The room was white. Not the forgiving kind of white, not the kind that lets you rest your eyes. This was the white of erasure. A white that wanted to scrape you clean until nothing remained but the outline of a man who once had a name.
Kael sat in the chair they had given him. Metal. Bolted to the floor. No restraints, but the absence of choice was its own chain. His wrists rested on the armrests, palms open, as if he were waiting for someone to measure the weight of his hands.
The clock ticked. Not a real clock. A synthetic tick piped through hidden speakers. Too loud. Too precise. Each beat landed in his chest like a nail.
Across from him: three figures. Time Auditors. They wore no insignia, no names. Their suits were the same white as the walls, their faces pale under the harsh light. They looked like subtraction given human form.
---
"Kael Valerius," one said. The voice was flat, genderless. "Your efficiency has declined."
He didn't answer. The tick filled the silence. Sweat gathered at the base of his neck, cold and slow.
"You harvested thirty-two percent less than projected in Zone 4," another Auditor said. "Deviation is unacceptable."
Kael kept his eyes on the table between them. Glass. Spotless. Reflecting his face back at him. He looked tired. He looked like someone who had been awake too long inside a ledger.
"I followed protocol," he said finally.
"Protocol is not performance," the first Auditor replied. "Performance is numbers. Numbers are truth."
The tick grew louder. He wondered if they had turned it up, or if his ears were betraying him. He thought of the boy with the clock-hands toy, staring at him as if waiting for an answer Kael didn't have. He thought of Lyra's voice, telling him not to trust her. He thought of Elara's respirator, counting seconds in a rhythm that was more honest than this artificial tick.
"You hesitate," the third Auditor said. Their eyes were pale, almost translucent. "Hesitation is inefficiency. Inefficiency is disloyalty."
Kael's hand twitched. He wanted to reach for the blade at his side, but it wasn't there. They had stripped him of it at the door. He felt naked without it, like a soldier without skin.
"I am loyal," he said. The words were heavy, dragged out of him like stones.
"Prove it," the first Auditor said. "Explain the deviation."
---
He opened his mouth, then closed it. The truth was dangerous. The truth was that he had spared people. That he had let seconds slip through his fingers because he couldn't bear the sound of a child screaming again. That he had seen Lyra's face in a reflection and it had cracked something inside him. None of that could be spoken here.
"I miscalculated," he said instead. "It will not happen again."
The Auditors stared at him. Their silence was worse than their words. The tick filled the space, louder, louder, until he thought it might split his skull.
"You will be monitored," the second Auditor said at last. "Your next assignment will determine your status. Fail again, and you will be audited permanently."
Permanent audit. Everyone knew what that meant. A clean erasure. No seconds left to trade.
Kael nodded once. He didn't trust his voice anymore.
The Auditors stood in unison, their movements mechanical, rehearsed. They left the room without another word. The door hissed shut behind them. The tick continued for a moment, then stopped. The silence that followed was worse. It was the silence of a ledger closing.
---
He sat there, staring at his reflection in the glass table. His face looked wrong. Too alive. Like it wanted to move but couldn't.
He thought of Lyra's chip, still hidden in his coat. He thought of Elara, waiting for the seconds he had stolen. He thought of the word they had chosen together: Clockfall. A word that could end him.
When the door finally opened, he stood. His legs felt heavy, like they belonged to someone else. He walked out into the sterile corridor, the echo of the tick still lodged in his chest.
The ledger was watching him now. Every step, every breath, every hesitation. He would have to be sharper. Colder. Or at least pretend to be.
Because the next assignment would not just measure his efficiency. It would measure his soul.
And he wasn't sure how much of that he had left.
---
The corridor outside the chamber was just as white, just as sterile. He walked it like a man walking through bone. The guards didn't look at him. They didn't need to. Their eyes were the cameras in the ceiling, the sensors in the walls, the ledger itself breathing through the vents.
He wanted to run his hand along the wall, to feel something solid, but he didn't. Touch was a confession. Touch meant you were still human.
He remembered the way the Auditor's eyes had lingered on him. Not suspicion. Calculation. They weren't asking if he was guilty. They were asking how much time he was worth if they decided to harvest him.
The thought made his stomach twist. He had harvested hundreds. Thousands. He had told himself it was survival, that Elara's life justified the arithmetic. But sitting in that room, with the tick hammering into his skull, he had felt the equation turn. He was no longer the one doing the subtraction. He was the number being tested.
---
He reached the end of the corridor. A door slid open. A handler waited there, clipboard in hand, face blank.
"You're cleared," the handler said. "For now."
Kael didn't answer. He stepped past, into the wider hall where other Taxmen moved like ghosts. None of them looked at each other. None of them spoke. They were all numbers waiting to be checked.
He walked until the hall emptied into the city's underbelly. The air changed. Less sterile, more human. Sweat, oil, the faint tang of desperation. He breathed it in like someone who had been underwater too long.
But the tick was still in his chest. He couldn't shake it. Every step matched it. Every breath. He wondered if that was the point. To leave the sound inside him, so he would never forget who owned his rhythm.
---
He thought of Elara. Her chest rising under the respirator. The machine counting for her. Each beep a borrowed second. Each hiss a reminder that her life was collateral.
He thought of Lyra. Her voice in the log. Her hand on his wrist, shutting down his watch. The fury in her eyes when she told him mercy wasn't a ledger.
Between them, he was being pulled apart. One demanded he keep stealing. The other demanded he stop. And the Auditors demanded only that he remain efficient.
He felt like a man standing on three ledgers at once, each one pulling him in a different direction. He wondered how long before he split.
---
Closing Beat
That night, he didn't sleep. He sat in his quarters, the chip in his hand, the watch ticking weakly on his wrist. He stared at the wall until it blurred.
He thought of the word again. Clockfall.
A word that could end him. A word that could save him. A word that meant nothing to the Auditors, but everything to Lyra.
He whispered it once, just to hear how it sounded in the room. The syllables felt heavy, final.
Then he closed his hand around the chip and waited for morning.
Because the next assignment was coming. And it would decide not just his efficiency, but whether Kael Valerius still existed at all.
---