The gear in his palm was colder than metal ought to be. It dripped with a rain he did not need to touch to remember: the rain that rose, the rain that flowed backward, the rain that tasted of old clocks and moments stolen from the sky.
Vyom sat perfectly still, listening to the normal world resume around him. The clocks ticked as if nothing had happened. The sun poured in, warm and ordinary. For a heartbeat — or a fragment of a heartbeat, because time had begun to fracture into pieces — he convinced himself it had been a dream.
Then the front door banged. His mother's voice called, sharp and afraid. His sister's running footsteps thudded on the stairs. He shoved the gear into his pocket before anyone could see.
"Vyom!" his sister whispered, hovering at his door. Her face was pale, eyes rimmed red from too little sleep. "You yelled in the night. Are you all right?"
He tried to smile. The muscle moved but the feeling did not follow. "I'm fine," he said. The word felt like a borrowed coin.
She studied him for a long moment and then turned away. "Papa's better today — the doctor said there was… an improvement." Her voice softened. "But you mustn't go near the workshop. Promise me."
He nodded automatically. "I promise." Yet the promise felt fragile, like glass held between two fingers.
All morning the house buzzed with a nervous energy. Neighbours stopped by with sympathetic platitudes and silly sweets. The doctor arrived again and scribbled nonsense on a paper Vyom could not decode. People talked and laughed and moved — and yet, as the day went on, Vyom noticed something small and terrible.
Movements echoed.
A man turning to speak would blink, then turn again, repeating the same gesture a fraction of a second later as if two frames of the world existed at once. The tea Mrs. Desai set on the counter wobbled forward and then jerked back; a child on the street waved and then paused, his hand repeating the wave as if the air had skipped a beat and decided to do it twice. Sounds arrived like delayed notes, overlapping themselves: a cough, then its echo; a door slam, then the same slam a breath later.
Vyom's stomach went cold. He remembered the doll's words: You must not listen to the ticking. He clenched his fists until the knuckles paled. He had not touched the watch for hours, but the broken gear in his pocket pulsed faintly against his thigh — like a second heartbeat.
At noon, he wandered out to the courtyard, pretending to gather firewood. The sun was high and the town smelled of dust and frying oil, ordinary scents that screamed normalcy. A stray dog ran past, paused mid-bark, and barked again a beat later — two identical barks stacked on each other like twin shadows.
Vyom pressed his palms over his ears. The double world thrummed against his teeth. He was the only one who noticed it completely; others only glanced around with puzzled frowns before going on. They didn't seem frightened. Or perhaps their minds were not meant to hold this kind of fear.
Later, as he crept near the gate of the workshop, he saw them.
They stood in the lane opposite: three figures, as tall as trees and silent as statues. Their coats were long and black, moving as if with a wind no one else felt. Their faces were hidden beneath wide hats. Where their eyes should have been, clocks turned slowly — not eyeballs, but tiny delicate faces of time itself. Each tick of those eyes felt like a command.
Vyom froze behind the low wall. His breath thinned to a thread. The men — the Watchers — did not move at first. They simply observed, their presence folding the lane into a different shade of day. Birds in the distance fell silent. The air around the figures rippled faintly, as if reality tightened around them like a harness.
One of them inclined its head. The clock-eye turned and focused not on the village, but on Vyom. He felt the gaze like a fingertip running down his spine.
The world doubled then — and he saw two of the Watchers: one standing in front of him, the other in the glass-city, mirrored and older, wearing cracks like scars. In the reflection, their clock-faces showed 3:03.
Something in his chest pulled taut. He wanted to flee but his feet were of stone. He felt the gear in his pocket grow warmer. The doll's voice echoed in the edges of his mind: They'll call you a curse.
A soft sound — like a bell turned on its side — announced the Watchers' approach. They crossed the lane with the slow certainty of something that cannot be rushed. Villagers glanced their way, squinted, then returned to their business as if a wind had passed. No one screamed. No one asked them to stay. The Watchers were within the workshop's shadow in moments that felt like hours.
One stopped by the open door, the one with the largest clock-eye. The hand on its face pivoted — not around time but toward Vyom, like a pointer. The Watcher raised a gloved hand, and the world thinned into glass for an instant. He spoke, and the words were not words at all but a rolling of gears felt directly under Vyom's sternum.
"The hour stumbled. The seal loosened."
The voice was everywhere and nowhere. Vyom could not tell if it came from the Watcher's mouth or from the town's bones.
His mother peered out at the sound and stepped forward, bravely and small. "Excuse me… who are you?" Her voice trembled but she did not step back.
The Watcher's head tilted. For a fleeting second, Vyom saw a clock's minute hand quiver toward his mother, then away. The Watcher did not reply in speech. It lifted a finger and, with a motion like the setting right of a broken gear, touched the air. A ripple spread; all the clocks in the lane beat their ticks together in perfect, unnatural unison.
Everyone stopped. A silence so deep it tasted like iron fell upon them.
Then the Watcher's clock-eye turned slowly. The tick on its face matched Vyom's pulse, which, though he hadn't noticed before, had begun to slow until it lagged behind his breath.
"A child of reversal," the Watcher said at last. The words were a grind of machinery, blunt and ancient. "You have opened where closure was required."
The villagers exchanged worried whispers. His mother's face drained. "Is he — is he sick?" she asked, voice small.
One of the other Watchers stepped forward. Its clock-eye showed a tiny scene: the broken pocket watch, the crack in its glass, and within it the city of upward rain. The eye flicked, and Vyom felt a seam inside himself tug.
The Watcher spoke again. This time a single syllable, but it landed like a verdict.
"Mark."
A word — just a marker — and yet it settled into Vyom's skin like an invisible brand. He felt it under his collarbone, cold and deep, as if an unseen gear had been fastened to his rib.
Fear rose inside him, not the childish fear of bumps in the night but a raw knowledge: the world now had watchers who could read the fracture and name it. They could see the hour he had stopped. They would remember.
The nearest Watcher tilted its head as if listening to a note others could not hear. Then it turned and disappeared into the shadow of the workshop as quietly as a thought.
The other two followed, their clock-eyes still pointing occasionally at Vyom as if to confirm he was still there. As they passed, the double-movements in the lane slowed and resolved; the world, for the moment, stitched itself back together.
When they were gone, the villagers returned to their chores as if nothing had happened. Only Vyom's mother stood still, hands clasped over her chest, staring after the black shapes until they vanished down the alley.
Vyom walked inside. The gear in his pocket felt like a living thing. He placed his hand over his sternum instinctively and felt, beneath the bone and muscle, a cold, mechanical tick: tick — pause — tick — pause.
Dev's voice — the doll's — whispered like smoke in his ear: They will come again. They always do. Learn to hide the hour. Learn to forget the hour. Or they will take the hour from you.
Vyom looked up at the clock on the workshop wall. For a brief instant, the hands flicked backward, then steadied, pointing to 3:03.
He swallowed. "I won't let them," he said aloud, and the workshop answered with a chorus of clocks that seemed to agree — or perhaps to mourn.
Outside, the sun slid toward the west. The hour moved on. But somewhere, in a place of dripping rain and reversed cities, gears turned and the Watchers readied themselves. They had seen the mark. They would watch now.
And Vyom, small and shivering, felt the meaning of the word chosen weigh upon him like a crown made of cold brass.
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End of Chapter 6 — The Watchers' Eyes