The Thirteenth Second

Every night at 3:33 a.m., the world holds its breath.

Elias Ward works the night shift in a Chicago transit control room, watching four hundred camera feeds. He has been an insomniac his whole life. Then one night he counts the seconds on a recording and finds 86,401 — one second too many. A second in which the rain stops mid-air, the trains freeze, and a woman no one remembers walks through the stillness and looks up at his camera.

She is one of the Forgotten: people the world has edited out of existence, living on inside the Thirteenth Second, trading memories for survival under the watch of the Curators — polite archivists who dont kill people. They revise them.

But every night Elias slips into the Second, the real world forgets him a little more. His ex-wife Sarah has started leaving herself notes in her own handwriting: His name is Elias. You loved him. Check the cameras.

And somewhere in the Curators Archive sits Eliass own file — impossibly thick. Because his insomnia was never an accident. He was engineered. And the footage from tomorrow shows him turning to the camera, mouthing two words: My turn.

Book One of The Second Draft.