Look. I’m telling you all this because I do, in fact, feel a shred of guilt about killing you again and again and again. And again. I don’t want you to suffer—you haven’t done anything to deserve it. It’s Enoch and his cronies who deserve it. But as you keep getting in the way…

Keep doing it? What do you mean? Yes, I remember the Loops. I remember dying. Of course I do. You expect that to stop me?

Ha. Yeah. That’s the definition of madness, isn’t it? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. But the thing is—and I don’t think it’s mad to believe it—with nine days of stuff to happen every Loop, and with something changing every time, then eventually, yeah… The result will change. On one Loop, and maybe it’s tens of thousands of years into our future, I will succeed. I will get to Enoch without having to take those skill vials. But until then, I’ll take them. Even though it hurts.

And I’ll do it because the voice tells me to.

‘Hold on!’ Julya’s father cried out as he wrestled with the floundering sail. ‘Hold on, darling!’

They hadn’t expected this. Hadn’t expected such a storm. The Emersons were a fishing family—always had been, as far back as anyone living could remember. If Seth Emerson said it was safe to sail, then it was safe to sail; that’s what everyone always said.

But the titanic waves lashing at their vessel, pouring over the deck… All that seemed to beg to differ.

The billowing wind caught the sail, sending the boom flying across the deck before either young Julya or her father had a moment to react. Seth was knocked to the deck, while the metal hit Julya on the head.

She blacked out for what surely could only have been moments.

Her father was still on the deck. She was on it, too, though she didn’t quite remember getting there.

‘I don’t understand!’ Julya’s dad roared at the storm, his voice drowning by the crashing seas. ‘You were supposed to be calm, today! Calm! You think I’d have taken her out if I’d known?’

Julya was used to her father talking to the sea. It was his oldest friend, he’d once told her. And it would be her oldest friend one day too. If only he’d known, then, how wrong he would turn out to be.

‘Get in the cabin, sweetheart,’ Julya’s dad shouted to her, but she found that she was fixed to the spot. Didn’t move. Couldn’t move.

Another great wave poured over them, and the two sailors—young and old alike—held on for dear life. The lightning struck again at the sea around them, lightning up their surroundings for a mere instant. It was daylight, really, but you wouldn’t have known it with the dark clouds above.

‘I said get inside, sweetie!’ Julya’s Dad insisted, his voice strained, his arms frantically working at steering the vessel back to land.

Another wave loomed over them. Larger than the last. Larger than any before.

‘Jules! Get inside!’ her dad shouted, screamed.

The beginnings of the wave met with the hull, sending the vessel upwards once more. The boat tilted towards one side with the force of the wave, sending it further and further over until Julya felt almost as though the cabin wall was the floor.

‘Jules,’ her father said again, his voice quiet now. His tone somehow more disheartening. ‘You know I love you, right?’

She nodded, braced herself. Waited for the end to come.

But it wasn’t the sea that swallowed them.

A great nothingness rose from the water—or perhaps it was just that their boat was tumbling towards it—not formed of darkness, or of shadow, but of the void. It was a monstrous beast that acted as the edge of reality, a stopping point between this world and no world at all.

Julya had found herself face to face with that spoken about only in whispers. That which plagued the people of the four cities more and more with every passing day. She found herself face to face with the Fringe.

Julya felt it wash over her, an iciness that seemed to pull at her skin. She felt the boat disappear beneath her feet, leaving her in the void. She watched as her father ceased to be.

And then she awoke.

Back on the shores, just outside Haven, coughing up a lungful of seawater. When she stumbled back to town, she headed for her home, for her mother and her grandmother. And she found that none of them knew who Seth Emerson was.

‘Hello, girl,’ said a voice formed of the thousands it had eaten before.

It had been a while since Julya had dreamt of that day.

For years, throughout her fatherless childhood, she’d had the same nightmare every time she’d slept. During the months following her contact with the Fringe, she’d done her best never to fall asleep. She’d drunk copious amounts of tea, levelled up her Vigour skill as much as possible, even managed to steal herself some Energy boono, on a couple of occasions. But no matter what she’d tried, sleep still came, eventually. And every time she slept she saw the void reach out and grab her.

The voice hadn’t spoken again to her for many years, and then even when it did, it was little and far between. Julya had kept telling herself that it wasn’t there, that she’d freed herself from it, or some other lie. But deep down she knew it was there, and deep down she hoped that it was not simply… biding its time.

But despite it all—despite a trauma she could never explain to anyone else—Julya had made a life for herself. She worked as a Vigour trainer down at the local gym, and been there enough time to work up to manager. Despite her humble fishing upbringing, there was a chance, she felt, that she could still make something of herself. This was a fact celebrated only by her last remaining family member, Marm, her young nephew.

