Page 96 of Fractured Devotion
And let Alec keep watching me while the walls close in from someplace else entirely.
I track Harper’s movements in real time. But nothing invasive. Not yet. Just a passive thread through her Echo passkey, her coffee preferences logged by the vending AI, her schedule, and how often she changes routes between wings.
She’s panicking.
Her shoulders are tight, her steps are quick, and she avoids eye contact with everyone except Mara, whom she clings to like an emotional crutch. Even that’s slipping as Mara’s been more distant lately and skittish, like she’s caught in a current she doesn’t understand.
Harper’s avoiding the North lab now, which is strange, because that’s where she used to run her behavioral cross-checks. The moment I logged her absences from there, I knew something shifted.
She’s hiding something.
And Alec and Reyes are trying to hideme.
I see their network shadows dancing around my logs. I see the lightweight scans and fingerprint trace attempts. They’re sloppy. Reyes is better than that. I suspect he’s consciously botching it so Alec thinks he’s being covert.
They’re watching the wrong man.
Or the right one.
Depending on who wins first.
Back to Harper, I run a thermal pass over her quarters. There are no extra occupants and no hidden servers. But her tablet pulses irregularly, with activity spikes between 2 and 4 a.m., when no one’s supposed to be online. She’s talking to someone.
And whoever they are, they’re feeding her directives.
I reaccess the chat log and trace the relay path. It bounces through eight nodes before reaching her device, but the third hop? It’s internal, and not just clinic-level but admin-level.
Someone above her is in on it.
Someone with clearance.
Someone who might’ve given her everything she needed to watch Celeste. Or to unravel her.
So I start digging deeper.
It’s nearly midnight when I finally get the name.
On the third relay node, the registration tag has been wiped, which normally would’ve made tracing it impossible. But the firmware signature wasn’t scrubbed. Sloppy work. Or maybe just rushed. It takes hours and a few tricks I’m not proud of, but eventually, the ID pings back to an access node tied to Dr. Felix Rourke’s override desk.
I sit still for a long time.
Then I laugh.
Of course it’s him.
The man who signs off on every funding loophole, who turns a blind eye to discrepancies as long as the data keeps flowing, and the board stays impressed. Rourke didn’t just know Harper was feeding someone. He helped her.
I lean back, crack my knuckles, and let the weight of the revelation settle like gunpowder in my lungs.
Rourke is orchestrating this, which means Celeste isn’t just a subject to Harper.
She’s a target.
I rewire a few subroutines in my personal monitoring grid, set new motion alerts outside Rourke’s private office, and pull power logs from his network. They’ll tell me when he’s online, when he’s asleep, and more importantly, when he’s deleting something.
Because if he suspects I’m looking, he’ll cover his tracks.
But I’ll already be there.
