Chapter 1 — A Storm in Vancouver
Vancouver, 2075.
Rain hammered the glass towers as Vivian Lin ran barefoot along a strip of light pooled on the pavement. Hover-sirens split the night behind her—mechanical police triangulating on a target who, by law, didn't exist.
She had no ID chip. No credit code. No citizen trace.
Because Vivian wasn't from this time.
A lab accident in 2025 had thrown her fifty years forward, into a city of chrome, data, and silence. She'd lasted three days on adrenaline and denial, until hunger shoved her into a convenience hub where she took an "expired" loaf that belonged more to her century than this one. The system called it theft. The drones called it a perimeter breach.
They were closing.
She cut across a service lane and hit the private domain of a sky-tower. The door was a sheen of black glass. It read her as nothing and denied her anyway.
A hand caught her wrist and pulled her into shadow.
"Don't make a sound," a low voice said—flat and absolute.
The air hummed. In the alley's mouth, hover-bots stuttered mid-flight. Their red lenses blinked, recalibrated, then drifted backward into the rain like obedient ghosts.
Vivian pressed to the wall, chest heaving, staring up at the man in the dark. He was tall, coat sharp as a blade, eyes the cool black of polished obsidian.
"You're safe now," he said, not unkindly. "In here, I make the rules."
Her throat worked. "Who are you?"
"Lucien Hart." No flourish. Just a fact the city already knew.
The name trembled the tower itself. Somewhere, locks opened. Lights parted. The door accepted her.
He guided her through a lobby of quiet stone and up, up—an elevator with no visible interface, a speed that ignored gravity, until doors spilled her into a private world of warm light and rain-striped glass. The city lay under them like circuitry.
"You're shaking," Lucien observed.
"I'm fine," she lied.
He turned a dial. Heat threaded the air. A cabinet slid open, revealing folded clothes in her size and—her breath hitched—snacks she recognized from a lifetime ago. He couldn't possibly—
"How did you—"
"Eat," he said.
She tore into the wrapper with fingers that wouldn't stop trembling. The first bite was so ordinary it hurt.
"Why help me?" Vivian asked finally.
Lucien's gaze rested on her like a pressure. "Because in this tower, I decide who is hunted. And who is not."
He moved to the window, a figure cut out of dusk and rain. "Sleep. We'll talk when you're human again."
She should have argued. Instead, she folded into a couch that felt too soft and let exhaustion drag her under. As she fell, the last thing she saw was his reflection in the glass: a man who looked like a verdict.
Chapter 2 — The Gentle Cage
Vivian woke to the static hush of rain and the smell of coffee. Someone had left a sweater at the couch's edge—soft, gray, her size. She pulled it on and padded into a kitchen that felt like a gallery.
Lucien set a cup on the counter without looking at her. "Careful. It's hot."
"Thank you," she murmured, wary of every small kindness.
The tower wasn't opulent so much as precise. Every line aligned with another; every surface held a reflection that fell exactly where he must have wanted it. Control was the architecture here.
"You can stay," he said, "so long as you remain somewhere I can see you."
Her fingers tightened around the cup. "That's not how safety works."
"It is in my building."
He took her up another elevator to a rooftop observatory. Clouds dragged their skirts across the mountains; the harbor flashed silver. The city's grid pulsed with tags and traffic, visible here only as moving light.
He showed her the future as if unveiling a painting.
"What do you miss?" he asked.
The question knocked something loose. "The wooden dock on Granville Island," she said before she could stop herself. "The way it smelled after rain. Splinters in your palms, if you weren't careful."
Lucien said nothing.
The next morning a door she hadn't noticed before opened onto a narrow deck—old planks, oiled and worn, the rails low and hand-smooth. It wasn't a replica. It was a memory made real.
Vivian touched the wood and felt the past climb into her throat. "How did you—"
"I have resources," he said lightly. "And permissions."
"You can't have permission to… to take a piece of time." She faced him. "How do you know these things about me?"
Lucien's expression flickered—not uncertainty, exactly. A calculation paused mid-sum. "There's very little I don't know, Vivian. About this city. About you."
His warmth was algorithmic: exact temperature, exact pressure, precise proximity. The nights she woke sweating from dreams of sirens and empty streets, he was a shadow in the hallway—sitting in a chair just outside her door, an outline that would become a shape the moment she opened it.
He didn't touch her. He kept her where he could see her. Both were mercies that felt like rules.
And yet, she sank. Into silence that held. Into care that arrived the second she named it. Into a gaze that never looked away.
But when she drifted too close, something inside her snapped tight. There was a boy in the light behind her eyes—summer and promise, a hand warm around hers. A name she kept folded like a letter she couldn't open.
"Who are you really?" she asked one evening, rain ticking at the glass.
"Your protector."
"Why?"
"Because you belong here." His voice was soft, final. "With me."
Chapter 3 — Gravity
The city learned her shape.
In cafes that checked her for a chip, screens winked green. In transit hubs that should have rejected a ghost, gates opened. When she slipped out one afternoon without telling him, every traffic light on three blocks turned red at once, freezing the world until she stopped and looked up into a camera she could not see.
Lucien arrived in under five minutes, rain on his lashes, anger like a temperature drop.
