Day 2

‘Kryl,’ Riot said, slammed hand against the frame of the opening door. ‘We need to talk.’

Without any knowledge of Kryl’s remaining safehouses, Sham and Riot had staked out Harcourt’s casino, on the assumption that Kryl would head this way before long. There had been no sign of him on the rest of the first day, and in Sham’s half of the nightshift he saw only drunken men and women fall in and out of the establishment. But on the following afternoon, just as Sham was sensing that Riot had grown tired of this process, a familiar face appeared.

Sham and Riot strolled confidently into the casino, not giving the apathetic bouncer a chance to stop them, and then proceeded straight after Kryl into the back rooms. That was where Riot had rapped her knuckles firmly against a door.

‘Do I…’ Harcourt started.

‘I’m here to see my brother,’ Riot replied.

Before the casino owner could respond, her brother’s voice called out from deeper in the room. ‘It’s alright, Harry,’ Kryl said. ‘They are no threat.’

Kryl didn’t make eye contact with Sham as they entered, keeping his gaze fixed on his sister.

‘I know what you’re gonna say,’ Sham ventured. ‘I—’

‘Where were you?’ Kryl pulled his line of sight away from his sister but not to Sham, instead to the papers on the desk in front of him.

‘Yes,’ Sham replied, ‘that. I got held up.’

‘Julya found him,’ Riot added.

‘I do trust it was a painful death.’ Kryl tossed a few pages aside.

Harcourt raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m not sure that I—’

‘It’s quite alright, Harry. You can leave me to it.’

With that, their host nodded and left the room, but not without flashing each of the visitors a curious gaze.

Sham approached Kryl’s desk, allowing himself a better vantage point on the work that was demanding the man’s full attention. He saw on the pages lines and arrow and circles, each meticulously noted, these shapes few on the left-most pages and many on the right-most. The diagram looked like a felled tree, one that had been towering, with hundreds of branches.

[REASONING] THE DIAGRAM: FAIL

You can see that it’s a timeline. Point A to Point B, via dozens of possible routes. But beyond that… It’s too messy to learn anything from the scribblings in front of you.

‘And this is…?’ Sham asked.

‘None of your business,’ Kryl answered.

‘Looks like a timeline. Well… many timelines. All this organisation and you ain’t cracked it? Thought you’d been winging it all this time.’

‘No, Mr Tilner, “winging it” is more your speed than mine.’

‘Sham told me the truth,’ Riot interrupted. ‘About what your role is in all of this?’

Kryl paused, papers in hand, finally casting a glance to Sham. ‘You did, did you? I suppose I should have anticipated such behaviour.’

‘Not in your pretty tree diagram then?’

‘Tree?’ Kryl asked, and then caught himself. ‘Never mind.’ He turned to his sister. ‘What exactly did he tell you, if you don’t mind me asking?’

‘Everything, I believe,’ she replied. A glance at a nodding Sham confirmed such to her. ‘I know about the crown in the next room. About your plot to unseat the Prime Minister, about Gresley Manwaring. All of it.’

‘And would you fight me on this?’

Riot paused, her eyes narrowing as she stared down her brother. She seemed to choose her words carefully. ‘Enoch needs to go. We’ve seen what he’s done to this city. I won’t fight you on that front.’

Kryl apparently saw straight through his sister’s wording. ‘“On that front”? And on the rest?’

‘I can’t support a queen I have not met.’

The monarchist sat back in his chair, sighed. ‘I don’t see a way to change that. Not until—’

‘Not until the Loop is broken,’ Riot finished for him.

‘Yes, well—’

‘But the Loop is only going to break once Julya reaches Enoch Chambers. Once she kills him. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that the path Gresley sent her down?’

Kryl was silent for a few moments, his face held tight and plain, as though a conscious effort to avoid betraying any emotions. Sham had seen this expression many times before, usually sitting across a poker table from him. ‘How could you know that?’ the monarchist asked.

‘As I said: Julya found him. They spoke.’

‘I’m surprised my associate was so foolish as to give Julya his real name. Though I suppose we all suffer lapses of judgement from time to time.’ Kryl’s eyes seemed to linger on Riot as he said this.

‘You lied to me,’ Sham said. ‘Before. When you brought me into the fold.’

‘“Into the fold”? Please. Just how much work have you done for the monarchy since you discovered its role in this?’ Kryl replied. ‘And no, I did not lie. No word of what I told you was untrue.’

‘Yeah, but you failed to mention that Gresley was the one who started this all to begin with.’

‘Yes. I did. Because it is of no consequence.’ Kryl fanned pieces of paper out across the desk. His layout wasn’t perfect; some lines seem to end between pages, some lines seemed to double back on itself, but with some study Sham was sure he would be able to decipher it. ‘Look,’ Kryl said, pointing to a lone point at the start of the messy web of timelines—on day 4, if the annotations were to be believed. ‘This is the point at which Gresley first stumbled upon the wrathful Julya. Notice how only one timeline travels through this event?’

Sham had noticed, yeah, but he didn’t have time to say so before Kryl continued.

