Page 46 of Fractured Devotion (Tainted Souls #1)

Morning light cuts through the windows, pale and cold, spilling across the room in thin slats. The files Reyes and I recovered from the corrupted auxiliary cache are still cold in my hands as I plug them into the air-gapped analysis terminal.

I’ve gone over them a dozen times already, but something in the embedded layers keeps tugging at me, whispering like an unfinished sentence, like a second language woven beneath the primary code.

Reyes stands beside me, cradling a mug of that awful chicory brew that he swears sharpens focus. He doesn’t speak. He just sips, watching as my fingers move over the terminal, fast and precise.

The room smells of wire insulation, morning chill, and the lingering bite of menthol lozenges.

“There,” I say, pausing the scroll on a subroutine buried six levels down. “This wasn’t authored by Kade.”

Reyes squints. “What makes you sure?”

I highlight the fragment. It’s an old syntax. It’s not just outmoded. It’s archaic. It’s structured more like handwritten logic loops, the kind they used in behavioral constructs a decade ago.

“This was ported in from something older. Possibly something pre-Echo.”

Reyes leans in. “Which means…?”

“Kade didn’t build this. He just inherited it.”

That subtle confirmation rings too loud in my head.

We’ve spent weeks assuming Kade was the origin, the manipulator, the puppeteer.

But what if he’s just another technician in a lineage of darker engineers?

Reyes pinches the bridge of his nose. “You think this ties back to Project Celestia?”

I nod. “Some of these tags match neural patterns from the Celestia logs. It’s crude but unmistakable. Someone built the emotional primers off an original template. A human one.”

Reyes whispers, “Celeste.”

And there it is, the gravitational center of all of this.

I push back from the desk, the taste of bile at the back of my throat.

She was never just a survivor. She was the seed.

And they grew a forest of ghosts around her.

“I want to cross-reference this tag set,” I say, “with the earliest known Echo trial logs, back when the system was still in prototype.”

Reyes raises an eyebrow. “You think we have that?”

I nod. “Not officially. But I know where to look.”

We relocate to the secure access terminal in the sub-archival wing.

The air is cooler here. The lights flicker overhead, one tube always half-lit like it can’t decide whether to burn out or keep trying.

I authenticate into the forgotten registry, an old encrypted sandbox used during the beta phase of the Echo trials.

It takes a few bypasses, but eventually, the drive syncs with the server.

We start pulling logs.

The dates are fuzzy, the metadata mostly scrubbed, but some of the code speaks like an old language I never forgot. There are early test entries, primitive syntax, and heuristic models tagged with codenames instead of patient IDs.

Then I see it.

C0-ZERO

It’s a file set buried in a deprecated partition, still intact.

Reyes leans closer. “That’s a ghost archive.”

“Not anymore,” I say.

I click through, and the logs spill out. Emotion-recognition algorithms, patterned response loops, and the earliest tests of the neural compliance system, the backbone of what Echo would later become.

And all of it was seeded with one model.

A child.

Her vitals, her emotional outputs, and her biometric stress thresholds.

C0-ZERO wasn’t just a subject. She was the model they built every loop around.

Reyes steps back like the air itself just grew poisonous. “Who the hell approved this?”

My voice is hollow when I answer, “This was never about approval.”

It was about control.

And now we know exactly where it started.

Reyes watches without a sound as I scroll further, cataloging the strands. Each file we unlock paints the same picture: a system built not to heal, but to condition.

One log catches my eye: voice transcriptions from a masked clinician. The language is clipped and technical. “Subject demonstrates high neural elasticity. Recommend progressive loop retention intervals at 30-second lapses, increasing by exposure.”

“Jesus,” Reyes mutters. “This isn’t therapy. It’s training.”

“Conditioning,” I say. “They were building reflexes. Hard-coded trauma reactions.”

“Why?”

I glance at him. “To test what could be broken and rebuilt. Over and over. Until the subject obeyed.”

He flinches like I hit him. I don’t blame him.

We pull one more file that’s older than the rest and marked with only a three-letter code: RHK .

My stomach knots.

“That’s Rourke’s old signature,” Reyes says before I can.

I open it.

It’s not code. It’s notes, observational and philosophical.

“The girl exhibits ideal malleability. Identity is not fixed. It can be scripted. Our task is not to discover who she is, but to decide who she will be.”

“There is no such thing as trauma. Only unfinished rewrites.”

“The body resists. But the mind, if properly cut, will comply.”

Reyes swears and steps away, and I close the document before I vomit.

Celeste wasn’t just studied. She was authored.

We sit in silence. The hum of the terminal is the only sound.

