By the time the sun cleared the hills surrounding Madiso, the town had already begun its ritual denial. Strange things had happened the night before—bells at wrong hours, glass that broke without touch, a girl who felt her skin betray her—but by breakfast, everything was folded back into routine. That was Madiso's talent: erasing the extraordinary before it could finish echoing.
Mido woke late, a rarity, and stared at the ceiling for a full minute before moving. His dreams had been flooded with time loops and whispering gears. Somewhere between sleep and waking, he'd imagined the tower not as a building but as a living organism, its pulses synced to heartbeats it hadn't earned. He sat up slowly, rubbed his temples, and reached for his notebook without thinking.
Last night's entry stared back at him:
9:47 PM — double chime; faint glowing ring around clock face, rotating in both directions.
Below it he'd scribbled: Witnessed event? Triggered event? Tower reactive or conscious?
He wasn't sure whether he believed in mystical forces or merely misinterpreted patterns in weather and infrastructure. But last night hadn't felt random.
He dressed in the same hoodie and jeans, worn like armor now, and cycled to the library. The streets were empty except for an elderly man feeding pigeons and a teenager walking a labradoodle in pink booties. No one looked up. Even the tower seemed half-asleep, clock hands resting at 8:03, though Mido's watch said 8:12. A lie of nine minutes.
Inside the library, he took the stairs two at a time to the third floor where he kept his notes—a collection of binders and ledgers tucked behind outdated programming manuals. As he flipped through them, he noticed a pattern he hadn't before. Every time the tower had double-struck outside its regular schedule, someone in town had either vanished, collapsed, or undergone some irreversible change. A farmer who disappeared on market day. A child whose hair turned white overnight. Sia, yesterday.
Sia.
He still hadn't decided if what he saw on her face had been real or imagined. The fine line, the shadow under her eye—it could've been tiredness. Or the beginning of a countdown.
Sia, meanwhile, had not returned to sleep after her strange dream. She'd awoken with a strange ache behind her right eye and a metallic taste on her tongue. Her mirror offered no new lines, but she swore her skin looked duller in certain lights.
Mrs. Oduor noticed too. "Rough night?" she asked as Sia poured the morning coffee.
Sia forced a smile. "Weird dreams. That's all."
"You're young. Dream about pretty boys and champagne, not ghosts."
But Sia wasn't thinking about boys. She was thinking about bells, and pulses in the air, and the strange quiet in her chest that made her feel like something had gone missing overnight. Like she was no longer whole.
Around noon, she excused herself for a break and walked down Maple Street toward the library. She wasn't sure what she wanted—maybe just fresh air, or maybe answers she couldn't name. When she reached the library steps, Mido was already sitting there, notebook open, coffee at his side.
He looked up.
"You felt it too," he said.
She didn't answer right away. Then: "I think something took a piece of me last night."
He flipped the notebook toward her. "It took something from others too."
She scanned the list of names, dates, notes: small moments of unexplainable shifts in people's lives. Not deaths, not exactly. Just... subtractions.
She looked at him. "Why you? Why are you seeing this?"
Mido looked back at the tower.
"Because I've been listening."
The next day, Sia noticed something strange with her hands. Her grip had weakened. She dropped a mug, then a pen, and finally her house key. Each time, it felt less like clumsiness and more like slipping out of sync.
She wore gloves, hoping it would stabilize her fingers or at least disguise the tremor now tracing her knuckles. But the gloves made the heat unbearable, and people stared. She didn't care. Vanity seemed smaller now, less urgent.
Mido kept to his notes, updating timelines and charts. He cross-referenced town records, old newspapers, even cemetery entries. One librarian grew suspicious and asked if he was writing a horror novel. He said yes. She smiled nervously and kept her distance.
But even fiction couldn't have explained what they discovered next: an obituary from 1963 for a woman named Muriella Cain. The photo was blurred, but unmistakable. Sia's face—only older. Thirty years older.
Sia went cold.
"That's not possible," she whispered.
Mido showed her the rest: Muriella had worked at Oduor's café, walked Maple Street daily, was known for her beauty. Then she vanished. No body found. Only the obituary and a single line: She aged too fast, they said. Like the tower demanded it.
They spent hours comparing Sia's life to Muriella's, drawing lines and arrows across time. The café. The street. The dreams. The bells.
"She didn't die," Mido finally said. "She was erased."
Sia stood, blood roaring in her ears. "So what am I? A copy? A loop?"
"Maybe you're the original," Mido offered. "Maybe she was your echo."
The tower rang again that night—three times. No clock in Madiso ever struck thrice. People paused. A few crossed themselves. The power flickered.
Sia and Mido ran toward it this time. No more watching. No more notes. They needed to see it up close.
At the base of the tower, an old iron door creaked open, as if expecting them. A staircase wound upward into impossible darkness. The walls breathed.
They stepped inside.
The door closed behind them.
A new ledger would begin.