Chapter 14: The Data Scar
The world had a new, fragile quality. For the rest of the day, Ellie moved like a ghost, her fingers constantly brushing against lockers and doorframes, reassuring herself they were solid. The twenty-minute void in her memory was a black hole in her mind, sucking in all sense of safety. She wasn't just being watched; she was being rewritten.
Kael found her after the final bell, huddled by her locker, her knuckles white as she gripped the metal.
"We need to go back,"he said, his voice low and urgent. "Now. Before the narrative fully resets."
"Back to the lab?" Ellie whispered, the thought making her nauseous.
"Where it happened. A temporal edit that big leaves a mark. A fracture in the local reality. A data scar."
Hope, thin and sharp, pierced her terror. "We can see it?"
"You can see it," Kael corrected. "Your connection to the script is primal, intuitive. I see the static. You see the source code. Look for a flaw in the canvas. A shimmer. A seam."
The biology lab was silent and empty, smelling faintly of bleach and dissolution. The frog specimens were put away, the counters wiped clean. It looked utterly normal.
"Focus," Kael instructed, standing guard by the door. "Feel for the inconsistency. The place where the story was spliced."
Ellie closed her eyes, pushing past the pounding in her head. She let the blue text of the room's default script fade into the background—[SCENERY]: An empty science lab, clean and orderly—and instead reached out with her other senses, the ones Kael had helped her unlock. She felt for the hum of reality, the steady data stream of the world.
And then she found it.
Near her lab station, the air wasn't smooth. It was like looking at a projected image where the film was slightly misaligned. A faint, vertical shimmer, no wider than a finger, hung in the space where she had been standing. It pulsed with a low, sickening energy, a visual static that felt like a wound.
"There," she breathed, pointing. "It's... throbbing."
Kael's face was grim. "That's the Ghostwriter's signature. Clean, surgical, and arrogant. He didn't even bother to hide the stitch marks."
"What do we do?"
"We leave it. Patching it would just alert him. We note it and go." Kael's stance was clear; this was reconnaissance, not a battle.
But Ellie was already stepping forward, her hand outstretched. The void in her memory was a scream of silence. She needed to know what was in it.
"Ellie, no! Don't touch it!" Kael's warning was sharp.
She ignored him. This was her memory. Her life. She reached out with her mind, not to patch or edit, but to pull. She mentally hooked her consciousness into that shimmering seam and yanked with all her will.
The world tore open.
It wasn't a memory. It was a playback. A third-person view of the lab, filled with the murmur of her classmates. And there she was, sitting at the lab station. But it wasn't her. Her body was moving with a fluid, unnatural precision, like a marionette. Her eyes were vacant, her face a smooth, expressionless mask.
She watched her puppet-self pick up the scalpel and begin the dissection. The cuts were perfect, clinical, far beyond her own skill. Her hand drew the diagram in the lab notebook, each line confident and exact, a machine replicating an ideal outcome.
And standing a few feet away, leaning against a counter with a sleek tablet in his hands, was Jeremy.
His gray script was visible, but now it was filled with lines of rapid, analytical data.
[JEREMY - LOGGING]: Subject demonstrates high autonomic precision under direct control. Motor functions optimized at 98.7% efficiency. Creative centers dormant.
He wasn't just watching;he was conducting an experiment. Taking notes. Profiling her.
The vision ended as abruptly as it began, the seam in reality snapping shut with a soundless pop.
Ellie staggered back, gasping, the phantom smell of formaldehyde in her nose, the feel of the scalpel in her hand. She had her memory back. And she wished she didn't.
"He was profiling me..." she choked out. "He's... a scientist, and I'm the lab rat."
Before Kael could respond, the lab door slammed open with terrifying force.
Mr. Henderson, the elderly, gentle history teacher who had the classroom across the hall, stood there. But his kind eyes were gone, replaced by the same sickly, pulsating green that had corrupted the A-List. In his hand, he held a heavy fire extinguisher, hoisted like a club. His script was a single, repeating, corrupted line.
[MR. HENDERSON - CORRUPTED]: TERMINATE THE GLITCH. TERMINATE THE GLITCH. TERMINATE THE GLITCH.
The Ghostwriter had detected their intrusion. And he wasn't sending a student this time. He was sending someone more dangerous.
Mr. Henderson took a jerky step forward, the fire extinguisher looking impossibly heavy in his hands. The green glow in his eyes pulsed in time with the corrupted script scrolling through his mind.
Kael didn't hesitate. He shoved Ellie behind him, his own silver static flaring into a defensive shield. "The override is complete. He's just a puppet now."
The teacher-monster swung the extinguisher in a wide, clumsy arc. Kael ducked, the metal cylinder whistling past his head and smashing into a lab table, sending glassware shattering to the floor.
Ellie's mind raced, panic and training warring within her. She couldn't fight physically. But she could fight with the narrative. She focused on the fire extinguisher in Mr. Henderson's hands, its script a simple [OBJECT]: Fire extinguisher. She poured all her fear into a single, brutal edit, changing its property.
[OBJECT]: Fire extinguisher. --> [OBJECT]: Feather pillow.
The Ink Cost was instant and brutal, a white-hot spike behind her eyes that made her cry out. But in Mr. Henderson's hands, the heavy metal cylinder shimmered and distorted, its weight and form collapsing into a soft, white pillow.
The corrupted teacher stared in confusion at the pillow, his programmed script stuttering. [MR. HENDERSON - CORRUPTED]: TERMINATE THE... what?
It was the opening Kael needed. He lunged forward, not at the teacher, but at the narrative itself. He didn't try to reverse the corruption—that would have taken more power than they had. Instead, he inserted a simple, overriding command into the puppet's script.
[MR. HENDERSON - CORRUPTED]: TERMINATE THE GLITCH. --> [MR. HENDERSON]: You are very tired. You need to take a nap.
The green light vanished from the teacher's eyes. He blinked, looked down at the feather pillow in his hands with utter bewilderment, then slowly slumped to the floor, fast asleep.
The silence that followed was deafening. Ellie slid down the wall, clutching her throbbing head. They had won, but it felt hollow. They were just putting out fires, and the arsonist was still out there, watching, taking notes.
A new, chillingly calm script appeared in Ellie's vision, this one in the Ghostwriter's distinct, flat gray.
[DIRECT MESSAGE - THE GHOSTWRITER]: Fascinating resilience. The lab rat can bite. The next test will be more... personal.