Jeremy held an auri in his palm, rubbing his fingers over its smooth, blue, jade-like surface.

“What are you thinking about?” I ask.

Jeremy looks up, his eyes widening. “...How did you know where to go?”

I tilt my head in consideration. Using stolen auris, I brought Jeremy on over twenty hovergloss trips around Menocht Bay. Wherever we disembarked, I led him to budding groups of infected, striding through back alleys and commercial districts alike. In just under five hours...I did it: I eradicated ginger.

“You know the city like the back of your hand, but I’m willing to bet you’re not from Menocht Bay—you’re too powerful. Are you from Kaspari?”

“No.”

“Did you grow up in Menocht, perhaps?”

I scoff. “Definitely not. Don’t you hear my accent?”

Jeremy’s brow furrowed. “...Shattradan?”

I grin. “You guessed it.”

“But...”

I sigh and fold my arms across my chest. “Look, Jer, it’s complicated, but have I steered you wrong thus far?”

“You consider culling over two percent of the city’s population a success and somehow convinced me to be your accomplice. You can’t blame me for still trying to figure out what’s going on. What kind of person are you to kill so many without blinking an eye?”

I snort and avert my gaze. “The kind of person with nothing to lose.”

❖❖❖

Inevitably some of the infected had access to store registers. I easily puppeted their corpses into giving us enough money to pay for two rooms at a hotel.

We’re in the hotel room now, a luxurious suite with two king-size mattresses. Jeremy falls asleep almost the second his head hits the pillow, not that I can blame him. I lie down on my own mattress, though I keep my eyes open to stare at the ceiling.

“Was this what I was supposed to do all along?” I murmur. “In hindsight, it seems so close-minded that I stayed with the ship until it docked. I can’t believe I never thought to go on ahead and stop the crisis from escalating.”

I chuckle bitterly. Sometimes when you linger on a problem for too long, you grow blind to the way forward. Even a single external comment can help you to see things differently and illuminate a flawed pattern of thinking.

Unfortunately for me, I’ve been alone. Maybe that was the first mistake I made, here, in the loop: failing to treat people like people. Just because they won’t remember anything in a few days doesn’t mean they don’t have anything to offer besides raw information.

Thinking of the potentially uncertain future, a part of me is terrified. The loop always restarted when I lost, which was inevitable after the city completely went off the rails. I normally could hold the ginger-infected people off for a few days, taking out strategic points and disabling lines of communication, but the end result was always my failure.

Was this the one time...that I would succeed?

❖❖❖

I’m awake after Jeremy—surprising considering that the man hasn’t had a proper bed in weeks. Based on the position of the sun, I’d say we’ve been sleeping for seven hours.

“What now?” he asks.

“We wait for the boat to arrive.”

“...That’s it?”

I raise an eyebrow. “Am I missing something?”

He recoils. “You seemed to be in a hurry yesterday,” he observes. “I find it hard to believe that there’s nothing for us to do but wait.”

“I was in a hurry to stop ginger’s spread,” I explain. “Now that that’s done with, we can relax.”

“The captain hasn’t called us.”

“Should she have?”

“Well...the guard must have realized that someone went and killed over five thousand people.”

“Why would they blame us?”

Jeremy’s jaw drops. “Forget it.” He turns away for a moment. “Speak of the devil,” he exclaims. “Look who’s making contact.”

I can’t but feel that Jeremy jinxed us. “What is it?”

“Conningway’s freaking out.”

“Well—”

“She wants us to come in now.”

I pause for a moment, then shrug. “Fine.”

❖❖❖

When we step foot onto the steps of the consulate, a different attendant from yesterday comes up to us and leads us inside. Before I know it, we’re once more within the office of Captain Conningway.

“Black, Sanderson,” she says, her voice strained. “Welcome back.”

“Is there a problem?”

“No, no, nothing at all. Just the deaths of 4,243 people.” She takes a drag from a cigarette and clenches her fist. “And that’s just what’s been called in so far. I can’t help but suspect the dark art is involved.”

“On what grounds?”

She snorts. “Only Death practitioners have anything to gain from the wanton destruction of human life.”

Conningway...I might be more willing to actually work with you if you weren’t so intolerant of all decemancy.

