Page 124 of Fractured Devotion
It’s still hers.
And now, so am I.
Tomorrow, I’ll make my move. I’ll intercept Rourke, set a decoy path, and protect what little of her hasn’t already been dissected by vultures in white coats.
But for now, I let myself fall apart, softly enough that she’ll never notice.
Chapter 39 – Alec - Files We Burn
The sun hasn’t risen yet, but Reyes is already waiting for me in the diagnostics bay. The monitors cast a soft blue glow across his face, making him look older than he did yesterday. He’s holding a datapad and frowning like it personally offended him.
“You were right,” he says as I step inside.
I raise an eyebrow. “About what?”
He turns the screen toward me. “Harper’s files. They weren’t just emotional logs and voice notes. I found a fragment of early Echo code buried in the audio backups. Really old stuff. It looks like it was part of the 5.0 prototype line.”
I step closer, my eyes scanning the string. It’s messy. Old architecture patched with newer logic jumps. But I recognize the bones.
“You think she planted it?” I ask.
Reyes nods. “That’s my guess. It wasn’t active, not doing anything on its own. But if someone accessed it remotely, it could be used to pull responses from the subject. Emotional cues, chemical shifts. Nothing precise, but…”
“But enough to influence how she reacts,” I finish for him.
He sighs. “Exactly. There’s no proof it was ever used that way, but the structure’s there.”
I fold my arms. “Do we know who gave it to her?”
“No. There’s no signature in the code. And the encryption she used? Sloppy. It’s like she rushed to hide it, not like someone trained her to keep it buried.”
“She was panicking,” I say.
“Probably. But this wasn’t a random mistake. Someone told her how to set up this kind of code fragment. Maybe she got in over her head.”
I exhale hard. “So she might’ve been watching Celeste. Or testing her. But not out of malice?”
Reyes shrugs. “Fear, maybe. Or obsession. It’s hard to say. There are a lot of gaps.”
I pull the pad closer, copying the data to the terminal beside us. The visuals render slowly—heartbeat graphs, neurochemical spikes, and minor facial pattern data.
Nothing concrete.
Nothing that says who was pulling the strings.
But something was.
And Harper was part of it.
“She knew more than she let on,” I say.
“Yeah,” Reyes agrees. “And she was hiding it. Maybe from Celeste. Maybe from someone else.”
“Do we tell her?”
Reyes hesitates. “Not yet. Let’s find out what else she was hiding first.”
Reyes steps away to initiate a deeper scan, and I stay behind, watching the lines of code scroll down the screen. The hush is dense, not the calm of peace but the strain before something gives way.
