The door opens hard. Chen steps in like the room offended her.

  “We’re moving,” she says immediately. No preamble. No eye contact with the cameras. “Now.”

  Buck stands as she reaches the table, already undoing the restraints with hands that move too fast to be casual.

  “What the hell did you do?” she mutters. “You went from ‘inconvenient’ to ‘solo temporal asset’ in under an hour.”

  “Good to see you too,” Buck says.

  She shoots him a look. “Don’t joke. They don’t do this unless they want data. Or silence.”

  She pulls him through the door and down the corridor before he can ask more. The pace is wrong. Too fast. Not procedural.

  “They’re reassigning you,” she continues, low and tight. “No team. No handlers on your side. Officially, this is a stress-response evaluation.”

  “And unofficially?”

  She exhales through her teeth. “They want to see what breaks you.”

  They pass checkpoints that barely slow them. Doors open on Chen’s clearance a second faster than they should. Buck notices. So does she.

  “They’re accelerating the timeline,” she says. “No pun intended.”

  The dressing room is just outside the accelerator chamber. White walls. Composite lockers. The smell of ozone and sterilized fabric. Chen shuts the door behind them and turns, eyes sharp.

  “Listen to me,” she says. “I don’t know what you uncovered, but it scared the wrong people.”

  She opens a locker, pretends to check a harness, then slips something small and heavy into his palm. A compact pulse pistol. Cold to the touch and Illegal as all hell.

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  Before he can react, she presses two sealed food cubes into his other hand.

  “You didn’t get these from me,” she whispers. “You never saw them.”

  “Chen,” he starts.

  She shakes her head. “I know. I know I’m not supposed to. But this feels wrong, and I’m not letting you go in empty handed.”

  Footsteps echo down the corridor. Too many. Too fast. Buck slips the items into the pockets of the jacket she hands him as he slips it on.

  Her voice drops even lower. “I wish I could do more.”

  The door bursts open behind them. Guards spill in, surprise flickering across their faces when they see Buck already geared, already moving.Chen doesn’t look back. She marches him straight into the accelerator chamber before anyone can object.

  The room is enormous.

  Circular. Cathedral-scale. Layers of superconducting rings stacked like halos, each one humming at a different pitch. The air vibrates with contained violence.

  At the center is the cradle. Upright. Narrow. Human-shaped.

  This is not a machine designed for comfort. This is a machine designed for certainty.

  Chen hands him off to the techs without ceremony. They fit the harness, lock the restraints, connect the ocular receiver. The HUD flickers briefly, then settles.

  “Temporal acceleration is not movement,” one of the techs recites, explaining procedure without emotion. “It is displacement along a constrained probability corridor.”

  Buck barely hears him. Chen leans close. “Short hops cost less energy,” she says quickly. “Longer jumps take exponentially more. Time and distance compound. They’re throwing a lot of power at this.”

  “Where am I going?” Buck asks.

  She hesitates. “Somewhere medieval from what I can gather. Somewhere they think you won’t survive without help.”

  That answer lands heavier than a destination. Chen and the technicians leave the chamber, she looks back one last time as she steps through the door, regret painting her face. Her eyes steel as she turns and walks away. The chamber doors begin to close. As the seals engage, a voice cuts into his ocular feed. Not corporate. Not filtered.

  “You’re about to have a very bad day,” the voice says. Calm. Dry. Sarcastic. “But it could be worse.”

  Buck stiffens. “Who is this?”

  “Jana,” the voice replies. “I sent the warning you ignored.”

  “I didn’t ignore it,” Buck says. “I just didn’t understand it.”

  “That tracks,” Jana says. “Listen. Too late for crying now. We can’t stop this launch. Too much energy already committed.”

  The hum deepens. The rings brighten, light bending strangely at the edges.

  “But we can… adjust,” she continues. “Original plan had you landing deep in the European dark ages 200% more plague now included at no extra charge. But wait, there’s more… a welcoming committee they sent ahead of you with what sounded like clear orders to make things… infinitely more difficult for you.”

  Buck clenches his jaw.

  “We nudged it,” Jana says. “Closer in time. Closer in space. We will cover your tracks as best we can, but can’t guarantee they won’t come a knocking.”

  A pause. Then a hint of amusement.

  “Be sure and write home once you get to Camp Crystal Lake so we can send care packages.”

  “What the fuck does that mean? Where am I going to end up?”, Buck grunts as the air around him seems to grow thicker with energy.

  “Ever wanted to see New York City grow up and…”, Jana laughs warmly, but it’s cut short as the transmission ends abruptly.

  The power spikes. Every light in the chamber goes pure white.

  The energy build up is not expressed as sound anymore. It is pressure. Rhythm and vibration that builds. It pounds into his bones, his teeth, his very being. Leaving no room for any thoughts. He can only focus on the forces building around him. In every part of him.

  Space folds inward. Time stretches thin. Then it hits. Pain beyond comparison. Beyond metaphor. Beyond anything he has a word for.

  The world detonates into white and when it fades, Buck is gone.