The group fled through a hidden tunnel beneath the city, the sounds of the Enforcers echoing behind them. Leah's mind raced, trying to process everything. Time travel, ripple effects, and now a war between temporal factions—it was too much. Yet, one question gnawed at her more than anything else.
"What happens if they catch us?" she asked, her voice barely a whisper.
Jaxon glanced at her, his expression grim. "They don't just catch you. They erase you. Wipe you from existence. Every version of you, every impact you ever had on time, gone."
Leah shuddered at the thought. "How do we stop them?"
The woman with the mechanical eye, who Leah now knew as Rayla, shot her a sharp look. "The only way to stop the Enforcers is to shut down the Chrono Nexus—the central hub they use to monitor and control the timelines. It's heavily guarded and almost impossible to reach."
"Almost impossible?" Leah asked, clinging to the glimmer of hope in Rayla's words.
Rayla smiled, a wicked gleam in her eye. "We've got a plan. But it's risky."
Leah nodded. "I'm in."
Jaxon shook his head. "You don't even know what the plan is."
"I don't care," Leah said, determination hardening her voice. "I caused this. I have to help fix it."
Rayla raised an eyebrow. "Good. Because you're the key to the plan."
Before Leah could ask what that meant, the tunnel opened up into a massive underground chamber, where a strange machine sat in the center, glowing with an eerie light.
"This," Rayla said, gesturing to the machine, "is how we're going to create a paradox."
Leah frowned. "A paradox?"
Rayla nodded. "We're going to send you back to the moment before you made your first jump. If we stop you from ever using the time travel device, the entire timeline will reset. The Enforcers, the ripple effects—everything will be undone."
Leah's heart pounded. The idea of erasing everything, including the future she had just seen, felt like too much to bear. But if it was the only way to save time itself, did she have a choice?
Before she could answer, the door behind them burst open, and the Enforcers flooded into the chamber.
"Get to the machine!" Jaxon yelled. "We'll hold them off!"
With shaking hands, Leah approached the paradox machine. She knew what she had to do, but doubt gnawed at her. Could she really erase everything?
As the Enforcers closed in and the machine whirred to life, Leah took one last look at the world she was about to unmake.
Then, with a deep breath, she stepped into the machine.