system… every protocol, every archived report, every closed-door explanation… might all be sitting on a foundation designed to mislead.

But this wasn’t the place to untangle that truth.

He stepped back, letting the darkness fold into itself. “Let’s go,” he murmured.

Maren opened the door manually. A thin strip of white hallway light sliced into the lab, clearing the shadows just enough to breathe again. Eli blinked against the change, letting the familiar brightness settle around him.

Outside, the corridor hummed with its usual sterile rhythm. Normal. Predictable. Unthreatening.

Almost reassuring.

Almost.

He took one slow breath—steadying, grounding, necessary.

Maren watched him carefully. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” he lied softly. Then corrected himself: “No. But I will be.”

They walked down the corridor in measured silence, each step peeling away the tension layer by layer, until the sealed lab was just a closed door behind them. Its secrets stayed inside—for now.

But Eli knew this quiet wouldn’t last.

Something had shifted.