We stopped in a place that might have once been a transit hub. 

“Where are we going?” I finally asked.

“You mean, who are we meeting?”

“Okay, so who are we meeting?”

“You’ll see.”

I rolled my eyes.

The ceiling had collapsed in layers, concrete resting on rusted steel like bones stacked out of order. Someone had strung lights between exposed beams. Someone else had claimed the corner with a cooking rig that smelled faintly of grease and scorched metal.

The Shadow leaned against a pillar and watched the movement below us. People bartered. People argued. People waited.

“You’re quiet,” he said.

“I’m thinking,” I replied.

“About?”

I looked at him then. Really looked. The way he stood was as if he expected the ground to shift under him at any moment.

“You weren’t supposed to bring me here,” I said.

“No,” he agreed. “I wasn’t.”

“I was supposed to leave the timeline.”

“Yes.”

“But I didn’t.”

“No.”

The word settled between us.

I wrapped my arms around myself. “Then why does it feel like everything already moved on without me?”

He exhaled slowly, like he’d been deciding how much to say.

“Because it did.”

I frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“It does,” he said. “Just not the way you’re used to.”

He nodded toward the city below us. “Inner Earth doesn’t react. It predicts. Once the system decided you were leaving, everything adjusted around that assumption.”

I shook my head. “You can’t just erase a person and expect nothing to change.” I stared at him. “You’re saying the timeline is already behaving as if I’m gone?”

“Yes.”

“They use AI to predict crime,” I said slowly. “Behavior. Outcomes. Who becomes what?”

“Right.”

“But the AI doesn’t decide on its own,” I continued. “It needs human direction. That was my job. I didn’t tell it who was good or bad. I told it how much variation a timeline could absorb before it fractured.”

He looked at me sharply now.

“They called it stability,” I went on. “But it was really about tolerance. How much complexity a system can survive.”

I swallowed.

“And once it decided I was leaving,” I said, “it recalculated everything without me in it.”

“Yes.”

I felt sick.

“So what does that make me now?” I asked.

He didn’t answer right away.

“You ever balance something carefully,” he said, “then remove a piece you think doesn’t matter?”

“Yes.”

“And the whole thing shifts,” he said. “But it doesn’t fall immediately. It sways, it leans, and then it finally collapses. That’s what you are. The sway before the fall.”

I looked out over the Outside again. The noise. The movement. The hunger.

“The projection has continued without me in it,” I said.

“Yes.”

The word finally landed.

“I’m the error,” I said.

“No,” he replied. “You’re the variable.”

The title felt wrong in my mouth. Clinical. Disposable.

“The system identifies variables all the time,” he continued. “People who don’t fit the predictions. Witnesses. Outliers. Anyone who might cause divergence.”

“And it removes them.”

“Yes.”

“But I wasn’t removed,” I said.

“No.”

“Which means the projection was wrong.”

“Yes.”

“And the system doesn’t know that yet.”

His expression tightened.

“Or it does,” he said quietly, “and it doesn’t know how to fix it.”

I turned back to him. “Well, can’t I jump again?”

He shook his head, “It wouldn’t be the same timeline, the exact moment you arrive is the exact moment the projection begins, and the timeline shifts to adjust the change. No matter what. You missed your chance.”

“What if I stay?” I almost whispered.

“That depends,” he said. “On how much you change.”

“I don’t want to change anything,” I said.

He gave a short, humorless laugh. “That’s not an option.”

I thought of the execution room. The polished floor. The way that decision had already been made before anyone spoke.

“I saw what happens when the system decides something is acceptable,” I said. “I don’t want to become that.”

“You won’t,” he said. “You’re not inside it anymore.”

“That’s worse,” I replied. “Because now nothing is accounting for me.”

He was quiet for a moment, then shook his head.

“Short answer?” he said. “You’re out of luck.”

I waited.

“Longer answer,” he continued, “you’re standing in a reality that already thinks you’re gone. That’s not something you fix cleanly.”

I swallowed. “So what happens?”

He glanced down at my clothes. Too clean. Too wrong.

“First,” he said, “we get you out of Inner Earth gear. You look like a question.”

I frowned. “And then?”

“And then,” he said, “I know someone who understands problems like yours. Or at least pretends to.”

“That’s comforting.”

He almost smiled.

“Don’t get excited,” he added. “This is well outside my jurisdiction.”

“So you can’t fix it.”

