A door opened behind her.

Melody, sitting in one of the two lawn chairs on the roof of 58 Petrichor, turned her head back at the sound, and exchanged greetings with Laura Staples, who approached and took the other seat.

“Lemme guess … Study break?”

“You know it. I come up here a lot to clear my head. Especially when I reach that point where it’s like, the words on the page just stop making sense. I’m physically reading them, but they don’t have any meaning anymore. You know what I mean?”

“Ha ha. Yeah, totally,” Melody lied. “How’s Elysia doing?”

“Better. You heal pretty fast when you’re young, so … yeah. Doctor says she’ll be out of that cast in no time.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah. How’s your day been?”

“Okay. I mean, it’s just started. I woke up like an hour ago.”

“Wait, really? Does this—does this run in your family or something?”

“No, no. I’m just—I’m sleeping during the day now. It’s less … terrifying.”

“Speaking of, where’s your brother been lately? Haven’t seen him in a while.”

“That doesn’t seem any different from your usual interactions with him.”

“You’d think so, right? But I guess when someone’s really gone, you notice it.”

Aw, nuts. Now why’d she have to go and say something like that? Melody made up some vague line about Noel being away for work, and then the two watched, for a long time, in silence, the view in front of them, the perplexing skyline of Somnhaven at night, a sprawl of lights, flickering and otherwise, lining the inner curved surface of an empty hemisphere.

Hold on—‘hemisphere’? … What, like a bowl? Was that right?

“Hey, I’ve been wondering—why can I see the entire … city from where we are? I, uh … I don’t think this geometry makes any sense. In fact, my head hurts. And it’s not just because I’ve been stuck on the same boss for three days now.”

“‘Boss’?”

“Was it always like this? Or am I just noticing it now? Look. There’s the reverse-timestamp overlooking Revocation Square. A-and … there’s the station where I got off the train on my first day. That’s Shambhala, obviously, but that makes sense because it’s tall—I should be able to see it. But all the other things—why can I see them from here?”

“That’s—that’s the effect of the bending. You didn’t know about that?”

“‘Bending’? I always thought that was just a figure of speech,” said Melody, who happened to catch, for a fraction of a second, a look on Laura’s face that resembled a certain one Noel used to give when Melody said or did something questionable, such as when she would miswrite the index of their family name, or when she would clean the lint trap with hands still wet from whatever she’d been doing last, or when she would take a sip from a cup but forget to open her mouth—an expression of not so much condescension as concern. “Like … You know. A metaphor.”

“No, the bending is very real. Remnant of the Technocrats. They knew how to manipulate light. And space. Gravity. Curve it, bend it. Make a place seem bigger than it really is. It’s the same principle behind the Concavity. You saw it on the way here, right?”

“Kinda. I was sitting on the other side of the train.”

“You can see the Concavity. But the mountain’s not where it looks like it is. You follow the sight of it, and it disappears when you get close. Can’t see it from satellites either. How do you think the Technocrats have evaded contact for so long?”

“Well, the Continuate’s pretty big.”

“Sure. But there’s a limit to that. Immensity provides only so much protection. Given enough determination and resources, any needle in any haystack can be found. No. You make the needle seem like it’s not there in the first place.”

Needle? Haystack? “Right. I gotcha. Like the um, box-cutter, in my moving box.”

“Uh …”

“You know what, though? I never understood why they gave the name Concavity to a mountain. They oughta call this the Concavity.”

Laura chuckled. “You’re not wrong.”

A bulb appeared over Melody’s head. “Hey!—space, light, gravity … Do you think the Technocrats could manipulate time as well?”

“What do you mean, ‘manipulate’ time? Like time travel?”

“Hmm. Maybe not ‘travel’, as such. Nothing so deliberate. But if space is wonky over here, then maybe …” (Laura looking on interestedly, eyebrow raised.) “… then maybe time could behave unexpectedly? In ways it shouldn’t be behaving in?”

Laura gave this some thought, constructing whatever insights she could out of such a vague query, not entirely uncompelled to do so by the expectant, wide eyes of the girl next to her, who seemed to have, for whatever strange reason, put an inordinate amount of stock in what Laura would say next—which, when Laura finally did respond, if only to keep Melody from falling out of her own chair, over which she’d been, all this time, leaning steadily out in fraught anticipation, turned out to be: “I suppose it’s possible. But I don’t think it’s likely. To my knowledge there haven’t been many records regarding time, or irregularities in time with regard to the Technocrats.” She paused to think some more. “Well, then again, there probably aren’t that many records in general. About anything. Not before Rectified Year One. Go type in ‘blood healing’, or ‘old faith’, or ‘Archaic texts’ in Syllabary’s search engine, see how many results you get.”

