The silence was the first thing Jeremy noticed. It wasn’t the peaceful quiet of a suburban neighborhood at three in the morning; it was a pressurized, vacuum sealed void that seemed to suck the oxygen right out of his lungs. He shifted in his bed, the familiar scent of stale coffee and unwashed laundry clinging to the sheets, and reached out to tap his nightstand clock.03:17.He frowned, his thumb pressing against the plastic casing. It was still 03:17. He shook it, a rhythmic, mechanical rattle echoing far too loudly in the oppressive stillness of the room. He climbed out of bed, his bare feet meeting the cold hardwood, and walked toward the window."What the hell?" he muttered, pulling back the heavy curtain.Outside, the world was a high-resolution photograph frozen in amber. A sparrow hung suspended three feet from his window pane, its wings arched in a frantic, mid flight flutter that had been arrested by an invisible hand. A delivery truck down the street was caught in a lurchi

The smell of cold, sterile ozone was the first thing Jeremy felt when he regained consciousness. His body felt like it had been dismantled and put back together by someone who didn’t understand the instructions. He gasped, his lungs hitching on a breath that felt too sharp, too thin.He was sitting up, leaning against a stack of crates that hadn't been there before. Elena was pacing a few feet away. She moved with a liquid, predatory grace, her coat billowing silently in the still air of the basement."You’re awake," she said, not looking at him. "Took you long enough. Your biological clock is sluggish, Jeremy. You need to stop viewing these repairs as a fight and start viewing them as an architecture project."Jeremy wiped a bead of cold sweat from his forehead. "Architecture? My kitchen table turned into a glitching memory, and I nearly died pinning a gravity well to the floor. What is this?"She turned to him, her eyes flashing with that same rhythmic, pixelated blue light he saw i

The silence left by Elena was not the quiet of a settled world; it was a pressurized, waiting void. Jeremy stood alone in the center of the observatory, the dust motes dancing in the cold moonlight. He stared at the spot where she had vanished, his chest heaving, the phantom sensation of her skin against his still burning like a brand across his nerves.He didn't wait. He couldn't.He bolted out of the observatory, his boots crunching on the gravel path. The moment he cleared the dome, he stopped dead. The sky wasn't dark. It was hemorrhaging.A jagged, crimson vein had split the horizon, pulsating with a rhythmic, sickly light that turned the clouds into bruised, swirling tumblers. Where the sky tore, reality itself was unspooling, the clouds dragging behind them long, translucent ribbons of data that looked like tangled fishing line."System," Jeremy breathed, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped animal. "Talk to me. What is that?"The blue terminal flickered into his

The silence in the sedan was thick, but it hummed with the aftershocks of Elena’s confession. Jeremy’s head still rested on her chest, his ear pressed against the frantic rhythm of her heart. Her fingers, no longer tracing the scars on his shoulder, now clutched the back of his neck, her nails digging in just enough to remind him that she was real, solid, here. The scent of ozone and something sharp, like crushed pine needles, clung to her skin, mingling with the heavy, sweet musk of their shared release.“From the world that ended before this one,” Jeremy repeated, his voice barely a whisper against her collarbone. He felt the words resonate through her, a tremor running through her tense muscles. “What does that even mean, Elena? Were you… always like this?”She shifted, pulling him tighter against her for a moment before gently pushing him up. The sudden loss of contact left him cold, exposed. She sat up, her movements fluid and practiced, her eyes scanning the broken culvert, ever