The clock outside Anchorpoint was the first to betray them.
It hung crooked on the cracked stone wall above the exit hatch, its hands still—trapped at 04:11.
Orin didn't notice at first.
He was too busy breathing.
Breathing like it meant something again.
Junie walked just behind him, quiet, the tether between them faint but warm. Her fingers grazed the sketchbook, now empty of drawings—but alive with potential.
"I feel like I just walked out of someone else's dream," Orin murmured.
Junie's lips quirked upward. "Maybe we both did. But we're not asleep anymore."
A gust of wind swept through the hallway—cold, metallic, unnatural.
Then silence.
Then a whisper:
"You shouldn't be here yet."
Orin froze.
Junie's fingers tightened around her sketchbook.
They turned together toward the voice.
But no one was there.
Only the hallway.
Only the hatch.
Only the clock.
Still.
Tickless.
Stuck.
04:11.
Orin stepped closer to it.
A faint line—almost a crack—ran along the centre of the clock face, like something had struck it from inside.
He reached for it instinctively.
The moment his fingers touched the glass—
Time screamed.
—
The world didn't spin.
It folded.
Junie was gone.
Anchorpoint was gone.
Orin stood in the same hallway, but the walls were young again—freshly built, lined with unread notices and system banners.
And the clock?
It ticked.
But it ticked backward.
04:10
04:09
04:08
A voice—his own, but younger—echoed from behind.
"Don't touch that again, Zail. You're not cleared."
Orin turned.
And saw himself.
Dressed in the uniform of a full Diver.
Clean-cut.
Smiling.
Confident.
And behind him—Seira.
Alive.
Laughing.
"You always try to fix things that aren't broken," she teased.
"You say that like they aren't already unravelling," the other Orin—Zail—replied.
Time ticked back again.
04:07
04:06
04:05
The hallway blurred.
The two shadows faded.
And Orin stood alone once more, clutching the cracked clock with trembling hands.
It wasn't a memory trap.
It was a looped anchor.
Set to pull Diver-class minds into echo states until they chose differently.
"Junie," Orin whispered. "Where are you?"
Then—
A hand closed around his wrist.
Hers.
Pulling him back.
Not gently.
Desperately.
Time snapped.
The hallway bent.
And Orin fell forward into the present—Junie screaming as he collapsed into her arms, the tether between them flickering like a frayed wire catching flame.
Orin hit the ground hard.
But it wasn't concrete.
It was paper.
Sheets and sheets of parchment softened the fall—pages torn from Junie's sketchbook, now scattered across the floor in a swirling constellation of half-formed lines.
Every one of them drawn in the last second.
By her.
"Don't move," Junie said, breath ragged. "You're not all here yet."
Orin blinked.
His vision split—
One layer showed the hallway as it was: decayed, humming, present.
Another showed the younger Orin—Zail—smiling at Seira. Still walking toward the looped clock. Still trapped in a memory that wasn't just a flashback.
It was a suggestion.
A recursion nudge.
Be him again, the system whispered.
Be what you were. Be what we need.
Orin gritted his teeth. "Not this time."
Junie's pencil flew over the page.
She didn't look at him—she couldn't.
But her sketchbook glowed now with something deeper than graphite: a counterweight.
A reality anchor.
She whispered as she drew:
"You are not the fragments you left behind.
You are the shape that formed around them."
Lines became scenes.
Moments only they had shared:
— Orin handing her a half-crushed can of peaches during the blackout in Loop 71.
— Junie sketching his silhouette by lantern light, the words "Still here" beside it.
— That first impossible memory they both saw—of a fire escape and a kiss that never happened… but should have.
The clock tried again.
04:05
04:04
04:03
A cold voice echoed:
[REALITY STABILIZATION AT RISK]
[DIVERSION DETECTED]
[REWRITING PROTOCOL – PENDING APPROVAL]
Junie slammed her hand down.
The sketchbook exploded with light.
Reality buckled.
The clock stopped.
And for the first time in that recursion field—
It clicked forward.
04:12
Orin exhaled.
The younger version of himself—Zail—faded into the dust of possibility.
And Junie, pale but resolute, whispered, "I won't let them take you back."
Orin stared at his hands.
They trembled—not from fear, but from misalignment.
