On the morning the sky cracked, Mara Ellin was late for work and blaming the trains.
The platform clocks all read different times again — 8:12, 8:19, 7:58 — and the commuters stood beneath them like worshippers unsure which god to believe. No one complained anymore. When time itself started drifting three months ago, customer service lines stopped being useful.
Mara checked her wristband. 8:16. Good enough.
The arriving train shimmered before it fully appeared — not a malfunction exactly, more like a hesitation. Steel resolved from blur. Windows filled in. Reflections chose their angles. Then the doors opened with a polite chime as if nothing strange had happened at all.
“Apologies for the phase delay,” the conductor announced. “Please board in sequence.”
Phase delay. New phrase. Third this week.
Mara stepped inside with the rest of the gray-coated morning crowd. The car smelled like citrus cleaner and static. Across from her, a child watched the air above his palm, giggling quietly.
“What do you see?” she asked.
“The birds,” he said.
There were no birds underground.
He pointed anyway. “They keep rewinding.”
His mother gently lowered his hand. “He has imagination,” she told Mara with a tired smile.
Mara nodded politely and looked away — but for half a second she thought she saw it too: a blur of wings fluttering backward through invisible wind.
The train lurched.
Reality settled again.
Mostly.
Mara worked in Municipal Records Sub-Basement C, Department of Urban Continuity — a name so boring it had survived five administrations and two collapses of government structure. Their job was simple: keep the city’s memory consistent.
“Consistency,” her supervisor liked to say, “is just truth with good posture.”
The Records Vault stored everything that proved the city existed as it claimed to exist — property histories, architectural schematics, census rolls, utility grids, burial maps, transit tunnels, permits, demolitions, rebuilds. If a building stood, there was a paper trail. If a bridge fell, there was a correction trail.
If reality changed, Records made it behave.
Mara liked the quiet order of it. Ink did not flicker. Paper did not glitch.
Usually.
Her desk terminal blinked when she arrived.
FLAG — STRUCTURE DISCREPANCY
District: Halcyon East
Block: 44
Structure ID: HE-44-119
Status Conflict: EXISTS / NEVER BUILT
She frowned. That was new.
She opened the file tree. Half the records showed a twelve-story glass residential tower built nine years ago. The other half showed an empty municipal garden that had occupied the space continuously for fifty-two years.
Both sets of documents were perfectly complete.
Both were certified.
Both had inspection photos.
“Len,” she called across the aisle. “You ever see a dual-existence conflict?”
Len rolled back in his chair. “Only in training sims.”
“This one’s live.”
He whistled. “That’s bad.”
“Or interesting.”
“Same thing lately.”
Procedure required a field verification. Normally that meant sending a drone. Today the drone request system was offline with a red banner that read:
TEMPORAL COHERENCE MAINTENANCE — TRY LATER
Len leaned over her screen. “You’re going yourself.”
“I’m records, not inspection.”
“You’re whoever’s not frozen by bureaucracy. Congratulations.”
Her supervisor popped up behind them as if summoned by liability. “Take a badge cam,” he said. “And if the building exists, don’t go inside.”
“Why?”
“Because the garden version might still be true.”
“That sentence doesn’t make sense.”
He sighed. “Exactly.”
Halcyon East should have been twenty minutes away.
It took fifty.
The city had begun folding its distances. Streets looped incorrectly. Intersections repeated. Once, Mara crossed the same bakery three times without turning around. No one panicked anymore — navigation apps simply said PATH RECONCILING and recalculated.
When she reached Block 44, she stopped cold.
Both records were right.
The glass tower stood tall and mirror-bright in the morning sun.
And the garden surrounded it.
Not a rooftop garden — a ground-level municipal garden complete with walking paths, old benches, and a bronze plaque dated half a century ago. Trees grew right up through the paved plaza around the building’s entrance. Flower beds overlapped the lobby steps. A fountain occupied the space where the loading dock ramp should be.
Two realities intersecting without permission.
People walked through it without noticing.
A woman sat on a bench that phased halfway through the tower’s security kiosk. A delivery robot rolled through a hedge that clipped through its chassis like green fog. No one reacted.
Mara lifted her badge cam. “Field verification, HE-44-119,” she said.
The camera screen split into two feeds automatically.
Left: Garden only. No building.
Right: Tower only. No garden.
She swallowed.
“Okay,” she whispered. “That’s new.”
The building’s front doors opened.
No one touched them.
A man stepped out wearing a gray maintenance coat with no city insignia — just a symbol she didn’t recognize: a circle fractured by a horizontal line, like a broken horizon.
He looked directly at her — not through her, not past her — at her.
That alone meant something was wrong.
“Records Division,” he said calmly. “You’re early.”
“You’re expecting me?”
“Someone like you.”
“Who are you?”
“Continuity Custodian,” he replied. “Temporary assignment.”
“That’s not a department.”
“Today it is.”
She glanced at her badge cam feed again.
He did not appear in either side.
Only in real space.
Her throat tightened. “What’s happening to the city?”
He studied the skyline like a doctor checking a pulse. “It’s remembering versions of itself that were supposed to be deleted.”
“Cities don’t remember.”
“They do when you build them on predictive foundations.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“It will.”
Wind moved through the garden leaves — except the trees weren’t moving on the tower-only camera feed.
Two winds. One space.
“You should come inside,” he said.
“My supervisor told me not to.”
“Your supervisor still believes there’s only one timeline active.”
“Isn’t there?”
He smiled sadly. “There hasn’t been for months.”
The glass tower flickered.
For a heartbeat, it was ruins.
Burned floors. Broken ribs of steel. Blackened windows.
Then it snapped back.
Mara made her decision.
“Five minutes,” she said. “Then I leave.”
“You won’t,” he replied gently. “But I admire the plan.”
She stepped through the doors.
The garden vanished behind her like it had never existed.