​Chapter 29. Be Confident, Be Yourself

A skinny girl with light-brown hair, а white coat, and dark sunglasses was flipping through the March issue of Seventeen. The spread showed prom night: shimmering dresses, smiling boys in tuxedos. “Be confident, be yourself, choose the best night of your life.” She mouthed the words like she was memorizing a spell.

He watched her and thought she was installing an upgrade. The magazine taught her to love herself — slim, glowing, next to a boy in a bow tie. Not with chaos. Not with rupture. Her code would update, so the cycle wouldn’t glitch.

He was interested in the glitch. When a person refuses and breaks the norms — that’s when something alive appears. Not a cycle, not an instruction, but a spark you can’t predict or hold. In those cracks he saw something real. Moments of refusal were the only things that didn’t reduce to an algorithm. As if chaos itself lifted its head, showed it was real, that the world could be different—then immediately hid itself back under the concrete of rules.

A man in a wrinkled suit buried his face in the pager. The screen blinked numbers; his tie was crooked, collar stained with coffee. A beep — he cursed, but still pressed the button. For him, there was no such thing as a glitch: one plus one = –13% GDP. The Pact demanded: respond, seal the crack, stay on schedule.

But what if refusal? What if he didn’t press it? Didn’t “fix”? Then something new would appear — not fear, but freedom. Brief as the pager’s beep, but real.

In the corner, a mother held a boy of about six. He was worrying at a nearly ripped-off white button on her coat, whining, “Mom, I wanna go home, it stinks here. In her other hand was a Kmart bag, a plush dog without an ear poking out of it — $4.99 for silence. Toy = comfort, bag = groceries. She hissed, “Quiet, we’ll be home soon.” Her face gray, deep cracks under her eyes. The same cycle: child = beginning, mother = end. Be born, grow up, raise someone — repeat. But why, if the Pact doesn’t care?

But what if she dropped the bag? What if the kid screamed not the “right” way, but instead until his throat tore? Maybe that’s why kids scream themselves hoarse — because they’re trying to break the system they were shoved into. In that scream lives the rupture. Where “I wanna go home” means “I don’t want the cage.”

A glitch always sounds like a scream. Short, piercing, uncontrollable. Everything alive begins exactly like that.

By the window, a worker in a Levi’s denim jacket slept, the jacket worn and scorched in places by electrical arcs. His head knocked rhythmically against the glass where someone had scratched something illegible, probably a curse — “Fuck Giuliani.” His palms were gray with grease, nails blackened, oil soaked into his skin. In his sleep, he twitched and hit the window harder.

Even sleep slipped away from the program: the body is supposed to rest according to the rules, but the brain conjured chaos. Not a report and not a prom dress. Not a Kmart dog. The glitch broke through where no one expected — in the flutter of eyelids, the grind of teeth, the thump against the glass.

Maybe in sleep, the world remembers it isn’t a machine.

The glitch always pulled people in. Crime movies — like Falling Down with Michael Douglas, where killing becomes the rupture. Novels — American Psycho, where Patrick hacks moral norms apart with a butcher’s knife. True-crime documentaries — a dry, indifferent voice listing facts: “dismembered a victim and fed the remains through a grinder.” Occultism, alien abductions, disasters — all variations of the same thing: the break.

People gravitate toward places where the Pact snaps, because in the glitch a choice appears — a choice against it. In those moments a person becomes, if only a little, free. Like that worker by the window, his head tapping against the “Fuck Giuliani” scratch.

And there’s always a crossing of the forbidden line, the one you shouldn’t and mustn’t cross. A step over. A violation. The thing that terrifies and lures, because on the other side there are no rules, no numbers, no “right.” Transgression. Sacred chaos — and the chance to breathe for the first time in your own rhythm.

The car lurched, lights flickered, and shadows slid across the yellow seats, across their faces — the girl with Seventeen, the man with the pager, the mother with the bag, the worker by the window. They were all cycles, functions, fragments of the firmware. He watched light and shadow wash over them, watched as the Pact played them like a scheduled performance. He unzipped the bag, fingers resting on the AR-15. The cold metal wasn’t a trope or a storyline. It was a rupture all by itself. A bare “no,” stripped to steel.

One plus one turned into blood. The Pact cracked, and in that crack something alive emerged — not a program, not a repeat, but something real, born in screams, in chaos, in the short burst of freedom that lasted exactly one magazine.

