When Sham awoke, he felt Riot’s gaze on him.

His skin was damp with sweat, the once-fresh bedsheets beneath him drenched. If Riot said anything at his stirring, he couldn’t tell, because his ears were ringing with the heavy thumping of his heart. He gasped for air.

Couldn’t draw in enough.

Gasped harder.

Felt his head go faint, blurry, dizzy.

A thick wave of dread washed over his body, and with it, Sham felt fear strike at his heart.

‘Riot,’ he breathed between gasps, ‘help.’

‘Yes, sweetie?’ a voice replied. Not Riot’s.

That figure in the corner of the room moved closer. Stood over him. Sat beside him on the bed.

‘What is it, darling?’ the shadow-Her said. She bent over, kissed him on the mouth.

Sham felt his lips fizz where they touched Her. He felt the touch calm him, despite himself, though it was not the electricity of love that made his lips feel strange.

‘Joy… no…’ he managed to gasp. ‘It’s not… fair.’

‘What’s not fair, darling?’ Joy said. ‘Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted? You and me, back together again. You and the woman whose face you burnt away?’

‘Not…’

‘Not what, darling?’

‘...like this,’ Sham finished.

He heard another voice in the back of his mind. A new voice. Not… not Perspicacity’s but… his own. He couldn’t make out the words.

‘Not like this?’ the Shadow-Her asked. ‘This is Joy. This is what Joy feels like, Sham.’

Sham forced his breathing to slow, forced the dread out of his heart. He was only somewhat successful. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it isn’t. I’ve felt… I’ve felt joy before. This is…’ He trailed off, not due to his irregular breathing but because he did not know the words that followed.

‘This is what comes when you have nothing left,’ Joy said.

‘What? No. This is—’

Sham’s tea was cold. He couldn’t remember if he had let it cool, or if the tea room had served it that way. He saw himself pick up the cup, throw it against a wall, where it would shatter into a thousand pieces. He resisted the urge. Barely.

Two figures sat at the table with him, each nursing a cup of tea of their own, though both drink and person were formed of the peculiar nothing.

‘Do it,’ Shadow-Fog suggested. ‘Throw it. Will be fun.’

‘Ooh, yes please, darling!’ Shadow-Her added.

Sham didn’t reply. Ignored them. Heard his own voice in his head once more, and again couldn’t quite make out the words. He raised his hand to signal down the waiter, to get a fresh cup, but stopped mid-motion. On the underside of his hand was the familiar darkness of tried blood.

He inspected his hand further. Inspected the slivers of blood under his nails. Inspected the grazed knuckles on his right hand. ‘What… happened?’ Sham asked the two figures in front of him.

The shadow-Fog—Vigour—flung his head back and roared with laughter. ‘Had some fun, didn’t we? What’s wrong, Sham, don’t remember?’

‘Oh, honey,’ Joy said, taking his hand and eliciting a fizzling sensation from his fingertips. ‘Did Recollection get to you again? Did he do this?’

‘No, no no no,’ Vigour interrupted. ‘Don’t you see? Recollection ain’t got nothing to do with this.’

‘The blood,’ Sham cut the figures off, speaking loudly, forcefully. ‘Where did it come from?’

Patrons of the café at the closest table turned to look at him. Two young boys and their mother. The boys watched on with the type of curiosity that only youth could manage, while their mother tried to pull their attention away, her eyes wide with fear.

And then, the voice again. Fully audible, now.

Sham’s Voice: This is what comes when you have nothing left.

‘You want to know whose blood that is, huh?’ the Shadow-Fog asked. ‘Might be worth you telling us what day it is.’

‘The… the 10th of Harvest. The sixth day of the…’ Even as Sham was replying he felt his voice grow weaker, his heart grow unsure.

‘Nah. Try the 12th, mate.’

‘Two days?’ the Shadow-Her said to the Shadow-Fog. ‘That’s… that’s a lot of time. Maybe Recollection was right.’

‘Maybe his mind ain’t fit no more?’ Vigour, in the form of Sham’s old friend, responded. ‘Yeah. Looks like, don’t it?’

‘Perspicacity? You think she broke him?’ Joy replied.

