Professor Heinrich Volker’s skull hit the titanium lab floor with a wet crack. His eyes locked on the countdown: 00:00:01. A thin line of blood traced its way from his temple across the polished surface like a crimson signature. Volker was arguably the most brilliant temporal physicist of his generation—with three Nobel nominations and an ego to match—and yet he had never imagined his life would end this way, sprawled beneath the machine he’d dedicated twenty-seven years to building.
Then black.
Darkness. Silence. Except for the machine.
The Temporal Gate surged open in a blinding violet flash—a machine never meant to be built, let alone activated. It hummed with the resonant frequency of a thousand angry bees, distorting the very fabric of local space-time. A faint tremor passed through Volker’s lifeless fingers—residual static from forces that bent time itself. The cameras shorted out one by one, each emitting a high-pitched whine before dying. The emergency failsafe collapsed spectacularly.
And then—
A man stepped through.
He materialized from the swirling vortex of quantum particles as if emerging from underwater, his silhouette sharpening with each millisecond. Six feet tall. Military-honed physique beneath a worn leather jacket. His weather-beaten face housed eyes that had seen civilizations rise and crumble. An ancient Patek Philippe clung to his wrist, ticking with suspicious precision.
No records. No origin. Nothing in any database on Earth. Just boots worn smooth from centuries of walking and a dark green duster that reeked of ozone, cordite, and rain from a thunderstorm that hadn’t happened yet. Every item on his person told a story of impossible journeys—from the titanium-reinforced combat boots to the micro-filament communications device embedded behind his right ear.
The intruder surveyed the laboratory with military precision—scanning the magnetic antimatter engine spinning like a demon’s gyroscope, the clustered quantum supernodes blinking with algorithmic patterns, and the body of Heinrich Volker sprawled unnaturally on the floor—all in less than three seconds. His face betrayed no emotion. No shock. No remorse. Only the slight narrowing of his eyes suggested any reaction at all.
Volker’s death was the match. He had come to snuff it out—before the fire consumed centuries. The fifty-eight known temporal incursion points throughout history had all been catastrophic: the Alexandria Library burning, Tunguska, Chernobyl. Each disaster spiraling outward from a single moment.
He didn’t say a word. Just pulled a data crystal the size of a tooth from his sleeve—a computing device that wouldn’t be invented for another 157 years—and plugged it into CERN’s quantum mainframe. The system welcomed the alien crystal like an old friend. Holographic displays flickered as binary code streamed across them like digital rain.
Red emergency lights instantly turned cobalt blue. The air temperature dropped ten degrees. The faint scent of burning silicon permeated the sterile laboratory air.
On the vast central monitor, security feeds blinked back to life—then reversed. Time itself unspooled on screen. Coffee surged upward. Shattered glass reassembled midair. And Volker… he breathed again. He gasped violently, as if pulled from deep water. His eyes darted in disbelief as time stitched itself back together around him, cellular death reversing at the molecular level.
The man checked his wristwatch and nodded once with grim satisfaction. The mission parameters had been met—for now.
He turned to the disoriented Volker, who was staring at him with wild, uncomprehending eyes.
“Volker lives. Timeline resets.” His voice was graveled, ancient. “Now I’ll see you in Tunguska.”
By the time the CERN security team burst through the reinforced laboratory doors, MP5 submachine guns raised and laser sights dancing across the room, the mysterious intruder was gone. Vanished. As if he had never existed at all.
The only trace of his visit? A single cryptic message scrawled on the whiteboard in permanent marker, the ink still wet:
READY OR NOT… IT’S TRAVIS.
CHAPTER TWO
CERN – Geneva, Switzerland – 3:12 a.m.
Security Chief Monique Laurent lowered her weapon slowly, her trained eyes scanning the intact laboratory. At forty-two, Laurent had spent fifteen years in French Special Forces before joining CERN’s elite security division—but nothing in her considerable experience had prepared her for this. Her tactical flashlight illuminated Professor Volker, disoriented but very much alive, sitting at his workstation with no memory of what had just occurred.
“Impossible,” she whispered, looking at the security logs that showed no breach, no anomalies, and most disturbingly—the footage now showed Volker alive and working the entire time. Not a single frame captured the intruder or the portal. “Run a full sweep. And check for residuals,” she ordered her team, voice sharp with authority. “If he was here… he left a fingerprint.”
She approached the whiteboard, studying the peculiar handwriting—precise but ancient, as if written by someone who had learned penmanship in another century. The name on the whiteboard chilled her more than the temporal breach itself. She’d seen that name once before. In a burned dossier with no return address, locked in a vault she was never supposed to open. A classified file containing only fragmentary reports spanning centuries—from Roman centurions describing a “wandering soldier” to Renaissance accounts of a “timekeeper” to declassified CIA documents about a “chrono-incursive entity.”
