Page 126 of Fractured Devotion
“Jesus.”
“There’s more.” He zooms in on the week before Harper died. “She pulled two system backups, both from terminated research branches. One of them matches a locked subroutine buried in your archived diagnostics.”
I frown. “Mine?”
Reyes taps the pad. “Your early biomarker conditioning trials. The ones you flagged for ethical review.”
“She lifted my work?”
“Or someone gave it to her,” Reyes says.
A cold dread climbs up my spine.
We’re not just chasing rogue behavior.
We’re tracing a pattern, one built from inside this place, using us and twisting pieces of everything we once thought was safe.
I turn toward the terminal again. “We need to shut down the backlogs. All of them. Scrub every node from the past month and start cross-referencing who accessed them. If this ties back to any current projects—”
“Already on it,” Reyes says, typing furiously.
The deeper we dig, the less this feels like curiosity or sabotage.
It feels like scripting.
Like someone ran a simulation of Celeste’s trauma in real time.
And Harper was the one pressing play.
I lean back from the terminal, rubbing my eyes with the heel of my hand. My thoughts are turning too fast, and none of them are settling in the right direction. The worst part? I don’t even know what the right direction is anymore.
Reyes speaks before I do. “We’re not going to be able to sit on this for long.”
“No,” I say. “But we need to tread carefully. We’re circling something that looks like a trigger, not just evidence.”
“You think it’s still live?”
I nod. “Harper was using test environments to activate neural responses. If even one of those routines slipped into the live Echo feed, it could be doing more damage than we realize.”
“Celeste?”
I pause. “She hasn’t been sleeping right. Her readings show stress cycling every ninety minutes. Either she’s caught ina loop or something is keeping her on edge. We can’t ignore the possibility that she’s being influenced.”
Reyes exhales sharply. “You think Harper meant to do that?”
“I don’t think she knew what she was doing. I think someone fed her just enough data to feel empowered. She was messing with variables she didn’t understand.”
He frowns. “And whoever fed her…?”
“Is still out there. Maybe closer than we think.”
We both fall silent, listening to the soft hum of the room. Somewhere behind us, one of the backups finishes indexing with a dull chime. I reach for the console again, but my hand stops short. My stomach clenches.
“What is it?” Reyes asks.
I pull up the metadata from Harper’s terminal sessions. A specific access code flags red. It doesn’t belong to her. It’s someone with elevated clearance.
I freeze.
