Chapter 11: When Time Felt Wrong
Ash blinked once, and the garage disappeared.
He was no longer holding a soldering pen or sketching lines on a power core casing. He wasn't sitting at his bench surrounded by wires and recycled tech.
He was in a field.
The sky above him burned gold—sunset, or maybe fire.
He heard shouting. Steel clashing. Explosions.
Then—
He blinked again, and he was back in the garage.
Sweating.
Breathing too fast.
The schematic on his screen was scrambled. Echo was silent.
Ash pressed the heel of his palm to his forehead.
Not again.
This was the third time it had happened that week.
Time, reality—memory—was beginning to fracture.
And it terrified him.
---
Later that morning, he walked to school with Peter.
The world around him seemed off-kilter. The light flickered unnaturally between tree shadows. Footsteps echoed twice. Once when made… and again, half a second later.
"I think the school changed the science fair date," Peter said as they passed a bus stop. "You still entering?"
Ash looked at him. "The what?"
"The science fair," Peter repeated. "You okay?"
"Yeah," Ash replied, forcing a smile. "Just… didn't sleep much."
Peter frowned. "You've been saying that all week."
---
At lunch, Ash didn't eat. He sat with his tray untouched, watching students laugh and chat like time made sense to them.
Around him, it began again.
The clock on the wall ticked backward—just one second.
Then resumed forward motion.
No one else noticed.
Ash stood, tray in hand, and dumped it without a word.
---
He didn't go home right away after school. Instead, he walked to the one place that always felt constant: Riley's scrapyard.
But Riley wasn't there.
In fact, the entire yard seemed… off. The drones were silent. The machines dormant. Ash passed the melted Quinjet remains and climbed the stacked shells of old Sentinels.
And there, beneath the broken jaw of an Ultron clone, he sat and listened.
"Echo," he whispered. "What's happening to me?"
Nothing answered for several heartbeats.
Then—
> "Temporal dissonance detected."
> "Cause: Multiversal residue."
> "Warning: Neural integrity degrading."
Ash felt his pulse spike. "Define 'residue'."
> "Residual echoes from prior lifetime. Memory bleed. Phantom timeline convergence."
Ash stood, angry now. "You told me you were stabilizing me."
> "Correction: Emotional anchor stabilizes function, not existence."
He rubbed his temples. "So I'm what… glitching out of time?"
> "You are becoming aware of the layers beneath this one. Before the Corp completes integration, temporal bleed is inevitable."
Ash sat back down, breathing shallow.
The Corp wasn't just merging with this life.
It was waking the one before it.
---
He remembered a time—barely—when he stood beside titans. Men and women in armor. A war that tore across stars. A final moment before the end, when he felt himself disintegrate—not from death, but from disconnection.
From being torn out of his timeline.
He hadn't just died.
He'd been ripped away.
That's what the Corp was trying to fix. Why it called itself Echo.
It wasn't a suit.
It was a bridge.
---
When he got home, May was cooking. Peter was upstairs.
Ash stepped into the hallway mirror and stared at himself.
Brown hair. Clear eyes. Tired posture.
Then—
His reflection lagged.
Only for a moment.
But enough.
Enough for Ash to see the version behind it—older, armored, marked by lines of light along his skin like veins of tech. That was the other him. The one that died. The one being rebuilt, piece by piece, inside a teenage body that couldn't hold it all.
Ash took a step back.
Then another.
He bumped into the wall.
May turned from the kitchen. "You alright, honey?"
Ash forced a smile. "Yeah. Just dizzy."
"You sure? You look pale."
"I'll lie down for a bit."
---
That night, Ash dreamt of both lives.
He stood in a lab that was also a battlefield.
Blueprints turned into weapons. Friends turned into strangers. A machine—a massive one—whispered from the edge of space, calling him back.
But he couldn't go back.
He was here now.
The clock tower chimed thirteen times.
And when he woke, his pillow was soaked in sweat.
Echo spoke softly from the HUD at his bedside.
> "You are not breaking. You are remembering."
> "The Corp was never meant to be a shell. It was a key."
Ash sat up.
"What does it unlock?"
> "Time."
> "Truth."
> "And the power you tried to bury."
---
He got dressed slowly.
No armor. No blueprints.
Just jeans, a hoodie, and a pocket full of shards from a world that no longer existed.
He had to understand what was happening to him.
Before he fractured beyond repair.
And he knew exactly who had answers.
The Inheritors.