Travis.
But she already knew. The time breach had begun.
Whatever Travis had done, it was only the beginning. Somewhere, the countdown had already started again. And this time, the fate of past, present, and future hung in the balance.
CHAPTER 3
Langley, Virginia – CIA Timewatch Division
Special Agent Kira Dahl’s fingers trembled as she slammed the dossier onto the polished titanium desk. Its contents—photographs, reports, and impossibly dated digital prints—scattered across the surface like fallen leaves.
“Jesus Christ,” she muttered, her voice barely containing the rising tide of panic. “He’s back.”
Across from her, Director Malcolm Straus stood rigid beside the floor-to-ceiling bulletproof window overlooking the subterranean complex codenamed CHRONOS. Rain pattered against the glass, each drop casting eerie shadows across his gaunt face. He pulled a silver case from his pocket, extracted a cigarette with shaking hands, and lit it—a flagrant violation of the facility’s strict no-smoking policy. But nobody enforced rules on the man who oversaw America’s most classified temporal defense program.
“I thought we shut the project down,” he said, exhaling a plume of blue-gray smoke that swirled in the harsh LED lighting.
“We did. In 2031.”
“Exactly.” Straus stabbed the air with his cigarette. “So why’s this bastard showing up in our 2025 systems like it’s a goddamn coffee shop?”
Dahl turned back to her laptop display. Images materialized above them—spectral evidence of temporal manipulation. She swiped through them methodically, each one more disturbing than the last.
“The South Fork Bridge photograph, 1941—originally contained thirty-seven people. Now there are thirty-eight.” She enlarged the image, zooming in on a figure wearing sunglasses and modern clothing that couldn’t possibly exist in that era. “The Versailles incident, where seventeen security cameras simultaneously glitched for exactly 3.7 seconds.” Another swipe. “That Chaplin film premiere where half the audience is suddenly wearing Apple watches.”
Each image bore the same barely-visible digital artifact: a timestamp that shouldn’t exist.
“All altered,” she said, voice clipped with professional detachment that masked her growing dread. “All carrying the same temporal signature.”
“How many sites are affected?” Straus demanded, stubbing out his cigarette on a crystal paperweight.
“Forty-three and counting. Our quantum algorithms detected the anomalies spreading exponentially.” She pulled up a three-dimensional map of the world, red dots pulsing across continents. “Whatever he’s doing, it’s accelerating.”
Director Straus collapsed into his ergonomic chair, the pneumatic cylinder hissing under his weight. “What do we know about him?”
“All we know is he calls himself Travis,” she said, standing to pace the length of the office. Her reflection bounced off the obsidian walls, multiplying her agitation. “No last name. No fingerprints. No biological profile. According to our most advanced facial recognition, he doesn’t exist.”
“But he does exist, doesn’t he?” Straus’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Because wherever he shows up, history… glitches.”
Dahl nodded grimly. “The quantum entanglement readings suggest he’s moving through temporal planes without using any known technology. It’s as if he’s… naturally resonating with the chronometric field.”
“Impossible. The human genome can’t support temporal displacement without—” Straus stopped abruptly, his face draining of color. “Unless Project MERCURY wasn’t a failure—just classified.”
A chill ran through Dahl’s body. Project MERCURY was the blackest of black ops—a theoretical exercise in human-temporal integration that had been deemed too dangerous even to prototype.
“You think he’s trying to break time?” Straus asked, his eyes fixed on the pulsating red dots spreading across the holographic globe.
“No,” Dahl said, reaching for her government-issue quantum-encrypted smartphone, already mentally assembling her field team. “I think he’s trying to fix it.”
The titanium desk suddenly emitted a low-frequency hum. A hidden panel slid open, revealing a sleek black case. Inside lay a device that resembled an antique pocket watch, its surface inscribed with mathematical equations that defied conventional physics.
“The Chronos Protocol,” Straus whispered. “It was only to be activated if the timeline was in critical danger.”
Dahl picked up the device, feeling its strange warmth against her palm. “Director, you know what this means.”
“Yes.” Straus stood, suddenly resolute. “Assemble Team Omega. Full temporal gear. You have seventy-two hours before the ripple effect becomes irreversible.”
As Dahl turned to leave, the lights flickered—once, twice, three times.
An impossible breach.
“He’s here,” Straus whispered, his eyes wide with terror. “In this facility. Right now.”
The security alarm remained silent, but the wall clock stuttered. Froze. Then ticked once… backward.
