The Chronos Effect
Chapter Fifteen: The Others
I knocked on Amy's door three times that afternoon. Each time, she told me to go away. The third time, she didn't say anything at all, which somehow felt worse.
Mrs. Chen came home around four with groceries and immediately sensed something was wrong.
"Did you two have a fight?"
"Something like that."
"Want to talk about it?"
I helped her unload the groceries, putting cans in the pantry without really seeing them. "I told her the truth about something. She didn't take it well."
"What truth?"
"That I'm not the person she thought I was."
Mrs. Chen stopped putting away vegetables and looked at me directly. "Damian, I've known Amy her entire life. She's stubborn, yes. Quick to anger, definitely. But she doesn't give up on people she loves."
"This is different."
"Every fight feels different when you're in the middle of it." She patted my shoulder. "Give her time. She'll come around."
But I wasn't sure she would. How do you come around from learning that your fiancé can manipulate time and has been lying about it for weeks?
At 6:30, Sarah texted me an address. An abandoned warehouse in the Bywater neighborhood. The kind of place drug deals happened in crime shows.
*7 PM. Don't be late.*
I stared at the message, then up at the ceiling toward Amy's room. I could hear her moving around up there, probably getting ready for dinner.
I needed to tell her where I was going. But the thought of another fight, another look of betrayal on her face, made my stomach turn.
I was still deciding when she came downstairs.
She'd showered and changed into clean clothes, but her eyes were red and puffy. She looked at me, then away, then back again.
"I heard you moving around down here."
"Your mom came home. I was helping with groceries."
"Right." Amy shifted her weight from foot to foot, arms crossed protectively over her chest. "Are we going to talk about earlier?"
"Do you want to?"
"I don't know what I want." She sat down on the stairs, her shoulders sagging with exhaustion. "Six hours ago, I thought I knew who you were. Now I don't know anything."
I sat down beside her, leaving space between us that felt carefully measured.
"I'm still me," I said.
"Are you? Because the Damian I know doesn't keep secrets this big. He doesn't lie about where he's going or who he's meeting."
"I was trying to protect you."
"From what? The truth?" She finally looked at me, her eyes searching my face. "Damian, we're about to get married. We're having a baby together. If we can't be honest with each other now, when can we be?"
"You're right."
"Then prove it. Tell me where you're going tonight."
I shouldn't have been surprised that she knew. Amy always knew.
"How did you—"
"You keep checking your phone. You have that look on your face, like you're planning something you know I won't like." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "So where are you going?"
"To meet Sarah. And three other people who can do what we do."
Amy was quiet for a long moment, processing this. "Why?"
"Because if there are more of us, we need to understand what's happening. Why it's happening. How to control it."
"Or you could just stop. Not go to this meeting. Not get more involved in something that's already destroyed our apartment and almost killed us both."
"I can't stop. The buzzing is getting worse. The anchor points are multiplying." I turned to face her fully. "Amy, what if the only way to make it stop is to understand it first?"
"And what if understanding it makes it worse?"
"Then at least I tried."
She stared at me, and I could see her wrestling with competing impulses—the desire to protect me fighting with the anger at being excluded.
"I'm coming with you," she said finally.
"No."
"It wasn't a question."
"Amy, it could be dangerous—"
"Everything about this is dangerous. But if you're walking into it, I'm not letting you go alone." She stood up, brushing off her jeans. "We're partners, remember? For better or worse. Even when worse involves secret meetings in abandoned warehouses with people who can break reality."
I wanted to argue. Wanted to tell her to stay home where it was safe. But the set of her jaw told me I'd already lost this fight.
"Okay. But you stay behind me if anything goes wrong."
"Deal. Now let's go before I change my mind about the whole thing."
The warehouse was exactly as sketchy as I'd imagined. Broken windows, graffiti-covered walls, and a smell like rust and old water. Sarah was waiting outside, smoking a cigarette with shaking hands.
"You brought your fiancée," she said when she saw Amy.
"She insisted."
"Smart woman." Sarah dropped the cigarette and ground it under her heel. "Fair warning—this is going to get weird."
"Weirder than time travel?" Amy asked.
"Much weirder."
Inside, three people were sitting on overturned crates in the middle of the empty warehouse floor. A portable camping lantern provided the only light, casting long shadows across the concrete.
Sarah made introductions.
"This is Marcus Webb—"
Amy's brother looked up, and I watched the recognition flash across his face. "Amy? What are you doing here?"
"I could ask you the same thing." Amy stared at her brother like she'd never seen him before. "Marcus, what's going on?"
"It's complicated, sis."
"Everything's complicated lately."
Sarah continued. "Marcus started experiencing temporal awareness after he got shot. The trauma created an anchor point."
Marcus nodded, his hand unconsciously moving to his chest where the bullets had hit. "I kept seeing the shooting happen, over and over. Then one day I realized I could go back. I could change it."
"Did you?" I asked.
"No. I was too scared of what else might change." He looked at me directly. "Unlike some people."
