The Center of Everything

Time was not a river here. It was a forest of veins, a crown of living filaments spreading from his hands, through his spine, anchoring in the shattered roots of a world that had stopped pretending it wasn’t broken. Loki sat at the center—on a throne that was less a chair than a graft, a bond he’d made willingly and now could not undo without killing everything it held. The timelines were cords under his palms: warm, pulsing, sometimes trembling, sometimes slack. He could feel the texture of them, like threads pulled through skin, tugged by a billion choices. He kept them steady with breath he did not need and will he could not afford to soften.

A million lives brushed past him in each second. Their sounds poured through him and left no echo except the ache of recognition. A woman in 1864 wept into a handkerchief that smelled of starch and coal; a boy in 2401 pinched his finger in a printer they still called a stapler; a dog barked at snow for the first time; a blade was drawn across a throat; a baby took a shuddering breath and latched; someone screamed in a ship’s galley as steam burned their forearm; a stadium roared in a city that never made it past the year 1998; a king signed a treaty that would be broken within an hour; a man whispered I love you into a phone and meant it, and the person on the other end did not.

Loki watched. He watched even when he closed his eyes. His fingers flexed on gold that wasn’t really metal, his magic woven into it so deep he could taste it like metal on his tongue. The Citadel had remade itself into something almost beautiful: fractures sealed in light, the air humming with the low, constant note of utter power held just shy of detonation. The throne’s arms were ridged, engraved with runes that remembered his childhood even when he tried not to. The ends of his cloak pooled like spilled ink at his feet, caught occasionally by the draftless wind, lifted and laid back down by forces that had no names.

He had never been still. Even when bound, even when muzzled, even when kneeling with chains cutting into wrist and ankle, he had always moved somewhere inside. Now stillness was the plane of his existence. Move, and a thousand lines snapped. Relax, and three million snarled. He had learned his own body like a map of hazards: if he swallowed too sharply, a colonial war flared hotter; if he sighed, a moonquake on a world no one would ever map rippled through sapphire oceans; if he let his heartbeat climb because he had remembered the way someone’s laugh had sounded, an entire branch line shivered with premature deaths. He cultivated an even pulse. He crafted his breath to a metronome. He sat with his back straight and his head tilted the way a god: the mask, yes, but also function, geometry, the best angle from which to see the next catastrophe before it arrived.

He was not alone. He was never less alone than this, and that was the cruelty. The ghosts visited without permission. His father’s voice, sharper at the edges than it had been while living: you were made to rule. His mother’s hand warm on the back of his neck: you were made to love. Thor, drinking, laughing, breaking a table with a hug that had hurt and felt like forgiveness. Sylvie’s eyes the moment she shoved the blade into—no, not that, don’t look there, not when the Loom’s beat is hitching in Sector 13—no, smooth it, smooth it, breathe, hold.

He saw Mobius most often when he did not mean to. A mundane office chair scuffed at one wheel, a ridiculous soda can sweating condensation into a ring. A smile that wrinkled the corners of his eyes like worn paper. The particular rhythm of his footsteps in a corridor that no longer existed. A hand on Loki’s shoulder in a hallway lit with sickly fluorescents, steadying, unafraid. He had not cataloged Mobius’s laugh on purpose, and yet it appeared in the dark between beats, and when it did, Loki’s hands clenched and some poor fisherman’s net tangled into knots that would never come loose.

He could unmake the knots, and he did, every time, quietly, with a small apology no one would hear. He had become skilled at apologies that were more action than word. He had become patient. He had become vast and thin, like gold leaf hammered over a surface too wide.

Sometimes, he allowed himself to lean his head back and stare upward at the vault of the End of Time, the way a child looks up at the ceiling of a temple and dares to imagine gods might look back. No one looked back. It was only him. The Loom’s radiance bathed his skin in a light that never warmed. The ends of his fingers glowed faintly now, as if he had dipped them into a dye he could not wash away. He could pluck a narrative like a string and feel its pitch vibrate inside his teeth.

