The loop started on Wednesday, and the trip was planned for the second weekend. That gave Myra several days to follow up on miscellaneous leads, while even having an additional opportunity to practice some of her recent skills. For example, now that she could bypass a professional disruption field, she realized she could break into the university office to pull up records on various people of interest.


    Benkoten Talzatta. Model student, near-perfect grades, no harassment complaints. Wonderful.


    Well, okay, to be fair: that was mostly what she had expected. Myra hadn’t yet seen anything to suggest there would be dirt on him from before the loop had started.


    Next: Hachirou Iwasaki, the head of security. His record had the same information she’d learned previously: he used to be in the navy. To Myra’s annoyance, there wasn’t any dirt at all, and everything indicated he had been a competent naval officer and a competent head of security. He’d received several raises since starting, all with letters of support from university administrators and staff, which Myra read. On-campus theft had dropped to near-zero since he upgraded building security at the start of his employment.


    “Mr. Iwasaki has achieved the paradoxical result that campus feels both more open, conducive to free learning, yet simultaneously safer,” wrote the president seven years prior. “Since joining, Mr. Iwasaki has kept the university free of major incident or tragedy.” The last recommendation and raise was from two years ago, which repeated the claim that he had performed his job admirably and that theft was near-zero.


    Professor Bandine, the elderly woman who leaves town the day of the disaster. Not quite an exemplary record. Lots of complaints about her conduct… Complaints included the fact that her standards were “strict and undocumented” and “inconsistent with university rules,” and that her disciplinary methods were “unnecessarily humiliating.” On the other hand, the professor brought in an extraordinary amount of funding and prestige, so unfortunately, the university was unlikely to enact any kind of pressure for change.


    Anyway… assholes were a dime a dozen. Again, there just wasn’t anything to indicate why she might be wrapped up in this whole thing.


    What about someone who worked in topology? Seemed like a good candidate for subverting the event hall enclosure (no matter what all the spatial manipulation experts said).


    Wait, what about Mio Suzuki? Two time loopers were in her class after all—


    Mio Suzuki was a new professor, so her record was completely empty save her application materials. As an apprentice at the Mituhaka Technical University, she had studied the topology of whales, having switched to the field from marine biology. Her application emphasized potential applications to advanced spatial manipulation, but much of it was speculative at this point…


    Now what?


    Hm…


    Professor Snailsworth, the old guy who worked on aura distribution. Myra realized that she was, in part, just going through some of the people she’d met in her first loop. But it sort of made sense—she had gotten wrapped up in this mess, so there was likely something important in her first-loop routine that she hadn’t found yet.


    Anyway, Professor Snailsworth was by far the most controversial guy of the lot. The guy attracted a lot of criticism and death threats the way garbage attracted flies. Though the political context of it went a little over Myra’s head, a lot of interest groups seemed to have very strong opinions on aura distribution. On the other hand, he was even more untouchable than Professor Bandine on account of his connections to the imperial royal family.


    She flipped through the files again, and a particular piece of information caught her eye.


    Oh, I have their addresses, now…


    ◆


    Iwasaki’s house looked difficult to break into (for obvious reasons). Professor Snailsworth was a rich fuck who lived in a manor with live-in servants and a literal security guard. Those were out.


    Mio Suzuki had a nice apartment, though she had done something to make the space non-Hausdorff, which Myra found extremely uncomfortable. She lived alone, and it seemed she liked to cook, and there was a blackboard in her living room where other people might have had a painting to tie the room together.


    Myra checked the woman’s mail, too. Most mail in the empire these days had tamper-proof seals that could be validated through cryptographic functionality in the Common Library, and Myra didn’t want to break those. Admittedly, it was unlikely anything bad would happen to her even if she did, but there was still an easier way: just teleport the paper out of the envelope and then teleport it back in. (Actually, this was how Myra often opened her own mail, just because opening envelopes cleanly was kind of annoying.) Anyway, Mio Suzuki mostly had mathematicians’ mail: colleagues mailing theorems and proofs back and forth.


    Professor Bandine had a much larger house, but it seemed to be vacant in the middle of the day, and it didn’t have substantial security. It was friendly and wheelchair-accessible, with ramps in the front and back, and a single elevator bridging the two floors. Based on the state of the rooms, it seemed she lived here with her husband and had others, probably relatives, that visited frequently.


