​Chapter 34. Are You Awake

Eliza walked through the dead park.

This was her place, the point of origin of her existence, the place she returned to when the noise of the Pact and the Mother’s whisper became unbearable. The air here was frozen, like ancient dust in a sealed crypt. The trees stretched their gnarled branches toward the eternal clouds; the surface of the canal cutting the park in half lay still like black mercury, reflecting nothing.

Here she had time to think. The souls of the Converted, those she guided, could not enter this place. Their worlds, full of pain and rage, remained beyond an unseen boundary. The park belonged to her alone.

She walked across the bridge spanning the dead water and thought of her mission. Of the Converted. They were the desperate ones, those who had peered behind the cardboard scenery of the Pact and accepted the primordial void. Those who could no longer tolerate the lie and chose to cut themselves free from it. They called, the Dark Mother heard them, and Eliza answered the call.

She was their deliverance. The ritual was simple and unchanging. She took their pain, their final desperate choice, killed them, devoured their tormented shell, and then, in the empty vessel, wove new life out of the Mother’s reality. Not death, but rebirth — a world free of lies. She was both reaper and midwife.

But the Girl...

Sometimes, on this very bridge, she appeared. The Girl was a mystery to her, a system error in her frozen dream. Yes, Eliza had killed her. She remembered it as clearly as she remembered her first breath in her new life. The last sin of Officer Liza Dahmer’s old life. A stray bullet that ended an innocent life.

But why had she entered the Limbo? Only the Converted entered the Limbo. Those who had chosen, those who had called. The Girl had not called. She had not despaired of the Pact — she lived in it the way children do, without questions. She was not Converted. Her soul should have gone through the Pact’s standard protocol, dissolving into the cycle of rebirth, or whatever else had been set aside for the innocent. But she was here.

Eliza stopped at the center of the bridge. She knew what would happen now.

In the motionless air before her, a figure condensed. First, a faint shimmer, then pale outlines, and then—she was there. Small, in a simple white dress with a red stain, blond braids. Her eyes, empty and glassy, looked straight at Eliza. Not with reproach, not with hatred. They simply looked.

Eliza did not move. Every time, she waited for the Girl to speak, to ask something, to accuse, to plead. But she always remained silent. Standing on the bridge in a world she did not belong to, the Girl looked at the one who had ended her life for a long, endless moment. And then she would begin to fade, dissolving into the unmoving air until she disappeared completely, leaving no trace behind.

Eliza remained on the bridge alone, and the silence of the dead park soothed her. This ghost from her past was the only true enigma in her new universe. And she knew that until she solved it, she would never be truly free.

She thought of Mark and pitied him — in the only way she knew how: distantly, like a scientist pities a test subject about to undergo a brutal but necessary experiment. And she herself was the author of that experiment.

It began with the Mother.

One day the Mother called to her. Not with words, but with a pure, disembodied image. She showed her the Pact — an endless, milky fog where lost souls wandered in silence. And among those faceless shades, the Mother found Mark.

He was no shade, but an anomaly — a dense, dark clot of rage and pain that didn’t dissolve into the fog, but instead made it thicker. He was trapped in the Pact, but his soul was already living in Hell. And the Mother sent her to that rooftop.

Convert him? No. From the very beginning, the plan had been different. She could not make him a demon, another “child” whose strength depended on his tether to Lilith’s reality. Something wild slept inside him, something capable of more. He was meant to become something else. What exactly? Even the Mother did not know, but she felt his potential.

And Eliza began her game. She nudged him, brushing reality with the slightest touch, the way an artist makes the first stroke. Every shift, every crack — not for torment, but for truth.

She wasn’t breaking him — she was trying to wake him.

Lilith didn’t understand this. With her centuries-old hunger for power and control, she saw in Mark nothing but another tool. Lilith believed that it was enough to shatter his world, drive him into a corner, and he would take their side. As Eliza had, and many before her. She wanted obedience.

But Mark didn’t break. He bent, cracked, went mad, but didn’t fall. And the plan had to move forward. The Agency was expanding and had moved into open warfare; the borgs were cutting down their people one by one. There was no time left for a delicate game.

So they made a decision — to change the plan. If Mark couldn’t be awakened from the outside, then they needed to create conditions in which he would awaken on his own. For that, he needed one final, most terrible loss.

They allowed him to become a traitor. Eliza led him to it, constructing the perfect situation in which his only choice was to become Judas. And she, through his betrayal, entered the one place no demon, no servant of the Mother, could reach.

Into the citadel of the enemy — the Agency’s sterile paradise.

Mark was a pawn. Or a queen. None of them knew what he truly was. Not her, not even the Mother. A joker in their deck, and the stakes of this game were far too high.

That night on the rooftop, she saw straight through him — as all demons see humans. One brief shift, and his entire essence, his weaknesses, all his rage buried beneath layers of cynicism lay exposed before her like an open hand. Not a broken cop, but a Destroyer locked in a human body.

And what happened next, in that cold room overlooking the City’s glittering lie, had been real. In that moment she wasn’t Elizazdra, but darkness recognizing another darkness. The only moment in her long, endless new life when she wasn’t alone.

Then she put the mask back on — the mask of a soulless, calculating bitch who manipulates, provokes, and pushes away. She played easily, move by move, leading Mark toward the betrayal that was destined for him. Every gesture, every word was part of the plan — to break him just enough for him to do what he had to do and hand her over into the Agency’s hands.

Her pain and longing for that real night, for that single moment of truth, stayed here, in this dead park. She drowned it in the black, motionless water of the canal, which reflected nothing.

And now she was drowning in it herself.

From far away, almost imperceptible, like static between worlds, another reality seeped through — the Pact. She had learned to perceive it as a second channel of reality, muted, a faint hum of someone else’s ordered life.

