Refuge in movement

Sally Padeira had always taken refuge in movement. When her relationship with Robert Bryant came to an abrupt end, she turned to the austere demands of her yoga practice. The studio was a narrow, minimalist space on the edge of São Paulo’s sprawling Avenida Paulista, its walls painted in muted tones of gray and ochre. The instructors, clad in white, spoke in hushed tones as if they were ritualists, and the classes were peppered with aphorisms about strength, mindfulness, and the necessity of discipline.

The practice was supposed to quiet her mind, but it didn’t. Each sav asana, each balancing pose, seemed to sharpen the edges of her memories. Bryant’s quick smile as he poured over his research notes, the smell of his cologne mingling with the antiseptic tang of his lab. The sting of his sudden departure, wordless save for the terse message he’d left on her commlink: I need to leave for Nazca. It’s important.

Her colleagues offered platitudes. “He’ll be back,” one said with forced cheer. “Men like that—scientists, thinkers—they always wander, but they come home eventually.” Sally smiled politely, but inwardly she seethed. Bryant hadn’t just wandered; he had disappeared.

Months passed. Sally buried herself in her work at the Nazca Institute for Cultural Preservation. Her focus was reconstructing the ancient pathways—intricate systems of irrigation and trade routes—that crisscrossed the Peruvian desert. She told herself she didn’t care about Bryant anymore. She had her research, her yoga, her carefully curated solitude.

But then the letter arrived.

It was delivered in an old-fashioned envelope, stamped and marked with the insignia of the Canadian Spacetime Agency. The very sight of it sent her heart pounding. She opened it with trembling fingers and began to read.

Dear Sally,

I have spent countless hours imagining how I would explain myself to you, and yet now that the time has come, I find words inadequate. You deserve honesty, so I will not waste time on apologies or melodrama. Instead, I will tell you what happened, as one scientist to another.

By the time you read this, the Nazca Lines may no longer exist in the form you know them. This is not hyperbole. I have been working with the Canadian Spacetime Agency on a classified project involving temporal adjustments—delicate, targeted changes to the timeline to prevent catastrophic events in the future. The Nazca Lines, you see, are not merely ancient geoglyphs; they have become something far more dangerous.

In 2050, an event occurs—or occurred—that fundamentally alters the course of human history. A group calling themselves the Eternals descends upon the lines, claiming them as a gateway to a higher plane of existence. Their influence spreads rapidly. They wear the trappings of cultists, yet they are transhumanists, augmented in ways we are only beginning to understand. They wield technology—or perhaps knowledge—that defies even our most advanced physics.

The Eternals bring abundance, yes, but they also bring control. A future shaped by their will is not a free one. Their rise begins with the Nazca Lines. The patterns, etched into the earth millennia ago, resonate with their technology. They are Promethean deviants.

I was chosen for this mission because of my expertise in chrono-engineering and your proximity to the site. My orders were clear: alter the visibility of the Nazca Lines in the timeline. Make them disappear, either by preventing their creation or by obscuring them in ways that future civilizations could not decipher.

Do you understand now why I could not stay? Why I could not explain? If I had told you, Sally, it would have implicated you. You would have become a target. The work we do—the work I have done—is fraught with risks I cannot share.

The mission itself was brutal. The desert does not yield its secrets easily, nor does time itself. To rewrite even the smallest fragment of history requires calculations of such precision that the margin for error is effectively nil. I stood on those ancient sands, looking out at the patterns that have fascinated humanity for centuries, and I had to decide which of them would remain and which would fade into obscurity.

But there is something else you should know, something that haunts me still. The Eternals are not an anomaly. They are a response. Their emergence is a warning of what humanity might become if we let technology and also power be concentrated in the hands of the few. They are not villains, Sally. They are us, centuries removed, refined and distorted by time.

I’m telling you this because I trust you. Not just with the truth, but with the responsibility it carries. You are one of the few people I know who understands that history is not meant to overreach knowledge by usurping the realm of social science. By treating as crystalline fracturing events in the phenomenal life of humans in the environment, we have effectively branched into an evolutionary dead end. I appeal to your scientific comprehension, especially in chemistry, to accept this.

You will have questions. You will be angry. You will think I abandoned you for a cause that is nebulous at best, dangerous at worst. Perhaps you are right. But I hope you can understand, if not forgive, the choices I made. They were not made lightly.

Yours,

Robert

Sally read the letter three times, her mind racing. She should have felt angry, betrayed, or even relieved. But all she felt was an aching emptiness. Bryant’s explanation was clinical, precise, and utterly devoid of the emotional resonance she craved.

The yoga studio no longer held any appeal. The calm she sought there felt trivial in the face of what she now knew. Instead, she found herself walking the streets of Lima late at night, staring up at the stars and wondering if Bryant was up there somewhere, tinkering with the threads of time.

Weeks later, she requested a leave of absence from the Institute. Her colleagues were surprised but supportive. “You need a break,” one of them said. “Find some clarity.”

She boarded a plane to Cusco, then took a long, winding journey by jeep and foot to reach the Nazca desert. The lines stretched out before her, stark and beautiful against the arid landscape. She stood at the edge of the hummingbird, tracing its curves with her eyes, imagining the hands that had carved it so long ago.

“If you were here,” she murmured to the empty desert, “what would you see? What would you change?”

The wind offered no answers. But for the first time in months, Sally felt something stir within her—not anger, not sadness, but a quiet resolve. If Bryant had rewritten history to save the future, she would preserve what she could of the past. She would be its guardian, its interpreter, its voice.

And perhaps, in time, she would find a way to forgive him.