Aidan stumbled past a rusted-out yellow cab half-merged into the street, his legs sore, his brain in open revolt.
The city was wrong.
He'd walked ten minutes—at least, he thought it was ten; time felt fuzzy here—and nothing looked stable. The architecture kept shifting. One moment he was walking by a deli, the next it became a S.H.I.E.L.D. recruitment center. A movie theater marquee flickered between Shang-Chi 2 and Captain America: The Musical in a language that looked like corrupted Wakandan glyphs.
He passed a convenience store with a busted neon sign that buzzed like an insect swarm. It read:
> MART-VEL'S UNREALITY
Snacks Across Time!
"I'm dead," he muttered to himself, palms sweating. "Or high. Or in a coma. Or I crashed into the world's most immersive Comic-Con simulation."
A cracked mirror beside a collapsed food truck reflected him back: hoodie torn, dirt smudged across his face, eyes wide and bloodshot. Not a hero. Not even close. Just a guy who spent more time reading Reddit fan theories than going outside.
Something moved above him.
A drone.
He didn't see it clearly at first. It was silent, round, hovering about thirty feet up, like a matte-black eye with concentric rings slowly spinning around its core. A low hum vibrated through the air. Its lens adjusted and fixed directly on him.
Then a soft mechanical voice filtered down:
> "Unrecognized biometric signature detected."
"Dimensional origin: NON-REGISTERED. Variant class: UNKNOWN."
"Alert level raised: PROTOCOL SIX – Unauthorized Entry."
Aidan's stomach turned to ice.
He looked up slowly, hands half-raised like it might mistake him for a confused tourist.
"…I'm sorry," he tried. "I think I—uh—I took a wrong wormhole?"
The drone beeped once.
Then, without further warning, it projected a cone of red light downward—scanning his entire body. Aidan flinched. It didn't hurt, but it felt like someone scraping data off his bones.
Then the voice changed tone—lower, urgent.
> "Tactical enforcement requested. Please remain stationary."
"You are in violation of Multiversal Transit Accord 42-C."
"Okay," Aidan said, backing away. "That's cool. That's fine. Let's not do this. I'll just... leave."
The drone whirred louder. Two more zipped in from opposite rooftops. Each deployed slim, angular panels from their sides—weapon mounts. One charged up with a buzz like a railgun on startup.
Panic surged.
Aidan turned and ran.
"Bad plan! Bad plan!" he shouted, tripping over a fallen mailbox, nearly eating curb. He scrambled up, heart pounding like an EDM drop inside his skull.
Behind him, the drones began to follow.
No alarms. No sirens.
Just that soft, mechanical voice calmly announcing:
> "RUNNING INTERCEPTION PROTOCOL. VARIANT MUST BE CONTAINED."
Aidan sprinted across the cracked pavement, lungs burning, the sounds of hover-thrusters whining just overhead. He ducked under a half-collapsed scaffold, knocking over a milk crate tower as he barreled into a narrow alley.
The moment he turned the corner, he froze.
Dead end.
"Of course it is," he panted, doubling over, trying to breathe around the adrenaline firestorm in his chest.
A thin beam of red light slid across his back.
He spun.
Three of the drones now hovered at the mouth of the alley—no louder than a whisper, yet radiating menace. Each one was sleek, all matte black and glowing red accents, like Stark tech made by people with no sense of humor.
From within the central drone came a booming, digitized voice.
> "Unauthorized variant. State your identity."
Aidan threw his hands up. "Aidan Cross. Freelance coder. Still paying off student loans. Definitely not a threat unless you count sarcasm."
> "Dimension of origin?"
"I don't—I don't have a dimension of origin, okay? I was in my apartment five minutes ago running code I probably shouldn't've—"
> "Non-coherent multiversal pattern. Nexus destabilizer flagged. Classification: threat-level ambiguous."
"Wait, what? Threat level ambiguous? That's not a real category!"
