We don’t fall down. We fall apart.
The shimmering air swallows us, and the sterile white walls and choking gas of 2157 vanish. There is no up or down anymore. There is only a roaring vacuum of indigo light and shattered glass, a slipstream of pure, terrifying momentum. It feels like being caught in the center of a hurricane, except the wind isn’t blowing air – it’s blowing time.
I am completely blind, but my senses are turned up to a deafening volume. I hear the sound of my parents arguing about the electric bill, looping in my ears like a broken record. I hear the mechanical hum of sterilization drones. I see flashes of silver needle-towers collapsing into rusted construction scaffolding.
The only solid thing in the universe is Atlas’s hand gripping mine.
But then, his fingers start to slip.
I open my eyes against the blinding blue storm. Atlas is floating beside me in the chaos, but something is violently wrong. The edges of his gray tunic are blurring, fraying into white static. His pale skin looks translucent, like a photograph left out in the sun. The anomaly is acting like a filter, and it’s violently rejecting him.
“Atlas!” I scream, the sound ripped from my throat by the temporal wind.
He looks down at his hand. The fingers intertwined with mine are flickering. He tries to pull me closer, but the vortex pushes back, a physical pressure wedging itself between our chests.
“It is the timeline!” he shouts, his voice echoing as if he’s speaking from underwater. “It knows I do not belong in the past! It is trying to correct the error!”
“No! Hold on!” I dig my nails into his skin, desperate to anchor him, but it feels like I’m trying to grab a handful of lightning. A jolt of agonizing static travels up my arm, making my teeth ache.
“Nessa, let go!” His dark eyes are wide with a sudden, horrible realization. “If you hold on to a displaced mass, it will tear you apart too! You have to drop me!”
“I am not leaving you behind to be gassed by your own world!”
“My world is my designation! I am Unit 7!” He pulls back, trying to sacrifice himself, trying to pry his glitching fingers from my grip. “Go home, Nessa! Let me go!”
“Stop it! Stop fighting me!”
I yank him toward me with everything I have. The vortex surges, howling in protest, sending a wave of crushing pressure against my ribs. It feels like swimming against a tsunami. The anomaly doesn’t want him. The universe doesn’t want him crossing the boundary.
And for a split second, I feel the terrifying, paralyzing grip of doubt.
What if it doesn’t work? What if the physics of the universe simply won’t allow a boy from 2157 to exist in 2024? What if holding onto him means we both get shredded into cosmic dust, scattered across a century of empty space?
But then I think about letting go. I think about landing in that dark, damp school basement entirely alone. I think about waking up tomorrow to the broken water heater, to the third foreclosure notice sitting on the kitchen counter, to Chloe Madison’s mocking smirk, to the crumpled dollar bill hitting my desk. I think about returning to a world where I am nothing but a tragedy, a charity case, a joke.
I can’t go back to that. Not after this. Not after someone finally looked at my messy, broken life and saw something beautiful in it.
Atlas looks at me, and the stoic, analytical mask of Unit 7 shatters completely. The boy who has never made a choice in his life, who has never tasted anything but nutrient paste until five minutes ago, stares into the terrifying void of the breach and makes his first demand.
“Take me with you,” he begs, his voice cracking, raw and desperate. He grips my hand back, his static-laced fingers digging into my palm. “Please. Take me with you.”
“I’ve got you,” I fiercely whisper, though I know he can’t hear it over the roar.
The anomaly responds to emotional resonance. That’s what he said in the archive. High-frequency neuro-chemical output. Feelings.
It opened because I was crushed by the absolute worst day of my life. It brought me to Atlas because my need to escape was a frequency too loud for the present to contain. Now, I have to be louder. I have to want him in my world more than the timeline wants to keep us apart.
I close my eyes. I don’t focus on the fear of the void. I focus on the sheer, stubborn defiance that has kept me surviving my life. I focus on the heat of the diner grill, the smell of cheap coffee, the loud, obnoxious laugh of my best friend Kevin. I focus on the taste of that bruised apple. I focus on the warmth of Atlas’s lips against mine in a concrete bunker at the end of the world.