They were too steady.
Too practiced.
Not his.
Fingers that once struggled to carry crates or swipe a store's scanner now flexed with reflex. Memory-guided muscle. A surgeon's calm.
Or a Diver's.
He clenched them into fists, hoping the familiarity would return.
It didn't.
Behind him, Junie watched quietly. She had stopped drawing.
The sketchbook's pages fluttered in place—stilled only because time, for the first time in hours, respected them.
"I think it's happening again," Orin murmured.
Junie stepped closer, voice calm but taut. "What do you feel?"
"…Like someone else is inside my skin."
He turned.
And for a second—
Just a flicker—
He saw himself.
But older. Confident. Diver uniform crisp. Hair shorter. A scar beneath one eye.
Zail.
Or rather, the system's preserved version of him.
Projected. Waiting. Watching.
Junie reached into her pack. Pulled out a chalk coin—etched with her handwriting.
She knelt.
Drew a circle.
Then a line.
Then a name: ZAIL_THORNE_0.CTD
The hallway dimmed.
And the recursion flickered—
Zail stepped forward.
No longer just an echo.
A system defence mechanism.
"You've activated a legacy tether," the Zail-projection said calmly. "You are not stable. Return to Diver Protocol Alpha, or identity rupture will proceed."
Orin stepped in front of Junie.
"I'm not going back to being a ghost in your loop."
Zail tilted his head. "You misunderstand. You are not returning. You are decaying. I'm here to help you preserve the version of yourself with the highest survivability rate."
Orin laughed—harsh and hollow. "The version that obeys?"
Zail didn't flinch. "The version that wins."
Junie's fingers twitched toward the sketchbook again—but Orin stopped her.
"No. Let me talk to myself."
Junie's eyes widened.
"You sure?"
"No," he said. "But I'm done running from mirrors."
He stepped into the circle.
And the tether began to burn.
The chalk circle flared once, then collapsed inward—pulling Orin and the system echo of Zail into a closed loop.
A mirror chamber.
Everything was white.
Endless, depthless white—no ceiling, no floor, no exit.
Only two figures.
One wore a grocery apron over an old thermal shirt, tether line faint and flickering at his wrist.
The other stood tall in Diver gear, posture flawless, eyes sharp as code.
Orin spoke first. "You don't belong here."
Zail didn't blink. "You activated me. Anchorpoint reactivation triggered legacy self-preservation. I am here. Because you're not enough."
"I'm alive."
"You're inconsistent."
"I'm real."
"You're inefficient."
Orin's hands balled into fists again. Still too steady.
He stared at Zail's form. The uniform. The scars. The air of invincibility the system preserved as optimal Diver-class presentation.
"You were made to survive recursion," Orin said slowly. "I was made to feel it."
Zail stepped forward. "And where has that gotten you? Collapsed timelines. System violations. A tether that endangers both you and the anomaly."
"Her name is Junie."
"Her name is a statistical anomaly. She shouldn't be able to stabilize a Diver at recursion depth five. She doesn't belong in the system."
"She doesn't belong in the system," Orin snapped. "And neither do I. Not like this."
Zail paused.
Then, calmly: "You cannot win if you're fractured."
Orin stepped forward, tether-line pulsing faintly.
"I'm not fractured. I'm complex."
Another step.
"I'm not optimal. I'm human."
Another.
"And that makes me more dangerous to your recursion model than you can calculate."
Zail tilted his head. "Then prove it."
The chamber flickered.
Behind Zail, a mirror appeared.
On its surface—Junie. Crying. Alone. A version of her without Orin. The tether severed.
Zail turned. "Remove yourself from her loop. Let her stabilize elsewhere. She'll live longer."
Orin shook his head.
"No."
The tether in his hand sparked.
And a memory surfaced.
Not of Junie.
Of himself. In a frozen aisle. Holding a cracked diver coin.
A voice whispered through the recursion:
"You don't fix the world by deleting the people who feel too much. You save it by loving them anyway."
The mirror shattered.
Zail staggered back.
For the first time—his face showed pain.
Orin stepped forward.
And whispered: "I'm not your echo anymore."
The white chamber peeled away.
And he woke up—face pressed to Junie's shoulder, tears hot on his cheeks.