He didn’t pull the rifle out. Just looked at it, feeling how the bag’s weight balanced the void inside — gaping like a black hole. In that void there was no morality, no program. Just calm before the break.

The car swayed. The wheels hammered: thud-thud, thud-thud. The dull rhythm of steel wheels on the continuously welded track. The vibration echoed in his chest like a second heartbeat.

He was mesmerized by the rupture. Not by blood or by crime, but by the fact itself: someone here had said “no.” Even if that “no” shattered and saved nothing, it was alive. Real. New. The girl in the white coat lifted her head. The flash of her sunglasses slid over him—blank, indifferent. She set aside the March issue of Seventeen: the fashion spread whispered, “Be confident, be yourself, but follow the trends: romantic dresses, boys in tuxedos.” She took a sip of coffee. On the cardboard Starbucks cup, her name was scrawled in marker: Maria. The paper was softening, the letters bleeding. The only word in the car that wasn’t an instruction or a code. Just a name. It seemed she was the only one who actually saw him.

Someone in the corner coughed—rough, cigarette-burned. Someone else cracked open a can of Coke—pssst, the hiss of gas, like the bubble-burst sound effect shot in a studio for commercials, but here in the train car it was just a sip dissolving into the collective drone, a fizz of CO₂, the hiss of gas consumed by the rules: refreshes, quenches, fits the script.

You can’t defeat the Pact halfway. It self-heals. One cell dies, but the body lives on—the car will jerk, lights will flicker, the child will quiet down, the mother will clutch her Kmart bag, the worker by the window will knock his head against the glass, and everything will reset.

To truly get out, you can’t rebel piece by piece—you have to reject everything at once: morality, culture, numbers, the very premise of “that’s how things are.” You can’t shout about chaos and then eat dinner at Veselka.

What happens if you say “no” to the Pact entirely?

No—to morality.

No—to culture.

No—to numbers.

No—to the very idea of “this is how it’s built.”

What’s left?

Snow. White as her coat, pure and cold, falling into the tunnel where darkness and echo live. And blood. Warm, sticky, spilled across the yellow seats with their cigarette burns. Mixing with the dark muck on the floor, where someone’s boot left a trail.

Blood that doesn’t follow instructions, doesn’t come with catharsis. Naked chaos. Alive. New. Darkness in the rupture, where the Pact tears—and the car finally falls silent.

The train tore through the tunnel, its lights dying every few seconds, dropping the car into brief pockets of black where shadows merged into a single wall of night and the passengers’ faces vanished like frames cut out of film. In those seconds he felt himself part of the darkness—unseen, a shadow sliding across the peeling blue paint of the car, where the “Fuck NYPD” graffiti had faded to a ghost image. The plastic strap above him tapped against the pole—clack-clack, clack-clack, a rhythm like tokens hitting a turnstile, a dollar fifty per passage. His fingers tightened on the cloth, sensing the metal beneath—an AR-15 Colt SP1, six hundred rounds per minute, light as the void he carried inside.

Somewhere up ahead, in the conductor’s cab, the radio crackled out something unintelligible—“delay at 59th, crisis in Asia, the baht collapsed, the won shot up to sixteen ninety-five... be confident, be yourself, follow the trends, prepare the reports...”—and the train sped up, pulling him deep into the city and into himself. The pole vibrated under his palm like a pulse in a temple. The rumble of the wheels synced with his breathing, heavy and steady as the inhale before a shot. The lights flickered more often, ragged flashes exposing the Pact.

He didn’t want a crack — he wanted a hammer blow, something to turn concrete into dust. Culture teaches you to cry; he chose to shoot. No icons, no symphonies—just metal and blood. He rejected everything at once: morality that says you cannot kill, like Dostoevsky; culture that demands you suffer nobly—like Titanic, where Leo sinks romantically, with an orchestra and a kiss; numbers that tally life and death—one plus one equals demography, twenty-five to thirty baht per dollar, the July 2nd devaluation that wiped out billions, like the mother and child in the corner, the boy tugging a loose button, whining “home,” and she hisses at him because the cycle never asks “why,” it just spins, like the wheels on the continuously welded rails, no seams, just the drone: thud-thud, thud-thud, no joints to scream.

The rag slipped, revealing the black barrel, metal catching the blinking fluorescent light like a camera flash in the throat of the tunnel where the train tore forward, roaring at eighty decibels, steel on steel, sparks spraying from the flanges. He rose — slowly, without haste, like he was just tightening the strap of the bag. His boots squelched in a thick puddle — Dunkin’ coffee mixed with piss from the corner. The doors clanged as the train took a curve, the car groaned, metal screamed along the warped tracks beneath Times Square.

