The First Day

  My eyes opened slowly and blearily, like the sunrise on a cloudy day. I sat up easily as I found myself exactly where I’d expected. My ribbon was where it always was, on the first day. It felt like months since it had fallen out of my hair that first night. It had grown into something of a symbol to me. The sign of a fresh start. When I saw that ribbon on the bed and felt my hair fall over my shoulders, I knew I could try everything again.

  I picked it up and deftly tied my top knot up as I had done most days. I breathed in the stale air of the poorly kept room. I was alone, which interested me. When I’d fallen asleep next to Margaret on the first and second days, she’d been there when I woke up. But not when the loop reset.

  I paused. I could leave her, if I wanted. I hadn’t grown to like her, just because we shared a common goal. I still felt a phantom pain whenever our eyes met. All she could really provide was someone to talk to and a few observations about the town. If I pushed, I could convince myself I didn’t need her at all. I almost did, on that first reset after I’d brought her back.

  But someone to talk to—even someone I feared and even sometimes hated—was making a difference. I couldn’t put it into words yet, but when she was around, I felt more like the woman I had once been. Just because I wasn’t alone. Or maybe because I had someone who believed me when I spoke. Either way, I stood and retrieved my pack, pulling my grimoire out. I sat in the middle of the floor and crossed my legs as I reached into the spell that made up all of Beddenmor.

  As before, I saw the tapestry of time in my mind. It moved like an unstoppable and violent force, and it twisted into one thick line, like a cyclone in the shape of an hourglass. I could see the severed threads of loops gone by, spinning around the central force like debris. They were connected but not entirely opaque, like memories of light. Whispers of what this day had almost been, if not actual parts of reality anymore.

  Margaret lived in all of them, and I started reaching into them and piecing her together again. Across the room from me, furious eyes glared at me. I knew they would. When I first built Margaret from the echoes of other loops, I’d done it unconsciously and in a moment of desperate hopelessness. But casting such an impressive spell intentionally? Without a chant, no less. A feat I suspected I could only accomplish inside the loop. It was a spell at a level my grandmother could never reach. With a thousand more years and a hundred souls to burn, she couldn’t do anything similar.

  And so she glared. Or at least, I saw her glare. I’d grown so used to it. So familiar with it that I could hardly cast anything without seeing it. Without feeling it judge me. Without feeling it hate me.

  But I pressed forward. I reached out, and I wrapped my hands around the illusions of loops gone by. I built Margaret piece by piece, like a puzzle. After only a few moments, she stood in front of me, arms crossed and eyes locked on me.

  “Alright,” I agreed as soon as she’d joined me again. “I’ve seen the loop once. I’m ready now—to follow the lead you want to follow. Just as soon as we save the girls.” I wouldn’t kill Luke as she wanted. I didn’t know if I had the stomach to even try. I’d only ever tried to kill one person, and it broke me. But she was right. That strange church was an excellent place to start investigating. It was time to stop stalling.

  Margaret took a moment to get her bearings, having just been created from aura and memories of false realities. She looked around the room, then toward the sunrise through the window. Finally, her eyes locked on me.

  “Right. The girls,” she agreed, not arguing on that point for even a moment. Relieving as this was, it wasn’t surprising. She didn’t have my connection to the children, but she had her own, in a way. If only one made of guilt. “Besides, I have some questions I want to ask on the way.” I tilted my head, but nodded. I could answer a few questions, even if I found it strange she hadn’t asked them earlier. Especially if they were important enough to be her first thought upon being brought back.

  We collected my things, stopped for Livia’s muffins, and left the inn. Margaret waited until we made it to a quieter street, then immediately spoke up.

  “Why do only you live until the destruction of the city?” she asked. “Everyone else is killed by the Quiet before the end, but not you. Why is that?” I thought for a moment. The thought had occurred to me, but it wasn’t high on my list of things to investigate.

  “I think because I am part of the spell causing the loop?” I suggested.

  “Maybe…” she considered. “But you must have made it to the end the first time. To start the loop, right?” I thought about it. She was right. That first time, I’d had no spell to protect me. The Quiet never took me.

  “That’s… true. And the loop never stopped when I died early, so it doesn’t need me alive in order to work. I’m also assuming a direct connection between the Quiet and the spell, which I can’t be completely certain of,” I admitted. “But if it’s something else… all I can think of is that I’m not from here. Maybe whoever is doing this is only targeting people from Beddenmor?” I couldn’t imagine why, and I certainly couldn’t understand how. I’d accepted that whatever magic being used didn’t follow the rules I’d learned growing up. I’d even accepted that somehow, the primary mage I was up against was manipulating the soul like a faerie out of a children’s story. But if I was spared simply for being a stranger, it had to be a limitation of the magic, or a deliberate choice. I really needed to understand which, if either at all. I needed to read about soul magic.

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  That thought tickled at my mind, like I’d forgotten something. I tried to focus on it, but the thought was washed away when Margaret asked another question. “Why does the loop bring everyone back?” She asked. “I remember, on one of the loops. You reversed time for a woman in front of me, but it didn’t bring her back to life. But when time in the city starts over, everyone is back. Why?”

