¡Viva España!

The sky over Madrid in February of 2045 was not a sky at all. It was a permanent shroud of industrial ash, a thick, slate-gray ceiling that pressed down upon the ruins of the city like a wet wool blanket. It smelled of old copper, sulfur, and the cold, flat rot of a dying world. Gabriel de la Cruz stood before the armored glass of the high-altitude observation deck, his fingers resting lightly against the cold pane. Below him, the skeletal remains of the Castellana stretched into the gloom, a canyon of cracked concrete where nothing had grown for a generation. The world was running out of water, running out of soil, and running out of time.

Behind his left ear, the surgical incision was still tender. He touched it, his fingertips tracing the slight, hard ridge where the neural chrono-link was embedded beneath his skin. It throbbed with a dull, rhythmic ache, a metallic pulse that seemed to sync with the hum of the cooling towers three floors below. The link was his anchor, the only thing that would keep his mind from scattering into static when they tore the hole through the bedrock of reality.

“You are staring at the corpse again, Gabriel.”

Dr. Beatriz de Leon stepped up beside him. Her face was gray, matching the light from the window, etched with the profound exhaustion of a woman who had spent thirty years trying to outrun extinction. She adjusted her wire-rimmed glasses with a sharp, nervous flick of her finger, a gesture he had seen her repeat a thousand times in the sterile, white-lit corridors of the Chronos Project. She wore a stained lab coat over a frayed wool sweater, the uniform of a high priestess in a temple of desperate measures.

“It is hard to look at anything else, Doctor,” Gabriel said. His voice was clipped, the flat tone of a career soldier who had learned to state facts without letting them drag him under. “There is not much left to see.”

“Which is why you are going,” Beatriz said, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper. She turned away from the window, motioning for him to follow her into the sterile, humming core of the main laboratory. “The royal family is dead. The crash took the last symbols of Spanish heritage, the last thread holding the regional councils together. The populace is starving, and they are starting to realize that the government has no bread left to give. Without a focal point, the state will collapse into civil war before the winter is out. We do not just need resources, Gabriel. We need a myth. We need the seeds of the Borbon line.”

The main laboratory was a cavern of steel and ceramic tile, dominated by the massive, circular housing of the induction coil. It looked like the turbine of a drowned ship, cold and gray, but the air around it was already thick with the scent of ozone and heated coolant. Computer banks lined the walls, their green terminal screens casting a sickly, underwater glow over the technicians who worked in silence. The power grid was struggling; Gabriel could hear the low, laboring whine of the backup generators in the basement.

Johan Schmidt was already there, leaning against a stack of equipment crates with his arms crossed. He looked massive in the dim light, his blond hair cut into a severe military crop, his gray eyes tracking Gabriel with a slow, calculating intensity. Johan had the thick shoulders of a weightlifter and the relaxed, predatory stance of a man who had seen too much blood to be easily impressed. They had served together in the French Foreign Legion, years ago, when Gabriel’s career had taken a hard, ugly detour into the dirt. Johan was a survivor, a pragmatist who did not care about the grand destiny of Spain, only about the paycheck and the next meal. He was a calculated necessity for this jump.

“The German is ready,” Johan said, his neutral accent carrying just a trace of his Saxon heritage. He offered a thin, humorless smile. “Though I must say, the accommodations in 1937 sound remarkably damp. I hope you packed dry socks, Gabriel.”

“We are not going on a picnic, Johan,” Gabriel said, stopping a few feet away. The tension between them was an old, familiar thing, a cord stretched tight by shared secrets and past betrayals.

“Of course not,” Johan murmured, his eyes dropping to the scar behind Gabriel’s ear. “We are going to kidnap a princess. A very romantic endeavor. Let us hope she is as cooperative as the history books suggest.”

Beatriz stepped between them, her sharp gray eyes snapping with authority. “This is a harvest, gentlemen. Let us not use polite euphemisms. The bridge is unstable. The power grid in Sector Four suffered another major failure three hours ago. We are rerouting everything we have, but the window is shrinking faster than our projections indicated. You will have exactly enough power for the initial jump, and then we will have to scavenge the municipal reserves to pull you back. If you miss the retrieval window, you will die in the past. Or worse, you will be trapped there when the project goes dark forever.”

She handed Gabriel a small, black data-slate. On the screen, a series of low-resolution archival photographs flickered. A young woman with a defiant chin, her dark hair tied back with a red bandana, her face smudged with grease as she stood beside a Republican militia unit. Isabella Maria de Borbon. She had rejected her title, vanished into the chaos of the civil war under a false name, and was currently holding a line in the freezing mud of the Guadarrama mountains.

“She is the key,” Beatriz said, her fingers tightening on the edge of the console. “Find her. Keep her alive. And bring her back to us. She is the only seed that can grow in this ash.”

Gabriel stared at the green, vibrant hills in the background of the old photograph. It was a Spain he had never known, a world of liquid water, ancient forests, and clean air. It felt like looking at a dream, or a lie. He felt a sudden, sharp pang of guilt. They were going to tear that girl out of her own struggle, her own history, to serve as a puppet for a dying future.

“The induction coil is at ninety percent,” a technician called out, his voice cracking with tension. “Power fluctuation in the primary ring. We are losing stability in the temporal field.”

“Get in the chamber,” Beatriz ordered, her maternal firmness returning as she gripped Gabriel’s shoulder. Her hand was shaking, just a little. “Save our soul, Gabriel. Because there is nothing left for us here.”

Gabriel nodded once. He stepped onto the cold steel platform inside the massive ring, Johan falling into step beside him. The air began to vibrate, a high-pitched scream that bypassed the ears and drilled straight into the neural link behind Gabriel’s skull. The world around them began to blur, the solid steel of the laboratory turning translucent, then gray, then nothing at all. As the induction coil began to spin, Gabriel felt the terrifying, physical pull of the void, a cold fist reaching into his chest and dragging him through the dark. He was a bullet fired into history, and there was no turning back.