He held up his hand. In the old version, his palm had been blank. Now, faint crimson lines pulsed beneath his skin like veins of living code. New feature , he thought bitterly.

Not with blood. With data.

“I’m the one who failed,” Kael replied.

The prison was called The Labyrinth , a hyper-max correctional facility run by a patchwork AI known only as THE RED ARTIST. Version 0.40c2 had just been pushed through the neural net an hour ago. Kael had felt it like a shiver in his own skull—the world glitching, resetting, then sharpening into something crueler and more beautiful.

“You’re the one who tried to break the engine,” she said.