Chapter 11

     The night was creeping back in, a darkness that seemed to curl around the edges of the city like smoke, soft and suffocating. I’d been tracing the map’s points for days, moving through places where time seemed to lose its grip—abandoned warehouses, empty lots, old tenements standing like gravestones to a past nobody remembered. Each spot was the same: nothing but the faint echo of something just out of reach, like a secret you almost understood.

     It felt like I was chasing a shadow, a pattern that kept folding in on itself. I could see where Achilles had left his marks—signs of passage, like swaths cut through a field. But whatever he was hiding, he had hidden it well, like a magician's sleight of hand, leaving behind only the sense that something was missing. I needed to look at the pieces differently, to find where the repetition began to blur the lines between what was real and what was just an echo.

     I was back at Pritchard’s clinic, though I hadn’t planned to be. The places on his map seemed to form a spiral around the city, with the clinic near the center, the eye of the storm. It had drawn me back here, though I wasn’t entirely sure why. Maybe it was Pritchard himself—there was something about the way he spoke, his quiet insistence that things weren’t as they seemed, that had stayed with me.

     The door to his office was half-open, and as I stepped inside, I saw him hunched over his desk, the metrical radar clutched in his hand, the needle twitching faintly. He looked up as I entered, his expression unreadable.

     “Back again?” he asked, as though he’d been expecting me.

     “There’s something I’m not seeing,” I said. “Something that doesn’t fit.”

     Pritchard’s eyes narrowed slightly. “And you think I might know what it is?”

     I hesitated, then nodded. “The places on your map,” I began. “They seem random, but there’s a pattern there, isn’t there?”

     He leaned back in his chair, the radar still humming faintly. “Patterns aren’t always what they appear to be,” he said. “Sometimes, it’s the repetition that hides the truth. Like a copy of a copy—each one just a little more blurred than the last.”

     “A ditto,” I muttered, the word surfacing from some dim recess of memory. “Something repeated, over and over, until the original is almost lost.”

     Pritchard’s faint smile returned. “Exactly,” he said. “Achilles has been working in swaths—marking out places that seem the same, each one an echo of the last. But somewhere in that pattern, there’s a deviation. Something that isn’t like the others.”

     I thought of the places I’d been, the empty buildings and forgotten corners. They were all alike, yet there had been moments—brief, fleeting—where I’d felt something different, a slight shift, like the air had changed. “If he’s hiding something,” I said, “it would be in the place that doesn’t fit. The place that isn’t just a repeat.”

    Pritchard nodded, setting the radar down on the desk. “But you have to find it first,” he said. “And that’s where it gets tricky. Because Achilles isn’t just marking places. He’s erasing them, one by one.”

     I felt a chill run down my spine. “Erasing them how?” 

    “Not in the literal sense,” he replied, his tone even. “But in memory, in perception. Making them disappear from the map, until they’re just gaps—places where time slips away.” 

    It was a thought that unsettled me, the idea that the city itself could be rewritten, its history folded over and concealed until there was nothing left but empty spaces. I turned back to the map, tracing my finger over the lines Pritchard had drawn. The dots blurred together, like the afterimage of a bright light. 

    “Where would he hide something like that?” I asked, half to myself.

     Pritchard’s voice was calm. “Where it would blend in,” he said. “Where it would seem like just another echo.”

     I stared at the map, the locations swirling in my mind. It was a riddle, a maze with no clear path, but I kept coming back to one point—a place I hadn’t visited yet. It was near the outskirts of the city, an old printing warehouse that had been shuttered for years, its windows dark and boarded up. I hadn’t thought much of it before, but now, it felt different. The name itself seemed to pulse in my memory, a faint whisper that grew louder the more I focused on it.

     I turned back to Pritchard. “There’s one more place,” I said, my voice low. “The old printworks on Ralston Street.”

     He didn’t react, just nodded slowly, as though he’d known I would say that. “It’s as good a place as any,” he said. “But remember, Achilles is counting on you to follow the pattern. To look where he expects.”

     I left the clinic, the air cold against my skin, the city’s dampness settling in. As I made my way to Ralston Street, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was walking into a trap of my own making, that I was playing into Achilles’ hands even as I tried to unravel his plan. But there was no other way. I had to see it through, to find the place where the echoes fell silent.

     The old printworks loomed ahead, its façade cracked and peeling, the dark windows staring blankly out at the street. I stepped inside, the air thick with the smell of old ink and paper. The machinery lay dormant, covered in dust, their forms barely visible in the gloom. It felt like stepping into a world that had been forgotten, a place where words no longer had meaning.

     As I moved deeper into the building, I noticed something—a slight glimmer on the floor, like a reflection of light where there should have been none. I crouched down, running my fingers over the surface. It was a small piece of mirrored glass, no larger than a coin, hidden beneath a layer of dust.

     And then I saw it. In the corner of the room, half-hidden by stacks of old newspapers, a figure stood motionless. The shadows obscured his face, but I knew who it was.

     “Achilles,” I said, the name catching in my throat.

     He didn’t speak, didn’t move. It was as if he were part of the room itself, a reflection of the emptiness around us. The glass in my hand felt cold, sharp against my skin, and for a moment, I wasn’t sure if it was Achilles I was seeing or just another echo—another copy of something that had already been erased.

     The silence stretched out, heavy and taut. Then, with a faint sound like the turning of a page, he was gone, leaving nothing behind but the dust and the darkness, and the hollow sense that I had missed something crucial, some deviation in the pattern that had slipped through my fingers.

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