Junie held him before he could fall again.
Orin's body was trembling—muscle memory still half-trapped in Zail's rigid stance—but his hands found hers without hesitation.
The tether hadn't just survived.
It glowed.
A steady, silver pulse coiling with threads of deep amber.
"Did you win?" Junie asked softly.
"No," he said. "I chose."
Junie smiled.
And opened her sketchbook.
The pages were blank.
Burnt clean after the mirror duel.
But she didn't hesitate.
Her pencil touched down, and the line began to move.
A hallway.
A clock that no longer ticks.
A girl kneeling beside a boy who doesn't know which name belongs to him.
"I'm sketching the version we keep," she murmured. "Not the one the system wants. Ours."
Orin sat beside her.
"I don't know how much longer the recursion will hold."
Junie didn't stop drawing.
"I know."
A tremor rippled through the walls.
Anchorpoint shimmered.
The time-stuck zone began rewriting—system threads racing to reclaim what Zail failed to contain.
But Junie's pencil kept moving.
Faster.
More frantic.
Two Diver-class figures holding hands.
A cracked clock with its hands removed.
A new hour that doesn't exist on any system-approved dial: Zero:Zero.
"I'm anchoring us in anomaly," she said.
Orin's eyes widened.
"That'll trigger a pulse."
"I know."
"Junie—"
She looked at him.
"I'll take the hit. I was always meant to."
"No."
Orin pulled something from his jacket.
The Diver coin.
Still burned, still marked with recursion heat—but whole.
"I was Zail. But I'm not now. I'll carry it."
The tether between them flared.
And the system reacted:
[UNAUTHORIZED TIMELINE DETECTED]
[RECURSION PULSE DEPLOYING IN 00:10]
[DIVER-CLASS PAIR OUTSIDE SYSTEM BOUNDS]
Junie dropped her sketchbook.
Let it fall open on the floor.
Let it display the image of them—standing side by side in the timeline they claimed.
"Then let it rewrite us," she said.
Orin nodded.
"But this time—we're the authors."
[RECURSION PULSE IN 00:03]
[DIVER PAIR UNSHELTERED]
[PURGE PENDING]
[01]
[00]
The world should've fractured.
Should've burned.
But it didn't.
Not yet.
—
Instead of heat, the pulse came as stillness.
As if the entire system took a breath… and forgot how to exhale.
Anchorpoint shivered—metal bones groaning in protest as timeline threads strained against Junie's sketches and Orin's coin. Between them, the tether pulsed not with panic, but with pattern.
Junie stood.
Sketchbook pages scattered.
The last image was still forming: a doorway. Not drawn. Not complete.
Just a shape, lined in stars.
Orin knelt, coin in hand, muttering something under his breath.
Not a prayer.
A memory.
"Loop 43. The market that vanished before we kissed.
Loop 71. The lantern light.
Loop 0. The field where we forgot our names.
Now."
He pressed the coin to the floor.
The tether surged.
And for the first time—
The pulse bent.
It slowed.
The wave collapsed in on itself, folding through Junie's art, fracturing across Orin's words, reshaping mid-burst into a recursion echo.
It didn't erase them.
It remembered them.
—
[RECURSION PULSE — FAILED]
[NEW BASELINE RECORDED]
[DIVER PAIR CLASSIFIED: FRACTURE-ANOMALY ALPHA]
[ALERT: OBSERVE. DO NOT CORRECT.]
Anchorpoint steadied.
Dust fell.
And the clock on the wall, long stuck, ticked once.
04:13
Junie exhaled, chest trembling. "We're still here."
Orin looked at the sketchbook in her hand.
She turned the page.
This time, she didn't draw.
He did.
His fingers were uncertain, but she guided him.
Together, they etched a new page:
Two people.
Not perfect.
Not rewritten.
Just real.
And together.
Beneath a sky that no longer told the time.
The system watched them survive a recursion pulse. It didn't understand. But it recorded.
What happens next—when observation turns to obsession?
If the world stopped rewriting you for just one hour—what would you choose to draw into it?
The hour ended. But not in system victory. Not in Diver collapse. Orin and Junie drew their survival—literally—into existence. A recursion pulse failed for the first time in recorded anomaly history. And now… the system is watching.