    She had a lot of photographs adorning the walls, most of them depicting her either inside or in front of a hospital, standing with a patient. Most of them were black-and-white or highly desaturated. One depicted a smiling man with no left arm and a prosthetic right arm, supporting himself with a single crutch. One depicted a bald woman with scars on the top of her head and a metallic contraption in place of her eyes, but with an extra biological eye in the middle of her forehead. One depicted the professor with her arm around a young, scruffy-looking teenager in a hospital gown, every limb of theirs prostheticized and with thick bandages wrapped around their face. And many others.


    The next hall over had plaques and newspaper clippings of various awards.


    ~


    Moving the Needle Award:


    To Dr. Lana Bandine for her tireless work on safer surgery through semi-autonomous stitching


    ~


    And stuff like that.


    ~


    The Human Efficiency Project Presents:


    OUR BREAKTHROUGH OF THE YEAR AWARD


    To Professor Lana Bandine


    The cardiovascular system represents thousands of grams of biomatter that could be put to better use. Thanks to Professor Bandine’s work on minimal viable prosthetics, this wastage can almost entirely be eliminated—


    ~


    Local surgeon kicks over trolley


    When a significant government official and a poor orphan boy arrived at Halibar Hospital at the same time, both in critical condition, it was quickly determined that the most experienced surgeon, Dr. Lana Bandine, was the only employee capable of saving either, and time was running short. Surprising everyone, the doctor chose to perform double-surgery: Standing between the two stretchers in a stance that onlooking residents would describe as ‘heroic,’ the ambidextrous doctor devoted each hand to a different life-saving procedure.


    ~


    Someone like that couldn’t possibly be involved, could she?


    If she was, it’d just be depressing…


    Myra felt a little bad combing through the woman’s mail, even accounting for how much the woman had pissed her off the one loop she’d apprenticed for her. She tried to focus on that to feel less guilty.


    Amidst all sorts of work-related correspondences, there was an envelope containing six tickets for a cruise on the Ilmanian Ocean. They must have been the tickets for the vacation that the professor had told Myra about many loops ago, the one that began the very last day of the loop.


    The same envelope had a professionally typeset letter from a director at Halibar Hospital, complete with the hospital seal, explaining that in recognition of exemplary service for years yadda yadda yadda, the board had unanimously voted to approve a “gift,” and explained that the professor needed to provide some information related to shipping in order to receive it.


    Behind the letter, there was a flyer with information on the vacation, with the words “A well-earned rest!” scribbled on top.


    The timing is suspicious, but it could easily be a coincidence. Besides, the tickets are a gift from the hospital, so that means she didn’t even pick the date, right?


    She even checked the seals—the seal on the envelope and on the letter both validated as being from Halibar Hospital. Still, she couldn’t help but feel like something about this stunk.


    ◆


    The next stop was Ealichburgh to snoop into Carmac Sermanol’s house. To her frustration, though, her newfound teleport skills were no help at all.


    Carmac Sermanol was presumably an expert at these sorts of security systems, but still. The murk bogs had taught her the teleportation techniques to break into a high-security government-owned vault. It was extremely concerning that this house in a rustic retiree nowhere village had a higher-grade disruption field than a literal nation-state.


    It only increased Myra’s urgency to get into the damn house. She inspected the door again, more thoroughly this time. Rather than fixating on the lock as she’d done last time (and the lock was still very weird, with all its pins at the same height, making it functional but degenerate in its design) she tried to sense around on the inside. There was something blocking her extra-senses just as there was her teleportation. As a result, she could only ‘see’ a few centimeters in, and that was probably only because of her personal domain overriding whatever blocking mechanism was in place.


    As centimeters went, though, they were pretty interesting. There was some kind of device that was almost certainly the detonation mechanism, but there wasn’t an obvious way to disable it directly, and it felt like it would trigger at the slightest disturbance. So how was the door meant to be opened?


    There was another device on the back of the door, a slab of silver. That was a good sign: silver meant runes. She could make out a little bit of the structure—the runes were clearly connecting the door knob to the detonation mechanism. So the high-level picture was obvious: you had to unlock the door the ‘right’ way to disable the mechanism. Many loops ago, when Myra had unlocked it by moving the pins, that obviously hadn’t been the ‘right’ way.


    But what was the right way?


