Chapter 14 - "The Teeth of the Machine"

Mason and Vega close in. Eloise sets her trap. And the killer sharpens the cogs.

Clocks don't scream when they break.

They whisper.

A delay in the click. A hesitation in the gears. A second hand that twitches instead of gliding.

Eloise was no longer just misaligned-she was deliberate sabotage. Her existence scraped against the inside of his mind like a faulty gear.

He stood in front of a pocket watch, long broken, watching the hands tremble with a life hadn't granted. A reminder.

"Even a second hand," he whispered, "if it turns without purpose, becomes noise."

That's what she had become.

Noise.

And noise spreads. Into the balance.

He no longer thought of her as a student.

Not even a gear.

She was rust incarnate.

And when rust takes root, you don't sand it-you excise it.

He lifted a cloth from the table. Beneath it: the same tool his mentor had once used on him, when he first failed to kill clean.

A reminder of correction.

Not punishment.

Purification.

Tick.

Tock.

The alley stank of copper and rot, but Vega leaned close to the wall anyway. There, half-hidden under a torn flyer, was another clock.

Drawn in charcoal. Three hands.

"This spot match the route?" Mason asked, glancing over her shoulder.

Vega nodded. "Matches the map. It's her. Eloise passed through here last night."

Mason stared at the shape.

"No time carved."

"No victim either."

"Yet."

They both paused.

Then Mason said it.

"She's waiting for him."

Vega didn't ask who. He didn't have to.

She wasn't just spiraling-she was baiting him.

"She wants a showdown," Mason said. "She thinks she can win."

Vega added, "Or she wants to lose on her own terms."

Mason glanced up at the sky, then back at the alley.

"She's picked the battlefield."

Tick.

Tock.

The room was rigged. Not with explosives or traps-but with narrative.

Each wall bore a clock face. The floor was a spiral of numbers drawn in glass dust and thread. In the center: an old wooden chair. Stained. Waiting.

She didn't plan to kill him. She knew that wasn't likely.

But she would make it ugly. messy. Public.

She would ruin his symmetry.

And if she died?

Let it be her second hand that counted it out.

Her lips moved without sound. She mouthed times, memories, minutes she wished she could erase. The mentor's voice. The beatings. The silence. The ticking. The praise.

"You're the minute hand, Eloise," he had once said. "You mark time, not command it."

She smiled now.

"I'm not the minute hand anymore," she whispered.

Tick.

Tock.

He watched her through the window.

He had been watching for hours.

She moved differently now-like a bird already flying into the glass, wings wide, eyes shut.

She had no rhythm.

No order.

No devotion.

He didn't feel hate. He didn't feel anger.

He felt...pity.

She had believed she could become part of the machine.

But she was born broken.

Too soft. Too loud. Too human.

And the machine cannot house compassion.

It only ticks forward. Unfeeling. Unyielding.

He lifted the gear from his coat pocket and placed it on the step.

A warning.

A signature.

Then he slipped into the dark-his fingers wrapped around a scalpel, and his heart beating to the only god he had ever known.

Time.