The junkyard was a mausoleum of outdated time tech, nestled deep in a crater of rust and silence just outside the ChronoCity borders. Eira descended the slope carefully, his boots crunching over debris that once measured lives—expired sync monitors, cracked time transponders, and stripped-down enforcement drones with TIB insignia half-scoured by acid rain.
Time didn't flow naturally out here. It pooled and festered. There were no sync beacons, no HUD overlays, no ambient pulses. Just the ache behind Eira's eyes as his implant struggled to find footing in the silence.
A warning message flickered across his vision: Signal Unstable. Manual Sync Required.
He pressed two fingers against the side of his neck where his implant throbbed beneath skin. He was burning minutes just being here, but the trail had led nowhere else. Tarin was the last name on his list of viable contacts—and the most dangerous.
The perimeter of the junkyard was guarded not by weapons, but by time-thieves—defunct AI sentries with outdated code that drifted in loops, muttering timestamps and glitching when approached. Eira skirted past them and followed the crude markers he'd decrypted from a courier terminal last night: a sequence of corroded traffic mirrors bent at odd angles, catching light that shouldn't have reached this far down.
By the fourth mirror, he saw the bunker.
It was built into a shattered piece of an old transit station, the ChronoCity crest barely visible under char and soot. The hatch was sealed with a biometric lock repurposed from a morgue unit. A phrase was etched into the frame in faded ink:
"No future here."
Eira knocked twice, waited, then three times—just like the entry code he'd bought from a whisper broker two districts back.
Silence.
Then: click.
The hatch hissed open a crack. A single eye, bloodshot and twitching, peered through.
"You've got three seconds to explain why I shouldn't shiv you and drain your sync." The voice was hoarse, unbalanced. Familiar.
"Tarin," Eira said, raising his hands slowly. "I'm not here to rob you. I'm here with something you'll want to see."
"Doubt it."
"It's TIB-class. Expired Assets drive. Found it in a sealed courier case—barely decrypted the shell before it hit back."
A pause. Then the eye widened—subtly, but enough.
"...You're lying."
"I'm not. The file lists over a thousand names. Including mine. I died five years ago, apparently."
A longer pause. Then the door slid open completely, revealing the man behind it.
Tarin looked nothing like the clean-cut hacker once assigned to TIB Core-9, according to old records. His hair was a chaotic snarl of greying dreadlocks, his skin pale from lack of daylight. He wore four sync rigs on his wrists, all jury-rigged with copper coils and twitching indicators. His left eye blinked independently, out of sync.
And he was barefoot.
"Inside. Slowly," Tarin said, stepping back.
Eira entered. The bunker smelled of oxidized metal, solder, and human exhaustion. The ceiling was strung with pulsing wires, casting fractured light across an interior filled with scavenged tech. Disassembled time meters lined one wall; another was wallpapered with strips of code printed on old holo-tape.
A thin sheet of copper foil hung over the central terminal like a curtain, and from behind it, a chorus of whispered timestamps echoed—7:22:14, 7:22:15, 7:22:16... over and over again.
"You hear that?" Tarin asked suddenly, his voice quieter. "That's time... trying to remember."
Eira said nothing. He'd heard rumors that Tarin had burned too deep into the sync-net once—back when the TIB was still experimenting with predictive entanglement, trying to 'pre-flag' criminal time transactions before they occurred. Whatever they'd injected him with, it had left his sync trails corrupted and his sanity unraveling.
Tarin dropped into a cracked seat and stared at Eira. "Show me the drive."
Eira retrieved it from inside a sealed titanium slip-case. The moment it touched the workbench, Tarin flinched—then relaxed, like it was something sacred.
"No visible access port," Tarin muttered. "Custom shell. Heat-glide signatures... TIB for sure."
He connected it to a decomposer deck built from a repurposed auto-doc and an old war drone. The screens flickered. Static swirled.
Then the file name appeared: TIB_ARCHIVE_486A.EXPIRASSET.
Tarin recoiled. "It's real."
"Yeah."
"I thought this was just rumor. I heard whispers in backchannels years ago—about a database they kept hidden. List of names they'd wiped from public registry. Ghosts. People with scrubbed deaths."
"It updated," Eira said. "I checked the file after decrypting it, and one of the names went dead minutes later. A guy I used to know in the southern districts. Public expiry, hit by a misfire, but his name popped up after I saw it."
Tarin's hands began to tremble. He dug into a drawer and retrieved an old sync-collar, wrapped it around his neck, and activated it. His eyes glowed faintly blue for a second.
"You realize what this means, right?" he whispered.
Eira frowned. "Enlighten me."
"This list isn't just a file. It's a kill queue. A ledger of debt that someone's collecting in real time. If it's updating while offline, it's not just a relic. It's still tethered. To a node... or worse."
"To what?"
"A clean-hand protocol. Something embedded inside TIB's inner ring. Untouchable, hard-coded and legacy-locked. That's why your own death shows up on it—you were probably flagged, and someone buried the override in Level-4 code."
Eira swallowed hard. "Then why am I still breathing?"
Tarin stared at him. "Because someone paid for you. Illegally. And now that you've seen this file... you're evidence."
A chill slid down Eira's spine.
Tarin ran a quick parser on the list, isolating death entries and metadata. A string of hashes populated the screen, followed by a seal that hadn't been used publicly in over a decade.
A crimson triangle with an eye in the center. TIB SECTOR 0: INTERNAL OVERSIGHT.
Eira stepped back. "That's real? I thought Sector 0 was a myth."
"Everything dangerous is a myth... until it kills you," Tarin muttered. "You need to vanish. Now."
Eira shook his head. "I can't. I need to know why. Why me? Who bought my time? What's this list for?"
"You're thinking small. This list? It's not just about you. It's about control. The TIB always said time was regulated. Balanced. Fair. But if this thing's real... it means the entire system's a rigged ledger. Someone's choosing who gets to keep breathing."
Tarin's words hit like acid.
"They're not just deleting the poor," he added. "They're managing population flow. Resource balance. Maybe even politics. You think a senator's rival dies of a heart seizure? That might've been scheduled five years ago."
Eira's knees felt weak.
He gripped the table. "Can you trace the source of the data push? Where it updates from?"
Tarin hesitated. "Maybe. But if I do, the moment I ping it, they'll know. We'll light up like a beacon in the dark. There's a reason I live off-grid in a scrapyard, Eira."
Eira nodded. "Then do it. I'll take the heat."
Tarin narrowed his eyes. "You don't get it. They won't just come for you. They'll torch this place, burn every byte of code, kill everyone you've talked to since touching that file."
"I know," Eira said quietly. "But if we don't do something, that list will keep growing. And no one will even know they're dead."
Tarin was silent for a long moment. Then he flipped a switch.
The decomposer hummed louder, its antennae shifting toward the sky like skeletal fingers. A deep, rhythmic pulse filled the bunker—Eira recognized the cadence. It wasn't a signal. It was a handshake.
Connection established.
"You've got twenty hours before this trace burns out," Tarin said. "After that, they'll zero in. You need to find a place to disappear."
"Any suggestions?"
Tarin reached under the bench and handed him a small disc the size of a thumbnail. "This'll blank your time signature for about ten minutes. One-time use. Don't waste it."
Eira took it.
As he left the bunker, he didn't notice the old TIB recon drone half-buried in scrap nearby flicker to life for just a second. A single red dot blinked once, then vanished.
High above, in the ether of old satellites and relay clouds, a signal quietly changed vectors.
Subject Eira - FLAGGED. Sequence Activation Pending.
To be continued…