The air in the map room was still, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath.
Elara stood before the web of red threads, her eyes scanning the tangled routes between years. Some threads stretched centuries without interruption; others stopped abruptly, ending in frayed wisps.
She traced one line with her gaze — 2025 → 1923 → 1478 → 2091 — before it simply ended, midair.
"Why are some of them cut?" she asked.
Casimir, hunched over a desk scattered with clock parts, didn't look up. "Because those threads no longer exist. The events they carried unraveled."
She swallowed. "And the people?"
"Gone," he said simply.
The answer sat in her chest like a stone.
Her mind kept circling back to the man in the overcoat — his stillness, his smile, the strange familiarity in his voice.
She glanced at Casimir. "When he spoke to me… it felt like he knew me. Not just from now, but from… somewhere else."
Casimir stopped adjusting the watch in his hands. Slowly, he raised his head.
"Describe him," he said.
She did. Every detail — his height, the cut of his coat, the weight in his gaze. Casimir listened without interruption, his eyes narrowing slightly.
When she finished, he set the watch down. "There is a possibility," he said carefully, "that you were not meeting a stranger."
The back of her neck prickled. "Meaning?"
"That man… might be you."
Elara laughed once, but it came out flat. "What, like some sort of evil twin?"
Casimir's tone stayed level. "Like a future you. Or rather — one version of you. Fractured, split off from the timeline you are in now."
"That's insane."
"Perhaps," he said. "But in my work, 'insane' usually means 'possible.'"
She stepped closer to the wall of maps. "Why would I — or she — be trying to erase me?"
Casimir's gaze sharpened. "That is the question that keeps me awake. And until we answer it, you cannot confront her. Knowing too much about your own future accelerates the Fracture."
Elara stared at him. "You're saying that if I talk to her, I could destroy the whole timeline?"
"Yes."
Her reflection caught in a framed sheet of glass on the wall.
But the face looking back wasn't quite hers.
The hair was the same, but longer. The eyes — her eyes — had that same shifting, glassy depth she'd seen in the overcoat man. And the expression… was not her own. It was sharper. Older. Tired.
She blinked, and the reflection was normal again.
The journal in her hand grew warm, a fresh line of ink curling across the page.
"She is closer than you think."
Casimir's head snapped toward her. "What does it say?"
She hesitated, then read it aloud.
His face paled slightly. He crossed the room, pulling a curtain across the glass wall of maps. "We need to leave."
"Why?"
"Because," he said, shouldering his satchel, "the closer she gets, the more the boundaries between your times weaken. If she's already bleeding into your reflections—"
A faint click echoed in the room.
Both of them froze.
The sound came again, from behind the curtain — not a clock ticking, but a deliberate, slow step.
Casimir grabbed her wrist. "Don't look."
They moved to the rear exit, but before they could reach it, a voice drifted from behind the curtain.
Soft. Amused.
"Still running, Elara?"
The journal pulsed in her grip. Another line of ink bloomed:
"If you answer her, you will not leave this room."
The voice didn't sound like it came from behind the curtain.
It sounded like it came from inside her head, curling around her thoughts like smoke.
Casimir's grip tightened on her wrist. "Elara," he murmured, "you have to keep moving."
But her feet felt rooted.
The pull of the voice was magnetic — intimate, as though it wasn't a stranger speaking at all but a memory, a part of herself she'd forgotten.
"Elara." Casimir's tone sharpened. "Don't listen."
She swallowed. "She sounds like me."
"That's how she gets you."
The shadow of a figure shifted against the curtain. Elara's pulse thundered. The silhouette was unmistakable — tall, shoulders squared, head tilted just slightly, exactly as she'd seen the man in the overcoat stand in the street. But the figure was slimmer. Her height. Her build.
"Tell me," the voice said, "do you still dream of the fire?"
Elara's throat went dry. She didn't know why, but those words hit her like a blade between the ribs.
Casimir's fingers dug into her arm. "We're leaving. Now."
He tugged her toward the door, but something inside her whispered that leaving without answering would be… wrong. Like tearing a page from a book mid-sentence.
The journal in her hand throbbed hot enough to sting. Another line of ink unfurled:
"She remembers what you have not yet lived."
Her knees felt weak. "Casimir… what does that mean?"
"It means," he said, already unlocking the rear door, "that if you stay here another thirty seconds, you'll never leave this building."
---
As the lock turned, the ticking of the clocks in the next room suddenly returned — but faster. Too fast. A hundred clocks, each running at a different speed, their combined rhythm spiraling into chaos.
The walls trembled.
One of the red threads on the map wall snapped with a sound like breaking glass. The parchment beneath it browned and curled inward as if burning, but there was no smoke, no flame — just… absence.
The figure behind the curtain took a slow step forward. The fabric rippled.
"Elara," the voice coaxed, "you think he's saving you. But he's only keeping you until the right moment to—"
The curtain tore.
Elara didn't see a face. She saw herself — but overlaid with something fractured, like a mirror smashed and reassembled wrong. Parts of the face aligned with hers, others didn't, the angles just slightly off, like reality couldn't decide what she was supposed to look like.
