Cross's fingers trembled as he loaded the last magazine into his rifle. Three bullets. Three chances to survive the night. Outside the bunker's rusted door, the Ravagers howled with voices that sounded almost human—a cruel mockery of what they'd once been before the world died.
But that wasn't right, was it? The world hadn't died. Cross pressed his palm against his temple, trying to stop the splitting headache that had plagued him since the memories started bleeding through. Images of another life, another world where skyscrapers touched the clouds and people walked streets without fear of being torn apart.
"Focus," he muttered, the word echoing in the cramped space that had been his home for two years. Or was it twenty years? Time felt strange now, elastic, as if multiple lifetimes were compressed into his thirty-something years of existence.
The Ravagers hit the door with thunderous force. Rust rained down from the ceiling. Cross shouldered his rifle, steadied his breathing, and did what he'd done every night for as long as he could remember—he prepared to fight.
Except now he remembered something else. A name: Ethan. Dr. Ethan Cross. A laboratory full of machines that hummed with barely contained power. A woman named Sarah whose smile could light up a room. And an experiment that went catastrophically wrong.
"I was a scientist," Cross whispered, the revelation hitting him like a physical blow. "I wasn't always this."
The door exploded inward. A Ravager burst through, all mutated muscle and jagged bone protrusions, its eyes burning with feral hunger. Cross fired once, twice, three times. Each bullet found its mark. The creature dropped, twitching, as black blood pooled beneath its malformed body.
Silence. Blessed, terrible silence.
Cross lowered his rifle, hands shaking. The gun clattered to the floor as another wave of memories overwhelmed him. He was in two places at once—standing in a ruined bunker covered in a dead monster's blood, and lying on a laboratory floor as Sarah screamed his name and machines wailed warnings into an uncaring void.
"Sarah," he gasped. The name felt foreign on his tongue, yet impossibly familiar. He could see her face clearly now—not as a memory, but as if she were standing right in front of him. Brown eyes filled with intelligence and compassion. Dark hair pulled back in a practical ponytail. The small scar on her left eyebrow from a childhood accident.
How did he know about the scar? Cross had never met anyone named Sarah. Everyone he'd ever known was dead, consumed by the apocalypse that had swept across the world thirty years ago.
Except that wasn't true either. The apocalypse happened fifteen years ago. Or five years ago. Or it hadn't happened at all.
"What's happening to me?" Cross staggered to the corner where he kept his water supply—three bottles, carefully rationed. He splashed lukewarm water on his face, trying to clear his head.
The reflection in the cracked mirror showed a man he barely recognized. Scars crisscrossed his weathered face. His hair, prematurely gray from years of stress and malnutrition, hung in matted clumps. His eyes, once bright with intelligence, had hardened into the calculating gaze of a predator.
But as he stared at his reflection, another face overlaid his own—younger, cleaner, wearing glasses and a confident smile. The face of a man who believed he could save the world through science.
"I broke the world," Cross whispered to his reflection. "I broke reality itself."
More memories flooded in, each one carrying the weight of absolute truth. The Cascade Project. The quantum stabilizer. The moment when he'd reached across dimensions and shattered the barriers between universes. He hadn't just broken his own reality—he'd fractured his consciousness across multiple timelines, each one equally real.
In one timeline, he was a scientist trying to fix his catastrophic mistake. In another, he was a detective investigating impossible crimes. In yet another, he was a forgotten king watching his empire burn.
And here, in this timeline, he was Cross—a survivor in a world that should never have existed, fighting monsters that were born from the same cosmic fracture that had split his soul.
"The Ravagers," Cross said slowly, understanding dawning with horrific clarity. "They're not mutations from radiation or disease. They're fragments. Pieces of people who got caught in the fracture, twisted and corrupted by the spaces between realities."
If that was true, then every Ravager he'd killed hadn't been a monster. They'd been victims, just like him—people whose existence had been shattered across dimensions, their consciousness unable to cope with the strain, degenerating into mindless, violent creatures.
Cross sank to his knees, the weight of countless deaths pressing down on him. How many had he killed? Hundreds? Thousands? How many of them had been people who'd simply been in the wrong place when reality came apart?
"I'm sorry," he whispered into the darkness. "I'm so sorry."
But regret wouldn't change anything. The damage was done, written into the fabric of this broken timeline. Cross could remember being the scientist who caused this catastrophe, but he was also the warrior who had survived its consequences. Both lives were real. Both versions of himself existed simultaneously.
The question wasn't which life was true. The question was whether he could use the knowledge from one timeline to survive in another.
Cross pulled himself to his feet, his warrior's instincts reasserting themselves. If he was right about the Ravagers, then they weren't mindless after all. They were fragments of human consciousness, lost and confused, lashing out in pain and fear. Which meant they could potentially be reasoned with. Helped. Saved.
Or it meant they were far more dangerous than he'd ever imagined.
He gathered what few supplies remained—a half-empty canteen, some dried meat of questionable origin, a knife that had seen better days. His rifle was useless now, nothing but dead weight without ammunition. Cross strapped the knife to his belt and prepared to leave the only shelter he'd known in this timeline.
If his fragmenting memories were correct, there was a research facility about fifty miles north. Before the world ended, it had been a government installation studying dimensional physics. If any place in this broken reality held answers about the fracture—about how to fix it, or at least how to survive it—it would be there.
Cross stepped over the Ravager's corpse and out into the wasteland. The sky hung heavy with toxic clouds that never rained, lit by the perpetual twilight of a sun that seemed to have forgotten how to rise or set properly. In the distance, more Ravagers howled, calling to each other in their disturbing almost-human voices.
But Cross wasn't afraid. Not anymore. Fear was for people who didn't understand what they were up against. Cross understood perfectly now—he was living in one of many fractured realities, fighting monsters that were human fragments, searching for a way to repair a cosmos he'd personally broken.
The memories continued to bleed through as he walked. Each step brought new revelations, new connections between his fractured selves. Somewhere, in another timeline, Detective Cross was standing over an impossible crime scene. King Ethan was watching his empire fall. Dr. Ethan Cross was convulsing on a laboratory floor as his consciousness tore itself apart.
They were all the same person. They were all real. And somehow, impossibly, they were all connected through the spaces between realities—where something ancient and malevolent watched with growing interest.
Cross didn't know what that presence was, but he could feel it at the edges of his awareness. It had been there since the moment of the fracture, patient and hungry, waiting for the right moment to emerge from the darkness between worlds.
Whatever it was, Cross knew one thing with absolute certainty: it was coming. And when it finally crossed over into their fractured realities, the apocalypse he'd been surviving would seem like paradise compared to what was waiting in the spaces between.
As dawn never came to the perpetually twilight world, Cross walked north toward answers he wasn't sure he wanted to find, carrying memories of lives he'd never lived and deaths he couldn't remember dying.