Chapter 4: The Map That Drew Itself

How long he had been running, Haruto did not know.

Streets turned into streets swirled into themselves. Sympathetic still flicked in reverse alphabets. The time that showed on his wrist pulse was like a second heartbeat.

99:55:44

He pulled in at a squatting lamp-post. Then the lighting system sounded like insects dying. Fog crept along cracks between the buildings, thick and sultry.

Then—

Footsteps.

Haruto retreated into the dark.

Then there appeared a figure that was pulling something along.

They did not include one of the mannequins.

Not frozen.

They moved. Deliberate, alive.

The girls were clad in layered coats over a school uniform with sleeves needlessly pinned with pieces of string, paper, and what were presumably pieces of clock faces. In their rear was tied with a cord a scrolling parchment, which as they walked was unrolling and heaped, falling over upon the surface.

Haruto came close carefully, “Who…?”

The figure turned.

Their face was covered with a cracked visor, like shattered sunglasses fused to skin.

“You’re new,” the voice rasped. “The map added you just now.”

“What?”

The image indicated the parchment. Haruto looked—and froze.

This was depicted, in black, gleaming as oil, a moving view of the city. Alleys shifted. Windows blinked like eyes. In the lower right - a small image with H. Seno written on it.

“That’s me.”

“Yes,” said the figure. “You’re the echo that rang when no bell was pulled.”

“…Who are you?”

They shrugged. “No one important. Cartographer. Interim. Until the next one forgets me.”

“Forget you?”

“It’s how this place works. Nothing stays. Not time. Not memory. Not maps.”

Haruto hesitated. “So how come that you know where to go?”

Instead, the figure touched his coat and pulled out an odd compass, the needle of which swung around till Haruto spoke, and then pointed to him.

The Cartographer just indicated people. “Places come and go.”

Haruto stepped back. “What is this place?”

“An afterthought,” the Cartographer said. “A shelf between books. Where the misplaced are kept.”

Haruto's mouth went dry. “I wasn’t… supposed to be here.”

“No one was. But most drift in for a reason. You… you were called.”

And there was silence between them.

Then the Cartographer threw back their head. “Want answers? follow the cracks.”

“What cracks?”

“In every frozen world faults there be. Yours are around time. Mine were in memory. Two districts north, there is an Archive. It forgets everybody but notices everything.”

Haruto frowned. “What kind of place is that?”

The Cartographer said, “A dead one. But not silent. Not anymore.”

They walked together.

Through alleys, across bridges made of chalk, across piano keys. The city was transformed in every turn, either very subtly, or violently.

Each step or so, there was a change.

The sign above a ramen shop threw itself upside down, and then began gradually to write in a language that Haruto nearly knew.

On a roof ,a frozen kitten. It thawed down only slightly enough to settle on the earth--then melted to dust the minute its feet caught on the ground.

“This was not like this then”, said Haruto.

“It was,” the Cartographer said. “You simply are not yet on the map.”

Haruto frowned. “What does that mean?”

The Cartographer made no reply.

Haruto looked at his hands.

They felt the same.

Solid.

Real.

Every time that this city moved around him, every time he found himself mentioned by a piece of selling machinery, a part of him grew dull.

“No, I do not want to forget who I was”, I said before the Cartographer, but only to myself.

The words were blowfly. Not heroic. Just scared.

“All say so”, said the Cartographer. “Yet forgetting is no worse in this. It is knowing the wrong of the wrong versions of oneself that sometimes breaks a person down.”

They made a turn around and passed a vintage sell machine.

It also whirred into motion once every two-second: just enough time to transform all the doctor labels into the face of Haruto.

He froze.

The Cartographer never even looked.

“Ignore it. The city is only attempting to confirm who you are.”

Deep on they some brick walls went over. Somebody had drawn jarring black lines on it which were reading: “Time isn’t broken. It’s just scared.” Haruto gradually stopped and read the message.

The Cartographer is standing beside him.

“That wasn’t here yesterday. I imagined that no time passed here.”

“It doesn’t. This is why everything must not change. But you’re here. Now it’s writing back.”

Haruto kept walking. In the foreground, one of the alleys led off narrowly in obscurity. Inside was a woman, standing still, without a smile or with a slight one, with closed eyes.

“Is she…?”

None, said the Cartographer. “Don’t talk to her.”

“Why not?”

“Because she might answer.”

Haruto said nothing. The female stirred not at all, meanwhile there was humming in the air upon which she was lying, the noise of, as though, radio malfunction. Her smile never faded.

When they reached the Archive entrance, Haruto looked at his watch.

99:55:16

Still ticking.

Still slow.

But Haruto wondered for the first time whether it was not after all counting down to something.

Perhaps it was teasing him off of something.

Haruto felt it when they reached the border of the district. As to enter the chill dream.

A rampant door sawed on what appeared to be an ancient subway access tunnel threw the Cartographer. But the words on it were inverted afterwards. As Haruto made himself to squint, he received a response of bloodstains, and an inverted message was seen:

“ARCHIVE OF UNFINISHED PEOPLE”

The doors opened on their own.

Inside was silence.

Columns and columns of transparent glass windows, and in them wavering signs, incalculable features, curves of fragments of life.

Haruto stepped forward. Panels informed him that he had overtaken.

A child's laugh. A scream. A breath before a car crash.

"What… is all this?"

The Cartographer fell down. "Files. Half‑saved. Broken backups. Profiles malfunctioning when they departed. Others dwelt too focused on illusions. Some were overwritten. Some… ". He looked at him. "Were never meant to start."

Haruto stopped at one panel. An appalled man, holding a shopping bag.

He had seen him on a previous occasion, lying motionless in the alley.

"This is the same man."

The Cartographer nodded. “He left behind a legacy hence the Archive possessed it. His body? Possibly firmly nailed up to the wall.”

Haruto moved deeper. Then–his breath caught.

His name was flickering at places in some panels.

SENO, HARUTO

Status: Echo anomaly

Authorization: Revoked

Anchor: Not found

Memory Access: Partial

"It’s mine," Haruto told himself. "But… it's empty."

"Not empty," said a new voice.

Haruto spun.

One of the distortions depicted was an old saturated paper of brass. One eye had been covered over with a golden lens. The voice they possessed was very small--a shrunken-up voice like pages turning in a fire.

"I am the Librarian. I slay the things that should not be.”

Haruto stepped toward him. "Am I… one of them?"

"You’re a retained echo. When the bell struck you should have died. But something kept you here."

“My watch”, Haruto looking at his wrist.

The Librarian blinked. "No. Not the watch. The decision you had previously that you cursed yourself. The one you don’t remember."

Haruto's head spun. "What choice?"

The glass panel was contacted by the Librarian. “would you like to see what you left behind?”

Haruto nodded.

The panel shone--and he perceived.

A hallway. His school. A version of him walking away. Someone whom he could not see said something like his voice:

"Wait. If I say yes… will I forget?"

And another voice answered:

"Only what doesn’t anchor you."

Then darkness.

Haruto stepped back. "That was real? I… chose this?"

"No," the Librarian said softly. "You chose someone. And they brought you here."

The Cartographer moved around. "Then the bell didn’t fail. It was redirected."

"Indeed," said the Librarian. "And now the city’s noticing. Timelines can never sustain an echo in which the rest are linked.

Haruto gazed at his watch.

99:55:00

The countdown keeps tick‑ting.

Not to his death.

But to something larger.