The warehouse echoed with silence.
Not the peaceful kind. The apocalyptic kind. The kind that made your footsteps feel like crimes.
Aidan moved carefully between rusted shipping containers and cracked concrete pillars, one hand on the wall to steady himself. His ribs still ached from the fall—if it had even been a fall. Maybe it was more like a… dimensional slap? He didn't know. Physics had given up about thirty minutes ago, and honestly, so had he.
He was hungry. He was tired. His mouth tasted like static. And he was pretty sure his right shoe was dissolving.
"Okay," he muttered. "Let's recap. Accidentally ran weird code. Got multiverse-yeeted. Chased by drone cops. Rescued-slash-kidnapped by some girl who punches universes. Left in a smoldering ghost-town. This is fine. This is all very—fine."
He reached for his phone out of sheer habit, even knowing it was fried. The screen was still spiderwebbed, half-melted. When he pressed the power button, it made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a dying hamster.
Aidan sighed.
No food. No internet. No clue where—or when—he was.
He turned a corner into another section of the wreckage.
This one looked like a mall food court had exploded. Bent tables, torn umbrellas, scorched signage in at least three languages. One charred banner still flapped in the wind:
WELCOME TO THE FUTURE OF FLAVOR!
He dug through a toppled kiosk. Found a bag of something that used to be chips, maybe. He sniffed it. Decided not to open that bag. Ever.
The silence tightened.
He paused.
Something was wrong with the air. Not colder—just… heavier. Like it had suddenly learned how to hold a grudge.
Then he saw it.
A glint of metal between the shadows. Not part of the wreckage—moving.
Before he could react, a net of blue energy snapped around his legs, yanking them out from under him.
Aidan hit the ground hard.
"HEY—WHAT THE—"
Three figures dropped from the scaffolding above him like vultures in hooded armor. Each wore patchwork gear—half scavenger, half SWAT team. Their masks glowed faintly with shifting digital faces: one a cartoon skull, another static bars, the last a clock counting down.
"Dim-scan locked," the first one said. "Variant confirmed."
"Pulse signature bleeding. Class unknown."
"Juno's gonna love this one."
Aidan tried to scramble away, but one of them hit him with a low-voltage baton. Pain exploded across his spine, and the world tilted sideways.
"Wait—hold up—not hostile!" he gasped, grabbing at the air. "Just—confused—hungry—definitely not worth—"
Everything went black.
The first thing Aidan noticed when he came to—aside from the pounding in his skull—was the hum.
Not the high-pitched whine of a drone. A deeper, thrumming mechanical heartbeat, like a room filled with old machines trying to remember how to breathe.
Then came the smell: solder, ozone, and something burnt that might once have been pizza.
He blinked.
A single flickering bulb swung above him, casting stuttering shadows across rusted columns and walls covered in wires, broken consoles, and half-dismantled tech.
A subway station. Or it used to be.
Now it looked like a junkyard had made love to a hacker's basement.
Aidan shifted—and realized his wrists were tied to the arms of a metal chair.
"Okay," he rasped. "This is… a new low."
Footsteps echoed.
Someone stepped into the light.
She looked like she'd built her outfit out of three different timelines: black exo-pants scorched at the cuffs, a chest plate with the remains of a Stark logo scratched off, fingerless gloves wired into a bracer that blinked softly. Her dark hair was tied up in a messy braid. One side of her face was streaked with oil and dirt. The look in her eyes said: Don't try me.
She glanced down at a device on her wrist, tapped a few things, then looked at him.
"Name," she said.
Aidan blinked. "I—what?"
"Name. Now."
"…Aidan. Aidan Cross. Not a threat. Unless mild sarcasm offends you."
She didn't smile. "What timeline are you from?"
"Mine?"
Her jaw tightened. "Okay. Let's try again. Origin dimension. Anchor frequency. Anything that tells me why you were bleeding signal like a busted TVA collar."
"I have no idea what you're talking about! I was running code! Just some weird multiverse sim I found online, and then next thing I know—boom. Light show. Reality punch. Now I'm tied up in a subway station being interrogated by… you. Which, no offense, is not how I imagined dying."
