She woke to the sound of breathing that wasn't hers.
It echoed in the room—slow, wet, shallow. Like something trying not to die.
Carmen sat up in the rented flat above the undertaker's parlor, the candle beside her nearly burned down to nothing. Her scalpel lay beneath the pillow. The room was empty.
But the breathing was still there.
And it was coming from inside her own skull.
The first vision came with blood.
She had gone to wash her hands. The water was cold, metallic. She blinked once.
The mirror showed a hospital room—modern, flickering, soaked in red. Alarms screamed. A woman convulsed on the floor. Carmen stood over her, surgical gloves torn and dripping, mascara running like rivers of grief.
Then blink—gone.
Back to the past.
Back to yellow wallpaper and cracked basins.
She stared into her own reflection.
Eyes hollow.
A voice, not hers, whispered in the back of her mind:
"You've already done this. You've already failed."
She kept moving, but the echoes followed.
She saw a child's drawing in the street—charcoal, smudged, crude. A spiral. A flame.
The same symbol.
She picked it up, heart pounding.
The child had no face. Just wide, smeared eyes. A body stitched with red lines. Beneath it, scribbled words:
"Mommy is burning. Daddy said she deserved it."
She turned the paper over.
Blank.
But when she touched it, her fingers came away wet.
Not ink.
Blood.
She told herself it was madness. Trauma. The result of falling through time like a bone thrown into the void.
But Carmen Vale didn't believe in madness.
She believed in patterns.
And this was becoming one.
That night, she dreamt of Julian again.
But not this Julian.
The one from the future. From the end.
He lay on a surgical table, chest opened, heart still beating.
She stood over him in a white gown soaked red, her hands deep in his body.
He looked up at her, eyes soft.
"You never let go," he said.
She pulled his heart free.
It kept beating in her hand.
And he smiled.
She woke gasping, eyes wide, nails dug into her palm so deep they drew blood.
Outside, London slept, wrapped in fog and filth.
Inside her, something ancient stirred.
A memory from the future.
A warning from the past.
Time wasn't linear. It wasn't a thread. It was a spiral.
And something was pulling her toward its center.
The next evening, she found Julian waiting.
Not at the club. Not in the alley.
In the morgue.
He stood beside a fresh corpse, his hands gloved in shadow. The room smelled of death and sawdust.
He didn't look at her. Just spoke.
"I've been dreaming of hospitals," he said. "Machines screaming. You with a knife. Me with no heart."
Carmen said nothing.
She walked to the body beside him.
The throat was slashed. The spiral carved just beneath the ribs.
Julian watched her.
"You're not going mad," he said.
She turned to him. "Then what am I?"
He smiled.
"Remembering."