Only two people were looking at him. The kid in the corner froze, stopped picking at the button on his mother’s coat, his eyes blown wide — pupils black as the tunnel where there are no instructions, only echo. And the girl in the white coat lifted her head, the shine of her sunglasses sliding over him — empty, indifferent. Two gazes: one lit with shock, the other full of reflection. The rupture was already blooming, the hammer in his hand, and soon the car would shatter like glass, leaving snow and blood, white and red, with no labels, with no “don’t.” The bolt clacked — a sharp metallic snap, like a steel pin hitting a rail bracket, its echo slamming through the car and cutting through the rumble of the wheels. The sound split the world in half — before and after. The passengers froze. The man with the pager lifted his head, fingers suspended above the buttons, mouth slack. The mother crushed her kid against her chest, her bloodshot brown eyes widening in horror, lips trembling, baring yellowed teeth. She held the boy so tightly, it looked like she wanted to hide him under her skin. The fabric of her coat wrinkled under her grip, her nails digging into the rough wool. The girl in the white coat didn’t scream, didn’t jump — she just stared. Something in her stillness was inhuman. Behind the black lenses — emptiness, a blank monitor. She didn’t move, holding her paper cup of coffee, the name Maria smearing on the softening cardboard. The first shot punched into the ceiling. The 5.56 NATO round ripped through the thin metal with a sharp, hollow crack, and the echo slammed the walls of the car, ringing in their ears. A fluorescent tube shattered; white shards rained down, mixing with gray dust from the vents, settling on hair and shoulders. Lights flickered; one bulb flared, then died like a burned-out filament. The air filled with the sulfur bite of gunpowder, the bitter stench of melting plastic.

There was no good. No point in working — the clerk with the pager, his report on Asia where a currency had collapsed almost in half — 900 to 1700 per USD, numbers he had jabbed with his finger now as useless as the Wall Street Journal smeared in the grimy puddle. No cycle — the mother and child, her Kmart bag with the earless plush dog, the familiar loop of “born, raise, die” snapped by a single trigger pull. No rules — the grease-stained worker by the window, his sleep, and the slur carved into the glass. Every bullet said “no.” Every death refused to sign the Pact. Not “save the system,” not “suffer beautifully,” but a torn artery feeding life into this car.

Screams detonated the air — shrill, jagged, like the squeal of brakes, tangled with a child’s sobbing, high and ragged, breaking into coughs, and the leather-jacketed bruisers yelling, “What the fuck!” Their voices were rough, smoke-ruined. The crowd surged for the doors, smashing into each other — an elbow in the ribs, a fist in someone’s shoulder. Some hammered the center exit, the red “OPEN” button blinking uselessly; others threw themselves at the inter-car door under the NO EXIT sign, someone already trying to break the latch with a shoulder. Bodies, heavy and slick with sweat, shoved and crushed. Bags spilled onto the floor: a Duane Reade bag, a beer can bursting foam, mixing with Dunkin’ coffee. Newspapers whipped through the air, immediately blooming red with someone’s blood. The man with the pager dropped it, the plastic cracking underfoot with a small, pathetic snap.

He wasn’t hiding behind ideas or slogans, wasn’t a Knight of Faith to be redeemed later. Not protest, not revenge, not a punk’s pose from the platform. It was pure severing. The Pact, with its “don’t,” “endure,” “save,” ripped apart like a cable hacked by an axe, sparking in the tunnel’s dark throat. And when the car plunged into chaos, when the screams and the blood — a dark-red jet from the bruiser’s shoulder, spraying the wall — were stripped of their masks, he felt for the first time that he had made the right choice. Not a gesture inside the frame — but a step outside all frames at once, into the void, like the echo of a gunshot, the thud-thud of wheels, and the silence after. He was the Knight of Rupture. The Knight of the Void.

Second shot. The bullet punched into the big guy’s back as he climbed over the seats, ripping through the leather jacket with a dry crack before exiting — dark, viscous blood spraying out in thick drops. He collapsed forward, his body going limp, knees hitting the floor, arms falling wide as blood bubbled down onto the cigarette butts and candy wrappers beneath his feet. His buddy didn’t stop — he stepped over the body and shoved a woman with a child aside, forcing his way toward the exit. His elbow slammed into her shoulder like a battering ram, and the crack of bone cut through the screaming.

