Pain leaves scars on time, too. And some learn to read them.
The servers were buried beneath layers of bureaucracy and encrypted nonsense, tucked away inside the belly of ChronoTech's now-crippled mainframe. It had taken Elias and Rae three days to find access, through an anonymous key buried in Roe's backup drive, passed through what looked like an old chess program.
"Bishop to F7," Rae had whispered, just before the file tree bloomed like a mechanical flower.
They were inside.
The room smelled like damp dust and dead electricity. Emergency lights cast the vault in sickly yellow.
Elias sat cross-legged, sifting through data while Rae stood guard near the door.
"They called it RELIC Protocol, he muttered. "Recursive Event Loop Induction Construct. It wasn't just a study. It was an experiment."
"On what?"
"Not what. Who."
He turned the screen.
Seven case files. Each with a codename. Each marked with an event, a place, and a single word underlined in red: Trauma.
We are the sum of our scars. Some scars bleed through.
One file stood out.
Subject: VAL-013 Alias: Elias Vale Event Affinity: Unknown Reactivity: High Retention Degradation: In Progress
"I was a test subject," Elias whispered. "They knew about me."
Rae frowned. "This is impossible. This file is dated before your birth."
"No... it's dated before my birth. But what if this isn't the first time I've been Elias Vale?"
Silence.
He reaches for truth. But every answer pulls a thread from his mind.
They moved to the second terminal. Rae decrypted an archive with what looked like corrupted footage. Dozens of short clips stitched together: blurred images of people screaming, cities burning, storms forming over deserts, a man holding a mirror high above his head, deflecting light like a weapon.
Then, a quiet recording. Roe's voice, strained, older than the man Elias had met.
"We cannot fix the past. But perhaps we can understand why it breaks the way it does. Each relic is a wound. The carriers, they're the scab. Fragile. Temporary. Necessary."
A second voice, female, distorted:
"And if the scab is picked?"
Roe again:
"Then time bleeds."
Back at their hideout, Rae stared at her notes.
"Seven relics," she said. "Seven traumas. Seven leaps?"
Elias nodded. "Each one pulling me deeper. Backward."
She hesitated. "What happens when you reach the first one?"
He didn't answer.
Because he'd begun to wonder the same thing. The Watcher hadn't spoken since Cairo. But his presence hung thick, like a scent that lingered even after a fire was extinguished.
Closer. He's closer now. And still, he doesn't ask the right question.
Rae pulled up a classified memo marked with Roe's old security code.
Inside: a map. Not of space, but of time.
Wounds plotted like constellations. One glowed faintly — 1791.
"Haiti," Elias murmured. "The next trauma."
Rae looked away. "I don't think I can do this again."
"What?"
"Watch you die. Change. Lose more of yourself. Elias… you're fading."
He reached for her hand. She pulled away.
"I don't know if you're still you," she said, standing. "And I'm not sure you know either."
After she left, Elias sat in the dark.
The mirror lay on the desk. Silent. Waiting.
He thought about the word in the file, Retention Degradation.
What would it mean to forget himself entirely?
What if that was the point?
Not a question of whether he forgets. Only when.
The mirror shimmered.
He saw flashes. A blade. A storm. A burning flag. A child's scream.
Then silence.
He whispered to it, voice trembling: "What are you doing to me?"
No reply.
But in the next instant, he wasn't alone.
A man stood in the reflection. Not quite his face. Not quite different either. Behind him, fire.
He blinked. The image was gone.
Only the Watcher's whisper remained:
You are not breaking. You are being unmade.