Chapter 3: First Echoes
"You cannot outrun yourself if you're already behind you."
Day 6 – 07:30 a.m. – The Echo Field
They started tripping over their own stuff—literally. Gear they'd marked, all eaten up by time, half-sunk in mud. Tents, busted wires, food wrappers they'd doodled on. Only, the camp map they swore by last night? Shifted. Like the ground itself was playing games, two meters off where it should be.
Yara dug up her old voice recorder under a chunk of mossy rock. It still had juice. She hit play, and, well... chills.
"If you find this, I'm sorry. We didn't mean to break it. We only wanted to understand."
Her own damn voice, but older—wrecked, tired as hell.
"That's me. Years from now."
Aanya poked around in the dirt. "Nobody dropped this. It was left here. For us. Or, you know, for... whoever comes next."
"Or the last us," Malik said, barely above a whisper.
Every new find just made things weirder. Like, exactly who are we right now? Or who did we used to be? Time wasn't just background noise out here—it was poking at them, bending, twisting, making a mess.
Day 6 – 09:12 a.m. – Duplicate Journals
Aanya's journal came back—except now there were two. She found them chilling side by side up by the ridge, in the shade of that scraggly tree. One was hers, no doubt. The other? Looked almost the same but singed around the edges, ink all faded and patchy. Some pages just blank, others covered with entries she didn't remember ever writing.
One line, though—sloppy handwriting, big letters:
"Yara will vanish. Don't stop her. Let the loop solidify."
Aanya's face went pale. "I never wrote that."
Malik flipped through pages. "There's stuff in here about things we haven't done yet. Stuff we haven't even talked about."
"And deaths," Reeve muttered, holding up a page like it was cursed. "Some of us didn't make it."
Yara's voice got small. "Maybe... another us lived longer. Or not as long. Maybe we're just leaving each other clues."
Aanya shut the book. Real slow. "So... not our first go at this, huh?"
Day 6 – 10:30 a.m. – Echoes of Conflict
They found some drone footage, buried in a file basically screaming "DO_NOT_OPEN."
Malik spent two hours cussing at it, but he broke through. What they saw? Not good.
Video starts: Malik and Reeve, screaming at each other in the rain. Malik's bleeding. Reeve storms off, Yara tries to pull him back, Aanya's losing it. Raw, ugly, heartbreaking stuff.
Except—none of that's happened. Not yet.
Aanya checked the metadata. "This is three days from now."
Reeve just stared. "So, we crack up in three days?"
Malik looked away. "Maybe we already did. Maybe we're stuck in the rerun."
Yara, barely above a whisper: "Which one of us is closest to snapping right now?"
Nobody had an answer. That silence? Heavy.
Day 6 – 02:00 p.m. – Future Traces
Yara needed air, so she wandered out to the trees. That's when she spotted it—bare footprints, her size and stride, heading into the clearing. Right next to them? Bootprints, facing her.
She knelt, tracing the prints. Deep. Fresh.
"I met someone," she said when the rest caught up. "Or I will. She looked like me. Sounded like me. Knew things—stuff I never told anyone."
Reeve, leaning in: "What'd she say?"
"She told me to stop writing. Said words make the loops worse."
Aanya shook her head. "But the journals are how we remember. How else do we know what's real?"
Yara nodded, biting her lip. "That's what scares me."
Day 6 – 04:40 p.m. – Mirror Zone
Suddenly, the woods went all weird—trees so shiny you could see your face in them. The air was thick with a low, drumming pulse. Not a bird, not a bug. Dead quiet.
Each of them stared at their own reflection.
Aanya saw fire—her lab, up in flames. Papers everywhere with "Temporal Weaponization" stamped across them. She was screaming.
Reeve saw his brother. Blood-soaked. Just standing there, not mad, not forgiving. Guilt weighed on Reeve like a wet blanket.
Malik watched himself turn into a little kid—then just... vanish. Like someone blew out a candle. He looked scared, not of dying, but of never having mattered.
Yara saw... nothing. Just a fuzzy shadow where her face should be. The shape wobbled, blinked out.
She backed up, shaky. "I don't have a future self here."
Aanya, voice barely audible: "Or your loop's just... too far out to show up."
The trees hummed. Not a sound, more like a headache.
Day 6 – 06:00 p.m. – The Silent Version
Sun dipped. Sky went purple. Out from the trees, another Yara appeared.
Same face, same everything, but this one? Stone silent. No feeling in her eyes. Mouth clamped shut. Blinked once, slow, like she had all the time in the world.
Reeve's hand went to his weapon—reflex. Aanya stepped in. "She's not here to hurt us. She's a marker."
Silent Yara walked up, opened her palm. Black stone inside, spiral symbols all over it. No words. Just that stone, heavy as the end of the world.
Yara grabbed it, and bam—memory sucker-punched her. That old rush of being way down below, wandering tunnels while her own voice bounced off walls. Screams fading out, whispers crawling up her spine, then just... dead air.
"She's what's left after I choose," Yara said, voice catching like she'd tripped on the word. "She's the echo."
The figure just gave this sad, tight smile—looked almost sorry for her—and stepped back, melting away like fog at sunrise. Gone.
Malik, barely louder than a thought: "We're not just watching echoes. We are them."
Day 6 – 08:00 p.m. – The Night Journal
So, Aanya's at it again, cracking open her latest journal by that stubborn little lantern.
Except—boom, new line appears out of nowhere. Not her handwriting, not her timing:
"The Archive watches. The island chooses. Be where you are."
Malik's already got his science hat on, running spectral tests on the ink. Guess what? Same formula as hers, but it's old. Like, way old. The stuff's aged.
Reeve's pacing, classic. "We're being prepped. Like bugs under a glass slide, and we can't even see the scientist."
Aanya glances up, eyes sharp. "So let's throw it for a loop. Give it something it doesn't see coming—coherence."
Yara's thumbing her stone, like it's a stress ball or a lifeline. "We've never stuck together this long. Maybe that's our move. Maybe that's already screwing up the system."
Malik chips in, "Which means the loop's cracking. Or it's getting wild."
Reeve nods, all grim determination. "Come dawn, we hit the coordinates. No stalling—the only way out is straight through the middle."
Aanya, voice barely a breeze: "Or maybe it just sucks us in before we get the chance."
Above, the stars aren't even pretending to be normal. They're spinning, slow and dizzy, like the whole sky's remembering something.
The island wasn't just reacting to them.
It was dreaming.
Remembering.
Maybe even waiting.