Chapter 10: The Fallout
The Party
It started as a celebration. The K team had pulled Kellyanna into their orbit—an invitation she rarely accepted, but after her legendary field trial, resistance felt like arrogance. The K’s specialty was boundary-pushing, risk-taking, and late-night revelry. They poured drinks, passed coded vials, and egged each other on with wild stories.
For a while, Kellyanna kept pace. She was in command of her aliases, letting Nala laugh too loud and J-voice riff off every inside joke. But the farther into the night they went, the blurrier her boundaries became.
The Spill
Someone handed her a second dose, something with a shimmer in the astral. She felt the effects almost instantly: a loosening of the memory gates, a tingling in her code that made secrets want to spill. She didn’t notice when the conversation drifted to operational talk—safehouses, recent breaches, mission frequencies. In her haze, she let Alexi answer a question meant for Katie, let Cassie chime in with too much detail about comm protocols.
By 4 a.m., a handful of civilian operatives—supposedly trusted, but never cleared for ops intel—were hearing stories they shouldn’t. Snippets of routes, field names, and drop codes, all mixed with jokes and music. It was more than gossip; it was a risk to the network.
The Crash
When the drugs wore off, Kellyanna tried to recall the night, but the memories came fractured. A message from council security was waiting: “Report for evaluation. Unscheduled frequency event. Possible code spill on the open net. Present for assessment immediately.”
The next thing she knew, she was escorted to the ward—windowless, humming with monitored energy, every comfort laced with the sense that she was no longer trusted.
The Evaluation
They called it a “psych eval,” but everyone knew what it meant: damage control. She was isolated from the network, field signals cut. The council didn’t care if she was exhausted, traumatized, or simply unlucky. What mattered was that the legend had failed to appear as herself, and that her masks had let slip what was never meant for civilian ears.
Staff ran their tests: • Could she recall which alias said what? • Did she remember leaking ops code? • Was her integration at risk, or was the trauma still keeping her core locked away?
She answered honestly, owning the mistake. “I crossed a line. The integration isn’t stable yet. I tried to cover too much, and the system overflowed.”
The Verdict
The council kept her in the ward for observation. She’d have to prove she could hold her core, no matter the pressure, before they’d let her back in the field. The K’s, for all their bravado, were quietly benched. Trust was currency, and she’d just spent too much of it.
Alone at night, Kellyanna stared at the ward ceiling, letting her frequencies drift, all the aliases flickering in and out. She knew she’d come back from this—she always did—but she also knew the cost: a legend, for now, sidelined by her own need to feel whole.
To be continued…
#fallout #ward #fieldnotes #aftermath #consent #consequences #ops #railroad #integration