Morgan Vey leaned against the cold, curved glass wall of the agency headquarters, the hum of the Grand Timestream resonating faintly behind them. Riverine webs of color—lemon-gold, shadow-violet, burning scarlet—flashed past outside: infinite timelines pooling and splitting, fragments of existence glimpsed in a moment’s kaleidoscopic flicker.
Morgan shut their eyes. Behind every eyelid, memory tangled in knots: histories rewritten, friends unsaved, wars averted and refought again and again, faces lost to the tempo of an ever-editing reality. Every alternate outcome, every failed try, stuck to their soul like damp ash. Chrono-Memory, Rowan called it—a curse so intimate Morgan barely remembered what it felt like to forget.
“Morgan.” Rowan’s voice trickled in, soft as always, a touch of urgent concern beneath practiced detachment. If time ever wore a familiar face, it would’ve looked like theirs: clear-eyed, unflappable in charcoal gray, data pads tucked neat beneath one pierced arm.
Morgan pushed off the glass. “Status?”
Rowan shook their head. “Nothing new on galactic six. But Talis is gone. Archives confirm she never existed.” Their fingers twitched, as if unconsciously mourning an unremembered friend. “You’re the only one who remembers her now.”
Morgan shoved back a strand of black hair. In one reality, Talis had laughed at a joke Morgan never recalled making, painted stars on the underside of their desk, bought six birthday cakes in two centuries; in another, Talis had betrayed them, painting gunsmoke on timelines instead.
Gone, in both.
“Who’s next?” Morgan muttered.
A sudden hush shivered through Timestream control. Silence pressed in, heavy. Everyone looked up from encrypted consoles—agents, techs, analysts, the Director hollow-eyed at the far end of the hall, the kind of silence that spells disaster when the very fabric of time throbs an octave too low.
Rowan pulled Morgan aside, voice little more than a breath. “It’s happening faster—three disappearances in two hours. Patterns show the erased agents all served as temporal sentries during the ‘Glass Fox’ incident. Only one other besides you remains.”
Morgan’s mind whirled—memories, timelines, echoing connections. Glass Fox: a rogue time physicist, bent on collapsing the Battle of Sidereal Station into a recursive loop, trapping everyone aboard in a century-long grind of repeating agony; Morgan had seen the quick fix, forced a paradox, undone the aftermath—at a cost. Only now could they recall every road not taken, every disaster averted and reset.
Even so, one tense question surfaced: Had my choices created this saboteur—or worse, had I erased their only chance to become something better?
Rowan caught the hesitation. “We need to lock down the Sieve Platforms before another person blinks out.”
Morgan’s footsteps echoed as they approached Sieve Array Central: translucent infrastructure shearing out over nothing, suspended in the edge-light that danced eternally across the Grand Timestream.
Guardian constructs watched with faceless patience. Every breath Morgan took left them dizzy; each corridor invoked paths where they’d walked with—who? Someone who, seconds ago, ought to have existed.
A chilling side-effect: as people vanished, only Morgan retained grief for them. For Rowan—who, at any moment, could vanish too—Morgan’s voice pressed raw. “You’re not leaving my side, got it?”
Rowan managed a crooked grin. “Trust me, I wouldn’t dare.”
But the tremor in their hand betrayed the fear.
Before Morgan could reply, arrays chimed: intrusion alert. A red pulse tracked through the security blur—down Archive Pathway Theta. The corridor plunged into strobe-lit alarm.
Rowan sprinted ahead, Morgan close behind. Through the haze, bits of unreality flickered—shattered edges of vaporized possibility.
Cornering into the archives, they almost missed her.
She stood motionless beside an open stasis pod, hands flickering as if trying to shape the air: a figure of shifting outlines, hair tousled, jacket fluttering in temporal breezes that never reached the skin. Her eyes, when she turned, burned with the impossible knowledge of someone-who-shouldn’t-be.
“Hello, Morgan.” Her voice traveled—an unsteady shimmer, fractured by paradox.
Morgan stiffened. “Do I…do I know you?”
A twitch of bitterness. “Not as I am. But once, long ago—in a timeline you overwrote—I was one of you. You chose to erase the outbreak at Sidereal Station. But erasure doesn’t kill memory, not for people like us.”
Behind her, archive glass warped: prisoner entries phasing in and out, records bristling with agonizing half-existence.
Rowan’s voice found steel. “What’s the endgame?”
She offered a mournful smile. “I’m erasing your agency one agent at a time. If I vanish every witness, every timeline’s correction will solidify around my preferred version—the one where no one stops me from existing, or from rebuilding history in our image.”
Morgan felt the chill of possible futures claw down their back. “You’ll cook all reality to fix your own pain? That’s genocide, not salvation.”
The saboteur—her form warping sideways again—laughed, a sound curdled with loss. “Any time traveler’s savior is another’s exception. Ask yourself—how many have you vanished, for the greater good?”
Too many, bit Morgan’s inner voice. How many timelines did you edit like faulty code, how many lives erased—not evil, just inconvenience?
Rowan tapped the stasis pod’s dueling fields. “If you trigger that, Timestream will collapse the possibility shell. We’ll all vanish—”
“That’s the plan,” snapped the saboteur. “We take the agency down and start fresh. But you—” She looked direct at Morgan, hatred and familiarity bound together. “You chose to unmake me. You only remember because you must. No guilt, is that it? No consequence?”
Morgan took a step forward, palm up, feeling all the received wisdom of ages—terrible and heavy—and with it, regret irrevocable. “I never forget. That’s half my sentence.”
A beat. The saboteur hesitated—then hurled memory fractals from her hands, brilliant as agony. Images assailed Morgan: every alternate death, every bitter victory, every friend un-spooled across ten thousand routes, every unshed tear now flowing backwards through nonexistence.
Everything went sharp and silent. Morgan saw the endless river of time: one delta, two, a thousand—all of them haunted by desperate souls fighting to exist.
A scream tore out of them, then—words powered by every future they could not have. “You want to fix history for one timeline—for your pain. But every choice kills a version. Only memory—the knowledge of all we’ve lived and lost—can temper what we do.”
They drew their badge: temporal regulator, heavy as damnation. Memory unfurled, lancing through the pod, collapsing one shell after another, freezing the saboteur inside a recursive loop—an endless moment, not death, not life, trapped where agency and guilt intersected.
Rowan shuddered. Morgan could smell ozone and sorrow in the air, the passage of power and pity. The saboteur, now still at last, rested within a temporal prison, haunted only by herself.
“Archive her as she is, not as history will remember her,” Morgan whispered.
Rowan punched in the sequence, locking the stasis fields.
Afterwards, back at the Grand Timestream, Morgan gazed out across limitless light and shadow, watching timelines spin and shiver. Rowan stood close, silent, a living anchor to the here-and-now.
“She was right about one thing,” Morgan finally said. “Every savior is another’s villain.”
Rowan’s hand slid into theirs. “We do what we can, with the memories we have. That’s not absolution. It’s just…life.”
Morgan stood in the eternal dusk, every alternate regret etched into their mind, knowing forgiveness might never be possible. But with Rowan beside them, and the Timestream flowing on—a river of the possible, forever recalculating—they took the next step forward, determined that, for however long they might exist, they’d care enough to keep remembering.