“No,” he said. “But I might know someone who can make it less bad.”

I looked back at the Outside. At the noise. The movement. The hunger.

“And if that doesn’t work?” I asked.

He started walking.

“Then we find another way,” he said. “Or the timeline figures it out without us.”

I followed him.

Either way, staying still wasn’t an option.

“Congratulations,” he said. “You broke the math.”

I looked out at the Outside again. The weight of my existence was heavy on my shoulders. 

I shivered.

“I didn’t mean to,” I said.

He pushed off the pillar and motioned for me to follow.

“Variables never do.”

“I have one more question,” My voice lowered. “No one has ever explained to me why this timeline can’t break.”

The Shadow smirked devilishly as a woman with long black hair emerged from behind a large rusted pillar and began approaching us, “Because this one is the original.”

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Inner Earth doesn’t see Outside Earth as evil. They see it as a necessary waste.

The Shadow led me through streets and alleyways, taking sharp turns through roads that barely felt like roads anymore as we spoke.

The first thing I noticed was the noise.

Not shouting. Not alarms. Just sound layered on sound. Metal clanging somewhere above us. Voices arguing two floors over. Wind pushing loose debris through corridors that used to be rooms. It was overwhelming, leaving my nerves raw with no sense of relief.

“You get used to it,” the man muttered, the one who had conveniently removed me from a bad situation.

I decided not to give him credit for saving my life. It had been purely selfish.

Inner Earth was quiet by design. Silence was enforced. Noise meant loss of control.

Here, noise meant life.

The Shadow led the way through a fractured stairwell, stepping over collapsed concrete, shattered glass, and exposed wiring like he had done it a hundred times before. I followed as best I could, my legs still heavy, my head floating somewhere behind my eyes.

Outside Earth did not welcome you. It did not soften itself for anyone.

As we entered a rusted building, I looked up.

The ceiling had collapsed completely, opening the structure to the sky. Gray daylight spilled in through broken ribs of steel and concrete, filtering through smoke and dust, catching on suspended cables and rusted beams.

I stopped abruptly and gasped.

I had never seen the sky.

Inner Earth simulated it. Panels and projections. Artificial light cycles calibrated to productivity and sleep regulation. The sky had been something you scheduled around.

This one was uneven. Clouded. Real.

My chest tightened in a way I didn’t expect.

The Shadow noticed.

“I’ve never seen the sky,” I said before I could stop myself.

He glanced at me then. Not curious. Not judgmental.

“I figured.”

“It’s real,” I whispered. “The sky.”

He nodded once, like that answered something for him.

We moved again.

The Outside smelled like heat, rust, and old water. Nothing was sealed. Nothing was contained. Every surface bore marks of use, damage, or ownership. Symbols carved into walls. Painted warnings. Fabric strips tied around railings and doorframes.

The Shadows. This faction controlled the northwestern region of what used to be the United States.

I felt exposed. My clothes were wrong. Too clean. Too neutral. I had dressed for Inner Earth, where blending meant safety. Here, it marked me immediately.

I caught my reflection in a shattered panel as we passed. Pale. Unmarked. No visible scars. No color-coded stitching. No symbols worked into my sleeves.

A civilian.

A liability.

“Don’t stare,” he said quietly. “They’ll ask questions.”

I forced my eyes forward.

We passed people who didn’t look away. Men, women, and children alike watched openly. Not curious. Assessing.

No one smiled.

No one pretended not to see me.

Inner Earth had trained me to lower my eyes. To be small. To move efficiently and without friction.

Outside Earth required the opposite.

The Shadow stopped near the edge of a platform overlooking a lower level crowded with makeshift stalls, generators, and bodies pressed too close together. Power cables hung like vines. Water dripped from somewhere above into a barrel someone guarded with their life.

“Welcome home,” he said. “Where they never stopped the hunger. They just moved it.”

I frowned, my chest heavy with grief.

“They don’t show us this,” I said.

“They don’t show a lot of things,” he replied.

I watched a woman argue loudly over a ration exchange. I watched a child pull himself up onto a railing, hands already scarred.

No one hid what they were doing.

No one dressed it up in policy.

“They let the Outside absorb the overflow,” he continued. “Population. Crime. Witnesses. People who complicate projections.”

“People like me.”

The realization hit hard.

He didn’t correct me.

We stood there longer than I realized.

