He begins to see the pattern. That is always the first danger.
The alley smelled of copper and ozone, like an old wound that had never healed. Rain slicked the bricks and turned the gutters into shallow rivers. Elias stood under the glow of an antique streetlamp, its golden light flickering like a flame on the verge of extinguishing.
The body had been found at dawn.
Rae stood beside him, arms folded, face pale. Her phone buzzed silently in her pocket.
Elias knelt next to the sheet-covered corpse. A small police drone hovered nearby, scanning, recording, silent in its judgment. He pulled back the sheet.
The man's throat had been slit, cleanly, and his eyes were wide open, fixed on something the living could no longer see.
Rae whispered, "Just like Roe."
Elias nodded slowly.
But this body wasn't Roe. It was a bookseller named Thomas Ebb, unknown to either of them. Yet the method of execution, the placement of the hands, the symbol carved into the wall behind the corpse, it was identical.
Too identical.
Time doesn't repeat. It folds. And sometimes… it leaks.
Back at their temporary hideout, Elias pulled up images of historical murders. The walls of the hotel room became a living archive, covered with printed photos, sticky notes, and old newspaper clippings.
"You're saying this has happened before?" Rae asked, pouring coffee with shaking hands.
"Not just before. Repeatedly. Look."
He pointed to a series of clippings.
"1851 — London. A journalist found dead. Same symbol. 1923 — Cairo. French diplomat. Throat slit, same pattern. 1968 — Buenos Aires. Again."
Rae stared at the photos. "But… these are decades, even centuries apart."
"Different cities. Different victims. But the same hand."
"You think it's the same killer?"
"I think it's something older than that."
He picked up a photograph. A daguerreotype of a burning man, a figure silhouetted by fire, arms raised to the sky.
"Roe's assistant mentioned a legend. The Burning Man. Found in whispers across cultures. Always just before catastrophe."
He flipped open Roe's old notebook. Latin phrases circled in red. One translated to: The first death is never the last.
He chases a phantom, unaware the shadow is his own.
They took a cab to the university's underground archives, using Rae's stolen faculty ID to gain access.
In the oldest vaults, they found the digitized files from Project RELIC, or rather, what remained. Most of it had been redacted. Whole sections blank. But in the margins of one corrupted file, Elias found a list of seven coded events, each with dates.
1791.
1851.
1923.
1968.
2025
Two more were smudged beyond recognition.
"Five confirmed," Rae said. "But what are they?"
"They're regression events," Elias whispered. "Moments where history… bled."
He speaks truth now. But the cost will come later.
That night, he dreamt of flames again.
Not London. Not Roe.
Another place. Another time.
Children screaming. A man holding the mirror aloft as shadows encircle him.
Elias awoke, gasping, heart racing. The mirror was warm in his hands, though he hadn't remembered touching it.
It whispered a name to him. One he didn't recognize.
Yet his mouth moved to answer it.
The next morning, Rae was gone.
A note on the table:
I need time. And you too. Stay safe.
Beside it: a photograph from the archive.
Elias, or someone who looked like him, standing among rubble. 1923. Cairo. Smiling.
She sees him slipping. She always does. And still she returns.
He picked up the photo and stared into the eyes of his other self.
"What are you trying to show me?"
The mirror pulsed.
The symbol on the wall. The pattern in the killings. The cities. The times.
They weren't random.
They were breadcrumbs.
Leading him backward.