The rain drummed against the glass roof of the observatory, soft but insistent, like a thousand fingers tapping in warning. Detective Idris Vale stared at the body sprawled across the marble floor—a man in a dark coat, his face frozen in an expression of shock. No blood. No visible wounds. Just an old pocket watch clutched in his lifeless hand.
The strangest part? The watch's hands weren't moving. They weren't even set to a specific time. They just hovered, twitching slightly, as if stuck between seconds.
"Cause of death?" Idris asked, glancing at the coroner.
Dr. Elise Harrow, the city's top forensic scientist, knelt beside the body, running a scanner over the man's still form. "No injuries. No toxins. No biological cause. It's like…he just stopped existing all at once." She frowned, adjusting her glasses. "And this watch—it's emitting a temporal distortion. Like it doesn't belong here."
Idris' gut twisted. He had dealt with strange cases before—disappearances, anomalies, even rumors of things slipping through cracks in time—but this felt different. More deliberate.
He crouched down and gently pried the watch from the man's grip. The moment his fingers brushed the metal, a sharp jolt shot through his hand, and the world blurred.
For an instant, the observatory vanished. He was standing in a city that wasn't his own. The sky was darker, the buildings taller, twisted in ways that defied logic. People dressed in sleek, unfamiliar clothing hurried past him, speaking in tongues he didn't recognize. Then—
SNAP.
He was back. Elise was shaking his shoulder, concern in her storm-gray eyes. "Idris, you blanked out. What happened?"
Idris exhaled, gripping the watch tighter. "I think…I just saw the future."
Elise paled. "That's impossible."
The detective's eyes flicked back to the dead man. "Tell that to him."
For the first time in years, Idris felt something close to fear. Because the city he had seen wasn't just any future.
It was a future where he was already dead.