The year was 2015.
The night: October 31st.
The last Halloween Gravesend would ever have before it forgot what a night even was.
And Mara's brother was still alive.
---
We moved through the clocktower like shadows.
Everything was too clean. Too untouched.
No cracks. No pulsing gears. No stitched ones whispering from the walls.
Just time.
Pure. Real. Whole.
---
From below, we heard his voice again—young, excited, unscarred by the ghosts of unmade minutes.
> "It's working, Mara! The pulse is stable. It ticked clean for sixty seconds!"
Mara froze on the landing, breath caught in her chest.
Her hand trembled toward the stair rail, like part of her wanted to call out to him.
I grabbed her wrist gently.
> "If he sees you… it might unravel everything."
She nodded slowly. Her mouth moved without sound.
Caleb.
---
We kept going down, following the vibration in the walls.
Something had just started humming.
And I could feel it again—that wrongness.
Like the air was bending a second early.
Like the room was preparing to forget.
---
At the base of the tower, we reached the old engine room.
It looked different.
Smaller.
Still made of steel and brass—but not warped like in our time.
And in the center, with sweat on his brow and sparks dancing around him, stood Caleb Thatcher.
He looked younger than I expected.
No stitched scars. No ghostlight in his eyes.
Just a genius mechanic standing on the edge of the apocalypse without knowing it.
---
He twisted a dial.
The anchor pulsed.
> "Stabilizing now… just a few more volts and—"
Mara's grip tightened on my arm.
> "This is it," she whispered. "This is where it happened."
> "Where time first… broke."
---
I looked around.
No shadows in the corners.
No singing.
But something was present—something breathing through the vents.
Watching.
Waiting.
---
Caleb pulled a lever.
And the second it clicked—
The air folded.
---
A sharp snap echoed through the chamber.
Not a machine.
Not a short.
A tear.
Reality cracked—barely audible—but I felt it behind my teeth.
The lights flickered.
The room got colder.
And time paused.
Not for long.
Just a blink.
But long enough for me to hear it:
A whisper from the wall, the same one I'd heard buried in the mirrors:
> "Permission granted."
---
Caleb stepped back, confused.
"That's… that's not supposed to happen," he muttered.
> "I didn't authorize a cut…"
He turned toward the staircase—but we were already hiding.
Mara squeezed her eyes shut.
"Riley… that voice. It wasn't Caleb."
"I know."
> "It was me."
---
She backed away from the wall, shaking her head.
"I gave it permission. I don't remember when. Or how. But it was me. I told the system to anchor the skip."
"But why?" I asked.
She swallowed hard.
Tears formed in her eyes.
> "Because I was trying to save him."
---
She pointed to the schematics on the wall—dozens of pages Caleb had drawn, equations I didn't understand, but one thing was clear:
He wasn't building a time machine.
He was building a containment system.
Something to trap a moment.
To save it.
To keep someone from dying forever.
---
> "Our mother died the year before," Mara said softly.
> "He became obsessed with stopping loss.
Said we didn't need to let time take people away anymore.
Said we just had to find a way to keep the moment going.
That if he could stop a second from ending, we could keep her with us.
Or maybe... bring her back."
---
I realized it then.
The skipped minute…
It wasn't a curse.
Not originally.
It was a grief trap.
A cage built to freeze one second forever.
To cheat time.
To cheat death.
And it worked.
But something else moved in when time stopped.
Something that liked the silence.
Something that feeds on skipped moments.
---
The chamber shuddered again.
The walls cracked at the seams.
And suddenly, I saw the future crashing back in—like waves surging through the mirror we came from.
Stitched shadows flooded the walls.
Clocks burst like glass eyeballs.
And the bell above rang once.
Loud.
---
Caleb turned—finally seeing the room for what it was.
> "It's happening again," Mara whispered.
> "This is where he gets pulled."
---
I grabbed her hand.
"We can still change it."
"How?"
"We break the anchor before it finishes its first full skip."
---
We ran for the dais.
Caleb shouted as we emerged, startled, but his voice vanished under the hum of a second cracking in half.
We reached the center.
The device pulsed blue.
A perfect ring of light hovered in the air, shimmering like the surface of a lake.
Mara looked at me, eyes fierce.
> "Together."
We pulled every fuse.
Every bolt.
Yanked the containment plate free.
Tore the stabilizer from its slot.
The machine screamed.
The ring collapsed.
And then—
Silence.
---
Not the broken, unreal silence of the skipped minute.
But true stillness.
The hum was gone.
The pressure in the walls eased.
No whisper.
No singing.
Just air.
Just the sound of time... continuing.
---
Caleb fell to his knees, panting.
> "What… what just happened?"
Mara stepped forward, voice trembling.
> "You almost saved the wrong thing."
She looked back at me, then whispered:
> "But now maybe we can save everything else."
---
The lights flickered—
—but didn't go out.
The tower held.
Time held.
And for the first time in ten years…
Gravesend didn't skip.