Darkness. Then breath.
Casen awoke to a stinging cold and the flicker of a broken light. He was on the floor of apartment KNR. The monitor still buzzed, but the ghost and Elian were gone.
He sat up fast, his heart pounding. His backpack—still there. Her coat—still inside.
What the hell was that thing?
The ghost had spoken. That shouldn’t have been possible. No ghost had ever spoken.
He staggered outside, found his bike untouched, and rode fast—no route, no direction, just away. But after a full hour of circling empty districts, he stopped.
He couldn’t run from this. She was real. And she needed help.
So he circled back.
Casen found Elian near the old school ruins, disoriented but alive. He carried her to an abandoned rooftop greenhouse, once used for city-grown vegetables before food got synthesized. Now it was ivy-choked and shadowed, but out of reach from the authorities.
She’d been unconscious when he arrived, curled beside a fractured skylight. He laid her on a bench padded with old insulation foam and let her rest.
Now, he sat beside her, watching her chest rise and fall in shallow rhythm.
“What are you?” he whispered.
Elian stirred.
Her eyes blinked open—one grey, one blue—and locked onto him with eerie precision.
“I remember falling,” she said softly. “And… waking up in a place made of glass.”
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Casen leaned closer. “You mean... metaphorically, or—?”
She shook her head. “A real place. Or close enough. Reflections. Fractured time. It didn’t belong to me. I think it was a memory. But not mine.”
“You weren’t part of the Return,” he said. “You showed up late. Like... twelve-forty-seven.”
“I know,” she whispered. “It wasn’t supposed to happen. I saw the clock-door starting to close. I tried to make it. But something pulled me back.”
“A clock-door?”
She nodded. “It bled. It was alive. I don’t understand it either.”
Casen didn’t know what to say.
She sat up slowly. “What time is it?”
Casen glanced at his watch. “6:12 PM.”
Her eyes widened. “It’s still the same day?”
“Yeah. You were out for a while, but not a full day. There’s no second Return, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I wasn’t,” she said. “But I need to go back. Where the ghosts were. That’s where I saw him.”
“Who?”
She hesitated. “The man from the memory. The one who closed the door.”
Casen frowned. “That was just a vision. A bleedover. You said yourself it wasn’t your memory.”
“I need to be there when it lines up again. Maybe… maybe he’ll be near the place where I came through.”
Casen sighed, stood up, and pulled his coat on. “You know this is dumb, right?”
“I know,” she said, standing shakily. “But everything about this is already broken.”
They made their way through dim alleys and quiet roads, reaching the outskirts of Ghost Square again. The square itself was mostly empty now, except for maintenance bots and a few lingering mourners.
Casen pulled her into the shadows beside a storage crate. “There. No GCA scanners here.”
Elian stared at the center of the square, her breath shallow.
“I think he’ll come,” she said.
Casen shook his head. “They already came. They’re gone. The ghosts only appear once a day.”
“I know,” she whispered. “But something stayed behind. Something like me.”
A chill crawled up Casen’s spine.
As they waited, the sky darkened. A low hum vibrated through the air—different from the shimmer of a Return. He turned.
A shimmer—not the same, not noon—but more like a tear. Not opening wide, not even visible to the normal eye. Just a flicker of wrongness.
From it stepped a man.
Not a ghost. Not fully alive.
Casen recognized him.
Tall. Crisp black coat. And eyes that didn’t reflect the world around him.
He looked straight at Elian.
“That’s him,” she said. “From the memory. The clock room.”
Casen’s fingers closed around her wrist. “He’s not part of the Return.”
“No,” she said. “He’s worse.”
The man smiled.
And waved.
