He reached out a hand, his fingers tingling with static. He was a ghost in his own past. Elena paused, shivering slightly as if a cold draft had just swept through the sealed room. She looked up from her screen, looking directly toward him. "Arthur?" she whispered into the empty air. Then, the clock flipped.
The hum rose to a glass-shattering shriek. The air turned the metallic color of a bruised sky. Arthur squeezed his eyes shut as a blinding flash of white light swallowed his vision. 1676971801.002
When he opened them, the smell of ozone was gone. Instead, the air smelled of stale coffee and old books. He reached out a hand, his fingers tingling with static
Arthur stared at the digital timestamp blinking on his monitor: . She looked up from her screen, looking directly toward him
He was standing in his old apartment. It was dark, save for the blue glow of a laptop screen in the corner. There she was. Elena was sitting on the floor, typing away at her thesis, completely unaware of the temporal anomaly forming behind her.
That was the exact fraction of a second his sister had vanished from a locked room.