Chapter One: The First Countdown
I never asked for this.
The cafeteria was loud, like it always was on Tuesdays—clattering trays, slammed lockers, the sharp tang of reheated pizza. I wasn’t paying attention to any of it. I was thinking about lunch, about whether I wanted the sad-looking Caesar salad or the even sadder veggie wrap.
Then I felt it.
A sudden, burning pressure behind my eyes, like someone had shoved their entire chest into my skull. I stumbled slightly, almost dropping my tray, and that’s when I saw the numbers.
00:13:49
They floated in front of me, bright white against the muted cafeteria lights, counting down like a clock ticking inside my brain.
I blinked, thinking it would vanish. It didn’t.
I looked around. Nobody else noticed. The boy from soccer who’d brushed past me moments ago—his hand nearly touched mine as he reached for the water dispenser—was just standing there, smiling dumbly, waiting for his turn in line.
Thirteen minutes. That was all I had to figure out what it meant. And if my history with… well, with this was any guide, it meant only one thing: he was going to die. Soon.
I wanted to scream. Or run. Or tell someone, anyone. But the numbers faded before I could even consider it.
Then my phone buzzed in my pocket. My best friend, June, texting like she always did during lunch.
June: “Hey, want to sit with us?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I grabbed my tray and wandered toward an empty corner, forcing myself to breathe, to ignore the pounding in my chest.
Thirteen minutes later, I was walking past the soccer field on my way back to class, trying to act normal, pretending the world hadn’t just dropped a hammer on me. And then I saw him.
He collapsed.
It happened in slow motion, even though my mind screamed run, run, run. He hit the ground with a sickening thud. His teammates screamed. Someone yelled for the trainer. And somewhere in the distance, I heard a siren.
I didn’t move. I couldn’t. My legs felt glued to the ground.
Because I knew. I had known.
And that was the worst part.
After that, I tried to hide it. Gloves, avoiding contact, skipping lunch, pretending to be sick. Anything to stop the rushes of emotion—the fear, the panic, the grief, and the final moments of someone’s life crashing into me like a wave.
But it didn’t stop.
Sometimes it didn’t even require touch. A glance, a passing voice, a scent of fear in the hall—I’d feel it. And the number always came. Always.
I called it “the countdown.” And it was perfect. Every time.
Two days.
Seventeen hours.
Thirty-nine minutes.
And it scared the hell out of me.
That’s how it started—the first time I realized the world wasn’t safe just because I hadn’t been paying attention. That life had a clock, and somehow, I was the only one who could see it ticking.
The first time I tried to warn someone, it went wrong. I rushed across the soccer field, shouting for help. People stared. He was already gone. My voice felt hollow, useless. My hands shook so hard I could barely keep my notebook open.
It was the first time I learned that knowing when someone dies doesn’t mean you can stop it.
And it was also the first time I noticed the other part of it—the dread that filled me every time I looked at someone now, every stranger on the street, every student in the hallway. The knowledge that I couldn’t forget what I had seen. That I would always remember their numbers. Their final moments.
I didn’t ask for this.
But it was mine now.
And something told me—it was only going to get worse.
Chapter Two: Emotional Downloads
The next morning, I woke up with a headache that felt like it had been carved into my skull. My pillow was damp with sweat, and my hands were shaking before I even opened my eyes.
Yesterday had been a warning. Today… it was worse.
I tried to ignore it at first. Go to school. Stay in my own little bubble. But the moment I stepped into the hallways, it hit me again—a surge of feelings that didn’t belong to me. Fear, despair, anger, sorrow… all crashing over me in one wave.
And then the countdown appeared.
3 days, 5 hours, 12 minutes.
I froze.
It was a girl—a freshman. I didn’t even know her name, just the hollow fear that radiated off her. She glanced at me briefly, smiled awkwardly, and moved on, completely unaware.
I wanted to warn her. I wanted to scream, “Get out of the hallway! Don’t go home today!” But the words stuck in my throat. I could barely breathe. I had learned the hard way that I couldn’t save them. Not yet.
And even if I could… would they believe me?
By third period, it was happening again, this time without any touch. Sitting in chemistry class, I felt a rush of rage and heartbreak slam into me like a truck. The boy in front of me, scribbling notes, looked completely normal. Smiled at me when I accidentally bumped his arm.
And then the numbers:
12 hours, 47 minutes, 33 seconds.
I didn’t even know how I knew it was happening, but I did. His anger, his confusion, his final terror—it wasn’t mine. It belonged to him. And it was relentless.
I leaned over my desk, pressed my palms to my eyes. I needed a second to breathe.
A voice whispered beside me.
“You okay?”
I flinched, nearly falling off my chair.
