Chains of a Time Loop

"What, what did I do?"

"I don't know, but they're going to turn over every rock looking for you."

"What, just for—just for knowing about this beaver expedition?" A trickle of sweat started to form on her forehead—she looked spooked already. It was no secret that Iz mistrusted the empire deeply, and it was probably second nature for her to conjure up cynical projections, though it was still unlikely she understood the true import of what she'd done.

"Did you give them any information?" Myra asked.

"No! Of course not!"

"When did you call them?"

"Last night."

"We need to hurry. Where's the journal? And do you have today's newspaper yet?"

Iz did have the paper, and the empire, it turned out, had already put out a notice that they would be running a 'test' around midnight. Frankly, they were lucky the empire hadn't run it the previous night, which would have caught them completely unaware, but as it was, they had a reprieve for the rest of the day.

Once she got the journal from Iz, she teleported out into the wilderness, as far from the city as she thought was clearly sufficient, and then teleported quite a bit farther. She hid the journal under a rock that seemed memorable enough, which in a fit of hubris Myra thought she would probably be able to find again. Then she headed back to the city, got everybody together, made them collect anything they had written down even remotely related to the time loop events, and burned it all. All of Lukai's meticulous notes, gone to ash. She couldn't take any chances.

She didn't get anything done for the rest of the day—she was too anxious. The 'test' came and went—just on schedule, a tower emerged from a nondescript building in Ralkenon she'd never heard of, blanketed the entire city in bright blue, and then vanished back whence it came. It probably hadn't reached the far-off spot Myra had hidden the journal, but even if it had, well, it wouldn't lead the empire back to her or her friends.

Exhausted, she willed herself to sleep, ready for another full day tomorrow.

◆

If Lukai thought Mirkas-Ballam's security was worthy of a few weeks of his time, the home of campus security head Hachirou Iwasaki was worthy of an afternoon.

When they got inside, though, it was probably one of the most disappointing houses she'd broken into. Though it was large and impressive from the outside, it turned out that the security head lived frugally and minimally—there were very few decorations or unnecessities, and the only sign the man was well-off was the modern architectural layout, all the rooms arranged in unusual but aesthetically pleasing ways, with every space seemingly perfectly shaped for its purpose.

The group agreed there was no reason to use magic to speed-search through his texts; Iwasaki had few enough papers that they could pretty much just leaf through everything—which turned out to be another overall disappointing endeavor.

"I mean, there's nothing here," Iz said. Some minor mathematical models hung around her head in Abstract Space. "I've gone through all his finances. Everything adds up, no mysterious funds, no mysterious payments."

For the most part, she was following along with the investigations now, having gotten swept up after the crisis with the journal. She was probably right that there was nothing in the guy's finances, but Myra still couldn't help but feel her iconic skepticism weighing heavily in her words.

"Th-there are some exciting stories in these old letters," Shera said. She was going through a pile of letters from some of his old navy buddies. "His anti-piracy campaigns were very successful. Could there be a connection there, to the naval conflicts between Briktone and Unkmire?"

"Did he ever operate in that area?" Lukai asked.

"No… He spent a lot of time in the northern Ilmanian, and some time just off Quistil-Dakteria, back when th-that area was hot."

"A lot of the pirates near Unkmire were driven south from the Ilmanian," Lukai added. "So it's not entirely unrelated. You could argue that northern raids were a direct cause of the present situation."

From Iz's frown, she didn't seem to think much of that connection. "So, almost nothing," she said.

"I dunno, I think I've got something here," Myra said. "He's got a book full of contact info for different legal agencies." Some of the agencies had notes next to them, like the Law Practicers of Km-Faceprice noted as 'recommended highly,' or the Bird-Rong Agency being marked as 'too expensive,' which based on what Myra understood, was something of an understatement. It seemed absurd that he had even considered a prestigious group like Bird-Rong. There was, however, no indication on the page of what legal predicament might have prompted this assembly of contacts.

"I recognize th-that one," Shera said, pointing to the bottom of the page, where a banally-named organization, 'Agency for Fair Access and Protection of Underground Resources?' was annotated only with a curious question mark. "They do a lot of litigation around th-the heavy metal mines in Northern Halnya."