    Unfortunately, the runes seemed to be some kind of aural composition that left Myra flummoxed. She kind of recognized it as an element combinator, similar to the one she had built to do the book spell. This one was mixing the ‘information’ element with the vacuum element, each supplied by a massive aura crystal. What did that mean?


    Yet another thing I need Iz for…


    ◆


    Myra probably would have left it at that, but there were still a couple of days before the trip. She had little to do, and she had a bit of a whim.


    She went to a locksmith and bought a handful of differently-sized key blanks, which were basically just keys with smooth, straight edges, absent any bitting, thus not yet attuned to a specific lock.


    Her logic was this. In the past, she’d tried to open the door telekinetically, but that hadn’t worked. It seemed likely that the lock was meant to be opened with a key, and that the detonation mechanism would trigger if the lock was subverted via basic telekinetic lockpicking—even if Myra had no idea how that mechanism actually worked.


    But she didn’t need to understand the mechanism just to try opening the door with a key. Since the pins were lined up at the same height, it seemed like a flat key ought to be able to work.


    Now, she hadn’t measured the lock in advance or anything, she just bought enough key blanks in hopes that at least one would be the right size. She figured she could resize one with magic if she really needed to. So she just tried each key blank in turn, hoping to find one that would fit.


    And one did! One of the ‘keys’ worked perfectly, and when she did she could feel something on the inside moving. But her heart sank when she felt a little more closely. There were two latches that needed to be undone to deactivate the bomb, and she had managed to undo one.


    Just to make sure she understood it properly, she removed the key from the lock and tried the telekinesis approach, moving the pins that way. This time, nothing on the inside moved.


    That was progress of a sort. She was on the right track—she just had to open the door ‘the right away.’ Moving the pins telekinetically wasn’t ‘the right way,’ but opening the door with a key was. If she could understand how that happened, maybe she could figure out how to fix the second latch…


    ◆


    “So, neither of you told anyone where we’re going, right?”


    “Myra, you’re not gonna serial kill us, are you?” Cynthia said.


    “I’m not gonna serial kill you!”


    “That’s a serial killer kinda thing to ask us, though,” Iz said.


    Yes, it was a weird thing to ask, but Myra remained terrified that Ben would find out where she was going. Until now, her habit had been to randomly pick a small village and tell Cynthia she was going there, knowing that whatever she told Cynthia would be relayed to Nathan, and Nathan was likely to tell Ben if he came asking.


    For this trip, she was in the awkward position that being too insistent about secrecy would look awkward, but if she didn’t insist at all, Cynthia would just tell Nathan as a matter of course.


    Myra’s solution had been to play the ‘my life is in shambles’ card and give them all something about how she was really embarrassed and didn’t want anyone to know she was having a mental breakdown that required vacation treatment or something. It had been an absolutely dreadful excuse, and Myra was terrified it hadn’t worked and that Cynthia had told Nathan anyway.


    “I just want this vacation to be a secret,” Myra said.


    “Well I didn’t tell anyone,” Cynthia said, rolling her eyes. “Come onnn, I gave you my word.”


    “Okay, okay…”


    “Let’s play a game,” Cynthia said, already bored of the train ride.


    “Do you all wanna hear a puzzle?” Myra asked.


    “I like puzzles,” said Iz. Cynthia pursed her lips.


    “Okay. And this is hypothetical,” Myra emphasized. “Just to be clear.”


    “I get it, it’s a puzzle. You don’t need to belabor this.”


    “Okay, so, 13 people enter a room, and it gets cut off from space…”


    ◆


    Myra didn’t really get much out of portraying the puzzle as she did. Neither Cynthia nor Iz seemed to find anything suspicious about her puzzles or notice the similarities to real-world events, and at the same time, Myra’s abstractions were too divorced from reality for any of their speculation to be meaningful. Eventually, they stopped and played cards instead.


    Iz’s hometown was Kaloru Vizha, translated as Kalo’s Valley, a calm village nestled between tall, lush mountains. The village itself was hilly, with spacious dirt roads that sloped in a mostly downward direction on the hike to Iz’s parents’ apartment, on a small street offshooting from the main market road. Inside, there was a steep, cramped stairwell that had been jammed in against all sense, stairs positioned in a way that only technically worked. Iz had the wisdom of experience to just teleport herself and her luggage up. Cynthia followed suit while Myra, armed with her unfortunately wide trunk, fought against the pathway’s low turn radius.


