"They woke us up, put us in a room, and we died almost immediately."
Velvet didn't blink when she said it.
The screen glow carved her face into sharp, clinical geometry, and the Share-Lock between us hummed like something pretending not to exist. I felt her fear before she even named it—sharp, reflexive, not directed at the system but at the implication of us inside it.
"Really?" she asked, but it wasn't disbelief. It was calibration.
I didn't answer right away because the thought was already forming in me, too fast to stop and too clean to ignore: we were probably killing each other.
The Share-Lock transmitted it before I could bury it, and Velvet flinched like something had struck her behind the eyes. She didn't deny it. That was worse. The laptop kept scrolling through logs like it had all the time in the world, each line identical in structure and slightly different in death.
Aggression spike. Terminated. Aggression spike. Terminated.
