Page 45 of Fractured Devotion (Tainted Souls #1)

I haven’t spoken to anyone since I left Kade’s office. Not Reyes, not Alec, not even Mara. The walls of Miramont are a bit soundless now. Or maybe I’ve just tuned the frequency of the world out. It’s easier to move through these corridors when you pretend you’re part of the architecture.

I sleep in my lab now, but not deeply. Not restfully.

Just enough to stave off collapse. I prop my chair against the diagnostics console, curl under a lab coat I don’t remember folding, and close my eyes to the hum of still-running equipment.

The scent of sterile metal and faint cleaning agents lulls me better than any sedative.

The flash drive never leaves my pocket, not even when I sleep.

I’ve stopped replaying the file, but it replays itself inside my skull in perfect fidelity. Every time, the hallway lights flicker. And every time, I hear a door click shut. Then, the sound of the closet, the humming, and the scream. My scream.

What disturbs me most isn’t the footage. It’s how familiar it feels.

I should’ve been horrified. And I was. But underneath that was something else. A bitter certainty. Like finding a scar you didn’t know you had and realizing it’s been there the whole time, just hidden under better pain.

I start mapping again.

Not data.

Not test subjects.

I map my memories.

I draw them out in digital schematics, overlay them against the Echo logs, and align my timelines against the system triggers. It’s a new form of self-diagnosis. A science of unburying.

And what do I find?

Patterns. But not random ones. Instead, I find installed ones.

Conditioned responses to stimuli.

Some subtle. Some blunt.

And many of them were implanted long before Kade entered the picture.

Which means he wasn’t the architect.

He was just another engineer.

And I? I was the lab.

The test.

The proof.

I sit back in my chair, my eyes burning, my breath shallow.

No one should ever be trained to respond to trauma with arousal.

And yet.

My body remembers.

That isn’t healing. It’s programming.

And I intend to trace it back to its source, brick by brick, lie by lie.

Because I don’t want to dismantle the system anymore.

I want to watch it burn.

I see Alec twice in the hallway before either of us speaks.

The first time, he’s walking out of a post-op debrief, his face drawn. He doesn’t stop when he sees me. He just gives me a tight nod and keeps going.

The second time, I’m walking to the archives wing, and he’s leaning against the doorframe of Reyes’ office with his arms crossed, staring through me like I’m a ghost he can’t quite place.

“Celeste,” he finally says.

I stop.

He looks tired. And not just from work. It appears to be from carrying too many things he doesn’t have names for.

“You’ve been avoiding everyone,” he says.

“I’ve been working.”

“That’s not the same thing,” he says.

I offer no rebuttal. He steps closer.

“Reyes is worried. So is Mara. And me.”

“I’m not a patient,” I say, my voice sharper than intended.

“No. You’re someone who thinks she can bury trauma in code and call it therapy.”

That lands harder than I expect.

I fold my arms. “You’re not wrong. But I’m not ready for comfort. I’m ready for answers.”

He watches me long enough that I start to shift under his gaze.

“I have something,” he says. “But you’re not going to like it.”

My stomach knots. “What kind of something?”

“Recovered metadata. Reyes decrypted a portion of the initial Echo framework—early builds. There’s evidence of memory-loop trials predating Kade.”

I stiffen. “How far back?”

“Too far. And too targeted.”

We’re both silent for a moment.

“Project Celestia?” I ask.

He nods slowly. “It’s not just a name. It’s a category.”

I blink.

“I need to see it.”

“I’ll show you. But… there’s more.”

He opens a secured tablet from under his coat and navigates to a file directory.

One of the video logs has a timestamp from nearly twenty years ago. The file name is distorted and partially redacted. But the subject ID isn’t.

C0-ZERO.

Me.

Even before I play it, I know what it will show.

And I know I’m not prepared.

But I press play anyway.

The video is grainy, like it was filmed on a forgotten security feed, too old to process with clarity. The resolution doesn’t hide the truth, though. It just makes it worse. A child sits on a low cot in a white room. There are no toys and no color. Just walls and a mirror.

I recognize her posture.

Straight spine, clenched fists, controlled breathing. She’s trying to pretend the camera isn’t there.

I used to think I learned that in med school interviews.

But I didn’t.

The date stamp reads like a death sentence: 04.07.08. I would’ve been…

Nine.

A voice comes from the speaker embedded somewhere offscreen. It’s male. Neutral. He’s reading phrases like he’s testing pronunciation, except the phrases don’t belong in any childhood lexicon.

“The corridor is on fire. What do you feel?” the male voice asks.

“The woman is crying. What do you feel?” the voice asks again.

“Your name is not your own. Say it,” the voice instructs.

My voice—hers—cracks somewhere around the third answer. “I… I don’t know.”

And I feel it like a needle behind my eye. The slip, the gap, the moment when your self-definition fragments.

Alec stands beside me, his arms crossed but jaw tight. He doesn’t speak.

The file skips and glitches.

Then, it returns to an even colder frame.

She’s strapped now, though not violently. She’s strapped in the way you’d anchor a subject under an MRI.

The voice continues, “What do you see in the mirror?”

“Me.”

“Who is she?” the voice asks.

“I don’t know.”

I turn the tablet off.

