At 03:16:59, rain was falling through the open levels of NEON CITY.
At 03:18:00, it still was.
Between those two moments, the transit network recorded nothing.
Most people never noticed. A lift paused between floors. A payment terminal asked a customer to try again. Somewhere above the cloud line, an apartment window darkened and came back to life. The city had learned to mistake small failures for ordinary weather.
But beneath the eastern transit spine, a mechanical clock kept ticking.
Dax Rhen stood in front of it with a wrench in his hand. The network terminal beside him had moved forward sixty-one seconds. His clock had not. He wrote the difference on the back of a maintenance receipt. Then a telephone that had been disconnected for eleven years began to ring.
Three levels above him, Mira Vey stopped on a service stair.
The capsule in her pocket had become warm. No sender. No return address. Just a destination — Platform Nineteen — and a delivery time that no longer existed. She turned it over in her palm. Through the seal, a voice said, “If you can hear this, don’t take the lift.”
It was her voice.
Across the lower market, Iona Vale unlocked an archive drawer and found a cylinder she had never catalogued. Tomorrow’s date was printed on its intake label. She connected it to the reader, expecting corruption. Instead, she saw a platform, a sealed door and four figures waiting beneath a broken sign.
She recognised one of them immediately.
Herself.
And below the bridge, where the city’s light thinned to reflections on wet steel, K-07 opened its hand. Rain collected against the lines of its palm. Its diagnostic record said OFFLINE. Its memory said something else.
It had seen the door open.
It had heard the question.
For the first time since its activation, the unit chose not to synchronise.
NEON CITY continued around them. Trains departed. Messages arrived. Windows filled with borrowed light. By morning, the network would classify the interruption as a corrected timing error.
There would be no public incident report.
Only a courier with a message she had not yet recorded. A repairman keeping time by hand. An archivist watching tomorrow. And a machine holding a memory the city said did not exist.
Four lives. One missing minute.
Somewhere beneath Platform Nineteen, a door was still open.
