The split engulfed them.
Lila had expected pain—every theoretical model suggested human consciousness couldn't survive pure temporal energy. Instead, she experienced everything. Every moment that ever was or would be poured through her mind like molten silver. She was five years old on Mars Colony, crying over a broken toy. Ninety (though she'd never live that long), watching the sun die from some ship she'd never seen. Scattered across infinity like light through a prism.
Edmund's hand anchored her. In the chaos, only his grip remained real.
Through their connection, she felt his mind spinning in the same vertigo. But where hers spiraled toward madness, his held steady. A man who'd kept ships whole through decades of storms saw this as just another tempest.
Hold with me, his mind whispered across dimensions. Don't let go.
Never, she promised back.
History happened around them. Shattered pieces. She saw Edmund on some ship called HMS Intrepid, brass buttons shining as he shouted orders over cannon fire. He saw her giving her first lecture on temporal mechanics. Shaking hands she'd tried to hide. They were seeing the whole of each other's lives in one impossible moment.
Something was amiss with it, though. The memories weren't being revealed so much as they were merging together like watercolor paint.
Suddenly Lila stood on the deck of a sailboat. Salt spray spraying in her face. But it was the wrong boat. Sails solar panels, cannons energy guns. The crew dressed in this bizarre mix of old navy uniforms and space suits. Saturn's rings above a giant alien clock face instead of clouds.
"What the devil?" Edmund's voice was on the side of her. She spun to find him staring at his uniform with a confused expression. It fluctuated between his navy coat and a station jumpsuit. Never quite committing to either. "This isn't my ship. This isn't. anywhere."
"It's a mashup," Lila realized. Her mind trying to fit it together with the seasickness on a ship that didn't belong. "Our memories are constructing some kind of communal space. Part your time, part mine, part. I don't know what."
A voice shouted from above.
In the rigging, which was somehow rope and fiber optic cable simultaneously, a figure waved wildly. It was Dr. Chen, but dressed in ship's officer style, younger than she'd ever seen him.
"Dr. Reyes!" he shouted. His voice had the authority of professor and sea captain. "Temporal storm closing in! You have to get your calculations right before we're torn apart!"
"Temporal storm?" Edmund gazed where Chen was looking. His expression paled. On the horizon, where sea gave way to space, a wall of sheer untruth was hurtling towards them. It was like a hurricane made up of calendar pages and clock faces, all spinning at different speeds. Where it grazed objects, they became old and unrolled, were born and died, were and never were.
"The schism," Lila exclaimed. "It's not stable. We're stuck in some kind of loop. If we can't move through it—"
"Then we plot a course," Edmund interrupted. Stepping towards the ship's wheel with renewed determination. But as he drew bead, holographic screens flashed about the wooden spokes. "Good God. How does one use math to navigate?"
"Same way you sail with current and wind," Lila moved in beside him. Her fingers flying across half-brass, half-quantum computer controls. "We need to chart the stable path through time. Too far in either direction and we'll be ripped asunder by our eras."
The storm moved in upon them like a freight train.
Their impossible ship rolled and bucked. Crews boarded and disembarked - sometimes Lila's co-workers at the station, sometimes Edmund's mariners, sometimes strangers from times and places that neither of them recognized.
"The mast!" Edmund roared as a spar of wood and dynamism became crystalline and started to break. "We'll never stay on course if we lose it!"
Without thinking, Lila was climbing the rigging beside him. Her body moving with a beauty she'd never experienced. Pilfering muscle memory from Edmund's years at sea. His hands working in minutes-at-most knots with a delicacy born of her own years of precision work in zero-g. They were becoming something new. Something neither of them ever had been alone. Not anymore.
Lightning flashed nearby. If lightning were made of time. In the flash of light, Lila saw something that stopped her heart.
Other ships in the storm. Dozens of them. All trying to sail through the same impossible strait.
"Edmund," she whispered, pointing. "See."
He glanced in her direction. She felt his shock through their connection. The rest of the vessels were all different versions of their own - the same mix of sail ship and spaceship, but different. On one, she saw herself and Edmund, but older and weathered by years of adventure. On another, versions of them who had never met each other, dying apart. On a third, she saw her alone. Edmund's dead body on the deck.
"Other times," she panted. "Each choice we could possibly make, each path we could take - they're all here, all trying to escape all at the same time."
"Then we'd better make sure it's us that escape," Edmund snarled. He spun back to face her. In his eyes she saw the same determination that had carried him through fights that would break lesser men. "What do you require of me?"
The question was more profound than it had sounded.
From their bond, she knew he wasn't asking about the crisis only.