She fell, her elbow crashing against the metal floor of the car — a dull thud, like a hammer hitting brick. The bone cracked, pain shot down her arm, but she didn’t even scream — only a sharp breath tore from her lungs. Her face twisted, lips drained of color, her head pressed into the floor where a puddle of spilled coffee had mixed with the shards of the broken pager.

The child shrieked, his sneakers with white laces smeared with blood kicking at the air as he tried to get up, but the crowd was pushing — someone’s shoe forced him down, pinning his shoulder to the floor. His mother crawled toward the doors without looking back, leaving him behind.

The big guy who stepped over his friend was pounding on the door with his fist. His knuckles split under the glove, blood seeping through the fabric, but he didn’t stop. A woman in a torn coat grabbed his leg, her fingers digging into his jeans and leaving scratch marks. He kicked her in the face — the boot struck her cheek, the skin split, blood spattering across his jeans in a red streak, bright against the blue. She fell back, her head hitting the metal leg of a seat, hair spreading across the filthy floor. He shoved forward, elbows working like pistons, driving ribs and shoulders out of his way. Someone fell beneath him, but he stepped over without looking. His pupils were blown wide, locked on the door — on escape, on survival at any cost.

He watched it all, the AR-15 warm in his hands from the first shots, and saw how the masks tear away. The Pact was splitting at the seams — not within him, but in them, in those who a moment ago were part of the same system where good = help, family = sacred, child = protect. Now all of it was gone. Morality shattered like glass beneath a boot. Each person whispered to themselves: this isn’t me, it’s the situation. Not murder — survival. The man shoving the woman didn’t see her, only the exit. And somewhere in his head, the thought surely flashed through his mind: everyone does this in panic; otherwise I’ll die.

Empathy — which on a normal day would have made him step aside — drained away, leaving only cynicism: victim = obstacle, help = weakness, survival = the only morality.

The mother who had just been shushing her child was now crawling, trying to cover him with her body. “Good” is something the system stitches into you like a filter — so the world seems bearable, organized: good = normal, help = function. Some have that filter and instinct reinforced; in others it burns away instantly, leaving only the raw instinct: child = ballast, woman = obstruction, blood on the coat = the price of escape. The big guy kicked, the mother crawled, the child was trampled. A war of all against all. No one stopped, no one helped. The mask fell away, revealing the function underneath: survive, at any cost. The Pact would soothe it away: it was stress, you panicked.

Third shot. The bullet tore into the chest of the teenager in headphones by the door, entering at an angle and ripping open his “No Fear” hoodie. The fabric split, blood flooded down his chest — dark, frothing from the lungs. He collapsed to his knees, hands jerking to the wound, fingers immediately red, the headphones slipping off and hitting the floor. Someone’s sneakers stomped the hoodie into the grime, leaving dirty prints on the sleeve. A man in a suit dropped his newspaper and scrambled under the seat, fingers shaking, muttering, “God, no.” But his eyes kept darting toward the exit, and if someone had fallen in front of him, he would have stepped over — like everyone else. Because the mask of goodness is a luxury of a world where one plus one equals two. In danger, it glitches, and the system later fixes it: I didn’t mean it. It was panic.

Someone pissed themselves, and in that smell he saw the end of the illusion: the Pact whispered “be kind,” but under the gun the truth burst out in a yellow stream — people aren’t heroes, aren’t units of mercy, but survival machines where empathy is a brake and violence is the engine. The mother reached the door but got wedged in the crowd, her fingers slipping from the railing, blood mixing with grime on the railing. She screamed, her voice breaking into a rasp as the bullet entered the back of her skull: the entry wound — small, coin-sized; the exit blew the head open, fragments of bone striking the wall, blood running into her hair, clumping it into sticky knots.

The child in the corner didn’t move. Empty eyes. In his hand — a button torn from his mother’s coat. Fingers white as snow. No one turned around — the mask had fallen off, and underneath there was no kindness, only selfishness, pure as a bullet in the chamber. There is no good or evil, only a choice — and the price.

Now they will write about a “horrific tragedy.” Headlines will race across every screen: “Six-year-old boy killed in subway.” Reports, shots, black-and-white photos with roses on the station steps. Experts will nod: “society must,” “we cannot allow this to happen again.” Psychologists will explain stress and trauma, politicians will talk about safety.

