The hum beneath the observatory floor was not mechanical—it was deeper, older, like a frequency buried under the skin of the world. Duran tightened his grip on the camera. The lens, still fogged from his breath, was aimed squarely at the vertical seam of light pulsing in midair.
Julia stood beside him, half-lit by the breach. Her voice was steady, low. "You'll know when to press it. Just... feel."
"Feel what exactly?" Duran asked, his heart thudding in his chest like it wanted out.
"The shift. The one that doesn't belong to this world."
And then it happened.
The shutter clicked on its own.
A white flash exploded through the room—an unnatural light that swallowed the observatory whole. For a moment, Duran's vision vanished, followed by complete silence. Not the silence of peace, but of absolute displacement.
The light vanished as quickly as it came. The seam in space closed with a hiss, leaving the room dim and oddly sterile, as if it had been bleached of presence.
He blinked.
The observatory had returned to stillness, but it no longer felt the same. Time, once slippery and unsure, now clung to the walls like dust after a storm.
Julia's shoulders dropped, a long breath escaping her. "You stabilized it. The Fold's healing."
Duran glanced down at the screen on his camera. His breath caught.
The photo it had taken—the one he didn't press the shutter for—showed something no camera should have been able to capture. The observatory was there, yes, but inside it were fractured reflections: versions of himself, scattered like ghosts through layers of space. One was older, his beard flecked with gray. Another had blood on his shirt. One stood with Julia in his arms, her face turned up toward him, tear-streaked but smiling.
"What is this?" he asked, barely above a whisper.
Julia stepped closer, her hand brushing his. "Possibilities. All of them true. All of them real. Just... not here."
He couldn't look away. "And you? Which version of you is real?"
"I'm all of them," she said. "But only this one loves you."
He finally turned to her. "Then tell me the truth."
She hesitated. "You're not supposed to know yet."
"I already know too much."
A quiet laugh escaped her, but there was no joy in it. She pulled back, looking toward the ceiling as if something beyond it was calling to her.
"I'm not from this timeline," she said. "Not exactly. I'm what's left when a version of someone breaks through too many timelines and doesn't quite fit into any single one."
"A traveler," he guessed.
She nodded. "An Echo."
He sat down on a cracked bench beneath a rusted telescope. The room still felt charged, like static before lightning. "Why me?"
"Because you saw me before I was meant to be seen. You gave form to something formless. That changes everything."
Duran swallowed, suddenly aware of how small he was in all of this.
And yet... he'd never felt more alive.
That evening, they didn't speak of science or timelines. They walked through the city in silence, letting the shifting sky speak for them. The horizon glowed oddly purple, clouds moving in the wrong direction, as if time itself was still sorting out which way to flow.
They ended up at the park—their park—even though neither said the name aloud.
The tree Julia always sat beneath was still there, but the bark bore strange markings now. Spiral patterns. Like fingerprints pressed into ancient stone.
Duran traced one with his thumb. "Did we cause this?"
"We anchored it," she said. "Now it remembers."
They sat side by side on the bench. The lake shimmered with that same wrong moonlight. For once, he didn't raise his camera. Some moments demanded to be lived, not captured.
"You know what I miss?" Julia said softly.
He glanced at her.
"Moments that don't mean anything," she continued. "The quiet kind. Laughing at something dumb. Making pancakes. Forgetting your phone. Things that don't carry the weight of the world."
Duran watched her profile, the soft curve of her jaw, the distant sadness in her voice.
"What if we had one of those moments now?" he asked.
She turned to him. "You think we could fake it?"
"No," he said. "But we could try."
And so they did.
They talked about their favorite childhood snacks, and argued over birds versus cats, and whether magic tricks counted as art. Julia confessed she hated root beer. Duran told her he once fell out of a tree trying to photograph a squirrel.
And for an hour, it worked.
The world didn't end. The Fold didn't pulse. Time didn't bend.
They were just two people in a park, laughing beneath a sky that might have been their own.
But the next morning, the second breach began.
It didn't announce itself with noise.
It unspooled reality with silence.
Duran woke in his apartment to find everything slightly off. His clock blinked nonsense symbols. The rug he never bought lay on the floor. A photo of him and Julia was pinned to the fridge, even though they'd never taken one.
He ran outside.
The sky had frozen in pre-dawn.
No wind. No birds.
And then—he blinked.
The street flipped. Cars parked on the ceiling. Trees growing sideways. Buildings bent at unnatural angles, warping like reflections in a shattered mirror.
He stumbled back inside and grabbed his camera.
The last photo—the breach—was gone. Wiped.
And then he found it.
A new photo. Unlabeled. He didn't remember taking it.
Julia, in a hallway of light, holding up three fingers.
Her eyes locked with his through the lens. Urgent. Afraid.
The final breach was coming.
And this time, it wouldn't just warp space—it would decide what stayed.
And what was erased.