Page 146 of Fractured Devotion
It’s time to pull this all the way into daylight.
The hallway outside my office is quiet. Most of the admin staff have either gone home or buried themselves in closed-door diagnostics. I move quickly, keeping the drive tucked inside my coat again.
I take the east stairwell down two flights to Sublevel 1, where Reyes’ secondary lab is nested behind a double-security corridor. I pass two orderlies and nod at a nurse who doesn’t make eye contact.
When I reach the lab door, I knock once, and Reyes opens immediately. His face is pale, his eyes shadowed.
“You saw it,” he says. It’s not a question.
I step inside and shut the door. “Yeah, I saw it.”
He locks the door behind me and gestures toward his terminal. “There’s more.”
I cross the room and glance at the screen. It’s all still frames—paused video segments, raw neural capture files, and metadata overlays. Reyes has already mapped out what we found.
He taps one image. It’s the girl. Celeste. She’s younger. “This wasn’t just therapy, Alec. It was prototyping, iteration testing, memory disruption, and emotional priming. That’s not child counseling. It’s manufacturing.”
I feel sick.
Reyes scrolls through the logs. “There are dozens of these files. Some are incomplete, others looped. They weren’t training her. They were trying to fracture her. To rebuild from the break.”
I steady myself against the desk. “Who did this?”
Reyes doesn’t answer. He just clicks another tab.
A signature tag blinks in the lower corner. C0-ZERO.
The same identifier from the earlier architecture.
And suddenly, I’m not sure if Rourke is the end of the ladder.
Maybe he’s just the rung she’s meant to break next.
And maybe Kade wasn’t her first captor.
Maybe he’s just the one who made her remember.
Chapter 44 – Kade - Vanishing Point
Rourke’s private office is exactly as I remember it—sterile, silent, and designed to keep you from relaxing. There’s nothing personal on the walls and no furniture that isn’t strictly functional. Just a glass desk, a backlit terminal, and a single chair that feels more like a stage prop than a seat.
I sit anyway. Because that’s the role I play today.
He doesn’t look up at first. He just types something into his terminal with one hand while swirling a tumbler of something gold in the other. When he finally acknowledges me, his smile is all teeth and calculation. “You’re late.”
“You’re drinking.”
He chuckles and sets the glass aside. “Don’t mistake this for a luxury. It’s insulation.”
I say nothing. My fingers rest calmly on my thigh, but my right hand itches to check the drive I’ve hidden. It’s not on me. It’s in a shell terminal back in my quarters. A ghost drive with a live clone of Echo’s experimental interface logs, the same one he thinks I’m here to deliver.
“Where is it?” he asks.
“She hasn’t cracked the final layer yet. The encryption is deeper than we thought. She won’t move recklessly.”
“Then make her,” he says sharply, his voice slicing cleanly through the room. “I don’t need excuses. I need that interface.”
I lean back, letting the edge of his threat pass without comment. He doesn’t scare me, not in any meaningful way. But he does annoy me.
