The smell of burnt copper and boiled grease clung to the pawnshop like rot.
Elian stepped inside, fingers curled tightly around the device in his coat pocket, though he knew better than to show it. Not here. Not in the Grey Wards' oldest time-exchange hub, where secrets and seconds were traded with the same indifference.
"Back again, Voss," grunted the vendor behind the glass.
An older woman, hunched and half-mechanical, her left eye flickering in and out of focus. She didn't look up from her ledgers. "What're you looking to lose this time?"
"Two years," Elian said.
She let out a wheezing chuckle. "What's left to trade? Bone marrow? Organ futures?"
"My service bond."
That made her glance up. Her metal eye whirred to scan his wrist. The screen displayed: 2.3 YRS. Active. Unsanctioned.
Not much. But enough to draw interest.
"You're going to give up two years? That'll leave you with crumbs."
"I need the credits. Now."
She grunted, cracked her knuckles. "We don't do clean conversions anymore. Only bonded pain trades."
He stiffened. "Meaning?"
"Meaning we inject you with a simulator—make your nervous system think it's dying for real. Pain, hallucinations, trauma. Just for a few minutes. It satisfies the temporal tax rules. Legal fiction, real agony."
Elian swallowed. He'd heard of it. New government regulation: time must be "emotionally contextualized" before it could be exchanged. Another way of making people suffer for every second they sold.
"Do it," he said.
The machine looked like a reclined dentist chair wrapped in cables. The vendor strapped him in without ceremony. Tubes slithered under his skin, clicking into ports that hadn't been used in years. As the drug cocktail entered his bloodstream, Elian braced himself.
The lights dimmed.
Then—
He was drowning.
Cold filled his lungs. His limbs flailed against invisible walls. The world blurred into pain and static, and for one searing moment, he saw himself on a gurney, heart slowing, doctors shouting—his mother crying. But none of it was real. It didn't matter. His body believed it.
Time didn't just hurt.
It stole.
When he woke, he was on the floor. The vendor was counting credits on her terminal, casually, as if she hadn't just watched him die.
"Transfer complete. You've got 280 crons. That should buy you what? Three days of oxygen filters? Maybe four if you like the off-brand ones."
Elian wiped blood from his nose, staggered to his feet. "Give me 100 in food credits. The rest I want transferred to a new ghost account."
The vendor raised an eyebrow but didn't ask questions. "Hiding something?"
"Hiding everything."
Back in his apartment, Elian stared at the device again, the memory of the courier's final words rattling in his mind:
"They're storing time. The Vault isn't a myth."
He turned the device over in his hands. It had no ports, no interface. Only a strange, almost organic glow—like it was breathing. Like it knew it was being watched.
He pressed his palm against it.
NO VALID QUERY. USER UNTRAINED.
A pause.
Then a soft chime, and a new prompt appeared on the device's side, glowing in light only he could see:
YOU ARE NOT THE FIRST. YOU MAY BE THE LAST.
His blood ran cold.
Elian set it down, stepped back, and for the first time in a long while, felt something close to terror.
Not just for himself.
For the system.
For the whole damned world.