Page 85 of Fractured Devotion
The three of us stand there for a moment. It’s reckless, and it’s borderline suicidal.
But it’s also the first plan that feels like it might work.
We split again right after because it’s safer that way. Too much proximity, and we’ll get flagged, tracked. One pattern deviation, and the wrong eyes will start watching.
I take the elevator up to the diagnostics wing to stall. I make it look like a routine check-in. Rourke has eyes everywhere, and it doesn’t take much for paranoia to bloom into consequence.
When I pass the east corridor, I catch Kade leaning against the window near the stairwell with his phone in hand, his eyes scanning the courtyard below like he’s waiting for a ghost to appear.
He sees me.
I don’t stop, but I feel the weight of his gaze lock onto me.
I head straight for the testing lab and log in to the terminal just to keep up appearances. For the next thirty minutes, I review meaningless diagnostics until the system logs confirm Celeste has returned to her office.
Then I slide my badge, exit the wing, and double back to the sub-basement archive room, one of the only places left without a live feed.
Reyes meets me there fifteen minutes later, pale, the sound gone out of him.
“I pulled a scrape from the legacy server,” he whispers. “It’s worse than we thought.”
He hands me a slim drive.
I plug it in, and the files load.
Trial 14: Subject Conditioning Parameters. Trial 14: Behavioral Reinforcement Loops. Trial 14: Memory Submersion & Fragmentation.
My throat tightens as I scroll.
Celeste’s name is on every single one.
I look at Reyes. His voice is tight when he says, “She’s been in it from the beginning, Alec. This wasn’t a continuation.”
“It was the plan all along.”
“Yeah.” He nods grimly. “And someone made sure she’d never know it.”
We exchange a look.
We need to move faster.
Because if Kade suspects what we’re doing, we’re already too late.
The elevator ride back up is slow. Too slow. I keep my hands tucked in my pockets, but my brain is spinning.
Reyes walks a few steps behind me, keeping a casual distance. We look like coworkers on break, not two men carrying the key to a buried crime.
We go our separate ways again at the lab wing. I take the far corridor that leads toward central administration, just to throw off any potential tail. The weight of the drive in my pocket feels like it’s dragging gravity with it.
I stop by the second-floor supply closet, pull out my tablet, and encrypt the files Reyes gave me into three separate directories, masking them beneath maintenance report codes. One copy goes into a hidden folder I’ve been using for years. Another, I upload to a private cloud that’s encrypted beyond belief, and the third, I bury inside a public diagnostic cache with a fragmented key I’ll deliver later.
It’s not enough. But it’s something.
A ping flashes across my screen. It’s a message.
Unknown ID:You’re pulling at threads that don’t belong to you.
I freeze.