A girl stood there—dark hair in a messy braid, green eyes sharp and calculating, a small smirk tugging at the corners of her mouth. She wasn’t smiling in a friendly way. It was the kind of smile someone gives when they know more than they’re letting on.
“I… yeah,” I mumbled, not meeting her gaze.
Her eyes flicked to mine. There was something in her stare that made me shiver. “You’re not,” she said simply.
I wanted to protest. I wanted to say, How do you know? But my voice caught.
She stepped closer. “You feel it too, don’t you?”
I froze. That’s when I realized—she could see it. Maybe not the numbers, but she knew. She knew the feeling.
“What… what do you mean?” I asked, voice trembling.
She leaned against my desk, arms crossed. “The downloads. The emotions. The countdowns. I’ve seen them before. You’re not alone.”
I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream. I wanted to run. But mostly, I wanted to believe her.
“Who are you?” I whispered.
“Wren,” she said. “And if you want to stay alive… you need to listen to me.”
After school, she found me outside the library. I thought I could lose her, duck behind a bookshelf, pretend I didn’t exist—but she was always one step ahead.
“We don’t have much time,” she said as soon as I stepped out. “You feel them. All the people around you. You know when they die. And you think it’s a curse. But it’s not. It’s a warning system. And it’s starting to fail.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t. None of us do. But something’s interfering with the natural order. People aren’t dying when they’re supposed to—they’re dying early. And you… you’re being triggered.”
Her words made my stomach twist. Early deaths. Manipulated time. And I could feel it now, like a ripple in the air. A tug at my senses that I couldn’t explain.
“I can’t stop them,” I said. “I… I tried.”
She looked at me seriously. “You can. You just haven’t learned how yet. But there’s a price.”
I swallowed hard. “What price?”
Wren hesitated. Then her eyes hardened. “Everything. Your sanity, your safety… maybe even your life.”
And just like that, the school bell rang, echoing down the empty hallway.
But I wasn’t thinking about classes. Or homework. Or tests.
I was thinking about death.
And the fact that I could see it, taste it, almost touch it—and it was starting to follow me.
Chapter Three: The Girl with No Countdown
It was the silence that scared me the most.
Not the screams, not the visions, not the endless flood of countdowns burning behind my eyes—but the quiet moments between them. The calm before the next emotional storm.
That’s when it always hit hardest.
By Friday, I’d started avoiding everyone. I didn’t eat lunch. I didn’t look at anyone for too long. I moved through school like a ghost, careful not to touch, not to feel.
But the universe—or whatever cruel thing was behind this—didn’t care about my precautions.
Because that was the day I met her again.
The bell had just rung. The hallway was a blur of students and noise and backpacks slamming against lockers. I kept my head down, earbuds in, pretending music could drown out the chaos.
Then someone brushed past me.
Normally, that meant pain. Fear. A number.
But this time—nothing.
No surge of emotion. No countdown. Just… silence.
I looked up.
Wren.
She stood there, hands shoved into her jacket pockets, head tilted like she was waiting for me to notice her. Her expression was unreadable, but her eyes—they were alive. Searching. Calculating.
“Still ignoring me?” she asked.
I blinked. “I—I didn’t see you.”
She smirked. “That’s the point.”
I glanced around. The hallway was thinning out, the noise fading as students disappeared into classrooms. I could feel the ticking of other countdowns pulsing faintly in the background like a second heartbeat—but not hers.
“You’re… empty,” I said before I could stop myself.
Wren raised an eyebrow. “That’s one way to put it.”
“I don’t see your time. I don’t feel anything. No fear. No emotions. Nothing.”
Her smirk faded. “Good. Then it’s working.”
We ended up sitting on the back steps behind the gym, where the brick wall was cool and rough against my palms. I didn’t know why I followed her, why I trusted her—but something about her silence felt safe.
She leaned back, staring at the overcast sky. “You’re different,” she said finally. “You didn’t just wake up one day with this curse, did you?”
I hesitated. “Two weeks ago. The first time… it was a boy from school. I touched him, and I saw—”
“—his death,” she finished for me.
I nodded. “And every time since. Strangers. Friends. Teachers. Everyone.”
“But not me.”
“No,” I whispered. “Not you.”
Her lips curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “That’s because they can’t track me.”
“Who can’t?”
“The ones who made us.”
The words hung there between us, heavier than the autumn air.
I waited for her to laugh, to say she was kidding, that she’d read too many conspiracy theories online. But she didn’t. She just stared out at the field, her expression sharp and distant.
“They call themselves The Keepers,” she said. “They monitor timelines. They make sure everything—every life, every death—happens exactly when it’s supposed to. And when it doesn’t, when people like you and me interfere, they come to fix it.”
I shook my head. “That’s insane.”
“Is it?” she said quietly. “You see countdowns to people’s deaths. You feel every emotion they’ll have before they die. You think that’s normal?”
