The calm of their reconstructed lives shattered again the moment Amaira pointed to the grandfather clock in the hallway—a clock none of them remembered owning. Its ornate wood was aged and polished, unfamiliar yet oddly fitting against their Victorian walls. Kayla felt a strange tug in her chest every time she walked past it, and Elias swore it hadn't been there before their return from the mountain lab. Tylor tested its gears, finding that it ticked backward at random moments, and sometimes—only sometimes—its face would flicker, revealing a swirling pattern like the fractures they had sealed.
That night, Kayla dreamed of standing inside the clock. Time moved around her in impossible ways—forward, sideways, looping back—while a whisper repeated a name she couldn't remember upon waking. When she tried drawing it, Amaira quietly slid a puzzle piece from her pocket, saying it matched the pattern Kayla had sketched. It wasn't from any game or box they'd ever owned. Elias took the drawing to the basement, where he'd been cataloguing leftover Collective tech. To his alarm, one of the old stabilizer cores hummed in response.
Tylor and Kayla opened the back of the grandfather clock, revealing a hollowed interior that extended far beyond the wall—an impossibly deep shaft of polished brass and flickering lights. It pulsed as if alive. Etched into the interior wall was a symbol they had only seen once—on the Architect's private console, long before it was destroyed. Somehow, the past was bleeding forward again.
Later that week, the clock struck thirteen. At that moment, Amaira vanished from her room mid-step, her drawing book falling to the floor. A shadow moved across the hallway mirror, but no one else was there. In her place, on the bed, lay a gear etched with the spiral insignia. Tylor's heart stopped—because it was the exact same gear he had once found in the time machine two years ago, the day he rescued Amaira.
The mystery of the clock—of how it came to be, what it meant, and why it called to only them—would lead them into a hidden thread of time they had never known existed. One that hadn't been fractured… but intentionally hidden.