But Bud was stubborn. He grabbed the crack with both hands—felt it sting like a paper cut across ten dimensions—and folded it into a paper airplane. He threw it toward the setting sun.

So he did. He chased it through a rainstorm that fell upward, past clocks melting into puddles of brass, past a younger version of himself who tipped his hat and said, “Don’t fix it, Bud. It’s prettier broken.”

Bud Redhead wasn’t a detective, not really. He was a retired horologist with a nervous twitch and a head of hair the color of rusted fire hydrants. But when the crack appeared—right there in the middle of Main Street at 3:17 PM, shimmering like a split in a movie reel—people started screaming about timelines, and Bud was the only one who didn’t run.

The crack whispered back: Chase me.

He knelt down and touched it. The crack was warm, pulsing like a vein. Through it, he saw himself at age nine, losing a red balloon at a fair. He saw his first wife laughing before she forgot his name. He saw next Tuesday’s lottery numbers, then watched them dissolve into ash.