Limbo.

The first time Lucy pressed the button, she didn’t mean to.

It had been sitting there on her desk, nestled between scattered research papers. She hadn’t built it. She didn’t even know where it had come from. Small, black, and smooth, with no seams or markings—just a single button in the center. It was strangely heavy in her palm.

She pressed it without thinking.

A strange pull twisted in her stomach, and for a brief moment, the world shimmered. Then, suddenly, she was back in the previous minute, standing exactly where she had been before.

Her coffee cup, which had been half empty, was now full again. The email she had just closed was open.

She had rewound time.

Over the next few days, she tested it in small increments. Five minutes back. Ten. An hour. Every time, it worked flawlessly. The world reset, wiping away mistakes like they had never happened. It wasn’t just a trick—it was real. A device that bent time to her will. A miracle.

But miracles always come with a cost.

The first mistake happened when she tried to save Michael.

They had been arguing in the car that night. He had taken his eyes off the road for just a second—just long enough for the headlights to blind them, just long enough for the crash.

The sound of metal crushing in on itself. Glass exploding. Blood.

She didn’t even think. She pressed the button.

The moment snapped back. They were in the car again, mid-argument. Her heart pounded. She had done it.

Then, out of nowhere, a truck ran a red light.

The collision was worse. The car spun. The impact threw him halfway through the windshield.

She screamed. Pressed the button again.

Each time she rewound, the accident changed. He swerved, but hit a tree. She reached for his arm, but the force of the crash broke his neck. He avoided one disaster, only to end up in another.

She pressed the button over and over, but time refused to let him live.

That should have been the moment she stopped. But she didn’t.

Her mother’s stroke? She rewound and got her to the hospital sooner—only for her to slip in the bathroom two days later and break her neck.

Her best friend’s overdose? She called before it happened—only for him to crash his motorcycle that same night.

Her childhood dog, Max, who had run away when she was eight? She went back and locked the door—but he spent the rest of his life pacing anxiously, whining at the windows, never the same.

Each time she tried to fix something, time found a way to break it in a different place.

And yet, she kept pressing the button.

It was supposed to be a gift. It was supposed to make things better. But she was only tearing reality apart, bit by bit.

The night before everything fell apart, Lucy sat alone in her apartment.

She had rewound so many times she had lost count. So many people were gone. And the ones who remained—they looked at her strangely, as if she didn’t quite belong anymore. Some didn’t even recognize her. Had she erased herself from their memories? Had she erased herself from time?

She pressed the button one last time.

And something went wrong.

The world didn’t reset. It slowed.

Colors melted, dripping like paint. The air thickened around her. Sound stretched into something low and warped. Her stomach twisted as gravity lurched sideways.

Then—

Silence.

She opened her eyes to nothing.

The sky was a blank gray. The ground was smooth and empty, stretching forever in every direction. No walls. No sun. No wind. No sound. Just an endless, featureless void.

The device was still in her hand, but the small light at its center was dead.

She pressed the button.

Nothing happened.

She pressed it again, harder.

Still nothing.

Panic set in. She turned in circles, searching for anything—an exit, a clue, something. But there was nothing.

She ran. The space did not change.

She screamed, but the sound did not come.

Her chest tightened as a terrible thought settled in.

This was the cost.

Every rewind had pulled her further from the world she knew. Every attempt to fix the past had unraveled her place in it. And now, she had fallen through the cracks of time itself, trapped in the silent inbetween.

She sank to her knees, the useless device still clutched in her fingers.

For the first time, she understood.

She had spent so long trying to control time. Now, she was outside of it.

Alone.

Forgotten.

And time moved on without her.

She sat in the gray emptiness for what could have been minutes or centuries. There was no way to tell. No hunger, no thirst, no exhaustion. No proof that she was even real anymore. Just the endless gray stretching in every direction, and the useless device in her palm.

It had to end somehow, didn’t it?

A new fear crept in—what if it didn’t? What if this was it?

Not death. Not even suffering. Just this.

A place where nothing existed. A place where she would never feel warmth, never hear another voice, never see another face. Just the hollow silence pressing in forever.

She tried to remember Michael’s face. Her mother’s voice. Max’s paws on the hardwood floor.

But the images blurred. They slipped from her mind like water through her fingers.

She was vanishing.

Not just from time, but from memory itself.

The device slipped from her fingers and hit the ground with a soft thud.

Her own breath shuddered in her chest.

It had been so easy, pressing that button, believing she could outrun regret. She had thought she was smarter than time, that she could bend it, shape it, force it to obey her.

But time wasn’t something you could control. It wasn’t meant to be rewritten.

And now, she wasn’t just lost in time.

She was outside of it.

A mistake, left behind.

She closed her eyes.

No more rewinds. No more do-overs.

Just the silence, stretching endlessly.

And time, indifferent, moving on without her.