‘That would be because my dear friend Gresley—much like Harcourt—does not possess the Recollection skill that affords the three of us memory of the previous loops. Of course, Julya does possess it. Which means—’

‘That he only needed to recruit Julya once,’ Riot pitched in.

Kryl looked up at his sister, nodded. ‘Precisely. Julya was set down this path an unknown number of Loops ago.’

‘And Gresley finds someone else on that day each Loop, or…’ Sham wondered aloud.

Kryl shook his head. ‘No. His recruiting of Julya was a result of happenstance. A matter of being in the right place at the right time, as it were. There was never a strict timeline on Enoch’s removal, only a plan that the Prime Minister must be removed from the occasion. Gresley, being the largely intelligent man that he is, saw an opportunity and pounced upon it. So you see—his involvement is of no consequence.’

‘So you left this bit out because of…’ Sham started, meaning to finish the sentence with some sarcastic remark. Unfortunately, Kryl beat him to it.

‘Because I wanted to keep the information concise enough that you might wrap your mind around it,’ Kryl replied.

Sham ignored the remark and leant over the table, trying to decipher Kryl’s scribblings. ‘He speaks to Asa, though. Asa, who has the—’

Kryl waved the very idea away. ‘Asa is nothing,’ he said. ‘Of no consequence. He only…’ And then the man seemed to trail off. He pulled some discarded pages from the floor, held them hovering over his diagram.

‘Only…’ Riot prompted him. ‘Only what, Kryl?’

‘What?’ The man snapped back to reality. ‘Oh, nothing. Nothing of consequence. My mistake.’

Riot glanced at Sham. They shared a suspicious look.

‘I trust you tried again to talk her out of this?’ Kryl asked Sham.

‘Out of killing the PM?’ Sham replied. ‘Yeah. I tried. Didn’t work. She has… reasons for her fixation.’

‘You’re speaking of her nephew?’ Kryl responded as he gathered up the papers on his desk once more. ‘Martin?’

‘Marm,’ Sham replied.

‘Right, yes, Marm. Peculiar name.’

Sham opened his mouth to point out that the man in front of him was called Kryl, and his sister called Riot, but found himself sighing instead; there was little he could do to reason with the monarchist.

‘I don’t quite know why Julya linked his death to the Prime Minister, but I don’t know that it matters, either. I cannot ask Gresley, of course, because the Gresley Manwaring that might have known was erased with the Loop.’

‘We know,’ Riot said. ‘Julya told Sham.’

‘Oh?’

‘You remember my friend Tripe?’ Sham asked.

Kryl looked blank.

‘My age, bald guy, works from under a pub in the Sunrise District? Gave you shelter?’

The monarchist’s eyes widened. ‘Ah yes. Quite the… character.’

‘And you remember the story he told us?’ Riot prompted him. ‘About the bodies turning up? About the patients he couldn’t heal?’

‘Those without skills? Yes, I remember. You mean to say…’

‘Marm was one of them,’ Sham said. ‘One of the victims.

Kryl nodded to himself, considering this for a moment. Then, suddenly: ‘Come, seeing as we are conversing anyway, we might as well have ourselves a drink. Old Fashioned’s all round?’

‘None for Sham,’ Riot cut in.

He smiled at her for the help, but couldn’t help but feel an ounce of resentment at her for keeping the cocktail out of his hands.

They followed Kryl through the back rooms of the casino and then out onto the main floor. Kryl flashed the bouncer a nod as he passed, as if to signify that everything was well, and then pushed onwards for the bar. He ordered the drinks not by opening his mouth, but by holding up two fingers to the woman behind the bar.

They waited in silence for the drinks to be made, and then, cocktails in hand, Kryl turned back to Sham and Riot. ‘I think we can all agree that there is a link. That, on one hand, we have dying citizens stripped of skills, and, on the other, mysterious vials with skills condensed from… Well, with no information on the source provided. It would take a particularly dim moron’ — Kryl glanced at Sham — ‘not to make a connection between the two.’

‘How, though?’ Riot asked. ‘How could—’

‘I do not know. The process itself remains a mystery to me, though I do not think that absence of information is enough to negate this hypothesis.’

Sham kept his eyes on the intricately detailed glass being held in Kryl’s hand as he spoke. ‘Can we stop their creation? Use the Loop to our advantage? Stop Julya getting her hands on more vials, getting stronger? That way, we might be able to beat her.’

Kryl shook his head. ‘The evidence—’

‘The bodies,’ Riot rephrased.

‘—suggests that this process has being going on for months. Or, at least, the research of this process. This could not have happened overnight, of course. The first evidence I have of skill vials being distributed is on the initial day of the Loop, suggesting that their creation is beyond the limits of our reach.’

‘You didn’t mock me for it,’ Sham commented.

Kryl shrugged, took a look around the room at the casino’s paying customers. ‘No. I had such an idea myself.’

‘So, then, the strategy remains the same?’ Sham asked. ‘We have to… We have to kill her?’

Both Kryl and Riot gulped down the remainder of their drinks. ‘Yes, Sham. I’m afraid so.’