Chapter 16 "The Mechanism Is Set"

The sky over the Bay was leaden. Not with weather-Michael didn’t believe in weather anymore. It was pressure. A shift in the mechanism. A promise something was about to click into place.

He stood at the edge of the rooftop across from the motel. Window 207. Curtain drawn for two days straight. Light on at 4:21 a.m., off by 5:00. Blinds tremor just before noon. A single fast-food delivery left untouched.

The impostor was rotting in his own ritual.

Michael adjusted the lens. Not to fire-the weapon sat quietly in its case beside him. The scope was for verification. For finality.

This wasn’t a kill. 

It was a correction.

He wrote a single line in his journal:

Time does not wait for thieves.

He turned back a page. A drawing of a spiral gear cracked at the edge, one tooth missing. Beneath it: Silo. The boy.

That was the beginning. The moment the Law was broken.

The impostor had stolen not just time, but origin-taken the boy’s silence and screamed it through sloppy acts of blood and panic. Now, Michael’s job wasn’t to fix the mechanism. It was to excise the rust.

He checked the clock at his belt.

6:12 p.m.

Two minutes ahead of the impostor’s next routine.

The case opened with a muted click.

Inside: not a weapon, but a tool. A syringe, modified for precision. Clean. Exact. Filled with a neurotoxin that froze without killing immediately.  Enough time for the imposter to feel what stillness meant-to know he'd never moved with the Law at all.

The room was prepared: fire escape entry, copied keys, blinds to shield the act.

Michael whispered to the hidden rhythm beneath breath:

“I do this for the Law. 

For the child you stole.

Because time remembers what men forget."

He rose, movements silent. Collected the tool. Closed the case.

Below, the motel pulsed with decay. No one would hear. And if they did-clocks don’t answer to men. Only to time.

He stepped into the staircase shadow and vanished from the rooftop.

-

Inside Room 207, the impostor hunched over the desk. Drawing. Hands shaking. Melting clocks. Blank wrists. One sketch without numbers, only concentric jagged teeth.

He didn’t hear the footsteps on the landing.

He didn’t see the door unlock.

He didn’t notice the red thread hanging from the knob.

But Michael did.

And Michael was already inside.

The clock had begun.