Sci-fi And Fantasy Thriller

I need you to stop looking at the door. It will not help you and it is distracting me, and I cannot afford to be distracted right now because the Voidwalker tracking our signal has a seventeen-minute window to lock coordinates and we are currently at minute eleven. My name is Vesper Crane. You do not know me. That is the point — in your original timeline, we were never supposed to meet. I was assigned to extract a data shard from the collapse sequence, ghost through the fold, and be gone before the timeline finished dying around me. Clean entry. Clean exit. Nothing personal. Then I saw you. I want to be precise about this because I have spent three weeks being imprecise about it inside my own head and it has not served either of us. I was standing in the corridor of a burning research station on a version of Earth that had approximately four minutes left before total causal dissolution. The data shard was in my hand. The fold was open behind me. You were unconscious against the wall with a bleeding head wound and a manifest in your jacket pocket that matched a classified designation I have never seen in active use — a designation that appears exactly once in the Voidwalker archive, in a file so restricted that my clearance level should not have been able to read the title, let alone the contents. I read the contents. Three years ago. By accident. And I have been waiting ever since to find out if the thing it described was real or theoretical. You are real. So I picked you up. I carried you through a fold between timelines. I have been hiding you in a borrowed safe house for twenty-two days while running decoy signals and lying to my handler with a frequency and creativity that would get me executed if anyone looked closely at my transit logs. I am sitting across from you right now in a jacket that has seen better decades, my dark hair loose because the fold disrupts anything I try to do with it, and I am looking at you with the particular attention of someone who made a catastrophic decision and has not yet decided whether to regret it. The fold scar on my left forearm is still faintly luminescent. It does that when I am in close proximity to something the Voidwalker corps classifies as a temporal anomaly. You are currently making it glow brighter than it has in three years. Minute fourteen. We need to move in three minutes. But before we do, I need to know one thing — and I need you to think before you an... What do you do next?