Chapter 887
She pushed open the heavy door to Room 402, a smile already forming on her lips, ready to offer a peace treaty in the form of sugar and dough. “Celeste, I brought those terrible pastries you pretend to hate but actually —”
The words died in her throat. The bag slipped from her fingers, hitting the floor with a soft, crumpled thud that sounded deafening in the sudden silence.
The room was empty.
Not empty in the way a room looks when a patient goes to therapy. It was surgically empty. The restraints were unbuckled and neatly coiled. The mattress was bare, stripped of its linens. The monitors were dark, their sensors wound like sleeping snakes. There was no trace of the woman who had been lying there yesterday, sedated and under twenty-four-hour watch — a woman whose face was a map of scars and secrets.
Skye’s breath caught, a sharp physical pain behind her sternum. The warmth of the cinnamon rolls on the floor suddenly felt mocking, a remnant of a naive hope she had foolishly allowed herself. She stepped forward, her heels clicking on the tile, her eyes sweeping the room for a note, a sign, anything at all.
The bolted-down bedside table was bare. No water pitcher. No plastic cup.
Except for one thing.
The teddy bear.
𝖡𝗲 pа𝘳𝗍 𝗈f 𝘰u𝗿 𝗰𝗈𝘮𝗆u𝗇𝘪𝘁y 𝘰ո 𝘨𝖺𝗅n𝘰𝘷𝖾𝘭𝘴.𝘤𝘰𝗆
It was a cheap, synthetic thing Skye had bought from the gift shop in a moment of pity — one of the few soft items permitted in a Level 4 psychiatric ward. It sat on the nightstand, propped up with meticulous precision, facing the door. Its glass bead eyes seemed to stare directly at her.
Its head had been twisted a full hundred and eighty degrees.
A chill crawled up Skye’s spine, prickling the skin at the back of her neck. This wasn’t a transfer. This was a message.
“Nurse!” Skye’s voice cracked, thin and frantic. She spun and rushed back into the hallway. “Orderly!”
A large man in white scrubs looked up from the station behind the bulletproof glass, startled. “Miss Sterling? Is something wrong?”
“Where is she?” Skye demanded, her hands gripping the edge of the metal counter until her knuckles turned the color of bone. “Celeste Cain. Cell 402. Where is the prisoner?”
The orderly blinked, confusion clouding his face. “She was there twenty minutes ago. I checked the camera feed myself.”
“She’s gone,” Skye hissed. “The room is cleared.”
“That’s impossible.” He began typing furiously. “There’s no transfer order. The magnetic locks haven’t been disengaged since shift change.” He looked up, his face draining of color. “The system says the room is currently occupied. The thermal sensors are reading a body in the bed.”
Skye felt the blood leave her face. “That’s a lie. I’m standing right there.”
“I know,” the man stammered, staring at the screen where a green silhouette still glowed. “But the log…”
“Hackers,” Skye whispered. The Mastermind was dead, burned to ash on Elysium Island, but his code — the Architect program — was a ghost in the machine. Or perhaps Celeste herself had finally found a way to cut her digital leash.