Kale Strix hated the silence. In a city that never stopped humming with neon, turbines, and the occasional gunfire, silence meant something was wrong. And tonight, Sector D-12 was silent.

  He stood atop the broken edge of a mag-rail platform, high above the ruined concrete jungles of Old Earth, watching synthetic rain patter off his coat. The holographic crime scene flickered before him in soft blue, held in place by half-broken emitter drones. The body wasn’t there—not yet. But the report said it would be.

  “Murder due to occur at 02:11 Standard Time,” the dispatch had said. “Victim: Undetermined. Killer: Unknown. Temporal signature confirmed.”

  Kale checked the time. 02:09.

  “Still early,” he muttered, lighting a slow-burn stim stick. The nicotine was fake, but it calmed the twitch in his augmented fingers.

  Behind him, a voice buzzed to life—metallic, calm, inhuman.

  “You’re not supposed to be here, Agent Strix.”

  Kale didn’t turn around. “Neither are you, Echo. But here we are.”

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  The AI’s avatar shimmered into existence—an elegant woman made of flowing code, her face always shifting just enough to be unfamiliar. Echo had been assigned to him three years ago after he “accidentally” triggered a micro-warp during a case in Sector C. She was supposed to be helpful. She rarely was.

  “The Equinox Initiative requested a passive scan,” she said coolly. “You’ve altered the timefield just by being here.”

  “Yeah,” Kale said, tossing the stim over the edge, “that’s kind of my thing.”

  The air suddenly crackled with a sharp static pulse. His neural HUD flashed red. The platform beneath him shimmered, then twitched—a distortion in the loop.

  02:11.

  Time collapsed like glass.

  For a moment, Kale saw two versions of the same man standing before him, flickering like broken frames in a video. One was slumped forward, blood blooming from his temple. The other held a black-steel pistol in a trembling hand.

  Then—just one. The killer stood alone, blinking in confusion. He hadn’t pulled the trigger yet.

  Kale raised his own weapon—an old-fashioned revolver that didn’t trip time sensors.

  “You’ve got about six seconds to tell me who sent you,” he said.

  The man’s eyes glazed over. “We all die at once,” he whispered. “But only some of us remember.”

  Then he pulled the trigger—on himself.

  Echo screamed in his neural feed, and the world fractured.

  Time twisted. The killer fell. And on Kale’s HUD, the same murder reloaded.

  02:11.

  Murder due to occur.

  Victim: Undetermined.

  Killer: Unknown.

  Kale stared as the cycle started again.

  “Shit,” he said.