Redacted Symbol Novels & Stories

Losing control meant losing her. And he wasn’t ready for that. “Silas doesn’t want you for your past,” Holden forced out. “He wants you for what you could become.” She frowned, confused. “What do you mean?” Holden hesitated— —and the lights flickered. The screens died. The room plunged into brief blackout. Then every monitor simultaneously lit up with a symbol: A red circle, bisected by a diagonal slash. Elena gasped. Her hand flew to her mouth. “I’ve seen that,” she whispered. “Holden—I’ve seen that symbol on the files… in the facility. On the doors. On—”

His fingers brushed the cloth, tugging it down just enough to reveal the full shape of the Mark. The symbol glowed faintly, as if responding to his attention. A spiral of intersecting lines and curves, wrong and beautiful, like something that would make you sick if you stared too long. He stared. The room held its breath. “What does it mean?” one of the men asked behind him. The leader didn’t answer. Instead, very slowly, he reached out and pressed the pad of his thumb lightly against the Mark. Pain tore through me. I gasped, the sound ripped from my lungs as heat exploded across my skin, radiating out from his touch like a shockwave. The symbol burned brighter, the lines pulsing red beneath

I practically screamed. He rubbed his reddening cheek but didn't respond. The look in his eyes told me everything I needed to know. Still I needed to hear it. Just for confirmation I zipped around him and lifted the hair covering the back of his neck. Not to my surprise there was a small red symbol of intersecting swirls. It kind of looked like a heart with another one crossing through the first but the second was upside down. Jace stumbled away from me but he knew I'd already seen it. "Tell me now Jace! How long?" I demanded

Weston simply shakes his head with this stupid smirk not leaving his face. Millan rolls his eyes. Whatever. He’ll find out I’m a crappy omega soon enough anyway, he concludes. “Fine.” Millan averts Weston’s eyes focusing on the white sheets instead. He speaks as fast as he wants this moment to be over with. “Red means ‘don’t go back’ and green means ‘you probably won’t get killed if you really have to go back’. Although the X means it’s preferable to move on.” Weston’s smile disappears and Millan's gaze is tearing a hole in the sheets.

“Heart symbol means love, doesn’t it? Virgo zodiac symbol means a virgin woman. So, the love from a virgin woman whom we also love. The three drops of blood of a virgin woman whom we also love immensely truly, deeply, and sincerely can make us resistant to red orpiment. That’s the most famous urban-legend and so-called ‘myth’ everybody’s known about, Sumi Darling.” “Look, Brother Vir... The problem here is there’s a kind of space between the picture of womanhood symbol – you know, a circle with a cross downwards – and the picture of red orpiment with a thick cross on it. I think... the space just doesn’t need to be there. We don’t need a kind of space between those two pictures. Perhaps, the

But at last there is a suspicion happened with rosy. Usually alish laptop had red color cover, but now it is in black covered. I can see there is a small chip attached to it. *****

A massive, bright red banner flashed across the bottom of the screen: BREAKING NEWS: SINCLAIR GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CONCEALMENT EXPOSED. An anchor with a grim, severe expression spoke into the camera, a graphic of our corporate logo displayed right next to her head, overlaid with a giant, transparent red stamp that read UNDER INVESTIGATION. The logo I'd grown up seeing everywhere… on buildings, letterheads, my father's cufflinks, even embroidered on my childhood blankets - now looked like a target. Like something diseased.

A small, folded note tucked just beneath the green ribbon. I opened it slowly. The handwriting was unfamiliar… but the tone was unmistakable. “Hey, Ms. Carter. I’m a fan. It wasn’t easy to get this to you, but I hope you like it. Know that someone is always watching… and waiting for the right time to introduce us. Signed, Your secret admirer” My heart dropped, but it wasn’t just the message. Below the signature was a small symbol. Drawn in red ink, a shape I hadn’t seen in years. It was a curved triangle with two vertical lines crossing through it.

"This is some information I gathered on my own related to our field. Don't lose it." Even my employer, the man we jokingly called Capitalism's Lil' Soldier, pressed a bank card into my hand. He had heard about my mother. "There's 72,000 dollars on it," he said quietly. "Everyone contributed. Use it for your mother's treatment." I nodded, raised my glass, and drank a blend of wine and tears. I thought about the days when Sebastian stayed away. My mother had been on the thirteenth floor, and his office was on the seventeenth. A ten-second elevator ride or a two-minute walk down the stairs would have been enough.

--- Then Dani found something that made all three of them stop. It came from an ancient security archive. The file itself wasn't important. A routine access log from one of Flagship's original offices. The building no longer belonged to the company. Most of the records had survived only because they were copied during a litigation hold years earlier. The access list contained twenty-three employees. Twenty-two names remained visible. One had been removed. Not deleted. Redacted. A black bar sat where the name should have been. Noah stared. Then laughed once. Not because it was funny.