Time moves like a wounded animal, and the whispers get louder. The dead keep talking quiet voices wearing borrowed faces. Maybe it’s the Reaper, punching his timecard, coming to settle a debt I never agreed to pay. I grin anyway. Mocking the void is the only joke I have left. Death a two-bit clown in a thrift-store suit, trying too hard to look dangerous. People fear him, worship him, curse him. But he’s just a shadow with good PR. “I don’t die,” I tell him, because lies are the only currency that spends in this city. I scream it to the broken moon, letting its cold light drown my doubts. The night answers back, a choir of defiance echoing off concrete and bone. Death flickers, dissolves another cheap illusion in a world full of expensive truths. He recites the same line he’s sold for centuries: “As I was, so shall you be.” A fortune cookie prophecy with a gun pressed to it. But death’s just a wall someone forgot to finish building, a veil thin enough to breathe through, a mistake waiting to be corrected. The future bleeds chrome and static, muscle welded to machinery, hope carved from circuitry and cold fire. I won’t die. Not today. Not ever, if I can help it. We won’t die. Not while there’s still a trigger to pull, a heartbeat refusing to quit, a reason—however broken—to keep going.

When I walk the walk, he’s there a whisper slithering through the cracks of my skull: “Don’t dare it. Your life’s on bet.” Like the universe itself is calling my bluff. I glance down at my own skin, this sickly green shade, like a corpse that forgot it was supposed to stay dead, a ghost caught somewhere between breath and memory, still pretending it belongs among the living. I try to tune him out, but the echo splinters, falls apart like everything else in this city of broken promises. Because you’re not here. You don’t care. Not anymore. And that truth that loaded little fact hits harder than any caliber I’ve ever taken. Harder than the ones that should’ve ended me. Harder than the ones I wish had.