One of the drones began unfolding—panels rotating, arms extending. From its side, a tube-shaped attachment clicked into place. At the tip: a sparking emitter coil glowing blue.
Aidan took a step back. "Okay, hold up! Can't we talk about this? I'm not a villain. I don't even jaywalk!"
The weapon ignited.
A pulse of blue-white energy surged from the barrel, cracking the air as it missed his shoulder by inches and blew a hole clean through the dumpster behind him.
"OKAY!" Aidan yelped. "WE'RE SHOOTING NOW! THIS IS HAPPENING!"
Another drone fired. He dove sideways, rolled into a pile of ash-coated trash bags, and kept crawling.
His ears rang from the blast. The air sizzled with ozone. The whole alley lit up in rapid flashes as the bots advanced, aiming with mechanical precision.
> "Subject is noncompliant. Escalating to suppression mode."
"Why do they always say suppression mode right before they tase people?!" he shouted, scrambling to his feet again and bolting toward the alley wall.
No exit.
Unless…
He grabbed a twisted metal fire escape ladder and launched himself upward, missing the first rung, slipping—then catching himself on the second try. A stun blast grazed the wall beside his head, leaving a molten scar on the bricks.
Aidan didn't look back.
He climbed like his life depended on it.
Because it did.
By the time Aidan reached the roof, his hoodie was soaked with sweat and his legs were screaming.
He didn't stop to admire the view.
Not that he could.
From this height, New York looked like it had lost an argument with a cosmic blender. Whole blocks shimmered like mirages, buildings ghosting in and out of existence, overlapping with alternate designs. The Empire State Building shifted between its classic spire and a twisting tower of black glass, as if two versions of it were fighting for dominance.
In the sky, a tear hovered.
Like someone had slashed the atmosphere open and forgotten to stitch it back up. Purple light bled through the crack, revealing glimpses of something vast beyond—a swirl of stars and machines and distant, circling structures that made Aidan feel nauseous just looking at them.
"Nope," he gasped. "Nope nope nope, keep running, don't look at the cosmic terror."
Behind him, the drones hissed louder, engines winding as they rose toward the rooftop.
He bolted across the roof, shoes scraping tar paper and gravel. A narrow gangplank connected one building to another—clearly not up to code, and very much not meant for sprinting humans.
He took it anyway.
The second rooftop dipped sharply under his weight. He stumbled, almost tumbled down a skylight, then kept going, dodging behind a rusted satellite dish that kept flickering between a dish and a pair of old SHIELD antennae.
"Why is everything glitching?!"
He ducked through a door into a stairwell that shouldn't have existed—literally shouldn't have. The building exterior was only one story, but the inside was a four-floor walk-up. He pounded down the stairs as reality shifted with every level.
One floor: the walls covered in vines.
Next floor: a '70s-style carpeted hallway with disco music playing faintly from a broken speaker.
Next: blank white, sterile, flickering like a horror game tutorial.
He burst out onto street level again, somewhere else entirely.
The signs around him flickered between languages—Korean, Russian, alien glyphs, a quick flash of Quinjetwork script.
The graffiti on the alley wall showed Spider-Man swinging—but when Aidan blinked, the spray-painted Peter morphed into Miles, then into a six-armed variant, then something else.
He kept running.
His lungs burned. His vision swam.
And the street ahead... looped?
He stopped.
No way.
He turned around—and saw the same looping alley behind him.
"Okay," he panted, leaning against a mailbox that smelled like burnt plastic, "either I'm hallucinating, or this city has non-Euclidean geometry problems."
Above, the drones regrouped.
One descended. It didn't say anything this time. It just extended a new attachment.
This one didn't glow.
It spun.
"Oh hell no," Aidan whispered.
Then—CRACK—the sound of something ripping through space exploded behind him.
A star-shaped portal burst open mid-air.
And a boot came flying through it—straight into the drone.
