The future was clean.
That was what Melina noticed first—before the machines, before the equations, before the promise of return. Clean air. Clean sound. Even silence had been engineered not to disturb the body. Nothing smelled like rot. Nothing touched without permission.
Boris trusted that kind of world.
"Thirty seconds," he said, fingers hovering over the console. "Visual confirmation only. No deviation."
Melina exhaled slowly. She hated these moments before displacement—not fear, exactly, but the awareness that they were about to look at something that did not know it was being seen.
"Thirty," she repeated. "Then we're back."
The chamber responded with a low hum. Controlled. Civilized.
Then it fractured.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just a shiver through the floor, like the room had reconsidered its own existence.
Boris frowned. "Abort—"
The word never finished.
Gravity tore them out of order.
Air slammed into Melina's lungs, raw and wet and too thick to filter. She screamed—not because she was falling, but because the air itself felt wrong, like breathing without permission.
They hit the ground hard.
Stone. Mud. Cold.
Melina curled instinctively, hands to her head, heart hammering. The sound was unbearable—water crashing with no restraint, no dampening, no design. It wasn't noise. It was force.
She lifted her head.
The waterfall filled her vision.
It was impossibly tall, violently beautiful, mist exploding outward where water met stone. Sunlight fractured through it in sharp, uncontrolled angles. The smell hit next—earth, minerals, wet decay, something animal underneath it all.
Melina gagged.
"Oh god," she whispered, covering her mouth. "It smells."
Boris pushed himself upright, breathing fast, eyes darting. "That's… that's unfiltered atmosphere."
"Boris," Melina said sharply. "This isn't right. This isn't anywhere we mapped."
The device on his wrist flickered uselessly. No interface. No return vector.
He swallowed. "Failsafe engaged."
"What does that mean?"
"It means," he said slowly, "the system thinks we're the threat."
Melina stared at him.
He reached out to steady her—and his hand passed through her sleeve.
They both froze.
Melina looked down at her arm, fingers digging into her own skin. Solid. Warm. Real.
Boris stepped back, panic flaring. He kicked at a fallen branch. His boot went through it like smoke.
"No," he breathed. "No, no—"
"We're invisible," Melina said, voice tight. "We're… not here."
The realization hit her body before her mind. She shivered violently.
"We can't wash," she said suddenly. "Boris, the water—look at it. It's untreated. There's bacteria everywhere."
He nodded automatically, training kicking in. "Parasites. Pathogens. We shouldn't even be breathing this without—"
Without filters. Without vaccines. Without a century of hygiene.
She took a step toward the river and stopped, horrified, as water flowed straight through her boot.
"We can't touch anything," she said. "We can't clean. We can't protect ourselves."
"And nothing can touch us," Boris added, though the words didn't comfort him.
The forest around them was alive in ways the future had forgotten. Insects crawled openly. Birds cried without rhythm. Everything moved because it needed to, not because it was optimized.
"It's beautiful," Melina said weakly.
"And it's filthy," Boris replied.
They heard movement.
Melina stiffened. "Did you hear that?"
Low sounds. Throaty. Not language—something older. Closer to breath than speech.
Figures emerged from the trees across the river.
Humans.
Melina's stomach turned immediately.
They were wrong—not monstrous, not deformed, but wrong to her eyes. Hair grew unchecked. Skin bore scars that had healed unevenly, badly. No sign of care. No sign of sanitation. Bodies exposed without embarrassment or modesty.
"They're naked," she whispered, panic creeping in. "Boris, they're—there's no hygiene. No barriers."
"No children," Boris said, scanning quickly.
She noticed it too. Only adults. Alert. Watchful. Their eyes moved constantly, not paranoid—attentive.
One knelt by the water and drank directly from the river.
Melina gasped. "No—don't—"
The man swallowed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Another laughed.
The sound made her flinch. It was too raw. Too unfiltered.
"They don't know," she said, horror rising. "They don't know what's in that water. They don't know what disease is."
"They've adapted to it," Boris said, though his voice lacked conviction. "Or they die."
The humans moved closer to the waterfall, stepping through the mist.
One passed straight through Melina.
She screamed.
Her body reacted before her mind—heart racing, skin crawling, revulsion flooding her senses.
"They touched me," she said, shaking. "I—I know they didn't, but—"
"They didn't feel it," Boris said quickly. "They can't see us."
"That's worse," she snapped. "That's so much worse."
She wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly hyper-aware of her own body—clean, protected, raised in a world where touch required consent and pain had explanations.
"These people," she whispered, watching the humans press fingers into one another's arms, into skin, into muscle, experimentally, "they don't have boundaries."
"No," Boris said. "They don't have concepts yet."
One of the humans scratched at his leg until blood appeared. He watched it with interest, then wiped it on the grass.
Melina felt bile rise in her throat.
"Oh god," she said. "Blood just… out in the open."
"No response," Boris murmured. "No urgency."
"They don't understand infection," she said. "They don't understand wounds. They don't understand anything."
A sudden, distant cry echoed through the forest.
Melina's breath caught.
"Did you hear that?"
Boris nodded slowly.
"It came from deeper in," he said. "Another group, maybe."
Melina stared at the humans before them—at their calm, their ignorance, their unprotected bodies moving through a world that would kill them without warning.
"We shouldn't be seeing this," she said, voice breaking. "This isn't history. This is… exposure."
Boris didn't answer.
He was staring at the device on his wrist, then back at the humans, then at Melina.
"We can't interfere," he said quietly.
"I know."
"We can't help."
"I know."
"And if something goes wrong," he continued, voice tightening, "we will understand it long before they do."
Melina looked back at the humans, disgust and fear knotting in her chest.
"Then watching is going to hurt," she said.
The waterfall roared on, indifferent.
The past had no obligation to be humane.
And they were trapped inside it.