She studied him for a long second, then sighed and holstered the tool in her hand.
"Name's Juno Reyes. I run salvage ops out here."
"Cool. So… you kidnap people as a side hustle?"
She ignored him.
"You're lucky my crew found you first. D.O.D.C. would've processed you through a wall."
"Yeah, I met their drones. Very shooty. Not big on hospitality."
Juno moved to a nearby workbench and picked up a piece of tech—what looked like a Pym Particle lens welded to a Vibranium socket. She turned it in her hand, then looked back at him.
"You look normal," she said. "But you're not. My scanners flagged your energy field before we even touched you. You're leaking multiversal bleed. That's not something you just… get."
"I don't have an energy field. I have anxiety and a student loan and a phone charger that sparks when I plug it in."
She raised a brow. "Cute. But whatever you did—opened, triggered, ran—that signal you activated? It's dirty. Unstable. And people are going to start hunting it."
"…People like you?"
Juno gave a tight smile. "Nah. I prefer to sell the problem before it explodes."
Then she walked over and flipped on a screen behind him—showing his face surrounded by swirling data and a pulsing red outline labeled:
> STATUS: UNCLASSIFIED NEXUS VARIANT
STABILITY INDEX: 12%
RENDER THREAT RATING: UNKNOWN / EXPERIMENTAL
Aidan's stomach dropped.
Juno leaned in.
"So tell me, Glitch-boy… what exactly are you?"
Aidan squinted at the display behind him, the red glow pulsing like a warning label on an unstable bomb.
"Nexus variant," he muttered. "That… sounds important."
Juno was already rummaging through a side cabinet, pulling out a gauntlet-sized device shaped like a warped tuning fork. Its edges shimmered, and exposed circuits sparked faintly where someone had jury-rigged alien alloys into the core.
"What are you doing?" Aidan asked, craning his neck to watch her.
"Running a proper scan," she said. "The portable unit only gave me the headline. I want to see the fine print."
She snapped the device into place on her wrist, locked it with a hiss, then approached him like a doctor who hated her job. With a flick of her fingers, it powered up. Pale green light washed over Aidan's chest, forming a lattice grid that scanned his body in slow, vertical sweeps.
"I should mention," Aidan said nervously, "I'm allergic to invasive diagnostics."
Juno ignored him, eyes locked on the readings streaming across her bracer.
She tilted her head.
"…Huh."
"What does 'huh' mean? Is it the good kind of 'huh' or the 'this guy's about to explode' kind of 'huh'?"
Her face was still, but the tension in her shoulders betrayed her thoughts.
"You've got a fracture signature I've never seen before," she muttered. "It's like... something halfway between a timeline remnant and a phase echo. But it's tethered to nothing."
"I usually try not to be tethered to things," Aidan said. "Commitment issues."
She didn't laugh.
"There's more," she continued, tapping rapidly on the scanner. "Your readings are pinging against at least three cataloged dimensional frequencies. You're not from just one universe—you're reading like you've been… smeared across several."
Aidan blinked. "That's not a thing people can be. Right?"
"Exactly."
She stepped back, powered down the scanner, and frowned at him like he was a math problem she regretted starting.
"You're not a sorcerer. Not enhanced. Not gamma. Not mutant. Not even tech-augmented. But you're mutating."
His mouth went dry. "Mutating how?"
"Can't tell. Not yet. The bleed's fresh—whatever brought you here left a tear in your quantum signature. You're not stable. You're not complete."
"Wow," Aidan said. "You're great at pep talks."
She finally met his eyes. "If someone doesn't figure out what you are soon, you're gonna start bending reality just by breathing. You're a leak in the timeline, Glitch-boy. And leaks get sealed."
Aidan swallowed.
He didn't fully understand what any of that meant—but he understood the look in her eyes.
She didn't think he was just a problem.
She thought he was dangerous.
Juno powered down the scanner with a sharp hiss, locking its jagged prongs back into the wrist mount.
Then, without ceremony, she walked behind Aidan and—click—unlatched his wrist cuffs.