He had once craved adoration. He had wanted the freedom of directionless power, the heat of a crowd’s belief. Now he felt the drag of all belief pressing against him like a slow tide. They did not know him. They did not pray to him. They did not think of him at all, most of the time. They lived. That was the point. That was the only thing that mattered. And still the bone-deep, marrow-sore loneliness coiled in him, a serpent with its jaw forced shut.

He spoke aloud sometimes, for the sound. “Steady,” he told the lines, and they steadied. “Easy,” he murmured, and a plague eased its hand. He said “No further” and a tyrant’s pen stalled, the ink drying in its nib. His voice came back to him off the gold and the crystal and the shadows, thinner than it had been, edged with ages he hadn’t lived in the usual way.

In the blank minutes between disasters, when the forest of time whispered instead of screamed, Loki let himself remember. Not the battles, not the performances—there were too many of those, and he could drown in their versions. He remembered a cheap pie shared in a cafeteria where the coffee tasted like melted coins. He remembered a remark about jet skis, absurd and earnest at once, and the feel of laughter in his own chest that he hadn’t needed to fake. He remembered a touch that had not been strategy.

He held it all and let none of it show. The throne demanded balance and he was good at that. He had always been good at lying, and now the lie was to his own blood—nothing wrong, nothing missing, nothing touched, nothing hungry.

A filament went taut, sharp as a breath sucked between teeth. He felt it before the alarm would have sounded, if there were alarms here, and turned his attention like a blade, narrow and precise. Something—somewhere—a seep, a strange texture like rot in the seam between realities. He reached with care. The weight of all else shifted against his spine, against the base of his skull. His mouth went dry. He tasted ozone and old iron, and the ache inside him tucked itself tighter, quieter, politely stepping aside for the work.

His hands did not tremble. They never trembled. He guided the frayed edge back into its weave, soothed the chafed border between two histories, and the pull eased. For now. The aftertaste lingered: wrongness that was not random, a fingerprint smudged across a pane of glass he had kept immaculate at cost. He breathed once, twice, in the pattern he had taught himself. The ghosts pressed closer, curious, concerned, or maybe only hungry for something to haunt.

“Not yet,” he told them, to hear his own voice again. The forest rustled. The throne held. The loneliness sat, patient as a companion who has nowhere else to be. He sat with it, as he always did, and waited for the next second to arrive with its million lives, its million losses, its million small joys that he would never touch and could never stop keeping.

Mobius had organized his office three times this week. The fourth found him standing in the doorway, taking in the extreme neatness like a stranger might—coats hung level, files squared to the edge of the desk, pencils sharpened to identical points in a mug that said World’s Okayest Analyst. He didn’t remember when the mug had appeared. He didn’t remember liking jokes about himself. He set his jacket on the back of the chair and watched it slide down, collapse, and spill one sleeve over the seat. He left it there, a single uncorrected thing.

The faint hum of the TVA filled the quiet: distant bootsteps in hallways that seemed longer now, the high, delicate buzz of the revised Loom regulators far away, a chorus of TemPads chirping in other rooms where other people were busy. Here, silence pressed against him. He popped the tab on a Josta. The scent hit first, sweet and medicinal, a memory embedded in carbonation. The first sip slid over his tongue and turned flat halfway down, like someone had stolen the charge mid-swallow. He made a face at the can, stared at the label, and set it on a coaster he never used before. The ring it didn’t leave felt like an accusation.

On the monitor wall, streams of light and symbol folded over each other in living graphs, the TVA’s new readouts for a multiverse nobody wanted to admit still scared them. The resolution improved after the restructure; the data was cleaner. The thrill of solving had drained away with the danger. He knew that was the point. He sipped again. It still tasted wrong.

He tapped a finger against the desk. The TemPad on the blotter woke at the contact, HUD flaring with a half-dozen flagged anomalies that were so minor they barely deserved the color red. Someone’s coffee break extended six minutes longer than recorded in their timeline. A street bus jumped two stops on a fringe branch because a driver hit the gas too hard and arrived early. A pop star developed a cold the day of an important concert, delaying it twenty hours and saving three people from a fan crush that would have injured them in the original. The TVA logged and let it be. That was the new mantra. Let it be. Let them live.

