Darkness. Then breath.

Casen awoke to a stinging cold and the flicker of a broken light. He was on the floor of apartment KNR. The monitor still buzzed, but the ghost and Elian were gone.

He sat up fast, his heart pounding. His backpack—still there. Her coat—still inside.

What the hell was that thing?

The ghost had spoken. That shouldn’t have been possible. No ghost had ever spoken.

He staggered outside, found his bike untouched, and rode fast—no route, no direction, just away. But after a full hour of circling empty districts, he stopped.

Somehow this experience started to make him reminiscence about his mother. His mother’s death had left a hole in him that never quite stopped bleeding, no matter how many years passed, no matter how many walls he built. And now, that hole was speaking back to him.

He leaned the bike against a rusted lamppost and slid to the cracked pavement, his breath catching in his throat, shallow and frantic. The cold bit deeper here, not the kind that touched skin—but bone-deep, soul-deep, the kind that reminded you of hospital waiting rooms and the silence that follows the last breath.

Casen gripped her coat in the backpack, the fabric still faintly holding her scent—lavender and smoke. He pressed it to his face. He remembered the way her hands trembled in the end, how she smiled anyway, like she was trying to spare him. But the worst part—the part he couldn’t forget—was the moment her eyes dulled. Just gone. Just like when he lost his mother and became alone. Just a boy and the echo of machines turning off.

No one had saved her. And he wasn't there when it happened.

And now—now there was another voice in the dark. This ghost, this impossible echo, had looked at him like it knew. Like it saw the wreckage inside him and still reached out.

He’d spent so long burying her memory under silence and apathy, pretending the nightmares didn’t come, pretending the dark didn’t scare him anymore. But it did. It always had. That ghost—no, she—ripped the scab clean.

Casen wiped his face. He hadn’t realized he was crying.

The trauma clawed up from his gut—screaming nights, whispered apologies to a gravestone, the sick guilt of living when she hadn’t. Every moment alone in that apartment had just been a quieter way to scream.

But now?

Now he couldn’t pretend it was just grief playing tricks. That ghost had spoken. And in her voice was something he hadn’t felt in years: need.

He wasn’t running anymore.

He stood slowly, knees shaking, heart hollowed out but somehow steady. He breathed in, shaky, like the air itself resisted.

He couldn’t run from this. She was real. And she needed help.

So he circled back.

Casen found Elian near the old school ruins, disoriented but alive. He carried her to an abandoned rooftop greenhouse, once used for city-grown vegetables before food got synthesized. Now it was ivy-choked and shadowed, but out of reach from the authorities.

She’d been unconscious when he arrived, curled beside a fractured skylight. He laid her on a bench padded with old insulation foam and let her rest.

Now, he sat beside her, watching her chest rise and fall in shallow rhythm.

“What are you?” he whispered.

Elian stirred.

Her eyes blinked open—one grey, one blue—and locked onto him with eerie precision.

“I remember falling,” she said softly. “And… waking up in a place made of glass.”

Casen leaned closer. “You mean... metaphorically, or—?”

She shook her head. “A real place. Or close enough. Reflections. Fractured time. It didn’t belong to me. I think it was a memory. But not mine.”

“You weren’t part of the Return,” he said. “You showed up late. Like... twelve-forty-seven.”

“I know,” she whispered. “It wasn’t supposed to happen. I saw the clock-door starting to close. I tried to make it. But something pulled me back.”

“A clock-door?”

She nodded. “It bled. It was alive. I don’t understand it either.”

Casen didn’t know what to say.

She sat up slowly. “What time is it?”

Casen glanced at his watch. “6:12 PM.”

Her eyes widened. “It’s still the same day?”

“Yeah. You were out for a while, but not a full day. There’s no second Return, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I wasn’t,” she said. “But I need to go back. Where the ghosts were. That’s where I saw him.”

“Who?”

She hesitated. “The man from the memory. The one who closed the door.”

Casen frowned. “That was just a vision. A bleedover. You said yourself it wasn’t your memory.”

“I need to be there when it lines up again. Maybe… maybe he’ll be near the place where I came through.”

Casen sighed, stood up, and pulled his coat on. “You know this is dumb, right?”

“I know,” she said, standing shakily. “But everything about this is already broken.”

They made their way through dim alleys and quiet roads, reaching the outskirts of Ghost Square again. The square itself was mostly empty now, except for maintenance bots and a few lingering mourners.

Casen pulled her into the shadows beside a storage crate. “There. No GCA scanners here.”

Elian stared at the center of the square, her breath shallow.

“I think he’ll come,” she said.

Casen shook his head. “They already came. They’re gone. The ghosts only appear once a day.”

“I know,” she whispered. “But something stayed behind. Something like me.”

A chill crawled up Casen’s spine.

As they waited, the sky darkened. A low hum vibrated through the air—different from the shimmer of a Return. He turned.

A shimmer—not the same, not noon—but more like a tear. Not opening wide, not even visible to the normal eye. Just a flicker of wrongness.

From it stepped a man.

Not a ghost. Not fully alive.

Casen recognized him.

Tall. Crisp black coat. And eyes that didn’t reflect the world around him.

He looked straight at Elian.

“That’s him,” she said. “From the memory. The clock room.”

Casen’s fingers closed around her wrist. “He’s not part of the Return.”

“No,” she said. “He’s worse.”

The man smiled.

And waved.