He blinked, rubbing at his sore wrists. "So… you're not going to sell me to space bounty hunters?"
"I thought about it," she said, crossing the room to a cluttered supply shelf. "But people don't pay good creds for anomalies they can't cage. You're too unstable. Too weird. That makes you interesting."
She tossed him a bottle of water. The label had long since faded into obscurity.
Aidan caught it, hesitated. "Is this radioactive?"
Juno rolled her eyes. "Everything is, these days."
He cracked the cap and drank anyway. It tasted like regret and metal.
"So," he said, wiping his mouth, "what now? You let me go and I get zapped into a puddle by timeline cops?"
Juno leaned against a table, arms crossed. "You're leaking energy like a broken arc reactor. Anyone with a sensor grid within fifty blocks already knows you're here. The only reason you're still breathing is because most of them don't believe anything good comes from investigating a live Nexus ping."
Aidan winced. "Comforting."
She nodded toward a map projected on the wall behind her. It flickered between blueprints of the city and patches labeled UNSTABLE, INCURSION-RISK, and NO-FLY. One section glowed yellow: a circular building half-buried in digital static.
"I need to make a run," Juno said. "A cluster of anomaly wreckage just dropped near Midtown. Clean. Unpicked. Might be old Illuminati tech."
"And you want me to help?"
"You owe me," she said simply. "You're not dead. That counts for something."
"Technically I didn't ask to be rescued."
"Technically, I didn't ask to waste time babysitting a physics glitch with no exit strategy."
Aidan opened his mouth, then closed it. "...Fair."
Juno turned back to her workstation, grabbing a strange-looking rifle with glowing tubes running down its spine. She slung it over her shoulder and looked at him again—not quite cold now. Just wary. Calculating.
"You're not my responsibility," she said. "But you are…interesting. And if I figure out what makes you tick, maybe it'll be worth something."
"And if I explode?"
"I'll sell your remains for parts."
A beat.
"...You're joking," he said.
She stared.
"Ish," she replied.
Aidan followed Juno through a narrow hallway lit by hanging cables and jury-rigged lanterns. The station was bigger than it looked—sublevels, crawlspaces, flickering monitors mounted to cracked tiles. If Doomsday Preppers had a love child with Tony Stark's garage, it would look like this.
"Does everyone down here build their secret lairs in abandoned infrastructure?" he muttered. "Or is that just a multiversal trend?"
Juno didn't answer. She tossed him a beat-up jacket from a hook by the exit—slightly armored, slightly scorched.
"Put that on," she said. "It's cold outside."
He slipped into it, surprised by how heavy it was. The shoulder had a faded insignia—some kind of hybrid between a SHIELD logo and something written in Kree glyphs.
"So," he tried, "this scavenging thing... you do it often?"
"Every day I want to eat," she said, strapping a belt of tools across her chest.
"And this area we're going to? Totally safe, right?"
"Not even slightly. It's a fracture site. Temporal currents, dimensional warps, reality feedback loops. Bring your best instincts. And don't touch anything that hums unless I say so."
"Cool," Aidan said. "So just a normal Tuesday."
She turned sharply and looked him in the eye.
"You don't trust me," she said. Not a question.
"I don't know you."
"Good. Keep it that way."
He frowned. "So... why let me come?"
"Because," she said, loading a charge into her rifle with a satisfying click, "you glow. And sometimes glowing things attract monsters before they attract profit."
They reached the edge of the station. The tunnel ahead was blocked off with a sliding panel of plasma-welded scrap metal. She hit a button on a nearby panel—something beeped—and the barrier rolled open with a metallic groan.
On the other side: night.
Not just night—twisted night. The city above was visible through a distant storm grate: purple-black skies, power lines arcing with stray electricity, buildings leaning into one another like they were tired of holding form. Somewhere in the distance, something howled.
Juno stepped into it like she was walking into a grocery store.
Aidan hesitated—then followed.
Because what else could he do?
She had the knowledge. The scanner. The tech. The rifle.
He had… questions.
And maybe—just maybe—the beginning of something even more dangerous.
Answers.