    “You didn’t really need to double down on that, Myra…”


    “I just wanted to prove it was possible.”


    Iz rolled her eyes but smiled, then turned to her apartment doorway.The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    “Mother, I’m home.”


    There was the scraping of a chair and quick footsteps. “Oh, Isadora, what a surprise, so soon!” Iz’s mother was a squat woman, with short blonde-brown hair that curled reminiscent of Iz’s much longer hair, wearing a very colorful patchwork shawl over much plainer, gray-white robes. “Isn’t school in session?” She gasped, and in a clearly joking tone asked, “You didn’t get kicked out, did you?”


    “No, Mother, I’m visiting for the weekend. I brought a friend—”


    Her mother gasped again, looking first to Myra and then Cynthia. “Oh, you must be Cynthia and Myrabelle!” she exclaimed, guessing them correctly as an unordered pair, then pulled both of them into a hug.


    Iz’s mother, Selene, was quick to usher the two inside to feed them, bombarding them with questions about their favorite classes and hobbies and whether Iz had any crushes or budding romances that she didn’t know about. She fed them cheese (delicious) and bread (kind of stale).


    Myra’s eyes were quickly drawn to a large framed portrait by the table. The portrait was of a man and woman, and though it was so lifelike, the object was so uncommon that Myra didn’t know what she was looking at. This was embarrassing because she had just seen them in Professor Bandine’s home, but in fairness, she associated them with rich people and industries, and on top of that, this one was so much more colorful than the ones she had seen in the professor’s house. The blue and brown eyes of the two individuals shone vividly, and behind them, there was an expansive, striking blood-red sunset. At first, she thought it was just a hyper-realistic painting.


    Cynthia said what she was thinking, “Wow, is that a photograph?”


    “Yeah, that’s my grandparents—mom’s parents.”


    “I was just surprised to see a real photograph here.”


    “Well, the camera-leaf is native here,” Iz said. “You all always act like they’re so rare in the empire… We could just go for a walk and pick some, right now.”


    Iz did that sometimes, using ‘the empire’ to refer only to its core bloc—Halnya, Casire, and Mituhaka—while excluding her home country.


    “It’s probably not the abundance, per se,” Myra suggested. “It’s the expertise.”


    “Yeah, you’re probably right,” Iz agreed. “You can probably find four or five professional photographers on this street. The imperial government just wants camera-leaves for their cheap newspaper photographs. It probably doesn’t occur to them to invest in… this sort of art. Not Miirunian art, anyway.”


    ◆


    They eventually escaped Iz’s doting mother, and Iz showed the pair to her room on the upper floor of the apartment. (The apartment as a whole turned out to be much more spacious than the building entrance area had suggested. Iz pointed out that this was just efficient building design.)


    Anyway, Iz’s room was highly on-brand, the back wall stuffed from floor to ceiling with books on every topic imaginable: magic, engineering, mathematics, history, geography. On the side of the bookshelf, there was a hand-written yet entirely alphabetized index annotating various subjects with books and page numbers.


    “Oh my god, Iz, how much work was this?” Cynthia asked.


    Iz squirmed. “I didn’t like the idea of reading something and not being able to find it later. So, uh…”


    “It’s so cute! What are these arrows for?” she asked. She pointed to the arrows inked on the side of the parchment.


    “It lets me move the text down,” Iz said. “When I need to insert something into the list, since I need to keep it alphabetized. I used to just replace the pages wholesale, and that was dreadful…”


    Myra burst out laughing while the others looked at her in confusion. “Oh, man, Iz, I know a spell you’re gonna love.”


    She quirked an eyebrow.


    “Y’know that fancy aura composition class you’re taking?”


    “Fancy? Oh, you’re talking about the book-searching spell.”


    “Yeah! You learned it already?”


    “Day before I left—how did you know about it?” She looked at Myra suspiciously.


    “Don’t worry about that,” Myra said slyly.


    Iz looked at her painstakingly crafted personal book index with a look of faint dejectedness. “Yeah, I guess I don’t really need this anymore.”


    “Aw, Izzy, I think it’s great!” Cynthia patted her on the back.


    They didn’t stay in the room long after that, only quickly changing out of their travel clothes.