‘Or the memory.’

Sham’s heart skipped a beat. The memory. The memory that Recollection had been keeping from him, had given back to him for only a moment. He felt it, there, in his mind, though he felt it as an absence. He felt it as a hole where something should have been. And as a feeling.

Sham’s Voice: In other timelines, I am a healer and a corpse.

‘Tell me,’ Sham insisted, feeling his heart beat faster with every moment that passed. ‘Tell me who I hurt!’

‘Oh, sweetie, you—’

Evening.

The sun cast red streaks across the sky, the tall buildings of the Sunrise District piercing this vast canvas.

Sham’s Voice: Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight.

‘And just where the fuck am I now?’ Sham blurted out.

A passer-by—a man in his late sixties or so—flashed Sham a funny look.

‘Look around, Sham,’ the Shadow-Riot said at his side. ‘You know where you are.’

‘Perspicacity. You’re still here.’

The living skill laughed. ‘You think Recollection could get rid of me that easily?’

‘I’m starting to think he doesn’t have even half the power he acts like he has.’

A smirk. ‘Yes and no. No power on me, but… How are those memories coming along, Sham? Remember how you got here? Joy and Vigour seemed to think you were having some trouble.’

‘No, I don’t fucking remember,’ Sham responded.

‘Well let’s think it through, Sham, shall we? Look around you. What do you see? Where are you? We can work backwards from there.’

Though despising the idea of being bossed around yet again by the very being that were toying with him, Sham did this time as suggested. The streets were familiar to him, of course. Two months ago—or just over a week according to anyone who didn’t remember the Loop—Sham wouldn’t have had a single bloody clue where in Haven he was. But now, after having met the woman whose form Perspicacity had taken, he recognised this street.

‘Riot,’ he said, ‘She lives around the corner. It’s where I’m staying.’ Sham looked down to his feet, glanced back over his shoulder to where Riot’s apartment building was. ‘And I appear to be leaving.’

‘Very good, Sham,’ the Shadow-Riot said. ‘See, there’s hope for you yet. So you know you, at some point in the last few hours, headed back home. What might have brought you there?’

Sham looked down at his hands. The blood was gone. Cleaned. Scoured. His hands were raw at the touch of cleaning chemicals.

‘Yes, Sham, go on…’

‘I had to get it off. The blood. I was… fearful of what I’ve done?’

The Shadow-Riot shrugged. ‘Yes. Or…’

Sham’s Voice: Or, or, or.

‘Or fearful that someone else would know what I’ve done,’ Sham replied, staring at the shape of Riot.

‘Or that, yes.’ Sham stood still, ignoring the strange stares from those that had to walk around his position in the centre of the pavement. ‘And I was…’

‘Going to find out more, I suspect.’

‘You suspect, or you know? Am I the only one suffering these memory losses, or—’

‘I live in this mind, Sham,’ Perspicacity said, prodding him on the temple. ‘Just the same as you. Where you’re broken, I am.’

‘Yes, but does that mean you’re—’

Sham’s legs froze in the wake of a hurtling tram’s headlights, unresponsive to his heart telling them to get moving.

‘What the fuck are you doing, mate?’ the Shadow-Fog shouted at him. ‘Fucking move!’ The figure charged into Sham, hands outstretched, as if trying to push him over. But although Sham felt the hands on him—fizzing sensation and all—he was not moved by it. After all, Vigour didn’t exist in this reality, not really. Only in his—

‘If you don’t move, you ain’t ever gonna see her again,’ Vigour said. ‘Now fucking—’

But something in that first line had yanked Sham back to reality. He leaped out of the way of the surging tram just in time to avoid serious injury. As he rolled in the ground, staring up at the starry sky, a dark figure blocked it.

‘What the fuck are you playing at, mate?’ the Shadow-Fog bellowed down to him. ‘Trying to get us all killed?’

Sham’s Voice: Get us killed. Yes. It’s time for that, now. Yes.

‘What did you mean?’ Sham retorted as he hopped back up to his feet. ‘What do you mean “see her again”?’

