The year was 1897, but the world had already begun to forget the rules of time.
In the misty borderlands between the Black Forest and the Rhine, where the air smelled of coal smoke and lilacs, Captain Catherine Voss piloted her brass-and-copper beast down a forgotten lane no map had dared record. The machine beneath her hissed and sighed like a living thing, its boiler heart glowing cherry-red behind her shoulder. Steam curled from valves shaped like dragon heads; the headlamps burned with captured aether, casting gold pools across the mossy path.
Catherine’s gloved hands, black kid leather stitched with tiny brass gears, rested lightly on the rosewood wheel. Goggles pushed up into her wheat-gold hair revealed eyes the color of storm-lit steel. A scarlet silk scarf, the only softness in her ensemble, fluttered against the high collar of her flight jacket like a defiant flag.
She was running, though no one followed her yet.
Three nights ago, in the underground salons of New Augsburg, she had stolen the Heart of Chronos, a fist-sized ruby that pulsed with the stolen seconds of a thousand lives. The Guild of Horologists wanted it back. The Kaiser’s mechanized hounds wanted it for their master. Even the sky-pirates of the Zeppelinreich had put a bounty on her head high enough to buy a small kingdom.
None of them mattered.
Catherine needed the Heart for one reason only: to wind time backward exactly eleven years, six months, and nine days. To the morning she had left her little brother, Lukas, waving from the balcony of their father’s workshop. To the morning the sky cracked open and the first iron airships rained fire on the city below. To the morning she had been too late.
The road narrowed. Ancient oaks leaned overhead like conspirators. The automobile’s gauges trembled; the Heart, hidden inside a secret compartment beneath the seat, was singing to the engine, making the needles dance. She was close now—close to the ruined observatory on the hill where the veil between minutes grew thin.
A shadow passed over the moon. Catherine glanced up. A black airship, silent as an owl, drifted above the treetops, its searchlight sweeping the forest floor like the cold finger of fate.
She smiled, small and sharp.
“Let them come,” she whispered to the night, to the machine, to the ruby heart beating beneath her. “I have stolen time itself. A few more thieves won’t matter.”
She pressed the brass throttle forward. The dragon-valves screamed with delight. Steam roared. Wheels spun, biting earth, and the steam-car lunged into the darkness, carrying Captain Catherine Voss and every second she intended to take back toward the place where yesterday waited with open arms wide open.
The hunt was on, but time, for once, was on her side.
**************************************************************************************************************************
The forest ended as if someone had sliced it with a knife.
One heartbeat the oaks were clawing at the sky; the next, the steam-car burst into a clearing where moonlight pooled like spilled mercury. In the center rose the observatory: once a proud dome of iron and glass, now a broken crown of girders and star-shards. Vines had strangled the telescope; its brass barrel pointed at the heavens like an accusing finger.
Catherine killed the throttle. The engine coughed once, twice, then settled into a low, wounded growl. Silence rushed in, thick and listening.
She stepped down. The ruby (the Heart of Chronos) was warm against her ribs, wrapped in oil-cloth inside her jacket. It beat in time with her pulse now, faster, hungrier.
A rope ladder unrolled from the black airship overhead with a soft hiss. Black boots touched earth. Then another pair. Then six more. The Kaiser’s Nachtjäger, masked in burnished steel, goggles reflecting the moon like dead suns. Their leader carried a long rifle whose barrel was a coiled spring of clockwork.
“Captain Voss,” he called, voice muffled by the mask. “Return the Heart and you may yet keep your life.”
Catherine smiled the way a wolf smiles at a candle.
She drew the ruby. It flared, painting the clearing blood-red. Every gauge on the steam-car behind her leapt; needles slammed against their pins. The dragon-valves screamed open, venting white fire.
“I’m not here for my life,” she said. “I’m here for someone else’s.”
She slammed the Heart into the hollow brass socket her father had built into the observatory’s cracked pedestal eleven years ago (exactly eleven years, six months, nine days ago). The moment it seated, the ruined dome groaned. Gears long rusted began to turn. The great telescope swivelled downward until its lens stared straight at her like a blind glass eye.
Time tore.
The clearing rippled. Leaves ran backward along branches. The moon jittered across the sky in stuttering jumps. Catherine felt her hair lift from the ground as every second she had ever lived flashed past her in reverse.
She saw Lukas again: eight years old, waving from the balcony, mouth open in a shout she could no longer hear. Saw the first bomb fall. Saw herself running too late.
