The front gate creaked just slightly louder than it did this morning.
Hale stepped into the house.
It was quiet.
Too quiet for Ivy.
No humming.
No sarcastic one-liners.
No clang of a fork dropped by accident.
He paused in the entryway.
The scent of toast still lingered faintly in the air. The sun angled gently across the kitchen floor like nothing had changed.
Then he saw it.
A note.
Pinned to the fridge with a little cat magnet.
Simple handwriting. Her handwriting.
"Went out to grab rations.
Shouldn't take long.
If I'm late, check the corner store on Bell Street.
– Ivy"
Nothing dramatic.
No panic.
Just... too normal.
And Hale's chest felt tight for no reason he could explain.
He folded the note, slid it into his back pocket, and stared at the fridge for a few seconds longer than necessary.
"Bell Street..."
He mumbled it like it was a name he didn't trust.
The house was... ordinary.
Uncomfortably so.
Hale wandered from room to room, half-expecting to see something wrong
a picture turned upside-down, a window open that shouldn't be, a sketch out of place.
But everything was untouched.
The cups in the rack.
The shoes by the door.
Even the flicker of sunlight filtering through the yellow curtains was exactly as he remembered.
Too exactly.
No distortions. No pulses.
Not even the mark.
He reached the bedroom.
Dropped his bag onto the floor.
Sat at the edge of the bed.
Pulled out the photo of ALP.
Still faded. Still impossible.
Still real.
His eyes drifted, slowly, up to the wall.
And there it was.
The clock.
The same old clock from his first day here.
Glass face. Faint crack across the top right.
He stood.
Walked to it.
The crack wasn't just similar. It was exact.
Same curve.
Same depth.
Same barely-visible dust line along the top.
He leaned in.
Staring.
Thinking too hard.
"This can't be coincidence."
His mind spiraled looping through last night's conversation, the photo, the sketch, the woman in Gyroson's office, Ivy's voice, the dreams he couldn't place in time
Tick.
Tick.
The sound wasn't loud.
But it was too consistent.
"Hey."
A soft voice behind him.
He jumped.
Turned quickly heart racing.
It was Ivy.
Plastic bags in her hands. Cheeks pink from the sun. A little out of breath.
"Didn't mean to scare you. You looked like you were about to time travel with your brain."
Hale blinked.
"I—uh... I was just... looking at the clock."
"It's a clock," she said, setting the bags down. "They're famously known for ticking and doing absolutely nothing else."
He tried to smile.
"It's a good clock."
"Right," she said with a grin. "And I'm the Queen of the Sun."
She stepped past him into the kitchen.
"You hungry? They had those sad little frozen pancakes you pretended not to like last week."
He nodded vaguely.
Still staring at the clock.
But his voice came steady.
"Yeah. Pancakes sound good."