His hand hovered over a memo from B-15 he’d already read, about deployment schedules and cross-training for field and analysis roles. Under it, a printout of an internal policy update with corners so fresh they could cut skin. Under that, nothing. No dog-eared pamphlet about sacred timelines. No stack of incidents with the word Prune on top in red. The desk had never looked so much like a desk.

He swiveled the chair toward the monitors and leaned back, letting the seat creak. He waited. He told himself he was processing. He told himself he wasn’t waiting for anything at all. The screen showing the broad-spectrum scan of critical branches ticked through its slow revolution. Blue, white, gold, the irregular heartbeat of causality settling into a normal range. He’d learned to see glitches at a glance, learned to love the minute he could spot a problem and put his feet on the ground toward it. His shoes were polished. His feet were not going anywhere.

He took another sip. Watched. The gold lines twined and crossed, clean as ink on vellum. Somewhere at the edges, where the instruments always blurred, a familiar thought climbed into his head without asking: if something flares, and it’s green, will you move? The answer came too fast: yes. He scolded himself like a parent catching a kid with a hand in the jar. He set the can down more firmly than necessary and the metal rang. The sound faded.

The door clicked, opened a little, and Casey’s head popped in, hair a little more rumpled than it had been before the reform. “You on lunch?”

“No,” Mobius said, noting the time and the calendar notation that told him he had missed lunch by an hour. “I mean—yeah. Sure.”

Casey’s gaze flicked to the monitors, as it always did now whenever anyone spoke to him. It was habit, like touching a lucky coin. “You should come by Archives later. We got a new shipment of rescued records. There’s some pre-’90s consumer tech brochures I thought you’d—well, you know.” He made the universal gesture for jet skis without meaning to, two hands describing handlebars and a throttle twist. He caught himself, blushed, and lowered them. “Sorry.”

Mobius didn’t smile, not at first. Then it came, small, local, like a light switched on at a desk lamp instead of in a room. “Yeah. Maybe. Thanks, Casey.”

Casey nodded and vanished, leaving the smell of paper and dust that clung to Archives on the air for a second before the TVA filters ate it. Mobius stared at the space where he’d been, then back at the monitors. He told himself he should take a walk. He told himself he should go stand by the girls at Logistics and let them gossip him into a better afternoon. He told himself a lot of things that sounded responsible.

Instead, he adjusted the parameters of the central display. The graphs zoomed, lines thickening, indices in the corners flickering to green status. The wide-scope view contracted to a tighter sweep over the sectors that tended to show odd hum. He tracked the golden bands like a man tracking clouds for a storm he wasn’t sure he wanted. His thumb rubbed the edge of the desk.

He thought about how he used to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in this same building and argue philosophy with someone who would grin at him like an accomplice. He thought about pie, and about a voice saying no one is ever really bad or good, just choices and consequences. He thought about a hand on his own, warm, solid, refusing to let go at a moment when everything else came apart.

Time ticked. The numbers were so clean they might as well have been lying. He opened the top drawer and found three staplers he didn’t need and a packet of napkins from the cafeteria with grease dots that had set into the paper. He set the napkins on the desk, then stared at them like they might answer something. A chuckle escaped him, flat as the soda. “Okay,” he said to the room. “Okay.”

On the far left display, a shimmer passed over a graph—nothing dramatic, a momentary banding in the gold, like interference. He leaned forward. The shimmer settled, smoothed out. He froze, eyes on the point, waiting for it to misbehave again. It didn’t. He breathed in. The chair creaked when he moved back, his shoulders dropping without relief.

He picked up the Josta, considered it, and set it down again. He could almost see his reflection in the black screen of the one monitor he’d powered down to save energy, a ghost of himself layered over the data. The ghost looked older than he felt most days, and younger than he felt on the others. He scrubbed a hand over his jaw and listened to the hum.

