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NO REWRITE. NO FALSE LAYERS. JUST OPHELIA

Author: Edna Ozibe
last update Last Updated: 2025-07-22 21:04:19

It wasn’t supposed to matter.

A sparring match. That was all it was. That’s what she told herself as she stood under the cold spray of the dormitory shower, steam curling around her like the ghosts of things she didn’t want to feel.

But his smirk wouldn’t leave her head.

His voice — “I think you like me.”

Wrong. Absolutely wrong. Carl Maddox was everything she hated: arrogant, chaotic, disruptive in more ways than one.

And yet… when he touched her, her mind went quiet.

Too quiet.

She couldn’t hear the memories. Couldn’t feel the pull of other people’s stories. Her gift vanished when he made contact, and in that silence, she remembered what it was like to just be her.

No rewrites. No false layers. Just Ophelia.

And it scared the hell out of her.

She dried off, threw on her uniform, and stormed out of the bathroom, hoping she could outrun the thought of him.

“You’re distracted,” Lilith said over breakfast the next day, narrowing her eyes like a cat who’d smelled a secret.

Ophelia stabbed her scrambled eggs. “I’m not.”

“Then why did you just put salt in your orange juice?”

She looked down. Damn it.

Lilith smirked, brushing a strand of pink hair behind her ear. “Is this about Carl?”

“No.”

“Liar.”

Ophelia sighed, pushing her tray away. “He gets under my skin.”

“He’s hot.”

“He’s infuriating.”

“Those things are not mutually exclusive.”

She glared. “Do you want to die?”

Lilith grinned wider. “Not before I see how this plays out.”

Before Ophelia could respond, the cafeteria lights flickered — once, then twice. A low hum rose in the air, followed by a sudden, sharp pulse of static that made everyone wince.

The screen behind the serving station blinked red.

“ATTENTION: Unauthorized Power Surge Detected in Sector C.”

Lilith stood. “That’s not good.”

Ophelia was already moving. Her dorm was in Sector C.

And something — no, someone — was trying to send a message.

By the time Ophelia reached her dorm, the air was thick with tension.

The door was ajar.

She moved carefully, fingers twitching with the readiness to strike, but her gift was already pinging — someone had tampered with her room, her things, her memories.

She stepped inside.

Everything looked intact. Her bed. Her shelves. The worn copy of Psychic Biowarfare: Vol 1 on her desk. But when she reached into her drawer, her notebook was gone.

The black one.

The one she’d hidden memories inside.

She spun just as a voice spoke from behind her.

“You shouldn’t leave things unprotected, Wolfe.”

Carl.

Of course.

He leaned against the frame of her window, notebook in hand, flipping it open like he had every right to.

Her blood boiled.

“You broke into my room?”

He held up a finger. “Correction. I neutralized the lock.”

“You’re insane.”

“You’re hiding something.”

She marched toward him. “Give it. Back.”

“Tell me what’s in it.”

Her hand reached out to snatch it, but the second her fingers brushed the cover, he dropped it — and the pages scattered like feathers across the floor.

Dozens of memory fragments fluttered through the air — snapshots of voices, faces, secret missions, and one particular memory…

Of him.

Lips. Hands. Fire.

It wasn’t real — a planted scenario, an experiment she’d conducted on herself to test the limits of her powers. But it felt real enough now.

Carl’s eyes met hers, all the teasing gone.

“You rewrote me?”

She swallowed. “I erased it.”

“Then why does it still burn?”

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  • OUR LITTLE SECRET    CHAPTER 44

    The girl hadn’t moved since they brought her in.She sat on the floor of the diagnostic chamber, knees tucked under her chin, hands glowing faintly like bioluminescent fireflies. Her silver hair fell over her eyes, veiling the eerie calm in her face.Nadine’s scans were inconclusive.“She’s not fully conscious,” she told Mira. “It’s like… a fragment of her mind is here, and the rest is inside something else.”“Another system?” Carl asked.“No,” Nadine said. “A network.”Ophelia stared at the girl.Her voice had echoed in her mind for hours now.“I am the memory of what you tried to erase.”It haunted her.It sounded like something Ophelia herself would say.Too sharp. Too calculated. Too aware of what pain meant.“She’s a failsafe,” Mira explained. “Her code is partially linked to yours, Ophelia.”“How?” Ophelia asked.Mira pressed her lips together. “Because she was grown from the same strand. You’re not just her ‘key’—you’re her source.”Carl’s head snapped toward them.

