Jack materialized on Chronos VII at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday, which was exactly the wrong time to arrive anywhere, but especially here.
"Ranger Castellan, you're early!" The greeting came from thin air—or rather, from where Mayor Chen would be standing in thirteen minutes. Her voice echoed from next Wednesday, which was already bleeding through in patches. "Or late. Time's a bit subjective here!"
Jack checked his chronometer three times. Definitely still Tuesday. Around him, the colony flickered like a badly tuned hologram—buildings half-existed, streets faded in and out, and a confused dog walked through the same spot seventeen times, each loop slightly more transparent.
"ARIA, what am I looking at?"
"Temporal dysfunction on a scale that makes my processors itch," she replied, her voice crackling with dimensional static. "The colony exists in a stable time loop, but only on Wednesdays. We're watching reality argue with itself about what day it is."
Jack's shadow stretched toward a building that wouldn't exist for ten minutes, curious about its architecture. He yanked it back. "Professional, remember? We're Rangers now."
The shadow made a gesture that suggested professional was boring, but complied.
11:58 PM. The flickering intensified. A colonist ran past, stopped, ran backward, then dissolved into temporal static. Somewhere a rooster crowed for dawn that wouldn't come for days. Jack's Ferox-touched bones began their familiar ache—the impossible was about to get more impossible.
11:59 PM. Reality held its breath.
Midnight.
The universe hiccupped.
Jack had experienced dimensional shifts, reality storms, and that one time on Kepler Station when someone divided by zero in real space. But this was different. This was existence itself changing channels. Tuesday didn't become Wednesday—Tuesday ceased, deleted from the local timeline like a typo, and Wednesday crashed into being with the subtlety of a meteor.
Buildings solidified mid-construction. Streets completed themselves. The confused dog finally reached its destination and barked triumphantly. And several hundred colonists popped into existence looking harried, exhausted, and somehow already behind schedule.
Mayor Chen materialized fully—a middle-aged woman whose expression suggested she'd been dealing with this far too long. Her mayoral sash read "WEDNESDAYS ONLY" in frustrated embroidery.
"Ranger! Thank god. We've been waiting for—" She paused, calculating. "Six Wednesdays? Seven? Time gets weird when you only exist one day a week."
"Ma'am, I'm here about your temporal anomaly reports—"
"Reports?" Chen laughed, but it had edges. "Son, we don't have temporal anomalies. We ARE a temporal anomaly. Follow me, I'll give you the one-day tour. We've gotten very efficient at explaining our predicament."
She led him through streets that buzzed with frantic activity. Everyone moved with practiced urgency—a week's worth of living crammed into twenty-four hours. Children attended speed-school ("Today we're covering Monday through Sunday's curriculum!"). Farmers tended crops through time-lapse growth chambers. A couple was getting married at the courthouse while simultaneously filing taxes and renewing their speeder licenses.
"How long has this been happening?" Jack ducked as a delivery drone careened past, its pilot trying to make seven days of deliveries before Thursday deleted them.
"Three months? Three years?" Chen shrugged. "We've existed for exactly forty-three Wednesdays. Can't tell you how much time passed between them because we weren't there to experience it."
Jack's shadow pointed at a construction site where workers were speed-building a house, knowing it would need to last until next Wednesday. One worker had spray-painted "FUTURE US: THE FOUNDATION CRACKS ON THE NORTH SIDE" on a beam.
"We leave ourselves notes," Chen explained. "Only way to maintain continuity. Though sometimes..." She pointed to graffiti that read "TRUST NOBODY, ESPECIALLY YOURSELF - WEDNESDAY #37."
"Your reports mentioned the situation was deteriorating?"
Chen's expression darkened. "At first, we thought we could manage. Build a society one day at a time. But people are starting to... remember."
"Remember what?"
"The other days. The stolen time. And that's when we realized—" She stopped at the town square where a digital calendar flickered desperately between Tuesday and Thursday, never landing on the days between. "The days aren't missing, Ranger. Something's taking them. And last Wednesday, someone saw it."
Jack felt his professional composure slip. "Saw what?"
"The thing that's eating our week. Right around Thursday breakfast, just before we stop existing." Chen met his eyes, and Jack saw the exhaustion of someone trying to govern the ungovernable. "We need help, Ranger. We're tired of living life in fast-forward. Some folks are talking about trying to jump to Thursday, see what happens. But we know what happens to people who try to leave Wednesday."
"What happens?"
Chen pointed to the memorial wall—names of colonists who'd tried to escape their temporal prison. Next to each name was a timestamp. They all stopped at 12:01 AM Thursday.
"Welcome to Wednesday, Ranger Castellan," Chen said quietly. "Try not to forget us by Thursday."
Jack stared at the memorial, his shadow already taking notes, and wondered what exactly he'd gotten himself into. Somewhere in the distance, a clock ticked toward an impossible tomorrow.