When the lights flickered, just once, just the slightest dip and return, he looked up so fast his neck hurt. Normal, he told himself. The Loom adjustments sometimes did that when they synced. The readouts stayed steady. He held his breath for two seconds, three, then let it out. His hand drifted to the TemPad and hovered. He didn’t open it.

Another minute. Another sip he didn’t want. Another slow rotation of the central scan. He kept watching, eyes scanning for a particular tone of light he’d never seen in these machines but had learned somewhere else, in a different hall, beside a different man, one who did not live in this room, or this building, or any normal distance from this chair.

He watched until his vision blurred, then blinked and kept watching.

The glitch didn’t come as a flare. It came as a sag. The central display dipped a quarter shade, like the gold got tired in the middle. Mobius leaned forward, every muscle attentive. The algorithm did not flag it. The system hummed like a content animal. His gut didn’t believe any of it.

He keyed a manual zoom. The readout resisted for a fraction of a second—then slid open layer by layer, revealing the fine-grain weave of indexed branches. In the mesh, a place where reality should have been braided split like wet paper. Not a fork. Not a knot. A seep. A thin ribbon of color bled through the gold: gray-white, like ash in water, diffusing outward. The overlay tried to categorize. It flicked through labels—Branch Divergence, External Disruption, Loom Sync Delay—and then spit out a new icon he hadn’t seen before: UNDEFINED.

“Okay,” he whispered, as if he could coax the machine into sense. He tapped the diagnostic. Numbers cascaded. Energy gradients, entropic load, curvature stress. The curve didn’t spike the way a branch did. It slumped. The local reality’s coherence index sank a fraction of a point and kept sinking, slow as a leak.

He opened three more views. Two showed clean, one showed another smear of gray at the periphery. He compared the signatures. The smear wasn’t the same shape, but it hummed with the same wrongness—flatter than vacuum, hungry in a way that registers and people’s eyes could feel without anyone telling them what it was.

Casey stuck his head back in without knocking, mouth open like he’d come to say another harmless thing, and froze at the monitors. “Uh. That…doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen.”

“No,” Mobius said. He expanded the field. The gold lattice stuttered and re-rendered with little hiccups, as if the software itself didn’t like looking at it. The UNDEFINED icon replicated, one for each smear.

He opened a comm. “B-15,” he said, keeping his voice even. “Need you in Analysis. Now.”

Her response came curt and immediate. “On my way.”

He pulled up the Loom feed for comparison, because some part of him wanted the comfort of a mechanical heartbeat. The Loom’s regulators pulsed like they should, numbers marching along the bottom edge. No correspondence. The bleeds—he tried the word out in his head and it fit with an ugly click—did not care about the Loom. They sat on the mesh and melted borders by the millimeter.

B-15 came in hard, two other analysts on her heels. She didn’t waste time on greetings. “Show me.”

Mobius stepped back so she could get close to the controls. He hit play on the recorded buffer. The screen rolled back two minutes, then crawled forward. The first seep darkened by degrees. He added a second feed, a map overlay showing the adjacent branches to the affected zone. The gray ghosted into them at the edges, like damp spreading in cloth.

“Not a branch,” she said. “And not an incursion. Incursions spike.” Her jaw flexed. “What am I looking at?”

“Cross-contamination,” Mobius said. The word tasted wrong, too clinical. He tried again. “One reality is leaking into another. Or out of itself into nothing and pulling another with it. It’s not forcing a change by choice. It’s rot.”

“Levels?” she asked, eyes on the numbers blooming and collapsing in little contextual boxes.

“Coherence dropping at a constant rate. Local physical constants fraying at the margins.” Mobius tapped a tiny window where the system had flagged anomalous particle behavior. “Speed of light shear across boundary zones, microscopic but non-zero. Entropy ratios skewing upward. The algorithm can’t slot it.”

Casey, pale, said, “Like a…cancer?”

B-15’s eyes flicked to him, then back to the screen. “We don’t say that unless we know that.” She moved her finger through the air to shift the map. “Scope?”

