Page 98 of Fractured Devotion
Then I see it. Right before the cut. Harper. She’s standing near the terminal outside Rourke’s door.
And after the cut? Gone.
My jaw clenches, and the skin behind my ears tightens like someone strung a cord there.
She was there.
And she’s part of it.
But still, she’s not the one pulling strings. She’s the one dancing on a leash.
I make a decision I know I’ll regret.
I start to build a new archive. One that Celeste can’t ignore.
All the logs, the footage, and the metadata. Encrypted and clean, with no commentary and no manipulation. Just enough to let her walk to the edge of the truth herself.
And then I’ll be there when the floor crumbles.
She’ll either lean into me.
Or she’ll run screaming.
And God help me, I’m not sure which I want more.
I seal the new archive inside a hidden node only Celeste can access. One tied to her retinal scan and buried beneath a mundane research folder labeled as “Autoimmune echo resonance.”
She won’t find it right away.
But she’s not stupid. And curiosity is a far more potent drug than trust.
She’ll look eventually.
I close the console and take the back corridors toward the east wing exit, careful not to trip any motion alerts or get caught on late-night admin patrols.
The hall outside the observation chamber still smells faintly like antiseptic and ozone, the synthetic signature of trauma cleaned too fast. My boots make no sound against the tile.
I pause by the door to her old lab, the one we’ve both been pretending doesn’t exist for a week now.
Just for a second.
Because even now, even after all I’ve done and all I still plan to do, I still want to be close to her.
But not to touch yet. And not to speak to either.
Just to see and be around her.
But I turn away.
Because it’s not time.
Not yet.
I know she’s in her upstairs apartment. She hasn’t drawn the blinds in two nights. She sits at the edge of her bed like she’s waiting for something, or deciding who to stop trusting next. And I watch from a grainy corner of the feed, not because I enjoy it, but because silence is more revealing than speech.
But I don’t go to her. Not yet.
I step into the night instead, the cold swallowing me whole. The air smells like sterilizer and distant electricity. I could stay and push and gamble it all with a knock at her door. But if I force it, I lose everything.