Alec exhales like he’s been holding his breath the entire time.

“She’s not a subject,” I whisper.

“No.”

“She was the test.”

Alec doesn’t say yes, but he doesn’t need to.

Because we both know now. Project Celestia wasn’t an experiment I walked into.

It was one where I was born inside.

We stand in silence for a long time after the screen goes black. Alec’s shoulders are rigid. I think he wants to say something—maybe apologize, or maybe offer some kind of moral compass—but there’s nothing left to moralize. Not here. Not with this.

I push the tablet away and lean back against the cool wall. The ache behind my eyes has moved lower into my throat. And it settles there like a swallowed stone.

“They logged her as C0-ZERO,” I murmur.

“The beginning of the chain,” Alec says softly.

“And everything since has just been iterations.”

He nods. “That’s what it looks like.”

“So every patient that’s come through Echo… they were trying to recreate this.” I tap my chest once. “Me.”

Alec glances away. His silence is answer enough.

I let the thought bloom fully for the first time. Not just that I was a subject, but that I was the blueprint. The system’s baseline. Every pain they studied, every pattern they logged, all of it started with me.

I feel cold. But not angry. Not yet. That may come later.

“What about the voice?” I ask. “Do you recognize it?”

Alec shakes his head. “It’s been filtered and masked through a modulator. It could be anyone. Rourke or someone we haven’t uncovered yet.”

I chew the inside of my cheek. “He said, ‘Your name is not your own.’”

“I heard it.”

“What if it’s true?” I voice.

“Celeste—”

“No. I’m serious. What if my name, my memories, my personality… what if all of it was planted?”

“You think they invented your entire identity?”

I don’t answer immediately.

Instead, I look at him and say, “You’ve seen how this system works. It doesn’t stop at observation. It programs.”

He doesn’t argue. He just breathes deeper, heavier. “What do you want to do now?” he asks.

“I want to find out what’s real.”

A beat passes.

“And if you don’t like what you find?”

I give him a flat look. “I haven’t liked anything I’ve found yet.”

Neither of us looks back at the tablet.

Because some truths, once seen, won’t let you forget them anyway.

I return to my apartment without speaking to anyone. I avoid the elevator and take the stairs instead, each step tapping a countdown inside my chest. One thought, one mission, overriding everything else.

Find the source.

Once I’m inside, I shut the door with a gentle push and lock it.

The flash drive sits on my desk, still cold from being carried all day.

I plug it into the terminal, not because I’m ready to revisit the video, but because I need to start isolating the residual metadata, the buried fingerprints of whoever recorded it, encrypted it, and buried it like a virus in Echo’s archive.

I expect silence. The usual digital hum.

But there’s a noise I didn’t program.

It’s a ping. A faint, irregular pulse.

I trace it and find a hidden time-stamp tag embedded into the tail-end of the clip. I isolate it and run a trace.

The signature isn’t Rourke’s.

It’s older.

One I haven’t seen since I was seventeen.

My hand hovers over the mouse.

Dr. Niko Reyes.

For a moment, I feel suspended, held midair by the realization.

He’s the one who taught me how to format neural trace pathways. He’s the one who convinced me not to dig too deep into early Echo. He said it would “cloud my judgment.”

And now I know why.

He was there, not in the chair. But in the glass.

Watching.

I lean back, my blood cold.

The man who gave me my first surgical tool.

The man who told me my trauma made me strong.

The man who may have helped carve me out from the inside before I knew my own name.

I close the file.

Then, I open a blank one.

The title bar blinks.

Heretic Loop – Draft 01 , I write as the title.

And I start typing like I’ve never typed before.

I lose time while I write.

The Heretic Loop isn’t a code, not at first. It’s a howl through circuitry.

A scream fed through the wire. I don’t bother mapping its end function yet.

I start with raw sentiment and unfiltered logic.

I strip everything sacred out of Echo’s root design—every compliance trigger, every memory gate, every restraint threshold—and I flip them all inside out.

I’m not making a backdoor. I’m blowing out the walls.

The irony is delicious.

They tried to turn my mind into a blueprint. And now I’ll return the favor, with interest.

Each line of code is a wound reopened.

Each override is a scalpel turned inward.

I code with fury, but it’s not wild. It’s surgical. Every line and every command is purposeful. I know this system intimately. I know its nervous tics, its hidden handshakes, and the ways it gaslights users into thinking compliance is their own choice.

They trained us for this, with mandatory coding and encryption drills from the moment we joined the clinic.

They called it an operational necessity.

But everyone understood the real lesson.

It was self-reliance. No waiting for IT, no third-party oversight.

When something needed to be erased, concealed, or unearthed, we did it ourselves.

And right now, I don’t need an analyst. I need precision.

Because the system blinked at me tonight, just for a second. And I’m not letting it go.

Not anymore.

I write through the night. My fingers cramp, and my eyes blur. But still, I write.

Until the first stable build compiles.

Heretic_L1: Autonomous Liberation Loop, prototype unstable.

I don’t test it yet.

But I don’t need to.

Because for the first time in a long time, I know what I’m building.

It’s not salvation. Not healing. Not even revenge.

I’m building freedom.

And I intend to release it like a virus into every room that ever tried to own me.

Even if it kills me.