At the center of the garden, where sunlight cut through hanging vines and the sound of distant windchimes filled the air, little Ishan sat with a crayon between his fingers. The sketchpad on his lap was covered in spirals, constellations, and odd lines only he understood.
Amira watched him from the bench nearby.
"Why do you always draw stars, Ishan?" she asked gently.
The boy didn't look up. "Because that's where he talks to me from."
Amira blinked. "Who?"
"The man with sad eyes," he whispered.
She stilled. "What does he say?"
Ishan paused, then tilted his head, listening like he could hear something inside his mind.
"He says... he misses you."
Ishan had been at the clinic for just over four weeks.
His parents had exhausted every other option. No hospital, no surgeon, no specialist had given them hope. But then, like a dream, a letter had arrived—an invitation from the Rayan Foundation. Full treatment. No cost. No fine print.
Just the promise of life.
They had arrived trembling with desperation.
Now they watched their son laugh again.
Amira found herself spending more time with Ishan each day. There was something in him—something oddly familiar. The way he moved his hands when he spoke. The way he would furrow his brow when trying to explain big ideas he didn't fully understand.
He reminded her of Rayan.
Not in appearance. But in spirit.
Sometimes, he even used words no six-year-old should know.
"Temporal distortion."
"Neuro-echo."
And once, when she'd asked how he knew those words, he simply said:
"I remember them from somewhere before."
It gave her chills.
One evening, as twilight fell across the observatory courtyard, Silas and Amira stood in her office overlooking the garden. Below, Ishan played with chalk, drawing on the stone tiles.
Silas sipped his tea. "You think he's special?"
"I know he is," Amira said. "It's not just the disease going into remission. It's… everything else."
Silas nodded thoughtfully. "There are patterns in the treatment logs. Brain activity levels that don't match normal responses. He's not just healing. He's evolving."
Amira turned to him, a question weighing on her lips. "Do you think it's possible… that some part of Rayan—his memories, his essence—was passed into the serum?"
Silas didn't answer right away.
"I ran simulations on the final version of the cure. It binds with neurocells. Rebuilds synapses. Reconnects lost pathways. There's a theory—hypothetical, but—memories can leave residue."
"You mean like... an echo?"
Silas nodded. "Maybe Rayan left more behind than we thought."
That night, Amira sat beside Ishan's bed.
He had fallen asleep with the sketchpad curled to his chest. A new drawing stared up from the top page—an image of a man and a woman holding hands beneath a massive clock, its hands broken and floating in midair.
She gently pulled the pad from his grasp and flipped through the other pages.
Stars.
Always stars.
But some pages... some weren't just doodles.
One page had complex shapes with angular runes—the kind Rayan used to scribble during testing. Another had an exact diagram of the serum injector, right down to the molecular feed lines. He couldn't possibly know this.
Unless...
The next morning, Silas met her in the lab.
She showed him the drawings. He scanned them with trembling fingers.
"This is from his Level Six designs," he murmured. "Stuff he never even wrote down. We only talked about it."
Amira crossed her arms. "I think it's happening, Silas. I think Ishan's carrying something. Some part of Rayan."
Silas stared at the drawings again. "We may be dealing with cognitive transference through the cure. A living fragment. An echo strong enough to influence thought."
They both stood in silence, the weight of possibility thick around them.
That afternoon, Ishan approached Amira in the garden, his eyes troubled.
"Something bad is going to happen," he said.
Amira knelt to meet him at eye level. "What do you mean?"
He clutched her hand. "There's someone else coming. Someone looking for the machine. They know it existed."
Amira's breath caught. "What machine?"
Ishan's voice was barely a whisper. "The one he built. The one he broke the sky with."
And then, just like that, he turned and ran off toward the flowers, chasing a butterfly.
Amira locked the garden gate that night.
Every fiber of her being screamed caution.
She and Silas rechecked every encrypted file, reinforced the observatory's firewalls, and even considered moving the serum research off-site. If someone had truly learned of the machine's existence, it could spark chaos beyond imagination.
She asked Silas to erase the last surviving copy of the temporal blueprints.
He agreed.
But that night, when no one was watching, he made a backup.
Just in case.
Later that week, a stranger arrived at the clinic.
He wore a long coat, tinted glasses, and introduced himself as a philanthropist interested in funding neurological research. His name was Dr. Elion Greaves.
His smile was warm. His handshake firm. But his eyes...
His eyes were dead.
He toured the facilities. Asked about the cure. Took particular interest in Ishan.
And when he asked about Rayan's "rumored projects," Amira felt her blood go cold.
She played dumb. Polite. Cordial.
But Elion Greaves wasn't fooled.
He left that evening, but not before whispering to Silas at the gate:
"Secrets rot faster when they're buried. Be careful where you dig."
Then he was gone.
That night, Ishan woke screaming.
Amira rushed to his side.
"They're coming!" he cried. "The ones who want to steal time! They'll hurt you—they'll hurt everyone!"
She pulled him close. "Shhh, you're safe here."
But deep inside, she wasn't sure anymore.
The past had caught up.
And the future was about to knock.
To be continue...