The jump never finished.

  One second, they were ripping through the fold, his breath tight with pressure and fallout. Then.......impact.

  Not against a surface.

  Against a system.

  A containment field snapped around them mid-stream, like being yanked out of hyperspace and thrown into a vat of cold math.

  They didn't crash. They were captured.

  When he came to, the smuggler's wrists were bound with filament-cuffs, legs shackled to a steel floor that hummed with a stabilizing frequency, meant to keep anomalies docile. He was in a chrome cube of a room with no seams, no features, and no time. There was no clock here. That was deliberate.

  An agent sat across from him.

  Black suit, no face, just a smooth reflective visor and a badge pulsing with Bureau red.

  Corvus Bureau. Or as he liked to call them: Corvus Corp's timeline accountants with guns. Officially, their job was preventing catastrophic paradoxes—cross-contamination between timelines. Unofficially, they controlled who got to jump, who stayed stuck, and who got quietly erased. Nobody elected them. Nobody challenged them. They just existed, keeping score on every illegal splice.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  "Well," the agent said, voice flat and synthetic, "congratulations. You’ve successfully committed cross identity transport across three restricted vectors. Would you like a medal or a bullet?"

  The smuggler smiled, lips cracked and dry. “Whichever Is cheaper.”

  “Don’t worry. The paperwork already decided for you.” The agent tapped a thin slate. “You’ve got nine active violations across five layers. Illegal jump. Unauthorized temporal anchor usage. Timeline contamination. And... this one’s my favorite... emotive continuity fraud. Haven’t seen that in a while.”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  The agent leaned forward. “So has your other self.”

  Cut to the next cell over.

  The clean version sat straighter, hands folded, jaw clenched. His cell had a chair. A small kindness. For now.

  His agent didn’t sit. She stood at attention, tablet in hand, posture sharp enough to slice air. Her voice was clinical, almost bored.

  “You assisted a fugitive in a class-5 interdimensional breach. He survived because you finished the jump.”

  “I didn’t...” he started.

  “You did. We have the logs. Your neural activity spiked at the anchor point. Without you, neither of you would be here.”

  He stared at the wall. The same wall he’d woken up against, chest aching from the jump, from everything.

  “You're not being tried as a smuggler,” she continued. “You're being processed as an accessory. Which means you’re not innocent.”

  He didn’t respond.

  She tapped her screen. “You're being transferred in the next cycle. High security containment. No legal representation in trans-dimensional custody. You won’t be interrogated again.”

  Back in the smuggler’s cell, the agent stood.

  “Any last words?”

  The smuggler chuckled, dry and small.

  “Yeah. Tell your system next time it wants to catch a ghost, maybe don’t use such cheap netting.”

  The agent didn’t respond. Just turned and left.

  The cell lights dimmed.

  The smuggler leaned back against the cold metal, staring up at the ceiling he couldn’t see.

  Next cycle, they’d be moved. Labeled. Locked. Forgotten.

  Unless they broke the system first.