Something shifted in my chest. Fear, yes. But underneath it, something else.

Recognition.

I understood systems. Back home, that skill had been useful. Here, it made me dangerous.

A memory surfaced uninvited.

The execution room. The polished floor. The tablet glowing softly in an official’s hands.

Outside Earth was not chaos.

It was consequence.

“I shouldn’t have stopped,” I said quietly. “I should have just kept walking like everyone else.”

The Shadow shook his head. “You would’ve seen something else eventually.”

“I read the projections,” I said before I could stop myself.

He turned fully toward me.

“Which projections?”

“The REPR ones,” I said. “The timeline models.” I paused. “It was my job.”

He waited.

“They simulate what happens when someone stays,” I continued. “When a witness remains in a timeline they weren’t meant to survive. How events ripple. How probability bends. Where fractures start.”

I swallowed.

“My job was to read the summaries and say whether relocation reduced instability or just pushed it somewhere else.”

That did it.

The Shadow studied me differently then. Not like a liability.

Like a problem.

“That explains why they didn’t kill you,” he said.

“What.”

“Because you weren’t just in the wrong place,” he said. “You were a variable.”

The word made me cringe.

The noise swelled around us again. Life grinding forward without permission.

I wrapped my arms around myself.

The projections never talked about death. They talked about divergence. About timelines that collapsed under too much truth. About realities that couldn’t absorb what someone knew and still hold together.

I had seen the outcome before I ever saw the execution.

Killing me would have been simple.

Removing me from the timeline was safer.

Inner Earth hadn’t sent me away to protect me.

They sent me away to protect reality.

That was why reviews were never approved.

You can’t return someone once they’ve seen how fragile their world really is.

Once a timeline knows it can break, there is no going back.

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I woke to the taste of copper and something faintly sweet.

I didn’t know where I was.

The ceiling above me was low and uneven, cracked in thin veins that glowed faintly where emergency lights leaked through exposed wiring. The air smelled of melting plastic.

I tried to sit up.

The world lurched violently to the side.

My stomach clenched, my vision smeared, and I dropped back with a sharp breath that scraped my throat on the way out.

“Easy,” a voice said. Close. Calm. “Don’t do that yet.”

I froze.

My pulse slammed against my ribs as I turned my head.

He was sitting a few feet away, back against the wall, one knee bent, the other stretched out. His jacket was gone. His sleeves were rolled to his forearms. In his hand was an apple, bright red, clean, impossibly ordinary.

He took a bite.

The sound was loud in the quiet room. Crisp. Wet.

My eyes drifted to his wrist before I could stop them.

The mark.

Subtle. Engraved.

The same one I had seen in the execution room.

My throat tightened.

“You,” I whispered.

He followed my gaze, then looked back at me. No surprise. No denial.

“Yeah,” he said. “Me.”

I pushed myself backward instinctively, palms scraping against the cold concrete until my shoulders hit the wall. The movement sent another wave of nausea rolling through me, sharp and disorienting.

He watched without moving.

“You’re fine but it feels weird,” he said. “It’s the prep serum.”

“What?” My voice shook despite my effort to control it.

He tore off a slice of the apple with a small folding blade and held it out toward me.

“Eat,” he said. “It’ll help.”

I didn’t move.

After a moment, he placed the slice on the floor between us and leaned back again, non-threatening.

“They started you early,” he continued. “Stabilizers. Neural buffering. Muscle compliance. Everything they give you before a leap so your body doesn’t tear itself apart when the frequency locks.”

“I didn’t jump,” I said.

“I know.”

The words landed heavier than I expected.

“You were minutes out,” he said. “Then the center went up.”

My stomach twisted.

“The bombing,” I said quietly.

“Yes.”

“Because of him.”

He took another bite of the apple. Chewed. Swallowed.

“Retaliation,” he said. “Fast response. Poorly aimed.”

His eyes sharpened slightly.

“You executed him,” I said. “I watched you.”

“I know.”

“You didn’t hesitate.”

“No.”

I waited for justification. It didn’t come.

“I was under orders,” he said finally. “That’s true. But don’t confuse that with compliance.”

He leaned his head back against the wall, eyes tracing the cracked ceiling.

“That man wasn’t just a politician,” he continued. “He was a stabilizing variable. Removing him not only destabilized timelines but it’s causing chaos Outside.”

My chest tightened.

“And now?” I asked.

