Day 2

Upon returning to Resistance HQ the next day, Sham found it empty. Ariel and Asa’s absence wasn’t surprising; their role in all of this was to keep their respective “flocks” in line, and keep those in them working on projects that aligned with resistance priorities. But Tripe should have been here, and Mona. And Riot.

‘No surprise there, though, is there? It’s not like we’ve seen much of—’

‘Enough,’ Sham replied, speaking aloud as there was nobody around to hear it. He contented himself to raid the drinks cabinet—a secret stash of whiskey that Ariel kept behind the pulpit and revealed only to Sham and Riot, back on the day that the resistance had officially formed. It seemed so long ago, now, even though Sham knew it had only been a few weeks, by their timeline. Back then, Sham had refused the whiskey, but now…

‘Sure you should be doing this?’ Recollection asked. The strain in the living skill’s “voice” betrayed its concern.

‘Ain’t sure of anything.’

‘You’ve been doing well. Seventy-six days, it’s been, since you last drank. Since you broke.’

‘A break that you were the cause of,’ Sham reminded him as he dug around for a clean glass.

‘I had to do it. You know that. Put the bottle down, Sham. What’s got into you? What’s got you acting like this. You don’t need it.’

Sham pulled a glass from a cupboard, staring inside to find it dusty. Dusty, but not dirty. It’d have to do. ‘You know what it is. Ain’t any use hiding it from you.’

‘Riot.’

The resistance leader raised the empty glass in the air in mock salute.

‘I know I don’t need to tell you there’s something going on there. I know you remember. You just need to find out what it is. Don’t assume it’s got something to do with you; you’re not that special.’

‘I wasn’t assuming—’

‘Yes you were. I’m in your head. You can’t lie to me. Now put the whiskey down and keep that bloody head clear. The gods know it struggles enough as it is.’

Sham looked down at the bottle of whiskey in one hand, and the dusty glass in the other. A sickness took hold of him—but not of the usual kind.

[HARDENED LIVER] SEVENTY-SIX DAYS: SUCCESS

Seventy-six. That’s an awful lot of days. You sure you want to lose that? Sure you want to start again at zero?

With a sound of despair that roughly approximated to “gah,” Sham placed the bottle of whiskey back into Ariel’s hiding place.

‘Yeah, good. There we go.’

‘Don’t gloat.’

‘Who says I’m—’

‘Who you talking to, Sham?’ asked a voice in the doorway.

The resistance leader spun around to see Tripe standing in the doorway, his jacket slung over his shoulder. ‘Nobody.’

Tripe seemed to think this was an acceptable answer, because he immediately changed the subject. ‘It’s hot. I don’t remember it being this fucking hot last time around. Have we done that?’

‘Have we…’

‘Changed the weather. Cos you were talking about how no Loop is the same, really. How we can… how we can fucking sneeze at a different time and that snowballs and things all unfold differently, right? So is that possible? Changing the weather?’

Sham scrunched up his face. ‘What? No.’

Tripe pulled a face to match. ‘Well I’m just asking, ain’t I? Don’t need to look at me like I’m fucking stupid or something.’ He ambled up the centre of the aisle, and Sham—knowing full well where his old friend would be heading, creature of habit as that man was—took a seat on the front bench. Tripe sat down next to him, announcing the move with all the huffs and sighs that came with their advancement into middle age.

They stared up at the broken stained glass window ahead of them, both of the two men apparently enjoying the moment of silence.

‘I been thinking about the old days a lot,’ Tripe suddenly said.

Sham posed a question in the form of turning to face the man and raising an eyebrow.

‘Do you remember that job we did down on Devil’s Quay? That firework shipment coming in from… well, I don’t remember where, but I remember the rest of it. I remember every. Fucking. Detail.’ The punctuation of that last sentence seemed to be intended to remind Sham that he was responsible for the voice in Tripe’s mind.

‘What did I just say about assuming everything is about you?’

‘Yeah,’ Sham said. ‘Yeah, I remember. I was lookout, wasn’t I? Back on the main road.’

Tripe nodded. Slowly. ‘Yeah. Me and Vice on the boat. Me and Vice doing the heavy lifting that night.’

‘We all took our turns.’

The other man raised a hand in surrender. ‘Ain’t saying we didn’t. Just you weren’t on the boat that night. That’s all.’

‘Why? Why are you dwelling on—’

‘The past?’ Tripe guessed.

But Sham knew the answer to that one. When he’d first had Recollection put into his head, he’d done much the same, too. ‘This job specifically,’ he said.

Tripe eyes seemed glazed over, so unfixed did they stare into the void ahead of him. ‘Cos you ain’t hear what we had to do.’

‘What—’

‘The boat was empty, right? You remember, we watched it for half a fucking day or so, keeping track of who came on, who came off. We made sure it was empty, that everyone was accounted for, yeah?’

‘I remember.’

‘Except… they weren’t. There was someone we missed. A young guy. Couldn’t’ve been older than, I dunno, sixteen. When everyone else was off the boat, he wasn’t. He was keeping watch. And he found us. I remember… I remember what me and Vice had to do to stop him from talking. From telling anyone who we were. We didn’t even question it, like. We just did it. We just did what we had to do, what was programmed into our souls. I…’

Tripe trailed off, and Sham thought it best not to interrupt; this was a man working through some stuff. Besides, he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know what horrors he was complicit in—there’d been enough of those in recent weeks.

‘I’ve been thinking about those times a lot, lately,’ he finished, his tone… not sad, but resigned, perhaps.