"What?" Myra scratched her head. "Has anyone seen anything else even remotely connecting him to that area?" Everybody shook their heads. "What are we supposed to conclude, Shera, was he being sued for improper extraction of radioactive thallium or something?"

Shera only looked as puzzled as Myra.

"Even if we suppose he got tangled up in something, it probably doesn't have anything to do with what's going on now, does it?"

"I don't know," Myra said. "Legal troubles mean something shady, and something shady means blackmail material."

"We don't have any evidence of blackmail. You're stretching," Iz said.

"Well, fine. Anyway, this seems like the kind of thing Sky might know how to dig into." Myra was in the process of befriending the amicable reporter again, using the summit as leverage like she had before. "If there are court records, he can probably get them."

◆

She spent the rest of the afternoon with Lukai working on the plan to disrupt the Mirkas-Ballam barrier, a process which was going to involve flooding the barrier with high-frequency fluctuating aura to overwhelm it, a subject Myra should have known something about because she had studied it in her very first loop, but it had been so long ago now that she'd forgotten practically everything about it. Even so, it was weirdly satisfying to apply the theoretical work to such a practical purpose.

During dinner (treating Lukai to campus food stands), she realized she hadn't seen Nathan the entire day. The plan for the evening was to go rock-skipping at the pond, which she hadn't gotten to do in all the loops she'd been avoiding Nathan, and she wanted to teach Lukai how to play.

She found Nathan alone in his room, which was rather reclusive of him, but he looked fine, so she gently pushed him outside to the pond, set up the whirlpools that would serve as goals, and quickly learned that they were both dreadful teachers: neither she nor Nathan actually knew how to describe the correct wrist movement for skipping a rock, having long internalized it into their muscle memories. Lukai also insisted on using his prosthetic arm, though whether he expected this to make it easier or harder, Myra wasn't entirely sure.

So Lukai had to figure it out pretty much on his own, and Nathan was off his game, which meant Myra trounced the both of them, at least until Shera and Iz came by. Myra invited Shera to sit where she could cuddle her from behind, but then this made it really awkward to throw, and it would have been too awkward to tell Shera to move, so her performance started to suffer.

Iz, for her part, had a book on Unkmirean politics, which she was ready to devour in favor of ignoring the game entirely, while Shera wanted to chat with Lukai, awkwardly twisting herself around to face the guy without leaving Myra's arms.

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And she didn't get the memo that they were trying to chill for the evening, because she went right for the heavy questions.

"Have you th-thought about how we can help you find the arsonist?"

Lukai actually just didn't respond to this at first. Shera kind of shrank back, and there was an entire round (Lukai: 2 skips, Nathan: 9 skips + the low target, Myra: 11 skips + the mid target, earning 1 rock-back) before suddenly replying. "I've spent six years trying to find answers. If I knew where to look, I would have found it already. So no. I need you all to figure something out."

"We'll f-figure something out!" Shera quickly blurted out. She looked at Myra. "Won't we?"

No, where the fuck do we start? "Well, there's still a few holes in our understanding," Myra said instead. "Why don't you just start with the facts?"

Lukai sighed. Myra thought they were going to get another long pause. "All right. Well, I told you most of it. The culprit broke into the control room and destroyed the core. But it's all but impossible to get into the rune cabinet without leaving your fingerprints on the cabinet door."

"Yes, that's why you thought the culprit took your arm," Myra said. "I'm still confused, though—when did you lose your arm?"

"The day of the fire… there was an anomaly. I don't remember—I really don't remember, I mean, a lot of it was a blur. One moment I was in Roc's observatory, and then—I don't know. I don't remember how I got from there to the safety of the platform. Roc said he never saw me, and in the aftermath, I gave contradictory testimony, which I also barely remember. The detectives dismissed me as an anomaly, but apparently, I claimed the fire started half an hour earlier than Roc or any of the other survivors did."

"Ah."

