Chapter 165

  - Kaysi -

  My heart was still racing, and my thoughts were scattered, like the clock demon had shaken them loose and never put them back in pce. The pces he dragged us through weren't meant for humans. I knew that much. They weren't ndscapes. They were fractures—cracks in reality that pressed against the soul.

  When the wind finally returned, it didn't feel like relief.

  It felt wrong.

  Something inside me was misaligned, not broken or frozen. Just… shifted down to the marrow of my bones.

  I barely made it to the bushes before I got sick.

  Becky rubbed my back. " Yep, I felt the same way when my body went through the time portal for the first time," she said.

  "Apparently," I said, barely able to smile at her. "Time is not my friend."

  "You did age like 3 years and then back. I don't bme you." She half-heartedly chuckled.

  The clocks all around ticked out of rhythm, creating a chaotic symphony.

  Evan leaned over to us and whispered. "We aren't out of the woods yet."

  Shell City wasn't steady anymore.

  It was jittering.

  Josh wiped his eyebrow with his sleeve. "Okay. I officially hate time right now."

  Becky didn't respond.

  She was staring at her hands.

  Thin frost yered faintly over her fingertips—not wildly, not quickly, but softly and controlled.

  Too controlled, she felt something.

  "Becky?" I asked quietly.

  She inhaled slowly. " He's pulling at threads."

  Evan tensed as he turned to look at her. "Expin?"

  She swallowed. "Time bends and stretches, but it doesn't...fray."

  The distortion rippled across the ptform again.

  Not violent this time.

  Precise.

  The world didn't dissolve.

  It peeled back.

  Like someone lifting the top yer of reality.

  And beneath it—

  Bck gss.

  Endless.

  Reflective.

  We weren't standing on the ptform anymore.

  We were standing on a pne of polished midnight, stretching into nothing.

  Above us—

  We were back in the clock dominion as it flickered.

  "I have the power to rewrite your history, your existence, and the very essence of who you are—mere children. You will regret the moment you chose to underestimate me."

  I stood alone, staring into the Abyss again. My head paused.

  "I know what you are and who you are, each and every one of you." The clock demon said as he stepped around me, flickering with his movements like a ghost.

  Becky's ice froze the ground around me. Her eyes were fixed on the demon.

  The clocks around us stood still, frozen in ice as they cracked and fell to the ground, shattering into snow.

  The demon tilted his head.

  Becky didn't blink.

  We were on a bridge when the metal froze, weakening it. We saw the image py out.

  10-year-old Becky walked across the bridge as it broke, falling into the frigid waters below. What looked like a spirit or angel lifted her out of the waters.

  Debris stayed frozen in the winter air as if the world paused around her small body.

  The water was even suspended mid-spsh where she st fell through.

  "I… don't remember this," Becky whispered. "But I remember falling somewhere, as I slipped between moments."

  The demon circled us slowly.

  Josh stared at her. "You never told us this."

  "I had no clue how this happened until now. Even seeing this, it's like an echo."

  "I almost erased you that day," the demon said. "And again, when you entered the time portal. You are a paradox, and yet here you are; you keep returning."

  The clocks outside of Becky's field slowed almost instinctively.

  "You are an anomaly," he said. "Time did not select you, and yet you survive it!"

  I raised my chin slightly.

  "Then maybe time isn't as absolute as you think," I replied coldly. "You aren't its creator nor its commander; you're just a desperate little fraud hiding behind the clock. You're too weak to face reality, so you weave these pathetic illusions to mask your own insignificance. You don't master time; you cower inside it."

  The demon hesitated. He was not amused, nor did he mock us.

  The bck gss beneath us didn't ripple this time; it darkened, like ink bleeding into water.

  You misunderstand," he said quietly.

  The sound didn't echo.

  But the words pressed against my skull, making the pain in my head worse.

  "You believe distortion is a spectacle, but I will prove you wrong; you are but infants to this world."

  The air thickened.

  Not cold, but heavy clouds formed.

  Josh tried to speak, and though his mouth moved, it was as if he was muted.

  I moved my foot forward; my steps never touched the ground. I looked down, and we were suspended but only partially slowed; it was as if we defied gravity.

  My heartbeat skipped—too slow, too loud—and pain fred in my chest.

  Becky's frost expanded outward, anchoring us back to this reality. It crawled through empty air, making crystalline patterns in frozen fractals all around—a fragile ptform beneath our boots.

