Time did not stop.
It bled.
At first, people thought it was rain—thin red lines falling from the sky, warm when they touched the skin. But the rain did not soak clothes or darken the ground.
It evaporated into seconds.
Clocks began to drip.
Minutes slid off walls. Hours pooled in the corners of rooms like wounded animals, twitching and slow.
And Mira Kestrel was the only one who could hear Time screaming.
She worked at the Bureau of Corrections, a dull building meant for dull mistakes: broken dates, repeated Tuesdays, the occasional missing afternoon. Mira's job was simple—patch small fractures in the timeline and pretend they were never there.
Until the bleeding began.
Her watch shattered at exactly 11:11 a.m.
Not cracked—shattered, exploding into dust that hovered in the air, spinning backward.
Mira didn't scream. She never did.
Instead, she whispered, "Show me where it hurts."
The dust rearranged itself into an address.
Her own.
The apartment was empty when she arrived—except for the future.
It sat at her kitchen table.
Not a ghost. Not a vision. A version of her, older, eyes hollowed by things that had not happened yet.
"You're late," the older Mira said.
"What did you do?" Mira asked.
"I tried to fix it."
Time screamed louder.
The older Mira explained everything without excuses.
Time was alive—not a god, not a machine. A wounded thing held together by rules humans barely understood. And someone had broken the oldest rule of all:
No one is allowed to remember what Time forgets.
"But you did," Mira said.
"Yes," the older one replied. "So will you."
The walls began to peel, revealing layers of yesterday, tomorrow, and never. The city outside flickered—buildings aging and un-aging in violent pulses.
"How do we stop it?" Mira asked.
The older Mira smiled, sad and soft.
"You don't stop Time from bleeding," she said. "You transfuse."
They stood on the roof as the sky cracked open.
Mira felt it then—Time's pain, raw and endless. It wasn't dying.
It was exhausted.
She opened her arms.
Seconds poured into her veins. Memories she never lived burned through her bones. Births, extinctions, first kisses, last breaths—all of it rushing through one fragile human body.
The world went silent.
Then—
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
The next morning, time worked again.
Clocks behaved. Days moved forward like obedient children.
No one remembered the bleeding.
Except Mira.
She no longer worked at the Bureau.
Now, she runs a small shop that doesn't exist on any map.
A place where people come when they feel like something is wrong with their lives but can't explain why.
Mira pours them tea.
She listens.
And sometimes—only sometimes—she gives Time back a little of what it lost.