Page 148 of Fractured Devotion
I shut the door behind me and flip the deadbolt out of reflex. The room smells like warm plastic and faint electricity. My eyes go straight to the decoy terminal in the corner, the one I tucked the ghost drive into. It’s still there. Still blinking.
I don’t touch it. Not yet.
Instead, I sit down, close my eyes, and run my hand over my face. The weight of her presence still clings to my skin, like a touch I haven’t earned. And maybe never will.
She looked at me differently this morning.
Not with trust.
Not with fear.
But with calculation.
Like she’d started to understand just how deep I’d already cut into her. And how much deeper I’m willing to go.
I shouldn’t want her to figure it out.
But part of me does.
Part of me needs her to know how fucked up this whole thing is and needs her to look at me and say it, to say she sees it. So I can finally stop pretending that I don’t care.
I grab a pill from the bedside drawer, dry swallow it, and lie back.
But I don’t sleep.
Because in three hours, I’m supposed to meet her again.
And this time, I won’t be the one watching.
Two hours later, I’m still wide awake, tracing the contours of the ceiling with my eyes. I can’t shut it off—my brain, my nerves, my need.
I sit up, grab the decoy terminal, and pull the chair close. The ghost drive fits into the port like a needle into skin. Smooth. I open the cloned files and scroll through directories, watching the coded strings pulse across the screen.
Folders open like confessionals. They’re not hers exactly, more like hers filtered through layers of project scripts, system patches, and emotional triggers.
A few tagged logs sit at the bottom of the directory.
ARCHIVE_ECHO-10X03
OBS-SIGNAL-RED7
USER-TAG-C0Z
My fingers freeze over the last one.
C0Z.
My mouth goes dry. That’s not her current tag. That’s not an active identifier.
That’s a legacy string. It’s one I’ve only seen once, back when I was granted root access to the earliest Echo dev builds. Before the clinic rebooted and before her name was public.
I click it.
The file unfolds.
It’s a video.
It’s grainy with low resolution. It’s also timestamped and borderline corrupted. I see a small room with white walls. A child—dark-haired, no older than eight—sits against the corner. Her knees are tucked to her chest, and there’s a mask on the table beside her. A voice behind the camera says, “Trigger B.”
