Everything went to hell.
Lila was flung backward like a rag doll, her body slamming into the emergency padding with a force that drove the air from her lungs. The neural interface ripped from her skull with a wet, tearing sensation that made her scream—like someone had hooked electrodes to her brain and yanked. Blood filled her mouth, copper-bitter and warm, and through tears that burned like acid, she watched reality have a complete breakdown around the containment chamber.
The rift man—the impossible man from 1822—materialized solid and real, his brass buttons catching laboratory light as he crashed across polished deck plating that sparked where his boots scraped metal.
"EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS ENGAGED!" ARIA was screaming now. "TEMPORAL ANOMALY DETECTED! EVACUATE SECTOR SEVEN IMMEDIATELY, EVERYONE!"
Red lights were flashing everywhere, and the whole situation was starting to feel like a horror movie. The rift was still there, still throbbing, still very much not following any of the safety protocols Lila had spent two years writing.
She tried to stand. Her legs were jelly. This was not good. This was very, very bad. Everything she knew about physics said this was not possible. But there was a man from 1822 passed out on her lab floor, so apparently physics could kiss her ass.
"Reyes!" Khatri was bleeding from his forehead, his spotless uniform torn. For the first time in his life, he really looked scared. "The containment field is failing! We've got minutes perhaps before—"
A sound like tearing cloth, and they both looked to see cracks spread across the viewing portal. Not just cracks in the glass. Cracks in space itself. Little lightning bolts of pure wrongness that arced with energy.
"The rift is collapsing," Lila said, her brain struggling to comprehend what was happening even as she wanted to run. "Without the proper calculations, it's going to—"
" Collapse," Khatri finished. He stumbled to the emergency panel and struck the scanner with his palm. "I'm sealing off the whole station. We need to contain this before it propagates."
The man on the floor groaned.
They both froze. For all their talking about time travel theory, they'd never really thought through this moment. What do you do when the person actually shows up?
Lila moved on autopilot, kneeling next to the stranger. Up close, she saw what the rift had hidden. His coat was pure wool, hand-stitched like they didn't make it anymore. His skin was weathered from the outside - not recycled air, but honest-to-God outside. Dark hair fell across his forehead, and when his eyes opened, they were brown as Earth dirt. She hadn't seen real dirt in years.
"Where." His voice rasped, with an accent she couldn't quite place. Old British, maybe? From the time when they still had an empire. "What in God's name."
"Don't move," she said instinctively, then felt how stupid that was. The man had just time-traveled. Telling him not to move was like telling water not to be wet. "You're safe. Kind of. I mean, we're all doomed, but you're not going to die immediately—"
"Lila!" Khatri yelled. The cracks in reality were widening, creeping across the walls like frozen lightning. "We have to go. NOW!"
Her hand closed around the stranger's wrist. As soon as her skin touched his, the world skewed sideways.
—cannon fire and sea spray, shouting against the wind—
—recycled air and life support hum, floating in the dark alone—
—a woman laughing in a garden, roses all around—
—equations and silence and being the only one who knew—
Lila tried to step back, but he held fast. His eyes were open with the same surprise she was feeling. As if they'd just seen pieces of each other's lives.
"You," he whispered, and she could tell he didn't just mean 'you're the woman standing here in front of me.' "You're the woman from my dreams. The one with the stars. I thought I was losing my mind."
"Temporal entanglement," she whispered. Her rational mind was trying to comprehend even as her heart was racing. "The rift didn't merely move you through time. It connected us. Our minds, our memories—"
"Enough!" Khatri was trying to pull her to her feet. "Security's coming. If they get their hands on him - a man with no ID, no records, no citizenship status - they'll kill him and ask questions later. We have to—"
The door slammed open.
But it was not security. Three people in full environmental suits charged in, faces hidden behind mirrored visors. They moved like soldiers and carried guns that were most definitely not station-issue.
"Dr. Reyes," the commander said, voice all icy and spooky. "By order of the Temporal Oversight Committee, you're under arrest for violation of the Chrono-Stability Act. Step away from the anomaly."
"Temporal what?" Khatri was baffled. "There is no such committee. I'd know if—"
The commander whirled around and shot Khatri with some kind of blue energy beam. The Director dropped like a rock.
"No!" Lila moved forward, but the stranger - Edmund, her mind supplied, though she had no idea how she knew his name - pulled her back.
"Get back behind me," he commanded, coming to his feet with the kind of fluid ease that was the result of military training. Stranded and out of time by four centuries, Captain Edmund Hartley knew danger when he saw it. "I don't know what's happening, but I know danger."
The leader tilted their head. "Interesting. The anomaly is already showing protective behavior. The bond formed faster than we predicted." They raised their gun. "No difference. Dr. Reyes, you're going to come with us. The anomaly will be terminated."
"Terminated?" Lila's mind was reeling. Who were these people? How did they find out about her experiment? "He's not an anomaly, he's a human!"
