The interior of the sedan smelled of wet leather and the ozone tang of Elias's overheating laptop. I leaned my forehead against the cold window, watching the neon signs of the Mid-Sector dissolve into long, bleeding streaks of electric blue and poisonous green. Every bump in the road sent a jolt of white-hot needles through my temples. My vision was still vibrating—a side effect of the "Slip." When you look too deep into what was, the "is" starts to lose its grip on you. For a few seconds, the raindrops on the glass didn't seem to be falling; they were rising, or perhaps they were simply suspended in a moment of indecision.
"Adrian, your pupils are still dilated. Drink this." Elias handed me a thermos without looking away from his screen. The liquid inside was a bitter, sludge-like concoction of electrolytes and stimulants he'd designed to kickstart my nervous system after a Glimpse.
I took a swallow, grimacing as the heat burned its way down my throat. "I'm fine, Elias. Just... out of sync."
"You're not fine. You're bleeding from your left ear," Liora said, her eyes fixed on the rearview mirror. She didn't sound sympathetic; she sounded like a mechanic reporting a faulty engine. That was her way. Sentimentality was a luxury we had burned through years ago. "If you pass out in the back of this car, I'm leaving you there. I'm not carrying two hundred pounds of detective up three flights of stairs."
"I'll walk," I muttered, though the idea of standing seemed like a Herculean task.
I closed my eyes, but that was a mistake. Behind my eyelids, the violet eyes were still there, glowing in the darkness of my subconscious. It wasn't just that the figure had seen me; it was the way it had looked through me. Usually, when I Glimpse, the people of the past are like actors in a film—unaware of the audience, trapped in their own linear loop. But that shadow... it had been an observer as much as I was. A predator waiting for the prey to finally look into the trap.
"What did the data say, Elias?" I asked, trying to force my mind back to the tangible world. "You mentioned a micro-lag in the digital timestamps."
Elias sighed, the blue light of the screen reflecting in his glasses. "It's worse than I thought. The Tower 7 security logs didn't just lag; they folded. For exactly four seconds, the server's internal clock registered a leap of twenty days. To the system, the present and three weeks ago were occurring simultaneously. The biometric sensors didn't detect an intruder because, technically, the intruder wasn't 'there' in the present. They were acting through a temporal overlap."
"Is that even possible?" Liora asked, taking a sharp turn that made the tires screech against the slick asphalt. "I thought your brother was the only one with a broken internal clock."
"It shouldn't be," Elias replied, his fingers dancing across the keys. "Adrian's ability is biological—a neurological mutation or a curse, take your pick. But what happened in that penthouse felt... mechanical. Or at least, it was a manipulation of the environment's fundamental constants. If someone has figured out how to create localized Chronos-pockets, then walls, locks, and distance don't mean anything anymore."
I thought about the silk thread I saw in the Glimpse. The shimmering line that connected the two versions of Victor Vane. "It's not just about being in two places at once, Elias. It's about causality. The killer didn't just kill Vane; he harvested a moment from Vane's past and transplanted it into his present. He turned the victim's own history into a weapon."
The car slowed as we entered the Narrow District—our home. Here, the towers were replaced by crumbling tenements and tangled webs of overhead power lines that hissed in the rain. This was the gut of the city, where the shadows were thickest and the law was a suggestion. We pulled into the basement of a repurposed warehouse that served as our headquarters and living space.
Liora killed the engine. The sudden silence was deafening. I stayed in the back seat for a moment, waiting for the world to stop spinning. My hand went to my pocket, brushing against the silver watch. It felt cold—unnaturally cold, like a piece of dry ice against my thigh.
"Adrian?" Elias was holding the door open.
I stepped out, my legs trembling. I managed two steps before the vertigo hit me again. The concrete floor of the garage seemed to liquefy, turning into a dark, bottomless pool. I grabbed the edge of the car door to steady myself, my knuckles white.
"I've got you," Elias said, sliding an arm under mine.
"I told you," Liora sighed, though she moved to the other side to support me. Together, they navigated me toward the freight elevator.
The elevator groaned as it rose, its metal cage rattling with every floor. We lived on the top level—a vast, open loft filled with salvaged tech, stacks of old case files, and a small kitchenette that mostly saw use for making coffee. As we entered, the smell of dust and old paper acted as a stabilizer. This was my domain. Every object here had a history I had already memorized.
They dropped me onto the worn leather sofa in the center of the room. Elias immediately went to the medical kit, pulling out a neuro-stabilizer patch and pressing it against the side of my neck. I felt a sharp pinch, followed by a cooling sensation that dampened the roar in my head to a dull hum.
"Stay here. Don't move. Don't even think about the fourth dimension," Elias ordered.
Liora walked over to the window, pulling back the heavy blackout curtains just an inch to peer down at the street. "We were followed."
I sat up, the stabilizer already working. "How many?"
"Two black SUVs. They kept their distance, no lights. They didn't pull into the alley, but they're circling the block. Probably Upper District Cleaners or a private hit squad," she said, her voice calm. She reached into her waistband and pulled out her service pistol, checking the chamber with a practiced flick of her wrist. "They know we have the data. Or they know what you saw."