Candles will appear, memorials, plush toys lined up in a row — as if stuffed animals could stop the next gunshot. The Pact knows how to show compassion when needed. It builds a storefront of sympathy — exactly on the wavelength that can be aired.

And then new rules will be passed. More cameras, more scanners, more bans. “For your safety,” they’ll say. And the cage will tighten: less freedom to breathe, less right to choose. The tragedy will become a pretext not for remembrance, but for restriction. The Pact knows how to heal, but always with a stitch that pulls the space tighter — until the cage suffocates the inmates.

But at the same time, thousands of children just like him die every day. In wars, where numbers erase names. From violence hidden inside statistical tables. From hunger, which the news calls “a food crisis.” Their deaths are background noise, not a disaster and not a memorial.

The Pact decides who gets a name, who gets the label “horror,” and who stays a number in a report. One child gets candles, toys and headlines. A thousand others get silence and charts. Compassion is measured out and dispensed in doses.

He held the trigger down, and the rifle spoke in a long burst — a heavy, stuttering tat-tat-tat, a rhythm without pauses, eardrums tearing, the rumble of the wheels drowning in the dry crack that vibrated in his bones. Four grams of metal in a copper jacket ripped through the air, plunged into flesh, blowing out sprays of blood. The man in the suit collapsed, the bullet entered beneath his collarbone, tore through his tie and the white fabric of his shirt; blood bubbled from his mouth, soaking the crumpled newspaper with its bold headline about the market crash, the pages swelling and dissolving in a puddle of coffee and piss. The burst tore through the kid in the ripped shirt — the side of his neck split open, the artery blasted a wide arc of blood, drenching the handrail that still held the smudged prints of dirty fingers.

Shell casings rained down, clinking across the floor, hot brass burning his boots. Red streaks slid down the walls, streamed over the peeling blue paint, drowned the scratched letters “Fuck NYPD,” turning the words into a blurred dark stain where no letters could be made out anymore.

He watched the rupture unfold, every bullet echoing his choice — not partial, like in movies where the hero quits his job but still comes back for catharsis, and not like in novels where betrayal inevitably ends with forgiveness in the final pages. There was no return here.

The crowd tore toward the doors, people clawing for an exit, trampling the fallen, yanking at each other’s clothes. A jacket sleeve split, the fabric unraveling into threads, an elbow smashed into a face, blood from a broken nose sprayed and mingled with sweat. The screams merged into a low roar — animal, feral — drowning out the clang of the wheels, thud-thud, thud-thud, like a drumroll before an execution.

He stopped. The rifle breathed heat, the AR-15’s black phosphate-coated barrel glowing, a thin ribbon of smoke curling from the muzzle. The air smelled of burned nitrocellulose. The car froze in a strange calm, and only the wheels — thud-thud, thud-thud — hammered the vacuum with their rhythm. Now and then the quiet was broken by the moans of the wounded: wet, rattling, like the foam bubbling out from the mouth of the kid in the torn shirt with the tattoo on his shoulder.

Was the death of these people justified? No. “Justice” isn’t a measure or a truth, but a storefront the Pact stretches over an execution. When it needs to, it polishes slaughter: in the basements of Dresden, people were baked alive — and that was justice, because they were “enemies”; in Hiroshima the nuclear flash stamped silhouettes onto walls — and that was a blessing, because they had “earned it.” The Pact whispers: enemy, and violence is permitted; whispers: good, and the ash smells like celebration. As long as the label clings to the face, death is announced as order. Once the word slides off, what remains is the smell of burned flesh, soot on the teeth, and silence where there are no righteous and no victory.

The blood on the floor proved nothing. It didn’t become the truth just because the Pact said so. And the Pact itself had never been truth — only the bookkeeping of death, where the numbers balance and people disappear. The Pact doesn’t hide violence — it monopolizes it: appoints the “right” death and the “wrong” one. It is the high priest: it says “good,” and the crowd delights in the smell of burned flesh. It says “evil,” and judgment descends.

And across from it stood neither a priest nor a judge.

A white coat, dark glasses. In them — himself, without excuses. Her face showed nothing — no fear, no plea, her lips parted slightly but without trembling, the pink Maybelline polish on her nails was chipped, fingers resting on the pages of Seventeen, March 1997, open on a spread with LeAnn Rimes in a white off-the-shoulder dress, romantic dresses, “be confident, be yourself, but follow the trends — cute boys in tuxedos,” the slogan “Just Be” — unisex, thirty-five bucks for three and a half ounces, a bottle shaped like a cylinder, a model with wet hair.

