She sat in the shadows of the old auditorium, legs curled into herself, her voice low—like the truth might collapse the room if she said it too loud.
"I'm not Ivy," she said.
Hale blinked. "What?"
"I mean—I was. But that's not my real name. It was given to me. Like a placeholder."
She pulled something from the folds of her jacket. A piece of paper. Worn thin, like it had traveled through too many hands and too many storms.
A child's drawing.
Old. Torn at the edges.
A staircase with no top.
A sun without a sky.
Stick figures floating upward like they were falling.
At the bottom—faint pencil lines, half-erased—
A name: I__
She stared at it for a moment, her thumb brushing the faded graphite like muscle memory.
"I was part of something called the Null Draft," she said. "A project. Or maybe a mistake. They marked children born at the edge of timelines. Ones who didn't belong. Or belonged to too many."
Something in the air shifted. The faint smell of ozone. Like rain on copper.
Her eyes drifted shut.
"I remember the room they kept us in. It was always cold. Not from air. From... misplacement. Like even time didn't want to stand still there. And there was this hum, this frequency—low and steady, like the sound a wire makes when it's burning quietly."
She opened her eyes again—hollow, yet anchoring.
"You didn't just survive the loops, Hale," she said.
"You broke one."
He said nothing.
Because he didn't understand.
Not yet.
But Ivy—who wasn't really Ivy—did.
And something inside her was starting to remember too.
The scent of burnt graphite.
The way the hum used to match her heartbeat.
And a syllable, soft and old and incomplete, floating through her mind like a ghost name:
"Is—"
But then it was gone.
Only the drawing remained.
The unfinished sun.
The nameless staircase.
And the growing awareness that she was no longer a girl.
She was a timestamp with a pulse.