Chapter 3 - The Missing Seconds
No one knew who had taken control of the gym’s screens. The old footage played without sound, repeating twelve seconds in a loop. Daniel Kane lay beneath a tilted bar. Young Elias knelt beside him. Victor stood near a steel cabinet, his mouth open as if shouting. Then the image jumped back to the beginning.
Tyler did not blink. His entire identity had been built around an absence: a father his mother said had chosen ambition over family. Now that absence had a face, a room, and a man standing ten feet away.
“Turn it off!” Brent yelled.
The screens went black.
Tyler crossed the platform and struck Elias in the chest with both hands. Elias’s injured leg gave way, but Maya and Lena caught him before he hit the floor.
“You knew my name,” Tyler said. “Yesterday, you knew who I was.”
“Yes.”
“And you said nothing.”
“There are truths that should not be delivered for an audience.”
Tyler pointed at the dark screens. “You signed the report.”
“I signed a lie.”
Victor’s security guards moved closer, but he lifted a hand and kept them back. His expression suggested patience, almost compassion. “Elias has always been gifted at turning guilt into philosophy.”
Maya faced him. “You were in that room too.”
Victor smiled. “I was the sponsor who called the ambulance.”
“Twenty-seven years ago,” Elias said, “Victor ran an unauthorized drug trial on six young athletes. Daniel discovered their medical records and threatened to expose him. The night of the accident, Daniel was not training. He was searching that laboratory for evidence.”
Tyler’s eyes shone with rage. “Then why did your report say he ignored safety instructions during a lift?”
“Because Victor told me Daniel would receive no treatment unless I signed it.”
Victor laughed softly. “Convenient. The dead man cannot correct him.”
Elias looked at Tyler. “Daniel was alive when the ambulance left.”
The words caused another wave of murmurs.
Tyler’s voice broke. “My mother was told he died at the scene.”
“That was what I was told later. But I never saw his body.”
Victor turned to the cameras. “You are watching a desperate man revise history. Mr. Mercer lost his coaching license after the inquiry. He vanished from the sport and has spent decades blaming everyone except himself.”
“Why is your company’s symbol on a threat left in Brent’s office?” Maya asked.
Victor’s smile tightened for half a second. “What threat?”
Elias reached into his pocket. The black card was gone.
He searched the other pocket, then looked toward the place where Victor’s security guard had steadied him after Tyler pushed him. The guard’s hands remained folded innocently.
“There is no card,” Victor said. “Only another story.”
Brent demanded that everyone leave. The crowd resisted until fire alarms began sounding. Whether there was a real emergency or someone had triggered them deliberately, the result was the same: the gym emptied into the parking lot, where rumors multiplied faster than facts.
Maya drove Elias to a nearby urgent-care clinic. Imaging showed a deep thigh contusion and an aggravated ligament injury in his wrist, but no fracture. While a nurse wrapped his leg, Tyler entered the room without knocking.
He had removed his microphone. Without the lights and followers, he seemed exhausted.
“Five minutes,” he told Maya.
“You don’t give orders here.”
Elias nodded for her to stay. “Ask what you came to ask.”
Tyler placed his phone on the counter. The paused laboratory image filled the screen. “The timestamp jumps from 11:42:08 to 11:43:31. Eighty-three seconds are missing. What happened?”
“Daniel found a file in Victor’s cabinet. Victor tried to take it. They fought. Daniel fell backward into a loaded bar resting on unstable supports. The bar came down across his neck and shoulder.”
“And you?”
“I arrived when I heard the crash. I lifted the bar. Victor injected Daniel with something before the ambulance came.”
“What?”
“He said it would protect Daniel’s heart. I believed it was part of the trial.”
Tyler’s fists closed. “You let him?”
“I was holding pressure on your father’s artery. I had to choose where to put my hands, whom to trust, and what to believe in less than a minute. I chose wrong.”
Tyler turned away. His breathing became uneven. Elias did not ask for forgiveness.
Maya noticed a tiny reflection in the dark corner of Tyler’s phone screen. “Who sent you the footage?”
