Page 18 of Fractured Devotion
By 7.30 a.m., the clinic comes alive. Hallways bloom with orderly chaos—nurses shuffling carts, interns spilling caffeine,researchers clutching encrypted tablets like lifelines. I slip into the rhythm seamlessly. I’m not seen. I’m scanned and forgotten.
I make my rounds, checking sensors that don’t need checking. When I pass Alec Rennick in the north stairwell, he barely glances at me. Good. I prefer the edges. But I log his presence, just the same.
Then I see her.
Celeste enters from the west wing side, her hair swept into a knot, her tailored coat drawn tight. Her mouth is set, unreadable. She stops to exchange words with a nurse outside the cognitive lab—Juliet, I think—but her eyes flick toward the upper floors. The backup apartment. A thread of tension coils under my skin.
She knows something.
Or maybe shefeelsit.
Either way, it puts me on alert.
I duck into a side corridor and trigger the hallway feed from her apartment upstairs, just to make sure everything I planted stays intact and hidden, skimming footage from the night again. Nothing. There are no alerts. No signs of disturbance. But she’s not easily fooled. That’s what makes this interesting.
I return to the control hub, the soft whirr of cooling fans and muted screens wrapping around me like a second skin. It’s still early. The scent of stale coffee lingers, and the first stirrings of the morning shift echo faintly down the corridor.
I check the feeds out of habit, but there’s only one I care about. Celeste. The image flickers once before it sharpens. She’s at her desk now, a soft halo of light spilling over her shoulders. She’s not working. She’s sitting still, one hand resting lightly over a closed file, her eyes on nothing. Not the screen. Not the data. Just… silence.
She moves slowly. Elegantly. Her fingers trail over her temple, brushing a stray strand of hair back into place. It’s not the action that gets me. It’s the tenderness of it. The kind of absent gesture one makes when they think they’re unobserved. That intimacy of solitude.
She reaches for her mug, lifts it, and pauses halfway. She stares into it like it might whisper a secret back. Her mouth doesn’t move, but her expression shifts subtly. A flicker of sorrow, maybe. Or memory.
I zoom the feed tighter, my breath shallow.
I notice the way her lips part ever so slightly, the tilt of her neck, the faint dark circles beneath her eyes.
I shouldn’t notice these things. But I do.
I’m not cataloguing behavior now. I’m watching the woman, not the subject. And it’s dangerous.
I shut the feed off abruptly, my breath sharp in my chest.
Obsession creeps in with small permissions. I won’t give it more, at least not until after lunch.
I lean back, my eyes burning, and glance at the time. It’s mid-morning. The rest of the clinic is finally stirring and getting to full speed. And I’ve seen enough.
For now.
Before lunch, I meet with Rourke. He’s planted in his glass-walled office like a spider in a web, his eyes sharp over folded fingers.
“You’re ahead of schedule,” he says, his tone unreadable.
“Progress takes shape when you leave people alone long enough to show their fractures,” I reply.
He chuckles once. “And?”
“She’s unraveling. Slowly. But definitely.”
Rourke exhales through his nose, then leans back slightly, his fingers steepled. “I wasn’t honest with you when we first started this.”
I don’t speak. I just wait.
“There’s something buried in her early research… before the tribunal, before the revisions. Notes that never made it to the public archive. Concepts beyond redirection and into neural overwrite. If she kept copies, they’d be encrypted and hidden. But if she’s building anything off them now…”
His voice trails, heavy with implication.
I nod once. “You think she’s picking up where she left off.”
