Chapter 1

The smell of ozone was so thick I could taste it on the back of my tongue. It was 11:14 PM, and the fluorescent lights of the Northwood chemistry lab were humming a low, dying tune. I was alone, or I was supposed to be, scrubbing the remnants of a failed experiment when the beaker in my hand simply... vibrated. It shattered without hitting the floor, the glass shards suspended in mid-air like static.

Then the air ripped.

It wasn’t a sound; it was a pressure that slammed into my eardrums. A seam of white light split the space between the fume hoods, and a body tumbled out. He hit the linoleum with a sickening thud, coughing up a spray of crimson that looked black under the harsh lights.

I froze, the spray bottle still in my hand. "Jax?"

It was him. The same athletic build, the same shock of blonde hair. But this Jax was wearing a tattered Northwood hoodie I’d never seen, and his face was a map of jagged scars. He looked at me, and for the first time in three years, there was no mockery in his eyes. There was only a raw, jagged terror.

"Leo," he gasped, reaching out a trembling hand. "Please. It’s cold. It’s so cold there."

"What are you—how did you—"

Before I could move, the heavy lab door swung open. The real Jax—*my* Jax—sauntered in, spinning a car key on his finger. He had that smirk, the one that usually preceded him knocking my books into the gutter or reminding me that my tuition was paid by his father’s "charity."

He stopped dead. The key dropped, clattering against the tile.

"What the hell is this?" My Jax’s voice was sharp, a whip-crack of confusion. He looked from me to the broken, bleeding version of himself on the floor. "Leo, what kind of sick freak show are you running in here?"

"It was an accident," I whispered, backing toward the emergency eyewash station. "The collider... the surge..."

The Jax on the floor let out a whimpering sob, curling into a fetal position. Seeing it sent a jolt of revulsion through me. This was the man who had made my life a living hell, yet seeing him reduced to this—a shivering animal from a world that had clearly ended—made my chest ache.

My Jax didn't feel the same. His shock curdled into a familiar, ugly aggression. He stepped toward his double, his face twisted in disgust. "Get up. Stop crying with my face, you pathetic loser." He looked at me, his eyes burning. "Is this a prank? Some kind of projection?"

He kicked the bleeding Jax in the ribs. The sound was dull and wet.

"Stop it!" I shouted. My voice didn't shake. For the first time, the power dynamic of Northwood University didn't matter.

"Or what, scholarship?" My Jax sneered, stepping over his alternate self to loom over me. "You’re going to protect this... thing? It isn't even human."

"He's you," I said, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. "He’s you without the safety net. He’s you when everything goes wrong."

The rift behind them began to pulse, a rhythmic throb of light that made the shadows on the walls stretch and shrink. The air grew thin. The scarred Jax reached out, his fingers brushing the hem of my jeans. "Don't let him," he wheezed. "He doesn't know. The fire... the sky turned black..."

My Jax lunged, his hands reaching for the other’s throat, driven by a panicked need to destroy the mirror that showed his own weakness. I didn't think. I grabbed the heavy red fire extinguisher from the wall bracket and swung it. Not at him, but between them, slamming it onto the lab table with a deafening clang that made both of them flinch.

"Back off!" I roared.

I stood between them—the predator and the prey, the bully and the ghost. I was the smallest person in the room, the one with the least to lose, and yet I was the only thing holding the center of the universe together. I felt a strange, cold bravery settle into my bones.

The lab lights began to strobe. The rift was growing, a vacuum of white noise that started to pull at the loose papers on the desks. The scarred Jax was being dragged backward toward the tear in reality, his fingernails screeching against the tile.

"Leo!" he screamed.

My Jax was frozen, his arrogance stripped away by the sheer impossibility of the physics unfolding before him. He reached out, his hand hovering near the rift, a look of morbid fascination crossing his face.

"Which one?" I whispered to the empty, ionized air.

The white light expanded, swallowing the fume hoods, the shattered glass, and both versions of the man who had defined my misery. I reached out blindly into the glare. My fingers closed around a wrist—solid, warm, and trembling. I pulled with everything I had as the world turned into a silent, blinding scream.

When the light faded, the lab was silent. The collider surge had passed. The smell of ozone was replaced by the mundane scent of floor wax.

I sat on the floor, gasping for air. A figure sat across from me in the shadows, hunched over, face hidden in his hands.

"Jax?" I asked.

The figure looked up. The light was too dim to see the scars, or the lack of them. He just looked at me with wide, unreadable eyes—a stranger with a familiar face.

"I'm here," he said. His voice was a hollow echo, stripped of both cruelty and fear.

I didn't know which world he belonged to. I didn't know if I had saved my tormentor or a man who had lost everything. I just stood up, wiped the blood off my palms, and walked toward the door, leaving him alone in the dark.