The city should not have been awake.
That was the first thing Kael noticed.
At 3:17 a.m., Axiom City was usually dead—its skyline dimmed to emergency blues, transit rails silent, the megascreens reduced to low-power civic notices. But tonight, light flooded everything. Towers pulsed in irregular waves, as though the city itself were breathing too fast.
Kael stood on the edge of his apartment balcony, fingers gripping the cold alloy rail, eyes narrowed.
Something was wrong with the sky.
It wasn't dark. It wasn't light either. It hovered in an in-between state, a bruised gray stretched thin across the heavens, streaked with static lines that blinked in and out like corrupted code.
His neural implant chimed.
⟡ TEMPORAL SYNC ERROR ⟡
Kael exhaled slowly.
"Not again," he muttered.
He blinked twice, bringing up his internal interface. Time readouts cascaded down his vision—local, planetary, system-standard.
None of them matched.
His apartment lights flickered.
Outside, a transit drone stalled midair, hovering unnaturally still before jerking forward in a stuttered burst. Far below, a crowd gathered in the street, their voices rising in confusion, then fear.
Kael's implant chimed again.
⟡ WARNING: MEMORY DESYNC DETECTED ⟡
He closed his eyes.
The sensation came immediately—a pressure behind his forehead, as if someone were pushing fingers into his thoughts and twisting. Images flashed uninvited.
A corridor bathed in red emergency light.
A woman screaming his name.
Blood floating, not falling.
Kael staggered back, hand slamming against the glass door.
"No," he whispered. "You're not real. Not yet."
He had learned to recognize these episodes. Temporal bleed-throughs. Echoes from futures that should not exist.
And yet… they kept happening.
The city sirens wailed.
Not the slow, ceremonial alarms for weather or curfew violations—but sharp, urgent pulses reserved for system-wide threats. The sound clawed at his spine.
Kael grabbed his jacket, fingers moving on instinct. If time was fracturing again, standing still was death.
He stepped inside, sealing the balcony behind him, when the air changed.
It wasn't a sound at first.
It was absence.
The humming of appliances vanished. The distant sirens cut off mid-note. Even the city's constant electromagnetic buzz—something Kael had never consciously noticed—dropped into silence.
The world held its breath.
Then someone knocked.
Kael froze.
No one knocked anymore.
Doors auto-announced visitors. Drones delivered packages. Security systems verified identities before human interaction was even required.
The knock came again.
Three slow taps.
Kael swallowed. His implant screamed warnings he couldn't fully read—data flooding faster than his mind could process.
He approached the door cautiously, palm hovering near the manual override.
"Who is it?" he asked.
A pause.
Then a voice—low, steady, unmistakably human.
"Kael Ardent. If you don't open this door in the next five seconds, the day will reset again."
His blood turned to ice.
"Four," the voice continued calmly.
Kael's hand slammed the override.
The door slid open.
She stood there as if she belonged in the ruin of the moment—dark coat soaked from rain that hadn't been forecast, hair pulled back loosely, eyes sharp and impossibly tired.
Their gazes locked.
The world lurched.
Kael gasped as a surge ripped through him—memories that weren't his, emotions that hit like impact shock.
He saw her bleeding out in his arms.
Saw her pull a trigger with shaking hands.
Saw her walk away without looking back.
She sucked in a breath too, steadying herself against the doorframe.
"So," she said quietly. "This is earlier than last time."
Kael stared. "Do I… know you?"
Something flickered across her face—relief? Pain? Regret?
"All over again," she murmured.
Behind her, the hallway lights strobed, glitching between brightness and darkness.
Kael's implant blared:
⟡ CRITICAL EVENT DETECTED ⟡
⟡ TEMPORAL COLLISION IMMINENT ⟡
"Get inside," Kael said automatically.
She didn't argue.
The door sealed behind her just as the building shuddered violently. Somewhere deep within the structure, metal screamed.
The woman shrugged out of her coat, scanning the apartment with quick, practiced movements, as though she had been here before.
"You're three minutes behind schedule," she said.
"My schedule?" Kael snapped. "You broke into my apartment during a city-wide anomaly and you're—"
"Lyra Vale," she interrupted. "And you're about to watch the world fail its first integrity check."
As if summoned by her words, the windows went dark.
Not dim.
Gone.
Beyond the glass, the city dissolved into blackness—as though Axiom City had been erased and replaced with void.
Kael's chest tightened.
"That's not possible," he said.
Lyra moved closer to the window, eyes narrowed. "It wasn't last time either."
Last time.
Kael turned to her sharply. "You keep saying that."
She finally looked at him fully, and for a moment her composure cracked.
"Because this isn't the first run," she said. "It's the cleanest one so far."
A deep, resonant crack echoed through the apartment, like reality snapping a bone back into place.
The darkness outside fractured.
The city flickered back into existence—but wrong.
Buildings were misaligned, overlapping in impossible angles. Streets folded into themselves. A train rail curved upward into the sky, frozen mid-collapse.
People were screaming now.
Kael's implant overloaded, flooding him with alerts before cutting out entirely.
Silence returned—heavy and suffocating.
Lyra stepped closer to him.
"Listen to me carefully," she said. "In the next sixty seconds, time will attempt to correct itself. Most people won't notice. Some will forget. A few will die."
"And us?" Kael asked.
Her gaze softened.
"We're anomalies."
The floor trembled again, harder this time. Somewhere nearby, glass shattered.
Kael laughed once, sharp and humorless. "You're telling me the universe is breaking, and I'm… what? Special?"
Lyra reached out, fingers brushing his wrist.
The contact sent a jolt through both of them.
Kael gasped as memories slammed into him—real ones this time.
Running through collapsing corridors.
Holding her hand as alarms screamed.
Making a choice he didn't remember making.
Lyra hissed, pulling her hand back.
"Damn it," she whispered. "We're syncing too early."
"What did you do to me?" Kael demanded.
Her jaw tightened.
"I saved you," she said. "Over and over."
The apartment lights flared blinding white.
Outside, the sky fractured into shards of light, time itself tearing like glass.
Lyra met Kael's eyes.
"And every time," she said softly, "the world makes sure I regret it."
The light consumed everything.