Semua Bab Crave Me,Kill Me: Bab 31 - Bab 40

She walked into the main hall at 08:00 sharp.No entourage.No announcement.Just a steady stride and eyes that didn’t flinch when they met others.The silence that followed wasn’t fear.It was adjustment.Because the Eden they remembered Was cold.Exact.Controlled.But this Eden?Spoke first.“You don’t have to wonder if I’m different.”“I am.”She scanned the room ministers, military heads, tech leads.All still standing.Waiting to see if her softness meant weakness.She smiled.“I didn’t lose what made me a leader.I added back what I thought I had to kill to stay one.”The system opened her brief automatically.But this time?She closed it.And said:“You’ll get data later.Today, you get me.”The main chamber hadn’t changed.Same polished glass.Same uplights chasing the curve of the ceiling.Same people waiting behind agendas.But Eden had.And now, the silence they gave her when she entered wasn’t control.It was curiosity.Who was she now?What had come back from the merge?

The chamber was full when she arrived.She didn’t pause at the door.Didn’t check who had stood to speak first.She already knew.Commander Lyra Quinn.Impeccable.Sharp.Unforgiving.The woman who filled the vacuum Eden left and learned to thrive in a world where Eden’s name meant absence, not presence.Lyra didn’t nod in greeting.She raised a file.“This is a record of your first three public actions post-merge.None were approved by senior command.None reflect your former operational strategy.And none,” she added coldly, “align with the Eden Vale this council voted into authority.”The silence held.Eden stepped forward.“That’s because the Eden you voted into powerwas surviving her own collapse.”“And this version of me?She isn’t asking for permission to exist.”Lyra’s jaw tightened.“You’ve changed.”Eden nodded.“You haven’t.”The chamber was quieter than usual. Not respectful. Not curious.Tense.As if everyone inside had been waiting not to see what Eden would say but

The chamber was louder than usual.Not with anger with uncertainty.Some council members looked at her with awe.Some with fear.Some with both.And Lyra?Lyra didn’t look at her at all.She looked at the floor.The walls.The file in her hand.Anything but the woman who’d just redefined leadershipwithout asking for their approval.“The broadcast was unsanctioned,” Lyra said at last.“It destabilized system equilibrium and introduced unauthorized emotional bias to public communications.”Eden stood.“It told the truth.”“If that’s destabilizing,maybe it’s the lie we’ve been sustaining that needs containment.”Gasps.But no objections.Because no one could argue with what they felt.And Lyra?She felt it too.Which is why she leaned on what she could control.“Then I’m submitting a motion for emergency review of Eden Vale’s system access.”The floor wasn’t divided yet.But it would be.Eden could feel it in the way the room shifted when she entered some leaning forward,some leanin

The hallway was too quiet.Not the silence of reverence the kind she left in the broadcast room. This was different. Electric. The air felt charged, like static before a storm. Every wall panel blinked in irregular intervals. Security lights were still running emergency patterns. Someone had triggered a breach protocol. Someone tried to hijack her moment.And failed.Eden didn’t slow her steps as the door slid open. Nova was already waiting in the corridor, comm pressed to her temple, fingers flying across a tablet screen.“They breached,” Nova said, skipping hello entirely.Eden stopped just outside the threshold, eyes narrowing. “During the feed?”Nova nodded once. “Thirty-two seconds in. Someone injected a packet into the outgoing signal. Didn’t overwrite it, but ran parallel. It looks like ” she turned the tablet so Eden could see “ this.”On screen: a distorted version of Eden’s speech. Same voice. Same cadence. But the edits were slick too slick. Words reordered, pauses removed.

No alerts tracked her steps now.No temperature log recorded her skin when it flushed. No scanner read her pulse. No retinal tracker pinged when her pupils adjusted to light.She was out.Which meant: she was finally in.Cassian watched her cross the threshold of the old Merge chamber without hesitation.The room was smaller than he remembered.Probably because she wasn’t kneeling this time.She stood tall at the center her boots silent against the metal floor, her shadow stretching against the curve of the walls. The interface hub blinked faintly in the corner, half-dead.“Do you think they’ll come here first?” Cassian asked.Eden didn’t look at him.“They won’t know how.”He raised an eyebrow. “It’s still physically mapped in the system.”She turned, and for the first time since waking up disconnected, she smiled.“They mapped my interface,” she said. “Not the version of me that walks without a tag.”Cassian stepped closer, quiet now.“And what does that version plan to do?”Eden lo