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CHAPTER 33

Author: Edna Ozibe
last update Last Updated: 2025-08-06 14:52:20

The halls of Velgrave were quieter than usual, the kind of silence that came after a storm. After Mira's showdown in the Core, the academy's systems slowly rebooted themselves, layer by layer, each flickering interface humming back to life—free of the Phantom's mirror corruption.

But for the students, especially those closest to the chaos, the effects lingered.

Mira sat in the infirmary, not because she was injured, but because Headmistress Wren insisted she undergo post-core reintegration diagnostics.

It felt invasive. Cold.

The sterile lights buzzed above as the scanner swept over her temples, her wrist, her spine.

“You’re still you,” the medical AI finally said, its voice filtered and emotionless. “Cognitive integrity: 98.3%. Neural drift: negligible. Mirror code residue: purged.”

Mira didn’t smile. “Thanks for the confirmation.”

But part of her still didn’t feel like her.

Carl waited outside the infirmary door, leaning against the wall, arms crossed.

When Mira stepped out,
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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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