Minutes Lost, Hours Found

Kira blinked twice before the world caught up. The outpost’s central corridor wavered in the half-light, shadows stretching in odd directions—the way they always did after a dilation cycle. She steadied herself against the wall’s cold panel, exhaled, and checked her wrist: 14:07 local. Two days might have passed outside.

She hated these jumps.

The Timekeeper Outpost, floating at the edge of Saturn’s smallest ring, was home to four souls. They called themselves keepers, but Kira knew better—they were guardians of lost time, janitors sweeping up minutes spilled by humanity’s relentless push for progress. The dilation field thrummed beneath her boots, gravity and reality both fickle here.

Her pack was gone.

Kira’s heart kicked up. She swept the hall with trembling hands—no sign of her battered rucksack or the clunky tools inside. Her mind reeled: Had she set it down before cycle? Or after? That was the trouble with time stretching and snapping back—it unraveled memories until you weren’t sure who you’d been an hour ago.

She tapped at her comm-link, summoning the tracking app. There, glowing on the schematic overlay of the outpost: a tiny pulsing dot labeled TOOLBAG. Relief fluttered in her chest; she’d attached that coin-sized tracker just last week, tired of losing things to temporal fog. The device’s signal blinked steady and clear from Storage Bay 3.

A voice crackled over the intercom. "Kira? You alive in there?"

It was Len, his tone more brittle than usual.

"I’m good. Just misplaced something," she replied, forcing casualness she didn’t feel.

The trip to Storage Bay 3 took longer than it should have; every step felt like moving through syrup as her thoughts circled. How long had she truly been here? Sometimes it seemed as if pieces of herself scattered with each jump—memories left behind like crumbs no one would ever find again.

She reached the bay and flicked on the lights. Amid crates and toolkits sat her pack—right where she must’ve left it, though she couldn’t recall when. She activated Precision Finding with a tap on her screen; a gentle chime guided her closer until she could all but hear her own relief echoing back.

As she slung the bag over her shoulder, she noticed a new message blinking on her comm-link: "Checkpoint calibration error detected. Manual inspection required." Of course. The universe never gave breaks—not even to those who maintained its clocks.

***

On route to engineering, Kira passed Mira’s quarters. Through the window, Mira sat hunched over old family holos, face lit by blue static. She looked up at Kira with hollow eyes.

“Lost my necklace again,” Mira said softly, holding up an empty chain. “I can’t remember if I ever took it off.”

Kira hesitated only a moment before digging into her own pocket and pulling out another tracker—a spare she’d brought for cases just like this. “Here,” she offered gently, “clip this to it next time.”

Mira smiled for the first time in weeks. “You always know how to find things.”

“I wish I could find more than just objects,” Kira said before she could stop herself.

***

The checkpoint terminal was glitching badly—display flickering between past logs and present data like it couldn’t decide what year it wanted to be in. As Kira worked to recalibrate its sensors, her mind wandered back to Earth: rain tapping glass in her mother’s kitchen; music looping through speakers late at night; the certainty that tomorrow would follow today.

But here… here she only ever felt untethered.

A warning klaxon blared suddenly—an airlock malfunction somewhere above deck. The schematic flashed red, but Kira’s mind blanked for one terrifying moment—where had she left her toolkit? Panic clawed at her ribs as she fumbled for the tracking app again.

There it was—already on its way toward Deck 2 with Len’s ID pinging beside it. She let out a shaky breath and sprinted after him.

***

They fixed the airlock together under flickering emergency lights—Len cursing at stripped bolts while Kira handed him tools almost before he asked for them.

“How do you always know where everything is?” he muttered in awe as she found the right bit among dozens scattered around them.

“It’s not magic,” Kira said quietly. “Just… not wanting to lose anything else.”

He paused then—really looked at her—and nodded like he understood exactly what she meant.

***

That night (or was it morning? Time meant little here), Kira sat alone at Observation Deck 6 watching Saturn spin slow gold beneath them. The tracker app glowed softly on her lap—a constellation of dots marking every item tethered to this drifting station and everyone living inside it.

She realized then that keeping track wasn’t about tools or devices—it was about refusing to let herself drift too far from who she used to be. Each ping from a tracker was an anchor: proof that some things could still be found after all.

Her reflection shimmered ghostlike in glass as another dilation cycle began; outside, hours would vanish in an instant, but inside this pocket of borrowed time, Kira held onto what mattered most—even if sometimes all you could do was mark your place before moving forward again.