The accusation hung in the air.
Sarah gestured to the next person. "This is Father Tom Brennan. Catholic priest. Had a heart attack two months ago."
Father Tom was elderly, probably in his seventies, with kind eyes and liver-spotted hands. "I died on the operating table. Was gone for almost three minutes. When they brought me back, I could... feel things. See moments that hadn't happened yet."
"And this is Keisha Washington," Sarah continued. "High school teacher. Lost her husband in a car accident."
Keisha was younger than the rest of us, maybe thirty, with neat braids and eyes that looked like they'd seen too much. "I watched him die. And then I went back and saved him. Except he died anyway, three weeks later. Different accident, same result."
The pattern was becoming clear. Trauma, death or near-death, the desperate need to change things. We'd all experienced the same trigger, all discovered the same impossible ability.
"So what now?" Amy asked. "You all just sit around comparing notes about how you broke reality?"
"We're trying to find a pattern," Sarah said. "Something that explains why us. Why now."
"I might have an answer to that." Dr. Vasquez's voice came from the doorway.
We all turned to see her walking in, carrying a tablet and looking like she hadn't slept in days.
"Dr. Vasquez?" I stood up. "What are you doing here?"
"Sarah contacted me. Told me about your meeting." She set the tablet on a crate and pulled up a graph covered in spikes and valleys. "I've been analyzing the temporal data from the past month. And I found something disturbing."
She zoomed in on a specific point on the graph. September 15th, 11:47 PM. The night Amy died in the original timeline.
"This is when it started. When Damian created the first significant fracture." She traced her finger along the timeline. "And here, here, and here—these are where the fractures spread. Each one corresponding to someone else's trauma."
"You're saying Damian caused this?" Marcus asked, his voice hard. "All of us can do this because of him?"
"I'm saying Damian's fracture created a weakness in the local spacetime continuum. When the rest of you experienced similar trauma, you fell through that weakness."
"So this is my fault," I said.
"It's no one's fault," Dr. Vasquez said firmly. "You didn't know what would happen. You were trying to save someone you loved."
"And instead I infected five other people with the ability to destroy reality."
"Six," a voice said from the shadows.
We all turned. A figure stepped into the lamplight, and I felt my blood run cold.
It was Amy.
Not my Amy, who was standing right beside me. This Amy looked older, harder, with scars on her face and arms that my Amy didn't have. She was wearing tactical gear and carrying herself like someone who'd been through a war.
"What the hell?" Amy breathed.
The other Amy smiled, but it wasn't a happy expression. "Hello, Damian. It's been a long time. For me, anyway."
I couldn't speak. Couldn't move. Couldn't process what I was seeing.
"Who are you?" my Amy asked.
"I'm you. Or I was you. Or I will be you. Time travel makes pronouns complicated." The other Amy looked at me with eyes that held years of pain. "In my timeline, you saved me from the truck crash. We got married, had our daughter. Everything was perfect for about six months."
"What happened after six months?" I managed to ask.
"The fractures caught up with us. Reality started breaking down. You tried to fix it, looped back again and again until you couldn't tell which timeline was real anymore." She touched one of the scars on her face. "I'm what's left after fifty-seven loops. After watching you die, watching our daughter die, watching the entire city collapse into temporal chaos."
Amy grabbed my hand, squeezing so hard it hurt.
"Why are you here?" Dr. Vasquez asked.
"To warn you. To stop this before it gets as bad as it did for me." The other Amy looked at each of us in turn. "Every time you loop, you make it worse. The fractures don't heal—they just spread. And eventually, they spread so far that reality can't sustain itself anymore."
"How do we stop it?" Sarah asked.
"You can't. Once it starts, it doesn't stop. The only way to prevent the collapse is to never loop in the first place."
"But we already have," Marcus said.
"I know. That's why I'm here." The other Amy pulled out a small device that looked like a cross between a phone and a scientific calculator. "I built this in my timeline. A temporal stabilizer. It can't undo the fractures, but it can prevent new ones from forming."
She handed it to Dr. Vasquez, who examined it with growing wonder.
"This is... this is incredible. The quantum mechanics alone—"
"Took me fifteen years to build. I'm giving you the shortcut." The other Amy looked at me. "But here's the catch. To make it work, someone has to anchor it. One person carrying all the temporal debt, preventing the fractures from spreading to anyone else."
"What happens to that person?" I asked, though I already knew the answer.
"They carry the weight forever. Every loop that was made, every change that was prevented, every death that was postponed—all of it compressed into one consciousness." She smiled sadly. "In my timeline, I volunteered. I've been carrying it for thirty years."
Amy looked at her older self, at the scars and the exhaustion and the weight of decades in her eyes. "That's what I become?"
"That's what you became. In one possible future." The other Amy turned to me. "But you can change it. You can make sure this version of Amy never has to carry what I've carried."
"How?"
"By volunteering instead. By being the anchor."
The warehouse was completely silent except for water dripping somewhere in the darkness.