"They can't come in here," Elias said, though he looked nervous. "I've got the perimeter rigged. If they step onto the landing, the floor becomes a localized EMP zone. It'll fry their comms and their pacemakers if they have them."
"They don't want to kill us yet," I said, rubbing my face. "If they wanted us dead, Tower 7 would have been a crater before we even left. They want to know how much I can see."
I stood up, more stable now, and walked to the large corkboard on the wall. It was covered in photos, maps, and notes—a three-year-old obsession that most people called a hobby. At the center was a photograph of my father, Alistair Kael, taken a week before he disappeared. He was standing in front of a clock shop that no longer existed, holding the same silver watch that now resided in my pocket.
"My father used to talk about the 'Veil' as if it were a physical thing," I whispered. "He said that time wasn't a wall, but a curtain. And once you learn how to draw it back, you can never really close it again. I always thought he was speaking metaphorically. That he was talking about the burden of memory."
"And now?" Liora asked, turning away from the window.
"Now I think he was talking about a map. Vane was part of something called the 'Chronos Initiative.' My father mentioned it once in his journals, tucked between notes on horology and quantum entanglement. He called it the 'Great Erasure.'"
Elias sat at his main console, his fingers flying across the holographic interface. "The Chronos Initiative? I've searched the deep web for that name a thousand times. Every time I get close, the data self-destructs. It's a ghost protocol."
"Because it's not a company, Elias," I said, looking at the violet-eyed shadow in my mind. "It's a cult. Or a cabal. They aren't trying to build the future. They're trying to own the past. Think about it. If you can change what happened ten years ago, you control who is in power today. You can win wars before they start. You can make enemies vanish before they're even born."
"That's insane," Liora said. "The paradoxes alone would tear the world apart."
"Not if you only change the small things," I countered. "The 'Butterfly Effect' is only dangerous if you're clumsy. But what if you're a surgeon? What if you only pluck a single thread, like the killer did with Vane? You don't destroy the tapestry; you just change the color of one stitch."
I walked to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water, my hand finally steady. The silence of the loft was broken only by the steady rain against the roof.
"Elias, I need you to go back to the surveillance footage from the night my father disappeared," I said.
Elias froze. "Adrian, we've looked at those tapes ten thousand times. There's nothing there. Just the empty street and the rain."
"Look again. But don't look at the street," I said, my voice hardening. "Look at the reflection in the shop window across the road. Look for a flicker. Look for a lag. Look for a shadow that doesn't belong to a person."
Elias hesitated, then nodded. He knew that once I started pulling on a thread, I wouldn't stop until the whole thing unraveled.
Liora walked over to me, her expression unreadable. "You're pushing yourself into a corner, Adrian. This isn't just a case anymore. It's an obsession. And obsessed men are easy to predict."
"I have to know what saw me, Liora," I said, looking her in the eye. "That thing in the penthouse... it wasn't just a killer. It was a mirror. I felt a connection there that I've never felt with anything in this timeline. It was like looking at a version of myself that had finally stopped fighting the tide."
She didn't say anything for a long time. Then, she reached out and squeezed my shoulder—a rare gesture of affection that felt heavier than a lead weight. "Just don't forget which side of the glass you're on. If you lose yourself in the past, there's nobody who can pull you back."
I nodded, though I wasn't sure I believed her.
As the night wore on, the loft became a hive of quiet activity. Elias was lost in the digital archives, his face pale in the glow of the monitors. Liora was back at the window, a silent sentry against the darkness. I sat at the table, the silver watch laid out in front of me.
I picked up a jeweler's loupe and examined the cracks. They weren't random. They were forming a pattern—a geometric shape that looked vaguely like a star, or perhaps a web. I realized then that the watch wasn't breaking because it was old. It was breaking because it was being 're-tuned.' Every time I used my power, the watch was absorbing the temporal stress, acting as a lightning rod for the paradoxes I was creating.
I thought of Selene.
Her name came to me like a phantom limb—a memory of something I had lost but could still feel. Selene Varys. I hadn't seen her in three years, not since the night the world went grey. She was the only one who had ever seen the Veil without being consumed by it. She was the one who had warned me that the clock was ticking down to zero.
*Where are you, Selene?* I thought. *Are you a thread in this web too?*
Suddenly, Elias let out a sharp gasp. "Adrian... you need to see this."
I was at his side in a second. He had pulled up the footage from three years ago. It was the night of my father's disappearance. The video was grainy, a black-and-white relic of a simpler time. We watched the empty street. We watched the rain.
"Watch the reflection," Elias whispered, pointing to the window of the pharmacy across from the clock shop.
In the glass, I saw my father walk out of the shop. He was alone. He paused to light a cigarette. But in the reflection, he wasn't alone. Standing behind him, barely visible in the distortion of the rain-slicked glass, was a figure. A tall, thin shadow with no discernible features.
The figure reached out and touched my father's shoulder.
In the real-world footage, my father suddenly vanished. Not a flash of light, not a fade. He was simply *gone* from one frame to the next. But in the reflection, the figure remained for a fraction of a second longer.