Dahl drew her weapon—standard issue—plus one illegal modification: temporal stabilizing rounds—and aimed it at the door.
“Ready or not,” she whispered. “We’re coming for you, Travis.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Luxor, Egypt – Beneath the Temple of Seti I
The ancient lift groaned as it descended into darkness, its rusted chains moaning like tortured spirits. The sandstone shaft trembled, flakes of dust raining down from walls carved with warnings in lost languages. Electric light had never touched this place. Only the hum of buried energy pulsed through the stone like a distant heartbeat.
Travis stood motionless in the center of the iron platform, hands clasped behind his back, his weather-beaten duster streaked with desert grime and centuries of war. Six-foot-two and lean as a predator, his face betrayed nothing—not fear, not anticipation, just the unmistakable focus of a man who had crossed countless timelines in pursuit of this moment.
As the platform thudded against the floor of the hidden chamber, a plume of dust spiraled outward, disturbed for the first time in two thousand years. The stale air carried the metallic tang of ancient power systems never meant to be discovered by modern man.
The room ahead was vast—cathedral-like in scale, but impossible by ancient engineering standards. Obsidian pillars lined the perimeter, each inlaid with glowing lines of code etched in microscopic script. The ceiling arched impossibly high, vanishing into darkness punctuated only by faint pulses of amber light. At the center, half-buried in layers of collapsed stone and ritualistic ash, pulsed the monolith: a slab of black crystal eight feet tall, humming with latent power.
Travis approached slowly, boots crunching over centuries of secrecy. Each step was measured—thirty-seven paces exactly. He had calculated this moment down to the millisecond. The chronometric implant behind his left ear throbbed softly, synchronizing with the room’s energy field.
He reached out.
Symbols flickered beneath his fingers—Tartarian glyphs, thought to be myth, erased from every historical record during the Vatican Purge of 2044. A language older than memory, designed not for speech, but for synchronization. The glyphs responded to his touch, rearranging themselves in patterns that seemed to follow no mathematical logic yet contained the secrets of time itself.
From beneath his coat, he drew the key.
Copper. Cold. Shaped like a Fibonacci spiral, etched with fractal runes. It had taken him seven decades to recover all six pieces from fractured timelines and hostile futures. This one—the final—he had pulled from the ruins of Osaka in 2091 during the Antichron Rebellion. It had cost him three companions and the last of his temporal stabilizers. Worth it, he told himself. Worth every sacrifice.
He pressed it into the lock.
The monolith reacted instantly. With a sound like unfolding stone and bone, it bloomed open—not like a door, but like a living organism shedding armor. Petals of obsidian retracted, revealing a nest of ancient technology within. The air crackled with ozone and possibility.
Hover drive. Neural deck. Stabilizer core. Systems that shouldn’t exist for another three centuries, yet here they were, buried beneath one of humanity’s oldest temples. And at the center, one final screen, pulsing in red.
13:17:06 UNTIL GLOBAL TEMPORAL COLLAPSE
Travis exhaled slowly. Not panic. Not surprise. Just resignation. He had seen this countdown before—in his dreams, in the fragmented whispers of dying timelines, in the desperate scrawls left by his future self across seventeen parallel realities.
“Guess we’re doing this the hard way,” he muttered, reaching for the neural interface cables. The fiber-optic threads glimmered like liquid silver in the dim light. One direct connection to his temporal cortex would bypass the security protocols, but the feedback alone could fry his synapses.
Behind him, something moved.
A scraping sound—metal against stone. The whisper of tactical fabric.
Travis didn’t flinch. “You’re early,” he said without turning, fingers hovering over the interface port.
A figure stepped into the dim light, emerging from the shadows of the obsidian pillars. Her silhouette was unmistakable—tactical gear, a gleaming pistol with the distinctive bulge of a temporal dampener attached to the barrel, and a sliver of silver visible just behind her ear: a Chrono-anchor, government issue, latest model.
Agent Kira Dahl.
“You were expecting me?” she said, weapon raised. Her voice echoed off the ancient stones, steady but tinged with suspicion. The laser sight painted a crimson dot directly over Travis’s heart.
Travis turned slowly, hands open, nonthreatening. The ghost of a smile played across his face—the expression of a man who had seen this moment play out across a thousand possible futures. “Not you. But I’m glad it’s you.”
“Step away from the device,” she commanded. Her posture was textbook Temporal Enforcement Division—legs shoulder-width apart, weapon grip perfect, gaze unwavering. But Travis noted the slight twitch at the corner of her eye. Uncertainty. Good.