“An anonymous account. It messaged me after the challenge.” Tyler opened the conversation. The sender’s name was DK-1142. Beneath the video was a single line: ASK MERCER WHERE THE MEDAL IS.
Elias sat upright. “What medal?” Maya asked.
He reached beneath his shirt and drew out a tarnished bronze disk on a cord. It was not a competition medal. One side bore the same clenched-fist symbol; the other was engraved with the number 6.
“Daniel slipped this into my hand while they carried him out,” Elias said. “There were six trial athletes. I thought the number identified him as the sixth.”
Tyler took the disk and pressed along its edge. A narrow seam opened. Inside was a wafer-thin strip of old photographic film.
Elias stared. “I never knew.”
Tyler gave him a bitter look. “You kept it for twenty-seven years and never opened it?”
“Daniel closed my fingers around it and said, ‘Not yet.’ I believed opening it might destroy the only thing he chose to leave me.”
Maya held the film beneath the examination lamp. Tiny documents had been photographed across several frames. Names, dosages, dates, and bank transfers were visible under magnification. The final frame showed a handwritten transport order for Subject Six after the accident. Destination: North Valley Neurological Institute. Status: Alive.
Tyler gripped the counter. “He survived.”
“At least long enough to be transferred,” Maya said.
The room door opened again. This time it was Tyler’s mother, Renee Kane. She had seen the livestream and driven two hours from Westbridge. Tyler moved toward her, but stopped when he saw the expression on her face.
Renee was looking at Elias.
“You,” she said.
Elias stood despite the pain in his leg. “Renee.”
She crossed the room and struck him once. Then she embraced him so suddenly that everyone froze.
“I thought you were dead too,” she whispered.
Tyler stepped back. “You know him?”
Renee released Elias. Tears had already begun running down her face. “He came to our house three days after your father disappeared. He told me to take you and leave the state. That night, someone cut the brake line on his car. The crash put him in a hospital for four months.”
Tyler stared at Elias’s scars with new understanding.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked his mother.
“Because the men who threatened us sent photographs of you sleeping in your crib.” Renee’s voice shook. “I changed our names for a while. I told you Daniel left because hating an absent father seemed safer than searching for one.”
Tyler sank into a chair.
His phone chimed. The anonymous account had sent another message containing an address and a time: NORTH VALLEY, MIDNIGHT. COME WITH THE MEDAL. NO POLICE.
Elias immediately said, “It’s a trap.”
“Or my father is alive,” Tyler replied.
“Those possibilities are not opposites.”
Renee seized her son’s hand. “You are not going.”
For the first time, Tyler looked at the people in the room without performing for them. “My whole life, I believed strength meant never letting anyone see fear. Yesterday I used that lie to hurt him.” He glanced at Elias. “Tonight I’m terrified. But if there is even a chance—”
The clinic lights failed.
Emergency lamps glowed red. Footsteps rushed past in the hall. Maya locked the door, but a soft electronic beep came from the counter. Tyler’s phone screen displayed a new live video.
It showed the gym’s supply room. A hooded figure opened Elias’s locker, removed the torn photograph, and held the missing half beside it. The complete image revealed a fourth athlete standing next to Daniel Kane.
Renee covered her mouth.
“That’s my brother, Samuel,” Elias said. “He died before Daniel’s accident.”
The hooded figure turned the photograph around. Written across its back was a message.
ONE OF THE SIX NEVER DIED.
Then the figure lifted its face toward the camera.
May you like
It was the man in Victor Sloane’s navy jacket.
The video remained active for five more seconds. In the mirror behind the hooded man, a second figure was visible near the supply-room door. Renee leaned closer to Tyler’s phone and asked him to freeze the image. The blurred stranger wore a hospital identification band and held one hand at an unnatural angle, two fingers permanently curled. Elias remembered Daniel suffering the same injury during a junior meet. Tyler enlarged the reflection until it broke into pixels, yet a pale line across the stranger’s jaw remained visible. Renee began crying before anyone spoke. Whether it was Daniel or someone made to resemble him, the sender knew details no ordinary blackmailer could have found.