“Heh. Yeah. Plus, then Societal Sanitation would pull up out of nowhere and toss you into the back of their van.”

“Mmm. I don’t think that kind of stuff actually—”

“Say, Laura, would you happen to be … anti”—in a low whisper—“anti-Rectification?”

(“You know, I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but you have a habit of leaning in and whispering when you say things that you think are going to somehow get you into trouble.” “What? No, I don’t. At least not that much … I don’t think.”)

“… I wouldn’t say I’m anti-anything. I just think that …” (And just how carefully did she pick the words to follow?) “… I just think that in a nation like ours … a nation with such a remarkably long history … where so much has endured, for so many millennia … I mean—it can’t be in anyone’s best interest for all of that to be discounted. Right?

“Take the corruption, for instance. The current administration would have you believing that this is a relatively recent development. But do you really believe that it was only within the last hundred years that our blood suddenly became tainted? No. Our ancestors and the ancestors of our ancestors knew about this. And they also knew the proper techniques to properly fight against it. If not outright cure then at least temper it to a reasonable extent. Precious knowledge once passed down by mouth and by hand. Knowledge now lost.”

“Is that … Do you think that’s the key to helping people like … like Elysia’s brother?”

“Oh. You know about Elegia.”

“Elysia told me about him. She mentioned you—she spoke highly of you on this subject.”

“Oh.”

“Um, sorry. Don’t mean to be nosy.”

“No. That’s fine. I don’t mind talking about it.”

So she did. And Melody listened. Learned about the Sastrugus family. Their money. Plot of land in North Chapel. Birth of the twins. Their father and her mother, some sort of history. Babysitting the twins. Birthday parties. Watching them grow up. Onset of Elegia’s illness. Hospitalization. Decline. Elysia’s acceptance ceremony. Laura in search of lost knowledge. Present.

And what had Laura meant by this? Any of this? If this opening up was in direct response to Melody’s prying then how could this be anything other than a slyly-veiled attempt at retaliation? As in: “Oh, you wanna stick your head in matters that don’t concern you? That nobody invited you into? Alright, then. Boom, presto. Now you know too much. Can’t un-know it. Have fun being entangled in a cycle you never had any place in. ‘New Quest Accepted,’ dipshit. And not even the Void can clear an entry from that log.”

Melody: Quest? Log? I suppose that’s a dig at my current fixation? Because ha!, joke’s on you, that game doesn’t even have a quest tracker menu.

“No, trust me, I’m aware. That’s exactly why no less than three NPCs are now either dead or hostile against your character. And you’ve still yet to beat the very first boss. First! Boss! I can’t stress that part enough. Great work, Adventurer! The Kingdom appreciates all you’ve done for it!”

That’s—that’s not my fault. NPC sidequests are too cryptic! I don’t have a particular insignia equipped and Father Bertrand irrevocably loses his mind? How is that fair?

“Gee, I didn’t think of it that way! That’s a great point, Melody! You’re right! The rules that govern real life are so-o much tidier than those of a consciously crafted world! So much more fair!”

Sarcasm. Nice. I love it. Very mature.

“Look here. If you can’t take care of business in a virtual world, how do you think you’re gonna fare out there? Let’s make a list of all the items on your plate for the next month, shall we? First off, telling your brother about the time loop so he can help you break out of it.”

Shut up.

“Two: Prevent his abduction.”

Shut up.

“Then Elysia’s arm.”

Shut—

“And Elegia’s corruption.”

Shut, shut—

“I lied.”

“Eh?”

“I lied. Noel’s not away for work. He was taken away by some SocSan agents in broad daylight, on a bus. In broad daylight. (Wait, I said that already.) I have no idea where he is now and I don’t even know if he still exists anymore. All traces of his life are slowly disappearing.

“But they got the wrong person. At least that’s what I think. I think they’re probably looking for me. See, I’ve been stuck in this time loop—this same September for eight cycles now. At the very end of the month, the very end of it, like midnight, the world disappears in this expanse of—of white, I guess you would say, which also, um … I call it the Void, because what else am I going to call it?