In that distant hum, she heard words. Clear, filtered, spoken without emotion.

“Transport to Alpha.”

They rang like a bell, tearing her out of the still, frozen timelessness of Limbo. It was time to return.

Her body was being moved. The metal sarcophagus shuddered and lifted. Then came a dull clang, a vibration, and a steady, monotonous hum. They were taking her to a new location. She felt acceleration, turns, braking — as a faint, distant echo brushing against her awareness, trapped in darkness.

All their brain manipulations, the IVs, and the darts meant nothing at all. Her body was only a temporary point of contact with the Pact. The anchor was in her park, in the Mother, who anchored herself in that place humans called Hell.

The movement stopped. A hiss of hydraulics, and the lid of her sarcophagus slid aside. For a moment, her skin was struck by cold, sterile air. Hands in stiff gloves lifted her and transferred her onto another, even colder surface. A new sarcophagus. Dozens of soft but unyielding straps fixed her body; electrodes were attached to her temples and wrists. The lid closed, plunging her into darkness.

A sharp sting in her neck — and chemical heat rushed through her veins. Stimulants. The world, once blurred and muffled, turned into a set of sharp, precise signals. She heard the roll of the gurney wheels beneath her, the chirp of medical equipment, the distant, filtered voices speaking in the language of codes and protocols.

Her body, locked inside the perfect geometry of its new metal prison, was pushed along endless corridors. Through a narrow strip of reinforced glass, she glimpsed walls buzzing under the ceiling lamps. Inside, there was no pain, no fear. Only cold, detached observation.

The gurney stopped. Two figures in gray jumpsuits rolled the sarcophagus into a room and locked it in place at the center. Instead of faces, they wore shimmering ripples of virt-masks.

Another hiss, and the lid opened. This time the light blinded her. Harsh and merciless, it struck her empty eye sockets, causing phantom pain. They moved her onto an operating table.

The smell of antiseptics and filtered air. The examination began. She scanned the room: no turrets. Perfect. From a hidden speaker above her head came a flat, emotionless voice.

“Are you awake?” asked the first.

“What is your name?” added the second.

They echoed like a broken algorithm.

“Are you awake?” repeated the first.

“What is your name?” repeated the second.

“Useless,” the first concluded. “Scanners confirm no signs of higher brain activity since capture. We can proceed.”

The moment he said the last word, the world began to die.

The bright surgical lights dimmed, fading into a dull, deathbed glow. The perfectly white walls yellowed, split with deep cracks from which white, viscous ooze seeped. Chrome instruments on nearby trays bloomed with rust and crumbled into dust. The room aged in seconds; the sterile lab turned into an ancient, rotting crypt.

“What’s happening?” shouted the first — his synthesized voice faltered for the first time, broken by the impossible.

Snakes poured from the cracks in the floor. Hundreds, thousands of black, glistening bodies covered the entire floor in seconds, a living, hissing carpet.

With a deafening crack, the sarcophagus split open, its metal walls tearing apart like foil. Eliza rose smoothly. Naked, pale, with dark hollows of burned-out eye sockets, she stood in the middle of that seething sea of snakes, and her asymmetrical face expressed nothing but ruthless triumph.

The borgs tried to run, but the snakes surged upward as a black, hissing wall, coiling around their bodies, slipping under their jumpsuits, sinking into synthetic flesh. Short, gurgling screams were cut off at once. The snakes tore their bodies apart with merciless efficiency.

The slaughter lasted only a few seconds. Eliza stood in the center of the ruined, decayed room, surrounded by bloodied scraps. She was free. She was in the very heart of the enemy base, and she had brought her hell with her.

Eliza walked through the base, and the sterile whiteness of the corridors drowned in her shadow.

They had miscalculated. All their power, all their perfect security systems were aimed outward. Turrets, minefields, and force barriers were built to repel an external threat. In their arrogant logic, none of them had expected that the enemy would come from within.

She walked in her true form, tearing the Pact with every step. The right half of her body had become a nightmare of black, scaled flesh crowned with a curved horn. The left remained the perfection of a human form. From her shadow, from beneath her feet, from the very walls, streams of black, glistening snakes were born and slithered out.

They were her will, her hunger. They slid silently across the white floor, filling the corridors with a living carpet. The guards didn’t even have time to raise their weapons. The snakes shot upward, wrapping around bodies, their fangs finding the weak points in armor. The base screamed, dying in agony, incapable of resisting Chaos.

She walked past laboratories, residential blocks, control centers. Bodies were everywhere — torn apart, distorted, frozen in poses of grotesque terror. Hell had devoured their sterile heaven.

Finally, she reached the heart of the base.

It was a massive spherical chamber, and in its center — suspended in an antigravity field — floated a humming sphere of crystalline matrices and fiber optics, pulsing with blue light. The Agency’s primary servers. Their God and their brain.

Eliza stepped inside.

A synthesized voice filled the hall. It came from everywhere and nowhere.

Red level. Containment protocol breach. Existential threat detected. Purification protocol activated.

The hall was flooded with red emergency light. A timer lit up on the wall, counting down the last seconds. Confronted with a threat it could not defeat, the system chose the only logical response — self-destruction.

Eliza did not try to run. She stood and watched as their God prepared to sacrifice itself. She had won.

By the time she walked back toward the exit, a low, devouring hum was already rising behind her.

The earth shook. From beneath the snowy plain, a pillar of blinding white fire erupted, turning the day into an inferno for a heartbeat. In her mind — like the strike of a bell — came the message: the end of the old and the beginning of the new world.

Then she walked across the scorched, smoking ground without looking back, a woman clothed with the sun. Behind her, Base Alpha died in flames.

Ahead, in the cold haze of dawn, the City’s towers shone.