The portfolio felt like a live thing in Elara's arms, humming with the residual energy of its bearer. Kaelen Kershaw. Kai. The name echoed in the silence of her workshop, a key sliding into a lock she hadn't known existed. The voice from the pier. The hand she had held in the darkness of the hospital. He was no longer a specter in her memory journal; he was a man of flesh, bone, and a troubled, penetrating gaze.
For a full hour, she didn't open it. She simply sat at her workbench, her fingers tracing the fine-grained leather. Her world, so carefully ordered and compartmentalized, had been violently tilted on its axis. The Shuffle had always been a deeply personal, private madness. Now, it had an external focal point. He had looked at her as if he could see the fissures in her reality.
Finally, with a steadying breath that did little to calm the tremor in her hands, she untied the leather cords and opened the portfolio.
The air left her lungs in a soft rush.
Inside, nestled in acid-free sleeves, were not just maps. They were visions. Galileo's own celestial charts, hand-annotated in a sharp, frantic script. They were breathtaking, depicting the moon's craggy surface, the moons of Jupiter, all rendered with the awe of first discovery. But their fragility was alarming. The paper was thin as a dragonfly's wing, browned with age, and fissured with a web of cracks, especially along the folds. They felt like they were holding on to existence by a prayer.
This was a test. Dr. Aris, the head of the university's Historical Archive, would never have sent something of this caliber with a casual courier. He had sent it with him. Because it required the utmost skill. And because, perhaps, Kai had volunteered.
The thought sent a jolt through her. She carefully slid one of the sleeves out. The chart was of the Orion constellation, but Galileo had overlaid his own observations, correcting the star positions with an arrogant, brilliant certainty. As her gloved finger hovered over a crack near the belt, a familiar dizziness threatened at the edge of her perception. The Shuffle, always drawn to potent anchors.
Not now, she commanded herself, squeezing her eyes shut. She focused on the scent of her workshop, the feel of the cool, polished wood beneath her elbows. The pressure receded, leaving her shaky. She couldn't afford to lose herself now. Not when she held a piece of his world in her hands.
She spent the rest of the afternoon in a state of heightened awareness, performing the initial assessments and stabilizing the most vulnerable fractures with a temporary facing of Japanese tissue. Every time the door to the main building opened down the hall, her head snapped up, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs. But it was never him.
At 5 p.m., she gave up the pretense of work. She packed the portfolio into a reinforced case, her decision made. She needed to see Dr. Aris. She needed a context for the ghost who had stepped into her light.
The Physics & Astronomy building was a stark contrast to her own arts-centric haven. It was a monument to glass, steel, and right angles, where the air smelled of ozone and industrially cleaned air. The click of her boots on the polished floor echoed with a lonely finality. She found Dr. Aris in his cluttered office, a jovial man with a halo of white hair and spectacles perched on his forehead.
"Elara! My dear!" he boomed, looking up from a precarious stack of books. "I take it Kaelen found you?"
"He did," she said, her voice thankfully even. She set the case on a clear corner of his desk. "The Galileo charts are… profound. And incredibly delicate."
"Aren't they just? A once-in-a-lifetime find. I knew you were the only one I could trust with them." His eyes twinkled. "And what did you think of our Dr. Kershaw? Brilliant mind. A bit intense, but that's the mark of a true visionary, isn't it?"
"Visionary?" Elara prompted, her casual tone a carefully constructed facade.
"Oh, yes. His work on causal dynamics in closed timelike curves is reshaping the department's understanding of…" He caught her look and waved a hand, laughing. "Forgive me. In simple terms, he's one of the leading minds in the world on the theoretical physics of time. He's been using historical astronomical data to model… well, let's just call it 'temporal turbulence.' He was fascinated by the Galileo charts. Said they represented a key moment in humanity's calibration of time. He insisted on delivering them to you himself."
Time.
The word landed in the center of her chest with the weight of a prophecy. A physicist who studied time. A man whose life's work was the architecture of the very thing that was broken inside her.
It was too much to be a coincidence. It felt like the universe had written a equation where she and Kai were the only two variables.
"Do you know where his office is?" she asked, her mouth dry.
"Down the hall, 4B. But he's probably at the observatory. He often works there late. Prefers the stars to people, I think." Dr. Aris winked. "Tell him I said hello."
The observatory was a silver dome perched atop the building, accessible by a silent, cold elevator. As the doors slid open, she stepped into a circular room dominated by the massive, silent form of the telescope. The air was several degrees cooler. The domed roof was partially open to the twilight sky, revealing a deep, velvet blue. And there, silhouetted against the emerging stars, was Kai.
He wasn't looking through the telescope. He was standing before a large digital screen mounted on the wall, displaying a complex, three-dimensional model of swirling lines and glowing nodes. It looked like a neural network superimposed over a galaxy. His suit jacket was gone, his shirtsleeves rolled up, and he was frowning at the screen, a stylus dancing between his fingers.
He hadn't heard her approach. She watched him for a moment, this architect of time, so immersed in the cosmos he'd built that he was blind to the world. This was the man who laughed in the rain.
"The fabric of reality looks… complicated," she said, her voice soft but clear in the vast, quiet space.
Kai started, spinning around. The stylus clattered to the floor. For a split second, the look on his face was pure, unguarded shock, which quickly morphed into a wariness that made her heart ache.
"Elara." He said her name like a statement, a fact he was trying to reconcile. "What are you doing here?"