  She wasn't attacking.

  She was anchoring reality itself.

  The demon didn't move.

  The darkness grew like a fog filling around us.

  "You fracture under pressure," the demon continued. "Every time you hesitate, you wait, you fear."

  Becky used to study her enemies from the shadows. Fear was never weakness for her—it was a bde she sharpened carefully, a protective edge that kept her thinking three steps ahead.

  Then she stopped being afraid.

  For a while, that made her terrifying. She became the kind of person who would throw herself into the heart of a fight without hesitation, eyes steady, movements precise. I thought I understood her then. I told myself she was calcuting, dissecting the demon's motives, and waiting for the exact second to strike.

  But watching her now… something feels different.

  That fire in her eyes doesn't burn the same. It flickers.

  She isn't studying him. She isn't preparing to leap.

  For the first time since I've known her, Becky doesn't look like she's choosing her moment.

  She looks like she's trying to find her footing.

  And I'm starting to realize she isn't searching for answers anymore.

  She's trying not to lose herself.

  "You are an anomaly, a fragment of time that should never have existed."

  Another version of Becky, emotionless, walked close to Josh and me. Every step is outlined in the rings of ice. We were unable to move, stuck in time, and now in the ice as it crept up our legs.

  Becky moved so fast that there was but an afterimage in our mind where she once stood.

  "She erased herself."

  Josh swore under his breath as the ice cracked and fell from our legs. "Becky may be our only hope in defeating him. "He stated.

  "No," Becky whispered.

  The demon leaned closer to her.

  "You are not special, child; you're broken," he hissed.

  Many alternate versions of Becky rushed from the dark mist, attacking us in an army of demon-controlled bodies of ice everywhere.

  "This is inevitable, the downfall of the fractured girl and her friends."

  Becky sent ice like a glove that covered my arm painfully, but I no longer felt the effects of the demon's time manipution; her power countered his.

  Josh's arm hissed with an icy, fming mist that reverberated from his prosthetic.

  "My powers can only cover those close enough in the area." She shouted to me not far away.

  "Kaysi, lead me to your strength so I may reach the others."

  Just as I stepped forward, I was impaled in my stomach with an ice sword. I felt its cold bite sinking deeply into every inch of my cells.

  To my horror, as I turned, the dark mist of the Becky variant had impelled me.

  Becky inhaled sharply.

  The sound cut through everything.

  I looked down.

  The bde wasn't an illusion; it was real.

  Ice—clear and jagged—drove clean through my stomach as blood slowly trickled out.

  Cold spread first.

  Then heat.

  Then the numbness of nothing.

  The mist around the variant wavered—

  And I saw it wasn't Becky at all.

  It was the demon wearing her shape.

  Mocking her posture.

  Her stance.

  Her power.

  "You see?" it whispered in her voice. "You hesitate."

  The demon looked at Becky, now trembling. "You will never overcome."

  The bde twisted.

  I couldn't scream.

  My lungs forgot how.

  Josh roared.

  Fme exploded outward, but the fire bent midair—

  Curved—

  And aged into smoke before reaching me.

  The demon didn't freeze him.

  He sped the fme forward into burnout.

  A spark of Becky's energy rippled to Evan, who lunged.

  Evan lunged, but time skipped ahead of his motion, snapping his strike backward in momentum.

  Becky released our friends one by one. She knew she couldn't do this on her own.

  Micah tried to form a barrier of wind around us to push back the dark mist.

  But with no luck, it dispersed before fully closing.

  James fired at the demon—

  The bullet hung midair.

  Then corroded to rust.

  Everything we did—

  He offset no matter what we tried.

  Becky didn't move, yet her eyes locked on the bde in my stomach.

  The ice crept outward from the wound within me.

  The demon leaned closer to me.

  "Watch, Becky."

  He pressed his palm to my shoulder.

  And my body weakened, the breath pulling from my lungs, and energy drained.

  My skin paled, and scars that had healed from Becky's many battles with me opened.

  The pain multiplied.

  Becky's breath shook.

  "You're broken," he whispered to her again. "Helpless to even save your friends, you remember the fear of the st battle with another like me and like you, don't you?

  It clicked that the demon that almost killed her during the dome also got into her head.

  I dropped to my knees.

  The bde had dissolved and melted into vapor, but the damage remained, with blood pooling out.