He was asking her to trust him entirely, to let go of whatever walls remained between their minds. If they were going to navigate this storm, they couldn't be two individuals reliving memories - they needed to become something whole.
"Anything," she confessed. Watching her scientific detachment crumble. "I need all you are, all you know. And I must have the same to give you. But Edmund, if we do this - if we melt this completely - we might not be able to unbend anymore. We might become inextricably entwined."
He smiled. It was the smile of a man who'd set his mind on something. "Lila - I've been ripped out of my time, flung into a world of wonders and terrors I barely understand. In the past hour, I've seen devices that dwarf our finest achievements as mere toys. I've watched reality itself break apart. By all rules, I should be mad with fear."
He put his hands on her face. She noticed the callus from rope and wheel, the strength of a man who'd held lives in his hands and never let any fall.
"But when I'm with you," he continued, "when I feel your thoughts along with mine, I'm not scared. Whatever we become, no matter what we're reduced to - I'd rather finish it with you than go back to my own time by myself. Is that crazy?"
"Absolutely," she laughed. Rivers of tears streaming down her face. "But no crazier than a physicist who fell in love with a man from 1822 in the span of an hour."
"Falling for?" His eyebrows shot up. "Why is that?"
Before she had time to answer, another spasm of temporal lightning hit. This one on their mainmast directly. The cosmos erupted into sensation - every instant they'd spent expanded a thousand times. She was Edmund enjoying his first command. Pride and fear warring in his chest. He was Lila solving the problem that had beaten her competitors for years, the joy of discovery singing through her veins. They were both, they were neither, they were something new.
Now! Chen's voice echoed across time and space. While the barrier's weak! Set your course!
Lila and Edmund stood hand in hand, taking the wheel.
The mathematics course through her mind, but now it had his sense of intuition about wind and water. She felt the mathematics of time as not dead equations but as living streams. Streams that were readable like a prediction of weather. He felt the quantum mechanics as not impossible science but an increase of the natural forces he had spent his life learning to use.
Together, they found the way.
It was impossibly narrow. One path through the temporal storm that would keep their timeline safe and enable them to soar unencumbered from the destruction of the collapsing rift. But to take it, they'd have to trust completely. Pilot perfectly. Adapt to whatever changes their union would bring.
"Ready?" Edmund asked. The question issued from both their minds at the same moment.
"Ready," Lila confirmed.
They turned the wheel.
The ship responded as though alive. Hybrid sails packed with temporal winds that don't belong to this reality. Beside them, the rest of the ships from the other timeline tried to keep up with them, but one by one, they lost them - some were engulfed by the storm, others disappearing like dreams when you wake. Only their boat, their perfect mix of past and present, held the course.
The storm blustered. Fighting to tear them apart. Other people's memories flowed through - Edmund's line, Lila's heritage, all the lives that tied them down through the centuries. She knew that their meeting was not coincidence. The blood lines had been intersecting, pulled together by some force that knew what even she did not know - that some links outweigh time itself.
"There!" Edmund pointed through the chaos. "A hole in the tempest!"
Lila perceived it too. A gash in the spinning energies of time, and glimpses of ordered reality beyond. But closing rapidly, and other forces were moving to seal them off. Vessels that were not ships, crewed by creatures in those same station suits. Their weapons mounting energies that could render them never-haves who never existed.
"The Temporal Oversight Committee," she snarled. "They're trying to stop us from—"
"From remaining alive," Edmund filled in. "Well, they'll learn what you do with a British naval officer and an egghead physicist who've got nothing whatsoever to lose. Full sail?"
"Full sail," she promised.
They piloted their impossible ship at speeds that distorted the universe around it.
The Committee fired, their guns blazing, but their shots went somewhere. The hybrid ship was in too many places at once. Zipping through dimensions their enemies could not follow. Lila's skill and Edmund's instincts wove them through probability currents no single mind could have conceived.
The nothingness was collapsing. They had seconds left.
"Both of us," they chanted simultaneously.
Made the final push.
The ship burst out of the storm's center at the very moment it settled in behind them. For a fleeting moment, they hung suspended in a total stillness - no time, no place, just the two of them and the tie that had saved them both.
And then reality struck back with a vengeance. They were plummeting, their vessel shattering them asunder like morning mist. Descending towards a planet that might be his era or hers or something entirely different. No way of knowing until they crashed.
Edmund enfolded her as they fell. She buried her face in the warmth of his chest, hearing his heartbeat against hers - two beatings finding rhythm across impossible odds.
"Whatever occurs," he breathed in her hair, "I don't regret anything."
"Neither do I," she breathed back.
The earth rose up to meet them.
The world went white.