Page 43 of Fractured Devotion (Tainted Souls #1)

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?”

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.

The more I look, the more I’m convinced Harper wasn’t just collecting this. She was reacting to something, anticipating something. It’s like her files were prepped for someone else to find, either to warn them or mislead them. Maybe both.

I dig through her backup logs, opening old session reviews. A few are timestamped during hours she claimed to be asleep, which sends a new chill through me.

“Reyes,” I call out.

He returns fast, his eyes narrowing. “You find something?”

“Maybe. These sessions were saved manually in the middle of the night. It doesn’t match the schedule she submitted. Someone was in the system, and it wasn’t for standard recording.”

He takes the terminal from me, squinting at the logs. “She had admin clearance?”

“No. But she had Celeste’s temporary clearance from the last sync.”

Reyes clicks his tongue. “Then she was snooping.”

“More than that. Look at this.” I highlight a segment where the Echo environment registered a spike in system load. At the same time, Celeste’s vitals spiked too.

A dream. Or something worse.

Reyes hums under his breath. “She could’ve triggered it. Echo listens. It always has.”

“And we never saw it because it didn’t trigger a threat protocol.”

“Too subtle.”

I lean back in the chair. “Then we need to see how far this went. If Harper was testing something or running partial loops, we need to know what it was doing to Celeste.”

Reyes gives a single nod. “I’ll start compiling a threat map. But if there’s more buried in the backups, it’s going to take hours.”

“Start with the nights she was most off-pattern. Any deviations from routine. We map the behavior, and we’ll find the breach.”

He pauses before turning away. “If this gets traced back to someone outside the clinic…”

I meet his gaze. “Then we deal with it. But not before we understand it.”

He walks off, and I stare at the last line of the log—Harper’s final session, never submitted, never edited.

It’s just a title.

CELESTIA.v0

And for the first time, I wonder if she wasn’t watching Celeste.

Maybe she was trying to become her.

I close Harper’s final log but leave the file open in the background. Something about it—CELESTIA.v0—won’t let go. It’s not just a name. It feels like a beginning, or maybe a warning.

The lab lights dim slightly with the automated cycle shift, and I stretch the tension out of my shoulders, already feeling the early pangs of a migraine clawing at my temples.

I glance toward the far end of the room, where Reyes has moved to another terminal.

He’s got two holos pulled up, one mapping system anomalies over the last six weeks, and the other showing patterns of biometric deviation.

Even from here, I can tell it’s not clean.

There are too many spikes and too many alignments that shouldn’t naturally occur.

“Do we have a common anchor point yet?” I ask as I approach.

Reyes shakes his head. “Nothing direct. But look at this.”

He overlays the biometric plot onto the schedule of Harper’s last known lab activities. The fit isn’t perfect, but it’s close enough to make my chest tighten.

“She was accessing Echo’s test environment after hours,” he says. “And running isolated simulations. Mostly within non-invasive thresholds. But she was targeting Celeste’s neural ID. Over and over again.”

“Jesus.”

“There’s more.” He zooms in on the week before Harper died. “She pulled two system backups, both from terminated research branches. One of them matches a locked subroutine buried in your archived diagnostics.”

I frown. “Mine?”

Reyes taps the pad. “Your early biomarker conditioning trials. The ones you flagged for ethical review.”

“She lifted my work?”

“Or someone gave it to her,” Reyes says.

A cold dread climbs up my spine.

We’re not just chasing rogue behavior.

We’re tracing a pattern, one built from inside this place, using us and twisting pieces of everything we once thought was safe.

I turn toward the terminal again. “We need to shut down the backlogs. All of them. Scrub every node from the past month and start cross-referencing who accessed them. If this ties back to any current projects—”

“Already on it,” Reyes says, typing furiously.

The deeper we dig, the less this feels like curiosity or sabotage.

It feels like scripting.

Like someone ran a simulation of Celeste’s trauma in real time.

And Harper was the one pressing play.

I lean back from the terminal, rubbing my eyes with the heel of my hand. My thoughts are turning too fast, and none of them are settling in the right direction. The worst part? I don’t even know what the right direction is anymore.

Reyes speaks before I do. “We’re not going to be able to sit on this for long.”

“No,” I say. “But we need to tread carefully. We’re circling something that looks like a trigger, not just evidence.”

“You think it’s still live?”

I nod. “Harper was using test environments to activate neural responses. If even one of those routines slipped into the live Echo feed, it could be doing more damage than we realize.”

“Celeste?”

I pause. “She hasn’t been sleeping right. Her readings show stress cycling every ninety minutes. Either she’s caught in a loop or something is keeping her on edge. We can’t ignore the possibility that she’s being influenced.”

Reyes exhales sharply. “You think Harper meant to do that?”

“I don’t think she knew what she was doing. I think someone fed her just enough data to feel empowered. She was messing with variables she didn’t understand.”

He frowns. “And whoever fed her…?”

“Is still out there. Maybe closer than we think.”

We both fall silent, listening to the soft hum of the room. Somewhere behind us, one of the backups finishes indexing with a dull chime. I reach for the console again, but my hand stops short. My stomach clenches.

“What is it?” Reyes asks.

I pull up the metadata from Harper’s terminal sessions. A specific access code flags red. It doesn’t belong to her. It’s someone with elevated clearance.

I freeze.

It’s not Celeste. It’s not Reyes.

And it’s not mine.

“We’ve got a ghost user,” I say.

Reyes’ jaw tightens. “Someone was logging in under restricted access?”

“Worse. Someone with root override. Someone who’s not listed on the current staff directory.”

“That narrows it down.”

“No, it doesn’t.” I stare at the ID string. “This login hasn’t been used in almost a decade. It predates Miramont’s current structure.”

Reyes stiffens. “You think it’s an old developer?”

I shake my head. “I think it’s someone who never left.”

I pull the ghost user’s credentials into a sandbox environment, isolate the metadata, and start dissecting every trace it left behind.

There isn’t much. The user’s activity logs are fragmented, and some of the file timestamps have been deliberately blurred, as if someone knew how to corrupt the audit trail just enough to raise suspicion without offering clarity.

Reyes looks over my shoulder, the tension in his silence louder than any alarm.

“You think this account was used to manipulate Harper?” he finally asks.

I nod. “It lines up. The logins started just before Harper’s behavior changed, right when she got clingy and desperate.”

“And paranoid,” Reyes adds.

“She was talking to someone,” I say. “Someone feeding her these scripts, giving her access, and nudging her to test things she didn’t understand.”

He crosses his arms. “That means she wasn’t acting alone.”

“No. But I don’t think she knew the full picture either. Whoever it was, they used her. They gave her just enough to feel important. Then left her to spiral.”

Reyes mutters under his breath, “Classic grooming strategy.”

I lean back, staring at the ceiling. The weight of it settles in my chest like wet concrete.

“If we’re right, Harper might’ve been the canary.”

Reyes tilts his head. “You mean she didn’t crack the system. She warned us it was already cracked.”

“She was the first one to fracture under pressure. And now she’s dead.”

The silence stretches.

“What do we do?” Reyes asks, his voice low.

I look back at the ghost login, the half-buried script, and the tangled mess of Harper’s final digital footprint.

“We track it discreetly. No flags, no alerts. Whoever’s behind this is watching for movement, so we give them silence instead.”

“And Celeste?”

“She stays out of this until we know more. She’s already carrying too much.”

Reyes nods, reluctant but agreeing.

As he walks away to start the trace, I minimize the logs and stare at the blank desktop screen. My reflection glimmers faintly.

I don’t know who the ghost is.

But I know what they want.

Control.

And they’re willing to burn anyone who stands in their way.