Leo Vance was a mid-level data-scrubber, a man who prided himself on being perfectly, utterly invisible. He paid his taxes on time, never questioned the Oculus, and wore only beige. When the glowing red summons appeared on his wrist-screen, he didn't scream or cry. He just felt a cold, hollow click in his chest. Of course.

Leo fell, not into acid, but into memory. The gauntlet, flawed and unpredictable, didn't rewind five seconds. It rewound five years.

The floor gave way.

The enforcers froze. The temporal signal vanished. Without the gauntlet, he was no longer an anomaly. He was just Leo Vance, a citizen who had never been summoned to Brave Service because, in this timeline, he had never existed in Atherton.

He looked at the gauntlet. Its screen displayed a single line of text:

Leo stood in the town square, the gauntlet on his wrist. The enforcers closed in. He looked at the screen:

One of the enforcers tilted its head. "Your identification, please."