The first ripple hit Cinder Sol on a Tuesday. Not a tremor in the earth, or a glitch in the city's perpetually shimmering Chronos-feed, but a faint, almost imperceptible whisper in his skull – a ghost of a sound that shouldn't exist. It was the distinct clinking of keys from an old keyring, the kind his grandfather used to carry. A keyring that, officially, was never manufactured in this era.
Cinder slammed his mug down on the chipped synthetic counter, the lukewarm nutri-paste sloshing over his fingers. He stared at his Chronos-pad, its sleek surface displaying the ubiquitous public data stream: global news feeds, weather projections, historical summaries of the past three centuries – all meticulously cataloged and irrefutably perfect. The official record. The gospel. And the reason Cinder Sol lived every waking moment with a quiet, furious dread.
He ran a hand through his perpetually messy, dark hair, his pale grey eyes scanning the mundane flow of information. Two years. Two years since the Year of Null. Two years since a segment of time, roughly twelve months, had been surgically excised from the Chronos Stream, leaving behind a perfectly smooth, undeniable blank. Except for him. He remembered. Not perfectly, not like a recording, but in flashes, in sensations, in the echo of a brass keyring.
"Another phantom, Cinder?" a voice chirped from the doorway of his cramped apartment.
Aera Rourke, his unwanted shadow and unofficial partner, leaned against the frame. Her dark uniform, crisply ironed, was a stark contrast to Cinder's rumpled utility jumpsuit. As a Chronos Stream internal investigator, Aera was the embodiment of the system Cinder fundamentally distrusted. She was sharp, principled, and utterly convinced of the Stream's inviolable truth – a truth Cinder knew was a lie.
"Just static," Cinder grunted, not looking at her. He hated how easily she saw through his carefully constructed apathy.
"Static doesn't have a specific decibel count, Sol," she countered, stepping inside. Her eyes, the color of polished jade, swept over his small, cluttered living space, probably cataloging every out-of-place data chip and questionable wiring job. "You're picking up a resonance, aren't you? A temporal bleed?"
Cinder pushed away from the counter. A temporal bleed was the technical term for a micro-distortion, an accidental overlap of temporal data. Most people, especially the Chronos Stream's vast majority of 'untuned' citizens, never noticed them. But Cinder wasn't most people. The Year of Null had given him a peculiar sensitivity, a 'Sol' resonance that picked up the ghost of erased time. It was a curse, a constant reminder of what was missing.
"It was nothing," he insisted, though the phantom clinking still resonated. "What do you want, Rourke? Another lecture on my 'unverified data imprint'?"
Aera's expression tightened. "No. I want to know why the Guild just activated a new Loom signature." She pulled a sleek, transparent Chronos-pad from her belt, tapping its surface. A holographic projection shimmered between them: a complex, intricate web of data points glowing with dark energy, emanating from a precise, previously inert location.
Cinder felt a cold dread trickle down his spine. The Echo-Weaver's Guild. They weren't just erasing the past anymore. Activating a Loom signature meant they were doing something. Changing something. And the only thing worse than erasing history was actively rewriting the future.
"Where?" Cinder asked, his voice losing its usual weariness.
Aera met his gaze, her jade eyes serious. "The Chronosyn's core programming. They're targeting the historical records of the founding of the Global Unity Coalition. Specifically, the ratification event."
Cinder's blood ran cold. The ratification of the Global Unity Coalition was the cornerstone of their modern world. To alter that… that wasn't an alibi. That was an assassination.
"They're not just covering a crime, Rourke," Cinder said, his eyes finally locking with hers. "They're attempting to unmake the present."