I didn’t answer. Because she wasn’t wrong.
She turned to face me fully now, her eyes catching mine with eerie intensity. “The Keepers use empaths to maintain order. We were designed to sense when death’s coming off-schedule. To pull the strings. To make sure it happens on time. But something broke. You’re feeling deaths that weren’t supposed to happen yet.”
I swallowed hard. “How do you know all this?”
Her gaze drifted to the horizon. “Because I used to work for them.”
I didn’t speak for a long time. The air between us was thick with things neither of us wanted to say.
“So why can’t I feel your countdown?” I asked finally.
“Because they can’t see mine,” she said softly. “I cut myself off. I erased my data, burned the records. As far as they know, I’m already dead.”
I stared at her. She said it so casually, like it was nothing. Like death was just another line item on her list of things to escape.
“You said you can help me,” I whispered. “How?”
Wren turned to me then, her expression serious. “First, you have to stop running from what you feel. The countdown isn’t your enemy—it’s a message. But you’re letting it control you. You need to learn how to control it back.”
My pulse quickened. “What does that even mean?”
She smiled faintly, a flash of something dangerous behind her eyes. “It means we start training tonight.”
When she walked away, the silence followed her like a shadow. No countdown. No fear.
Just the quiet hum of inevitability—like the ticking world around us had paused for one single heartbeat.
For the first time since this nightmare began, I realized something terrifying:
Wren wasn’t just different.
She was the reason I’d started seeing the numbers in the first place.
Chapter Four: People Start Dying
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the numbers—burning white against the darkness. Countdown after countdown, endless ticking toward nothing.
Except they weren’t counting down anymore.
They were glitching.
Skipping backward. Pausing. Jumping ahead.
I sat up in bed, heart pounding, as one sequence burned across my vision:
00:00:00
Then it vanished.
Someone had just died.
Morning felt off. The world too quiet, the sunlight too dim, the usual hum of life replaced by something hollow. My mom had already left for work. The kitchen smelled faintly of burnt toast and coffee. I tried to eat something, but my stomach turned before I could even swallow.
When I opened my phone, I saw it—the headline.
LOCAL TEEN COLLAPSES DURING NIGHT PRACTICE
I didn’t need to read the rest. I already knew who it was.
The boy from my chemistry class. The one whose countdown had said twelve hours.
Except that was yesterday afternoon.
He should’ve had at least half a day left.
The clock had been wrong.
And that terrified me more than anything.
I found Wren after school, sitting on the bleachers like she’d been waiting for me. The late afternoon sky was heavy and gray, the kind of color that swallowed sound.
“You saw it, didn’t you?” she asked as I approached.
“How—how did you know?”
Her expression was grim. “Because it’s starting. The pattern’s breaking.”
I sat beside her, the metal cold against my legs. “He wasn’t supposed to die yet. The countdown—”
“—jumped ahead,” she finished. “It means the timeline’s unraveling. Someone’s rewriting death.”
I swallowed hard. “How can anyone do that?”
Wren looked down at her hands. “The Keepers can’t stop it. They rely on empaths like you to detect anomalies. But this—this isn’t random. Someone’s cutting the threads early.”
Her voice dropped lower. “And if they can control when people die, they can control everything.”
I didn’t want to believe her. I wanted to think I was losing my mind—that maybe this was just a breakdown, a hallucination, something that could be explained by stress or insomnia.
But then I felt it again.
The surge.
It came from the far end of the field—waves of panic and sorrow so thick it nearly knocked me off the bleacher. I gasped, gripping the edge, trying to breathe through the weight of it.
“What is it?” Wren demanded.
I couldn’t speak. The air shimmered, and suddenly the numbers were there again, filling my vision.
00:00:12
00:00:11
00:00:10
Wren grabbed my shoulders. “Whose is it?”
I looked toward the football field. A man in a maintenance jacket was walking across the track, humming to himself.
“It’s him,” I whispered.
We both ran.
The countdown hit zero as we reached him. He turned toward us, confused. “Hey, you kids aren’t supposed to—”
And then his eyes went wide. His body jerked once, violently, and he collapsed.
No sound. No warning.
Just gone.
I fell to my knees beside him, shaking, trying to feel for a pulse. Nothing. Wren’s face was pale, her jaw tight.
“Another early death,” she muttered.
Tears stung my eyes. “Why can’t we stop it? What’s the point of knowing if it never matters?”
Wren crouched beside me, her voice low but firm. “Because someone wants you to see it. They’re using you. Testing you.”
I looked at her, horrified. “Testing me for what?”
She didn’t answer right away. When she finally spoke, it was barely a whisper.
“To see if you’ll break.”
That night, I saw something new in my dreams.
