Page 9 of Fractured Devotion
I hum the lullaby again—soft, fractured.
But it’s different tonight. It’s not comforting. Not grounding.
I somehow have the feeling of being watched.
Even here, inside my own skin, something feels… inhabited.
The light above the vanity flickers.
And I wonder, briefly, if I imagined it.
Or if something… someone… is learning how to blink.
The water turns tepid as I remain in the tub, watching steam curl like breath from a wounded throat. Eventually, I force myself out, wrap myself in a towel, and sit at the edge of the bed with damp hair clinging to my back.
I should sleep. But instead, I reach for the tablet on my nightstand and tap into the clinic’s closed system. Just a check. Just a quick review of Subject 17’s chart.
The logs are clean—too clean. Almost sterile. Harper’s correction from earlier sits near the bottom. I open the overlay and study the waveform distortion she flagged. It’s minor, yes, but there’s a nuance in the drift. It mimics a neuro-exhaustion tremor I’ve only seen in patients undergoing unauthorized stimulatory feedback.
That shouldn’t be possible, not unless someone tampered with the sedation protocol.
I cross-reference logs, and a timestamp pings red. 02:03 a.m. A system override? There’s no matching authorization trail. My breath catches in my throat. There’s no video footage and no room access registered. Just the edit.
No way to know who did it. At least not yet.
My fingers hover above the screen, itching to flag it, to report it.
But instead, I encrypt a private note and bury the anomaly deep within my personal files. It’s second nature by now—almost every staff at the clinic goes through compulsory coding and encryption training during induction.
They say it’s to streamline patient security protocols, but everyone knows the real reason. It keeps us self-reliant. No waiting around for IT when something urgent surfaces. And no loose ends outside the clinic.
I need more. One breach doesn’t make a pattern. But if it shows up again…
I close the tablet, slide beneath the sheets, and stare into the half-dark, wide awake.
Outside, the generators hum again. A familiar, surgical lullaby.
Something’s changing inside the clinic.
Inside me.
Sleep remains elusive. I lie still, staring up at the ceiling as shadows crawl across it in slow, patient strokes. There’s a little insistence in the air, as though the walls themselves have begun to hold their breath.
I think of Harper, of her nervous glance and how carefully she tried to please. Then, I think of Kade’s unsettling stillness in the boardroom, of Alec’s unreadable silence, and of Rourke, always the spider in the corner, waiting.
The clinic is pulsing with secrets.
And I am too tired to chase them.
For now.
So I close my eyes and let the lullaby in my mind stretch thinly across the dark as sleep takes me under one breath at a time.
Chapter 4 – Kade - Fracture Codes
It’s still dark when I rise. It’s the kind of darkness that folds over you, thick and soundless, like a cloth pulled tight around the neck. I haven’t slept, not in the way people mean when they talk about rest. I’ve been watching, always watching.
Three days have passed since the blackout, one that the clinic blamed on a system-wide calibration surge. But I know better. It wasn’t planned by me, though I wish it had been. That flicker, that moment of chaos, was a crack in their perfect wall, and it revealed more than just technical vulnerability. It exposed timing. Fear. Silence.
