Page 159 of Fractured Devotion
I feel the guilt in my bones. For every time I thought I understood her. Every time I judged her without knowing this.
She didn’t choose this path. She was funneled into it.
“We tell her now?” he asks.
“Not yet,” I say, staring at the diagram. “Not like this. We need to pull the last layer first. And we need to find out what they’re planning next.”
Because if they went this far to make her, they’re not done yet.
And I have a sick feeling they didn’t just train a subject.
They’re waiting for results.
Reyes sighs, rubbing the back of his neck. “What are you thinking?”
“I think the final project was never Echo. It was Celeste. And the minute they see she’s deviating from protocol, they’ll come to reclaim her.”
He goes still. “And if they can’t?”
I turn to him.
“Then they’ll burn everything down and start over.”
We stare at the map.
And for the first time in weeks, I feel cold to my core.
Because we’re not just fighting a system anymore.
We’re fighting the designers.
The following hour is a blur of silent movement. Reyes and I comb through the secondary files buried in the cluster directories Mara flagged earlier—string after string of dead names, backdated financial injections, and shell organizations. There’s no smoke without fire, and this much smoke could bury a city.
I pause at one line item: ST. CORA INSTITUTE – DEFUNCT, 2002. It’s marked in red.
“Reyes. Look at this.”
He leans over. “Is that—”
“Celeste’s mother was admitted there,” I say. My pulse kicks up.
We drill down. Celeste’s mother had been registered under a pseudonym: Marian Vale. Institutionalized under suspicion of a dissociative breakdown after the death of her husband. The notes are fragmented and corrupted. But a cross-reference pops up. Project Celestia. My stomach turns.
“She wasn’t just a patient,” I murmur. “They used her too.”
Reyes swears under his breath. “They tested experimental therapy on her.”
A few clicks later, we find something worse. We find custody documents, signed over to the clinic’s education wing. They raised Celeste under institutional observation and labeled her a “conditioned sleeper subject.”
“Jesus,” Reyes whispers.
We sit in silence. The kind of silence that’s heavier than grief.
Everything she remembers, all the gaps, the inconsistencies…
They were planted and designed. Not just by Rourke. But by something older. A foundation.
“This is it,” I say. “This is how they got her. Not through violence but through permission. Paperwork, protocol, and guardianship laws no one cared enough to challenge.”