“If I do that, we all die,” he replied calmly. “But feel free to pull the trigger. I’ve died before.” He tapped the scar that ran from his left temple to his jawline. “Sarajevo, 1914. Moscow, 2076. The Library of Alexandria, 48 BCE. Death isn’t permanent when time itself is negotiable.”
Dahl hesitated. Her chrono-tracker beeped softly, confirming his impossible timeline signatures. “Explain. Fast.”
Travis nodded toward the exposed neural deck. “This isn’t just tech. It’s a gate. It’s wired into a failsafe buried in the core of Earth’s temporal axis. Someone—someone very old—built it to stabilize history itself.”
“The Architects,” Dahl whispered, almost involuntarily.
“So you’ve heard the legends.” Travis raised an eyebrow. “They’re not legends. They were flesh and blood, just like us. But they saw what was coming—the fractures, the paradoxes that build up over millennia of human existence.”
She frowned, the laser sight never wavering from his chest. “So why is it counting down?”
“Because the failsafe’s about to fail. A singularity is forming at a convergence point in 1847. If we don’t patch it from here—” He tapped his temple, where his own chrono-anchor pulsed slightly out of sync with standard temporal flow. “—everything goes sideways. Time won’t collapse all at once. It’ll fragment. Slice itself to ribbons.”
The chamber seemed to darken, the obsidian pillars absorbing what little light remained. A distant rumble—not from within the temple, but from within time itself—reverberated through the floor.
“Why should I believe you?” Dahl’s voice was softer now, uncertainty creeping in around the edges. “You’re wanted in seventeen temporal jurisdictions. The Cairo Incident alone—”
“Was necessary,” Travis cut her off. “Those twenty-seven lives bought us time. This time. Right now.” He stepped closer, slowly. The red dot from her weapon’s sight climbed from his chest to his throat. His voice softened. “Because I’ve been to the end, Agent Dahl. I’ve seen what happens when no one acts. When fear wins. This device doesn’t just reset timelines. It chooses which ones survive.”
Another tremor shook the chamber. Dust cascaded from the ceiling. The countdown flickered.
13:16:11
Dahl looked at the countdown. Then back at him. The weapon lowered just a fraction. “You’re saying—”
“I’m saying we’re out of options,” Travis replied. His hand moved to his pocket, producing a small metallic disc. “This is an entanglement key. It’ll link us to the system. Two minds are stronger than one against the feedback.”
Dahl’s eyes widened with recognition. “That’s experimental tech. Classified. How did you—”
“I didn’t steal it,” Travis said, a ghost of amusement crossing his features. “You gave it to me. Three years from now. Right before you sent me back.”
A third tremor, stronger this time. One of the obsidian pillars cracked, a jagged line spreading from floor to ceiling.
Dahl holstered her weapon with a fluid motion. Decision made. “Tell me what to do.”
Travis handed her the entanglement key. Their fingers brushed, and for an instant, time seemed to hesitate around them—a microscopic stutter in reality itself.
“Connect to the temporal core,” he instructed, turning back to the monolith. “I’ll handle the navigation. We need to find the exact coordinates of the 1847 fracture point and seal it from inside the timeline.”
Dahl attached the disc to her chrono-anchor. “Inside? That’s suicide. The temporal backlash alone—”
“Is why I’ve been building immunity for decades,” Travis finished, plugging the neural interface directly into his forearm port. Data streams immediately flowed across his vision, ancient code intermingling with his own consciousness. “Ready or not, Agent Dahl. We’re making history by saving it.”
As the countdown continued its merciless progression, the chamber filled with cascading light, patterns of time itself made visible. The monolith’s core pulsed with increasing urgency.
Travis reached out his free hand to Dahl. A gesture of trust, of partnership across enemy lines.
“Once we’re in,” he warned, “there’s no coming back. Not to this timeline. Not to these versions of ourselves.”
Dahl hesitated only a heartbeat before clasping his hand firmly in hers.
“Then let’s make it count.”
The monolith surged, and the chamber dissolved around them into pure temporal energy—past, present, and future collapsing into a single point of blinding light.
The journey had begun.
CHAPTER FIVE – TEMPORAL DIVE
Somewhere Between Now and Then
For the first three seconds, there was light.
Not ordinary light—flickering fluorescents in an endless yellow corridor. The kind that buzzed like wasps. The kind that didn’t cast real shadows. The kind that made your skin feel two seconds out of sync with itself.
Agent Kira Dahl landed hard on a carpet that shouldn’t exist—stained, damp, the color of old teeth. The floor stretched out in every direction, endless repeating patterns of windowless office walls, faux wood doors, and buzzing ceiling tiles. No sky. No sun. Just hum.
