The dust in his apartment was a constant, a fine grey powder that settled on every surface the moment he finished wiping it clean. Kaelen ran a finger over the small table beside his cot, leaving a clean, dark streak in the grime. A pointless gesture. The rot of the Veridia District was in the very air, a slow, particulate decay that defied order. He could smell it now, a mix of damp plaster and the faint, metallic tang of failing temporal stabilizers from the street below. It was the smell of running out of time. His own, and everyone else’s.
The flickering began without warning. It wasn't the cheap light panel above his head, but the numbers hovering just over the skin of his left wrist. For five years, they had been a steady, reassuring amber, a countdown he could manage, a problem he could solve. Now, the digits stuttered, bled their color, and solidified into a piercing, critical red. Three days, eleven hours, and fifty-nine minutes. The legal threshold for solvency was gone. An automatic seizure alert, cold and impersonal, was already screaming its way through the Temporal Audit Commission’s central network. The system had found him.
A sound cut through the quiet of the room. Not the familiar groan of the building or the distant hum of the city, but a clean, sharp, official summons tone. It came from the speaker integrated into his apartment door, a sound he had authorized a hundred times himself, but had never heard aimed at his own life. It was a legal precursor, a ninety-decibel announcement that the property within was now marked for repossession. The property, in this case, was him. The sound stopped.
Then came the fists.
Heavy, measured, rhythmic pounding that shook the floorboards. A half-empty cup of water on the table vibrated, its surface trembling. Repo Auditors. The men who came to collect a life’s final, dwindling seconds. They didn’t negotiate. They didn’t listen. They were functionaries, human tools of a system that saw a man with a red T-Minus not as a person, but as a debt to be collected. The door shuddered in its frame, the wood groaning under the impact. He knew the specification. He’d written the manual.
He had to move. The thought was cold and clear. He could stay, be processed, and have his remaining three days stripped from him on a sterile table in a TAC facility. Or he could run. He looked at the shuddering door, then turned away. He moved to the dusty table, his hand closing not on a weapon, but on his old data-slate. It was heavy, a solid block of TAC-issue metal, its screen dark. His thumb brushed over the hairline fracture that ran directly across the Commission’s eagle-and-hourglass seal. The price of his disgrace, a constant, physical reminder of the day his ambition had zeroed out an innocent man. He couldn’t leave it. It was all he had left of the man he used to be.
He gripped the slate, the cold metal a familiar weight in his trembling hand. He was choosing to carry his failure with him into the dark. That was the cost of running. Dignity was a luxury for men with more time.
He crossed the small room in three quick strides, his heart hammering against his ribs. The back window was grimy, showing a narrow slice of the alley three floors below. The view was all crumbling brick and overflowing refuse containers, the signature decay of a district the TAC had long since written off as a loss. He worked the lock, the metal groaning in protest before disengaging with a soft click. The air that drifted in was thick with the smell of rot and damp stone.
The pounding on the front door stopped. For a moment, there was only silence, more terrifying than the noise. Then came a new sound. A high-pitched, metallic scraping. A bypass tool against the lock mechanism. They were done knocking. The lock’s integrity was failing; he knew the sound. He had less than a minute. He was no longer an auditor, a respected agent of the system. He was just another piece of meat running from the butcher.
He swung his legs over the sill and pushed off from the brick and dropped into the dark. The fall was short, but the landing was hard. His ankles screamed as he hit the slick, uneven cobblestones, the impact jarring him to the teeth. He crumpled, not fell, his shoulder hitting the alley wall as he fought to stay upright. He was a fugitive. The word was a brand, seared into his mind. He was outside the law, outside the system, a man with nothing but the clothes on his back and the cracked symbol of his own ruin clutched in his hand.
He pushed himself up, leaning against the cold, damp brick. The alley was quiet now, the only sound his own ragged breath. A fine mist began to fall, cool against his face.
Then the slate in his hand lit up, its fractured screen casting a faint glow. A new message. Encrypted, TAC-standard. The source was unknown, but the protocol was not. It was a ghost.
A ghost from his past was offering him a way back in.