    Out in the city, Iz took them to see her old school, which was out of session for the evening but hosted a dozen and a half kids playing some sport in the field out back. She took them to the town square, with its central attraction of an outdoor theater surrounded by cafes and street vendors.


    Iz took them underground, where there was a massive transportation cart system connected to other major cities in Miirun and even a few in neighboring countries. Her parents had met while working here, her father maintaining some of the equipment and her mother working in sorting.


    The main room contained a massive system of interconnected tracks that weaved in and out of junctions, through loading docks, and into pitch-black tunnels.


    “Can we ride in the carts?” Cynthia asked.


    “You can,” Iz said. “By which I mean it’s physically possible, not that it’s allowed. It’s also terrifying, though. It’s pitch dark in there.”


    “That means you’ve done it?” Cynthia asked.


    “Mmm… well…” She put her hands behind her back and grinned sheepishly.


    “Y’know, I think you told me about this place,” Myra said. “Didn’t it get shut down when Miirun lost access to the Common Library?”


    Iz frowned, her stature hardening. “I don’t remember telling you that.”


    “Uhh… you did!”


    Iz closed her eyes for a moment. “Yeah, that did happen. That was when the empire was doing everything it could to squash the independence movement. It almost destroyed the country. Food couldn’t get to the big cities…”


    “Sorry, I shouldn’t have brought it up.”


    “Did I tell you that’s how I got started in logokinesis?”


    “I think so.”


    She walked down one of the tunnels, beckoning the pair to follow her. “Let me see if it’s still here…”


    She located a runic wall with some kind of graphical structure. It was crudely drawn but with a touch of (and Myra didn’t want to say this out loud) whimsy in the way the parts were arranged and connected to each other. Professional rune scripts had an austere quality to them, packed so efficiently, that this lacked. The one here reminded her in a way of the murk bogs’ bridge.


    “I made this part here. The whole system is planned through a series of network flow algorithms that balance things so they can get where they need to go without it all getting clogged up. When Miirun originally made these tunnels, they used a mathematical framework that had originally been developed for the Common Library in Gurr, I believe.”


    “Gurr? Isn’t that on the other side of the planet?” Cynthia asked.


    “Yeah,” Iz said wistfully. “They can’t make those kinds of contributions anymore, of course… Anyway, I rebuilt some of it here. Looks like they still use parts of it.”


    “Man, you must have been, what—fourteen? fifteen?”


    “Fourteen, yeah.”


    “God, you never cease to impress me, Iz.”


    She scratched the back of her ear. “I just thought about how the tunnel network could be modeled and solved it the obvious way.”


    “You make it sound so easy.”


    “Yeah, honestly it wasn’t hard,” she said in her characteristic self-dismissive tone. “I just did it ’cause it had to be done.”


    “Oh, come on, Iz, I know you don’t like compliments, but you should be proud of this kind of work!”


    “Yeah!” Cynthia agreed cheerfully.


    “People always say things like this. But honestly… I think they’re just covering their asses. Look at it objectively. They needed a fourteen-year-old to bail them out! They went and heaped all this praise on me so they could tell themselves it was hard, so they could excuse themselves for not fixing the mess earlier.”


    “Sorry, I—I shouldn’t have said anything—”


    She shook her head. “You’re fine, Myra. It’s just bad memories. I get so upset when I remember how Miirun’s leaders let things get so bad. When they let so much crucial crap rely on the Common Library when anyone could see that Raine might have a fucking hissy fit and yank the thing any day…”


    She let out a long, long sigh. “I didn’t come here to reminisce, though.”


    “Did you come here to ride in the carts?” Cynthia asked.


    Iz stretched her arms out high above her head. “… Maybe.”


    ◆


    Myra was relieved to move the conversation on from the traumatic conversation she had accidentally stumbled into. She was then even more relieved when they were finished with their cart ride. Objectively, the experience was one of the least dangerous things Myra had done since the time loop had begun. Subjectively, she did not enjoy velocity in the dark as much as Cynthia seemed to.


    When they returned outside, it was approaching dusk, and the peaks of the surrounding mountains were softly glowing.


    “Oh my god,” Cynthia blurted out. “What is that? Are those all camera leaves?”


    “No, they’re lantern trees,” Iz said. “A lot of people get them mixed up, but they’re actually an ecological symbiote with camera-leaves.” And Iz launched into a long explanation about it, which Myra enjoyed, leaving the previous anxieties forgotten.


