Page 134 of Fractured Devotion
Because even when you look away, the mirrors remember.
Chapter 41 – Celeste - In Glass We Break
I haven’t spoken to anyone since I left Kade’s office. Not Reyes, not Alec, not even Mara. The walls of Miramont are a bit soundless now. Or maybe I’ve just tuned the frequency of the world out. It’s easier to move through these corridors when you pretend you’re part of the architecture.
I sleep in my lab now, but not deeply. Not restfully. Just enough to stave off collapse. I prop my chair against the diagnostics console, curl under a lab coat I don’t remember folding, and close my eyes to the hum of still-running equipment. The scent of sterile metal and faint cleaning agents lulls me better than any sedative.
The flash drive never leaves my pocket, not even when I sleep.
I’ve stopped replaying the file, but it replays itself inside my skull in perfect fidelity. Every time, the hallway lights flicker. And every time, I hear a door click shut. Then, the sound of the closet, the humming, and the scream. My scream.
What disturbs me most isn’t the footage. It’s how familiar it feels.
I should’ve been horrified. And I was. But underneath that was something else. A bitter certainty. Like finding a scar you didn’t know you had and realizing it’s been there the whole time, just hidden under better pain.
I start mapping again.
Not data.
Not test subjects.
I map my memories.
I draw them out in digital schematics, overlay them against the Echo logs, and align my timelines against thesystem triggers. It’s a new form of self-diagnosis. A science of unburying.
And what do I find?
Patterns. But not random ones. Instead, I find installed ones.
Conditioned responses to stimuli.
Some subtle. Some blunt.
And many of them were implanted long before Kade entered the picture.
Which means he wasn’t the architect.
He was just another engineer.
And I? I was the lab.
The test.
The proof.
I sit back in my chair, my eyes burning, my breath shallow.
No one should ever be trained to respond to trauma with arousal.
And yet.
My body remembers.
That isn’t healing. It’s programming.
And I intend to trace it back to its source, brick by brick, lie by lie.
Because I don’t want to dismantle the system anymore.
