I lose myself to rage, sobering up on the boat an additional iteration later.

I squeeze my eyes tight, then sit up and begin to weep, my hands over my head. I’m angry, frustrated, relieved–my head is a tumbler of emotions. I take a few deep breaths.

The past months I’ve been trying to put on a calm face for the watchers, tried to beat them at their mind games, show them that this loop hadn’t broken me. But I ruined that all when I ended up back in my room, when they tricked me into thinking I was free.

I ruined my facade even further in the last iteration.

I look down at my hands. I can’t remember the last time...an iteration had gone so poorly.

Bits and pieces of scenes flash through my mind like shards of a broken mirror: ripping through the water, forming a bone construct around myself out of drowned bones; tearing through the skies like a rocket; digging the bones into my own skin and grafting foreign flesh around them; slamming into Menocht Bay like a hurricane, leveling half of the city with my speed and strength; thralling as many people as I could touch to stop breathing.

Me adding a city’s worth of bones to my mega-construct, a four-legged lizard beast with me at its head, then doing as much as I can to decimate the entire province of Illuet.

I hang my head, staring off into the distance with a bitter taste in my mouth.

Somewhere along the way I must have run into some trouble, or even the watchers decided they’d had enough violence for one iteration. Regardless of why the loop restarted, I’m now back as myself, acutely aware of the normalcy of my arms and legs, the familiar bend of my ribs as I lean into the dingy’s side, all of it starkly contrasting with how it felt merging my entire being with a bone titan.

There wouldn’t have been any way to come back from that, not in the real world. I intentionally warped myself into something other.

I sigh at myself in disgust: I’ve done this kind of transformation enough times to recognize it as one of my coping mechanisms.

But I’m back now, whole, and calm.

I carefully reassess my present situation. First, I’ve learned that the loop has layers: Menocht Bay must be the first, while my school should be the second.

I laugh at myself self-deprecatingly: I clearly failed that layer. I exhale and dip my hand into the water outside the boat.

How the hell did everything go so wrong?

I recognize that I know the answer, though I don’t want to acknowledge it.

Everything went wrong, for the most part, because I couldn’t keep myself from using decemancy. I went out on my own and made a bone construct. I wasn’t thinking straight. Maybe I let the power get to my head, the fact that I had escaped the loop inflating my ego.

I don’t even know.

Think, think, think. What could be the point of the next part of the loop, other than to teach me control?

Menocht Bay, this iteration, develops my power. Obviously.

Then the school iteration forces me to keep it truly hidden. No potentioreader. No telling anyone, not even a counselor sworn to secrecy like Jasmine. While that alone didn’t set off the loop’s restart, it’s just one more potential avenue of suspicion: fundamentally, Jasmine was a counselor who saw practitioners.

If I’d woken up and realized that I didn’t have to wait for the damned cruise ship to go to the city, I could’ve solved Menocht a long time ago. Perhaps there’s a similar trick to finishing the school loop.

I think of the skills needed to kill the five-thousand-or-so people infected with ginger a few hours into the iteration. Considering the slow start I had learning decemancy, I needed...six months, maybe, to beat this layer of the loop. I wouldn’t have done it as well, and I would’ve needed to kill more than twenty-thousand considering my slower traveling speed (sans bone construct), but I could’ve done it.

I frown and look up at the clear, blue sky. This time, I don’t bother to wait for the boat, instead choosing to go straight to Menocht. I’m mostly convinced that the success or failure of this loop hinges not on my ability to deliver the ship to safety, but on saving Menocht’s people from a zombification. If I’m wrong, and the ship does matter, that’ll be one more thing I’ve figured out and I can just repeat the layer again.

I raise my arms and drag up a veritable graveyard of sunken bones to begin shaping the wyrm. The process takes only four minutes, even with non-human bones: I’ve grown faster with practice.

As I fly over the water, my mind wanders, and I think of life before the loop. I wonder about who the watchers are and what they’re preparing me to do. When I get out...will things ever be like they used to? My lips firm into a thin line. What will it take, from me, to make it so?

I wonder if the watchers think that they can control me, or if they’re regretting what they’ve let me become.

—

Somewhere in Selejo

One hour before the start of the loop.

Lisandro licked his lips and turned around. “I almost can’t believe we’re doing this so soon after the last one.” He sighed and typed a few final notes into the glosscomp.

The woman standing behind him, Dedere, smiled thinly, her red lipstick vibrant against her otherwise colorless complexion. “It’s what the Prophet says will work,” she said, rolling her eyes.

Lisandro made a small groaning noise. “I don’t think we’ve researched this subject thoroughly enough,” he noted, exasperated–not that his complaints would change anything at this point. “People with dormant affinities might never unlock them except for in an exact, specific scenario. I’m not confident the Infinity Loop dilation chamber will be configured for the right scenarios...”

Dedere placed a hand on his shoulder. “That’s exactly why ol’ Prophet had a direct hand in constructing the logic and scenarios of the infinity loop.”

“I don’t like it. The fact that the loop is set to use places that we’ve recorded with the tempFix only this past month means that it won’t be perfect. For instance, in the first layer, that godforsaken boat.” He shook his head.