She scrambled to her feet, disoriented, heart hammering against her ribs. Her ChronoSync™ wristband flashed red—a warning. Temporal anchoring unstable. Position unknown. The neural implant at the base of her skull buzzed with static—the quantum field was destabilizing around her at an alarming rate.
Kira Dahl had jumped through time thirteen times before—each mission meticulously planned, each landing site thoroughly mapped. She’d navigated the chaos of the French Revolution, witnessed the fall of ancient Babylon, and even briefly walked the cold surface of the moon three years before Armstrong’s famous step. Never once had she experienced anything like this.
Where the hell are we? This wasn’t 1847. This wasn’t anywhere.
The space was dead quiet.
Then the lights flickered.
Once. Twice. Three times.
Each flicker reset reality. Each darkness reshaped what existed when light returned.
A hallway to her left extended, elongating like it was breathing. The right-hand corridor compressed in on itself, vanishing with a soft pop. The walls shuddered, but the air remained still—no breeze, no sound, no scent. Just the feeling of being watched by something very old that had forgotten how to blink.
Impossible, Dahl thought. Director Thorne promised clean jumps. Guaranteed landings. The sacred oath of CHRONOS itself.
But Director Reginald Thorne, the iron-fisted ruler of the Chrono-Historical Research Organization and Nextworld Operations System, had lied before. His silver eyes and plastic smile had convinced the World Security Council that temporal manipulation was under control. That the fractures in reality were “minor aberrations.” That Travis’s theories about temporal collapse were the ravings of a madman.
Travis stepped into view from behind a file cabinet that hadn’t been there a moment ago. Completely calm. As if materializing in a hallway that defied physics was Tuesday’s routine.
“Welcome to the buffer,” he said.
His voice echoed despite the carpeted floors, bouncing back seven times, each echo slightly deeper than the last.
Dahl stared at him. “This… is the fracture?”
He shook his head. “This is where you land when you jump without coordinates. The place between times. The universe’s forgotten storage closet.”
Travis. Quantum Physicist. Temporal Fugitive. The man who had stolen the world’s most dangerous technology—and used it to escape not just the law, but reality itself.
Her anchor screamed static in her skull—failing, destabilizing. Her skin felt thin, stretched—like a hologram projected on water. The quantum particles that composed her physical form were struggling to maintain coherence in this impossible space.
“Something’s wrong,” she muttered. “I can feel myself—slipping.”
Travis moved fast. He pressed an entanglement key to the back of her chrono-anchor. It pulsed once. Stabilized. For now.
“You’re not supposed to stay here,” he said. “This space isn’t stable. It’s trying to resolve you into something else.”
“Resolve?” Dahl asked, forcing her voice steady.
“Quantum degradation. Your waveform is collapsing into potential states. The Buffer doesn’t recognize us as real, so it’s trying to… correct the error.”
A nearby door opened with no sound.
Inside: a perfect copy of her childhood bedroom.
Only… her mother wasn’t supposed to have black eyes. And the family portrait on the wall now had one extra sibling she never had—smiling, grinning too wide, teeth wrong.
She turned away, heart racing.
“Memories leak here,” Travis said quietly. “And things… echo. Don’t open the doors.”
Another door materialized three feet to their left. Then another. And another. Soon twenty identical doors lined the hallway where there had been none.
What the hell?
One of the doors was rattling. Something pounded from the inside.
“What is this place really?” Her hand instinctively moved to her temporal disruptor pistol—standard issue for Chrono Enforcement agents. Useless here, she suspected.
Travis paused, expression grim. His eyes—brown with gold flecks that seemed to shift position when you weren’t looking directly at them—scanned the corridor that now stretched impossibly long behind them.
“Reality’s waiting room. A place time forgot to lock.”
A low groan came from somewhere. Everywhere. Nowhere.
Dahl’s vision blurred. One of the walls now had a hallway that wasn’t there before—stretched too long, lit by a single strobing bulb. A shape stood at the far end. Watching. Unmoving.
A humanoid silhouette. Seven feet tall. Arms too long.
“Is that a—”
“Keep walking,” Travis said, grabbing her arm. “Don’t engage. This place is stitched together from discarded moments. Some of them don’t like being remembered.”
They moved faster now—down identical corridors, past looping rooms, through a stairwell that folded back into itself. Time warped. Sounds repeated. Once, she saw her own silhouette walking ahead of them before it turned left and vanished.
The ceiling began to drip. Not water—numbers. Glowing green digits fell like rain, vanishing before they hit the floor.
“Temporal code,” Travis muttered. “The Buffer is trying to recompile.”
“Do you see this every time you jump?” she asked breathlessly.
Travis didn’t answer.
