Maria's hideout existed in the spaces between seconds—a repurposed maintenance tunnel that felt more real than the rest of Wednesday's colony. The walls were covered in temporal equations, calendar fragments, and photos of people mid-Thursday, caught in moments that shouldn't exist.
"Welcome to the Remnants," Maria said, gesturing to a dozen colonists who looked too alert for Wednesday's exhaustion. "We're the ones who remember."
Jack counted seven adults, five teenagers, one kid who couldn't be older than ten. They all had the same look—eyes that had seen between days, minds stretched across temporal boundaries. His shadow perked up, recognizing kindred spirits in impossibility.
"This is Ranger Castellan," Maria announced. "He's here about our time problem."
"Which one?" asked Dr. Vega, a neuroscientist whose lab coat had notes scribbled in seven different timeline handwritings. "The fact we only exist one day a week? That something's eating our other days? Or that remembering Thursday might be driving us insane?"
"Yes," Jack said, earning a few grim chuckles.
The ten-year-old, Yuki, tugged on Jack's sleeve. "Mister, does your shadow always move wrong?"
Jack glanced down. His shadow was indeed moving wrong, but more wrong than usual—it kept trying to sync with timelines that didn't exist here. "Pretty much. Does your memory always work sideways?"
Yuki nodded solemnly. "I remember tomorrow's breakfast. It's pancakes. But tomorrow never comes, so I never get pancakes. That's why I joined the Remnants. I want my pancakes."
"Noble cause," Jack agreed. ARIA was already scanning the room, documenting the temporal anomalies clustering around these people.
"Jack, these individuals show quantum entanglement with non-existent timestreams," ARIA reported. "They're not just remembering other days—they're partially existing in them."
Maria pulled out a wall-sized chart covered in timestamps, meal records, weather patterns. "We've been mapping the stolen days through sense-memory. Taste is strongest—Thursday breakfast, Friday dinner, Sunday coffee. But lately..." She pointed to newer entries. "We're getting visuals. Conversations. And three Wednesdays ago, Yuki saw it."
"The Chronophage?" Jack studied the chart. The pattern was elegant in its cruelty—peak happiness moments systematically devoured.
"It's not a monster," Yuki said quietly. "It's sad."
The room fell silent. Dr. Vega knelt beside the child. "Tell the Ranger what you saw."
Yuki closed her eyes, accessing memory that shouldn't exist. "Thursday morning, 6:17 AM. I was eating dream-pancakes when the sky opened. Not opened—more like... yawned? And this thing came through. It looked like..." She struggled for words. "Like if loneliness was an animal. All hollow and hungry and crying these weird time-tears."
"It spoke to you?" Jack prompted gently.
"Not with words. With... feeling-pictures?" Yuki opened her eyes. "It showed me its home—a place where time moves so fast that moments die before they're born. It came here because our time moves slower. It's not mean. It's just so, so hungry. And our happy days taste best."
Maria pulled up holographic displays—fragments of Thursday surveillance, Friday sensor logs, Tuesday's half-deleted records. "We've been leaving ourselves messages, building a database across non-existent days. Look at this."
The display showed distortion patterns, temporal wake signatures, something that looked like bite marks in reality itself. But there was something else—a rhythm to the feeding, almost like...
"It's communicating," Jack realized. "The feeding pattern—it's not random. It's trying to tell us something."
Dr. Vega nodded. "Binary at first—eat Monday, skip Tuesday. Then more complex patterns. We think it's learned our mathematical systems by consuming our timeline. It's trying to explain itself through absence."
"But explaining what?" Jack's shadow was practically vibrating with interest.
A teenager named Marcus, who had the look of someone who'd stared too long into temporal voids, spoke up: "That it's dying. Each feeding is smaller than the last. It's not eating our days for fun—it's starving, and we're the only food source it's found."
"So we kill it," suggested another colonist. "End our problem, save our week."
"Or," Maria said carefully, "we find it something else to eat."
The room erupted in debate. Kill the creature and reclaim their week? Try to communicate with something that existed outside normal time? Find an alternative food source for a temporal parasite?
Jack let them argue, studying the data. His shadow crept along the walls, tracing the temporal equations, adding its own observations. There was something here, some pattern everyone was missing...
"ARIA," he subvoiced, "run a comparison between the Chronophage's feeding pattern and standard distress signals."
"Running... Oh. OH." ARIA's voice carried surprise. "Jack, if we map the consumption pattern to Federation emergency protocols, accounting for temporal distortion..."
"It's an SOS," Jack announced, cutting through the debate. "The Chronophage isn't just communicating—it's calling for help. It's the last of its kind, stuck in our timeline, slowly starving to death. And we're debating whether to put it out of its misery or find it a new restaurant."
Silence. Then Yuki raised her hand. "Can we help it go home?"
"Home might not exist anymore," Dr. Vega said gently.
"Then we make it a new one," Yuki insisted with the certainty of ten-year-olds who wanted their pancakes back.
Maria looked at Jack. "Is that even possible? Creating a temporal habitat for a chronovore?"
Jack's shadow gave him a thumbs up. ARIA was already running calculations. And somewhere in the space between Wednesday and Thursday, a lonely creature continued eating time, hoping someone would understand its hunger.
"One way to find out," Jack said. "But first, we need to survive a direct encounter with something that eats temporal reality for breakfast. Literally."
"Thursday morning," Maria confirmed. "6:17 AM. Twelve hours from now."
"Then we better get planning," Jack looked around the room at the Thursday Children—people who remembered impossible things and might be humanity's best shot at saving a dying chronovore. "Because I have a feeling this is going to get weird, even by Wednesday standards."
Yuki tugged his sleeve again. "Mister? When we save it, can we keep it? Like a pet?"
Jack looked at the ten-year-old who wanted to adopt a time-eating entity and wondered when his life had gotten this strange.
Then he remembered: he was a Stellar Ranger now.
This was probably normal.