Ray Shivers opened his eyes to the familiar sight of water-stained ceiling tiles and the distant hum of the factory district. For a moment—just a brief, merciful moment—he forgot to check his arm. Then reality crashed back, the way it did every morning in Dayton.
He turned his left forearm toward the grey light filtering through the cracked window. The glowing green digits embedded in his skin read: 22:18:43... 42... 41...
Twenty-two hours, eighteen minutes, and counting down.
Ray exhaled slowly and sat up on the thin mattress that served as his bed. The small apartment—if you could call it that—consisted of one room with a hotplate, a salvaged table, and walls so thin he could hear Mrs. Chen next door already awake, probably checking her own time and doing the same mental calculations he was doing now.
Twenty-two hours. Enough to get through today and tonight. Maybe breakfast tomorrow if he was careful.
He'd had worse. Last month he'd gotten down to three hours before a payment came through from the factory. He remembered that sick feeling in his stomach, the way his hands had shaken, the hyperfocus that came with knowing every second counted. But he'd survived. He always survived.
Ray stood and moved to the small mirror hanging crooked on the wall. The face looking back at him was twenty-eight years old and would stay that way forever—or until his clock ran out. High cheekbones, dark hair that fell across his forehead, green eyes that his mother always said were too serious for someone so young. But then again, nobody in Dayton stayed young for long, even if their bodies never aged past twenty-five.
Twenty-five. That's when everyone stopped aging, when the clock in your arm activated and gave you one year. Three hundred and sixty-five days to earn more time or die trying. Ray had been living on borrowed time for three years now, scraping together hours and days in the factories, never quite getting ahead, never quite falling behind enough to flat-line.
He grabbed a worn t-shirt from the floor and pulled it on, then checked his time again. 22:17:12.
A habit. An obsession. In Dayton, everyone checked their time constantly. It was survival.
Ray moved to the window and looked out over the ghetto. Dayton stretched out below him in shades of grey and rust—factories belching smoke, apartment blocks stacked like boxes, streets already filling with workers heading to their shifts. In the distance, he could just make out the wall. The literal wall that separated the time zones. On the other side was Milltown, where people had months or years on their clocks. Beyond that, the wealthy zones where people had decades, centuries, maybe more time than they could ever spend.
Here in Dayton, you measured your life in hours.
His stomach growled, reminding him that he hadn't eaten since yesterday afternoon. Ray grabbed his jacket—a dark, thin thing that had seen better days—and headed for the door. He had two options for breakfast: skip it and save the time, or spend four minutes at the corner noodle stand and hope he made it back in time tonight.
The hallway outside his apartment smelled like rust and boiled cabbage. Ray nodded at Mr. Perez, who was standing outside his door, staring at his arm with the blank expression of someone doing math they didn't like the answer to.
"Morning, Ray," Perez said without looking up.
"Morning. How much you got?"
"Sixteen hours." Perez finally looked up, his weathered face creasing into something between a smile and a grimace. "Payday tomorrow. I'll make it."
Everyone in Dayton said that. *I'll make it.* Like a mantra. Like if you said it enough times, it would be true.
Ray took the stairs down—the elevator cost thirty seconds, and he'd rather walk—and emerged onto the street. The morning shift was in full swing. People rushed past him, all of them checking their arms, all of them calculating. A woman jogged by with six hours glowing on her wrist, her face tight with panic. A man leaned against a wall, his clock showing two days, smoking a cigarette like he had all the time in the world. Maybe he did, by Dayton standards.
The noodle stand was run by Borel, an older-looking man who'd actually lived fifty-three years—an eternity in the ghetto. He'd been careful, he'd told Ray once. Careful and lucky.
"The usual?" Borel asked, already reaching for a bowl.
"Yeah." Ray held out his arm and Borel scanned it with the reader. Four minutes deducted. 22:13:08 now.
The noodles were hot and tasted like salt and something vaguely vegetable. Ray ate standing up, watching the street, watching people live their lives in fast-forward. A couple hurried past, arguing about rent. A kid—couldn't be more than a year past twenty-five—sat on the curb with his head in his hands, his clock showing forty-three minutes.
Ray looked away. You couldn't save everyone. Hell, most days you couldn't even save yourself.
He finished the noodles, tossed the bowl in the recycling bin, and started the walk to the factory. It was a thirty-minute walk, which meant he'd arrive with twenty-one hours and change. Work a ten-hour shift, earn eight hours and twenty minutes after the time-keepers took their cut and taxes. Leave with nineteen hours and change. Buy dinner for three minutes. Get home. Sleep. Wake up tomorrow with maybe fifteen hours and do it all again.
This was life in Dayton. This was life when you were poor.
Ray checked his time again: 22:11:33.
And he started walking faster, because in Dayton, standing still was dying slowly.