Ruhan couldn't sleep that night.
Not because of fear, exactly.
But because memory had grown louder than the present.
He lay in bed, staring at the ceiling fan spinning shadows across the cracked paint of his old room, and tried to tally all the differences between this world and the one he'd left behind. The list kept growing — not in volume, but in weight.
Ira's voice. His brother's quiet absence. The way the calendar pages fluttered even when the window was closed.
Something was bending the rules of time and memory. And he was no longer the only one sensing it.
2:13 a.m.
His phone vibrated once. No ringtone. Just a silent tremor across his pillow.
A message from an unsaved number:
"You're not alone. Meet where the silence breaks."
Below it, a dropped pin.
The old railway platform — forgotten, rusted, swallowed by grass and night.
His pulse jumped. Another vibration:
"Others remember too."
He sat upright, breath catching in his throat. The room felt colder now. Like the past itself had sucked some warmth from the present.
He dressed quickly, quietly. For a second, he stood by Ira's bed, watching her sleep, fingers curled into fists against a pillow. Should he wake her?
No. This wasn't a dream he could drag someone else into. Not yet.
The walk to the platform was short — ten minutes, maybe — but every step felt like walking deeper into a past that wasn't his alone anymore.
When he arrived, the silence greeted him first.
Then came the figures — not silhouettes but people. Three of them. Standing like they had been waiting long before he decided to leave the house.
None familiar. And yet, something inside him stirred. Recognition without memory.
The girl in the hoodie was the first to speak.
"You're Ruhan," she said, calmly. "You came back."
He nodded slowly. "Who… are you?"
"Samaya. I'm on my second life too."
"…Too?"
The tall boy with coal-dark eyes stepped forward. "I'm on my fourth."
"And I've… I've died seven times," the third boy said softly. His eyes were watery, not from sadness — but exhaustion. "But each time, I come back with more pieces of the puzzle."
They weren't lying. Ruhan knew it in the way you know a scar is real — felt before seen.
They talked.
They spoke of time loops. Fragmented returns. Of years repeating, with only fragments carried over — voices in dreams, events déjà vu'd into nausea. Whole lives rebuilt again and again.
Most terrifying of all, they spoke of Astra.
"She came to me once in a dream," Samaya whispered, looking up at the full moon. "Said I wasn't ready."
"I saw her," said the tall boy. "For a second. On the day I died. She was the only one not crying."
"To me," the third said, "she's not a person. She's a sound. A voice. But I know she's real."
Ruhan's chest tightened. "I've never met her," he said. "But everything I've seen in every life points back to her."
They sat in a circle on the edge of the platform, legs dangling over the broken tracks.
The air was still.
Samaya's voice came low, fragile.
"I think we're not accidents. We're… anchors. Or keys. I don't know. But someone, somewhere, is trying to hold this broken world together. Through us."
"Why now?" Ruhan asked.
She looked at him. "Because now… we're finally beginning to remember each other."
Silence followed.
Then the tall boy said, "If we find the rest — if we bring everyone together…"
He didn't finish.
Because the idea was terrifying.
Because the truth might be that time wasn't healing.
It was waiting.
For them.
And for the first time since his return, Ruhan didn't feel lost.
He felt chosen.
And that was far more terrifying.