Julian Vance wiped a smear of hot, copper-tasting blood from his right upper lip with the back of his thumb.
His right ear was not just humming. It was throbbing with a brutal, four-hertz binaural beat that vibrated the bones of his jaw and sent sharp electrical stabs behind his right eye socket.
Forty-one ninety-six hertz. Forty-two hundred. Forty-one ninety-six.
The two frequencies were grinding against each other like ungreased iron gears. Three separate timelines were stacking up inside the forty-by-sixty-foot sales floor of Store #04, and every single one of them ended forty-four seconds in the past.
Every senior clerk who worked graveyard shifts learned the terrifying mathematics of a temporal knot.
When time looped once, you felt dizzy. When time looped twice, your inner ear bled from the acoustic pressure. By the third loop, the physical matter of the store began to fatigue: the plastic shelves groaned, the glass sneeze-guard developed microscopic stress fractures, and the cash register’s direct-current ground line surged with dirty voltage.
At Station 3, Elena Rostova tracked Julian’s vitals across the counter with clinical dread.
“Julian,” Elena called over the monitor wire, her voice clipped and urgent. “Your systolic pressure is climbing past one-sixty. The epistaxis from your right nostril is vascular trauma from the binaural interference.
