All Chapters of Crave Me,Kill Me: Chapter 41 - Chapter 44

The room they stood in was once a memory compression vault.Now it was a studio.Not with cameras. With presence.A table.Three chairs.One drive.Eden sat at the center, sleeves rolled, hair undone, nothing staged.Cassian sat at her right, arms crossed, silent but steady.Aeris sat to her left reluctant at first, but there.That was enough.Nova’s voice came through the tower relay. She’d secured a private line. The system couldn’t trace this room not anymore. Aeris made sure of that.“Ready when you are.”Eden touched the drive.It pulsed once.And then the console lit up not with her voice.With dozens of others.Merge subjects.Early prototypes.Discarded, repressed, rewritten.One by one, their stories played across the old compression feed. Uncut. Unpolished. Names the public never heard. Emotions the Council said were too “dense” to process.“They told me grief would make me unreliable.So I stopped grieving.I didn’t get more stable.I got sick.”“My first kiss didn’t regist

The journey started just before sunrise.The original Merge site was a myth now collapsed, abandoned, sealed in by government ordinances and time. But not forgotten.Nova gave Eden the last coordinates.“You sure you want to go down there?” she asked.Eden didn’t hesitate.“If they made someone survive alone,” she said, “then I’m not letting them stay that way.”Aeris rode silent. She hadn’t spoken much since the archive flood, but Eden could feel it radiating off her: this wasn’t mission. This was recognition. One buried prototype meeting the echo of another.Cassian followed behind, armed but not tense. His hand never left Eden’s for more than ten seconds.They descended through rusted lift shafts and fractured access tunnels following a pulse that didn’t move like code. It moved like a heartbeat.The lower they went, the quieter the world became.Until they reached a pressure-sealed chamber at the bottom of a stairwell that hadn’t seen air in five years.Eden stepped forward.Place