Julian Vance did not step across the yellow grease line.
He knelt on the ribbed rubber floor of Row 6, his knees resting against the cold metal base of Stanchion Pole #6.
Three feet ahead of him lay Row 9 and the scratched aluminum backplate of Seat 9B. The metal bench sat tilted slightly under the bus’s lateral sway as Coach #404 carved along the salt marsh causeway.
The invisible seam between Row 6 and Row 7 hummed with silent, electrostatic tension. It was the line where the two-lamp rapid-start ballast lost its acoustic grip on the air. Forward of that line, the cabin was anchored in real-time space by sixty cycles of alternating current.
Aft of that line lay the temporal buffer—a frozen pocket of 1996 transit history where four drowned commuters rode an eternal twelve-second tape loop. If he stepped both boots across that boundary, he entered the 1.5-second temporal lag zone.
In that zone, the rules changed. The four rotated-head ghost commuters sitting in Row 12 would gain legal passenger jurisdiction over him.
“You can’t walk back there, Chief,” Mac Cole warned from the driver’s platform. His gravelly voice fought the deep roar of the Detroit Diesel. “You put two feet in their territory, and Conductor 00 punches your ticket from the roof.”