She didn’t move, the magazine didn’t shift, even when a splash of blood spread across the glossy cover, spreading across LeAnn’s picture. He lowered the barrel — the metal warm, heavy.

She wasn’t part of the chaos he’d created, wasn’t a function in the cycle where everyone runs, shoves, crawls, tearing off their masks of convenient excuses — moral disengagement: in everyday life — in business, in politics, at war — people justify harm to stay at peace with themselves: “it’s for the greater good,” like saving Wall Street from the baht crisis where the July 2 devaluation triggered contagion, but the IMF gave loans and reforms to restore order; diffusion of responsibility — “everyone does it,” like the crowd trampling the fallen, not just me; minimizing consequences — “it’s not that bad,” like the clerk with the newspaper muttering “God, no,” but diving under the seat instead of helping; dehumanizing the victim — “they deserved it,” like the big guy kicking the mother because “she’s in the way”; “their own fault,” like speculators blaming Asia’s weakness instead of themselves.

But she didn’t run, didn’t scream, didn’t crawl, didn’t search for a justification. She sat, watching, her fingers on the page as if about to turn it with the rhythm of the train. The perfume ad whispered “Just Be,” and she already was — not inside the Pact, where good = norm, fear = flight, chaos = death, but beyond it, where formulas stop working.

It was a complete refusal, the same as his gunfire — not a partial one, like someone else’s protest that is branded vandalism first and later hung in a gallery.

She wasn’t dismantling morality like everyone around her.

No.

She watched: the lenses of her glasses — a black mirror, his own emptiness, her face — a mask without emotion.

The Pact didn’t work on her: she stepped outside without signing the contract, without healing the cracks the way the system knows how to heal partial malfunctions.

Her choice — not to run, not to beg, not to hide — was a rupture, like his AR-15: where one plus one equals fifty-six, where good is not the norm, chaos is not the end, but simply is — alive, real, without filters, without “this is how it should be.”

In her glasses, he saw his own reflection.

She wasn’t a victim — she was a fellow participant in the refusal, a terminal with no data, where “Just Be” didn’t mean “follow the trends,” but “be beyond them” — in snow and blood, in white and red, without labels.

The train lurched, the lamps flickered, shadows slid across the bodies, across the magazine with LeAnn on the page, across the white coat spattered with blood.

He raised the barrel, pressed the muzzle to his chin — the metal burned his skin like a kiss from the void. His fingers tightened on the trigger. The final shot ripped the world, merging with the roar of the wheels. His body collapsed onto the floor, blood spreading out, soaking into the puddles and mixing with the shards.

He had delivered his proof. Blood became an axiom, death — a theorem. Everything aligned: the Pact no longer existed.

The world folded in — but he didn’t vanish. Something new unfolded inside him, filling him.

His body changed: bones cracked, his spine stretched, ribs spread apart, skin split, cheekbones pushed forward. Horns burst from his temples — at first just swelling mounds, hot, throbbing, then the skin tore, and black blood sprayed in thin jets. The horns curved outward, hard as steel, spiraled like Zephyr’s tags on the old subway car. Not pain, but restructuring, layer by layer, like the Pact collapsing in on itself.

He saw it clearly: the Pact no longer held him. The morality of “you cannot kill,” the culture of “suffer beautifully,” the numbers of “one plus one” — all of it burst. In the void, another self was born, one who had found his positive freedom. He was Satan — the enemy of the Pact, the breaker of its formulas. He was the Devil — the accuser of the Pact, the word that sliced through the lie of its axioms. Not a demon from books, but a total refusal — without excuses. He was the truth the Pact could not contain. His skin darkened, muscles tightened, horns crowned his temples with darkness. And he stood in the emptiness where there was no clatter of wheels, no groans of the wounded. The girl in the white coat watched — her dark, motionless lenses studied and reflected him.

And in her gaze — a mirror where Satan saw himself not as a monster, but as freedom: snow and blood, white and red.

The girl in the white coat closed the magazine — her fingers left a bloody smear on the glossy cover, the lacquer on her nails glinted one last time. She stood, stepped over the bodies, her shoes squelching in the blood, but her stride remained steady. At the next station, she stepped out. The platform light struck her face, the Coca-Cola neon flickered and reflected in the puddles, and she kept walking — in her white coat, in her dark glasses, with the magazine tucked under her arm — into a city where the Pact still lived.

She was smiling.