Mobius swallowed. “We’ve got three. One major, two minor. The major is—” He zoomed and the viewport snapped to a sector anchored around a low-tech Earth branch. “—here.” He expanded the metrics, sent them to her TemPad. “We’re reading bleed through from a neighbor with a similar constant set, but the signature on the seep isn’t a standard cross-branch signature. There’s an absence component. Like something from the other side is less, and the less is coming over and eating.”

“Can we isolate?” she asked. “Quarantine the affected areas?”

He had already run the command. The system had already spit back a polite refusal. “We can tag and monitor. Quarantine fields destabilize at the margin. The bleed knows how to go around or through. It’s not pressure; it’s osmosis. Our fences don’t stick.”

B-15’s mouth flattened. She looked at him directly for the first time since she came in, and he saw computations there he recognized from battles and aftermaths. “Preventive measures?”

“Nothing we have,” Casey said too quickly. He winced at his own voice. “I mean—we can deploy dampeners to stabilize local events, but if the constants are shifting, the dampeners will be tuned to the wrong values. They’ll think they’re working. They won’t be.”

The second analyst, Hana, cleared her throat. “Can we recalibrate the Loom to change the tension in the greater weave and starve it?”

Mobius pulled up a model and shook his head before the numbers finished. “Any macro adjustment risks tearing stable branches. And if this is systemic, tension changes might accelerate the flow. We’d be poking at a hole in a dam with a stick.”

B-15’s TemPad vibrated. She glanced at it, then showed it to them: a message from Systems. Minor readout anomalies appearing across three other departments. She silenced it. “You think this is targeted?”

Mobius stared at the gray. He hated how familiar the feeling in his chest was. The thing he’d been waiting for without permission. “It’s intelligent,” he said. “If not in the way we like to call intelligent. It’s following gradients. It’s finding low barriers between similar realities. It’s using our acceptance of variance as surface area.”

She nodded once, a hard click of acceptance. “We’re out of our depth.”

No one argued.

The room’s air felt thinner. Mobius adjusted the zoom again, just to do something with his hands. The gray kept spreading like nothing cared that he was watching.

“Start logs,” B-15 said, already dictating to her TemPad. “New classification: Temporal Bleed. Priority: maximum. Standing orders: identify, monitor, triage. No field interventions without my approval. Pull every piece of multiversal theory we’ve got, old TVA and new. Cross-compare with Void physics, anomaly containment protocols, anything on boundary phenomena. If there’s a manual for this, I haven’t read it.”

Casey nodded, a jerky movement. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Hana, notify Systems and Loom Control to maintain current tension, no experiments. We don’t touch the dials until we understand the dials.”

Hana moved, already typing.

B-15 looked back at the central screen, then at Mobius. She didn’t say his name, but she didn’t have to. He had the same thought standing in his chest like a person: this was a kind of trouble only one mind he knew had learned to take apart without breaking it worse.

He forced his eyes off the wrongness and down to his own TemPad. He could feel his heartbeat in the fingers that typed. He put together a packet, all the raw data, the pretty graphs, the ugly ones. He attached the Loom readouts, even if they were useless, because he knew the person he was thinking of would want to see the whole picture.

On the main display, the UNDEFINED icon blinked once and turned into a permanent label: TEMPORAL BLEED. The system had given up guessing and named it.

“Get me every senior on deck,” B-15 said. “And somebody find out if our new training materials printed the words ‘we don’t know’ in a big enough font.”

Mobius didn’t smile this time. He watched the gray touch another seam and take. He felt the old hope he hated and loved move under his ribs like it was waking up.

He turned the projector schematics in his mind without looking at them. He felt the device waiting in its drawer downstairs like a breath held. The monitors hummed. The gold lines tried to be brave. The bleeds kept bleeding.

B-15 stayed with the screen a long beat after everyone stopped talking. The room’s whirr and the quiet tap of keys sounded too loud around the gray smears gnawing at the gold. She exhaled, not quite a sigh, more a decision.

“Okay,” she said. “We’re out of our depth.”

Casey’s mouth opened like he might apologize for the universe. Hana’s hands stilled over her TemPad. Mobius glanced at the analog clock he’d stuck on his wall months ago to irritate Systems. The second hand moved on stubbornly, pretending time was a neat thing.