    They returned to Iz’s home and met her father, who was now home. He was a large, jovial guy with a bushy beard and thick wrinkles in his dark tanned skin. They all had dinner, and then they set up camp in Iz’s room, laying out a couple of cots and changing into their pajamas.


    As far as the plan went, Myra decided it was time to kick things up a notch.


    “Hey, Iz,” Myra started, pulling a small object out of her luggage. “I’ve got a book that’s uh—I don’t know what to make of it. I thought you might have some strong thoughts about it.”


    “Oh?”


    Myra was referring to the beaver journal, which she had taken the time to fetch. She handed the journal to Iz, who first looked over the ancient cover and binding with a look of admiration. The smile slipped off her face nearly immediately when she opened it to read, and Myra could probably guess the exact word she was reading when her eyes darkened.


    It didn’t take long for her to read the whole thing. When she was done, she closed it slowly and handed it back to Myra.


    “Where the hell did you get this?”


    “I kinda stumbled upon it in Emmett Massiel’s house.”


    “… And why were you stumbling around in Emmett Massiel’s house?”


    “Eh, can I talk about that later?”


    “Myra, you can’t drop this on me and then brush it under the rug.”


    “What’s going on?” Cynthia asked, joining in on the conversation. “What’s in the book?” Iz handed it to her to read through, then looked back to Myra.


    “I’ll tell you where I got it later, I promise.”


    Iz didn’t look happy about that, but what was Myra supposed to do? She couldn’t talk about the time loop. She hoped that bringing up the journal hadn’t been a mistake.


    “Have you heard of this beaver dam before?” Myra asked.


    “No…” She looked puzzled about that too. “Does this have anything to do with your sudden interest in visiting Miirun?”


    “Oh, no, not at all!” Myra said hastily but honestly. “I just thought it’d be something fun we could look into here. I mean, if you’ve never heard of it, it could be some lost history or something.”


    “Myra, is there something going on you’re not telling us?” She adjusted her glasses and squinted.


    “No,” she lied.


    “All right…”


    Myra could see the gears turning in her head, though.


    ◆


    The gears were fast and well-oiled.


    Someone shook Myra awake early in the morning. So early it was basically the middle of the night, but she would retroactively reconsider it to be ‘early morning’ a few hours later, after coming to terms with the fact that she wouldn’t be going back to sleep.


    She was sleeping on the floor in a cot between Cynthia and Iz’s bed. The person waking her up was Iz, leaning down from her bed, twisting all her blankets around so she could bend her torso off the edge.


    “Myra.”


    “Yeah?”


    “I’ve been thinking. That hypothetical time loop puzzle from last night… it’s not hypothetical, is it?”


    “You—you believe me?”


    “No…” she said slowly. “You told me it was hypothetical. And I don’t believe it was.”


    “Uh, right.” Myra flipped her brain around to make sense of that. “But like, you believe the time loop is real?”


    “Yeah, sure.”


    Myra nearly strangled her with a hug. “Oh, thank you thank you thank you—” Cynthia grunted in her sleep from the other end of the room.


    “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” Iz asked. “Why the whole guessing game?”


    “You never believe me! I was trying to be coy.”


    Iz blinked, barely visible in the dark bedroom. “What? Why not?”


    “I don’t know! I mean, sometimes you believe me, but only at the end of the loop! All the stuff with the, empire, I guess, happens, and you kinda just work out that I’m acting weird—you’ve done it a few times.”


    “What empire stuff?”


    “Oh, I guess I haven’t told you yet—”


    “And can you let go of me for a sec?”


    “Oh.” Iz was clearly suffering in Myra’s tight embrace, twisting her from what was already a very awkward slanted position. Myra let her worm out, and Iz positioned herself to get a better look at Myra’s face.


    “Myra, you look like you’re about to cry.”


    “I’m just so happy you believe me!”


    “I told you, I didn’t believe you. That’s why we’re having this conversation now.”


    “The thing is just, if I just outright tell you, you’re all like, ‘no, logic is officially impossible now. I can never believe anything ever again.’”


    “What…?”


    “I don’t know!” Myra told her again.


    “But you make it so obvious…”


    “I mean. It’s kinda unbelievable.”


    She heaved a sigh. “Never mind,” she said, though she still looked a little distressed about it. “Let’s just talk about the facts.”