“Not all of the loop is tempFixed,” Dedere remarked, looking over Lisandro’s shoulder. “And of the parts that are, many of them are carried over from some of the past experiments.”

“What if this doesn’t work, Dedere?”

“What?” she said, turning around.

“What if the loop comes to nothing again?” he asked, shooting her a blank expression.

“...We’ll just find another person, I suppose.” She grimaced at the thought. They could–and would–do it if they absolutely had to, but the energy cost involved of running the Infinity Loop again...and without any results to show for it...

“Did the Prophet ever say anything about why this guy was chosen?” Lisandro asked, eyebrows sagging in defeat. “It seems pretty arbitrary to me; he’s just a university kid over at Academia Hector.”

“Wouldn’t matter,” Dedere replied, eyes distant. “At this point, he doesn’t need to give reasons.” Their mentor was known for his uncanny intuition.

“He didn’t say anything at all?”

“Not that I’ve heard, at least.” She brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “We should make our way to the launch room.”

Lisandro pulled away from the computer and stood up, brushing off his knee-length steel-gray coat.

—

I kill the infected in the city again, though this time it’s only two-thousand. Given that most were still in the Jade District, it was a clean sweep. There were a few that were off in a more remote part of the city that were a slight inconvenience, but I found them eventually. If ginger wasn’t so contagious, I’d deal with the issue by sending minions–either construed from bone or thralled–to find and kill all those with the signature low vitality caused by the pathogen. But because it spreads so easily by bodily fluids, I need to dehydrate at the least and at best burn the bodies before other people encounter them.

If the infected people number in the low thousands, this is totally feasible. But after twenty-thousand...things fall apart. I can’t kill infected faster than the pathogen spreads. Hence why I was never able to exit the loop until now, when I entered the city two days earlier than before.

The boat never arrives, but all the same, I eventually blink and find myself in my dorm room. I sigh contentedly to myself and roll over in bed, grabbing my glossY off the bedside table and checking the time. It’s currently 6 am, a solid two hours before I naturally would. I set an alarm for 8 am, then turn off the glossY’s screen and fall back asleep.

I dream of being back in Menocht Bay, the city a ruin smouldering around me, red against a soot-black sky.

The alarm wakes me and I silence it, laying in bed for a full half hour. During that time, I resolved to absolutely refrain from using any decemancy while in this stage of the loop. What got me into trouble last time was clearly tied to making a flying construct and accepting the invitation to Sylvestri’s party. If I never displayed any affinity, and never changed my status within the school, hopefully I’ll be out of the loop and actually back in the real world as soon as possible.

I have a sinking feeling in my stomach that it won’t be so simple–especially considering how long it took to leave the first part of the loop in Menocht.

I eventually get out of bed, sighing and kicking off the covers as I change into a towel, slip on my shower shoes and head out the door. I step into the shower and let the scalding water run over my back. I take deep breaths, repeating two words like a mantra: be patient. I have a clear direction to go in, and can’t afford to be hasty.

I get out of the shower and finish washing up, then return to my room and get dressed. Casual clothes, I remind myself, recalling that it’s still the weekend. I grab my glossY and check my messages before I head out.

From Laura: What’s up?

I sigh. Do I want to go down this rabbit hole again when nothing matters? What would my previous self do in this situation? Y’jeni, the me of before...was meek, completely unwilling to pursue anyone. I know I liked a few people in the past, so it wasn’t from lack of interest. But I do think that if someone had reached out to me directly like this, I would’ve had the sense to at least flirt back.

As I formulate my response to Laura, I murmur that this is practice for when I leave the loop...whenever that is.

To Laura: Nothing in particular. Have you already eaten breakfast?

She responds five seconds later: Yeah, a little while ago.

To Laura: Are you eating with anyone for lunch? We can meet up around noon.

From Laura: Nope, I’m free! See you at noon!

I smile and shake my head slightly. “I wonder how long she’s been waiting for me to ask her to the dance.”

I shuffle downstairs and to the dining hall, giving Octavia a smile and a wave as I swipe my card.

“Nice to see you, Ian,” she says.

“Likewise,” I reply, beaming. “Have a great day.”

I pile my plate with food, then sit down at a random, unpopulated table. I don’t see any friends I should be sitting with, a small relief.

I scowl. It’s entirely possible I’ll never leave this layer, I think, if I see friends as chores. It all comes down to how closely I need to follow the behaviorisms of my former self and slip back into my old life.

While I presume that I’m supposed to act like my old self, it’s difficult to hang around friends while fronting a flawless facade. It was even hard in the last iteration, when I thought that people were all real, let alone this iteration, when I know that any relationships I develop will be fast forgotten.

I tighten my grip around my glass of water. This is nothing compared to saving Menocht. It’s a calm vacation, I reason, especially since none of my test grades will matter, assuming I make it to the end of the semester.

I finish my breakfast and head to the library to check up on the news, taking advantage of glosspads pre-loaded with subscription publications. In the last iteration, I dropped the ball in that department–I didn’t care about what was happening in the grand scheme of things. Instead, I had just been happy to escape the loop.

I had been lost, I realize. I had felt isolated from friends, dissatisfied wasting time on classes decemancy rendered obsolete...and wholly unsure of how I’d ever be able to be myself.