Let us through, I scream in my mind, throwing every ounce of my desperation against the walls of the vortex. He belongs with me!
Atlas anchors himself to me. I can feel him doing the exact same thing – pushing all his new, terrifyingly massive emotions outward. The rebellion of eating contraband. The wonder of my mustard-yellow coat. His profound, aching desire to choose.
Our combined desperation hits a critical mass.
The roaring vortex hesitates. The static shock vibrating between our joined hands suddenly shifts, changing from a painful resistance to a magnetic pull. The indigo shards of light around us ignite into a blinding, magnificent white.
The pressure breaks.
The universe snaps like a rubber band, and we are violently thrown forward into the dark.
We hit the ground hard.
My knees slam against solid concrete, and the impact knocks the wind out of me in a rush. I roll onto my side, gasping for air, my hands scraping against rough, gritty floorboards.
For a long moment, there is only the sound of ragged breathing.
I blink my eyes open. The blinding light is gone. The sterile perfection of Sector 4 is gone.
Instead, I am staring at a rusted metal pipe.
The air is heavy, thick, and humid. It smells intensely of damp earth, mildew, and decades of undisturbed dust. From somewhere above us, I can hear the faint, rhythmic thumping of a high school basketball bouncing on a gymnasium floor.
We are back. It’s the boiler room beneath Northwood High.
Panic spikes in my chest. “Atlas?” I croak, my throat raw.
I scramble up onto my bruised knees in the dim light. The false cinderblock wall the construction crew smashed is right behind us. The blue glow of the anomaly is gone, replaced only by the weak, yellowish light filtering from a single incandescent bulb swinging gently from the ceiling.
“Atlas!” I say louder, terrified I’m going to look down and find empty space.
“I am here.”
The voice comes from the shadows a few feet away. I crawl forward.
He is sitting on the dusty concrete, his long legs sprawled out in front of him. His perfect, matte-gray tunic is covered in streaks of gray soot and dirt. His dark hair is a messy, windblown disaster.
He is entirely solid. He is entirely real.
I practically tackle him, throwing my arms around his neck. He flinches for a fraction of a second – physical contact is still a foreign language to him – but then his arms wrap tightly around my waist, burying his face in the rough wool of my thrift-store coat. He smells like ozone and panic, but beneath that, he just smells like a boy.
“You made it,” I whisper, a dizzying wave of relief making my head spin. “You’re okay. We’re okay.”
He slowly pulls back, his dark eyes wide and pupils dilated. He isn’t looking at me. He is looking over my shoulder at the basement.
I turn to look, trying to see what’s wrong, but it’s just the boiler room. It’s a mess of twisted copper pipes, discarded wooden pallets, cobwebs thick as gauze in the corners, and the giant, rusted metal hulk of the old heating unit. It’s filthy and chaotic.
To Atlas, it is a miracle.
He reaches out with a trembling hand and touches the concrete floor. He rubs his fingertips together, feeling the grit of the dust.
“It is... uneven,” he whispers, his voice thick with awe. “The surface. It is not uniform.”
“It’s just dirt, Atlas.”
“Dirt,” he repeats the word like it’s an incantation. He looks up at the ceiling, where a massive spiderweb is draped between two rusted pipes. “And that?”
“Cobwebs. Spiders make them.”
“Biological architecture,” he breathes. “Unregulated.”
He stands up, his movements slightly unbalanced, like the gravity in my world is pulling on him differently. He walks toward the old rusted boiler, staring at the chipped green paint flaking off its side. He reaches out and gently touches a flake of peeling paint. It crumbles under his finger, falling to the floor.
He gasps softly, looking at the fallen paint chip, then at his dirty fingers.
“Things decay here,” he says. “They change.”
“Yeah,” I say, pushing myself up to stand, brushing the dust off my jeans. “Nothing stays perfect for long here. You’ll get used to it.”
“I do not want perfect,” Atlas says, turning to face me. The weak yellow light catches the sharp angles of his face, making him look less like a synthetic hologram and more human than ever. “I want this. I want the chaos.”
