The narrow alleys of Casablanca buzzed with rumors like flies over ripe fruit. Stories of explosions, stolen arms, and disappearing convoys spread faster than any newspaper could report. But in the old quarter—beyond Derb Sultan and the colonial offices—there was a place that didn't belong to time at all: the Memory Bazaar.
Yassin first heard of it from an old woman selling almonds wrapped in newspaper. Her eyes had cataracts but her words were sharp.
"You walk like a man chasing a shadow," she said. "If you're looking for something lost, try the souq where time forgets its path."
He had followed her directions, though she never gave him a street name—just a sequence of scents and sounds: cinnamon, oud, the whisper of a call to prayer that never ends. And somehow, it led him there.
The Market Outside Time
The Memory Bazaar did not appear on any map. It hid beneath a broken archway off Rue des Consuls, behind a crumbling wall where vines grew wild.
Inside, the air shifted.
Time bent.
Stalls sold oddities from every era: rusted colonial rifles beside transistor radios; ceramic mosaics that pulsed with color; scrolls written in a dialect Yassin didn't recognize but somehow understood.
He passed a man selling dreams in sealed jars, a boy hawking names of the dead for a coin, and an old Frenchman playing oud, though the strings wept instead of sang.
At the farthest stall was a mirror with no reflection.
Yassin stood before it. Then the watch in his pocket pulsed.
The Keeper of Echoes
A woman emerged from behind the mirror—draped in indigo, her face veiled in silver thread.
"You carry something stolen from time," she said, voice echoing like a canyon.
Yassin's hand gripped the pocket. "The watch?"
She nodded. "It chooses its bearer, but it also tests them."
"What is this place?"
"A refuge for displaced memories. A market of could-have-beens."
She gestured, and the mirror shimmered.
In it, Yassin saw a version of himself in a different timeline: never having returned to the past, walking through sterile corridors in 2025, a researcher with hollow eyes and empty purpose.
"Each path leaves an echo," she said. "Some louder than others."
"Why are you showing me this?"
"Because the fire you lit has consequences. The future you left behind is unraveling."
Reverberations
Outside the Bazaar, reality began to fracture.
Reports arrived: checkpoints vanishing, French broadcasts looping the same minute repeatedly, people forgetting the day of the week. Even Khalid noticed it.
"Something's wrong," he told Yassin. "There's talk of time folding over itself. Men who died last week walking the streets again."
Yassin didn't explain. Not yet.
But when Samira confronted him in the hammam, he told her everything.
"The watch lets me travel. Not just through time—but through versions of time. I think we're slipping between layers."
She stared, lips parted. "So what do we do?"
"We stabilize it. I need to go back—to the Bazaar."
The Price of Knowledge
The second visit cost him.
The Bazaar demanded a trade.
"Nothing is free," said the Keeper. "To understand the rift, you must surrender a memory. One that defines you."
Yassin hesitated. Then he placed his hand on the mirror.
He gave up his last memory of his mother's voice.
The mirror absorbed it. He staggered back.
"Now you may see," said the Keeper.
And she opened a door in the floor—revealing a spiral staircase made of books and bones.
At the Core
Deep beneath the Bazaar lay the true engine of the watch: a spherical chamber where time bled like oil from cracked stone.
Floating within was a map—not of geography, but of possibility. Threads of timelines pulsed in different colors.
Yassin touched the red thread—his current path. It shimmered.
"This line is unstable," the Keeper said. "Too much interference. You've pulled the past too far toward a new axis."
"Can it be repaired?"
"Only if you anchor it. Through sacrifice or permanence."
He nodded.
Return and Resolve
Yassin returned to Casablanca changed.
He called a meeting. Told the resistance everything. Khalid listened, stunned. Samira didn't speak.
"So what now?" asked Abbas.
"We finish what we started. But I don't return. If I leave again, the thread breaks. If I stay... it holds."
Khalid clasped his shoulder. "Then you stay."
Samira touched his hand. "Together."
And the watch dimmed—quiet for the first time.
To be continued in Chapter 9: The Silence Before Dawn