"Since 1822," the chief responded coldly. "His presence here is already creating timeline fractures. Look."
They pointed to a wall screen, and Lila's gut twisted. The station schematics showed pockets of temporal weirdness radiating outward from the lab. Time was moving too fast in some places - crew members were aging years in seconds on the security screens. In other places, time had slowed - individuals were stuck like they were in molasses.
"Oh shit," she breathed. "The rift. without calibration, it's destroying the whole station."
"Which is why the anomaly must be deleted," the figure said, finger tightening on the trigger. "And why you, Dr. Reyes, will explain how to end this. The Committee has uses for your genius. Under appropriate control, of course."
Edmund stepped fully in front of her. She could feel that tension in his body, a wound spring ready to release.
"I've survived fifteen years in His Majesty's Navy," he said quietly. "Fought at Trafalgar as a boy. Led boarding parties onto ships twice our size. I'll be damned if I let masked cowards hurt this lady."
"How noble," the figure sneered. "And how futile."
They fired.
But the plasma bolt never hit. The rift surged abruptly, and the air between Edmund and the gun grew all distorty. The bolt simply. disappeared. A second later, it came out of a fissure in the ceiling and hit one of the other suited figures, crashing them into equipment.
"The rift!" Lila understood suddenly. "It's not a door - it's interfering with space-time! Cause and effect are becoming entangled!"
The body on the floor suddenly stood up - not by rising, but by falling backward until they were standing once more. The alarms which had been blaring started to play backward, producing the worst noise Lila had ever heard.
"Retreat!" he yelled, backing away towards the door. "Containment Protocol Seven! Seal the sector and set up for sterilization!"
"Lila's Destroitization?" She stared. She remembered the protocols they'd authored themselves. It was a disaster-level failure of containment-a failure to keep from being infected. They'd eject the whole sector from the station and detonate it. "They're going to destroy the lab!"
The suited figures disappeared through the door, which shut behind them. Emergency bulkheads started to drop, cutting off their route of escape one by one.
Edmund looked at her, and she saw resolve mixed with something else - trust that made no sense since they'd known each other for a whole five minutes. But she'd experienced moments of his life, and he hers. They weren't strangers now, exactly.
"I'm guessing that's bad?" he said with a smile that was completely wrong for the situation and somehow exactly what she needed.
"Catastrophically bad," she confirmed, already moving to the console. Her fingers flew across the controls, trying to locate some way of shutting down the sterilization. "We've got maybe ten minutes before they decompress this sector and vent it into the sun."
"Then let's get moving." Edmund was looking around the lab as though he was planning a battle. "That rift of yours - can it take us anywhere else? Back to my own time, for instance?"
"It's unstable. We could rematerialize anywhere. Anywhen. We could rematerialize inside a star or in empty space. We could arrive before we left and break causality."
"So certain death here, or maybe death there?" He thought about it for a moment. "I've had worse odds."
Another part of the ceiling started phasing in and out, showing them glimpses of the deck above, and the deck above that, and maybe the station's hull, and beyond that the stars themselves, all in the same space at the same time.
"The entire space-time matrix is collapsing," Lila said, awed in spite of the fact that they were going to die. "This isn't just a matter of blowing up the station. If this continues to spread."
"The damage could spread," Edmund finished, and she gazed at him in astonishment. He shrugged. "I don't know your science, but I know chain reactions. Powder magazine blows, takes the ship. Ship blows, cripples the fleet. It's all a matter of scale, right?"
She nodded, impressed. "Unless we stabilize the rift in the next eight minutes, the cascade will engulf beyond the station. All of those ships in dock here, all of the shuttles - they'd be stuck. Thousands of people."
"Then we stabilize it." His tone suggested this wasn't up for discussion, and for some reason she believed him. This man who'd commanded ships in the age of sail was ready to grapple the fundamental forces of the universe to the mat. "What do you need?"
She looked at the rift, then at him, and made a decision contrary to every safety protocol she'd ever written.
"I need to have you trust me," she said. "And I need to have you hold my hand."
He did not hesitate. Their fingers intertwined, and the connection burst into existence. Memories flowed between them - not untamed this time, but purposeful. She showed him the equations, the gruesome math of time itself. He showed her star navigation, the instinctive understanding of forces and balance that allowed wooden vessels to stay seaworthy in storms.
Side by side, they walked toward the rift.
"This is madness," she snarled.
"Sanity's overrated," Edmund replied. "Now, regarding fixing reality."
The sterilization timer on the wall was at six minutes. The lab around them kept distorting - equipment aging decades in seconds, then snapping back to new, walls opaque one moment and transparent the next to show past and future versions of the same room.
Lila squeezed Edmund's hand and steeled herself to do what would either murder everyone aboard the station or rescue everyone aboard - including the impossible man who'd crashed into her life and somehow gotten her to believe in something beyond math.
"On three," she said.
"On three," he echoed.
They jumped into the rift just as explosions started tearing through the hull behind them