    ◆


    Many facts were talked about, then opinions.


    “I think Emmett Massiel’s murder is the easiest,” Iz said. “Someone, whoever has control of the loop, did something to him so that he’d always die at the beginning. I want to say… some kind of mental compulsion, causing him to cast this laser suicide spell on himself, but I’ve never heard of such a thing…”


    They had snuck out of the bedroom and taken over one of the walls in the living room, filling it with notecards. There were four main columns: ‘Massacre,’ ‘Crater Death,’ ‘Laser Death,’ and ‘Murk Bogs are Weird.’


    “How’d the culprit manage to give him a mental compulsion in the first second of the loop?” Myra asked, not following the idea at all. “And why do it that way?”


    “Oh,” Iz said, realizing she’d leapt too far ahead. “What I’m suggesting is that Massiel is himself a time looper, but the villain has… sabotaged him. Think about it, what’s the one thing that preserves itself when you loop back?”


    “My… brain. That’s why you suggested a mental compulsion. It would actually remain in the loop, even when the rest of his body puts himself back together, so—”


    “Exactly.”


    “But I’ve never heard of such a… compulsion before.”


    She shrugged. “I’ve never heard of a time loop before.”


    “All right, but—”


    “No, I know what you mean.” She sighed. “It’s best not to imagine two impossible things. I have heard of drugs that overstimulate your aura terminals and cause you to lose control of your own magic. But that’s too unpredictable. On the off chance such a thing were used, it would mean Massiel’s situation is unintended… Well, I guess it could be unintended. But would it be so repeatable…?”


    “I’ve tried drugging myself, but the effects don’t go back in time.”


    Iz blinked. “Oh. Well, never mind, then.”


    “Wait, what about this—” Myra snapped her fingers. “We’re hung up on why he dies the first second of the loop, right? But what if causality is reversed? What if he died for unrelated reasons, and then the person who initiated the loop intentionally chose his time of death as the loop-back time? Eh?”


    “Why… would they do that?”


    “I dunno.”


    “Well, uh. Let’s throw it in the theory pot, then.” She made a notecard for it and hung it on the wall, far from eye level. “Just to be clear, there’s more reasons to think Emmett Massiel might be a time looper, or at least know something about the time loop. After all, the time loop might be tied to the Common Library, like you said, and Emmett Massiel knew more about the Common Library than anybody else on the planet.”


    That made sense.


    “And… Can I see the journal again?”


    “Sure.” Myra handed it over, and the girl reread it twice in completion.


    “We should look into this,” Iz finally said.


    “You think it has to do with the time loop?”


    “It’s a hunch.” Iz bit her lip. “You were the one who brought it.”


    “I thought it would help me convince you about the loop, but I mean, at best it would help us figure out how his weird security system works, and I don’t know if that will really help with solving the case, so… I didn’t think it was a great use of time.”


    Iz sighed. “Myra.”


    “Yeah?”


    “At ‘best,’ it could bring to light lost history about one of the most powerful persons in the history of our planet. I’ve read a number of biographies of the emperor, and none of them mentioned anything like this. The emperor must have worked very hard to shove this out of sight, and there’s probably a reason. And I mean, look at what they’re talking about here, at the beginning—” She was probably referring to Massiel’s depiction of Raine’s opinions on the Common Library.


    “No, I get that!” Myra said. “I just didn’t think it had to do with the time loop.”


    “I know right now it’s hard for you to look beyond the month, but—y’know.”


    “Hey, I don’t mind looking into it!” Myra said quickly, and slightly hurt by the implication that she had tunnel vision. “I mean, I did bring it.”


    Iz smiled. “You were right that I’d be interested in this. I am very interested. How about this? My condition for helping you… is that we look into this. Whether or not it turns out to have anything to do with the time loop.”


    “Deal!”


    It was at that point the door to Iz’s room opened and Cynthia lumbered out. She took a good long look at the wall of notecards, scratched her head, then walked to the kitchen.


    ◆


    Cynthia thought Myra and Iz were doing some kind of bit. This wasn’t a surprise—just a disappointment—to Myra, but it had the silver lining that Iz would now get to know what it felt like to be disbelieved.


    Anyway, it was easy enough to motivate an investigation into the beaver dam, so the three of them began to work on that together.