The drone jerked in midair—its sensor eye flaring red—just before a glowing boot cracked across its chassis with a thunderous crunch. Sparks burst in every direction. It spun violently and slammed into the side of a warped vending machine, where it twitched once and went still.
Aidan flinched back, covering his face.
The air sizzled as the portal behind the boot widened—shaped like a five-pointed star, all white-blue light around a jagged tear in space. The energy coming off it was wrong, like it was chewing the air just by existing.
And then someone stepped out of it.
Black leather jacket. Faded jeans. Short-cut dark hair. Eyes sharp enough to cut drywall. She didn't walk through the portal—she stalked through it, radiating annoyed confidence like she'd just punched someone through a wall two minutes ago and wasn't done yet.
She cracked her knuckles, glanced at the downed drone, and said, "Cheap knockoffs."
Aidan blinked. "What the hell—"
She turned to him sharply. "You."
He froze.
She marched over, grabbed the front of his hoodie, and yanked him an inch off the ground with one hand. "You are not supposed to be here, variant-boy. You have zero subtlety, you know that?"
"Hey! I didn't—okay—first of all, ow. Second, who the hell are you?!"
"America. And you're lucky I was two blocks over punching a were-hydra. Now shut up."
Behind them, another drone rose from behind a parked car—its core flashing bright red.
America dropped him, spun, and launched her fist straight into the air.
Another star-shaped explosion.
The drone folded around her punch and vanished through the portal she'd created mid-strike—like she'd just punched it into another universe.
Aidan stared. "Did you just—what—where did it go?!"
"Somewhere less fun than here," she muttered, already opening another portal with a casual stomp of her boot. Another star cracked open in the air beside them.
"You coming or not?"
He hesitated. "I… I don't even know what's happening."
"You're glowing like a multiversal birthday candle. You're being hunted. And this timeline's unstable enough without your kind walking around."
"My kind?"
"Variants," she said, grabbing his sleeve. "You fell in. Now stay alive."
She yanked him through.
The star collapsed behind them.
The portal spat them out midair.
Aidan landed on a concrete floor with a loud thud, the wind knocked clean out of him. America landed in a crouch beside him like she'd done it a thousand times—which, he figured, she probably had.
He groaned. "Okay. Ow. That's two interdimensional slams in one day. I'm starting to take this personally."
She ignored him, scanning the dark warehouse around them. It was massive, hollow, maybe once an aircraft hangar or Stark tech shipping center. Now it was blackened, burned, and silent. Holes in the ceiling let shafts of weak daylight through, filtering down through dust motes like dying stars.
Aidan pushed himself up onto one elbow. "Okay. Can we please pause and do the part where someone explains what's going on? Because I'm pretty sure I just broke twelve laws of physics, maybe fourteen."
America looked at him. "You fell through. That's all I know."
"Fell through what? The multiverse?! This place looks like a comic book that got chewed up and spit out."
"Exactly."
She walked to the far wall, tapped something into a small circular device on her belt, and opened another portal—quieter this time, but just as bright. A swirling window into somewhere else—green mountains, maybe. Somewhere calm.
"Wait—where are you going?" Aidan called after her.
She paused in the threshold, half-turned back. Her face was unreadable. "I can't stay. You're not supposed to be here, and I've got bigger problems right now."
"But I don't know anything. I don't even know where here is!"
"Earth 199999-F fracture zone," she said. "One of the unstable ones. Keep your head down. D.O.D.C. will be looking for you. And others."
"What others?!"
She stepped halfway into the star-portal. "If I find you again, it'll mean you're still alive. That's the first step."
"That's not helpful! What am I supposed to do?!"
America met his eyes.
"For now?" she said, and her voice softened just a touch.
"Don't die."
Then she was gone.
The portal snapped shut.
And Aidan Cross was alone again—in a ruined timeline that didn't want him, didn't trust him, and definitely wasn't finished with him.