Not numbers this time. Faces. A dozen of them—strangers, students, teachers, people I passed every day. Each one looking straight at me, their mouths moving silently in unison.
I woke up drenched in sweat. My phone buzzed on the nightstand.
A message from an unknown number.
“You shouldn’t have interfered.”
The screen flickered. For a second, the reflection in the glass wasn’t mine—it was Wren’s.
And behind her, shadows moved.
For the first time since it all began, I understood what she’d meant.
The countdown wasn’t just about death.
It was about control.
And someone—something—had just noticed that I could see it.
Chapter Five: The Keepers’ Mark
I hadn’t slept in two nights. My dreams were filled with numbers—countdowns that weren’t mine, faces that weren’t there, screams I couldn’t hear. Every time I blinked, I felt them: the deaths, the fear, the inevitable ticking toward zero.
And now… the countdown had started on me.
It was subtle at first. A flicker in the corner of my vision. A small, glowing number hovering above my hand when I reached for my water bottle. I thought I was imagining it.
But it wasn’t gone.
3 days, 14 hours, 12 minutes.
I froze. My chest tightened. My lungs burned. I pressed my hand to my face, shaking.
Wren appeared in the doorway like she always did—silent, observant.
“You’re late,” she said flatly, but her eyes softened when she saw my panic.
“I… it’s happening to me,” I stammered. “I have a countdown. My own.”
She stepped closer, crouched beside me, and studied my trembling hands. “That’s… normal.”
“Normal?!” I shouted. “People are dying early. I saw it happen today. And now me? I’m supposed to die?”
Wren’s expression darkened. “No. You’re supposed to survive. But the Keepers are taking notice. That’s why your number appeared. They don’t like unpredictability. And right now, you are very unpredictable.”
I could feel the weight of her words settle in my chest. The Keepers. Their presence had always been distant, abstract—a threat we talked about but never faced directly. But now… they were watching me.
“Watching me for what?” I whispered.
“Testing you,” Wren said. “And if you fail… they’ll fix the timeline, permanently. Which probably means erasing you.”
My stomach dropped. “Erasing me? That’s… that’s death, right? But… what about free will?”
She shook her head. “Free will doesn’t exist for the people they monitor. Only numbers, sequences, and correction. And they’re very strict about it.”
She grabbed my wrist, her grip firm. I flinched at the sudden contact, the surge of emotion pulsing through me—her fear, her tension, her resolve. I barely had time to catch my breath before she pointed to a small mark on my forearm.
“Look,” she said.
I glanced down. There it was—a faint, bluish symbol pressed into my skin, almost like a bruise but too intricate to be natural. It looked like a clock face, but broken. Tiny, almost invisible gears spun beneath the surface.
“The Keepers’ mark,” Wren explained. “They use it to track empaths. Once you have it, you’re on their radar. They know your location, your thoughts, your abilities. And right now, they’re deciding if you’re a threat or a tool.”
I swallowed hard. The mark pulsed against my skin. It felt alive, invasive, like it was crawling under my veins, syncing with the countdown.
“They… they can kill me?” I asked. My voice trembled.
Wren hesitated, then nodded. “Yes. If they need to. That’s why you have to learn control. Fast.”
I didn’t know if I could. Every death I’d witnessed, every emotional download I’d felt—it had been overwhelming. My head ached. My chest felt bruised. My hands shook from the constant flood of other people’s final moments.
And now I had my own countdown. My own death creeping closer.
We left the school grounds and walked to an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town—Wren’s makeshift safehouse. The shadows were long, the air damp with fog rolling off the river nearby.
“This is where it starts,” she said. “You’ll feel everything more clearly here. No distractions. No interference. Only you, me, and the countdowns.”
I nodded, though I felt sick with fear.
“I’ll train you,” Wren continued. “Teach you to see the numbers without drowning in them. To manipulate them, even. But it won’t be easy. Every time you push back, the Keepers will notice. Every mistake could cost lives… including yours.”
I looked at her, realizing for the first time just how real this was. The countdowns weren’t just warnings anymore—they were chains. And I was already tethered to them.
“Then we start now,” she said, her voice sharp. “Or you die.”
I swallowed. My heart pounded. And for the first time, I felt the weight of responsibility—and the terror of knowing exactly how little time I had.
3 days, 14 hours, 11 minutes…
The countdown continued, relentless.
And I knew that if I didn’t learn fast, I wouldn’t survive it.
Chapter Six: Training Against Time
The warehouse smelled of dust and damp concrete. Broken windows let in streaks of cold afternoon light that bounced off metal beams and rusted pipes. Wren led me inside, shutting the heavy steel door behind us. The sound echoed like a gunshot.
“This is it,” she said. “Your training ground. Here, the countdowns are clearer, sharper. You won’t just feel them—you’ll see them, manipulate them, even bend them if you’re careful.”
