The rusted train car creaked with every gust of wind. Outside, the city flickered like a broken reel of film—frames missing, looping seconds. Casen rubbed his eyes, but the glitches didn’t stop.

  It wasn’t just the ghosts anymore. It was the city itself.

  Elian stood by the doorway, her silhouette sharp against the fractured skyline. The jagged horizon glowed in intermittent pulses, a mix of unnatural neon and sickly amber, like the earth itself was trying to scream.

  Casen joined her. "You sure about this?"

  She didn’t look away. "No. But if we wait any longer, we’ll disappear like the others."

  He nodded. That was reason enough.

  They left at dawn—or what passed for dawn now. The sun was late. The light cracked sideways through the smog, casting slanted shadows that didn’t match the people making them. Time was leaking again.

  Their path took them through the Silent Wards, a district where no Returns had appeared in years. Not because no one died there. But because whatever died there didn’t come back.

  Buildings leaned like tired sentinels. Windows gaped open like mouths stuck mid-scream. Elian paused in front of a collapsed statue—a child holding a clock, melted down the middle.

  "You ever wonder," she asked quietly, "if maybe none of this was supposed to be saved?"

  Casen bent to tie his boot. "Yeah. But that’s not why we’re here. We’re not saving it. We’re trying to remember it."

  They pressed on.

  By midday, they reached the perimeter wall.

  The city’s edge wasn’t a straight border. It was a jagged, irregular seam. A ring of collapsed zones, abandoned checkpoints, and flickering hazard signs. The concrete perimeter was cracked open in parts, scorched in others. A massive sign dangled from a bent scaffold:

  BEYOND THIS POINT: TEMPORAL STABILITY NOT GUARANTEED.

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  Casen reached for his pocket. The photo from the Black Echo girl still rested there. Elian’s gaze dropped to it.

  "That version of us looked happy."

  "Maybe they weren’t," Casen said. "Maybe that’s why they broke."

  Together, they climbed through a breach in the wall.

  The Faultline wasn’t a line at all.

  It was a crater. A chasm miles wide, surrounded by layers of crumbling roads, incomplete buildings, broken time. Gravity bent in strange ways here—shadows curved the wrong direction. Distant echoes arrived before the sound that made them.

  A field of silence pressed against them as they stepped forward. Not absence of sound. More like sound didn’t know how to behave.

  Then they heard it.

  A voice.

  Their own voices.

  Faint. Distant. Repeating a conversation they hadn’t had yet.

  "I didn’t want to forget you."

  "Then why did you leave?"

  Casen froze. Elian gripped his sleeve.

  "We’re being echoed," she whispered. "Past, future—it’s bleeding together."

  A figure stood on the crater’s edge.

  Wynn.

  Or a version of her.

  She was older. Worn. Her coat was torn at the seams, and her eyes were ringed with sleeplessness. She didn’t flinch when they approached.

  "Took you long enough," she said.

  Casen blinked. "Wynn?"

  "Not your Wynn. But close enough."

  Elian stepped forward. "Is this the Faultline?"

  The older Wynn nodded. "It’s the edge. The place where all erased things sink. You’re standing on the verge of memory’s graveyard."

  Casen exhaled. "We’re looking for the truth. What came before the fracture."

  Wynn turned toward the chasm. "Then look in. But be warned—it doesn’t just show truth. It shows what was lost. And once you see it, you can’t go back."

  They stepped to the edge.

  Inside the Faultline wasn’t black. It was shattered. Like looking into a kaleidoscope of dead timelines. Moments fluttered like torn pages:

  —Elian dying in a fire Casen never remembered. —Casen being pulled from a wreck by a hand that looked like his own. —Wynn holding a child. The same child from the ghost square. —And then a still frame. One that didn’t move.

  A room.

  A machine.

  And a man with no face turning it on.

  Elian shuddered. "That’s it. That’s where it began."

  Casen clenched his fists. "That’s what they buried."

  The older Wynn’s voice cut through the static. "You can’t take it out. Not directly. But there’s a way to bring its echo back."

  Elian turned. "How?"

  "You go deeper. Through the Faultline. To the place where time never healed. The fracture’s core."

  Casen looked down once more, then back at Elian. Her eyes held the same fear, the same resolve.

  He nodded. "Then we go deeper."

  As they descended into the Faultline, the world twisted.

  The air shimmered. Ghosts flickered like thoughts halfway forgotten. The path ahead wasn’t stable ground. It was memory. Regret. Refusal.

  But they walked anyway.

  And as they did, the first piece of truth whispered through the static:

  "You were never supposed to meet. But you did.

  And that’s what broke the world."