That sort of chicanery sure sounds like…

"J-just to be clear," Shera said. "You're suggesting that the culprit ambushed you, st-stole your arm, and used it to open the rune cabinet, and attempted to disorient you to the point that you wouldn't realize you'd been attacked prior to the fire starting."

Lukai looked down, but he nodded.

"But you d-don't remember anything about being attacked? Not who the culprit is, or—"

"It doesn't matter," Lukai said. "I already know who the culprit is. It's the man who visited the village in the week leading up to the fire, there's no question about that. He wouldn't stop asking about the village failsafes. He went on and on about how fascinated he was by the concept of an Unkmirean city in the trees, how can we be so secure living up in the trees, on and on, even though he spoke flawless Unkmirean, mind you. He was suspicious as all hell. And if that's not enough, that man walked into the control room, leaned over, and put his palm flat against the wall. I saw this with my own eyes, and yet the forensics team said they couldn't find any prints that didn't belong to me or Roc. There's no world where he wasn't up to some trick."

"But why would he want to destroy your village?" Myra asked. "Did he give you any clue?"

Lukai shook his head. "Roc—Roc would know. He talked to him the most. I'm sure he knows something, but he—you saw him." He had to stop talking for a moment, burying his face in his hands. Shera gave him a gentle pat on the shoulder. "He doesn't talk about it. Whenever I ask what they talked about—he says he doesn't remember."

On her other side, Nathan had been quiet, too. Despite the effort he was making to look put together, Myra suspected that he'd finally gotten the time to properly dwell on the news about his brother.

"Nathan." She snapped a finger near his head, and he turned his head towards her. "What do you think?"

"Oh, ah…" He ran a hand through his hair. "It sounds a lot like the Blank Cloaks, doesn't it? Something absurd like faking fingerprints by stealing someone's arm and then tricking them about what time it is…"

Myra started to agree, but Lukai spoke first. "People talked about them back then," he said. "I'm afraid there's not a lot you can do with a hunch like that. Oh, so the crime was committed by a bunch of uncatchable imperial ghosts?" He grimaced. "Might as well call off the investigation, huh? 'Course, that's just about what they did, anyway. I can tell you it wasn't that one couple, anyway."

"The… Feraras?"

"Haladard Ferara and Sensa Ferara, Marquess and Marchioness of the Katalan Bay, esteemed military leaders, yadda yadda. Of course, the man who visited certainly wasn't either of them, not that I really believe they're the Blank Cloaks, anyway."

"I mean," Myra said. "I was actually murdered by Sensa Ferara. She made it look like I hung myself in a locked room—"

"Oh, they're assassins, there's no doubt about that. But are they the assassins?"

"I—I never really thought about it," Myra said. "Everybody just says 'it's the Feraras'—"

"Actually—" Nathan cut in from her other side. "The Blank Cloaks aren't really known for faking suicides, are they? The famous cases are the ones where there's no good explanation. The deaths at the snowed-in manor, the general drowned at his dinner table without a drink in sight. Something that has the opinions column piling high with ridiculous speculation. That's what the Blank Cloaks are known for."

"Of course, they wouldn't be known for faking suicides," Myra said. "That would defeat the whole point, if everybody knew the suicide was faked."

"I mean, sure. There are different reasons to want a crime that has zero explanations, versus a crime that has a single easy explanation. The first grabs people's attention. The second you want people to accept and move on. All I'm saying is, if we compare to the massacre of Lukai's village, it looks a lot more like a traditional Blank Cloak crime."

"Does it, though?" Myra asked. "It kinda looks like a botched attempt to frame Lukai."

"It wasn't an attempt to frame me. The footprints don't fit. Nathan is right—the crime was crafted to make no sense."

Myra didn't want to disagree with Lukai on this, but—

But why? When a Blank Cloak murder was plastered all over the imperial newspapers for a month, you could at least know the motive. It was a message from the empire. "We did this. You know it, but you can't prove a thing." But the arson of Lukai's village had never been a story at all. It was extinguished into obscurity almost as soon as it was set ablaze.

Extinguished.

◆

That night, she was able to cajole Lukai into some village stories.