I swallowed. My stomach churned. My hands were still trembling from the mark of The Keepers and the knowledge that my own countdown was ticking closer by the second.
3 days, 12 hours…
Lesson One: Control
Wren guided me to a worn mat in the corner. “Sit. Close your eyes.”
I did.
Immediately, the world exploded. Faces, screams, tears, and laughter flashed behind my eyelids. I tried to focus, but the flood of emotions hit me like a tsunami. I fell to my knees, clutching my head, and gagged against the rush.
“You’re panicking,” Wren said, calm but firm. “Breathe. You can’t stop the feelings, but you can separate them. Each one has a number. Each number is a timeline. Each timeline is not you. You are observing, not participating.”
I nodded weakly, trying to breathe through the chaos. Slowly, I began noticing patterns. Emotions clustered around numbers. Some were strong and immediate, like the boy who died on the field. Others were distant, quiet, months or years in the future.
“Now,” Wren said, “focus on one. Only one. Let the rest fade into the background.”
I tried. Tentatively, I picked the smallest number, barely visible in my mind’s eye. Its countdown ticked steadily. I forced myself to isolate the emotion attached to it—a tiny ripple of fear—and pushed everything else aside.
It worked.
For the first time since it all began, the flood of emotion slowed. My head stopped pounding. My hands stilled.
“You did it,” Wren said softly. “Not perfectly, but you’re learning. That’s the first step.”
Lesson Two: Manipulation
The next day, Wren introduced me to something more dangerous: bending the timeline.
She brought a volunteer—an old mannequin rigged with an electronic display showing a fake countdown. “We start small,” she said. “See the countdown? Now try to slow it down.”
I stared at the numbers. A rush of panic hit me, my heartbeat spiking. Every instinct screamed that this was wrong. But Wren’s eyes were steady, patient.
“Focus on the number. Your will shapes it. You are not the victim—you are the observer. Control it.”
I took a shaky breath and reached out mentally.
The numbers flickered.
Then slowed.
I gasped. My chest heaving, I looked up. Wren’s face held the smallest hint of a smile.
“You’re bending it,” she whispered. “You’re doing it. This is real power.”
I shook my head, overwhelmed. “It feels… wrong. I’m playing with lives.”
“Yes,” she said firmly. “And that’s the point. Every empath faces this. Control is a responsibility, not a gift. And now you understand why The Keepers hunt us. We see the threads, and we can tug them.”
Lesson Three: Resistance
By the third day, Wren upped the stakes. She introduced me to emotional downloads tied to real people, some of whom had imminent countdowns.
The first one was brutal. A man in the warehouse’s old corner, his life flashing in my mind—fear, confusion, regret. His countdown ticked dangerously close to zero.
“Try to slow him down,” Wren said, watching closely.
I reached out. I concentrated. I focused on the number. I tried to manipulate the timeline.
It didn’t work.
The man collapsed in my vision. His final moment burned into me. I screamed, falling backward, gasping for air.
Wren knelt beside me, gripping my shoulders. “It’s okay. You can’t save everyone. Not yet. But you can learn to survive.”
Tears burned my eyes. “I’m going to fail. I can’t do this.”
“You won’t,” she said. “You have to do this. The Keepers are watching. And now that they know about you… they’ll come for you sooner than later.”
By the end of the week, I was exhausted. My body ached, my head throbbed, and my mind felt like a broken clock trying to process a thousand times at once.
But I had done it.
I had seen. I had isolated. I had manipulated.
And somewhere deep inside, a small ember of hope glimmered:
Maybe I could fight back.
Maybe I could bend the countdowns without breaking myself.
But as I lay on the concrete floor, exhausted and trembling, I realized the hardest lesson hadn’t come yet:
The Keepers don’t just watch timelines. They punish interference.
And soon, I was going to learn exactly how much they were willing to take from me…
Chapter Seven: Enemies Among Us
The first sign that something was wrong came the morning the numbers vanished.
Every day since the countdown appeared on my wrist, I’d woken up to that sickly blue glow hovering just above my skin, taunting me with its precision. But today—nothing.
No numbers.
No ticking.
Just silence.
For a moment, I thought I’d finally beaten it. That maybe Wren’s training had worked.
Then the air turned cold.
The warehouse lights flickered, casting jagged shadows across the floor. I felt the shift in the atmosphere—a hollow pressure, like the air itself was holding its breath.
“Wren?” I called. My voice echoed. No answer.
That’s when I saw him—Eli—leaning against the far wall, his hoodie soaked from the rain outside. He’d been part of Wren’s network, another empath. Quiet, withdrawn. The kind of boy who kept his eyes on the floor and his secrets closer still.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I said, stepping back.
“I could say the same,” he muttered. His voice was different—colder, sharper than usual.
