Ladybird Jenkins and the Time Thieves

Saffron sat as if she had been quarried from the courtyard itself, spine aligned with the invisible geometry of the place. Around her, the obsidian lilies swayed, not to any breeze, but to some older, unseen current. Glitching fireflies traced erratic constellations in the air, their golden light occasionally bursting into static before reforming, as though the laws of nature here had been rewritten in the margins.

Meditation wasn’t just an exercise for her. It was an act of reclamation.

The Academy taught that stillness was the beginning of all strategy, that in war, in science, in history, victory often belonged not to the one who saw first. Archimedes, she’d once read, had discovered the principle of buoyancy in his bath, not his workshop. Newton, under an apple tree, had been thinking before he was calculating.

Saffron breathed in slow, letting the air fill every chamber of her lungs, holding it like a secret, then releasing it until even the thought of breath was gone.

Every morning began this way: a quiet treaty between her and the city. I will be the unmoving point. You may whirl as you please.

The garden floated high above the lower tiers of Indovian Academy, suspended on a terrace with rails cut from refractive crystal. From here, the city spread like a living diagram, sky rails carrying mag trains between spires, neon tributaries winding between towers, orbital satellites tethered like moons to structures older than recorded history.

Near the fountain, a half circle of students sat before an instructor drone, its brushed copper casing worn smooth by years of curious hands.

“Breathe in the moment,” the drone said in a voice designed to lower heart rates by measurable degrees. “Let your thoughts settle.”

A boy with bronze skin and prosthetic legs made of luminous alloy raised his hand. “What if my thoughts don’t want to settle?”

The drone paused, as though consulting the memory of every teacher it had ever met. “Then listen to your breath. It will teach your thoughts to follow.”

Behind him, Pip, tall, thin, and constitutionally allergic to silence, leaned so far back in his self-balancing wheelchair that the machine began to protest.

“I am the balance,” he declared.

“You’re about to be the medical expense,” someone muttered.

He tipped backward into a patch of neon moss, arms outstretched like an Olympic diver, then landed with exaggerated grace.

“And I stuck the landing!” he announced. “In my heart.”

Laughter moved through the group. Even the drone emitted a warm beep.

“Balance,” it said, “is also knowing when to sit still.”

A few paces away, a quiet girl with amber fur along her jawline and swallow-shaped ears clutched a pendant to her chest, whispering to it as though her words might rewrite the day before it began. Without a word, she pulled Pip upright.

Saffron didn’t join the laughter. She preferred to listen, the way astronomers listen to the faint hiss of background radiation to learn the shape of the universe. Chaos found her often enough without her inviting it.

Last week, chaos had come as a lunch drone detonation that sprayed noodle soup into the ventilation ducts. The week before, a teleportation exercise had gone wrong, three first years appearing in three different centuries.

Today, chaos arrived by tearing through the hedge.

Ben stumbled into the garden, breath ragged, headset flashing red, tablet clutched like a living thing in need of rescue. His jacket hung half zipped, one cyber shoe blinking a warning signal out of rhythm with the other.

Of course, it was Ben. Trouble didn’t just follow him; it forwarded his mail.

Saffron opened one eye. “What now?”

He nearly collided with a meditating student whose quetzal feather braids fanned into the air like a signal flare.

“Someone’s jamming the network,” he said, voice sharp with adrenaline. “Not a ping, not a scan, vault breach level.”

Saffron stood, brushing petals from her trousers. The instructor drone dimmed its lights, the Academy’s silent code for: Lesson over. Something bigger begins.

Ben thrust the tablet into her hands. Lines of corrupted code scrolled like a fever dream, tracer routes looping back into themselves like Escher stairs.

“Encrypted fragments,” she murmured. “False traces layered over real ones. Whoever’s in there… they know our patterns.”

The wing-eared girl stepped closer, amber gaze unblinking. A second student rolled forward in a hover chair, glowing tattoos rippling faintly like code across her arms.

“Time Thieves?” she asked.

Saffron’s jaw tightened, but she didn’t answer.

Ben glanced between them. “Admin?”

She shook her head. “No time. We go to Ladybird. If I’m right, protocol’s already obsolete.”

They turned for the gate, but Saffron paused. The wind brushed her cheek differently now. The fireflies had stopped glitching; every light pulsed in perfect, unnatural synchrony. The drone had frozen in place, its lens no longer on the class, but fixed on her.

The stillness no longer felt like hers.

She leaned toward Ben. “Come on. We have a timeline to protect.” They cut through the colonnade. On a cracked tile, someone had chalked: Who owns yesterday?

The chalk was smudged; the question wasn’t.

They ran, and behind them, the garden watched, as gardens sometimes do, remembering things long after people forget.