out of time
Each story had to include a character who arrives somewhere LATE.
Each story’s first sentence had to contain only four words.
Each story had to include the words SKIP, KICK, BLUE and DISAPPEAR.
Something is terribly wrong.
He should be settling into the chair across from her in the restaurant. It should be him sipping that lukewarm cappuccino, watching the soft breeze ripple through the tips of her blonde hair. It should be his feet kicking out onto the pavement and his hand shielding his eyes from the sunlight.
He must have implemented the coordinates incorrectly.
These missed minutes could be disastrous. This is only one of two pivot points, and now they’ll need to skip straight to the second rendezvous in three days' time. 6:47 pm precisely in her hotel lobby, and he’ll only have a few final moments to convince her to take the alternative path. The consequences will be catastrophic if they fail to meet the next interception.
He should know; he’s seen them himself.
But right now, there’s not much he can do but observe from the fringes. From this vantage point, he can see the man leaning forward to speak quietly to the woman. With a wide-brimmed cap and tilted face, he can’t quite read his lips like usual. But he can see the expression on the woman’s face shift. Her eyes widen, her mouth falls open, and her focus zigzags away and around the restaurant.
It’s not uncommon to feel a strange sense of deja vu in this line of work. But today, the sensation had been more unsettling, like his tether to the world is frayed and ready to snap. When the scrape of her chair causes several heads to turn in their direction, he feels as if he’s seen this play out before.
When the man swivels to watch her storm away, he understands why.
Even though the lines on his face are more pronounced and his beard has been trimmed down to stubble, there’s no hiding the pointed nose and tight jawline. What is most damning of all is a pair of vibrant blue eyes, almost neon in their hue. Usually, he hides them behind a thick set of sunglasses to avoid extra attention.
Those eyes are staring right at him. It’s like looking in a mirror, a perfect reflection. He’s even wearing the same slack-jawed expression.
It’s him.
But it shouldn’t be. They have protocols in place to stop this very moment from happening. Dozens and dozens of handbooks in the agency library detailing this hypothesis all draw the same conclusion: do not cross the timestreams. There’s no documented evidence or a concrete way to know for certain, but the two of them together could cause the very fabric of reality to disappear around them.
It might be too late. The damage is already done.
