Chapter 13: The Flesh Dial
Mara didn’t scream.
She couldn’t.
Her mouth opened, but no sound came out—not even a breath—as she stared at the person crawling from her skin.
It was her.
Not the borrowed face, not the stranger she’d woken up as, but her—Mara Vex—pulling herself out of her own trembling body like some grotesque birth, like identity itself had ruptured.
The walls of the motel bathroom spun.
The second Mara—dripping, breathless, real—collapsed to the tiles, coughing hard enough to bleed. Her eyes were raw with fear, and her voice, when it came, was choked and hoarse.
“Echo’s inside. She’s inside the system now.”
Mara backed away, hitting the wall behind her, spine flattening against cold plaster. “What the hell are you—who are you?”
“I’m you. The last version. Before the jump,” the second Mara said. “And you’re not stable anymore.”
“I’m what?”
But her reflection was already gone from the mirror—replaced now by dozens of other versions. Different hairstyles, scars, ages. All of them Mara. All of them whispering in unison.
“She turned on the Flesh Dial.”
\---
The motel’s power flickered, then went out completely.
Darkness swallowed the room, save for the soft red light blinking from the phone still resting on the bed. Mara rushed forward, her duplicate staggering after her.
The device buzzed once.
A video.
She hit play.
The screen filled with surveillance footage—grainy, timestamped, footage of a morgue. The drawer labeled Jane Doe 317 was pulled open by a man in medical gloves. And inside it, Mara saw herself. Or rather, the version of her that had disappeared during the last jump.
Dead. Still. Until her eyes snapped open and locked on the camera.
The man screamed. The footage cut.
The screen went black again.
Another message appeared.
“You’re fracturing. Echo is using the dial. One more reset, and you won’t come back the same.”
The second Mara leaned forward, her voice trembling. “We have to get to the hub. The real one. Not the precinct server. Not Nolan’s leaks. The source. Or she wins.”
“Where?” Mara asked, pulse thudding in her ears.
The second Mara smiled grimly. “Where it all began.”
\---
By the time they reached the edge of Sector 9, the rain had turned to sleet, and the sky churned with a static haze that buzzed behind Mara’s teeth. The city felt peeled back here—raw, like muscle beneath skin. The old district had been abandoned years ago after a tech blackout no one could explain. And yet, the lights were on.
Flickering. Waiting.
Mara stepped over broken pavement and ducked through the chain-link gate of what used to be Saint Marrow’s Asylum. Her second self moved quietly behind her, weaker now, like she was fading with each step.
“This is where the Saints tested the first jumps,” the duplicate whispered. “Before the system was ready.”
They moved through shattered corridors and collapsed stairwells until they reached a rusted door sealed with biometric locks.
“I don’t have clearance,” Mara said.
“You don’t need it,” her double answered.
She reached out, pressed her palm to the scanner.
The door hissed open.
Inside, it was colder. The air tasted like metal and forgetting. The walls bore murals—drawings made in charcoal or old blood. Faces. Many of them. And all of them bore Mara’s eyes.
The deeper they went, the louder the ticking became.
It wasn’t just in her chest now.
It echoed in the pipes, in the floor, in the air itself. Like the building had a pulse.
They reached a vault. A narrow room lined with data towers and an ancient mainframe at its heart—something analog and impossibly alive, with wires like veins.
A voice emerged from the console.
“Welcome back, Agent Vex.”
Mara froze. “That’s not me.”
The voice paused. “Correction. Welcome back, Subjects Vex-3 and Vex-5. Awaiting final imprint.”
The duplicate collapsed. Mara caught her just before she hit the floor.
“She’s almost out of time,” Mara muttered.
Another voice now. Female. Silken. Wrong.
Echo Kade.
Broadcast from the mainframe.
“You can’t carry two of yourselves forever, detective,” she said. “Eventually, the shell fails. The soul leaks. You’ll be just another skin in the drawer.”
“What do you want from me?” Mara shouted.
“Nothing you haven’t already given. But since you insist—”
A jolt surged through the room. Every screen lit up with Mara’s face. Different timelines. Deaths. Resurrections. Bodies not hers. Voices not hers. The catalogue of her theft, her fracture, her false existence.
The system had been using her as a test bed.
And she had never consented.
The ticking reached a fever pitch.
Then something shifted behind her. A figure moved in the dark—a tall man, robed, face covered by an obsidian mask.
“Agent Vex,” he said, voice low and guttural. “The Flesh Dial awaits calibration.”
Mara backed away. “What is it?”
The man pointed to the wall.
A device—round, organic, pulsing—like a timepiece grown from bone and tendon. A dial with thirteen notches. Eleven were already illuminated.
“You’ve already jumped eleven times,” he said. “Only two identities remain.”
“What happens when I run out?”
“You become Echo.”
Mara froze.
Her duplicate groaned. “No... no, she lied. She said I’d wake up again. That I’d keep being me.”
“She lied to all of you,” the masked figure said. “Because Echo Kade isn’t a person. She’s a backup protocol. An override. When the Vex sequence runs out of hosts, the system compiles them into one.”
“She’s made of us,” Mara whispered.
The man nodded. “And she wants you to finish the cycle.”
\---
The lights blinked out. Red emergency panels flared.
The Bone Clock on the wall began to spin—fast—its notches whirling like a roulette wheel.
The masked man stepped back into the dark.
And Mara was alone again.
No, not alone.
Her duplicate was still breathing—barely. She opened her mouth, blood flecking her teeth. “You have to stop it... find the first name.”
“What’s the first name?”
The duplicate smiled.
“Yours.”
The lights exploded.
Darkness roared.
And Mara felt herself being pulled again—out of her skin, out of her mind.
She fought it.
This time, she wasn’t going quietly.
She lunged for the Flesh Dial.
Touched it.
And screamed.
\---
She awoke underwater.
No—almost. The air was dense, molasses-thick, every breath like drowning. She was inside a tank. Glass walls. Machines monitoring her vitals in real time.
A lab.
Real. Pristine. Alive with white light.
On the other side of the glass stood a child.
Blonde. Big eyes.
The same girl from the photo.
Mara reached out.
The girl placed her palm to the glass.
“You’re my mother,” she whispered.
Mara blinked.
“No... I’m not—”
“You were. Before they erased it.”
The glass cracked.
And the girl was gone.
\---
Mara sat up violently, wires ripping from her skin. She was in a medical chair now. The tank had vanished. The girl was nowhere.
But across the room—
She saw herself again.
Not the double.
Not Echo.
Not a copy.
But the original.
The real Mara Vex.
Sleeping.
Alive.
And seconds from waking.
She took a step forward.
Then the alarms screamed.
The containment door behind her hissed open.
And from it stepped Nolan Rhys—
Eyes glazed, hands trembling—
And aiming a gun directly at her head.