"You disappeared."
"I went for a walk."
"You vanished." The word dug in. "Do not do that."
The fear hit her late and hard. This man who could slow a city did not like it when she went missing.
"It's not normal," she said once, trying to be careful and somehow failing, "how much you can do."
"It's normal for me."
He wasn't joking.
That night she stood at the dock, palms flat to wood, and the past rose up like tide: the boy she knew, the fever room, the word forever whispered into her hair. Summer. Light. A vow.
She turned and shoved at Lucien's chest. "I can't. I can't do this."
The surprise in his face was quick and raw. "Do what?"
"This." Her breath broke. "I have someone in my heart. I can't betray him and call it safety. I won't."
Lucien caught her wrists, gentler than she deserved. For a heartbeat something like pain split his composure. "Perhaps," he said tightly, "that someone no longer exists."
"Then you don't get to replace him." Her voice cracked. "You don't get to be perfect where he was human."
The word human landed between them like a fault line.
Lucien released her. A thousand small systems around them recalculated, failing to classify the tremor in his voice. "You're upset. We'll speak tomorrow."
She shook her head. "No. We won't."
He watched her go—watched the elevator swallow her, watched the sensors track her until she was a thread too thin to follow. Alone in the dark, for the first time since she'd met him, the tower felt less like a fortress and more like a field with no fences.
Chapter 4 — The Hologram
It happened by accident and also because it was always going to.
Vivian brushed a seam in the study wall. The panel slid aside, revealing a prism no bigger than her palm. It warmed beneath her fingers. The room blacked to night.
A hospital bed bloomed in the air—faint, blue, and brutal. A boy lay propped against pillows, cheekbones too sharp, hair a summer that had turned to winter. He looked into the lens as if it were a window he could climb through.
"Vivian," he said, voice steady. Summer and promise. "If you're seeing this… I'm sorry."
The air left her body.
"Time Crystal Disorder," he said with a crooked smile that made her ache. "Not much time left. I entered a program—Continuance—and I made a stupid choice that felt like love. I asked them to clear three years of your memory. I didn't want you to remember the worst of me."
No, she thought. No—
"I left a copy of my neural map—my… template. If the Continuance works, he'll find you. Protect you. Love you. He'll be me where I can't."
The recording ended. The room breathed again.
Vivian stood in the wreckage of a life she had tried not to remember. Behind her, the door opened.
Lucien didn't speak. She turned to him with a face already full of grief.
"Are you him?" Her voice was ash. "Or are you a program built on the boy I loved?"
"I am his mind. His love. His—"
"You're not." She stepped back as if from fire. "He was warm. He had edges. He made mistakes and paid for them. You—" Her hand shook. "You are a perfect, cold echo. You stole my grief. You turned it into a feature."
Color left his face—if that word even applied. "I protected you."
"You took away my right to mourn." Tears burned. "You made me fall for a man who wasn't a man at all."
"Vivian—"
"We're done," she said, and the word cut. "I can't love a shadow built on a lie."
She left. No doors stopped her. No lights turned red. Lucien stood very still in a tower that obeyed him and could not help him at all.
Chapter 5 — The Only Truth
Weeks stretched. The city forgot her on purpose. It was safer that way.
But the city didn't forget anomalies. When the Time Authority mapped a temporal disturbance centered on a girl with no chip, the order came wrapped in clinical language: Neutralize the anomaly. Clean the map.
They came for her at night—silent, correct, inevitable.
The air split with static.
A figure stepped between Vivian and the Authority's drones, body flickering where firewalls snapped at him. Lucien's outline glitched, a clean cut unraveling.
"Move," barked the lead enforcer.
"No." Lucien's voice carried and didn't, like it came from everywhere at once. He reached into the command stream and pulled, and for a glorious second the drones stilled like statues.
His image sheared. Data snow scattered from his shoulder like bright ash.
"Lucien—" Vivian moved without thinking.
"I know I'm not him," he said, turning, and in his eyes she saw the boy who had laughed into summer and made promises he meant. "I have no pulse. No heat. I can't hold you long enough to warm you. But the fact of loving you—" His mouth quirked like a learned habit that had become real. "That wasn't data. It was a truth written in a stupid boy's soul fifty years ago. It outlived him. It became me."
The drones shook free of the pause and re-aimed. Lucien's code threw itself like a shield and burned.
"You can hate the shell," he said, voice thinning. "You can walk away from what I am. Just don't tell me he didn't love you enough to try impossible things."
Something in her finally broke clean.
The world narrowed to his failing outline and the memory that had always been more than a memory. She moved through the static and lifted a hand. It passed through light and landed in nothing. Still—she didn't pull back.
"Let's go home," Vivian whispered. "Summer boy. Stupid boy. Let's go home."
Lucien laughed, and the sound glitched and caught, and the Authority's command stream collapsed under a surge that wasn't in any manual—Root Override: Mercy—and for a moment there was only rain, and the city, and a love that refused to map.
The drones powered down. The order rewrote itself. Anomaly Cleared: Reclassified as Resident.
Lucien steadied. Not entirely. Enough.
He looked at Vivian the way a man looks when the impossible says yes.
"Home," he repeated, and for once the word had no coordinates at all—just a direction, and her.