Evan stopped writing, read over what he had written, and contentedly closed his journal.

Then he dropped over the side of the roof. When he hit the pavement, his organs painted the concrete red.

Baker was left in the white void with Romov.

“Great thinking, pal! Now you're here again. Utter genius,” said Romov.

“Wh… what?” replied Baker, delusions of Evan still caught in the nooks of his brain. Whatever was left of Evan was somewhat confused at this notion of an afterlife. And then Baker realized that Romov had just spoken.

“Romov? But--”

“Relax. I'm just an imprint of Romov. In this narrative, you're still crazy, remember?”

“Oh. So… you’re just a voice in my head.”

“Technically speaking, that's what I've always been. But narratives have power. Even as a simulation of the real Romov, I still have some connection to him.”

“But you can't be any more than what I already know, right? I mean, if you're a voice in my head.”

“A voice in your head in this narrative was the real Romov in our world. Technically, we're indistinguishable. Remember that you-- or Evan-- wrote down experiences that Baker never had. You were never in the lunch room. You never met Vox. And yet, there he was waiting for us.”

“Okay, well, get to the point!”

“This is the point, Baker. Or at least it was, until Evan took a swan dive.”

“I thought I couldn't die.”

“Evan could. Now, the universe doesn't know what to do with you. Welcome to limbo. Wasn't expecting to be here again until shard four.”

The two remained in the empty silence. Baker let his unanswered questions and protests and intrusive thoughts wash over him in waves, not really listening to any of them.

“Why piece yourself back together, anyways?” he asked the silence.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what's the point?”

“Being a candle wasn't super fun, you know.”

“Yeah, but what makes you want to go back to Kingsly?”

This question was met with a longer silence. Baker contemplated whether he had said something wrong; only briefly, before he realized he didn’t care and it didn’t matter at this point.

“I was going to join the council,” replied Romov. “I had ideas and plans to make Kingsly better. To teach people -- really teach them, not just throw them into the grinder and let the survivors graduate.”

“What is Kingsly, really?”

“A school. Dumbass.”

“Not like any school I’ve ever heard of.”

“You’ve never heard of anything. From what I know, you’ve got a completely false image of the world whipped up in your mind that you popped into existence with. This narrative apparently meshed with your internal logic better than Kingsly did, and so you chose being insane over being wrong.”

“And you chose being a candle.”

Romov chuckled in his head.

“Guess so. That makes both of us a little irrational, huh?”

“What did Kingsly actually punish you for? I’m assuming the council didn’t actually care much about your book... or books.”

“The number of people on the Council is fixed.”

“And?”

“For someone to go in, someone needs to get out.”

Baker took a second to realize what Romov was getting at.

“Ahh. Who did you want out? Vox? Cardona?”

“Zero. I don’t think you’ve got a name for him in that journal of yours.”

“Why him?” Baker felt a sharp pain in his skull as Romov winced away from the question.

“Sorry,” said Romov. But as Baker recovered, he was more excited.

“Wait, you can hurt me! We’re closer to Kingsly than... to Evan. If you can hurt me, you can kill me.”

Romov briefly flicked to life, but his hopes were quickly dashed. “Yeah, but Spelk will still remember.”

“Not if he can’t remember,” reminded Baker. For once, the confused silence that ensued was generated by Romov.

“What?”

“If I die whenever Spelk remembers, then he can’t remember.”

“He’ll just remember remembering.”

“Then I’ll die again.”

“What?”

“If we make my death an inevitability of him remembering, and I can’t die, then he can’t remember. That possibility will be erased.”

“You might have limited timelines, though.”

Baker fell silent.

“Didn’t Anna tell you?” continued Romov. “I think she actually knew a guy who--”

“Ran out of time.”

“Right. Spelk might remember you infinite times. To make it impossible, you need infinite timelines. And even then, it might not work. I mean, what’s infinity divided by infinity? They aren’t even numbers-- the question doesn’t make sense.”

Baker remembered the rush of wind on his face, punctuated by void. Evan was gone now.

“What other choice do we have?”

So Romov killed Baker.

He awoke in front of the glass. Romov was gone, along with Anna. Seraph quietly replaced books on shelves. Baker scrambled towards Seraph.

