Chapter 20 - "Before the Gears Align"

The seventh hour had always been part of it.

He just hadn’t seen the full shape-until now.

R.C. stood beneath the sputtering exit sign of a condemned medical facility. The light trembled above him, weak and failing. Once, this place had been his - before the board reassigned him. Before the first autopsy that didn't align with the clockwork he knew. Before Amelia Carr signed the order that shut down the only wing that had been clean.

She hadn’t known. Not really. 

But her signature had shifted something out of place.

And then came the noise - steady, invasive, as if a foreign gear had been forced into the machine.

He struck a match. The ember climbed toward his fingertips, its tiny warmth pulsing in time with his own breath.

Then he snuffed it out.

Not yet.

The time, the place, the final tooth in the gear - he had prepared them all. 

Amelia Carr would not be a victim in the ordinary sense. She would be the keystone, the last piece that would lock the face of the clock into place.

-

“She’s not dead,” LeClair said.

Brandt frowned. “That’s a hell of a thing to say about someone who vanished months ago.”

“No,” he said, tracing the lines of the timeline with his finger. “You’re thinking like a cop. I’m thinking like whoever did this. Amelia wasn’t an early mark. She was the end. All of this was built for her”

The names fell into their true order now:

Denton.

Teague.

Kravitz.

Harrow.

Voss.

Delaney.

Each name a tooth in a wheel. Each one narrowing the turn until the last piece could fit.

“You’re saying he’s been constructing a mechanism out of people?”

“Yes,” LeClair said. “And Amelia Carr is the final component.”

-

Brandt's call was short, decisive - federal request, cell tower dumps, deep zoning searches.

A light flared in the data.

A burner phone, used twice in the last month, pinged within four hundred feet of Amelia's old apartment.

“Let’s get ahead of this,” Brandt said, already pulling on his jacket.

LeClair followed. “And if we’re too late?”

“We won’t be,” he said. “Not this time.”

-

A new letter waited - shorter than the others, but colder.

“Time must correct the aberration.
She filed what was never hers.

Now she will be set into the wheel,

And the system will turn true."

Below it, two initials drawn with almost surgical care:

R. C.

-

In a quiet apartment above a shuttered hardware store, Amelia Carr opened her eyes.

She was alive.

But she was not free.

A metronome clicked in the far corner of the room, each tick sharp in the stale air. Beside it, a broken clock rested on a chair, its face fractured but the minute hand perfectly still.

It pointed to 7.

And it was waiting.