The Ink Beneath the Wrist

The light of this realm cast no shadows: it fell straight down from electroluminescent glass panels recessed into the arcades of an immaculate, sterile city.

Amalia awoke seated upon a transparent polymer bench opposite the Central Biometric Archives. Citizens moved past in minimalist tunics of leaden linen, glancing at the undersides of their left wrists with obsessive devotion.

She checked her own forearm: beneath her skin burned no digits, no barcodes, nor the faint cyan luminescence pulsing through the veins of commuters crossing the plaza.

—Clean skin —she whispered to herself—. A statistical anomaly. Again.

She entered the archive concourse, guided by the clicking rhythm of punched cards gliding along pneumatic brass rails. Behind the sorting counter, a young clerk with neatly slicked hair stamped preventive certificates of demise.

He had the same hazel eyes flecked with gold she had seen extinguished across three separate timelines. He wore a fitted tunic bearing the badge of the Scribes of Time.

—Citizen registry, please —he requested without looking up from the optical reader.

Amalia pressed her open palm against the glass plate.

The console emitted a low error tone that made the clerk's head snap up. Óliver stared at her through clear-framed spectacles.

—You possess no expiration index —he stated, brow furrowing—. That is medically impossible. Since the sanitary reforms of 2140, every subject is born with an engineered cellular clock sealed within the dermis.

—I'm not from this sector, Óliver.

The youth stiffened at the sound of his name. He tugged his sleeve down to conceal his own wrist, but Amalia had already caught it: the bioluminescent digits were glowing a feverish, erratic crimson.

00:41:18.

He had forty-one minutes left to live.

—You need to step away from this desk —she pleaded, leaning across the counter and taking his hand with desperate force—. Leave the stamps. Leave the registry. There is an emergency exit leading into the aqueduct gardens.

Óliver loosed a quiet, sorrowful laugh, entirely devoid of panic, and did not withdraw his fingers.

—Why does a timeless stranger care about the remaining minutes of an unknown clerk? —he asked softly—. Numbers do not deceive, miss. The heart ceases when the marker solution depletes. It is written in our telomeres.

—Numbers deceive in a thousand different realities, you idiot —Amalia hissed, furious tears stinging her eyelids—. In one you didn't know what a lightbulb was and split a hot chestnut with me; in another you bummed a light on a train platform. I'm not letting you die behind a plastic desk.

Óliver stared at her with sudden, dizzying depth, as if a drowned bell had rung at the floor of his consciousness.

—Chestnut... —he murmured, touching the corner of his lip—. What a strange word. I have never heard it, yet it tastes of roasted smoke.