The city didn’t breathe anymore. It pulsed.

  Casen felt it the moment he and Elian stepped out of the dead sector. The silence wasn’t absence—it was pressure. Something had changed.

  Buildings no longer creaked. Lights no longer flickered randomly. The city had always danced to a broken rhythm, but now it felt like the beat had paused, as if waiting.

  "Do you feel that?" Elian whispered.

  "Yeah," Casen replied. "It’s like the city’s listening."

  They moved through back alleys and busted rail tunnels, heading toward Safehouse Delta. Sector 6 was quieter than it had any right to be. No GCA patrols. No drones. Even the Ghosts weren’t appearing.

  Which was wrong. Noon had passed.

  They reached the edge of an old archive district—towers of glass libraries and repurposed news towers now repurposed into vertical slums. Casen checked the time. 12:53 PM.

  Safehouse Delta was tucked behind a burnt-out history museum, half-swallowed by vines and rust. He knocked twice, paused, then twice again.

  The panel blinked green.

  A soft hiss. The door opened.

  Dr. Ash Wynn was older than Casen expected. Pale, angular, with streaks of silver through her hair and a limp that made her favor her right side. But her eyes—sharp. Observant.

  "You made it," she said simply.

  "So did you," Casen said.

  Wynn studied Elian for a moment longer than was comfortable. "You’re unstable. Not emotionally. Temporally."

  Elian tensed. "What do you mean?"

  "You’re not synced to this timeline. Or maybe… it’s not synced to you. Come inside. Quickly."

  Inside, the safehouse was filled with old tech: analog monitors, stripped AIs, paper maps. No digitals. No smartwalls. It smelled like solder and dust.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Wynn sat them down beside a cracked chalkboard filled with equations and a phrase underlined twice:

  Echo Drift

  "The Mirror you destroyed—it wasn’t the source," Wynn said, voice even. "It was a lens. A focusing tool. Something’s generating temporal bleed across the city. And now that the Mirror’s gone, the echoes are unfiltered."

  "Echoes?" Casen asked.

  Wynn flipped a monitor on. Static resolved into blurry footage: a Return field downtown. But something was off—the ghosts were walking away from their death spots. One turned and stared into the camera.

  It was Casen.

  "That’s from this morning," Wynn said. "But I scrubbed city feeds—there was no recorded death of you there. No logs. Nothing. The system registered you as alive. It always has."

  Casen’s mouth went dry. "What does it mean?"

  "It means your tether to the world is breaking down. Yours, and hers," she nodded at Elian. "You’re both becoming something else. Something the world can’t categorize."

  Elian stood. "So what do we do? How do we stop it?"

  Wynn hesitated, then opened a drawer and slid a file toward them. It was stamped RED LIST.

  "I wasn’t always with NOVUM. I worked black-tier for the original Ghost Containment Agency. Project Requiem. You were both on a list. A watchlist of potential anomalies. But you—" she pointed at Casen, "—your name was crossed out. You were listed as dead. Date: five years ago."

  Casen leaned back, pulse racing. "That’s not possible. I’ve only been in contact with ghosts for the last year."

  "No," Wynn said, quieter now. "You’ve been in contact longer. You just forgot. Or someone made you forget."

  Elian clutched the edge of the table. "The Black-Suits."

  Wynn nodded. "They’re not just enforcement. They’re cleaners. Memory agents. If you started remembering... they’d come for you. And the fact that they haven’t yet?"

  Casen looked at her. "Means we’re on borrowed time."

  Later, as the sun dipped low and the city began to glow with that eerie pre-noon light, Casen stood alone on the balcony of the safehouse.

  In the distance, a bell rang—soft, broken, not quite on the hour.

  Behind him, Elian stepped out. "You believe her?"

  "I don’t know what to believe. But I saw myself today. A ghost of me. That’s not a coincidence."

  Elian crossed her arms. "Wynn said the Return anomaly might be centralizing. That the source might be mobile. If that’s true..."

  "Then it could be following us."

  A beat.

  Elian whispered, "Or one of us is it."

  They stood in silence as the light over the city shimmered unnaturally.

  And at exactly midnight, something new happened.

  Not a Return.

  But a person appeared in the middle of the plaza below. Not translucent. Not fading.

  A girl. About their age. Dressed in black. And alive.

  She looked up—directly at them.

  And smiled.