The air inside the Quantum Dynamics Facility didn't smell like air. It smelled like ozone, recycled nitrogen, and the faint, metallic tang of anxiety.
Alavina stood before the observation glass, her reflection ghosting over the massive subterranean machinery below. At twenty-one, she looked younger than she was a result of the oversized lab coat that swallowed her slender frame and the way she habitually tucked a strand of dark, messy hair behind her ear. But her eyes, a sharp, analytical grey, held the weight of someone who had spent more time conversing with variables than with people.
She checked the device strapped to her left wrist. It was a prototype, a bulky amalgamation of titanium, sapphire glass, and exposed circuitry that hummed with a low-frequency vibration against her radial artery. The team called it the "Anchor." Alavina called it the only thing keeping her sane.
"T-minus forty minutes to injection sequence," a voice crackled over the intercom. It was Dr. Aris, the project lead, his voice stripped of emotion, reduced to pure data. "Alavina, report status on the telemetry sensors."
Alavina tapped the screen of the wrist device. Holographic numbers spooled into the air, hovering in blue light before dissolving. "Telemetry is green, Doctor. The variance is within point-zero-three percent. It's cleaner than the simulation."
"Don't get cocky," Aris replied, though Alavina could hear the smile in his voice. "simulations don't have consequences. Physics does."
Alavina turned away from the glass and walked back to her station. The control room was a cathedral of technology, a semi-circle of glowing monitors and nervous technicians. This was the culmination of five years of work her work. While other girls her age were navigating the social complexities of university life or planning road trips, Alavina had been here, two hundred meters underground, rewriting the laws of thermodynamics.
The experiment was technically called "Project Aethelgard," a name the marketing department had chosen because it sounded mysterious and Norse. But to Alavina, it was simply "The Bridge." The theory was elegant: if they could isolate a graviton particle and accelerate it to a specific frequency the Zero-Point Energy state they could theoretically fold space-time like a sheet of paper. They weren't trying to time travel; they were trying to create instantaneous communication. A phone call to Mars with zero lag.
But Alavina knew the math hinted at something else. Something deeper. Something that terrified her just as much as it thrilled her.
She sat in her ergonomic chair, the leather cool against her back, and pulled up the primary code. Her fingers flew across the haptic keyboard. She wasn't just checking the code; she was feeling it. To Alavina, equations were not static numbers on a page; they were a language, a melody. The flow of energy through the collider below was a symphony, and she was the conductor looking for a single discordant note.
"Pulse rate is steady," she muttered to herself, her eyes darting across three screens simultaneously. "Cooling systems at ninety-eight percent efficiency. Magnetic containment field... holding."
She paused.
On the third screen, a tiny fluctuating variable blinked red for a microsecond before turning back to green.
Alavina frowned. She typed a command to freeze the log. "Computer, isolate sector 7-G. What was that spike?"
The artificial voice of the system responded instantly. "Micro-surge in the harmonic stabilizer. Duration: 0.004 seconds. Cause: Unknown environmental resonance."
"Unknown environmental resonance," Alavina repeated, the words tasting like ash. In high-energy physics, 'unknown' was synonymous with 'catastrophic.'
She tapped her comms unit. "Dr. Aris, I'm seeing a ghost in the machine. Sector 7-G had a harmonic tremble. I want to delay the sequence for a diagnostic."
There was a pause on the line. The silence stretched, heavy and oppressive. In a project costing billions of dollars, funded by military contracts and private investors who wanted results yesterday, the word 'delay' was a profanity.
"Alavina," Aris said, his voice dropping an octave. "We are in the window. The planetary alignment for the gravitational assist is only valid for the next twelve minutes. If we delay, we scrub the launch for six months. Is the reading critical?"
"It... it corrected itself," Alavina admitted, looking at the now-steady green line. "But nature doesn't just 'correct' itself, Aris. Something caused that surge."
"It's likely just settling sediment in the bedrock," Aris dismissed. "We are Go for injection. Alavina, you are the primary key-holder. We need your biometric authorization to unlock the core."
Alavina looked at her hand. It was trembling slightly. Not from fear, but from a deep, instinctual warning. It was the same feeling she got right before a thunderstorm broke the change in pressure that only she seemed to feel. She looked around the room. The other scientists were focused, sweating, eager. They wanted the glory. They wanted the Nobel Prize.
Alavina didn't care about the prize. She cared about the truth. And the truth was, the math was whispering a warning.
