The Bruise in the Sky

The servers hummed their familiar lullaby at 3 AM. Elena traced her fingertip across the desk, following an invisible equation. Her coffee had gone cold hours ago.

The secondary monitor showed what it always showed. T-minus three seconds to ignition. Her father's voice mid-sentence, forever frozen. She'd stopped hearing the audio years ago, but her finger still found the volume dial when equations refused to resolve.

The CMB Cold Spot data scrolled across her main screen. Standard background radiation patterns. Expected fluctuations. Nothing her colleagues hadn't already dismissed as sensor noise.

Then the numbers changed.

Elena's hand stopped mid-trace. The quantum fluctuations spiked. Not gradually. Instantaneous. She leaned forward, her watch catching the monitor's blue glow.

The Cold Spot wasn't cosmic radiation.

It was a scar. A dimensional breach where universes had collided. Still were colliding. The data showed interference patterns—two realities pressed against each other like hands separated by glass.

Her breath caught. Fourteen years of searching. Answered in a single data spike at 3:17 AM.

The observatory alarm shrieked.

Elena's chair hit the floor as she stood. The monitors flickered. Once. Twice. The numbers accelerated, cascading beyond measurement. Solar flare. Resonance cascade. The two events syncing in a way that shouldn't be possible.

"No." Her voice barely audible under the alarm. "Not yet."

The fluorescent lights began their death dance. Flicker-dark-flicker. Syncopated rhythm with something vast and incomprehensible. The servers' hum climbed to a scream.

Reality cracked.

Not metaphorically. Elena watched the air split like glass struck by an invisible hammer. Fracture lines spread from a point just above her desk. Through them, she saw... something. Somewhere. Two places occupying one space.

Her father's voice echoed. "T-minus three seconds to ignition."

The monitors exploded outward in frozen sprays of light. But they didn't fall. They hung suspended, their fragments catching reflections of two different rooms—hers and somewhere else.

Elena reached for her watch. Muscle memory. Anchor herself in measurable time. Her fingers found the cold metal band.

The fracture widened.

Wind that wasn't wind pulled at her. No—pushed and pulled simultaneously. She gripped the desk but her fingers passed through it like smoke. The observatory floor rippled beneath her feet.

"T-minus three—"

The breach opened fully. Reality shattered with the sound of her father's voice cutting off mid-word.

Elena fell through the seams of the universe.

The last thing she saw was her watch, still on her wrist, both hands spinning backward. The last thing she felt was the Observatory floor, impossibly solid and impossibly absent. The last thing she heard was the servers' scream dopplering away.

Then nothing.

Then everything.

Then something in between.