And then the cracks were in the air, spidering out from her future self's silhouette, glowing gold at the edges.
Casimir shoved the door open. "Move!"
---
They burst into another narrow alleyway, this one darker and colder. The sky above was split with hairline fractures that bled faint light, illuminating fog that swirled unnaturally around their ankles.
Behind them, the sound of footsteps followed — slow, deliberate, unhurried. Elara didn't need to look back to know she was there. The journal pulsed again, almost in rhythm with those steps.
They took turn after turn, Casimir never hesitating, as though he'd memorized the city's arteries. But Elara's chest burned, her legs threatening to give out. She stumbled once, catching herself on the damp brick wall.
Casimir stopped long enough to steady her, then glanced behind them. Whatever he saw made his expression tighten.
"She's not chasing," Elara panted.
"No," he said grimly. "She doesn't have to."
---
They ducked into another door — this one hidden behind a stack of crates. Inside was a room even smaller than the map chamber, but the walls here were covered in mirrors. Not glass, not silver — but polished disks of bronze, each with faint lines etched into their surfaces.
Elara stared. "What is this?"
Casimir shut the door. "A way to see where she is without letting her see us."
He moved to one of the mirrors and breathed on it. The surface fogged, and slowly, an image formed — the alley they had just left. Empty.
But the cracks were still there, hovering in the air like veins of light.
And then… her reflection appeared in the bronze, stepping into view. She bent toward the mirror, lips curling in a faint smile.
Casimir swore under his breath and covered the disk with a black cloth.
"She can track us through reflections now," he muttered. "We're running out of safe hours."
---
Casimir moved fast, pulling one black cloth after another over the bronze disks until the room was stripped of its reflections.
Elara pressed her back to the door, breathing hard. "Why mirrors? Why reflections?"
"Because time remembers your image before it remembers your name," he said without looking up. "And she knows how to reach through memory."
The last cloth fell into place. For a moment, the ticking in her ears was only her heartbeat.
Then the journal pulsed hot again. New ink crawled across the page like it was being written under her skin.
"This hour is already over."
Casimir swore under his breath. "We need to move before—"
A sound cut through him — a low, vibrating pop, like a bubble bursting.
One of the covered mirrors bulged outward, the black cloth stretching like something was pushing from the inside. The bulge became a hand — her hand — pale and trembling slightly, the nails dark with soot.
Casimir grabbed Elara's arm. "Now!"
---
They slipped through another back door into a street she didn't recognize — too narrow to be a road, too long to be an alley. The air here was warmer, and it smelled faintly of cinnamon and machine oil.
Elara slowed. "Where are we?"
"Between," Casimir said.
"Between what?"
He didn't answer.
The walls here weren't brick or stone but… wood? No — wood layered over something else, something smooth and metallic. The texture made her think of ship hulls, but these "walls" rose two stories high.
Above, there was no sky — only a ceiling of wood beams, with slivers of light leaking between them.
They walked for what felt like a full minute before she realized the street behind them wasn't visible anymore. Where they had entered was now just more endless corridor.
"Casimir—" she started, but then the journal burned again.
"She is already here."
---
They broke into a run, boots and sneakers thudding against the uneven boards. No footsteps followed… but she could feel pursuit. The hair on the back of her neck prickled.
Every so often, she caught movement at the edge of her vision — not the overcoat, not her reflection — but a flicker of her own silhouette stepping in perfect sync with her, just far enough away to seem unreal.
"Don't look at her," Casimir ordered.
"I'm not—"
"You are. You're thinking about it."
They turned another corner and emerged into a larger space — an abandoned marketplace. Wooden stalls stood in crooked lines, their faded signs written in alphabets she didn't recognize. Some looked centuries old; others looked like they'd never been built yet.
Elara slowed, glancing at the strange goods scattered across counters — a pile of coins with years stamped centuries apart, a set of eyeglasses with no lenses, a newspaper printed entirely in question marks.
"Where is this?" she whispered.
"Some call it the Lost Hour," Casimir said. "A market for things that fell between moments."
---
At the far end of the marketplace stood a massive grandfather clock — so tall it nearly touched the ceiling beams. Its pendulum swung in long, lazy arcs, but the hands were frozen at twelve.
Casimir led her to it, pushing on the frame until a narrow door opened in its side.
"This will take us back into the city," he said.
She peered inside. It wasn't darkness — it was mist, golden and soft, swirling like liquid light.
"Go," Casimir urged.
She stepped inside.
---
The mist enveloped her instantly, warm and thick. For a heartbeat, she thought she heard whispers — her own voice among them, saying words she couldn't quite catch. Then the floor tilted, and she stumbled forward into daylight.
She was back in 1923 — the same street where they'd first fled the tram. The air smelled the same, sounded the same.
But Casimir wasn't beside her.
The journal in her hands grew hot again.
"This is not where you left."
Her skin went cold. She looked up.
The tram was still there, but this time… every passenger was staring directly at her.
And every single one of them had her face.