But she was twenty-one. She was the youngest person in the room by a decade. Maybe Aris was right. Maybe she was just seeing monsters where there were only shadows.
"Understood," Alavina said, pushing the doubt down into the pit of her stomach. "Initiating biometric unlock."
She placed her hand on the scanning panel. A beam of light traced her fingerprints, then scanned her retina. The console beeped—a cheerful, optimistic sound that felt jarringly out of place.
ACCESS GRANTED.
Below them, the massive collider began to wake up. It started as a low thrum, a vibration that travelled up through the floor and into the soles of her sneakers. Then, the sound pitch shifted, rising higher and higher until it wasn't a sound anymore, but a sensation in the teeth.
"Injection in ten... nine..."
Alavina gripped the edge of her desk. She looked at the "Anchor" on her wrist. The numbers were scrolling so fast now they were a blur. The device was designed to measure local temporal distortion to prove that their communication signal had skipped over time.
"Six... five..."
She saw it again. The red blip. But this time, it didn't disappear. It grew.
"Wait!" Alavina shouted, standing up, her chair clattering back against the floor. "Aris, abort! The field isn't stabilizing, it's..."
"Three... two..."
"It's collapsing inwards!" she screamed, her voice cracking.
"One. Mark."
The world turned white.
It wasn't a blinding light, exactly. It was the absence of color. It was as if the universe had suddenly been erased, replaced by a void of absolute, terrifying purity. Alavina felt a sensation of weightlessness, followed immediately by the feeling of being crushed by a mountain.
The sound came next a tearing noise, like the sky itself was being ripped in half.
Alavina was thrown backward, not by an explosion, but by a sudden shift in gravity. She hit the back wall of the control room, the breath driven from her lungs. The alarms were screaming now, a cacophony of sirens that sounded distant, as if they were underwater.
She tried to lift her head. Through the shattered observation glass, she saw the impossible. The collider wasn't exploding. It was... blooming.
A sphere of swirling, chaotic energy had formed in the center of the chamber. It wasn't blue or orange; it was a color that the human eye wasn't designed to see, a violent violet-black that seemed to eat the light around it. And it was pulling.
Loose papers, coffee mugs, tablets everything was being dragged toward the glass.
" The containment field!" Aris's voice screamed over the comms, distorted and slow, like a warped record. "Alavina! The Anchor! Engage the manual override!"
Alavina gasped for air, tasting copper. The Anchor. Her wrist.
She looked down. The device on her arm was glowing with a searing heat. The sapphire glass face had cracked, a spiderweb fracture running down the middle. But the readout was still visible.
TEMPORAL DISPLACEMENT: CRITICAL.
LOCALITY: UNKNOWN.
She had to shut it down. If she didn't, the collider wouldn't just destroy the lab; it would create a singularity that could swallow Geneva.
She forced herself to move. Every inch was a battle. The gravity in the room had shifted sideways. She crawled across the floor, gripping the bolted-down legs of the consoles to pull herself forward. The wind was howling now, a hurricane generated inside a sealed room.
She reached her console. The screen was shattered, but the manual override lever a heavy, red mechanical switch was intact.
"Come on," she gritted out, her teeth clenched so hard she thought they might shatter. "Come on, basic physics. Action... reaction."
She reached up, her hand shaking violently against the G-force. Her fingers brushed the cold metal of the lever.
She looked up for a split second. Through the broken window, she saw the energy sphere expand. And in the center of that swirling chaos, for one impossible heartbeat, she thought she saw something. Not a machine. Not a black hole.
She saw a landscape. A flash of jagged mountains and a red sun.
"Hallucination," her brain supplied instantly. "Oxygen deprivation."
She grabbed the lever with both hands.
"I'm sorry, Aris," she whispered.
She pulled the lever down.
There was no explosion. There was no fire.
Instead, the energy from the collider didn't dissipate. It surged upward. It bypassed the containment field, bypassed the grounding wires, and arced directly toward the source of the override signal.
Toward her.
The bolt of energy hit the Anchor on her wrist with the force of a lightning strike.
Alavina didn't have time to scream. The electricity surged through her body, locking every muscle, turning her nervous system into a conduit for power that no human was meant to hold. She felt her very atoms vibrating, shaking loose from their bonds.
The world dissolved. The control room, the sirens, the smell of ozone it all shattered like a dropped mirror.