The glow from his wrist caught my eye. His countdown was gone too.
“They took mine last night,” he said. “Same as you.”
I frowned. “Who did?”
He looked up, and his pupils flashed a faint, unnatural white.
“The Keepers.”
The words froze me where I stood.
Before I could react, the walls around us groaned, metal creaking under invisible weight. The air shimmered, distorting like heat rising off asphalt. Shapes began to form in the shadows—humanoid silhouettes that weren’t entirely solid.
Their presence hit me before my eyes could focus on them: cold, methodical, ancient. The same emotion I’d felt at every death I’d ever sensed—detachment. They didn’t feel hate. They didn’t feel anything.
“Eli,” I whispered, backing away. “What did you do?”
He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “They promised to erase my countdown permanently. I wouldn’t have to live by the numbers anymore. I just had to give them you.”
Wren burst through the side door before he could move. Her gun was up—not that bullets meant much against what hovered in the dark. She fired anyway.
The sound cracked through the air like thunder.
“Run!” she yelled. “They’re not here for him—they’re here for you!”
I ran. Down rusted hallways, across collapsing stairs, through corridors that stank of mold and metal. The shadows followed, warping the space around me. Every time I turned, they were closer.
My lungs burned. My pulse pounded. My vision blurred with panic.
And then—they caught me.
A cold hand, or something like it, clamped around my arm. My body went rigid. The air around me fractured like glass. For an instant, I was everywhere—flashes of countless timelines, countless deaths, countless numbers counting down. I saw myself dying in hundreds of ways, each one precise to the second.
Then the voice came.
Not through sound, but directly into my mind.
“You were never meant to interfere.”
I screamed, thrashing against the invisible grip.
“I’m not a machine,” I shouted. “I won’t live by your rules!”
“Then you will die by them.”
Something inside me snapped.
The empathy that had always been a curse—every fear, every grief, every pulse of someone else’s end—flared like a storm inside my chest.
I pushed back.
The world bent. The warehouse floor split. Light exploded outward, flooding the room in blinding white. The shadows recoiled, twisting like smoke sucked into a vacuum. The voice screamed—metallic, mechanical, furious—and vanished.
When the light faded, I was on the ground, shaking, gasping for air. The mark on my wrist burned like fire. The numbers were back—but different now.
They didn’t just count down. They shifted—rewriting themselves in real time, responding to my breath, my heartbeat, my will.
Wren knelt beside me, face pale. “What did you do?”
“I think…” I whispered, staring at the shifting blue glow, “…I broke their clock.”
Eli was gone. So were the shadows. But the damage lingered like static in the air.
“Wren,” I said quietly, “they’ll come again. Stronger.”
She nodded grimly. “And next time, they won’t try to scare you. They’ll try to correct you.”
I looked at my arm—the living countdown twisting like a serpent beneath my skin—and felt something new stir inside me. Not just fear.
Defiance.
They could control time.
But now, so could I.
Chapter Eight: The Echo Chamber
The warehouse smelled of ozone and burnt metal.
I could feel it the moment I stepped inside—the remnants of my power lingering in the air. Every corner of the building pulsed with the echoes of what I had done: the flash of light, the retreating shadows, the chaos I had unleashed on the Keepers’ control.
And it wasn’t gone.
It was alive.
“Careful,” Wren warned, her voice low and sharp. “Every time you bend a countdown, it leaves a trace. A fracture. The more you push back, the more the timelines bleed into each other. That’s why we call this place… the Echo Chamber.”
I followed her to the back of the warehouse, where the walls were covered with cracked mirrors, some stained, some shattered. Light reflected at impossible angles, bouncing the space into infinity.
“Every reflection,” she said, “is a timeline. Every echo is a choice you didn’t make. Every death you’ve touched is repeating somewhere in this maze.”
I stared at the mirrors. Faces appeared and vanished—strangers, friends, people I hadn’t even met. All of them with faint blue numbers above their heads, all ticking down toward something inevitable.
I shivered. “I… I can feel them. All of them. The echoes.”
“Exactly,” Wren said. “And soon, The Keepers will notice. The more you interfere, the stronger the signal you send. They’ll come after you harder, faster, and… personally.”
I stepped closer to a cracked mirror. One of the reflections was me, except not. My reflection smiled faintly, holding a countdown that spun out of control—hours turning to minutes, seconds vanishing, numbers blinking like faulty code.
“What happens if I break a countdown too far?” I asked.
Wren didn’t answer immediately. She studied my reflection. “Then you risk collapsing that timeline entirely. The deaths might happen… or they might not. Sometimes, reality itself fractures. People disappear, events change. Entire timelines vanish. It’s why only empaths like us can manipulate time at all—we feel the cost.”