“I don’t think we should tell her yet,” Reyes says calmly.

I nod. “Not until we know more. Not until we have something solid to bring her. Real names and real proof.”

Because what we’ve seen doesn’t answer anything yet.

It just proves how deep the rot goes.

Reyes doesn’t speak for a while, and when he finally breaks the silence, he asks, “You think she suspects this already?”

I shake my head. “She’s circling the truth, but this?” I motion to the screen. “This would crush most people.”

“Celeste isn’t most people,” Reyes points out.

“No, she’s not,” I agree. “But she’s also not unbreakable. Everyone has a fault line.”

I close the last of the logs and unplug the drive. We wipe the terminal session clean and leave no traces. There’s no way to know who else might be watching, and paranoia isn’t optional anymore.

We walk back to my office in silence, passing interns and staff who nod respectfully, oblivious to what we’ve just seen. I can’t meet their eyes.

Back inside, Reyes locks the door behind him and sits down heavily.

“You’re thinking of digging further,” he says.

“I need to,” I say. “If this were just one instance, it might be containable. But this feels systemic. Institutional. Like Echo was designed around it.”

“I thought it was Rourke’s mess,” Reyes mutters.

“It is. But he didn’t work alone. Someone funded this. Someone maintained it.”

“And Kade?”

I hesitate before saying, “He’s not clean. But he’s not the architect.”

Reyes exhales. “So what’s next?”

I open the bottom drawer of my desk and pull out a battered notebook, its pages filled with crude sketches and systems flow. I tap a line, tracing a path through the server stacks below Diagnostics.

“There’s an unmarked hub down there,” I say. “It never appeared on official specs, but Harper flagged its power draw months ago. It might be where they kept the raw memory banks.”

Reyes leans over. “You think Celeste’s original logs are still there?”

I nod once. “I think if there’s any truth left, it’s there. Buried. Waiting.”

The stairwell down to Diagnostics creaks with age. Reyes and I move fast. The sublevel feels colder the deeper we descend, as though the architecture itself remembers what it was built to hide.

The unmarked server chamber is exactly where the schematics suggested, a hollow between two load-bearing walls. There’s no labeled access panel and no ventilation. Just a dull metal hatch camouflaged in shadow.

I hook a terminal bypass into the outer relay and spoof the biometric lock. The hatch hisses open on a delay, like it’s reluctant.

The room beyond is bathed in anemic blue light. Rows of outdated nodes blink steadily, dust coats the racks like ash, and a central bank hums faintly—alive but starving.

Reyes whistles under his breath. “Black Box Room.”

It’s not official Echo terminology, but every facility has one—the place where unwanted data goes to rot.

We move cautiously, our eyes sweeping. There are no cameras and no immediate power threats. Just old tech breathing through rust.

I jack in and start a file index.

It’s a mess, with layered encryption, corrupted frames, and time stamps looped like recursive clocks.

Reyes finds an old physical backup, dusty and tagged with an outdated clinic seal. I hook it to my rig. There are videos and dozens of entries, each marked with sequential tags, initials, and short descriptors like “response conditioning” or “fear loop test.”

I play one.

It’s a child’s voice, hoarse and frightened.

A lullaby plays.

Then, a shadowed figure enters the frame in a mask, and a voice speaks soft commands.

The child flinches and obeys.

The screen flickers with biometric readings: pulse spikes and brainwave compliance thresholds.

Reyes mutters, “Jesus.”

My throat tightens.

The girl is Celeste.

She’s younger. Barely seven.

But it’s unmistakably her.

And someone was training her to break.

Reyes puts a hand on the console. “We should stop. This… she doesn’t know. Not all of it.”

I nod, but my fingers twitch to click the next entry.

It’s another video, another mask, and another day that Celeste was bent into something she never chose to become.

I copy the files, but not all of them. Just enough to prove what we found. The rest stays buried. For now.

We leave the backups untouched because anything more would set off system flags. And right now, we need stealth more than closure.

As we exit, Reyes glances at me and asks, “Do we tell her?”

“Not yet,” I reply.

“Why not?”

“Because there’s still more beneath this. Someone greenlit these programs, and someone buried the records. If we show our hand now, they’ll lock down the rest.”

Reyes exhales slowly. “You think she’ll find out anyway?”

“She’s already digging.”

And if I know Celeste, when she reaches the truth, she won’t just burn the house down.

She’ll salt the earth underneath.

We secure the hatch behind us and step back into the corridor.

The lights flicker once, then settle.

The air feels colder than before.

Like it knows we saw something we were never meant to.

Like the system itself is watching us now.

And holding its breath.