A telephone rang from inside a wall. It rang fifteen times, then stopped.
Ahead, a mirror pulsed in midair—warped glass hovering inches off the ground. On the other side: gaslight, rain, and the unmistakable soot-black skyline of London, 1847.
He glanced at the chrono-readout on his wrist.
“We’re almost out of time. That portal won’t stay open forever.”
“Why 1847?” Dahl demanded. “What’s there?”
“Not what. Who.” Travis’s jaw tightened. “Dr. Elizabeth Mercer. My great-great-great grandmother. The woman who discovered the temporal equation—three hundred years before I perfected it.”
Impossible, Dahl thought. The history files had never mentioned a female mathematician in that era with those theories.
“History can be wrong,” Travis said, as if reading her mind. “Especially when someone’s been tampering with it.”
Dahl stared into the portal. Something flickered at the edges. Her left arm went translucent.
“Travis—” she began.
“I know.”
He reached into his coat, pulling a final stabilizer rod.
“I can hold your frequency long enough to make it through, but once we’re in… we’re committed. No resets. No fallback.”
He activated the rod. Blue light spread across her body, solidifying what had been fading.
“The Director will follow us,” she warned. “He won’t stop.”
“Let him come,” Travis said. His eyes darkened. “I’ve left surprises.”
Another light went out behind them. A low, wet sound echoed in the dark. Something was following now.
Footsteps. Too many footsteps for one person.
The thing with the too-long arms appeared at the far end of the hall. Only now there were three of them. Moving in perfect synchronicity, like puppets on the same string.
She didn’t hesitate.
“Then let’s go.”
They dove together through the portal—leaving the endless yellow hum behind.
As they passed through, the Buffer shuddered. A crack formed in its architecture.
And somewhere in that crack, something ancient—something that had forgotten how to blink—opened its eyes.
It had been waiting for this moment for a very long time. Watching. Calculating. A consciousness outside of linear time that had been tracking Travis Mercer’s quantum signature across eleven dimensions.
The ChronoHunter stirred.
London, 184711:37 PM Greenwich Mean Time36 Hours until Temporal Collapse
They crashed onto wet cobblestones, rain pouring from a night sky thick with coal smoke and industrial effluent. The stench of the Thames—a toxic soup of human waste and factory runoff—hung in the air like a physical presence.
Dahl gasped, drawing real air into her lungs. Cold. Damp. Smelling of horse manure, burning oil, and the unmistakable undertone of human desperation that permeated the Victorian era.
Her temporal transition sickness hit immediately—the disorienting wave of nausea that accompanied all jumps but was particularly violent after unstable transitions. She dry-heaved once, steadying herself against a lamppost that glowed with the sickly yellow light of early gas illumination.
She dry-heaved once, steadying herself against a lamppost that glowed with the sickly yellow light of early gas illumination. Her chrono implant clicked. Numbers stabilized on her wristband: April 17, 1847 – 23:37:42.
Real. This was real. The quantum fluctuations had solidified. No more shifting corridors. No more impossible geometries.
Travis helped her to her feet, his grip surprisingly strong for a theoretical physicist. His clothing had automatically recalibrated to the era—the sleek ChronoTech jumpsuit now replaced by a high-collared wool coat, vest, and trousers appropriate for a gentleman of means in Victorian society. Her own uniform had similarly transformed—now a modest but well-tailored dress with uncomfortable corsetry that restricted her breathing.
“Welcome to Victorian London,” he whispered, his voice carrying the reverential tone of a pilgrim at a holy site. “The crucible of mathematical innovation and, if my calculations are correct, ground zero for the temporal anomaly.”
A newspaper blew past in the rain-slicked gutter, carried by the coal-tinged wind. The headline partially visible beneath the spatters of mud: MYSTERIOUS DEATHS PLAGUE MATHEMATICAL SOCIETYTHIRD MATHEMATICIAN FOUND WITH STRANGE SYMBOLS CARVED INTO FLESH
Dahl snatched it up, the wet paper disintegrating slightly under her fingers. The date confirmed their temporal coordinates: April 17, 1847. Her eyes scanned the article—mentions of “impossible equations” and “non-Euclidean geometries” found in the victims’ notebooks.
“We have exactly thirty-six hours,” Travis said, pulling his coat tighter against the penetrating chill of the London night. “After that, the temporal variance collapses, and this entire strand of reality will be inaccessible—potentially forever.”
“And then what?”
Dahl reached instinctively for her temporal disruptor—now disguised as an ornate lady’s derringer hidden in the folds of her dress. The weapon felt reassuringly solid, its quantum core humming with enough energy to destabilize the molecular structure of anything it hit. Standard issue for CHRONOS field agents, though officially such weapons “didn’t exist.”
