The world cracked at 3:17 a.m.

  Not with a sound, not with light or violence, but with a shift.

  Like the floor beneath reality gave out for a second—and snapped back, crooked.

  Lena Rowe woke in her bed screaming, drenched in sweat.

  Her window showed the sunrise.

  So did her clock.

  But so did her phone.

  And her wristband.

  And the digital calendar on her wall.

  Each one read a different date.

  She reached for her journal—her anchor. Her handwriting was still there… but entire entries were missing. Some repeated. Some were in words she didn’t remember writing. One sentence scrawled itself across four separate pages:

  “You’ve been here before, just not this way.”

  In the command center, Commander Marr stared at the surveillance feed, jaw tight.

  There were now two versions of the Atrium on-screen.

  One—normal.

  The other—dim, overgrown with vines, vines that shouldn’t exist underground, and people that flickered like poor reception.

  “Loopback projections are crossing,” a tech stammered.

  “What does that mean?” Marr growled.

  “It means… we're leaking.”

  Sublevel 3 was sealed.

  Watts hadn’t spoken since Subject 9’s escape. But now, he stood barefoot in the core observation chamber, arms streaked with ink—his own ink.

  Not dripping… not painted.

  Grown.

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  He whispered to the glass: “It’s thinning.”

  The core pulsed in rhythm.

  Watts stepped forward and pressed his forehead to the containment shell.

  And whispered:

  “I remember dying.”

  The core responded with a hum that sounded like a memory.

  In the east wing, researchers found another version of Dr. Voss.

  She was dead.

  A bullet through the skull.

  But her face wasn’t quite right—too many wrinkles, a scar across her chin. DNA matched her at 91. She was only 56.

  Her badge read: Dr. Seraphina Voss – Project Eternum Directive: Erase Test Cycle 33.

  Reality began folding at the edges.

  Lena walked down a hallway and found herself in the same hallway—again.

  She turned left, then right—only to enter the same lab, with the same people, repeating the same motion.

  Then she blinked—

  —and they were gone.

  She was alone.

  Alarms screamed in her head, but the room was silent.

  When she looked in the mirror, her reflection stared at her with eyes two seconds too slow.

  And mouthed something she hadn't said.

  Elsewhere, soldiers reported seeing multiple versions of Marr.

  One in full gear. One in bloodied fatigues. One pale as death, mumbling about a battle that hadn’t happened.

  “General Jones is dead,” he kept saying. “We died at Blacksite Orion. We weren’t supposed to wake up again.”

  Except Blacksite Orion didn’t exist. Not yet.

  In the control room, all clocks froze.

  Then began counting backward.

  Lena found Watts in a quiet corridor. He was crouched by a flickering panel, scribbling equations on the wall with his finger—leaving ink trails that crawled on their own.

  “You said it’s thinning,” she said.

  He looked at her. His eyes were different. No whites. Just liquid black.

  “You’re bleeding through,” he whispered.

  “Me?”

  “You… Subject 9… Voss… Me... Everyone. We’re overlapping. We’re becoming what’s left behind when time doesn’t know who to listen to.”

  Her voice trembled. “Can we stop it?”

  Watts smiled—sad. Far too old for his face.

  “We already didn’t.”

  The Atrium trembled.

  Floors shifted beneath footsteps that hadn’t been made yet.

  Doors opened into rooms that no longer existed.

  And in the center of it all, the Temporal Core began to distort—stretching and pulsing like a dying star.

  A loud crack echoed through the base. A sound with no direction.

  And then—

  silence.

  Lena stepped into the war room.

  Everything was frozen.

  People. Screens. Even the dust in the air.

  And then—a ripple.

  A soft hum that moved through the room like water.

  The walls flickered.

  In an instant, she stood in a different version of the room.

  Same table.

  Same chairs.

  But now: blood on the walls.

  A name carved into the steel:

  “L. Rowe: ERROR CYCLE 23-B”

  Then, a voice behind her.

  Not Watts.

  Not Marr.

  Not Voss.

  “You’re the crack.”

  She turned.

  No one was there.

  Only a circle drawn in ink—pulsing like a heartbeat.

  Back in the command center, Marr issued the order.

  “Lock down every sector. I don’t care what protocol says—no one enters Sublevel 3. And someone find Watts.”

  “He’s gone,” the tech whispered.

  “Gone where?”

  She turned the screen.

  And there he was.

  Inside the Temporal Core.

  Standing.

  Smiling.

  Alone.