The ceiling has forty-seven cracks. I know because I've been counting them instead of sleeping.
My phone's been buzzing on the night stand for over an hour. I honestly couldn't care less about what color theme they have planned for homecoming.
The group chat I actually am invested in has been active since I got back home. Mara sent the tapes around nine. Multiple angles.
Jonah joked about us unlocking some kind of superpower. Mara corrected him with an actual definition of temporal manipulation. He just sent back a laughing emoji.
It feels like casual fun conversation. That's the part that keeps me awake.
I haven't replied to any of it. Haven't opened the thread. Every time I think about typing something my thumb freezes. The literal weight of betrayal resting on it.
Forty-eight cracks. Forty-nine, if you count the one near the light fixture that might just be a shadow.
I roll over to reach for my phone before second thoughts begin to creep in.
There's three new messages from Mara. Already outlining what we should try next time. She's treating this like something we can solve with a bit of trial and error.
I can't bring myself to agree with them. It's all well and good that nothing catastrophic happened out on the field. But to be honest, it feels like the real catastrophe is brewing inside me.
It's not panic. It's just the weight of carrying something that doesn't belong to just me anymore. Every thought I have about the three of us moving forward loops back to the same realization—whatever happens next, it's not something I get to decide on my own. I already crossed that line.
I'd spent the last hour coming up excuses. Probably more than I counted on the ceiling. But "I'll tell them later" was just a fancy word for "I'm too scared to say it". The room felt way too quiet, and it's starting to get on my nerves.
The bottom line—I couldn't keep this to myself and still pretend we were on the same side.
I scroll past Jonah's dumb memes and Mara's walls of text and just type it.
We need to meet up. I need to talk to you guys. Blue Bird Park. Tomorrow 5:30.
It looked official. Like a plan, not a confession. I hit send before I could delete it.
Watching the message sit there in the thread made my chest loosen up, just a little. It didn't fix anything, but at least the weight was shared now.
A response came in almost immediately.
Jonah: Why not just after school?
I didn't hesitate.
Me: Can't. Got an errand to run.
The typing bubbles popped up immediately. Mara.
Mara: Is this about the experiment?
I bit my lip, staring at the message. I couldn't give her the whole story over text, but I was done lying.
Me: Kind of. Just… be there.
I tossed the phone back onto the mattress staring at the ceiling again. Fifty cracks. I missed one.
Eighteen hours to figure out how to tell them I've been a walking omission since Saturday. I can already tell this is going to be the highlight of my week.
School dragged in a way where every period felt like a personal vendetta. I spent the day playing a high-stakes game of hide and seek ducking into bathrooms, taking the long route to the cafeteria, and killing the conversation every time Jonah tried to chat.
The group chat stayed dead, which was worse than if they'd been blowing up my phone. It felt like we were all just watching the fuse burn down.
At the final bell, I literally raced out the hallways.
By the time I make it out, my hands won't stop shaking. I've got that errand—the boring one I used as an excuse. Post office run for my mom. It took twenty minutes, leaving me with an hour of dead air before 5:30. I spent it wandering through neighborhoods I didn't recognize, trying to brace myself for impact.
By the time I get to the park, it's 5:28. I wasn't planning on being early. Except when I round the corner and see the bench near the playground, they're already there. Both of them.
Mara's got her laptop out, reviewing something. Probably the footage. Jonah's leaning back, scrolling his phone. They both look up the moment I clear through the trees.
There goes my rehearsal time.
Jonah straightens up. "There he is."
Mara just closes her laptop and stares at me.
I stop a few feet away, keeping my hands shoved in my pockets because if I take them out, they'll see the tremors. Silence settles between us—just the three of us, the park, the evening sun making everything look too normal for what's about to happen.
Mara breaks it first. "You said you needed to talk."
I took a breath, reaching for the speech I'd been rehearsing since last night. It wasn't there.
"I got a message." The words come out flat. Not how I wanted them to, but the trains already left the station. "On Saturday."
Jonah's expression shifted. Not into anger. It was more like confusion.