  I let a long breath out of my nose as I tried to think the question through before answering. The disparity had felt so natural to me that I hadn’t even questioned it. Like my innate connection to the magic involved had soothed any curiosity, promising me that it was simply the way the spell worked. This was likely true. Some difference between the two spells made it natural for one to return the dead to life and impossible for the other. But it was an important question, because whatever that difference was could lead us to unravel the spell itself.

  “My spell undid yours but failed to revive people for a simple reason,” I answered after a few quiet moments of walking. “I reversed time on the bodies and everything contained. Blood, bone, and whatever aura you gave them to make them move again. But something was missing. The Quiet… the Quiet seems to target the soul, for some reason. The very spirit of its victims. Whatever spell is being used to kill them, I think it is destroying their souls. I could unravel their lives back to childhood, but without a spirit to live in the body, they can't come back. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  Margaret walked out ahead of me, turning around and walking backward as she looked at me. It made me vaguely nervous, watching her back toward every puddle, uneven cobblestone, and abandoned cart in the quiet road. She was in no danger of hitting anything, I didn’t think. Although I had seen her lean against walls. Either way, she deftly avoided every obstacle without looking, evidence that the aura-created eyes on her head weren’t actually what she used to see. Even so, it added to my already ever-present anxiety, like the wrong seasoning on a spoiled dinner.

  “So why does it work when the loop resets?” she repeated. I looked past her, spotting her home and the graveyard we’d need to pass in the distance. I stopped walking so we could finish the conversation, and I could dismiss her before she saw her own abandoned grave. Her mother lived in that house, and still, Margaret’s grave was neglected. However I felt about Margaret, that was a reality I wouldn’t expose anyone to. I couldn’t go on if I knew, for a fact, my grave would be left to time alone as company. I was fairly certain it would be, and that knowledge chewed through me, day after day. But the possibility I was wrong let me keep doing something. Even Margaret deserved to believe she might be wrong.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “I can only think of two reasons it would be different. I suspect it is because the loop affects not just an individual, but the state of the entire city. All of the world, actually. Looping time in just one city would actually take more power than looping time itself, since the difference between Beddenmor and everywhere else would continue to grow forever. So I believe reversing time on everything restores a destroyed soul, whereas ‘Undone’ can only reverse what I can personally reach.

  “The other possibility is that somehow, the spell looping time has access to the destroyed souls in a way I don’t, and can reverse time on them directly. But that doesn’t make sense to me. Destroyed is destroyed. I don’t know how they could be reached after the Quiet has already disposed of them. But honestly? I don’t know. I don’t know anything. All of this is guesswork based on what I’ve seen and felt, but I haven’t been able to find the truth about, well, anything. So if my first guess is wrong, it can’t really disqualify the second. I’m sorry,” I answered. Margaret looked at me one last time, then walked to the nearest home and sat on the steps leading to the porch. I strolled over and sat next to her.

  “Thanks,” she responded, leaving me a bit confused. “For stopping before we reached the graveyard. I know what’s waiting for me there, and I appreciate your efforts to hide it. One last question, before you send me away?” I nodded. “The first time we spoke, you didn’t talk nearly so much. I suppose I don’t have much room to speak, since I talked far more. Even so. It’s strange. That was before I… That was before you knew what I was doing, and you were more nervous then than you are now. Why is that?” There was a strange desperation in her eyes, like she hoped I had an answer to a different question than the one she’d asked. I looked up at the sun in the sky and thought of Camilla.

  “There are a lot of reasons,” I replied quietly. “I was a proud woman once, you know? Arrogant, even. And I loved to talk. I loved people, and I wanted as many around me as possible. I loved solving their problems, and I loved the praise it brought me.” I looked across the road. I could see the illusion of my grandmother—sitting on the opposite porch. Glaring. Sneering. Loathing. “That version of me was chewed up and spit out by the hateful actions of the two women I loved most. My grandmother and, even more than her, myself. I evaporated like water from a forgotten kettle, and the woman you met was all that was left. Since then, I have seen—and done—a lot. My perspective has changed over and over like the colors of a kaleidoscope. Honestly, I don’t know why I feel more confident speaking to you now, not for sure. But part of it is because I am not who I was. Another part is that, well, you are dead.” Margaret looked at me, and her shoulders slumped.

  “There is one more, isn’t there?” she asked. I sighed and gave her a guilty look.

  “Yes. I can speak with you freely because, well. You are one of the only people in the world I don’t have to look up to,” I admit. Margaret winced, but nodded.

  “I appreciate the honesty,” she said. We sat there for several long moments after that, before she hung her head. “You’d better get going. Just… Please bring me back before we start looking into that strange church. I need to see it for myself, if you’ll let me.” I nodded gently, almost imperceptibly, but she understood. And then, she was gone, and I was alone again. The last woman left in the city who had willingly tried to kill her sister.

  I pushed myself to my feet and went to meet two desperate children again.