Darkness swallowed sound first.
Elias felt it close around his ears like hands pressing inward, muting the world until even his own breathing sounded distant and artificial. The subway entrance yawned beneath them—stairs descending into a throat that had forgotten how to echo.
Mara ran.
Elias followed.
The warning tape snapped against his chest as he tore through it, the plastic biting into his skin before dissolving into something softer, wetter—as if time itself had briefly forgotten what the tape was made of.
They descended.
Each step felt heavier than the last, as though gravity were recalculating its loyalty.
Behind them, the voice spoke again.
Not louder.
Closer.
You are indexed.
Elias stumbled.
Mara caught his arm. Her grip was iron.
"Don't listen," she hissed. "It learns faster when you react."
The stairs ended abruptly at a platform that should not have existed. No rails. No tracks. Just a vast, circular chamber carved from concrete and shadow.
Lights flickered to life overhead—not fluorescent bulbs, but moments. Elias recognized some of them instantly: a childhood bedroom, a hospital corridor, a rain-soaked street he had crossed years ago without thinking.
They were memories.
Not his.
Pinned in the air like specimens.
"Oh God," Elias whispered.
Mara released him and stepped forward. "Welcome to the Catalog."
The floor was covered in names.
Not written.
Etched.
Thousands of them, carved so deeply into the concrete that the letters had split and warped, as if the ground itself had resisted remembering.
Elias knelt.
He traced one with trembling fingers.
The name was warm.
A scream echoed—not from the chamber, but from the memory suspended above them. A man fell from a building again and again, his death replayed without resolution.
"What is this place?" Elias asked.
"Where time puts what it can't erase," Mara said. "Only what it can contain."
The voice returned, now everywhere.
ERROR CONFIRMED.
The air vibrated.
A shape emerged from the far end of the chamber. Not a figure, not exactly—more like an absence shaped like a person. Its edges folded inward, collapsing and reforming, as though reality were being compressed around it.
Elias couldn't focus on it.
Every time he tried, his thoughts slid away.
"Don't look directly," Mara warned. "It doesn't like being perceived."
The shape stopped.
Names began to glow.
One by one.
Each glow ended with a sound—a soft click, like a lock closing.
A name faded.
Then another.
"They're being archived," Elias said.
Mara nodded. "Unreturned anomalies. People who noticed too much. Remembered too long. Lived when they shouldn't have."
Elias's stomach dropped.
"What happens to them?"
Mara met his eyes. "They stop being possible."
The shape turned.
For the first time, Elias felt it see him.
Not with eyes—but with criteria.
SUBJECT: ELIAS MORVEN.
STATUS: ACTIVE DISCREPANCY.
AGE: CONTINUING.
The last line pulsed.
Mara swore.
"That's bad," she said.
The floor beneath Elias's feet cracked.
From the fracture, memories poured upward—his memories this time. Moments he had forgotten: a car accident he survived when no one else did. A watch that stopped on his wrist years ago and never worked again. A dream where time asked him a question, and he answered yes.
"What did you do?" Mara whispered.
Elias shook his head. "I don't remember."
The shape moved closer.
CAUSE OF FRACTURE: PENDING.
The chamber trembled.
A siren wailed—not sound, but sensation. Elias felt it in his bones, vibrating his age forward by seconds at a time.
Mara grabbed his hand.
"We can't stay," she said. "Once it finishes cataloging you—"
A name ignited beneath Elias's feet.
His name.
The concrete burned cold.
ELIAS MORVEN.
The voice softened.
Almost kind.
YOU DO NOT BELONG TO THIS ITERATION.
Elias felt something peel away inside him—like a memory being unlearned.
He screamed.
Mara pulled him backward, dragging him toward a tunnel that hadn't existed moments earlier.
The chamber collapsed inward.
Names screamed.
Lights shattered into seconds.
As they fell into darkness, Elias heard the final judgment.
RELOCATION AUTHORIZED.
BEGIN CORRECTION.
The world snapped.
And Elias woke up somewhere that had never heard of time at all.