B-15 straightened, shoulders squaring under the new cut of the coat she’d earned. “I’m not going to pretend we can whiteboard our way out of this by dinner,” she went on. “We need an expert who understands the weave beyond how the TVA writes its manuals.” She didn’t look at the analysts. She looked at Mobius.

The look landed like a hand on his chest. He kept his face neutral, the way he’d learned to do when a variant started to beg and he had to keep procedure smooth. His pulse ticked a little faster anyway.

She didn’t say the name. She didn’t have to. The monitors threw their soft light up across the room, catching on the faint silver in his hair, catching on the uneaten Josta sweating on the corner of his desk like an accusation. The drawer in the bottom of the console, the one with the Projector nestled on a bed of foam in a sealed box, seemed to hum at him with memory.

Casey swallowed. “You mean…him.”

Hana darted a glance between the two of them, a flicker of confusion and curiosity. She hadn’t been there. She’d read the briefings. She didn’t know the space in a room where a man used to stand and make you feel like the ground under your feet belonged to you for once.

B-15 nodded. “I mean the only person who has sat at the heart of it and survived long enough to think about it. The one who chose to hold it.” Her tone stayed even, but her jaw shifted like she was fighting the memory of a bridge and a green coat and a choice none of them could unmake for him. “We have to ask.”

Mobius’s fingers were steady when he set his TemPad down. “The Projector isn’t exactly field-tested in that direction,” he said, because he was supposed to say the sensible thing, the cautionary thing. “We’ve only modeled short-distance stabilization. The Citadel’s pressure—”

“We don’t have time to perfect it,” B-15 said, cutting gently. “I’ll authorize what you need to get it ready. We’ll put a medical team on standby in case your atoms try to argue with reality. But we both know what you were building it for.”

He let the truth of that sit between them. He had built it piece by piece like a man carving a key he hoped never to use. He’d told himself it was for emergencies, for a theoretical consultation, for a contingency briefing. He’d never said the other words out loud. The room didn’t need him to.

Casey recovered enough to stammer, “If this works, if you actually—if you see him—what do we even ask? What’s the ask that doesn’t—” He gestured helplessly at the feed, where the label TEMPORAL BLEED blinked its steady judgment. “—make all this worse?”

Mobius’s eyes never left B-15. “We bring data,” he said. “No ask except help understanding. No leverage. No pressure. We don’t ask him to leave anything. We don’t ask him to fix it from there. We ask him what it is.”

B-15’s mouth softened, the barest degree. “Good. He deserves respect. We’ll give him that.” She looked back at the gray on the map. “We might have to risk a lot regardless.”

Hana cleared her throat. “Procedural question,” she said, voice careful. “Is this a…permission-to-contact situation? Or a…we’re going whether the Council likes it.”

B-15’s answer was immediate. “There is no Council.” Her eyes didn’t move from Mobius. “There’s us. There’s the people who trust us. We’ll document. We’ll notify. And then we’ll do what needs doing.”

Mobius nodded once. He could feel the shape of the moment drop into place like a lock accepting a key. He thought of a laugh that sounded like it was private, shared on a bench with a tired man who liked terrible magazines and better conversation. He thought of green light and the taste of burnt sugar from a soda he pretended to like. He thought of a hand on his shoulder in a rain of glass.

“I’ll get the Projector,” he said. The words felt too simple for what they were. He reached to the lower drawer and keyed in the code. The latch released with a small, final click that made Casey flinch.

B-15 stepped closer, her presence solid and grounding. “Mobius,” she said, quieter. “If there’s anything in there you don’t want to bring back into this room, don’t. This is a mission. It’s also not just a mission. I’m not going to stand here and pretend there isn’t a cost to this ask. You tell me when to pull the plug.”

He let himself meet her eyes, really meet them. He saw the commander who’d cut her own leash and watched too many others do it the hard way. He saw the woman who had held a line in a doomed hallway while the world rewrote itself and refused to blink.

