Thursday, 6:00 AM. Except it wasn't.
Jack stood at the temporal boundary with the Thursday Children, watching reality argue with itself. His chronometer insisted it was still Wednesday, 11:47 PM, while his bones knew dawn was breaking somewhere that didn't exist. The colonists had set up monitoring equipment that sparked and protested, trying to record something between seconds.
"Remember," Maria coached, her temporal tattoos glowing with sympathetic resonance, "when 6:17 hits, we'll have maybe thirty seconds of Thursday before local reality reasserts. That's our window."
"To hunt something that exists outside time," Jack muttered. "Right. Easy."
His shadow had other plans. Without warning, it dove through the temporal boundary, stretching like taffy across non-existent Thursday. Jack felt the pull—his shadow exploring moments that weren't, tasting time that had been devoured.
"Jack!" ARIA's voice fragmented. "Your shadow's sending back data from—oh that's not right. Thursday has colors that don't exist. It tastes purple and sounds like regret?"
"Pull it back!" Dr. Vega warned. "If it gets stuck in Thursday—"
Too late. Jack's shadow snapped back like a rubber band, dragging something with it. Not the Chronophage—just temporal residue, the crumbs of devoured time. But those crumbs painted a trail.
"Northwest," Jack gasped, feeling Thursday's echo in his bones. "It feeds at the old mining complex. Where the colonists were happiest on Fridays—payday celebrations."
Yuki grabbed his hand. "I'm coming. It talked to me. Maybe it'll do it again."
"Absolutely not," Maria started, but the ten-year-old was already walking toward the boundary, dragging Jack along.
"She's the only one it's communicated with," Jack found himself defending the terrible idea. "And my shadow seems to like her."
Indeed, his shadow had wrapped protectively around Yuki's feet, forming impossible patterns that made her giggle. "It tickles! Like temporal giggles!"
6:15 AM. The team moved through Wednesday's edge-lands, where reality grew thin. Buildings existed in probability states—maybe there, definitely not, occasionally perhaps. Jack's boots crunched on ground that couldn't decide if it was Wednesday's dirt or Thursday's grass.
"Sensors are going haywire," Dr. Vega reported. "We're approaching a temporal gradient. Time's moving at different speeds in pockets."
Jack watched a butterfly zip past in fast-forward, live its entire life cycle in seconds, die, and resurrect as Wednesday looped its existence. His shadow reached out to touch it, curious about localized time loops.
6:16 AM. The mining complex loomed—a structure that existed more solidly here, fed by the ghost-happiness of a hundred Friday paydays. Through the skeletal framework, something moved. Not movement—the absence of movement, a hole in motion itself.
"There," Yuki whispered.
The Chronophage didn't arrive. It had always been there, would always be there, was never there. Jack's eyes watered trying to focus on something that existed in temporal tenses that English hadn't invented. It was loneliness given form—a creature of pure hunger wrapped around an aching void where its timeline should have been.
6:17 AM.
Thursday crashed into existence like a wave, and Jack finally saw.
The Chronophage was beautiful in the way black holes were beautiful—destructive majesty that broke your heart while it devoured you. Its body existed in temporal layers, each showing a different stage of starvation. Young and vibrant in deep time, growing thinner as the layers approached now, until the present version was barely a whisper of appetite wrapped around desperation.
It saw them. Saw through them. Saw every moment they'd ever lived or would live, laid out like a buffet it was too weak to fully consume.
"Hello," Yuki said simply. "We want to help."
The creature's attention focused on her with weight that made reality creak. Then it spoke—not in words but in absences, showing them visions of what wasn't:
A world where time flowed like honey, thick and sweet and nourishing. Others like it, dancing through temporal streams, feeding on the excess time that bloomed from joy. Then disaster—their timeline shattered, scattered across the universe. It alone survived, flung into this thin reality where time moved too fast to sustain it. Starving. Calling. Hoping.
"You're not a monster," Yuki said firmly. "You're lost. Like when I got separated from my parents at the spaceport, but worse because your whole home got lost too."
Jack felt Thursday beginning to slip. 6:17 and 30 seconds. 31. 32. His shadow was frantically recording, storing impossible data.
"ARIA, can we—"
"Already calculating!" she interrupted. "If we could create a temporal greenhouse, slow time enough to replicate its native environment—but we'd need massive amounts of energy and a way to—"
Thursday shattered.
Wednesday slammed back into place, throwing them backward. The Chronophage vanished—no, not vanished, just returned to existing in the spaces between. But something had changed. Where it had been, symbols hung in the air. Mathematical equations written in devoured time.
"It's teaching us," Dr. Vega breathed. "It's showing us how to save it."
Jack's shadow was already copying the equations, translating temporal mathematics into something almost comprehensible. The solution was elegant in its impossibility: they didn't need to feed the Chronophage or send it home. They needed to teach it to digest time differently. To survive on temporal quality instead of quantity.
"One problem," Maria said, studying the equations. "This would require someone to sync with its timeline. To exist partially in its temporal state while guiding the transformation."
Everyone looked at Jack's shadow, which was practically vibrating with eagerness.
"Of course you volunteer," Jack sighed. Then louder: "Alright, people. We've got less than eighteen hours to build a temporal greenhouse and teach an alien chronovore to go vegetarian. Who's good with impossible mathematics?"
Every hand went up.
Because they were Wednesday colonists.
Impossible was just another day of the week they didn't have.