It turned toward the camera.
Even in the low-resolution footage, I could see them. The eyes. Violet. Shimmering with an ancient, cold intelligence.
The figure raised a hand and pointed—not at my father, but at the camera. At the person who would be watching this footage three years later. At me.
Then, the pharmacy window in the reflection shattered. Not in the real world—the glass remained intact in the primary footage—but in the digital memory, the reflection exploded into a million shards.
"He was there," I whispered, the coldness in my chest turning into a block of ice. "He was there when it started. He didn't just take my father. He marked the timeline."
"Adrian, look at the timestamp," Elias said, his voice trembling.
I looked at the bottom of the screen. The numbers were spinning. They weren't counting seconds anymore. They were counting down.
3:14... 3:13... 3:12...
The video didn't end. It was still running, but the numbers were moving toward zero.
"It's a dead man's switch," Liora said, joining us at the console. "The moment you looked at this specific file, you triggered the countdown."
"Countdown to what?" Elias asked, his fingers frantically trying to kill the program. "I can't stop it! It's buried in the kernel of the OS!"
I looked at the silver watch on the table. It was vibrating now, a low hum that I could feel in my teeth. The cracks were glowing with a faint, violet light.
"It's not a countdown for the computer," I said, the realization hitting me like a physical blow. "It's a countdown for the room."
I grabbed the watch and shoved it into my pocket. "Get out! Now!"
"What?" Elias shouted.
"The temporal overlap! He's folding the space-time of the loft! We're about to become the 'twenty-day-old' blood!"
I grabbed Elias by the collar, hauling him away from the desk. Liora didn't hesitate; she grabbed the backup drive and headed for the door. We ran for the freight elevator, but as we reached the landing, the air around us began to shimmer.
The walls of the warehouse started to peel back—not like wood and brick, but like layers of a painting. I saw the loft as it was fifty years ago—a dusty garment factory. I saw it as it would be twenty years from now—a hollowed-out ruin. The past, present, and future were colliding in a violent, kaleidoscopic whirl.
"The elevator is gone!" Liora yelled.
In its place was a solid brick wall—the way the building had looked before the elevator was installed in the nineties.
"The fire escape!" I pointed toward the far window.
We sprinted across the floor, which was now vibrating so hard it felt like walking on a drum skin. I could hear the whispers again. A thousand voices, all screaming the same word in a language I didn't know but somehow understood: *Synchronize.*
We reached the window. I didn't wait to open it. I threw my shoulder into the glass, shattering it. We tumbled out onto the rusted metal grating of the fire escape just as the loft behind us erupted in a silent, violet flash.
I looked back through the broken window.
The loft was empty. Not just empty of people, but empty of everything. The furniture, the files, Elias's computers—all of it had vanished. The room looked as if it had never been inhabited. The walls were pristine, the floor unscarred. Three years of my life, erased in a single heartbeat.
"My data..." Elias whispered, clutching the single backup drive Liora had saved. "Everything is gone."
"Not everything," I said, looking down at my hands.
My skin was translucent. For a split second, I could see the bones beneath, and beneath the bones, the pale, shimmering threads of my own history. I was fading.
"Adrian! Stay with us!" Liora's voice seemed to come from miles away.
I felt a sharp pain in my hand. I looked down. The silver watch had shattered completely. The glass was gone, and the metal casing was twisted. But the hands... the hands were moving.
They weren't moving forward. They were spinning backward, faster and faster, a blur of silver against the white face.
I looked up at the rainy sky. The SUVs were still there, parked at the end of the alley. The doors opened, and men in black suits stepped out. They weren't carrying guns. They were carrying devices that looked like tuning forks, glowing with that same violet light.
"They aren't Cleaners," I said, my voice sounding hollow and metallic. "They're Harvesters."
One of the men looked up at us. He didn't have a face—just a smooth, featureless surface of violet energy.
"Adrian Kael," the faceless man said, his voice echoing in the rain. "Your time is no longer your own. Return what was stolen."
I stood up on the narrow fire escape, the wind whipping my coat around me. I felt the exhaustion, the pain, the fear. But beneath it all, I felt a new sensation. A cold, burning rage.
They had taken my father. They had taken my home. Now, they were trying to take my existence.
"You want my time?" I whispered, reaching into the Void within myself. "Come and take it."
I stepped off the fire escape.
I didn't fall. For a heartbeat, I simply hung in the air, the rain suspended around me like a halo of diamonds. Then, the world snapped back into focus, and I hit the ground with the force of a falling star.
The hunt was no longer in the shadows. The Veil was torn, and I was the only thing standing between the present and the end of history.
As I stood up in the middle of the rain-slicked alley, the violet-eyed men closing in, I knew one thing for certain.
The clock had finally started ticking. And I was the one who was going to break it.
I looked at Elias and Liora, who were staring down at me in shock. "Go," I mouthed.
Then, I turned toward the Harvesters and let the darkness take me. Not the darkness of death, but the darkness of the Gap—the space between the ticks of the clock, where the real monsters live.
And for the first time in my life, I wasn't afraid of the monsters.
I was one of them.