"What kind of message?"
I pull out my phone. My hands are still doing the tremor thing, but I just unlock it and pull up the message.
Mara takes it first. She reads it, her face doesn't change but something in her posture does.
She passes it to Jonah without a word.
He reads it once. Then again.
"Don't go back to the field tomorrow." He says out loud, as if testing the weight of the words. "When did you get this?"
"Right after you left the hut."
Jonah hands the phone back, his thumb brushing the screen. "So… you've had this since the weekend."
"Yeah"
"And you didn't think it was worth a mention." It's not a question.
"I didn't know if it was real," I say. It sounds like exactly what it is—a pathetic excuse. "I thought it might be a prank, or—"
"A prank?" Jonah's voice goes dead. "You thought someone pranking you about the exact thing we're doing was just... what? A coincidence?"
"I don't know, okay? I just—" I stop. There's no point. Nothing I say is going to fix the look on his face. "I didn't want to mess things up."
"You think hiding it didn't mess things up?"
That hits harder than a punch.
Mara's still quiet. Just watching me. Her fingers tap a steady rhythm against her laptop case, like she's running the math on how much of a liability I've become.
"When were you planning to tell us?" Jonah asks. He's quieter now, which is somehow way worse.
"I don't know. I was going to—"
"When? After something went wrong? After we all got hurt?"
"No, I just—"
"We agreed, Elias." He leans forward now. He isn't being aggressive; he's just there, filling up the space between us. It's like he's trying to force me to actually hear him. "No secrets. That was the whole point. That's how this works. We trust each other."
And there it is. The word I've been dodging since Saturday.
Trust.
"I know," I say.
"Do you? Because it really doesn't feel that way right now."
I've got nothing. No defense, no clever comeback. He's right. I snapped the only rule we had, did it on purpose, and now I'm standing here offering up excuses that sound like garbage even to me.
Mara finally moves. "Let me see it again."
I hand the phone back. She stares at the screen, then pulls her own phone out and lines them up side-by-side.
"Same number," she says. Her voice is a sharp contrast to Jonah's heat—cold, clinical, like she's dissecting a specimen. "Different message."
She looks up at me. There's no sympathy there. No anger, either. Just a look that says she's already figured out where I fit into the equation.
"Mine told me I'd want to act alone. Yours told you not to go back to the field." She pauses, her eyes flicking back to the screens. "That means whoever's sending these knows how we think. They're targeting our personalities."
Jonah's still staring at me, waiting for something I don't have.
"I'm sorry," I say. I mean it, but it feels useless. Like throwing a cup of water at a house fire.
He doesn't say a word. He just leans back, arms locked across his chest. The silence stretches out, thin and cold, and nobody moves to break it.
Mara is still locked on the phones, running mental comparisons I can't follow. Jonah's gone into that toxic quiet. The kind where he's stopped talking but the anger is still radiating off him in waves.
I'm just standing there, useless. I feel like I should say something, but every thought that pops up sounds like a bigger mistake than staying silent.
Finally, Mara looks up.
"This changes the scope," she says.
She sounds like she's reading a lab report, not sitting on a bench with a group that's currently imploding. "If we're both receiving messages, the source has access to multiple points of contact. It isn't random."
"Yeah, we got that part already," Jonah mutters.
She ignores him. Pulls her laptop closer and opens it. Starts typing.
"I need to cross-reference the timestamps. See if there's a pattern to when the messages arrive." Her fingers are already moving across the keyboard. "And we need to figure out who's sending them."
Jonah looks at me. Then at her. "You're just... moving past this?"
"No." She doesn't look up. "I'm prioritizing. We can deal with trust issues after we understand what's happening."
"Trust issues," Jonah repeats. He laughs, but there's no humor in it. "Right. That's one way to put it."
Mara stops typing. Looks at him. Then at me.
"If you want to be angry, be angry later. Right now, we have incomplete information and someone actively interfering with what we're doing." She immediately goes back into rummaging through her files.
