Aris stared at the words. Seventy-two hours. He’d stolen a child from a past where she still faced a slow, painful death. A child who remembered dying. Who remembered him holding her hand as the monitors flatlined.

She hugged him back weakly, then pulled away. Her gaze drifted past him to the terminal screen, still glowing with the conversion log. She stared at it for a long moment, her small face unreadable.

His finger hovered. The lab was silent except for the hum of the air scrubbers. Somewhere above, the Nevada desert night pressed against the bunker’s concrete skin.

They’d fed the device a dead sparrow. A second later, the output tray produced a living, breathing sparrow—older, feathers a shade lighter, but unmistakably alive. The test had been buried. The lead scientist had resigned. Then disappeared.

“Can we go to that beach?” she asked. “Before I go back?”

The terminal asked: Confirm irreversible quantum substitution. Original timeline data will be overwritten. Y/N?