Page 125 of Fractured Devotion
The more I look, the more I’m convinced Harper wasn’t just collecting this. She was reacting to something, anticipating something. It’s like her files were prepped for someone else to find, either to warn them or mislead them. Maybe both.
I dig through her backup logs, opening old session reviews. A few are timestamped during hours she claimed to be asleep, which sends a new chill through me.
“Reyes,” I call out.
He returns fast, his eyes narrowing. “You find something?”
“Maybe. These sessions were saved manually in the middle of the night. It doesn’t match the schedule shesubmitted. Someone was in the system, and it wasn’t for standard recording.”
He takes the terminal from me, squinting at the logs. “She had admin clearance?”
“No. But she had Celeste’s temporary clearance from the last sync.”
Reyes clicks his tongue. “Then she was snooping.”
“More than that. Look at this.” I highlight a segment where the Echo environment registered a spike in system load. At the same time, Celeste’s vitals spiked too.
A dream. Or something worse.
Reyes hums under his breath. “She could’ve triggered it. Echo listens. It always has.”
“And we never saw it because it didn’t trigger a threat protocol.”
“Too subtle.”
I lean back in the chair. “Then we need to see how far this went. If Harper was testing something or running partial loops, we need to know what it was doing to Celeste.”
Reyes gives a single nod. “I’ll start compiling a threat map. But if there’s more buried in the backups, it’s going to take hours.”
“Start with the nights she was most off-pattern. Any deviations from routine. We map the behavior, and we’ll find the breach.”
He pauses before turning away. “If this gets traced back to someone outside the clinic…”
I meet his gaze. “Then we deal with it. But not before we understand it.”
He walks off, and I stare at the last line of the log—Harper’s final session, never submitted, never edited.
It’s just a title.
CELESTIA.v0
And for the first time, I wonder if she wasn’t watching Celeste.
Maybe she was trying to become her.
I close Harper’s final log but leave the file open in the background. Something about it—CELESTIA.v0—won’t let go. It’s not just a name. It feels like a beginning, or maybe a warning.
The lab lights dim slightly with the automated cycle shift, and I stretch the tension out of my shoulders, already feeling the early pangs of a migraine clawing at my temples.
I glance toward the far end of the room, where Reyes has moved to another terminal. He’s got two holos pulled up, one mapping system anomalies over the last six weeks, and the other showing patterns of biometric deviation. Even from here, I can tell it’s not clean. There are too many spikes and too many alignments that shouldn’t naturally occur.
“Do we have a common anchor point yet?” I ask as I approach.
Reyes shakes his head. “Nothing direct. But look at this.”
He overlays the biometric plot onto the schedule of Harper’s last known lab activities. The fit isn’t perfect, but it’s close enough to make my chest tighten.
“She was accessing Echo’s test environment after hours,” he says. “And running isolated simulations. Mostly within non-invasive thresholds. But she was targeting Celeste’s neural ID. Over and over again.”