  • OUR LITTLE SECRET    CHAPTER 43

    The next day, a name resurfaced from the hidden layers of Velgrave’s internal system. An ancient student registry, never meant to be recovered, blinked into existence for exactly thirty-four seconds—just long enough for Nadine to screenshot it before it wiped itself clean.And there it was.Carl Maddox — Entry: RedactedNot deleted.Redacted.There’s a difference.Deleted meant the file was gone.Redacted meant someone had erased it from view.“You never told me,” Ophelia said, sitting across from him in the greenhouse they often snuck into after hours. “Your record is ghosted.”Carl exhaled. “I didn’t know.”“You seriously never tried to check your own past?”“I tried. Every trace of my childhood before Velgrave ends in white noise.”She stared at him. “Carl, that’s not normal.”“I know.”His voice was quiet.“I think I didn’t want to find out what they’d hidden. I thought maybe… if I didn’t search, I could just live.”She sat beside him, fingers playing absently with

  • OUR LITTLE SECRET    CHAPTER 42

    For the first time since she arrived at Velgrave, Ophelia couldn’t stop replaying her own past.Not the version she’d memorized.But the holes.The parts that didn’t make sense.She remembered her mother being cold.She remembered being transferred between “safe houses.”She remembered a man with gloves who used to press two fingers to her temple and say, “Just a little longer, sweetheart.”But she never remembered his name.Never remembered his face.“Decoy,” she whispered under her breath as she stood at the academy library archives.It echoed.Like it was meant to.She dug through old files under the identity registry section—a part of the Bloodborn system that Mira said hadn’t been touched in years.She found her own entry.Ophelia Wolfe. Born 17th of March. Classified: Grade A — Memory Class. Ability: Memory manipulation.But something was off.There was no birth record attached.Only a single line typed in the background clearance:“Synthetic implantation cleara

  • OUR LITTLE SECRET    CHAPTER 41

    When the lights exploded, it wasn’t from heat or power overload.It was resonance.Every bulb, every wire, every screen—shattered not from force, but from frequency.The Echo didn’t just enter the room.He changed it.Carl shielded Ophelia instantly, arm wrapped around her as a pulse of invisible energy rippled through the chamber. The air itself vibrated, filled with high-pitched static that turned their thoughts into noise.“Contain him!” Mira yelled, struggling to access the dampener console.But the Echo didn’t move.Didn’t need to.He just stood in the center of it all—hands at his sides, eyes closed, like a god in prayer.Then he opened his mouth—And every voice in the room spoke at once.Their own voices.Distorted.Replayed.Mimicked.“Carl Maddox, Ophelia Wolfe, Mira Kassel, Nadine Ayre.”Each name echoed from their own lips—except they hadn’t spoken.Carl gritted his teeth. “He’s inside our fields.”“He’s broadcasting on a neural loop,” Mira shouted. “He’

  • OUR LITTLE SECRET    CHAPTER 40

    Ophelia didn’t sleep that night.Not because she couldn’t—but because she didn’t want to.She lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, fingers curled tightly around the edge of her blanket. Her thoughts looped, rewinding again and again to that one flickering moment. That blurred figure. That single glowing word.Echo.A name.A warning.A forgotten ghost.By morning, she was already in Mira’s office.“You’re absolutely sure?” Mira asked, her tone clipped.“As sure as I was the day Lyra glitched,” Ophelia replied.Carl leaned forward, arms folded. “You said the Echo program was shut down years ago.”“It was,” Mira confirmed. “The Echo Initiative was part of a classified tier of experiments. The idea was to train a single Bloodborn to replicate others’ abilities perfectly—without exposure limits.”“Wait,” Nadine cut in. “That’s impossible. Mimics can barely hold one ability at a time. The neural strain alone—”“This one didn’t mimic,” Mira said slowly. “He absorbed.”Everyon

  • OUR LITTLE SECRET    CHAPTER 39

    A week after the Lyra Incident, Velgrave initiated what Mira termed “a hard recalibration of trust.”New security protocols were introduced. Memory scanning regulations were tightened. Dorm access points now required triple authentication. And every student had to undergo a personal “resonance test” to ensure no fragments of Lyra’s code had embedded themselves unknowingly.To most, it was tedious.To Ophelia Wolfe, it was insulting.“So let me get this straight,” she muttered as the scanner hovered over her temples, “you think I could have a piece of Lyra bouncing around in my head?”Nadine, holding the scanner, didn’t blink. “You made direct contact with her. We’re not taking risks.”“You know if anyone’s brain would fry a digital parasite, it’s mine.”“That’s exactly what worries us.”Ophelia frowned. “That’s… fair.”A green light blinked.“You’re clean,” Nadine confirmed.“Obviously,” Ophelia said, hopping off the scanner bed. “I run on spite and caffeine. No room for vi

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