You try to walk away from the cell without exposing it, which is another way of saying you want out of the consequences without choosing a side. You draft reasonable messages in your head and delete them before they exist. You picture Mango shrugging. You picture Dane laughing once, bitterly, at how naive you are. Mango hasn't answered. That isn't mercy, it's bookkeeping: he's counting what you owe and hasn't decided whether to send the bill. Then you remember the freeze you imagined, the lure you built, the way you learned to speak Blackridge's language well enough to hurt someone with it. There's no version of this where you simply stop and nothing follows. [[Burn The Operation|Burn it all down now]] --- [[The Aftermath|Wait and see what happens]]