Lightning forked across the sky, painting the gaslit streets in stark chiaroscuro. The electrical discharge illuminated Travis’s face with brilliant white light. For just a moment, something else seemed to flicker behind his features—something not entirely human.
A geometric pattern. A fractal structure beneath the skin. As if his human appearance was merely the most convenient shape for something far more complex.
The lightning faded. His face returned to normal. But Dahl had seen it.
“Then they find us.” Travis’s voice dropped to a barely audible whisper. “Or worse… it finds us.”
Behind them, a figure in a top hat paused at the corner, face obscured by the shadows. It turned toward them with mechanical precision, too smooth to be natural human movement.
“We need to keep moving,” Travis urged, pulling her into the labyrinthine streets of Whitechapel. “The Chrono-algorithms will have traced our jump signature already. Director Thorne’s Temporal Enforcement Units won’t be far behind. And neither will the thing that was awakened in the Buffer.”
“What exactly did we wake up in there?” Dahl demanded, hurrying to match his pace through the rain-slick streets.
Travis’s expression darkened, his eyes scanning the foggy alleyways with practiced vigilance.
“Something that feeds on temporal anomalies.” He checked his ChronoSync device, now disguised as an ornate pocket watch. “The indigenous hazard of non-linear reality. CHRONOS classified its existence as ‘theoretical’—just another of Thorne’s lies.”
They turned down a narrow alley between towering tenements. Somewhere in the distance, a woman screamed, then abruptly fell silent.
“My grandmother called them ‘Chronophages’—time-eaters,” Travis continued. “They hunt by sensing distortions in reality’s fabric. And we just tore a massive hole right through it.”
A clock tower chimed midnight, the sound echoing across the sleeping city.
Thirty-six hours until temporal collapse. Thirty-six hours to find Dr. Elizabeth Mercer. Thirty-six hours before the hunters—both human and other—closed in.
CHAPTER SIX – ARRIVAL: 1847, LONDON
April 17, 1847 – 11:38 PM Greenwich Mean Time 36 Hours Until Temporal Collapse
Rain fell in sheets, cold as needles and reeking of ash.
The quantum portal spat Travis and Dahl onto a cobbled street slick with filth. A shimmering vortex of chrono-particles—beautiful and wrong. Their impact sent a spray of gutter water across the hem of her dress. Thunder cracked overhead, echoing between narrow brick alleys and soot-choked chimneys. The stench of unwashed humanity, coal smoke, and horse dung hung heavy in the air—London, raw and rotting at the height of its own empire.
“Temporal variance stabilizing,” Dahl gasped, staggering to her feet. “Anchor lock holding. I think.”
Travis stood already, cloak soaked, eyes scanning the gaslit void around them. Their jump clothing had adapted instantly through the CHRONOS nanofabric technology: he in a tailored wool coat and cravat worthy of the aristocracy, she in a corseted traveling dress that clung like wet canvas.
The city around them twitched.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
A lamplighter passed by, humming to himself—then flickered, like a corrupted hologram from the SecDef briefings Travis had endured at Langley. For a heartbeat, the man’s body turned to static, morphing into pure quantum uncertainty. When he reappeared, his face had changed. Just slightly. His nose longer. His gait smoother.
Timeline fracturing. Faster than predicted.
Dahl backed away. “That’s not normal.”
“No,” Travis said grimly. “It’s starting already.”
A loud clang—metal on stone—echoed through the rain-soaked night. They both turned, reflexes honed through years of CHRONOS training.
Standing thirty feet away, just at the edge of the gaslamp’s radius, was a man in a top hat and long coat. His face obscured by shadows that seemed too dark, too complete to be natural.
No footsteps. No warning. One blink, and he existed. Reality had added him retroactively.
Dahl’s hand dropped instinctively to the hidden derringer beneath her skirt—a Model 7 Temporal Disruptor disguised as a Victorian lady’s pistol. The weapon could collapse an entire micro-timeline if fired at full charge.
“No,” Travis snapped. “Don’t engage. Not until we know what thread it’s bound to.”
The figure twitched.
Then its jaw dislocated. Too far. A sound like tearing fabric rippled through the rain. The dimensional membrane between realities stretching to its breaking point. It began to scream—only there was no sound. Just pressure. Just vibration. Dahl’s nose started bleeding instantly as capillaries ruptured under temporal strain.
Travis flung a temporal dampener to the ground. It detonated in a flash of blue static—a miniature EMP for the fabric of time itself.
The shadow vanished.
For now.
“We’ve got twelve minutes before that field collapses,” Travis calculated, checking his chronometer. “Move.”
