The lights in Tarin's scrapyard bunker flickered with intermittent voltage, throwing long shadows across racks of obsolete time hardware and melted sync arrays. Eira stood over Tarin's shoulder, watching as the former TIB systems analyst muttered to himself, fingers dancing over a matte-black touchboard patched with solder scars and taped wires.
The decrypted Expired Assets file hovered in sections on an array of cracked displays, each line showing a name, a timestamp, and a status. EXPIRED, glowing in a dull red font that never stopped pulsing. Tarin had rearranged them across time sequence, bypassing the file's lock layers with something he called a "quantum diff spill"—a technique Eira didn't understand, but respected.
"Look at this," Tarin whispered, tapping one section with a nicotine-stained fingernail. "They're grouped."
Eira leaned in. "Grouped?"
"Temporal clustering. Every single one of these deaths occurred inside the same 20-minute window. Repeating. Not daily. Not hourly. But exact to the nanosecond—across different days, weeks, even years. The executions are timed."
The word settled in the cold air between them: executions.
Eira's stomach tightened. "You're saying someone's scheduling deaths... like appointments."
Tarin nodded, face pale under the jaundiced light. "That's not the worst part."
He tapped another control, and a simulation launched—a scrolling timeline, dead silent except for the occasional mechanical clack of the old terminal drives syncing. The visual pulsed every time a name expired. It formed a pattern—clean, efficient, deliberate.
Eira recognized some of the names now. Not just from the clinic backdoor checks or ghost registries, but from real memory—faces on courier routes, vendors he passed, names he didn't remember until seeing them here, lined up like tombstones with clocks.
"What about me?" Eira asked quietly. "When was my scheduled time?"
Tarin pulled up a filtered search, isolated Eira's entry. The data flared into the console:
Name: EIRA VEX
ID: 428-L12-D7-EN
STATUS: ACTIVE
TIME OF EXPIRY (Scheduled): Year 3211, Cycle 88, Hour 19:38:44
RESULT: FAILURE – Life Extension Detected
Override Source: [REDACTED]
Eira stared at it.
"That's five years ago," he said.
Tarin didn't respond. He didn't need to. They both knew what it meant.
"You were supposed to be dead," Tarin said eventually. "Someone intervened. But look—your extension was unauthorized. Whatever gave you more time? It wasn't legal. And now…"
The screens around them trembled, as if reacting to the implication.
Eira rubbed his chest instinctively, where the implant sat beneath the skin like a second heart. It had always itched. Sometimes it burned. Now he wondered if it had been screaming at him for years.
"I didn't know. I didn't ask for more time."
"No one does," Tarin said. "Not from the Bureau."
They stood in silence, broken only by the slow clicking of Tarin's decrepit cooling unit. Outside, the storm that had been brewing since midday rolled over the ruins of Old Sector 14, metal shells of towers groaning like they remembered something.
Tarin returned to the console, typing. "I tried isolating the source of the execution command. Every record is signed by the same key—encrypted, sealed with something I haven't seen since the early TIB restructuring days."
A symbol bloomed on the center display: a hexagonal seal with a slashed hourglass inside it, encircled by binary. Eira recognized it.
"Bureau Purity Division," he said. "They're supposed to be dormant. Merged after the Integrity Act."
Tarin shook his head. "Officially, yes. But someone revived the signature. That's what's controlling the purge cycle."
He brought up a different stream—rows of purge attempts, many of which were successful. Some failed. Some were manually overridden.
"Whoever's running this is inside the system. Deep inside. They have master clearance and execution protocol keys. These aren't natural deaths, Eira. They're... ordered disappearances."
Eira stepped back, breath ragged. It wasn't just that he was marked. It was that he had escaped, however briefly, from a cycle no one else seemed able to dodge. And that someone noticed.
Tarin kept typing. A new flag pinged at the bottom of the screen. The list had updated. One name flashed brighter than the others, marked in amber.
"New entry," Tarin said, clicking to expand it. "Someone just got added."
They both read the name at the same time.
KAEL VORN.
"Kael?" Eira breathed.
"Who is that?"
"He's... enforcement. ChronoEnforcer. Been tracking me."
Tarin's eyes narrowed. "Then why's he on the list?"
Eira didn't know. The man had followed him, maybe even stalked him—but always with a detachment that didn't fit. Was Kael a threat... or a loose piece in the machine, just like him?
"You think he's rogue?" Eira asked. "Out of Bureau favor?"
Tarin leaned back. "Could be. Or maybe he found out something he wasn't supposed to. Or maybe... he was helping you all along."
Eira replayed every encounter—Kael's absence of aggression, his consistent distance, his refusal to act even when he had every legal right to.
"Why would a Bureau enforcer go off-program?" Eira asked.
Tarin just stared at the name glowing on the screen. "Maybe because he realized the system's broken. Maybe he saw the same list."
The console beeped again. Another line appeared beneath Kael's entry:
Time of Expiry (Scheduled): Cycle 134, Hour 20:00:00
Time Remaining: 00:19:54
Eira's blood ran cold.
"He's scheduled to die... in twenty minutes."
Tarin snapped into motion, pulling a separate terminal online. "I can trace the signal packet. If I can isolate the purge source, maybe I can stall the execution code."
"But we don't even know where Kael is," Eira said.
Tarin's hands were already moving. "We've got twenty minutes. Find him."
Eira turned toward the exit, mind racing.
"Eira," Tarin called, not looking up. "If they realize you're interfering with a purge... you're not going to get a second miracle."
"I know," Eira said, slamming the door open.
Rain hammered the yard as he sprinted into the streets, the city lights burning through the haze like blood in water. Somewhere, Kael was walking with less than twenty minutes of time left on the ledger—and if he expired, Eira knew the next update would come for him again.
But for the first time, he wasn't just running from death. He was running into it—trying to interrupt a machine that had chewed through thousands without leaving a trace.
And this time, he'd seen the schedule.
He knew the window.
And if he didn't get there fast enough—Kael would become the next name on a list that was never meant to exist.
To be continued…