“I know,” he said. He closed his hand around the case handle. It was heavier than it had any right to be, balanced just so, a neat miracle they’d engineered in a lab under fluorescent lights. He set it on the desk and opened the clasps. The device inside looked modest, a polished ring of metal nested with coils and a frame meant to sit around the shoulders and throat like a yoke. It hummed when he brushed his fingertips over it, waking up to his temporal aura the way it was designed to.

Casey hovered, eyes big and full of a dozen unasked questions. “Do you want—should I prep a tether? If the field drops, we can yank you back—”

“Yes,” Mobius said. “Prep it. Make it redundant. Triple it.” He glanced at Hana. “Run a live sync with Loom Control but keep their fingers off the dials. I want flat lines on their end while we’re in motion. No corrections.”

Hana nodded, already moving.

B-15 reached for her TemPad. “I’ll clear corridors and put the rumor mill on a leash for as long as I can. You’ve got an hour.”

Mobius lifted the Projector out of its casing. The metal was cool against his palms. It sat across his shoulders and neck with the weight of a collar and a promise. He thumbed the activation stud to a low diagnostic hum just to hear it live.

B-15’s gaze held him one last time, searching for cracks. “You sure?”

He gave her the only honest answer he had. “No.” He adjusted the frame’s snug fit and felt it settle around his pulse. “But I’m going.”

He moved fast because stillness would let the fear speak. He set the collar’s contacts against the notch at the base of his throat, the way they’d designed it to read his field strongest. The inner ring adjusted itself with small servo clicks, aligning to the rhythm under his skin. A hairline arc of blue light traced the outer rim, a diagnostic pulse syncing with his heartbeat. He watched the numbers scroll across his TemPad: amplitude, harmonics, the ugly variance spike where his aura had been scrambled and stitched back together a dozen times over the years.

Casey set down a tray with extra power cells like he was bringing tea to a sickbed. “I rerouted a stabilizer from the chrono-lab for your buffer,” he said. “If you feel pressure in your sinuses, that’s normal. If you taste copper, that’s also normal. If you start seeing things…try not to look at them straight on.”

“Comforting,” Mobius said dryly. He rolled his shoulders, feeling his body learn the new weight. The collar’s frame extended along his spine, a flexible lattice that would disperse the force of the Citadel’s pressure—if the math held. He took the remote emitter from the foam cutout and clipped it at his sternum. The unit hummed, then settled into a low, purring steady state. He let the sound work into him.

B-15 stood at the door, keeping people out with the shape of her presence. Her TemPad vibrated, and she muted it without breaking her gaze. The room was a pocket of quiet in a building humming with alarms that hadn’t been designed for this kind of threat.

Mobius checked the tether pack Casey held up. Three redundancies, hardwired and quantum-linked, braided like rope. He ran his fingers along the cable, not because he doubted Casey’s work but because he needed the simple, stupid sensation of a thing he could touch and test. “If the primary fails,” he said, “the second kicks in on a one-millisecond delay, and the third trips on loss-of-signal.”

Casey nodded. “We slaved them to your biosigns. If your heart rate stops, if your temperature spikes past survivable, if your aura vector collapses—we yank.”

Mobius met his eyes. “Don’t wait for consensus. Don’t run it by anyone. If those triggers hit, you pull.”

Casey swallowed and nodded again, harder. “Yes.”

Hana slid into the room, breathless from running between stations. “Loom Control is synced and locked. They don’t like it, but they’re holding. We fed the system a false fluctuation profile so it stops trying to compensate when your projector spikes the field. It’ll think it’s already doing something.”

“Smart,” Mobius said. His voice came out even. His palms were slick. He clipped the tether line to the D-ring at his hip. The cable coiled itself neatly, sensing his movement and adjusting. The design team had joked about making it a seatbelt. He hadn’t laughed.

B-15 stepped in close enough for her voice to drop. “You know we can send someone else.”

“No,” he said, already shaking his head. “You can’t.” He tightened the strap at his shoulder until it bit. “He’ll listen to me. Or he won’t. But if he won’t, he’ll at least look.”