“The very first time the Void came for me I was at a party. The End of the Universe. That's just what they called it. I don’t know. Whatever. It’s dumb. I was sitting in a chair and I’d been drinking. Okay, I was pretty drunk. And I was scared. It was scary. I looked out the window and there was nothing. The campus gone. The walls of the house dissolving, becoming nothing, not even air. I thought I—I thought maybe somebody put something in my drink. And the people around me, disappearing. Fading into nothing. Getting swallowed up by the Void.

“I’m the last to go. Always. When I’m alone and there’s no world left that’s when it takes me. And the very next thing is I wake up in my bed in my dorm on September 1, at the time I originally woke up that day. And of course, I have all my memories prior to that, of all these Septembers that never happened.

“But nobody else does. It’ll be the same with you too. In a few days the Void will come, and then it’ll be the Ninth. And I’ll be back. And I’ll have met you, and Elysia, but neither of you will remember me. You’ll forget me when the month resets.”

Words she’d traveled across the Third to say. And she couldn’t even say them to the right person.

In the extended silence that followed—which Laura spent, as she stared fixedly ahead at the refracted projection of the city in front of her, ignoring, or at least pretending not to notice, the furtive, or perhaps not-so-furtive, attempts at eye contact (which continued to go, and had been going, ever since the first mention of the words ‘time loop’, unreciprocated) coming from the girl beside her; and which would eventually be broken, not by Laura, as Melody had hoped it would be, but by a resumption of that same voice which had last spoken—the city seemed, to Melody, to be fixed in what she could only begin to describe as an un-blooming: by which apparent undergoing the city’s surface appeared to be curving (… or no, wait, more like rising … or no, that’s not right either … maybe, warping? or … angling?) further upwards, folding up towards the house on Petrichor from all directions yet somehow revealing to her nothing more of Somnhaven than what she was already seeing—doing so unceasingly—loopingly—albeit with no starting or ending points that she could discern—like the visual equivalent of octaves playing over each other—as if the nature of this secondary, active bending were somehow distinctly separate from (which it probably was, because come on, there’s no way Laura was seeing the same thing, was she?) that of its more passive variant, that vestige of the Technocrats, that lasting effect of whatever they might or mightn’t’ve done to this land during their millennia-spanning inhabitancy, in that time so long ago, before (in descending order, now): her own birth; the ascendancy of the Rectifiers; the meaningless division of the land into Firsts and Thirds and the equally meaningless resassembly of these Divisions into something called a Continuate; the end of martial law; the birth of her older brother; the abolishment of Reconstitution; the forcible mutation (though some—who? Laura?—would no doubt say, ‘perversion’) of a common language into something dubbed ‘National Standard’; the end of the Great War; the atrocities committed by the Reconstituted Army during said War; the country’s initial and official declaration of support to and alliance with the side that would end up losing, which defeat would, in addition to shaping the trajectory of the future of the world to come, mark the beginning of an unprecedented, lasting period of docility in a land that has never known it; the centuries of preceding, glorious violence in lesser (though no less destructive or bloody for being so) wars waged against and by belligerents and combatants from within and without, sometimes over ideology and sometimes over resources but almost always, always for violence’s own sake; even the very concept of a nation itself, never mind the name Circadia or the idea of people united under such a moniker …

… which was all to say, literally, ancient history. A lost time. When Archaic wasn’t so archaic, and the Old Faith wasn’t so old, and miracles, or acts so similar as to be practically indiscernible, abounded. A time when scholars and healers not only understood but treated that which so plagued the anatomical fabrics of those descended from the first blood. When the channels through which higher powers could be reached, and the corresponding communions conducted, for the appeasement of one plane and protection of another, ran clear yet. A time to which no leaf could be flipped back.

Well, sure, not flip back, per se. But it's not like there aren't options. What, people don’t have to deal with daylight saving time? A-and power outages? Just wind it fowards until it loops back around. Or wait until the day catches up. Or realize that horopalettology is a niche aesthetic that has no functional place in current modern-day, twentieth-year-Rectified life and buy yourself a nice, uh—I don’t know, a sundial or something.

Melody laughed aloud, shaking her head. “Ha. Sundials.”

Laura inched her lawn chair further away.