Back in their Victorian home, the familiar creaks of wood and scent of aged paper should have brought comfort—but now, every shadow felt deliberate. Amaira was the first to move, feet silent as she slipped down the hallway toward the grandfather clock that had always sat unused beneath the staircase.
Tylor followed, heart pounding. The riddle's line echoed like a whisper: "Find the clock that ticks in silence."
The clock loomed in the dim light—its brass face polished, hands still. It had never ticked, not once in all their years here. Amaira ran her fingers over its frame, pausing near the base.
"There's something carved here," she said.
Kayla knelt beside her and brushed away a layer of dust. Faint etchings emerged: a spiral with three dots at the center. Tylor recognized it immediately—it matched the spiral key they used to stabilize the fractures at the Hub. But this one... this one was burned into the wood, not placed.
Kayla looked at him. "Your father left this. It's a mark used to encrypt physical time anchors."
With a low creak, Amaira opened the clock's front panel. No gears. No pendulum. Just a hollow chamber with a strange device inside—silver, orb-shaped, laced with wire veins and humming faintly.
Tylor leaned in. "This isn't a clock. It's a memory vault."
Elias, who had quietly arrived behind them, studied it with grim recognition. "That's Collective tech. Old. Obsolete… but dangerous. You don't store memories like this unless you want them buried forever."
Kayla placed her palm on the orb. A sharp click echoed, followed by a ghostly projection—hazy at first, then crystal clear.
Daniel stood in a sterile lab, younger, sharper eyes but the same tired soul. He clutched a baby wrapped in red fabric—Amaira.
"They'll never stop. She's not just a key—they made her a mirror, a living resonance node. Every fracture she touches adapts to her presence. If she stays, she becomes the timeline.""I can't let that happen."
He turned to someone just outside the view. "You know what to do. Wipe the records. Hide her. And if I don't make it back—"
The memory cut off.
Amaira's eyes shimmered. "A mirror… That's why I remember places I've never been. Why my drawings match timelines we never saw."
"She's not just a puzzle-solver," Kayla murmured. "She's the reason puzzles exist. The timelines are shaping around her."
Tylor took a step back, overwhelmed. "Then the kidnapping… it was never about cruelty. It was a rescue. Dad wasn't running from justice—he was running from a future where Amaira couldn't choose who to be."
Suddenly, the orb flashed again, revealing a second, locked file. It needed a passcode.
Amaira stared at it. "Try... 927."
Kayla keyed it in. "Why that?"
Amaira smiled faintly. "That was the day Tylor gave me the red balloon. It was the last normal day before everything changed."
The orb accepted it.
This time, the voice was Elena's—Tylor's mother. Weary, fading, but calm.
"If you're hearing this, it means Daniel failed. It also means you survived. Amaira, you were never meant to be a weapon. But they built you that way. Your empathy is your resistance. Protect it. And Tylor… forgive him. He broke everything to keep you whole."
The message ended.
Silence returned, but something within Tylor shifted. The anger. The questions. They didn't vanish, but became something else—resolve.
"We need to know what the Collective planned next," he said.
Elias stepped forward. "Then we go where it all began."
Kayla nodded. "The original fracture. The one they never mapped."
Amaira turned toward the window. Outside, lightning forked across the sky—and for a second, in the reflection, a second version of her stood watching back.
No smile. No warmth.
Just a mirror waiting to shatter.