“And now,” he said, looking back at me, “you’re a loose end wild card.”

“I can’t go back home and I can’t jump,” I said.

“Well,” he agreed. “You’re half right.”

“I hate this, I didn’t even do anything wrong.”

“You understood what you saw,” he corrected. “That was enough.”

An eerie silence surrounded us. Then suddenly, somewhere in the structure above, metal groaned softly as it settled.

“Why are you here?” I asked. “Why save me?”

He studied me for a long moment.

“Because,” he said slowly, “this is bigger than you. Bigger than me. Bigger than the program you think you were entering.”

“And you expect me to trust you?”

A faint smile touched his mouth. 

Not kind. 

Not cruel.

“No,” he said. “I expect you to survive.”

He nudged the apple slice closer.

“You can’t stand yet,” he added. “And you don’t know where you are. Looks like you don’t have much of a choice.”

He stood in one smooth motion, already scanning the shadows beyond the room.

“Eat,” he said. “Then we move.”

I stared at him, the executioner, the Shadow, the only person who hadn’t lied to me yet.

I didn’t know if I could trust him.

But the room was shaking somewhere above us, and my body still felt half-disconnected from itself.

He was right.

I didn’t have a choice.

And as the truth settled in, I understood something the program never intended.

I wasn’t being relocated to save my life.

I was being removed because the truth I carried couldn’t be allowed to return.

And The Shadow was the only one who knew where they hid people like me from the prying eyes of the officials from Inner Earth.

“Welcome to the Outside, your life will never be the same.”

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I wasn’t supposed to be there.

That was the first thing I realized, not in words but in my body. The way my steps slowed. The way the corridor felt narrower, quieter, like sound itself had been filtered out. I felt them before I saw them.

Inside, the room was small and clean and far too bright.

A polished floor that reflected light like water. There were no restraints bolted to the furniture, no weapons visible. Nothing that looked violent.

A man stood in the center of the room.

He was bound. He was on his knees. He wore a tailored jacket, dark fabric, pressed clean. His hands were folded in front of him as if he were waiting for a meeting to begin.

Two officials stood a few feet away, reading from a tablet. Their voices were low, professional, and boring.

“This action has been approved under Stabilization Clause Twelve,” one of them said. “Regional impact projections show a net reduction in Outer-zone volatility.”

The man didn’t interrupt.

A third figure stood slightly behind them. A Shadow. I recognized the mark on his wrist immediately. He wasn’t tense. He wasn’t alert.

He was waiting.

I should have left.

I should have turned around and pretended I’d never taken the wrong corridor, never misread a clearance map. But my feet stayed rooted to the floor, my breath shallow and quiet, as if my body had already decided silence was survival.

The man finally spoke.

“You’re outsourcing violence again,” he said calmly. “You’ll destabilize the zones faster than you can contain them.”

One of the officials sighed. “You’re no longer in a position to speculate.”

“I built those projections,” the man replied. “You’re feeding scarcity into a system that…”

“That will be all…” the other official said.

There was no argument. No raised voice.

Just a nod.

The Shadow stepped forward.

It happened quickly.

Not dramatic. Just, final.

The Shadow moved behind the man, placed the old school pistol to the base of his skull, and pressed.

The man stiffened once, just once, and then he was gone. His body folded to the floor like something powered down. Vaguely robotic.

I remember staring at his shoes.

Perfectly polished. Untouched.

One of the officials tapped their tablet again.

“Witness exposure?” they asked casually.

The other glanced toward the doorway.

Toward me.

Our eyes met.

For a fraction of a second, something flickered across his face. Not guilt. Not fear.

Calculation.

“No,” he said. “Containment protocols held.”

The Shadow dragged the body away, efficient and silent, leaving behind nothing but a faint smear where the man’s shoulder had brushed the floor.

The room returned to stillness.

I stepped back, slowly, carefully, my pulse roaring in my ears. I didn’t run. I didn’t scream. I didn’t report what I’d seen.

I went back to my assigned corridor. I completed my shift. I smiled when spoken to. I followed every instruction precisely.

That night, my wrist chimed softly.

“Protected Timeline Relocation Program.

Exposure Risk Identified.

Relocation Recommended.”

They didn’t accuse me.

They didn’t threaten me.

They thanked me for my compliance.

I understood then what I had really witnessed.

Not a death.

A decision.

It was the truth that they couldn’t afford to let me come back with.

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