    There was nothing in Iz’s atlas, so they went to the town library (where Iz was very well-known by the friendly old librarian) and they didn’t have anything on it either. They tried to cast the book-search spell, but as always, they found they would have to wait for nightfall when they could access the abundant information aura in the astral channel.


    “Can’t we just get an aura crystal?” Cynthia asked.


    “The element’s too rarely used,” Iz said. “It isn’t even officially used yet, I don’t know where you’d get an aura crystal outside a specialty store.” Something itched at Myra’s brain, but it slipped away when Iz directed them to their next destination.


    Iz led them to the wilderness guild. This was a place Myra didn’t expect her friend to be quite as well-known as she was at the library. Myra was wrong.


    The guild headquarters was on the edge of the city, bordering the woodlands. It was a large log building surrounded by an enormous, overgrown garden. Iz walked right on it to the sight of a large gathering, men and women sitting around a table with mugs of alcohol and dark drink stains.


    “If it ain’t our little Isadora!” the person closest to the door shouted, a large man with scraggly brown hair, a thick beard, and no less than three scars across his face. “We was just talking about ya! Have a beer!”


    There were some greetings and cheers from the rest of the crowd, and he thrust a mug into her hands, and she managed to take it into hands without spilling overmuch.


    “Sanna ’ere’s gone and ripped up that tent o’ yours,” said the woman next to him, slapping him on the shoulder. “We need your magic touch ta fix it right up.”


    Iz frowned. “I just fixed it a couple weeks ago…”


    “Can I have a beer?” Cynthia asked.


    “Ya know me,” the large man continued, as he obliged Cynthia. “I can never keep track o’ the moon, can I? Ha ha ha! Coulda sworn we had a full one last month!”


    “We have a full moon every month,” Iz said flatly. “Technically two, if you count Altina.”


    He banged a fist on the table, nearly knocking over a beer or two. “That explains it!” While the entire table burst into uproarious laughter.


    Iz looked to the far wall, where there was a large, dark blue tarp that looked like it had been shredded by a wild animal. There were tent poles leaning on the wall next to it, one of them having been snapped in half. There were also some runes etched in with thread.


    “W-what happened here?” Myra asked.


    “I designed them a tent that’s bigger on the inside,” Iz explained. “Pretty basic space magic, works really well at night. Figured it was a great application for a tent.” She brushed her fingers along the tarp, inspecting the damage.


    “What kinda predator did this?” Myra asked.


    “Ya gonna introduce us to your friends, there, Izzy?”


    Iz turned back to the large group. “Ah, everyone, these are my friends from school, Myrabelle and Cynthia… And for you two, this is the wilderness guild, or at least the ones of them that like to have more pints than brain cells.” Though as she said this, she took a drink of the pint they had thrust into her hands earlier.


    “Ya wound us, Izzy!” Sanna held a fist to his chest in mock agony.


    “Sanna’s a werewolf,” Iz explained for the girls’ sake, “if you hadn’t worked that out.”


    He bared his teeth. He had human teeth befitting his present human form, but the expression still made him very wolflike.


    “Nice to meet you all,” Myra said, doing a short curtsy.


    “I’ll fix the tent again,” Iz said, “but we need help with something. Do any of you know about a massive beaver dam somewhere in the wetlands?”


    “Ya mean that pond down the old rust road?”


    “No, uh, much bigger than that. How big was it…?”


    “Like two kilometers,” Myra said.


    “Yeah, and there was some kinda expedition there some sixty years ago,” Iz added.


    The group all looked at each other with searching expressions. “No idea. But y’know, somethin’ that long ago, you’d best ask Old Hat. He’s probably out by the gardens.”


    Iz led the girls out to the gardens, where they found an elderly guy hunched over a patch of root vegetables with a trowel, the majority of his body obscured by a beige, wide-brimmed hat.


    “Old Hat!”


    “Well, if it isn’t young Isadora,” the man called back in a stretched, nasally voice, not looking up from the vegetables whatsoever. He poked at the ground with his trowel, contemplative but noncommittal. “What brings you here today?”


    Iz explained the situation yet again.


    “A large beaver dam… a damn large beaver dam… The damnest beaver to ever leave ’er…” He muttered on, wandering increasingly far from the subject. “A dam what damns Beavis to hell… Can’t say I know of anything like that.” But then in direct contradiction, he continued, “But you know. Back when I was a young’un, there was a rumor like that. A large beaver dam.”