Chapter 11 - "Echoes in False Metal"

The imposter began with a boy. Mchael finds the pages he left behind-and begins his judgement. The detectives begin to close in on a pattern of their own.

He had gone back to the silo.

No police tape. No memorial. No open case file, as far as he could tell.

Just a stain in the dirt, dried by months of silence-and a child's journal, weather and plastic-wrapped, wedged into the corner of the structure.

Michael had read it twelve times.

On the twelfth, his thumb rested on a damp, buckled page.

"You saw what the world tried to forget," he whispered. The paper didn't answer, but the silence was heavier than words.

The boy had written about the mouse trap, the quiet shed,
 the clock he drew in the dirt with a trembling finger. About the screaming inside the house. About the silence afterward.One page held a drawing-a clock with no hands, motion lines sketched around the edges. Beneath it, the boy's uneven scrawl: 

It still ticks if you listen close enough.

Not because he wanted to remember-but because someone else had remembered it wrong.

The imposter hadn't followed the Law. He'd followed theses pages. Imitation. Infection. Rot.

"He killed a gear before it had teeth," Michael whispered. "Silenced a child who heard the rhythm of time without knowing the words."

Now the imposter carved corrupted versions-misunderstood sketches, time twisted by panic.

The child had listened. The imposter had only stolen.

-

He hadn't meant to take the book.

He'd gone back after the boy stopped twitching-not to clean up, but to stare. 

That's when he'd seen the plastic wrap, tucked behind a crumbling support beam. A spiral notebook with crooked lines and ink bleeding at the corners.

Tick. Tock

Silence counts more than words.

He thought it was a sign.

So he made his first clock.

Burned the pages that didn't make sense.

Carved his second victim a week later.

Now, in his dreams, a boy's voice begs him to stop.

-

"Imposters wear mirror as masks.
They show reflections, not truths."

"He began with theft.
A false metal gear jammed into the works."

"It must be removed.

Before the rest of the machine begins to rust."

-

Brandt flipped through the file on their third male victim. "Still no overlap-no friends, no family, no workplace."

LeClair pulled up the autopsy photos. "Same cut depth. Same placement. But notice-no second hands."

"We did find something else," LeClair said, sliding over a clear evidence bag. Inside, a cheap travel alarm clock, its cracked face spiderwebbed, the hands were bent back as if scorched. "Tossed in a ditch two streets over from the scene."

"And?"

"The ones with second hands share another detail. The incision angle. It's consistent."

Brandt whistled. "Someone's getting closer."

"Or," LeClair said, "they're being taught how."

-

He started with the boy. 

And for that, he will end sooner than he thinks.

"I do not allow stolen time to tick."