Sham considered telling him where Ariel kept the whiskey.

* * *

The church doors swung open with a furious energy that made Sham assume that Riot had returned. But when he turned to welcome her—perhaps to even say that he’d missed her, recently, though maybe that was too far for this stage in their… whatever this was—he saw a red-faced Mona instead.

‘Woah,’ Tripe offered. ‘What got your—’

Sensing where this question was headed, Sham interrupted. ‘What’s wrong? Warren?’

Mona slowly, deliberately, shook her head. ‘Riot.’

Sham found his heart drop through the pit of his stomach. Was this the sort of man he was, now? The idea that Riot held such power over him did not help the queasy sensation in his stomach. ‘Riot? What about her? What did she do?’

‘Oh, you know. Just abandon me, is all.’

Suddenly Sham was beginning to notice the dishevelled hair, the faded makeup.

‘Missing Perspicacity, are we?’

‘She disappeared, all of a sudden. Like she had some idea and then had to rush off and see to it.’

‘Did she say where? What it was?’ Sham asked.

‘She didn’t even say she was going.’

Right. That wasn’t good, even for this new version of Riot that seemed to be haunting him these past few Loops.

‘You were out tracking Warren all night?’ Tripe asked. ‘Hard, isn’t it? Doing it all by yourself?’

‘I had to.’

‘No,’ Sham said, ‘You didn’t. Like I told Tripe before’ — Sham wasn’t going to let him get away with that subtle dig — ‘if you track them by yourself, you risk getting spotted. And if you risk getting spotted, then we risk our targets telling Enoch. Or worse, in the case of this one.’

Mona’s upper lip curled in disgust. ‘I had no choice. I had to. You see a man doing… you see someone doing the kinds of things that Warren Hargreaves does and you don’t want to stop him as soon as possible? After what I’ve seen… No. He should be stopped. I won’t rest easy until we have a plan in place.’

Tripe’s face no longer possessed the amused smile it usually did. It was almost weird to see him without it, in fact. ‘What’d he do?’

The woman shrugged. ‘Paid visit to a few new Loopers.’

‘But we knew he was doing that, didn’t we?’

‘Sure,’ Mona said. ‘On a rational level, yeah, we did. But I didn’t know just how much sheer… glee he got from intimidating people. From hurting them. From holding power over them.’

While her eyes drifted to the floor, Tripe glanced at Sham. Sham had known Tripe long enough to know what he was silently communicating to him: “Oi, you, reassure her.”

With a gulp, Sham did as non-verbally suggested, approaching Mona’s side and putting a hopefully reassuring arm on her shoulder. ‘We’re gonna get him. Soon. And until then, any people he hurts—or… kills—that’ll all be undone by the next Loop.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No,’ Mona said again. ‘They’re Loopers. They’ll remember. You saw what it did to Verd. To Ariel. To…’ She let the end of that last fragment hang in the air. Who had she meant? Herself? Riot? Sham, even? Sham didn’t know that he wanted to know.

‘Have you found an opportunity?’ Sham asked. ‘If you think you have an in, I’m happy to give his elimination a go now, if it’d help?’

Mona shook her head. ‘No. Not really. Of the Legion, he’s been doing most of the heavy-lifting with the newest Loopers. But they’ll all be with Ariel, next Loop. After what he did to them, they definitely will.’ Her eyes seemed to glaze over with this last point. ‘And next Loop? There’ll be new Loopers. We don’t know where the PM will end him.’

Sham nodded thoughtfully, then looked to Tripe, who responded with hands raised into the air as if to say “don’t look at me, I got nothing.”

‘Any ideas what skills he has? What part he plays in the Legion?’

‘Vigour,’ the woman said.

‘Just vigour?’

Mona shrugged. ‘Does it matter? When you’ve got Legendary-grade strength like he has, that’s all you need. He can abuse whoever the hells he likes, and no Magnetism, no Perspicacity, no Empathy skill is going to be enough to stop that.’

Again, Sham nodded—using the movement to communicate his acceptance of these facts while buying himself time to think. There had to be a way. There had to be something that would force Warren Hargreaves into a pattern—one that the resistance could exploit Loop after Loop, should the need arise. Sham just needed to work out—

[REASONING] MOVING MOUNTAINS: SUCCESS

Oh. That’s something. The resistance don’t need to know what Warren’s timeline would look like each Loop if they can bring the monster to them.

‘We bring him to us, then. Kinda like what we did with Vince.’

Mona nodded. ‘OK, sure.’

‘You got anything we can use? Family members? A lover? A…’

‘I…’

Sham waited for Mona to continue, but nothing was forthcoming. ‘What? What is it?’

‘There’s something,’ the woman said. ‘But I don’t like it. You’re not gonna like it. She’s not gonna like it, either.’

‘Who? Who’s “she?”’ Tripe asked. ‘Riot? Ariel?’

Mona shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Ah,’ Sham said, the truth revealing itself to him.

‘Yeah. Told you, you’re not gonna like it.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Tripe said, brow furrowed. He scratched at the back of his head as he scowled, as though trying to will his brain into higher function.

‘We need bait,’ Sham told him. ‘For Vince, that was his family. That was what he cared about. But Warren? The only thing he cares about is inflicting pain. So, for Warren, we need a Looper. Someone that he can sink his teeth into. Someone he can…’ Sham caught himself before he could say the world “hurt” out loud. ‘Someone that Enoch Chambers can send him after, who has no known link to any of us.’

It took Tripe a moment longer, but finally he got there. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Verd.’

‘She’s really not gonna like it,’ Mona said.