“Seraph! Seraph, kill me! Please!” he urged. Seraph side-eyed him confusedly. He looked down at the piles of books, noticing teeth marks and slobber on some of the spines. She wasn’t making very quick progress. Baker rolled his eyes.

“If I help you put away these books, will you kill me?”

Seraph barked happily.

Baker took it as a yes.

Evan read the journal and tossed his pills. He heaved the bed against the door, then started smashing the window with the bedside table. Nurses started banging on the door, screaming his name. He ignored them.

He finally made it through, and plummeted to the ground below.

They followed Spelk down a corridor unwillingly.

“Whenever he remembers, kill me,” shouted Baker. The others pivoted slowly to face him. Spelk rotated his head around and cackled.

“You think that’ll work, you damn fool?”

“Baker?” inquired Romov.

“I’ve seen it, Romov. It’s not good. Trust me.”

And so Romov killed him.

Everything was black. It took Baker a moment to realize his eyes were squeezed shut.

“Damn fool,” said Spelk.

“Kill me,” said Baker.

“Damn fool.”

The words blurred past as Baker died tens, hundreds, thousands of times. His timelines stretched and screamed, unwinding at the end of their frayed rope.

Until eternities had passed in the moments it took Baker to die, and this eternity was long enough for Spelk to forget.

In the black before Baker finally awoke, he found himself peculiarly adrift in the void between now and the time that he wanted. It was lukewarm, an uncomfortable closeness to body temperature that permeated his skin and roiled in his veins.

Footsteps echoed in the vacuum without a medium to carry them, and in Baker’s vision, orbs of skin and cloth merged to form a person in a grinning mask and suit. Their right wrist was covered in several watches, and in their left hand was a spinning coin, like a top on a table.

“Oh, you’re new,” they said, in a voice neither male nor female, but also both. They let their hand drift away from the coin, and it remained spinning, suspended against the matte black void.

Baker looked down at his hands, only to find that he didn’t have any, nor a body in general. “Where--”

“Knock knock. You’re between the walls. That was a fun little stunt you pulled.”

“And who are you?”

“Brooks.”

The name gave Baker pause as he tried to remember where he’d heard the name, and pause melted into panic as he realized he was explicitly told to avoid it. Brooks adjusted their collar, straightened their tie, and continued.

“For the sake of narrative convenience, I’ll be female,” said Brooks, in a woman’s voice. The grinning mask spun in place and yielded to a vortex of blood, from which a new face arose like an island in the sea. It was a curious and bright face, with strong brown eyes prying at Baker’s lack of self. “It seems you were poking around for his sake.” She pulled a blue flame from her sleeve. “I understand. I can’t expect you to know the severity of your actions, for as young as you are. I’ll help you this time.”

She paused expectantly and Baker remembered something. His mouth blurted it. “Djymm says hello.”

She looked at one of her several watches, then laughed. “Thank you. Next time you see him, tell him I miss him.” She shifted in her posture, adjusted her hair, and poked the coin. It floated glacially forwards, towards Baker. “Alright, friend. Looks like you made it exactly halfway. For the sake of fairness, call it.” She pointed at the spinning coin.

Baker watched the spinning coin skeptically. “Heads?”

His words echoed in his empty dorm room, somehow more cramped than he remembered. A gloved hand reached from the air and dropped a strand of blue fire, then pulled back into the nothing. He looked down and checked, just to be sure. Hands, body, etc. Good. He was sitting on the floor in a puddle of broken glass. He shivered once, violently, the motion climbing from his feet to his shoulders, as his body remembered what would have happened if he had said “tails”. And with this knowledge, it remained silent, refusing to tell Baker’s mind, as though to shelter it.

He stood, groaning with the effort. Every inch of his body was in pain. Moments later, he realized Romov was panickedly asking several questions, one after the other, without allowing any time to answer them. He let the deluge of noise wash over his ears and slip into the void.

“Do you know someone who calls herself Brooks?” interrupted Baker thoughtfully. Romov paused in his questioning, before emphatically and sincerely delivering a final one.

“What the fuck did you do?”