“What kind of city is this?” I murmur, feigning surprise. Jeremy clears his throat and looks the other way as I continue. “First, a cruise ship full of captives, now mass murder. Were the deaths concentrated in any one area?”

“At least five hundred came from the lower level of the Flower District alone, but they’re also scattered all over.”

“Anything linking the bodies together?”

She gives me a worried look. “That’s just the thing: all the bodies have been burned to ash.”

“We’ll look into it while we continue our investigation into ginger,” I say encouragingly. “It couldn’t have just been one person. More likely it was a group of people working in tandem, or”—I stare at her—“Ginger’s so new that you know very little about it, right?”

“...That is correct.”

I grab my jaw. “It might, in fact, be the case...” I look over at Jeremy. “While we were conducting our own investigation, we ran into evidence that pointed towards the lower level of the Flower District being a manufacturing center for ginger.” I begin to pace. “Perhaps...the creator of ginger put some kind of deadly substance in it that can be activated remotely? Something that sets someone on fire from within?” I freeze in place, giving the captain a hollow stare. “But why? Why kill off the users of a successful drug?”

The captain rubs her arm, appearing more confused than ever. “I don’t know if that’s possible...”

“Regardless...the ship should be here in an hour. You do have guards stationed at the docks, right?”

“Of course.”

“We’ll go down to the docks to wait, then.”

❖❖❖

It only takes forty-five minutes for the former cruise ship to arrive within sight of the docks. The guards hail it down, and upon realizing that its course is set, they deploy anti-velocity nets to slow the vessel down. Then, they send out a team of tugboats to haul it to one of the piers.

I rush past them onto the boat. “Claude!” I call out. “Claude!”

By now, the captain has made her way to the dock to see the ship herself.

“Claude?” Jeremy whispers.

“He’s my assistant, remember?”

Jeremy gives me a dubious look. “Right...”

“Where could he have gone?” I murmur, looking dejectedly off into the distance. The captain boards with the other guards and stops by my side.

“Can’t find your associate?” she asks, concern visible in her eyes.

“I’m worried that the decemancer came back. If so, Claude probably left the ship to chase him off.” I groan. “But now I have no idea where he is...”

“Chasing off a peak decemancer by himself? Your friend must be incredibly strong.”

I shake my head. “He’ll be fine...but this entire situation of us being separated is an inconvenience.”

“Captain!” a guardsman calls out. “We found the captives.”

“Excellent!” she shouts back. “I’ll come and see for myself.”

“You sure that’s a good idea?” I say, grabbing her arm before she can leave.

She jerks her arm away. “Who do you take me for?” she growls.

I hold out my hands in defeat. I did warn her.

She comes back a minute later with a hand resting on her stomach. “Only the most depraved of men,” she hisses, “could ever do something like that.”

“I can’t disagree.”

She looks to Jeremy. “And you, Mr. Sanderson...you were there, in those pools?”

“I was.”

Her face turns ashen. “You seem much better off than most. No doubt thanks to Mr. Black’s assistance.” She shakes her head and exhales. “We’re taking them all off the ship in the next few minutes. Unless you’re going to help...it’d be best if you leave.”

I blink.

And suddenly, the world shifts.

❖❖❖

I’m back in my room.

My room?

My eyes are wide open, unbelieving. Some human is in the bed across the room, sleeping, his chest moving up and down beneath his pale sheet. Xander? My eyes open even wider. It’s really him. I feel his vitality from across the room, feel the vitality of others housed within the building.

I jump out of bed and rub my eyes. This isn’t real. It can’t be.

I don’t believe it. It must still be this damned nightmare loop. It has to be.

The dorm room is as I remember it, like some kind of bad dream, socks strewn about near the hamper, the walls covered in frayed posters, and the window’s cheap metal screen still torn. The worn wood of the floor calls me like an old friend, my slippers the most beautifully familiar object in the world. I haven’t seen a pair of slippers in years! Menocht denizens all wear sandals instead of proper, warm, fuzzy...

I step from the bed, my legs practically shaking from shock. I trip and fall over my shoes on the way to my fluffy sheepskin beauties. My eyes flash in annoyance.

