The Paradox of Us. Chapter 4

The alley smelled of rotting vegetables and wet newspaper as Lucian pressed himself against the damp brick wall. His pulse hammered against the cracked chronometer in his palm—its faint blue glow the only light in the suffocating darkness.

Six hours, forty-three minutes.

The numbers pulsed in time with his racing thoughts.

Boots splashed through puddles somewhere behind him. A beam of unnatural violet light swept across the alley's mouth.

"Subject Alpha still in quadrant," crackled a voice that sounded both mechanical and eerily human. "Beta iteration unaccounted for."

Lucian's breath fogged in the cold air as he edged toward a rusted fire escape. The iron groaned under his weight as he climbed, each metallic shriek surely giving away his position. At the third-floor landing, a shuttered window yielded to his shoulder with a sickening crunch.

The apartment was frozen in time—literally. Frost crept up the walls in delicate fractal patterns. A steaming cup of tea sat abandoned on the kitchen table, its surface frozen mid-swirl. And at the center of it all...

Her.

She knelt amid a circle of strange instruments—brass astrolabes modified with glowing filaments, a gramophone whose horn pointed upward at the cracked ceiling, and between her hands, a sphere of swirling mercury that cast shifting shadows across her face.

"You weren't supposed to follow me yet," she said without turning. The mercury sphere pulsed, revealing the bones in her hands like an X-ray.

Lucian stepped forward, his shoes crunching on frozen carpet fibers. "You gave me your chronometer."

A bitter laugh escaped her lips. "And you still don't understand." She turned, and Lucian recoiled—her left eye was completely silver now, the pupil dilated wide enough to show the strange machinery whirring behind it. "They're not hunting you because you're a time traveler."

The sphere floated upward, rotating to reveal a horrifying image—two versions of the same DNA helix, impossibly intertwined yet repelling each other like mismatched magnets.

"You're the original," she whispered. "I'm the paradox."

Outside, the violet light intensified. The entire building shuddered as something massive impacted the street below.

Glass shattered.

The frozen teacup finally toppled over.

Her silver eye whirred as she stood, the mercury sphere splitting into hundreds of droplets that hovered around her like a lethal halo. "Last chance to run, pretty boy."

Lucian found his fingers closing around the twin chronometers—his own and hers—now beating in perfect sync.

Three hours, seventeen minutes.

"Teach me instead," he said.

Her answering smile was all sharp edges. "Now you're speaking my language."

Read the first Chapter here: The Paradox of Us. Chapter 1 : A Love That Defies Time

Read the second Chapter here: The Paradox of Us. Chapter 2 : The Second Encounter.

Read the third Chapter here: The Paradox of Us. Chapter 3: The Third Reckoning.

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