I got the ping while I was mid-morph between a 1920s newsboy and a 30th-century hover-pilot.
A triple heartbeat, faint but pure, screaming somewhere deep in the In-Between.
Children. Three of them.
Children of the Light don’t ignore that sound. Ever.

The coordinates were a nightmare: a collapsed 1943 Luftwaffe airfield that had been ripped sideways into a 2089 and then left to rot in the void between moments. The place was crawling with Nimrod’s “ReGenesis” drones (soulless chrome spiders programmed to harvest kids for the immortality vats). The air tasted like burnt film reels and cordite.

I dropped in wearing the shape of a Hitler Youth courier (don’t judge, it let me walk right past the sentry bots). Luna padded beside me as a grey alley cat, Frostbite shrank himself down to the size of a large dog and pretended to be a statue, and Pukey… well, Pukey just rolled in looking like the world’s most suspicious apple. Somehow it worked.

We found them in the old hangar, huddled inside a half-melted Messerschmitt fuselage:

Aria – 9 years old, 1943, clutching a rag doll and whispering prayers in Yiddish.
Jun – 11 years old, 2089, wearing a cracked holo-school uniform, still trying to hack the cockpit AI with a broken tablet.
Little Rose – barely 5, timeline unknown, barefoot and glowing faintly (she’d already started manifesting uncontrolled Compassion resonance, the same frequency as Lucille). That glow was the only reason the drones hadn’t taken them yet; the machines couldn’t process pure empathy without bluescreening.

The drones finally noticed us when Rose reached out and accidentally healed a rust flake off the wing. Every red eye in the hangar swivelled at once.

Cue chaos.

Frostbite grew back to full size and started using drones like hockey pucks.
Luna threw moonlight illusions until the hangar looked like a dozen Timmys were running in every direction.

Pukey discovered that high-velocity rotten-apple juice shorts out Benevolent Corp circuitry in 0.8 seconds flat (new favourite weapon unlocked).

I grabbed the kids, slapped the emergency recall on my Hopper, and yelled the one phrase that always works:

“Hold on to something you love!”

Aria grabbed her doll.
Jun grabbed Aria.
Rose grabbed my hand and whispered, “You smell like hope.”

The Hopper screamed. Reality folded. We punched forward through three collapsing timelines at once.

We came out hard on the Atheran side, right under the Citadel’s Aegis Dome, 2052. Skidded across the grass of Safe-Zone 7 like a meteor made of children and bad decisions.

Gunny was already waiting (big guy, scarred armour, eyes soft when he saw the kids). Behind him, a dozen CoTL medics and a very confused Abt al-Matin holding three blankets and three cups of hot chocolate.

Rose took one look at the sky (real sky, blue and whole) and started crying happy tears.
Jun stared at the stars like he’d never seen them before.
Aria just hugged me so hard I thought my ribs would morph into accordions.

Gunny ruffled my hair. “Good jump, kid.”

I shrugged, trying to play it cool while my heart was doing backflips.
“Somebody’s gotta keep the story going.”

Later that night, the Citadel’s archivists added three new names to the Wall of Safe Return.
And on Timmy’s Interactive Map, three tiny golden pins appeared over Safe-Zone 7, glowing brighter than any star I’ve ever stolen from the future.

Mission log closed.
Three lights saved.
Countless more still out there.

See you on the next jump.

— Timmy
(The kid who refuses to let the universe run out of childhood)