The Missing Time

The body was gone.

Idris stood in the center of the observatory, the same place where the dead man had been lying just minutes ago. The air still felt cold, and the rain still drummed against the glass roof, but the corpse—vanished.

Elise swore under her breath, scanning the empty floor. "That's impossible. We were just here."

Officer Lane looked just as confused. "No one came in or out. We had men at the entrance the whole time."

Idris' jaw tightened. He knew something wasn't right the moment he touched the watch, but this? This was something else. Either someone had taken the body without anyone noticing, or—

Or it had never truly been there at all.

Elise knelt and ran her scanner over the spot where the corpse had been. The screen flickered erratically before stabilizing. "There's still a residual energy signature. Like a temporal echo."

"Meaning?" Idris pressed.

She stood, adjusting her glasses. "Meaning something happened here that shouldn't have. Either time reset, or…" She hesitated.

"Or what?"

Elise sighed. "Or he was never supposed to be here in the first place."

The words sent a chill down Idris' spine. He had worked homicide cases for years, seen cover-ups, conspiracies, people erased from records. But this wasn't erasure. This was something much worse.

The man had simply stopped existing.

Idris turned back to Lane. "I need every security feed in this building, now. Something happened here, and I want to know exactly when the body disappeared."

Lane nodded, already reaching for his communicator.

Elise folded her arms, staring at the empty space where the corpse should have been. "If the body was erased from time itself, I don't think security cameras will help us."

"Maybe," Idris admitted. "But if this guy never existed, then why can I still remember him?"

Elise hesitated. "That… is a very good question."

A question that neither of them had an answer for.

Not yet.