They’d grown close after Marm’s mother—Julya’s sister—had passed away a few years back, and since then, Julya had watched that spotty little kid turn into a man. It would be time, soon, for the little man to move out, to start making a life of his own, but Julya kept herself in denial about it. To her, Marm would always be that young kid she’d first started training in Vigour, and certainly not the burly, muscle of a man he’d turned into.

It had never crossed her mind that he might die.

She’d bolted to the hospital the moment she’d heard he was sick, it slipping her mind that she might travel there by tram, her feet carrying her straight to her destination without any conscious thought required. Julya burst in through the hospital doors and demanded of the man at the reception to know where her nephew was.

‘Are you family?’ the glazed-eyed man asked.

‘Am I— Yes, I’m bloody well family.’

‘Room 34,’ the receptionist replied, and then waved her away. She hadn’t needed the waving, of course—because she was already gone.

Doctors surrounded the pale body of her nephew, each looking on with expressions formed of some complex mix of perplexity and dread. At this point, Marm was not yet dead; his clammy body was still moving, if only just, if with the little energy that his fever was allowing him. Where once there was muscle, there seemed only sagging flesh.

‘Marm!’ Julya cried out, pushing through the huddle of doctors to hug her nephew. ‘What’s happened to him?’ she snapped at the nearest physician, with more bite than was really necessary. It wasn’t their fault.

The doctor glanced, wide-eyed, at another doctor at her side. Her lips parted, no sound came out.

‘What happened?’ Julya asked again, this time directing the question to the room as a whole.

An older doctor stepped forward, coughed. ‘We… Put simply, miss: we don’t know.’

‘What do you mean you—’

‘Are you his mother?’ the same doctor interrupted her.

‘His aunt. His mum’s dead.’

The doctor looked on glumly, glanced from Marm to Julya. ‘We’ve not seen anything like this before. Not really.’

‘Heard rumours though, haven’t—’ another doctor piped up, but was cut short by a hard glare from the first.

‘Rumours?’ Julya asked. ‘What rumours have you heard?’

‘It’s nothing. We don’t practice medicine based on rumour,’ the more senior doctor responded, then glanced at the woman who’d spoken out of turn. ‘Do we?’

‘No,’ the physician who’d mentioned the rumours said, shaking her head.

‘So you can’t treat him?’ Julya asked, her voice breaking. ‘Then move him somewhere that can. Move him to the Sunrise District. Move him—’

‘You know that’s not how our healthcare works, miss. Harbour residents get Harbour healthcare. We don’t—’

‘Oh, sod that! He’s dying. He’s dying, what does that matter?’

‘Miss…’ the doctor said.

‘Please,’ Julya said through increasingly wet eyes. ‘You don’t have a diagnosis. You can’t—’

The more senior doctor approached, took Julya gently by the hand and looked into her eyes. ‘It’s not that we don’t have a diagnosis. We do. It’s just that we don’t know how to treat it.’

‘What is it? The diagnosis—what’s happened?’

‘It’s as if… It’s as if all strength, all ability—’

‘All skills,’ another physician added.

‘—have been—’

A loud cough announced an arrival at the door. ‘Enough!’ a tall man dressed in the black uniform of the Legion shouted. ‘Enough.’

The older physician stepped forward, pressed himself in the officer of the Legion’s face. ‘You mean to tell me what to do in my—’

He was interrupted by the member of the Legion grabbing him by the scrubs and pushing him against the wall. ‘You mean to tell me what to do in our city?’

This time, the doctor was quiet. The uniformed officer turned to the rest of the crowded room. ‘Out,’ he said. ‘We will take it from here.’

Julya never saw Marm again. She held a service for him nonetheless, without his body, and found herself heartened somewhat by the turnout. But the funeral didn’t help her, not really, not when she didn’t know what had happened to him. Not when she’d been denied the chance to say a proper goodbye. Not when she’d lost her last remaining family member.

The days that followed were a rage-induced blur. She’d been thrown out of the hospital so many times since then that the staff knew her on site, and in all the times she’d been there, nobody had been able to tell her what had happened. She caught the doctors in the room in their local pub too, though there again Julya found herself forcibly removed. There was only one path of investigation left to her. For that reason, she turned up next at the Tower.

Julya strolled in as though she had a right to be there, ambling straight up to the front desk, which would still be populated for the evening for a few more hours. She slammed her hands down upon it, and announced, as boldly as she could manage, ‘I’m here to meet with the Legion.’

