Awakened
Marcus and Lurii.
But they were distorted.
Lurii’s face was soft, lacking the sharp, cosmetic edges and the expensive filler she’d acquired in her twenties. She looked like a girl, her eyes wide with a performative worry that I now recognized as her primary survival mechanism.
And Marcus... He looked like the boy I had first fallen for at the library basement, fresh-faced, handsome, and seemingly earnest, not the monster who had calculated my value in billions while I choked on my own blood.
A dream, I thought, my mind reeling. The poison. I'm hallucinating the past as I die. My brain is misfiring, giving me a slideshow of my regrets before the lights go out for good.