I swallowed hard, pressing my hand against the mirror. The cold glass sent shivers down my arm. My reflection tilted its head, and for a moment, it felt like it was watching me, calculating whether I would survive this power or destroy it.
Then the first warning came.
A shiver ran down my spine, followed by a low hum vibrating through the warehouse. The mirrors flickered. The numbers in the reflections all began spinning faster, synchronized, like the heartbeat of a dying world.
“They’re here,” Wren whispered.
I spun around, heart racing. The shadows materialized first at the windows, stretching and flickering as they crossed the warehouse floor. Then, at the center of the room, a figure appeared—tall, impossibly thin, and glowing faintly with an icy blue aura. Its eyes were black pits, endless and unblinking.
“You’ve broken the order,” it said. The voice didn’t come from its mouth—it came from my mind, rattling my skull. “And now you will pay.”
I felt my wrists burn. My mark—the living countdown—flared violently, the numbers spinning wildly. Seconds became milliseconds. My heartbeat synced with the spinning numbers, every pulse amplifying the power that I barely controlled.
I realized, then, the horrifying truth: The Keepers could manipulate my countdown just as easily as I could manipulate theirs.
Wren grabbed my arm. “Focus! Don’t let them rewrite your clock!”
I nodded, terrified, and reached into the chaos of the numbers. I tried to anchor myself, to tether the countdown to my own will. The room exploded with light. The mirrors cracked, the shadows screamed silently, and time fractured around us.
And then, silence.
When I opened my eyes, the figure was gone. The mirrors reflected only us. The numbers above my wrist had stabilized, but irregularly, flickering like a warning.
“You’re learning,” Wren said quietly, exhausted. “But that was only a taste. They’ll come back. And next time… they won’t leave you standing.”
I looked at my reflection, now calm, but with eyes that felt older than mine, wiser, burdened. The Echo Chamber had shown me the cost of interference. The timelines weren’t just numbers. They were lives—and bending them left traces I couldn’t fully control.
The Keepers were coming. And I was running out of time.
Chapter Nine: Zero Hour
The countdown was relentless.
12 hours, 7 minutes, 42 seconds.
Every tick reverberated through me, shaking my bones, rattling the ground beneath my feet. I hadn’t slept in days. Every heartbeat, every breath, every thought was consumed by numbers and shadows and the terrible knowledge that I couldn’t save everyone.
And now… the Keepers had arrived.
The warehouse shook. Light flickered violently through broken windows. The shadows moved faster this time, merging into forms that defied shape. Wren stood beside me, her face pale, but her eyes burning with defiance.
“They’re going to hit us all at once,” she warned. “If we don’t act, every timeline we’ve touched will collapse.”
I nodded, though my hands shook. My mark flared, numbers spinning like a hurricane inside me. My own countdown was no longer a simple sequence—it had split into fragments, showing me hundreds of possible deaths, each one twisting and warping around me.
“I… I can’t control this alone,” I admitted, voice trembling.
“You won’t be alone,” Wren said. “But this is your fight. You’re the one they can’t fully predict.”
The Keepers emerged from the shadows like predators from the dark. They weren’t human—not fully—but not entirely something else. Their forms shimmered, rippling as though reality itself hesitated around them.
“You’ve interfered too much,” one said, its voice vibrating directly in my skull. “You’ve broken the timelines. You will be corrected.”
I forced my trembling hands forward. The numbers responded. The countdowns of everyone nearby—the echoes I’d been tracking, the lives I’d tried to save—shifted under my will. Seconds slowed. Minutes stretched.
The Keepers recoiled, momentarily unbalanced.
“Good,” Wren whispered. “Hold them. You can do this.”
I focused on my own heartbeat, the rhythm of my pulse syncing with the numbers spinning across the warehouse. For the first time, I didn’t feel the panic. I didn’t feel the fear of the deaths I’d seen or the ones I couldn’t stop. I felt power.
I bent the numbers. I twisted them, slowed some, accelerated others. The shadows of the Keepers flickered and screamed silently, their control over reality clashing with mine.
Time warped. The air stretched and snapped. Mirrors shattered. The floor beneath us cracked.
And then… I saw them—Eli, Wren’s old ally, trapped in one of the echoes. The Keepers had him as leverage. If I didn’t succeed, he would be erased.
“Stop!” I screamed. “Leave him out of this!”
“Your choice doesn’t matter,” the Keepers said.
But it did. I could feel the threads of timelines bending toward me. Every death I had tried to prevent, every life I had touched, responded to my will.
I focused on one sequence—the one that contained Eli. I reached deeper than ever before. My consciousness expanded, connecting with every heartbeat, every ticking countdown, every life hanging in the balance.
Then it happened.
The impossible.
I broke through.
Eli’s sequence stabilized. His countdown froze. The Keepers faltered, their forms flickering like bad code. The echoes I had touched—some saved, some lost—hovered in stasis, giving me room to act.
