Page 11 of Fractured Devotion
“You’ll find this place adapts faster than it welcomes,” she says.
A brief silence stretches between us as she shifts a folder from one arm to the other. I watch the way her fingers press into the cover—tight, possessive.
“See you at the briefing later,” I say.
She offers a faint smile. “Of course.”
I nod once more and keep walking, but not before I catalog everything—the cadence of her voice, the way her breath quickens before she speaks, and the glint in her eyes when she thinks she has the upper hand.
She’s every bit the enigma I expected.
And she’s only just begun to unfold.
It’s past noon now, and the post-lunch hush is settling over the clinic halls. I’m returning from a brief walk under the guise of a break, though I haven’t eaten a thing. It was all just steps and thoughts.
On my way back to the control hub, I spot her again—Celeste. She’s not alone.
There’s a man with her this time, a broad-shouldered man with a demeanor too comfortable around her to be casual. They stand close, not touching, but the air between them feels charged. He says something that makes her smile—not the tight-lipped one she gives to colleagues, but something closer to softness. Familiarity.
I slow my steps, watching from a reflection in the polished wall. He touches her arm lightly, and she doesn’t pull away. Instead, she looks at him, something complicated flickering in her eyes.
Who the hell is he?
Later, I see him again near the stairwell. This time, he’s alone. We pass each other.
“You must be the new security guy,” he says, pausing.
“Kade,” I offer.
“Alec. I used to work here, alongside Celeste… years ago. Glad to see the place is tightening its defenses.”
I nod, filing away every detail. His voice, his watch, and the way he glances back over his shoulder.
Used to. Right.
Everyone leaves marks. I just have to figure out which ones she still bleeds from.
The rest of the day blurs. My updates to the network system are ahead of schedule, which means I’m left with too much time and not enough restraint. I rewatch one of the boardroom feeds again.
I watch the way Celeste’s fingers flex when someone uses the term “neural resonance,” and the way she doesn’t blink when Alec looks at her like she’s a war wound he can’t stop tending.
I track her movements across the clinic. She’s intentional, mechanical almost, except in the moments when she thinks no one’s watching. Like when she reads a line of notes and bites her lower lip. Or when she pauses outside the break room door as if bracing against the noise inside.
But she doesn’t let anyone in. Not fully. Not even herself.
I don’t have access to her apartment feeds yet. The firewall is older than the clinic’s newest architecture. Probably her doing. I’ve placed soft access nodes in the ceiling vents near her quarters, but they need proximity syncing.
So I wait.
And while I wait, I study. Every motion, every change in gait, every coded nuance in her voice recordings. Her logs, her errata, and the journal entries I pull from system redundancies that she doesn’t realize still exist.
She once wrote about a lullaby and said it was the last song she remembered before the fracture. She said it echoed in her chest when she couldn’t breathe.
I find the audio file. It’s old and warped. I loop it. And I listen.
And then I write:“Subject-0: Fractured Devotion. Analysis ongoing.”
By nightfall, the hallways thin out as people leave. I slip through the underbelly of Miramont, past dormant offices and humming server bays. The air smells like cold copper and recycled air. I pass Harper DuVall, one of the new interns, if Mara’s onboarding list is accurate, in the west stairwell. She doesn’t see me. She’s biting her thumbnail and pacing like she’s afraid to be still. Noted.