They moved quickly—through alleys, past rat-infested taverns, weaving through human misery and steam. Victorian London—a city of stark contrasts. Fabulous wealth alongside desperate poverty. Progressive science alongside medieval superstition. An empire at its height, unaware of its coming fall.
Every now and then, reality blinked. A street would be paved—then gravel. A chimney would exist—then vanish. They were walking through a city with no fixed version of itself.
Reality collapse. Phase One.
Travis stopped suddenly, grabbing her arm with such force that Dahl nearly fired her concealed weapon.
“What?”
He pointed to the brick wall beside them. Carved into the mortar, barely visible under a sheet of rainwater, was a message that sent ice through Dahl’s veins:
“THE CHILD IS THE CATALYST. STOP THE FOURTH DEATH.”
Dahl froze. “Was that…?”
Travis ran his hand over it. The glyphs shimmered in ultraviolet for a second before fading—a CHRONOS authentication protocol. Only genuine temporal agents could activate the signature.
“I left it,” he said. “Six loops ago. Every time I try to stop the collapse, someone different dies. The message changes, but the outcome never does.”
“Which child?”
“I don’t know. I’ve failed five times.” Travis’s expression hardened, lips pressed into a thin line. The expression of a man who had watched the same apocalypse unfold over and over.
They reached the edge of the Thames. Across the black water, the tower of St. Apollinaire’s Orphan Asylum loomed through the fog. A Victorian Gothic monstrosity of spires and gargoyles. A place that shouldn’t exist. Not in any record.
Temporal anomaly. Ground zero.
Travis’s chrono-sync began to tremble on his wrist, its quantum processors fighting to maintain alignment with a deteriorating timeline. His voice was grim.
“That building’s a temporal parasite—anchored in one thread, bleeding into dozens. It doesn’t belong to any single reality anymore.”
A bell tolled across the water.
One.
Two.
Three.
A fourth bell—deeper, more resonant, somehow wrong.
He looked at Dahl. “That’s the fourth death. Three times I’ve stopped the wrong death. Every time, the collapse still comes. But this one… this one changes everything.”
Suddenly, static electricity filled the air. Dahl’s anchor howled—a high-pitched electronic scream no Victorian ear could process. She dropped to one knee, temporal sickness washing over her like a wave.
A backlash tore through the night—like thunder but deeper, slower. Something had breached the void between moments.
Behind them, a mirror opened in midair—the same warped glass from the Buffer, this time slick with blood. The blood of previous timelines, previous victims.
They found us.
Two figures stepped through. Fully armored in matte-black temporal suits with heads-up displays and phase-shift generators. CHRONOS black ops.
Team Omega.
Agent Helena Cross and Commander Finch.
Both with chrono-anchors glowing red. Both programmed for complete timeline purge.
Cross raised her weapon instantly—a Quantum Disruptor Rifle capable of erasing a person not just from existence, but from ever having existed at all.
“Travis Mercer. Under authority of the World Temporal Accord, you are ordered to submit for de-resolution.”
Finch’s helmet split open with a hydraulic hiss, revealing a pale face with artificial eyes that glowed icy blue. His right cheek twitched in three different directions simultaneously—a man existing in multiple timelines at once.
“Category Seven confirmed,” he said, voice skipping like a damaged recording. “Causal collapse initiated. This th-th-thread is already dying.” His eyes flickered, showing memories of deaths he’d already experienced—would experience—was experiencing now.
Travis raised his hands—a gesture of surrender that Dahl knew was purely tactical.
“I know,” he said. “And if you don’t lower your weapons, we all die six hours ahead of schedule.”
Behind Team Omega, something moved inside the mirror.
Something too big to exist in normal space-time.
It pressed against the glass from the inside—bulging it outward like a membrane about to rupture. Bones cracking. Shapes that weren’t meant to be seen by human eyes. A creature formed from the debris of collapsed timelines.
Dear God.
The ChronoHunter had followed.
Travis turned to Dahl, his eyes communicating a lifetime of strategy in seconds. “Get to the orphanage. Find Elizabeth Mercer,” Travis growled. “She started it. She might be the only one who can stop it.”
“No,” Dahl said, drawing her pistol. The derringer expanded in her hand, morphing into its true form—a Quantum Particle Accelerator. “We’re doing this together.”
He smiled. The smile that had saved and doomed civilizations. “Then make it count.”
The ChronoHunter cracked the mirror.
A sound like the universe breaking.
The ChronoHunter stepped through the breach. Gaslamps exploded. Horses screamed. Dahl’s anchor cracked.
Time—real, remembered, linear time—began to tear like parchment in fire.