A flutter of nervous excitement erupts in my stomach. I did it. I actually stole a boy from the future. He’s here, in my messy, difficult, chaotic world, and for the first time all day, the heavy weight of my reality feels a little lighter. If I can pull someone across time and space, maybe I can survive junior year. Maybe I can figure out the electric bill.
“Come on,” I say, stepping over a discarded wooden pallet. “We should get out of here before anyone finds us. I need to get you out of this basement. I’ll take you to Kevin, my best friend. He’s going to absolutely lose his mind when he meets you. Then I’ll take you to the diner. Jerry’s probably furious I walked out, but...”
I stop talking.
A sudden wave of nausea washes over me. It’s a strange, disorienting vertigo, like stepping onto an escalator that isn’t moving. The air in the basement suddenly feels... thick. Not with humidity, but with a strange, vibrating tension.
“Nessa?” Atlas asks, stepping toward me. “Is your biological system experiencing distress?”
“I don’t know,” I say, pressing a hand to my forehead. “I just felt... weird for a second.”
“The transition between timelines is severe. Your neuro-chemical balance requires calibration.”
“I’m fine. I just...” I shake my head, trying to clear the dizzy spell. “Let’s just go.”
I start walking toward the heavy metal door that leads up to the school hallway. The single, swinging incandescent bulb hangs directly between us and the exit, casting our long, distorted shadows against the painted cinderblock wall to our right.
I take three steps toward the door.
And then I freeze.
My blood runs completely cold.
“Atlas,” I whisper. “Stop moving.”
He stops instantly, his military-grade obedience kicking in. “What is the threat?”
“Look at the wall.”
He turns his head slowly.
We are standing completely still. I am frozen mid-step. Atlas is standing perfectly straight with his hands by his sides.
But our shadows on the cinderblock wall are still walking.
I watch in absolute, paralyzing horror as my dark silhouette on the wall takes another step forward, swinging its arms. Beside it, Atlas’s shadow mimics his earlier stride.
One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.
Then, abruptly, the shadows snap into place, aligning perfectly with our stationary bodies. They freeze, locking into the correct position on the wall, as if they had just been struggling to catch up.
I swallow hard, my throat clicking in the quiet basement.
I raise my right arm.
The shadow on the wall does nothing. It stands perfectly still.
One beat. Two beats. Three beats.
Then, my shadow’s arm jerks upward, raising in a delayed mimicry of my movement.
“What is that?” I ask, my voice trembling. “Atlas, what is happening to our reflections?”
Atlas stares at the delayed movement on the wall. He steps forward. The shadow waits three seconds, then takes a step forward too. A crease forms between his dark eyebrows, his analytical mind working furiously to process the impossible physics happening in front of us.
“The universe,” Atlas says softly, “is experiencing lag.”
“Lag? Like a bad internet connection?”
“Space-time is attempting to process our presence. I do not belong in this century. You do not belong with the residual chronal energy you absorbed in my century. We have created a paradox by returning together.” He looks down at his hands, then back at the wall. “Our mass is here in the present. But our temporal footprint is dragging behind us in the past.”
“Is it dangerous?” I ask, pulling my arm down. Three seconds later, my shadow lowers its arm.
“I do not know,” Atlas admits, and hearing Unit 7 say he doesn’t know something is more terrifying than the shadow itself. “In my time, temporal physics is theoretical. The State forbids unauthorized chronal experimentation because the ripple effects are entirely unpredictable.”
“Ripple effects,” I repeat, a cold dread pooling in my stomach.
I wanted an escape. I wanted to bring a piece of a better universe back to fix my broken one. But as I watch my shadow twitch on the wall – a dark, glitching stain on the fabric of reality – I realize what I’ve actually done.
I haven’t escaped my problems. I’ve just dragged a much bigger one across a hundred and thirty-three years of space and time.
“Come on,” I say, grabbing his wrist. “We need to get out of this school right now.”
We run for the metal door leading to the hallway. Three seconds later, our shadows finally begin to chase us.
This is so good. You get extra points from me because my son is called Atlas