Page 20 of Fractured Devotion (Tainted Souls #1)

I haven’t seen Celeste since lunch. She disappeared again mid-shift. No word, no alert. Her terminal logged off just before one.

I told myself not to worry. Told myself she’s not mine to worry over.

But it doesn’t stop the weight in my chest.

The hallway outside her lab is dim. There’s no light under the door. No trace of movement.

I don’t knock. I just stand there for a moment, my jaw tight, my fingers twitching with questions I know she won’t answer.

There’s been tension in the clinic lately. A sharpening. There’s something about the way Rourke has been moving, the sudden staff rotations, the security protocols that change without notice, and Kade.

He’s always exactly where you don’t expect him.

Yesterday, I watched him walk out of Celeste’s office. He didn’t linger. He just closed the door gently behind him and nodded at me as he passed. But there was something in the way he looked, as if he already knew what I was thinking.

I went into her office five minutes later. Nothing looked out of place, but she wasn’t there.

And neither was the flash drive.

She keeps it close now. I don’t blame her.

But something’s unraveling. I can feel it in the gaps, the missed calls, the short, clipped answers, and the way she flinches when someone enters a room too fast.

The door behind me creaks.

Mara.

“She went down to the sub-level,” she says cautiously. “Alone.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Why?”

“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 staff schedules, 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.

Not in Diagnostics, not during the hallway check-ins, and not even in the staff lounge. It’s like she’s vanished into the infrastructure, only traceable through log entries and whispered speculation.

And the more I don’t see her, the more I feel the weight of it—not just worry, but something colder and heavier, like watching a line go taut before the pull. The silence around her absence becomes the loudest thing in my day. And tomorrow, I’ll need to be earlier, closer. Ready.

The next morning, I arrive early, too early for anyone to be in the hallways. The lights flicker awake as I move, their hum loud in the stillness. In the breakroom, I find her.

Celeste stands by the vending machine, her fingers resting lightly on the glass as though she’s forgotten why she came.

She looks thinner, and her coat hangs looser than usual. There’s a deep, restless fatigue carved beneath her eyes.

I hesitate in the doorway, then step closer. “Celeste.”

She turns, no surprise on her face. Just recognition.

“You’re early,” she says.

“So are you.”

We walk the corridor in silence. The clinic feels like it’s caught in a pause. When we reach the lounge, she sits on the edge of the bench, her elbows on her knees. Ink stains the cuff of her sleeve, and a crumpled napkin flutters beside her foot.

I sit too, at a careful distance.

She doesn’t speak at first. She just stares at a broken hair tie on the table between us.

“I’ve missed seeing you around,” I say.

When she replies, her voice is flat. “Some people are watching and monitoring my moves. Bit by bit. And I’m letting them.”

There’s no fear in her tone. Only exhaustion.

I inch my hand across the table, stopping just short of hers. “Then maybe it’s time someone watched back.”

She finally lifts her gaze to mine.

And I see it. The weight she’s carrying. The fire that hasn’t gone out.

I don’t need to ask what she’s hiding.

I just need to stay close enough to catch what falls.

After our exchange in the lounge, I don’t push, and Celeste doesn’t offer more. But something’s shifted. There’s a wariness to her silence, but not the kind that shuts people out completely. It’s more like a door she’s left cracked, just enough.

We part ways near Diagnostics. She nods once, her eyes distant, then turns and disappears around the bend. I don’t follow. I never do. But I stay just long enough to watch the last thread of her coat vanish.

Later in the day, I check the logs again.

There’s nothing alarming, just more subtle signs. Her ID pinged in archives for twenty-three minutes. Then again near Lab 6, with no terminal login. I cross-check motion sensors and timestamps. No one else was near her either time.

By mid-afternoon, I’m back in my office, a neural map still blinking on the secondary screen. But I’m not really reviewing it. My focus slides, again and again, back to her pattern and how clean it’s gotten. Too clean.

The trouble with brilliant minds is that they know how to cover their tracks better than most. And Celeste is nothing if not brilliant.

A soft knock on my door startles me. It’s Mara.

She steps in without waiting for an invitation, her expression tight. “Just came from the eastern access node,” she says. “There’s something weird in the system logs. A looped camera feed. It’s short, only three seconds. But it plays over and over like someone patched it in to hide a moment.”

I frown. “Which corridor?”

“One level below the diagnostics wing. Near Storage B12. She was on that floor this morning.”

I run a hand down my jaw. “Pull the full loop. See if there’s a timing mismatch with the sensor grid. If someone’s hiding, they’re not doing it amateurishly. It could be admin-level interference.”

Mara nods and says, “I’ll flag it. Where no one will see it coming.”

When she leaves, I lean back in my chair and stare at the ceiling for a long time.

There’s an undeclared war happening beneath the surface here. One that we’re all dancing around without naming.

And Celeste… she’s in the middle of it. Or maybe she’s always been the target.

I don’t know yet. But I will.

I close the map, launch a new script to trace old neural session overlays, and set an alert for her ID.

Tomorrow, I won’t wait for coincidence.

Tomorrow, I’ll follow the patterns wherever they lead.

Even if it’s straight into the dark.