"You want me to carry all of it?" I asked. "Every fracture, every loop, every temporal debt?"
"Yes."
"For the rest of my life?"
"For the rest of your life."
Amy stepped forward. "No. Absolutely not."
"It's the only way," the other Amy said. "Without an anchor, the fractures will keep spreading. More people will gain temporal awareness. More loops will be created. And eventually, the entire city—maybe the entire world—will collapse into chaos."
"Then I'll do it," Amy said. "If someone has to carry it, let it be me."
"No," I said immediately. "You're pregnant. Our baby—"
"Our baby will be fine. Women have babies while dealing with chronic conditions all the time."
"This isn't a chronic condition. It's carrying the weight of broken reality."
"And you think I'm going to let you do that instead?" Amy's voice rose. "Watch you suffer for the rest of your life because you tried to save me?"
"That's exactly what I'm asking."
We stared at each other, both of us refusing to back down.
The other Amy watched us with something like nostalgia on her scarred face. "You know what's funny? We had this exact same fight in my timeline. Word for word."
"What did you decide?" I asked.
"We decided wrong. We tried to share the load, split the temporal debt between us. But it doesn't work that way. The debt needs one anchor, not two." She looked at Amy. "I spent the last thirty years wishing I'd let him carry it. Watching him struggle under half the weight while I struggled under the other half. Neither of us whole, neither of us truly present for our daughter."
"There has to be another way," Dr. Vasquez said.
"There isn't. I've run every calculation, tried every possible solution. This is it." The other Amy looked exhausted, ancient despite probably being only in her fifties. "Someone has to carry it. The only question is who."
Marcus spoke up. "Why does it have to be either of them? I'm already temporal aware. I could volunteer."
"Or me," Sarah said. "I don't have much to lose."
"Or me," Father Tom added quietly. "I'm old. I've lived my life."
Keisha nodded. "We all made these fractures. We should all share the responsibility."
I looked around at these strangers who'd become unwitting participants in my disaster. People who'd discovered impossible abilities because I'd been selfish enough to save the woman I loved.
"No," I said. "This started with me. I'll finish it."
"Damian—" Amy started.
"I'm not negotiating this." I looked at the other Amy. "What do I need to do?"
She held out the device. "Dr. Vasquez will know how to calibrate it. Once it's active, you'll need to interface with it. The transfer will take about an hour, and it won't be pleasant."
"How not pleasant?"
"You'll experience every loop simultaneously. Every death, every choice, every fracture all at once. Some people describe it as having their consciousness torn apart and reassembled."
"But he'll survive?" Amy asked, her voice breaking.
"He'll survive. But he'll never be the same."
I took the device, feeling its weight in my palm. Such a small thing to carry such a heavy burden.
"When?" I asked.
"Tonight. The longer we wait, the more unstable things become."
Amy grabbed my arm. "Damian, please. Let me do this."
I turned to face her, this woman I'd broken reality to save, who was offering to break herself to save everyone else.
"You're going to be a mother. Our baby needs you whole and present and there."
"Our baby needs a father too."
"Our baby will have a father. Just maybe one who understands time differently than other people." I tried to smile, but couldn't quite manage it. "I'll still be me, Amy. Just... carrying something extra."
"For the rest of your life."
"For the rest of our lives. Together."
She was crying now, tears streaming down her face. "I hate this. I hate all of this."
"I know. But it's the only way forward."
Dr. Vasquez had already started examining the device, muttering calculations under her breath. "I'll need about two hours to calibrate it properly. Damian, you should go home. Eat something. Say goodbye to—" She stopped herself. "Prepare yourself."
The other Amy touched my shoulder. "Thank you. For what you're about to do. In my timeline, no one volunteered. We all just kept making it worse."
"What happens to you after I do this?"
"I go back to my timeline. Keep carrying what I carry. But at least I'll know that here, in this version of reality, things turned out different." She looked at my Amy. "Take care of him. And yourself. And that baby you're carrying."
"How did you know—"
"Because I was you, remember? I know everything that's happening right now because I lived it once." The other Amy smiled. "Name her Sofia. She'll like that."
Then she was gone, stepping back into the shadows and disappearing like she'd never been there.
We all stood there in stunned silence, processing what had just happened.
Finally, Marcus spoke. "Well. That was fucking surreal."
Despite everything, I almost laughed.
Amy drove us home in silence. When we pulled into her parents' driveway, neither of us moved to get out of the car.
"I'm terrified," she said finally.
"Me too."
"What if this breaks you? What if you can't handle it?"
"Then you'll help me learn how."
"And what do we tell our daughter when she asks why her father seems different from everyone else?"
"We tell her the truth. That sometimes love means carrying heavy things so the people you care about don't have to."
Amy leaned her head against my shoulder, and we sat there in the darkness, holding each other while time continued its relentless forward motion.
In two hours, I would become something else. Something more and less than human.
But for now, I was just Damian Torres, holding the woman I loved and trying to be brave enough for what was coming.