It's like she's taking the role of an anchor being. Intentionally trying to keep us from falling apart right there. She's the only one of us who's more worried about the greater good at a time like this. Hard to believe she's the same age as us.
"When I first got my message, I did some digging." She's scrolling fast now.
"I found a forum post from six years ago. Someone describing the exact same symptoms. Clocks desynchronizing. Audio loops. Visual delays."
She spins the laptop around.
On the screen is an old forum thread. The kind with that early 2010s web design that looks like it hasn't been updated since.
Localized Time Distortion - Has Anyone Else Experienced This?
I lean in to read the page. Someone's describing almost exactly what happened to us—clocks showing different times in the same room, sounds repeating identically, visual delays that lasted less than a second.
Most of the replies are garbage—people calling it stress or faulty wiring. But she points out a particular one she highlighted.
Jonah reads it and scoffs. "Okay, so some guy on a forum says don't ignore it. That's not exactly—"
"He's not just some guy," Mara cuts him. "Reinhard was a physicist. He was publishing papers on temporal mechanics back in the early 2010s. Then, he just... stopped. No papers, no socials, no university affiliation. Nothing."
"So he retired," Jonah says.
"Or he was discredited. Or silenced." She tilts the laptop screen back slightly. "Either way, he knew about this. He warned people, then he vanished."
She looks between us, her eyes sharp.
"If we want to understand what's happening, we need to know what Reinhard found. And why he stopped—"
"Wait a minute," Jonah cuts in. "Shouldn't we be trying to find the person currently stalking us instead of chasing some conspiracy theorist from five years ago?"
Mara doesn't miss a beat.
"I tried that already. It was the first thing I did."
She pulls up a new window. "I ran the number through every reverse lookup I could find. It doesn't exist. No carrier, no location data, no registered user. The number's a ghost."
"So we can't trace it," Jonah says.
"Yeah," she affirms. "But there was an alias attached to it. E. Paradox."
Jonah raises a brow, "E. Paradox?"
Mara nods as she closes the laptop and looks at both of us.
"We need to find out who Reinhard was. What he discovered. Why he stopped talking about it." She pauses. "And we need to figure out if E. Paradox is trying to help us or stop us."
Jonah exhales. Runs a hand through his hair. "So what, we just... keep going? Pretend everything's fine and hunt down some ghost scientist?"
"No" Mara says. "We don't pretend. But we move forward anyway."
She stands. Starts packing up her laptop. "E. Paradox is a dead end. Which means we need a new angle."
She's staring at both of us now. "Reinhard is that angle. He's the only person who's talked about this publicly and then disappeared. If someone's sending us warnings, he might know about them."
"Or they are him," I finally say something, without clearly thinking it through.
Mara considers that. "Possible. But the messages are too... targeted. Too personal. Reinhard was a researcher. These feel like they're coming from someone who knows us specifically."
That sounds too logical to dispute.
She stands. Starts packing up her laptop "I'll dig into Reinhard's history. Academic records, publications, anything I can find. Jonah, you check social media and public records. See if there's any trace of him still active somewhere."
Her eyes are on me now.
"Elias. You search for recent activity. Forums, message boards, anything related to temporal anomalies in the last year. See if anyone else is talking about this."
It's not a suggestion. It's an assignment. And I can't argue it right now. I've lost all rights to that.
Jonah stands too, intentionally avoiding eye contact. He just picks up his bag. "We doing this tomorrow?" he asks Mara.
"No," she says. "We regroup once we have information. No more blind experiments."
The word blind being pointed and I feel it land like a physical weight.
She slings her laptop bag over her shoulder and starts walking. Doesn't wait for either of us.
Jonah lingers for a second. Looks at me., and for a heartbeat I think he might say something—something that helps fix this in some way. But his expression is just flat.
"See you later man," he says. It's quiet, Final. Then he walks off too.
I'm left standing by the playground, watching them head in opposite directions, knowing full well that I don't get to decide how this affects us anymore.
The sun is setting, the park is still peaceful, and this silence is the loudest thing I've ever heard.