The public data-node was a greasy plastic box bolted to a crumbling wall. Kaelen fed a burner chit into the slot, a sliver of disposable time he couldn’t afford to waste. The price was a handful of seconds, and the machine took them without ceremony. He leaned close, the faint smell of ozone and old sweat filling his nostrils as he keyed the access code provided in the TAC summons. The terminal’s public interface, a chaotic mess of advertisements and news feeds, dissolved. It was replaced by a single, clean line of white light on a field of perfect black.
The line expanded, unfolding into a sterile holographic space that seemed to push the grime of the Veridia District away. A man materialized in the blue-white glow. He was flawless, his image sharp and steady, without the flicker of a lesser projection. His dark hair was cut to severe, regulation length. His face was a collection of flat planes, his eyes a neutral grey. He wore the simple, high-collared charcoal uniform of the Temporal Audit Commission. This was Felix Hayes, a senior data handler Kaelen knew only by reputation: a man who was less a person and more a function of the system itself.
Felix’s voice was a monotone, as flat and unadorned as his face. There was no greeting. There was only the immediate start of the procedure.
— Your identity is confirmed, Rook. This communication is logged under directive 7-gamma. Acknowledge.
— Acknowledged, — Kaelen said. The word was dry in his throat.
— You have been selected for a high-priority assignment, — Felix continued, his gaze fixed somewhere just past Kaelen’s shoulder. He was not looking at a person; he was addressing a data point. — The objective is to resolve the ongoing temporal bleed in the Veridia District.
Kaelen’s jaw tightened. Resolve the bleed. His home. The place was dying on its feet, and the TAC was finally moving. For a moment, a flicker of something that felt dangerously like hope sparked in his chest. He crushed it instantly. The TAC did not resolve problems out of kindness. They resolved them for political calculus.
— Mission parameters are as follows, — Felix stated. — You will infiltrate the local chapter of the Aevum Seers.
The word landed like a stone. The Seers. The faction of mystics and intuitives who saw time as a river to be navigated by faith, not a ledger to be balanced by logic. They were everything Kaelen despised, everything he had trained himself to see as a corrupting variable.
— Your objective is to acquire verifiable proof of illicit temporal draining. The data suggests the bleed originates from within their operational sphere.
Kaelen’s mind raced, processing the logic. It was a standard audit, a deep-cover investigation. It was what he was good at. It was a way to use his skills, to prove his worth. But the memory of Silas’s warning echoed in the sterile silence. They’ll ask you to be someone you’re not.
— Your primary target for observation, — Felix said, and a smaller window opened beside his head, displaying the file photo of a woman with a kind, open face and dark, intelligent eyes. — Is the ranking manager of the Sunken Athenaeum, Seraphina Vey.
The name was unfamiliar. The face was that of a stranger. Kaelen committed it to memory. She was the target. The source of the bleed. He would find the data, expose her, and his life would be his own again. It was clean. It was procedural.
Then Felix Hayes delivered the next line, and the floor fell out from under Kaelen’s world.
— You will not be acquiring proof, Auditor. You will be planting it. Your mission is to frame Seraphina Vey for the temporal drain on the Veridia District.
The air left Kaelen’s lungs. A frame job. This wasn’t an audit. It was a political hit. He was being ordered to do intentionally what he had once done by accident. He was being told to find an innocent and turn them into a pile of dust for the good of the system. The face of the weaver, confused and terrified, flashed in his mind. The smell of ancient dust filled his memory.
He felt sick.
— The reward for successful completion is a full restoration of your T-Minus to a baseline of twenty-five years, — Felix said, his voice unwavering. He was stating a fact, not making an offer. — Your status as a senior auditor will be reinstated. Your record will be cleared.
Twenty-five years. The number was an abstraction, a fantasy. It was more time than he had seen on his own wrist in half a decade. It was a lifetime. It was the cool, steady blue of Silas Marr’s T-Minus. It was the freedom to walk down the street without counting his own heartbeats. It was everything.
His fingers clenched in his empty pocket. A focusing tool for a fraud was on its way. This was the price.
— The penalty for failure, — Felix added, his grey eyes finally meeting Kaelen’s in the holographic projection. — Or for missing the designated deadline, is total and immediate temporal repossession.
The threat was delivered with the same lack of inflection as the reward. It was just another data point in the equation. But Kaelen felt it like a physical blow. He saw the weaver’s body collapsing, turning to a fine grey powder. That was the alternative. Not just death. Erasure. His entire existence, every second he had ever lived, seized and unwritten.
He was trapped. The realization was cold and absolute. There was no negotiation. There was no third option. Silas had been right. This was the only door, and it led straight to hell. His own logic, the analytical mind he had honed into a weapon, confirmed it. Survival required this. Every other path led to a zeroed-out T-Minus.
His choice was an illusion. He was a tool being picked up to perform a dirty job, and the only question was whether he would allow himself to be used. The alternative was to be discarded. Broken.
He thought of Veridia. He thought of the sagging buildings and the smell of rot. The Seers were a threat, their intuitive nonsense a cancer on the system. Framing one of their leaders to save his entire home district… the cold calculus was there. The needs of the many. It was a lie he could almost tell himself.
But he knew the truth. This wasn’t about saving Veridia. It was about saving himself. It was a descent into the very corruption he had once sworn to fight, and he was walking into it with his eyes wide open. The price wasn’t just his integrity. It was his freedom. By accepting, he would forever be a man who had chosen his own life over another’s, a fact the TAC would hold over him for every one of those twenty-five years.
He looked at the impassive face of Felix Hayes. The system wasn’t asking for his loyalty. It was demanding his soul.
A long silence stretched, filled only by the low hum of the data-node. Felix waited. He would wait forever. He was a machine, and he had all the time in the world. Kaelen had only days.
He gave a single, sharp nod. The motion was small, almost imperceptible, but it felt like a tectonic shift inside him. He had made his choice. He had chosen to live.
The sterile white light of the hologram seemed to grow colder, the black space around it deeper. He had just sold the last piece of himself that wasn't already broken. He had chosen cynical self-preservation, and the path forward was now irrevocably set. He would become a monster to keep his own heart beating.
