7:17 AM – Vishwakarma High School Library
It was a library built for silence—rows of books standing like soldiers, sun slanting through high stained-glass windows, dust particles swimming in golden shafts of light. And yet, even here, the air held tension, like the pause before a scream.
Ira sat beneath the furthest window in the back aisle. No one ever came here. Not unless they were lost. Not unless something led them.
Her fingers traced the yellowed edges of an ancient book with no title. Inside, she had drawn again.
A wheel with broken spokes.
A window suspended in air.
A timer wrapped around a spine.
And a face with no eyes.
Her own timer, still wrapped around her wrist like a secret, read:
00:60
Not 01:00—never that. Never fluctuating. Always 00:60.
An impossible number.
A lie hiding in plain sight.
And Ira… she remembered something no one else could.
Someone.
Gone.
A boy with a crooked smile and dirt under his fingernails.
His name was…
No.
They took it.
But she remembered the absence of him. The shape his memory had left behind, like a crater in the heart.
She scribbled a symbol next to his imagined name. A name she couldn't say aloud.
---
10:03 AM – Chemistry Corridor
Neha sprinted through the hallway, a scream choking in her throat. Behind her, Priya knelt beside a girl who had collapsed mid-step. Her body was still warm, timer still glowing 00:00. But her name was fading from Priya's memory even as she tried to scream it.
"I don't know her name—I just talked to her!"
"She was in our class!" Aman shouted, panic making his voice crack. "She had the mole on her cheek—she—she—what was her name?!"
And then it was gone.
Like her.
As if she never was.
Just an echo.
Just dust.
Rahul threw up in the nearest sink.
---
10:05 AM – On the Roof
"Why is this happening?" Priya whispered, hugging herself.
No one had an answer.
Theories died under the weight of vanishing classmates.
"Ira," Neha said suddenly.
Everyone turned.
"Who?" Aman asked.
"The quiet girl. Earth-tone clothes. Always drawing in the back of the library. Never speaks."
"I think she's always watching us," Riya said slowly. "I see her… like, out of the corner of my eye. At school. Sometimes before something bad happens."
Neha nodded. "I think she knows something."
---
11:00 AM – Library, Restricted Section
The group approached the library together—tight formation, hearts pounding. The world beyond the school had become irrelevant. Adults didn't see the timers. Couldn't remember the lost. Couldn't help.
But Ira was there.
Still.
Unmoving.
Like she'd been waiting for centuries.
She didn't look up as they entered.
The old poetry book was open in front of her, symbols scattered like breadcrumbs across the page. A language none of them knew.
Neha stepped forward. "You remember, don't you?"
Ira slowly raised her head.
Those eyes.
Dark as bottomless wells.
She spoke—not loud. Not dramatic. Just real.
A voice made of midnight and mirrors.
"I remember what came before the clocks started."
Silence.
"What do you mean?" Riya asked.
Ira's gaze turned toward her. "You weren't supposed to remember him. But you do. You're breaking through."
Aman stepped back. "Who the hell is 'him'?"
Ira didn't answer.
Instead, she turned the book. Held it out. A single word was scrawled on the page beneath the symbol:
ALIVE
"It's not a countdown," she said. "It's a filter."
"What?" Rahul asked, shaking.
"The timer doesn't kill you. It erases you. If you become too fragmented, too far from your core self—you're rejected. Removed. The world heals around the empty space and forgets."
She paused. Looked at each of them.
"But the problem is bigger now."
"What problem?" Neha asked.
Ira raised her wrist.
00:60
"This," she said. "Is not real time. It's a fracture. A temporal echo. Someone rewrote the rules. The world is glitching."
Then she looked up.
And for the first time, her voice trembled.
"They're trying to fix it."
"Who?" Riya whispered.
Ira closed the book with a soft snap.
"The Architects."
---
11:29 AM – Courtyard
Across the school, timers flared red. Students began to collapse. One girl screamed as her timer stuck at 00:03, despite confessing a dozen truths.
She burst into flickering light and was gone.
Others followed.
The rule was changing.
Truth was no longer enough.
And above them, far in the sky—something shimmered. Not a cloud. Not a drone.
A structure.
Massive. Circular. Faintly metallic. Suspended in air, watching.
---
11:31 AM – Library Window
Ira looked up, as if she could see the shape even through the ceiling.
"It's beginning," she whispered.
Neha turned to her. "What is?"
"The recalibration. The clocks will soon reset. The time you have now will mean nothing."
"But why us?" Priya asked, desperate. "Why only us?"
Ira's eyes shimmered—moisture or memory, no one could tell.
"Because children remember dreams longer. And lies cut deeper in them."
---
Elsewhere – Unseen
In a space that did not exist in geography but only in time misfolded, a figure walked between giant screens, each showing students in moments of weakness, of laughter, of shame.
They wore a robe of broken reflections. Their face was shifting—every second a new mask.
Their hand hovered over Riya's image.
Then Priya's.
Then—
Ira's.
The screen flickered.
And the figure stilled.
"You weren't meant to survive the first reset," they murmured.
They tapped the image. Ira's symbol ☉ appeared.
And the timer beneath her name began to tick for the first time.
00:60 → 00:59
To Be Continued in Chapter 4: "Reset Protocol: Initiated"
A new rule begins.
Time is no longer truth.
Memory is a weapon.
And Ira is the last person who remembers how this world used to end...