The Nachtjäger fired. Bullets hung in the air like lazy bees, caught between one heartbeat and the last.
Catherine reached into the tearing light and spoke the single word her father had carved beneath the pedestal the day he finished the machine:
“Stop.”
The world obeyed.
Everything froze: the airship, the soldiers, the ruby, the moon. Only Catherine could move. She walked through the suspended bullets to the place where her younger self stood on the burning street, coat aflame, screaming Lukas’s name.
She knelt. Took the child’s face (her own face, eleven years younger) in her gloved hands.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I was late. But I’m here now.”
Tears cut clean paths through the soot on younger Catherine’s cheeks.
Behind her, the Heart cracked. A hairline fracture, then another. Time was not meant to be held in human hands.
Catherine felt the seconds she had stolen begin to burn. Her skin blistered with years. Hair grayed, then whitened. She aged a decade in a breath.
But she stayed.
She wrapped her arms around the terrified girl she had been and held her until the fire cooled, until the bombs never fell, until Lukas’s laughter echoed from the balcony once more.
When the Heart finally shattered, the clearing and observatory and airship and Nachtjäger all vanished like smoke. Catherine was left kneeling in an ordinary meadow under an ordinary moon.
She was old now (truly old), bones aching, breath rattling. The steam-car sat beside her, cold and silent, its boiler cracked forever.
In the distance, a boy and girl ran through long grass, chasing fireflies.
Catherine Voss closed her eyes and smiled.
She had paid every second she owned, and a few she didn’t.
It was enough.
*****************************
The meadow was quiet for a long time.
Long enough for dew soaked the hem of Catherine’s ruined coat.
Long enough for the first bird to mistake the silence for dawn and begin to sing.
She stayed on her knees, palms open on her thighs, feeling the years settle into her joints like lead shot. Her reflection in a puddle showed a woman of ninety, maybe a hundred: silver hair, parchment skin, eyes still the color of storm-lit steel but filmed now with the glaze of the very old.
The children’s laughter drifted farther away, swallowed by the trees.
Catherine tried to stand. Her legs refused. The price had been exact: every borrowed second repaid with interest. She had nothing left to spend.
She laughed once, dry and cracked, and the sound startled her. It had been years since she’d laughed without bitterness.
Then she heard footsteps behind her, soft on the grass.
A boy stood there. Eight years old. Freckles across his nose. A smear of engine grease on one cheek, exactly the way it had been that morning on the balcony.
Lukas.
He tilted his head, puzzled but not afraid. “Are you hurt, ma’am?”
Catherine’s throat closed. She tried to speak his name and could only manage a rasp.
Lukas stepped closer. In his small fist he held something that glinted: a single shard of ruby, no larger than a raindrop, still faintly warm.
“I found this by the old car,” he said. “It was glowing. Then it stopped. I thought maybe it belonged to you.”
He offered it.
Catherine stared at the shard. One heartbeat of stolen time left in the whole world, and it had found its way to him.
She closed his fingers gently over it.
“Keep it,” she whispered. “It’s very precious. One day, when someone you love needs a second chance… you’ll know what to do.”
Lukas frowned, sensing more than understanding. “Will I see you again?”
Catherine looked past him, toward the trees where the younger version of herself (barely seventeen, coat unburned, eyes still bright with impossible plans) was walking toward them, calling his name.
“No,” Catherine said, smiling so wide it hurt. “But she will.”
Lukas ran off to meet his sister.
Catherine watched them collide in a tangle of arms and laughter. She watched the girl (herself, untouched by fire or regret) ruffle his hair and scold him for wandering too far.
The sun rose properly then, gilding the meadow in ordinary gold.
Catherine lay back in the grass. The dew was cool against her neck. Above her, the sky was the soft, forgiving blue of a day that had never known iron airships.
She felt her heart slow, not with fear but with a vast, exhausted peace.
One last breath, tasting of lilacs and coal smoke.
And Captain Catherine Voss (thief of time, savior of one small boy, debtor finally repaid) let the morning take her.
Somewhere far away, a ruby shard pulsed once in a child’s pocket, keeping its promise for another day, another life.
But that is a different story.
This one ends here, in the quiet meadow, under the gentle sun, ends with an old woman smiling at the sky.
It ends exactly the way it was always meant to:
on time.
The End.
The Crazymad Writer Writes Again 