Chapter 1-"Echoes Uploaded"

The Law is never wtitten where the masses can read it. But some still find it.

He watched the screen in silence, the blue glow catching faintly on the scars along his wrist. The voice from the video was confident, too polished - laced with the kind of faux reverence only algorithms and advertisers could manufacture.

"...Eloise Danner. Copycat, some say. Prophet, say others. But we may never know the truth of what she believed..."

The host smiled too often. Cuts flickered between old footage of Eloise's body being escorted out of the crime scene - blood still fresh on her blouse-and grainy snapshots of carved wrists. Clocks. Some clean. Some erratic. All misunderstood.

Across the country, in the corner of a small, dark apartment, a second man watched the same video. Younger. Anxious. His screen paused on a still of a body in a plastic tarp. The timestamp: 12:47.

He zoomed in.

The clock wasn't symmetrical. The minute hand was crooked.

He smiled.

Tick.

-

Michael leaned back in his chair, surrounded by quiet. His home still bore the bones of a life meant for living-plants near death, carefully arranged books, a coat still hanging by the door. The host's voice drifted on, talking about "psychological distress" and "female rage." Michael sipped from a chipped mug and let the words pass like static.

They always missed it.

They always focused on the woman.

On Eloise.

As if she was the beginning.

As if her ending meant the rest of it stopped ticking.

She had burned too hot. Wanted a legacy, but not the discipline. She had let her gears grind with emotion-spasming art instead of clean function. And so she was removed. Not by his hand, but by consequence. Still, she had been a necessary disruption. her chaos had drawn eyes.

And those eyes now searched again.

"...and many believe the so-called Wrist Clocks Killer was never caught - that perhaps Eloise Danner was only one piece in a larger design..."

Michael blinked once. Slowly. 

Not belief. Not perhaps.

Truth.

But it was better this way. Confusion protected the structure. Her death created myth. Myths distracted people from method.

He no longer carved often. He didn't need to. The Bay Area had fallen quiet, the way he liked. Time was respected here. Precision maintained.

But something was brewing elsewhere.

He could feel it in the air - like a watch tick running out of sync.

Tick.

-

The young man - his name unimportant now - rewound the clip again. Third time. Fourth. he wrote the time down in a cheap composition book. 12:47. 4:12. 9:19. He circled one, fingers smudged with pencil dust. 

He didn't understand all of it yet.

But he felt it.

There was a rhythm beneath the murders, beneath the chaos. A code. A map.

They had tried to bury it behind police jargon and trauma psychology.

But time couldn't lie.

You just had to know where to look.