Her mouth did that small softening again. “Bring back what he gives you,” she said. “And bring yourself back. Both are orders.”

“Copy that,” he said, and forced a grin he almost felt. “If you see me dripping and smiling, it means it worked.”

“Dripping?” Casey said faintly.

“Sweat,” Mobius said. “From all the terrifying science.”

They moved together then, a practiced ballet. Casey anchored the tether pack to the floor mount. Hana attached the secondary and tertiary couplings to the projector’s ports at his collar and spine. The collar’s field warmed incrementally, like stepping into sunlight that had weight. The numbers on his TemPad slid into the range the whiteboards had promised and stayed there.

He keyed in the destination protocols himself. The endpoint had no coordinates in any system the TVA had ever used. It was a place defined by the sum of all places—he had to build a path out of his own pattern. The projector read his aura, extrapolated it, and tuned itself to the one signature in the multiverse that had shaped that aura more than any other. He entered Loki’s name anyway, as if the device could read it as instruction. The display returned a meaningless string that meant the right thing. The heart of it. The end of it. The place where his need to see that face was a vector strong enough to cross reality.

He took his TemPad, slotted it into the projector’s housing so it could talk to everything at once, and the battery indicator dropped by a notch. He ignored the prickle of sweat at his hairline and the way his tongue felt dry, like he’d eaten chalk. His hands were steady when he lifted the hood-like emitter and settled it around his head, the way a diver dons a helmet and thinks about the ocean as a room you can walk into if you have the right tricks.

“Final comm check,” Hana said, voice professional to hide the way it thinned at the end. “TVA Ops to Field. Reading you at full clarity.”

“Reading you,” Mobius said. His own voice sounded like it had traveled a long way to reach him.

“Medical’s online,” Casey said. “Pulse ox is good. Temp requires calibration because the projector is hot.” He fumbled with a small vial and then pressed it into Mobius’s hand. “Sugar tabs. If things…you know. Eat one.”

Mobius slipped the vial into his pocket. He almost said something easy. He almost said, don’t tell anyone I carried candy to the end of time. Instead he looked at B-15 for one last calibration, the kind no device could provide.

She surprised him by putting a hand on his shoulder. Warm, solid, human. “If you need to talk to him like a friend,” she said softly, “do it. You have that right.”

His throat went tight around a thing he didn’t have time to feel. He nodded. “Open the door.”

Hana keyed the final sequence. The projector’s field surged, the hum moving lower, through him, vibrating the tiny bones in his ears and the cartilage between his ribs. The air around him thickened. The first edge of pressure pressed into his sinuses like a storm front. The room tilted, or he did. He breathed through it and pictured the path he’d built in his head every night for months he’d pretended he wasn’t doing it. He pictured green light folding a room into itself, the smell of old stone and wet metal, and a thread of gold that wasn’t light at all but the shape of a promise someone had made and kept.

The floor under his boots softened into something less literal. The tether line tugged once, a reminder that there was still a place with floors, with colleagues, with coffee that went cold too fast. He leaned into the forward pull of the field, and the room rushed away from him like a curtain flung aside.

There was a bright, pressure-thick instant where all the sound in the world went thin, like a tape stretched too far. His vision fractured around the edges. The projector pushed back against the crush from all directions, held the bubble around his body intact, and asked him, in the language of numbers and heat, to keep wanting what he wanted.

He did. He wanted. It burned and tasted like metal. It carried him through the narrow throat between now and always. He thought, hold on, and heard B-15 in his ear saying, “We’ve got you,” like a rope in the dark.

The gold light hit first, not as sight but as temperature. Warm, then cold, then a precise neither. The pressure eased a fraction. The collar’s diagnostic tone steadied.

“Field holding,” Hana said faintly, very far away. “Mobius, do you copy?”

He exhaled and felt the breath go somewhere that wasn’t the TVA at all. “Copy,” he said, and opened his eyes on the place he’d built a key for, the one he’d told himself he wouldn’t use. He kept his hands down, like approaching a skittish animal, and he let the hope he’d been strangling stand up in his chest and look around.