Page 56 of Fractured Devotion
“Didn’t say. Just said she needed isolation for a neural audit. But I checked the queue. There’s no audit scheduled today.”
I give a measured nod.
Mara hesitates. “Dr. Rennick, I think she’s looking for something. Or someone.”
The way she says it makes my stomach turn.
“Watch her file logs,” I say. “And keep an eye on Rourke’s admin threads. Any flag requests and anything encrypted.”
She nods once and vanishes into the shadows.
Back in my office, I open the secure shell I created months ago. It’s a ghost branch of Miramont’s primary diagnostics system. It’s invisible to admin oversight, and it tells me one thing:
Someone has been accessing neural pattern simulations outside sanctioned hours.
Three times in the last week.
The logs don’t show anything conclusive, but the sequences are too closely tied to Trial 14 to ignore.
And the edits are careful. Almost too careful.
I narrow my eyes and start compiling cross-references. The gaps between timestamps. The deviations in trial variable coding. Nothing screams sabotage, but something about the formatting and its familiarity doesn’t sit right.
Before I can dig deeper, a call pings through the internal line. It’s Rourke.
I take a breath before answering. “Dr. Rourke.”
His voice cuts through the line, clipped and precise. “Rennick. Do you know where Dr. Varon is?”
I hesitate. “She’s been keeping to the sub-levels lately. Working on refinement trials.”
“Alone?”
“Yes. Mostly during off-hours. But she’s producing.”
A pause stretches between us, then Rourke exhales. “That doesn’t answer the question. She’s not submitting formal logs. There are no public updates, no briefings. That’s not sustainable.”
“She’s close. The work she’s doing… it’s meticulous. Quiet, but important.”
“Close doesn’t keep our funding, Rennick. We need deliverables. Trial 14 has lingered far too long in ambiguity.”
“She’s moving forward. Just slower than we’d like. But I’ve seen her adjustments. They’re sound.”
“I want formal updates by the end of the quarter. If I don’t see concrete progress—fully vetted protocol documents—we’ll reallocate her access. And her authority.”
The line cuts without ceremony.
I stare at the terminal, my jaw tight. Rourke’s pressure is mounting, and it’s clear he’s watching not just Celeste but me too.
I’m worried. But there are no answers yet. Not from Celeste, not from the system, and not even from the scattered indicators left behind in neural session logs. There are just signals—disjointed and too clean, like someone’s scrubbing data as fast as it appears. Anomalies.
There are clues that don’t fit the rest of the clinic’s rhythm—the way her access patterns shift slightly out of sync with staffschedules, the missed logs that vanish without raising alarms, the whispered conversations that never show up on official transcripts. Nothing blatant. Nothing provable. But just enough to set my instincts on edge.
The rest of the evening passes in a haze of noise and absence. I cycle through diagnostics, sit in on two briefings I barely absorb, and respond to three different inter-department queries I don’t even remember opening.
Everything functions. I function. But every task feels hollow, like motion without purpose. I sit through meetings I can’t recall the details of and shuffle through diagnostics that blur into meaningless patterns, and yet all I can think of is the way she looked this morning—still, frayed, and fragile in a way she never lets anyone see.
By the time I log out for the night, worries about her have nested somewhere deep under my ribs, pulsing with the certainty that nothing about this is incidental. I don’t see her for the rest of the day.
