The city insisted everything was normal.
Public notices dismissed the blackout as a synchronization hiccup. News panels debated infrastructure redundancies. Experts smiled calmly and used words like contained, unlikely, and statistically insignificant.
Ethan knew better.
He stood before his workstation, eyes locked on a model that refused to behave.
Time, according to every accepted theory, was resilient. Minor disturbances should smooth themselves out, the way ripples faded on still water.
But the ripples weren't fading.
They were overlapping.
He isolated the data from the past seventy-two hours, stripping away everything except temporal coherence. What remained was a pattern—faint, irregular, but unmistakably deliberate.
Pressure points.
Someone—or something—was pressing against time repeatedly, always close to him.
That realization made his stomach tighten.
Lena noticed the changes in quieter ways.
A familiar street corner felt subtly wrong, as if the buildings had shifted by a fraction of a degree. A café she loved served her usual drink, but the taste felt… muted. Even conversations sometimes repeated themselves—not word for word, but rhythmically, like echoes of something already said.
She told herself she was imagining it.
But imagination didn't explain the feeling that followed her like a shadow.
That night, she paused in front of the bathroom mirror.
For a heartbeat, her reflection lagged.
Just a heartbeat.
She stepped back sharply, breath catching. The reflection corrected itself instantly, smiling when she smiled, blinking when she blinked.
"You're tired," she whispered.
Still, she didn't turn off the light when she left.
Ethan didn't sleep.
He sat on the edge of the bed, laptop balanced on his knees, light from the screen painting sharp angles across his face. Lena watched him from beneath half-closed eyes.
"You're spiraling," she said softly.
He looked up. "I'm being careful."
"That's not what careful looks like."
He hesitated, then closed the laptop. "I'm sorry."
She sat up, pulling the blanket around her shoulders. "Ethan… whatever this is, you don't have to carry it alone."
He stared at the floor.
There were things he could explain.
And things he couldn't—not yet.
"I'm scared," she said quietly.
That broke something in him.
He reached for her hand. "So am I."
She squeezed his fingers. "Then promise me something."
"What?"
"No secrets that matter."
He wanted to promise.
He really did.
"I'll try," he said.
Lena nodded, accepting the answer for what it was.
Neither of them noticed the clock on the wall pause for exactly one second before ticking forward again.
The crack in Lena's classroom window spread overnight.
It wasn't dramatic—just longer, branching subtly, like veins beneath glass. Maintenance assured her it was harmless.
"Thermal stress," the technician said. "Happens all the time."
But Lena knew cracks.
Cracks had direction.
This one pointed inward.
During class, she lost her place mid-sentence.
Not forgot—lost.
The words vanished from her mind as if they had never existed.
Her students watched her with mild concern.
"I'm sorry," she said, forcing a smile. "Let's take a short break."
She stepped into the hallway, heart racing.
The dream from the other night returned to her in fragments—collapsed buildings, dust-choked air, the sound of her name being shouted in desperation.
She pressed her palm against the cool wall.
Why does this feel familiar?
At the facility, Ethan crossed a line he had sworn never to cross.
He isolated his own biometric data.
Heart rate fluctuations. Neural activity. Cognitive spikes.
Then he aligned them with the temporal anomalies.
The overlap was almost perfect.
"No," he whispered.
That wasn't coincidence.
That was coupling.
Time wasn't just destabilizing around him.
It was responding to him.
A memory surfaced—something Marcus had once said, half-joking.
Some minds push harder against reality than others.
Ethan's hands shook.
"If that's true," he murmured, "then what happens when the pressure becomes unbearable?"
He ran a projection.
The simulation didn't crash.
It fractured.
Multiple future states unfolded simultaneously—some stable, most catastrophic.
In every catastrophic outcome, one variable remained constant.
Lena.
Alive longer than she should have been.
Ethan stared at the result, breath shallow.
"What does that mean?" he whispered.
The system, of course, didn't answer.
That evening, they walked by the river again.
The water flowed steadily, deceptively calm.
"I keep feeling like I've forgotten something important," Lena said. "Like a word that's on the tip of my tongue."
Ethan watched the current. "Maybe you have."
She turned to him. "That's not comforting."
He smiled weakly. "Sorry."
She leaned against him. "If the world really is… changing," she said, "would we even know?"
"Yes," he said without thinking.
She looked up at him. "How?"
"Because things would stop making sense," he said. "Small things first. Then bigger ones."
She was quiet for a long moment. "Then promise me something else."
He tensed. "What?"
"If it ever becomes too much," she said, "you'll choose people over theories."
He met her eyes.
"I already have," he said.
The words tasted like a lie.
The first official warning came three days later.
TEMPORAL STABILITY ADVISORY – LEVEL ONE
Most people ignored it.
Ethan didn't.
Level One meant fluctuations were no longer theoretical.
That night, as Lena slept, he stood in the living room, staring at a half-assembled framework he had hidden behind a false wall.
Metal struts. Superconductive rings. A core that didn't yet exist.
The beginnings of something he had sworn would remain an idea.
A machine designed not to break time—
but to touch it.
He rested his hand against the cold metal.
"I won't use you," he whispered.
The structure, unfinished and silent, reflected his face back at him.
Behind him, unseen, the air shimmered faintly—as if reality itself were holding its breath.
Some cracks, once formed, didn't close.
They only waited.