She was falling.
She was falling through something thick and viscous, like warm honey. Colors flashed past her eyes gold, crimson, the grey of stone, the blue of a summer sky. She heard voices, millions of them, whispering in languages she didn't know. She felt time rushing past her skin, stripping away the layers of who she was. The scientist. The student. The daughter.
She was being unmade.
And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the falling stopped.
There was a hard, brutal impact.
The air left her lungs again, but this time, the air didn't smell like sterile recycled nitrogen.
It smelled of wet earth. Of smoke. Of pine needles and dried blood.
Alavina lay perfectly still, her face pressed into cold, gritty mud. The silence that followed was absolute. No hum of machinery. No sirens. No frantic voices of technicians.
Just the sound of the wind moving through trees, and the harsh, raspy sound of her own breathing.
She tried to move her hand. It felt heavy, leaden. Pain radiated up her left arm, a burning, throbbing agony. She opened her eyes, her vision blurry and swimming.
She pushed herself up onto her elbows, spitting dirt from her mouth. She blinked, trying to clear the spots from her vision.
She wasn't in the lab.
She was in a forest. But not a manicured forest like the ones near Geneva. This was a primordial, wild place. The trees were massive, their trunks thick with moss, their branches twisting like gnarled fingers against a twilight sky.
Alavina looked down at herself. Her lab coat was shredded, stained with soot and mud. Her sneakers were still on her feet, but the white rubber was scorched black.
She looked at her left wrist.
The Anchor was still there. It was fused to the sleeve of her coat, the metal twisted and scorched. The blue holographic light was gone. The screen was dark.
But as she stared at it, a single, faint spark jumped from the exposed wiring.
Zzzzt.
She touched the screen with a trembling finger.
Nothing.
"Aris?" she croaked. Her voice sounded small, lost in the vastness of the woods. "Dr. Aris? Can you hear me?"
Only the wind answered, rustling the dead leaves on the ground.
Alavina slowly stood up. Her legs were shaking, her balance off. She took a step and stumbled, catching herself on a rough tree trunk. The bark dug into her palm real, solid, abrasive.
She looked up at the sky.
It was dusk. But the stars...
She was an astronomer as much as a physicist. She knew the night sky over Switzerland by heart. She knew where the North Star should be. She knew the constellations.
She looked up, and her blood turned to ice.
The stars were wrong.
They weren't alien she recognized Orion, she recognized the Great Bear but they were shifted. The angle of the ecliptic was different. The procession of the equinoxes...
"The axial tilt," she whispered, her brain automatically calculating the geometry even as panic clawed at her throat. "The position of Polaris... based on the degree of deviation..."
She wasn't on a different planet. She was on Earth.
But she wasn't in the 21st century.
Based on the drift of the stars, the precession of the celestial poles... she had moved backward.
"How far?" she asked the empty forest. "Decades? Centuries?"
A twig snapped behind her.
Alavina spun around, her heart hammering against her ribs.
Emerging from the shadows of the trees was not a rescue team. It wasn't a doctor.
It was a man. But he was like no man she had ever seen in the city. He was huge, his shoulders broad and draped in a ragged cloak made of animal fur. He wore leather armor that looked boiled and hardened, stained with use. In his hand, he held a spear not a prop, not a replica, but a weapon of wood and iron, the tip jagged and cruel.
He stopped ten paces from her. His face was smeared with ash, his eyes dark and wary. He looked at her white, shredded lab coat. He looked at the strange, scorched device on her wrist.
Then, he raised the spear, pointing the iron tip directly at her chest.
He spoke, his voice a rough, guttural bark.
Alavina didn't understand the words. It sounded like a proto-dialect, thick with consonants. But the intent was clear.
Threat.
Alavina raised her hands slowly, showing her empty palms. Her mind raced. Physics. Biology. Psychology. Calculate the variable.
"I am not a threat," she said, her voice trembling but clear. "My name is Alavina. I... I think I'm lost."
The man narrowed his eyes. He didn't lower the spear. He took a step forward, the dry leaves crunching under his heavy leather boots.
Alavina realized then, with a terrifying clarity, that her PhD, her funding, her knowledge of quantum mechanics none of it mattered here.
Here, the only law was survival.
And the experiment hadn't just failed. It had marooned her in a world where she was the alien.
She took a step back, her heel catching on a root. She fell, hitting the ground hard.
The man lunged.