The woman at the desk didn’t glance up from her doodling. ‘Do you have an appointment?’

‘Yes.’

‘No,’ the woman replied in a sing-song voice. ‘You don’t. They don’t take them.’

‘Then why did you…’

‘To see what your intentions were,’ the woman answered, finally looking up now that her image of a flower was complete. She raised her hand.

Julya nodded to the raised arm. ‘What’s that?’

‘I’m calling for security.’

‘Right,’ Julya said, glancing over her shoulder to see a person in uniform marching across the Tower’s ground floor. ‘I don’t think you understand,’ she continued to the receptionist. ‘The Legion. They took my nephew. I just want to see him.’

‘Can’t help you.’ The receptionist raised her hand further.

‘I need to see the Legion,’ Julya growled. ‘I need to know what they did to Marm.’

No reply came. Those government employees passing by the front desk were beginning to glance in her direction. The security officer was growing close.

Julya changed tact, turning to the crowd around her. ‘The Legion took my nephew!’ she said again, crying out as loudly as possible. ‘Won’t tell me why. And this woman’ — she pointed at the receptionist — ‘won’t let me see them.’

But nobody came to her aid. Nobody so much as slowed. Nobody cared enough to wipe those glazed-eyed expressions from their faces. And soon the security officer was upon her. They pulled Julya—kicking and screaming—from the ground floor of the Tower.

‘I’m going to find him, you know!’ Julya shouted, droplets of saliva spilling from her mouth. She probably seemed mad to onlookers, but she didn’t care; all she cared about in that moment was finding the truth.

The security officer threw Julya to the floor at the top of the steps outside the Tower, and she landed in a puddle.

Julya wiped the worst of the water from her body, but the feeling of damp tights on her legs remained. She stood up, stared at the Tower, and intended to march right back in. But something stopped her—exhaustion, perhaps, or despair—and she instead contented herself to stare up at the looming building.

A man arrived at her side as she did so. Out of the corner of her eye, Julya could see a finely-tailored suit and a pocketwatch—the usual costume of someone who actually belonged in this district of the city.

‘All rather odd, isn’t it?’ the gentleman said, all of a sudden. ‘Nobody able to tell you that which is truly going on. It is my experience that such is never a good sign.’

‘Who are you?’ Julya replied. ‘What do you want?’

‘What do I want?’ the man replied. ‘I want to help you. I want to help you get revenge on those responsible.’

‘And you’d do that out of what? The goodness of your own heart?’

The gentleman smiled. ‘Such distrust, I see. Good. You’ll need that, in the days to come.’ He held his palms in the air to signal his surrender. ‘No. You’ve seen through me, of course. I have no true investment in your tragedy—beyond the usual empathy, I mean. But I do see an opportunity in which we might assist one another. Our enemies are the same, you see.’

‘Our enemies?’ Julya asked. ‘You mean the people who killed my nephew? Who killed Marm?’

‘I do indeed, miss…’

‘Emerson,’ Julya replied. ‘Who is it? Do you know? Who took him from me?’

‘Why, you’re standing at his home, Ms Emerson. The man responsible—not personally, of course, but indirectly—is none other than Enoch Chambers himself. Your Prime Minister.’

‘The…’ Julya started, and then felt her face grow pale. If this was true, then any hope of justice was gone. Nobody could take down the man in charge of Haven’s government. ‘Right. So, it’s over then. Hopeless.’

‘Don’t be so sure,’ the man said. ‘Please, come to the home of my associate on End Street, back in the Harbour District. Be there in three days’ time. A colleague there by name of Asa will be able to give you all the skills you could possibly hope for.’

‘Give me… What? How?’

The rich man smiled. ‘Vials,’ he said. ‘Skill diluted into consumables. Something that our Prime Minister and his own associates perfected four days ago. Power unimaginable, you see?’

‘And what do you want me to do with these… these skill vials?’ Julya asked, already halfway there on the answer herself.

‘Why, I want you to kill him, of course,’ the man responded, in a tone as flat as though he was ordering sugar in his tea.

‘I…’

‘There is a price, of course,’ the gentleman continued. ‘Such vials, though they will give the drinker legendary grade skill in a matter of moments, have a side effect.’

‘Like boono?’

‘Worse. These vials will plant a seed in your mind. A voice that you can’t quieten.’

‘That’s fine,’ Julya said, ‘I’ve been living with a voice in my head all my life.’

The man at her side narrowed his eyes, but didn’t investigate this response any further. ‘We have a deal, then?’ he asked, sticking out his hand.

Julya took the man’s hand in her own. ‘Julya,’ she said.

‘Gresley,’ the man responded.