Among others, she got the story behind all those owl photos, which had been a whim of Kari, Roc's late daughter and Lukai's fiancée. It had started from an inside joke—Kari and Roc had been so deeply into astronomy that they had started calling themselves "night owls," for their increasingly nocturnal behavior. Then that had spiralled into the idea that all the owls around them were "family" and Kari had decided they needed to take "family photos." Then she had imported a whole heap of camera-leaves for the project. On the whole, it was a very silly story, but Myra wanted to hear all his very silly stories, and she listened to him tell them until they were ready to doze off.

They both bolted awake at the sound of a sharp, loud knock. Lukai promptly grabbed his staff while Myra frantically fumbled around for hers, but they both relaxed when Nathan called out for them.

Myra opened the door so fast, it almost knocked into the poor guy's face. "Nathan, what's wrong—"

"Maybe it's nothing," Nathan. "It's just, I don't think it was on your timeline?"

"My timeline?"

"You know, your predictions—"

"Nathan. Nothing was on my timeline tonight." She grabbed his shoulders. "What's going on?"

"Uh…" He pointed upwards. "Come up to the roof."

It was the middle of the night, but halfway across the city, a bright white light shone as if the sun itself was rising from the middle of the city. Myra could scarcely look at it without her eyes burning. "A police raid?"

There was no doubt that was what it was—she would recognize that painful glow anywhere. But why? What the fuck?

"What building is it?" Lukai asked. He was shielding his eyes, but otherwise, he might have recognized it himself. Myra knew the city well enough—she could tell just from the direction.

"… It's Mirkas-Ballam, isn't it?"

"Yeah," Nathan said. "It is."

"What reason would the police have to be interested in Mirkas-Ballam?" Lukai demanded. "Why this loop, if not any of the others?"

Nathan turned up his palms. They both looked to Myra, for if anybody could intuit the answer, it would be her, and indeed, something was already coming to mind. In dawning comprehension, Myra put her hand to her forehead and muttered, "It has—It has happened before."

"How could that be?" Lukai asked, agitated. He was still covering his eyes. "How could you have missed it?"

"Ben—Ben's note," Myra said. "He wrote, 'Do not, under any circumstances, go after Mirkas-Ballam.'"

I should have thought it was weird! Why the hell was he chastising me about Mirkas-Ballam that loop of all loops? Fuck!

"He left that note right after the loop where the empire launched their ridiculous journal manhunt! I never saw the end of that loop because I got suicided by Sensa Ferara! Damn it!" Mirkas-Ballam was fucking raided by the empire in one of my loops, and I didn't even fucking know! FUCK!

That they were able to finish the synthesis in time despite your little stunt was nothing short of a miracle, she remembered.

Should they fail, the consequences will be disastrous.

"Oh damn, oh fuck, oh fuck—"

"Calm down," Lukai said, keeping her at task. "If there's a link here, we need to know what it is. Why does the journal hunt lead to a raid on Mirkas-Ballam's laboratory?"

"I—I need to check something," Myra said. "I want to sneak near the building. Can you keep me safe?"

"Of course," Lukai said. "How close do you need to get?"

◆

The police had cut off the area a block out from either side of the lab building. Employees were being collected out in the front, the overworked (or overzealous) night-shifters who all looked understandably distraught.

Lukai, who had done a handful of operations in the empire and knew all the theory, helped Myra get onto the roof undetected, clearing a disruption field that was out of her depth, and helping her find a spot where she would be out of sight. This left Myra to do her thing.

What led the imperial police to this location?

The government had been leading a search for a particular book, and in doing so, they had stumbled upon something at the Mirkas-Ballam laboratory. So what was it? To look for the journal, the empire had had to look for something in it. So what would that be?

When she was in position, she cast. Beaver. No, nothing? Miirun—no, too vague. Emmett Massiel, yes, but not in a remarkable way.

Uh…

Who was that one expedition member she hadn't heard of before? Jen Rebanko. No, nothing.

Well, how had she found the journal the first time? I was searching for—

Red vine.

And in her mind's eye, the whole building lit up.