The first time Rae said it, Elias barely noticed.
"Time isn't a river," she told him. "It's a scar. We reopen it every time we look back."
He nodded, distracted, staring out the circular window of their temporary dwelling in the Red-Spiral City. The spirals outside shifted subtly with the day's heat, their tattooed symbols glowing red, then violet, then dark.
But twenty minutes later, she said it again.
Same words. Same tone. Same distracted look in her eyes, as if she didn't know she'd said them before.
He stopped mid-sentence. "Rae… what did you just say?"
She looked at him, confused. "What?"
"Time. Scar. Reopening it, did you just repeat yourself?"
"No." She blinked, her focus returning like a wave receding from glass. "I haven't said anything."
But the unease didn't leave her eyes.
Elias had seen something like this before, during his first Leap, when the Watcher warped his sense of chronology so badly he relived his own death three times. But this was different.
This wasn't him.
It was her.
He activated his recorder, his own personal codex, a relic Rae had helped him build in Book 2. It glowed green, indicating stability. But Rae's voice, when captured and played back, repeated that same line five times over a 30-minute span.
Each time, she denied it.
Each time, her pulse slowed by exactly two beats per minute.
By the fourth instance, she didn't even blink.
She just stared at him and said:
"Time isn't a river. It's a scar."
And smiled.
The tattooed woman from the gate, whose name was revealed to be Yshari, led them to a relic chamber called The Coil. It wasn't a building, not really. It was a cavity in the ground wrapped in cables and whisper-metal, and it sang when you approached it.
The city's rebels used it to record "quantum echoes," fragments of personal memory that bled into the material world.
"I think she's leaking," Elias told Yshari. "My Rae. Something's wrong."
Yshari raised an eyebrow. "Rae? The Rae?"
"She wasn't always like this," Elias said.
Yshari frowned. "She never was."
That answer chilled him more than it should have.
Inside The Coil, time did not behave.
Elias moved left, his breath echoed seconds before his footsteps. He blinked, and the shadows blinked back. Rae stood near a mirror of woven obsidian, thin, spidery cracks running across its surface.
She reached out to touch it.
Elias shouted, "Wait—!"
Too late.
Her fingers brushed the mirror, and suddenly,
She was screaming.
But not aloud. Not with sound. The scream came from every surface, walls, glass, bone, even Elias himself. A scream of pure recognition. As if the city remembered her and wanted her back.
Then it stopped.
And Rae was on the floor, gasping.
Elias rushed to her side, but she pushed him away. Her eyes had changed.
One pupil was normal.
The other was spiraled, ink-black and slow-turning like a gear behind skin.
She whispered:
"He's watching through me now."
That night, Elias didn't sleep.
Instead, he sat beside Rae and rewound the recorder again and again. Her words were evolving. The phrases were repeating, but mutating slightly.
By morning, the line became:
"Time isn't a river. It's a scar. The Watcher claws at it every time I speak."
He finally dared to ask her:
"Do you remember the time loop in the atrium? The broken room in Book 1?"
She shook her head slowly. "That wasn't me."
He stared at her. "You were there."
She looked at him with distant pity. "No. She was."
A silence.
Then, calmly, she added, "I think you brought the wrong Rae with you, Elias."
That was the first time Elias considered something unthinkable.
That Rae might not be broken.That Rae might be copied.
That this city, this relic city, was bleeding not just memory, but versions.
Rae clones. Time ghosts. Fragmented selves. Left behind each time the Walker leapt and she did not.
The Recorder blinked red now. Unstable.
Reality frayed at the edges. Walls flickered. Symbols bled from people's tattoos and began floating in the air.
And Rae whispered again.
This time it wasn't a phrase.
It was a name.
"Darwish."
Elias stared at her in horror.
She did not recognize it. Didn't even realize she'd said it.
But he knew.
Darwish had been here.
Maybe was still here.
And if that was true…Then the Red-Spiral City was no longer just a shelter.
It was a trap.