"Returning the portfolio to Dr. Aris. He said I might find you here." She took a few steps into the room, her gaze drifting from him to the screen. "Is that your work? The… causal dynamics?"
His eyes narrowed. "Aris talks too much."
"He's proud of you." She stopped a few feet from him, close enough to see the flecks of green in his hazel eyes, the tired tension around them. "It's beautiful. What is it?"
He hesitated, a man wrestling with a door he wanted to keep locked. But something—professional pride, perhaps, or the same inexorable pull she felt—made him relent. He turned back to the screen.
"It's a visualization. A mathematical model of local spacetime." He gestured with his hand, and the model rotated. "Think of reality as a calm pond. This," he pointed to a cluster of violently oscillating nodes, a fiery red in the sea of cool blue, "is a theoretical anomaly. A ripple that shouldn't exist. It violates causality."
"Causality?"
"Cause and effect. The idea that the past influences the future. This… anomaly suggests a feedback loop. An effect influencing its own cause. It's a paradox. And according to every law of physics, it should be impossible. It would be… unstable. Dangerous."
His voice was low, intent, and she heard the unease in it. He wasn't just talking theory. He was talking about a problem. A specific one.
An effect influencing its own cause.
The words resonated with a terrifying clarity. Her Shuffles. Her future memories influencing her present choices. Was she the anomaly? Were they the paradox?
"Dangerous how?" she whispered.
He finally turned to look at her fully, and the intensity in his gaze was paralyzing. "The universe doesn't like paradoxes, Elara. It resolves them. Usually by collapsing the contradictory state. In simple terms, by erasing it."
A cold dread, colder than the observatory air, trickled down her spine. Erasing it. The hospital room. The flatline. Was that the universe's solution?
"Why are you really here?" he asked again, his voice softer now, but no less intense.
She hugged herself, suddenly feeling exposed under the vast, star-dusted dome. "I had to see you." The truth was all she had left. "When you came to my workshop… I knew your voice."
He went perfectly still. "That's impossible. We've never met."
"Haven't we?" She took a step closer, her courage fueled by a desperation she could no longer contain. "Your voice. The way you hold yourself. The callus on your right thumb. I know these things. I've seen you in the rain, laughing. I've felt…" She choked back the memory of the hospital, the grief still a fresh wound. "I've felt what it's like to be with you. And what it's like to lose you."
The digital model on the screen behind him flickered, the red anomaly pulsing brightly for a moment before settling. Kai's face had paled. The scientist in him was at war with something else, something raw and frightened.
"That's… You're describing a psychological phenomenon. Confabulation. Déjà vu." His words were rational, but his voice lacked conviction.
"It's not in my mind, Kai. It's in my life. I don't experience time the way you do. For me, it's… shuffled." The word felt both inadequate and profoundly revealing. "My past, my future, they're not linear. They're a collection of moments I visit, whether I want to or not. And you are in so many of them."
She saw the conflict raging in him. His life's work was built on logic, on equations, on a universe that obeyed rules. She was standing before him, a living, breathing violation of it all.
"Elara," he said, and her name was a plea. "What you're suggesting… it can't be."
"Can't it?" she pressed, her own voice gaining strength. "You're standing there, modeling ripples in spacetime. What if I'm one of those ripples? What if we are?"
He stared at her, his scientific composure finally cracking. In his eyes, she saw it all: the disbelief, the fear, and a terrifying, dawning recognition. He looked from her face to the pulsing red anomaly on his screen and back again.
"The data…" he murmured, more to himself than to her. "The localized readings…"
"What data?" Elara asked.
He didn't answer. Instead, he did something that stole the air from her lungs. He reached out, his movement hesitant, and brushed his fingertips against her temple, where a faint throb of an impending Shuffle had begun to pulse.
The moment his skin touched hers, the world dissolved.
---
Shuffle.
She was in a kitchen, bathed in the warm, golden light of a Sunday morning. She was wearing one of his shirts, the sleeves rolled up. He stood at the stove, his back to her, humming a tune she didn't recognize. The scent of coffee and frying bacon filled the air. This was a peace so deep it felt sacred. She walked up behind him, wrapping her arms around his waist, pressing her cheek against the warm, solid plane of his back. He stilled, his humming stopping. He covered her hands with his, his thumb stroking her skin.
"I could get used to this," she whispered.
He turned in her arms, his face, older, more lined, but his eyes the same. He smiled, a slow, devastating smile that reached his eyes.
"Good," he said, his voice a low rumble. "Because I'm planning on forever."
He leaned down to kiss her—
---
The observatory rushed back. The cold air, the dim light, the silent telescope. She was gasping, her knees buckling. Kai's hands were on her shoulders, holding her up, his face a mask of shock and confusion.
"What happened?" he demanded, his grip firm. "You just… phased out. For three seconds. You were gone."
Tears welled in her eyes, a confusing mix of the joy from the memory and the horror of the return. "I was… in your kitchen. A Sunday morning. You were making bacon. You said…" She couldn't finish. The intimacy of the memory was too raw, too potent.
He released her as if she'd burned him, stumbling back a step. The color had drained completely from his face. He looked from her to his computer screen, where the anomaly was now blazing a persistent, angry red.
"You said…" he echoed, his voice hoarse. "What did I say?"
Elara looked at him, at the brilliant, terrified man who was the constant in her chaotic universe. She saw the future in his eyes, and the past in her soul.
"You said," she repeated, her voice trembling but clear, "'I'm planning on forever.'"