The first time it happened, Aarav lost six seconds.
He blinked.
Looked down.
And realized he was holding a blade.
Not drawn. Not ready.
Used.
Blood on the hilt. Not his.
The room was empty.
So was his memory.
He told no one.
Not Maya.
Not Sila.
Not even the echo in his own mind that had begun whispering just before sleep.
The second time, he lost a day.
Woke up on the edge of the city. Dust in his mouth. Spiral symbols carved in chalk along the wall behind him — words written in a language he had never learned.
And yet he could read it.
"You are the answer and the collapse.
You are the blade and the wound.
The spiral does not break. It blooms."
It kept happening.
Time folding.
Memories shifting.
People looking at him differently — even Maya.
Like they saw something in his eyes that hadn't been there before.
Something looking back.
At night, he dreamed of cities built in spirals.
Of voices speaking in recursion.
Of himself — older, colder, godlike — giving sermons to thousands who wore mirrored masks and bled willingly into spiral-shaped bowls.
He'd wake screaming.
Then realize he hadn't woken at all.
In the observatory, Aarav finally broke the silence.
"Something's wrong with me," he told Maya.
She looked at him too long before answering.
"No. Something's awakening in you."
"That's what they feared, Aarav.
Not your rebellion.
Your recursion."
Sila ran a scan using forbidden tech — half-rigged memory-mapping gear she salvaged from an erased Keeper post.
The scan returned only one phrase:
"Conscious state: Nonlinear.
Fracture manifest."
She stepped back.
"You're not in danger," she said slowly.
"You are the danger."
Aarav stood alone at the top of the dome that night.
The stars spiraled overhead.
His body ached in strange, rhythmic pulses.
The world was beginning to loop — and he could feel himself sitting outside of it.
Watching.
Choosing.
Changing.
Not human.
Not Helix.
Something else.
And the Order?
They had no protocol for what he was becoming.