Wren grabbed my arm. “Now! Push them out!”
I did. I twisted every number like a dial, warping their control, bending their timelines against them. Shadows shrieked, the warehouse buckled, and the Keepers’ forms collapsed inward, vanishing in blinding flashes of blue light.
When the light faded, the warehouse was silent. The numbers above my wrist had stabilized, though they still ticked. I was alive. So was Eli. And for the first time, the echoes—though many were gone—were under my control.
Wren exhaled, leaning heavily against the wall. “You did it,” she said, voice shaking. “But this… this is only the beginning. The Keepers know you now. They’ll never stop hunting you.”
I looked at my arm. The numbers still ticked steadily. My countdown. My second chance.
“I know,” I said quietly. “But I’m not letting them win.”
The warehouse was calm, for now. But I could feel it—every timeline, every death, every echo—I was part of something bigger than myself. And the Keepers weren’t done.
Zero hour had passed.
But the war for the countdowns had only just begun.
Chapter Ten: Shadows and Choice
The morning was quiet, almost unnaturally so.
The warehouse was empty, the echoes of battle fading like smoke in the wind. My arms ached, my mind burned, and yet I felt… different. Stronger. Sharper. More alive than I had in weeks. But the countdown on my wrist still ticked steadily. The numbers reminded me that the fight wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.
Wren stood beside me, her eyes scanning the horizon through the broken windows. “They’re regrouping,” she said quietly. “And they’ll come back. They always do.”
I swallowed hard. “Then what do we do?”
She turned to face me, expression grim. “We end this. One way or another. You have a choice, and it’s the only one that can change everything.”
I frowned. “What choice?”
Wren gestured to the shattered mirrors lining the back wall—the remnants of the Echo Chamber. “The Keepers’ power isn’t just external. They live in the timelines, in the numbers. You can destroy them… but you’ll have to rewrite every timeline you’ve touched. You’ll save lives—but it will cost you.”
I froze. My pulse accelerated. My own countdown glowed brighter on my wrist, ticking down like a drumbeat toward inevitability.
“You mean… if I do this, I might die?”
Wren nodded. “Maybe. But if you don’t… millions will.”
I looked around, seeing the countless faces I had touched—some lost, some saved, all echoing in my mind. Every death I had tried to prevent, every life I had altered, flashed before me like a storm of memory.
I closed my eyes, reaching deep into the threads of time, the numbers, the countdowns, the echoes. I could feel them all bending toward me, waiting. Trusting me.
I had seen death. I had felt it. I had touched it. And now I held the power to rewrite it.
The process was excruciating.
I felt myself pulled in every direction—hundreds of timelines, millions of lives, the Keepers’ influence pressing in from every corner of existence. My body shook violently, my lungs burned, my consciousness splintered. The countdown on my wrist accelerated, seconds flashing faster than I could count.
But I didn’t stop.
I twisted the numbers. I redirected the threads. I reached into the echoes and pulled them into coherence. The Keepers’ forms appeared briefly—shimmering, screaming—but they had no hold here. Not anymore.
And then, silence.
I opened my eyes.
The mirrors were whole. The warehouse was calm. The numbers above my wrist glowed steadily—no longer spiraling out of control. The echoes were gone, but the lives remained.
I had done it.
Wren approached slowly, eyes wide. “You… you actually did it.”
I sank to the floor, trembling. “I think… I’m okay. But… everything feels different.”
She crouched beside me. “It is different. You changed the timelines. You’ve rewritten fate. But it came at a cost—you’ve bonded with the numbers. You’ll never be completely free of them. And the Keepers… they’ll always remember you.”
I looked at my wrist. The countdown had stopped… but the glow remained. A reminder of everything I had survived. Everything I had saved.
“I’m ready,” I whispered. “Ready for whatever comes next.”
Epilogue
Weeks later, life returned to a fragile normal. The streets bustled, school resumed, and the world carried on as though nothing had happened. But I knew better.
The numbers were still there, faintly glowing beneath my skin. Every now and then, I could sense the echoes—the heartbeat of someone’s final moment, the pulse of a life hanging by a thread. It didn’t frighten me anymore. It was a part of me.
Wren visited occasionally. She didn’t bring lessons or training. Just a quiet presence, a reminder that I wasn’t alone in this.
Sometimes, I wondered if the Keepers were watching, waiting for me to slip. I doubted they had forgotten. But I had learned something they hadn’t counted on: unpredictability. Resilience. The human will to survive—and to protect others, no matter the cost.
I had seen death, I had bent time, and I had faced the ultimate choice. And though the countdown never truly ended, I had learned to live with it.
The numbers would tick forever.
But so would I.
And now… I was ready.
The End