The Ashford Museum of Natural History smelled like old carpet and broken promises.
Maya Reeves sat at the security desk in the main lobby, watching a moth commit suicide against the EXIT sign for the fourth time in ten minutes. Stupid thing kept going back. She understood the impulse—sometimes you just couldn't help yourself, even when you knew better.
Her phone said 11:47 PM. Three hours down, six to go.
The museum at night was a different animal than during the day. During visiting hours, it was all screaming school groups and exhausted parents and that one old guy who came every Tuesday to stare at the mineral collection like it owed him money. At night, it was just Maya, the emergency lights casting everything in that greenish tint that made her look dead in the bathroom mirror, and approximately ten thousand dead things behind glass.
She'd been working here for three months. The pay was garbage—$16.50 an hour to sit in a building that probably had asbestos and definitely had rats. But it was overnight work, which meant she had her days free for classes at the community college. Or that was the theory. Mostly she just slept until 2 PM and felt like a vampire.
Her coffee had gone cold an hour ago. She drank it anyway.
The thing about overnight security at a museum was that nothing ever happened. The most exciting part of Maya's shift was usually when Derek, the other guard, would wander by around 1 AM with whatever conspiracy theory YouTube had fed him that week. Last Thursday it was something about the Denver Airport. The week before, chemtrails.
Maya checked her phone again. 11:48 PM.
Time moved differently at night. She'd noticed that. Minutes stretched out like taffy, but somehow entire hours would just evaporate. She'd look down at her phone and it would be 11:30, look up to check the cameras, look back down and suddenly it was 1:15. The space between felt like someone had just... edited it out.
She pulled up her Intro to Anthropology reading on her phone. Something about kinship systems. The words kept sliding off her brain.
That's when she heard it.
Not a sound, exactly. More like the feeling of a sound. Like when you know someone's standing behind you even though you didn't hear them approach. The air in the lobby changed. Got heavier. Got different.
Maya looked up from her phone.
The moth was gone. The EXIT sign looked dimmer than it had been a second ago, but maybe that was just her eyes adjusting. Everything looked normal. The front doors, locked and chained. The gift shop gate, pulled down and padlocked. The entrance to the Hall of North American Mammals, dark except for the emergency lighting.
Except.
Maya squinted.
There was a hallway to the left of the mammal hall. She could see it clearly—a wide corridor with the same scuffed linoleum as the rest of the museum, disappearing into darkness.
That hallway hadn't been there thirty seconds ago.
She knew the museum's layout. She'd walked every inch of this building during her first week, learning the patrol route. The left side of the Hall of North American Mammals was a wall. Solid wall. There was a utility closet, then the employee bathroom, then the offices. No hallway.
Maya stood up slowly. Her chair squeaked. The sound seemed too loud in the stillness.
She walked toward the hallway, her sneakers making soft squeaking sounds on the linoleum. As she got closer, she could see that the corridor wasn't completely dark—there was a faint bluish light coming from somewhere deep inside it, like moonlight through ice.
At the entrance to the hallway, there was a placard on the wall. The kind the museum used for exhibit labels. Brass, engraved, official-looking.
It read: THE CARTOGRAPHY WING - Donated by the Estate of Harrison Gill, 1967
Maya had never heard of a Cartography Wing. She'd never heard of Harrison Gill.
She pulled out her phone and opened the camera app, taking a picture of the placard. The flash made her blink. When she looked back at her phone, the image was there—the placard, clear as day.
So she wasn't hallucinating. Probably.
She should call Derek. She should check the security cameras. She should do literally anything other than walk into a hallway that hadn't existed five minutes ago.
Maya walked into the hallway.
The bluish light got stronger as she went deeper. The corridor wasn't long—maybe thirty feet—and it ended in an archway. Through the archway, she could see a room.
She stepped through.
The Cartography Wing was circular, maybe forty feet across, with a domed ceiling that showed a painted sky—not the sky from any particular place or time, but something composite and strange. Constellations Maya didn't recognize. A moon that was the wrong color.
The walls were covered in maps.
Not hung on the walls—part of the walls. They looked like they'd been there forever, pressed into the plaster like fossils. Some were on paper that had yellowed and cracked. Some were on vellum. Some were on materials Maya couldn't identify—something that looked like metal but bent like fabric, something that might have been glass but felt warm when she got close.
The maps were all wrong.
One showed the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, but the coastline was different—Florida was smaller, and there was an island off the coast of Virginia that definitely didn't exist. Another showed a city labeled "New Amsterdam" that sprawled far beyond what Manhattan should be, with districts named things like "The Smokeless Quarter" and "Whitestone Heights."
In the center of the room stood a glass display case. Inside it was a single map, spread flat.
Maya approached it slowly.
The map showed North America, but the borders were all wrong. Canada extended further south. There was a country called "Cascadia" taking up the Pacific Northwest. The Midwest was labeled "The Inland Sea" and was, apparently, full of water.
A small placard next to the display case read: North American Political Boundaries, 2025. From the timeline designated 'Laurentia-4' by the Ashford Institute.
Maya read it three times.
This year. Right now.
A timeline.
She pulled out her phone, hands shaking slightly, and started taking pictures. The maps, the room, the display case, everything. The camera flash kept firing, throwing harsh white light across the impossible geography.
Behind her, she heard footsteps.
Maya spun around, heart hammering.
Derek stood in the archway, backlit by the hall lights. He was a big guy, mid-fifties, with a gut and a graying beard and a Grateful Dead t-shirt under his security uniform jacket.
"Oh good," he said. "You can see it too."
Maya stared at him. "What the hell is this?"
"It's Thursday," Derek said, like that explained anything. He walked into the room, hands in his pockets, looking around at the maps with the casual air of someone checking out produce at the grocery store. "It's always Thursday. Third Thursday of your first month, give or take. Then you start seeing them."
"Seeing what? Derek, what—"
"The other wings." He stopped at a map showing South America with mountain ranges that didn't exist. "They show up at night. Different ones each time. Usually around 2:47 AM, but sometimes earlier if the building's in a mood." He glanced at his watch. "We've got time. This one usually stays until dawn."
Maya felt like her brain was trying to restart itself and failing. "The building's in a mood?"
"Yeah. It's a whole thing." Derek moved to another map, this one showing Europe but with the Mediterranean Sea half-drained, cities built in the dry seabed. "This is a pretty good wing, honestly. Some of them are..." He trailed off, made a face. "Weirder."
"Derek." Maya's voice came out steadier than she felt. "What the fuck is happening?"
He turned to look at her, and his expression was surprisingly kind.
"Welcome to the night shift," he said. "The real one."