Xander stirs. “Ian,” he murmurs, yawning. “You alright?”

Y’jeni, after everything I’ve been through, I’m actually hyperventilating. “Mmm,” I grunt in response. 

Me, hyperventilating after being spoken to by my roommate. I shake my head.

“Okay, well...I’m going back to sleep. Quiet please.” He rolls over to face the wall, the bed so thin width-wise that his nose practically touches the plaster.

I gingerly place a foot into a slipper, then the other. My hands are unsteady as I undress and grab a towel hanging from my dresser. I wrap it around my hips, doing everything I can to keep my teeth from chattering.

I need a damn shower.

I walk out of the room in a daze. It has to be a dream... There’s absolutely no way I’m out of the loop.

Of course, when I get to the shower, I remember that I really should be wearing my shower shoes (sandals...) and not my slippers. I double back, regretfully extract my feet from the slippers, don my sandals, and return to the bathroom.

I slam the door of the shower behind me and toss the towel on a hook outside. The water streams over me in a hot torrent, helping to ease my muscles and calm my thoughts.

I think through the possibilities in my head for what’s happening.

1. I’m dreaming, likely trapped in some kind of illusion because the captain suspected that I killed the people in Menocht. If this is true, then I’ve severely underestimated her.
2. I’m awake, and I’ve managed to break out of the time loop. I’ve beaten the puzzle.
3. I’m in the loop...but the loop has changed.

With each passing minute, I’m leaning towards option number two...but I can’t bring myself to accept it. After all those times waging a one-man war on Menocht Bay and its drug-zombified inhabitants, I refuse to believe that the answer I was always searching for—the way to win—was just going ahead of the boat and stopping ginger before it took over the city. It seems too simple. Not at all like the kind of resolution that would satisfy whoever made the loop in the first place.

After fifteen minutes of letting the water run, I realize I forgot to grab my shampoo. I sense the vitality in the area and note that nobody’s even close to the bathroom. Nude, I step out of the shower, grab the bottle of hair product, and return to the warmth.

Ten minutes later, I’m brushing my teeth and marveling at how long it’s been since I did so.

“You’ve been in here for a while,” Xander says as he enters the bathroom, unwashed brown hair sweeping around his forehead. He grabs his toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. He glances at me. “You okay?”

I give him a toothpaste-filled smile. “Fine.”

Just seeing him makes me want to panic, and I don’t know why. I shake my head. Hordes of insane humans and armies of skeletons don’t make me panic. Facing off against the entire armed Menocht Bay armada doesn’t make me panic. So why am I so jittery and anxious?

“Not shaving today?” Xander asks, raising an eyebrow.

I pause as though struck. Right. “Thanks for the reminder.” I chuckle, feigning normalcy. “I didn’t get much sleep last night. Nightmare.”

He nods. “Must’ve been some dream.”

I add another selection to my list of possibilities:

4. The time loop was a nightmare.

Though that seems even more unlikely than the other options: What kind of nightmare turns you into a decemancer?

“It was pretty terrible.”

“Wanna talk about it?”

My breath catches in my throat. “It started on a boat,” I explain dryly. “No matter what I did, after a few days, I always ended back up on that boat.”

“Sounds awful.”

“It really was.”

I head back to our room, donning the university uniform and a pair of dress shoes. I shuffle downstairs and head off to the dining facilities to get breakfast.

I barely get five feet out the main door before I turn around. It’s a weekend, I berate myself, scowling. You wear casual clothes on the weekend. This is the real world, and in the real world, you need to pay attention to how you dress. I shake my head as I angrily throw off my clothes, stripping the robe-like uniform off to don a T-shirt, zip-up jacket, and jeans. Not exactly the eerie black robe and greasy-haired look I always spawned onto the boat with.

I check myself in the mirror before I go out.

“Whoops,” I murmur as I grab my brush. Nearly went out with wet shower hair. The drybrush sucks the moisture from my hair as it passes over the follicles.

“So, I’ve escaped.” I sigh, glowering at the mirror’s reflection: brown eyes, pale skin, and dark hair. Utterly average. “Now what?”

Giving myself one last look, I reason that I look sallow and on edge but presentable. I head back out the door and make my way once more to the dining hall.