Vigour shrugged. ‘Just something that Recollection showed us. That scientist bird. The one who—’

‘Enough,’ the booming voice of Sham’s absent father cried out.

Sham turned to see Recollection step out of the shadows of a nearby alleyway, and assuredness in his gait.

‘You saw what that memory did to him,’ Recollection said. ‘You saw what it did to us. You would risk that again?’

Vigour shook his head. ‘Perspicacity’s right. He has to know at some point. This is, like, unsustainable, init? What happens when he stumbles across it? What happens when he confronts—’

‘Then we cross that bridge later. There is a plan for that.’

The Shadow-Fog stepped over to Recollection, passing through many a pedestrian as he did so. ‘A plan? What fucking plan? Why don’t you lot ever tell me when you got fucking plans?’

Recollection seemed unphased by the being shouted in his face. ‘A truth is harder to swallow in the abstract than when its placed in front of you. You must trust me on this, Vigour.’

‘Trust you? How the fuck am I supposed to trust you?’

Sham’s Voice: Trust is a fool’s reward for the venture of love.

‘Enough!’ Sham shouted. ‘I don’t even fucking care any more. I just want my mind back. I want to know where I am. Why I’m here. Where I’m supposed to be headed. And just whose blood I had on my hands. Understand?’

Vigour’s shadow head turned to Recollection.

‘Don’t,’ the latter said, then faded from sight.

The Shadow-Fog returned to Sham’s side in a blink. ‘Like you worked out before, with Perspicacity… you gotta go back to the casino. You gotta see what we did. Me and you. Together. Remember its me when you see just how much power you have in your—’

The birds were singing with the announcement of the coming dawn, though the beginnings of the sun’s rays were yet to be seen in the sky. Sham stood at the side of the Dripcanal, metal railing behind him separating him from the murky waters below. Part of him yearned to jump in.

Sham’s Voice: Wrap ourselves in cold, wet blanket.

He gripped at his mind. Tried to keep it steady. Tried to grasp it as though it was a sieve and he was stopping the water of memory from pouring out.

The casino loomed before him. Sham didn’t know if he wanted to know the answer, if he wanted to know where the blood had come from. Who had he helped the monarchists hurt? Could he live with having done it, if he knew, even if the mechanics of the Loop undid it for everyone else?

Had he seen Riot? Back when he’d been to her apartment, had he seen her? Had he spoken to her about all this? What would she have thought? Would she hate him for whatever he’d done?

Sham’s Voice: How do you know it wasn’t her blood?

Sham swallowed the lump amassing in his throat and forced his foot forward. Then the other. And then the other.

Sham’s Voice: This is how the magic happens.

The bouncer at the door swallowed hard as Sham approached, his face growing pale. Sham pushed on regardless, into a casino empty but for two of its guards, Kryl Resnuc, and a mangled body on the centre of a poker table.

The sound of blood dripping onto poker chip echoed around the near-empty hall.

Sham stepped forward, his footsteps not pulling anyone’s gaze away from the body on the table.

Kryl gulped as he stared on.

As he grew closer, Sham began to recognise the man behind those brutalised features. He recognised him not in face, but in style of dress, in the pocket watch that had spilled out onto the green surface, in the freshly polished shoe on one of his feet. He recognised it despite the band of gold around his head. Harcourt.

Finally, Kryl’s head turned to face him. It grew red.

Sham blinked as Kryl pushed him against a pillar, more fury on his face than Sham had thought him capable. ‘Why?’ he demanded. ‘Why do this? It matters not that he won’t remember; it still makes a monster of you.’

‘I…’ Sham started, too thrown by this line of questioning to push back. ‘What?’

‘Why, Sham?’ Kryl asked. ‘Why did you kill him?’

Sham looked back again at the body on the poker table. He looked again at its face, swollen almost beyond recognition. He looked again at the open mouth, all but two teeth beaten from it. He looked again at the monarchy’s forgotten crown, wedged onto his bleeding head.

‘I… I did this?’ Sham asked.

Kryl’s eyes narrowed, his grip on Sham’s shirt softened. ‘Yes, Sham. Yes, you did.’

Something snapped in Sham’s mind.

[ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED] BREAK