The jump had thrown us into chaos. By the time my vision stopped spinning, I could feel that time wasn’t stable anymore.

  It folded in on itself like burning paper, fast and silent.

  Timeline degradation. I'd seen it before. First, the sky cracks open. Then reality stutters... objects duplicated, memories twisted, gravity shifting without warning. Eventually, it all folds in, collapsing into what jumpers called the Rot, a decaying tangle of broken time and corrupted echoes. Nobody survived the Rot... not intact, anyway.

  The rig’s chamber was shaking, throwing off heat and light in pulses. Outside, the jump corridor had narrowed to a thin thread of spinning static, barely holding.

  The smuggler hunched over the console, fingers flying across controls. Sweat clung to his neck like gravity remembered him. A warning light screamed red across the panel.

  ANCHOR LOCK: FAILED

  IDENTITY STABILITY: ERROR

  JUMP COLLAPSE IN: 00:02:14

  “Son of a bitch…” he muttered, hitting override after override. His own biometric signature was degrading, fractured across too many threads, flagged unstable.

  He looked over at the containment pod.

  The clean version. Unconscious, cuffed, still breathing.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  Still whole.

  He stood, staggered, grabbed the restraints and popped the release. The pod hissed open. The clean version stirred, groggy and pissed, blinking under the harsh lights.

  “Wha—what the hell—”

  “No time for therapy,” the smuggler snapped, grabbing him by the collar and dragging him out. “We’re crashing.”

  The younger man shoved him back. “You dragged me into this—”

  “Yeah. And now you’re dragging us out.”

  The console blared again.

  JUMP COLLAPSE IN: 00:01:32

  “You don’t get it,” the smuggler growled, pressing their foreheads together for a second. “I’m not stable. You are. You finish the run or we both die here as cosmic debris.”

  The clean version hesitated, torn, breath shallow. “Why should I help you?”

  The smuggler just looked at him.

  Then he said, low and final:

  “Because if you don’t, we both burn. That’s the deal.”

  And he shoved him into the chair.

  The clean version sat, hands flying now across the interface, less out of agreement and more out of refusal to die for someone else’s mistake.

  The smuggler collapsed against the wall, watching the rig begin to stabilize.

  His own heartbeat sync’d with the console’s rising frequency.

  Time bent one last time.

  And then the jump hit.

  But something was wrong.

  Instead of the clean ripple of transit, the cabin buckled, once, then twice.

  Lights flared and died. The corridor outside twisted mid fold, a jagged split in the math.

  A sound tore through the ship, low and grinding, like physics trying to cancel the receipt.

  ANCHOR ERROR. TRAJECTORY INTERCEPTED.

  Containment fields surged around them. Not from the rig. From something outside it.

  The smuggler's last thought before blacking out wasn’t “we made it.”

  It was “someone made sure we didn’t.”