“It was only a rumor,” he said, looking up just a bit from where he was crouched, though not quite enough they could properly make out a face under his hat. “I don’t know who started it. Seemed like everyone an’ their cat had a friend of a friend who’d been there and seen it personally.” He waved his hand.


    “Do you know where it was?”


    “Oh yeah, yeah,” he said. “The location was the only thing consistent in all those fanciful tales. It was—I’ll show ya.”


    He turned away from his garden and hobbled towards the building, one careful and excruciatingly long step at a time.


    “So everyone an’ their cat was gearing up for an official expedition,” he went on. “The team down at Blurja was gettin’ ready to go. And there was this other bigshot group—they were the first.”


    “When you say ‘bigshot’…”


    “Big famous explorer outta Halnya, or whatever it was called back then.”


    “It was called Halnya.”


    “He was a big deal, had a buncha fans even over here. His name was… bah, I don’ remember.” He hummed to himself as they entered the building, a process that took several minutes. He dug around on one of the shelves, pulled out a large scroll, set it on the table, and let it roll out on its own.


    “There!”


    He jammed a finger onto the map, far from any of the labeled cities.


    “It was here!”


    “Is that even in Miirun?” Myra asked. To say it was in the middle of nowhere was an understatement. It was at the farthest end of nowhere.


    “Yeah it is,” said Iz. “Old Hat, how sure are you about this spot? You said it was decades ago, right?”


    “My memory’s sharp as ever,” he rasped out. “I know it was here because I remember it was behind the Snake Belt. That’s why it was practically impossible to get out there.”


    “Couldn’t they just teleport?” Myra asked. “Past the Snake Belt,” I mean.


    “I don’t think anybody knew how to teleport that far back then,” Iz reminded her. “This was sixty years ago.”


    “Right… never mind.”


    “Teleporting’s not in the nature of an explorer,” Old Hat said, as if Iz’s explanation was just irrelevant. “The nature of an explorer is to experience nature itself. Even if that means walking through the Snake Belt.” He coughed.


    “So the bigshot,” Iz asked, “do you know if he ever made it?”


    “I remember him! Whole lot of ’em came through that canteen by the—” He waved his hand towards nowhere. “—that one village I was at back in the day.”


    “Fulka,” Iz added helpfully.


    “Fulka! That was it. Anyway, I remember the leader well! Real sturdy looking guy, charismatic, too. I remember his team was starstruck, hangin’ off his every word.” He coughed again. “And I remember when they came back,” he said. “Passed back right the way they came.”


    “Did they… say anything about what they found?”


    “Nah, they said they didn’t find anything.”


    Myra and Iz looked at each other.


    “Came back real harrowed though.” The old guy wheezed with laughter. “Guess the Snake Belt really sunk its teeth in ’em! I dunno what became of ’em after that. Hear the man left the business for… politics or somethin’.”


    “And nobody else tried to find it after that?” Iz asked.


    “Nah, of course they did, the Blurja group went after that.” He shook his head. “And they said it wasn’t there either. They said they found uh…” He trailed off. “They found a… don’t remember. That group found a lotta things over the years. My memory’s not as sharp as it used to be, you understand.”


    “Any chance we could talk to this Blurja group?” Myra asked.


    “Talk to the… nah, ’fraid not, missy. Big Coat was the last of ’em, and he passed away ’bout a decade ago.”


    “Damn,” Myra said. “Is there anyone else? Can we go find their families in Blurja? Or maybe they left journals?”


    “You can try,” he said.


    “It’s not that far,” Iz said. “But if they never found it, I don’t know what we’re gonna learn. I think we should focus our efforts on the people mentioned in the journal.”


    That was just about all Old Hat had to tell them. Despite getting the location (which Myra made sure to memorize), it still felt like frustratingly little information.


    They stuck around at the wilderness guild for a bit so Iz could fix up Sanna’s tent while Myra thought about what to do next.


    “So…” she asked Iz, “how possible is it to go check this place out?”


    “Depends. How far can you teleport?”


    “Probably like forty or fifty kilometers before I lose my lunch.”


    Iz admittedly looked a little impressed. “Wow, you’ve been practicing.”


    “Yeah, I have.”


    She shook her head, though. “You’re gonna need to go a lot further than that. And honestly, the Snake Belt is the least of your problems. You’ll have to get past Bear Trap Canyon, not to mention the Fractal Fields… Unless you can one-shot the thing, you’re gonna have to stop somewhere. Also, you need to account for the average aura density out in the wilderness. Your 40 kilometers might not even be 5 out there.”


    “At least I don’t have to budget for the return trip.”


    Iz rolled her eyes. “Guess not.”


    “Hey!” Cynthia jumped in. “Let’s go to that beaver dam. The small one!”


    Cynthia was referring to the small pond someone in the guild had mentioned earlier, the one nearby at a place called ‘old rust road.’ Myra quickly agreed it’d be fun, so Iz led the way. It wasn’t far.


    They sat at the bank opposite the lodge, a mound of dirt and sticks. There was a beaver outside, a cute little guy, chipping his teeth away at a small tree trunk.


    “Do you think he’ll draw runes for us?” Cynthia asked.


    “I’d say the chance is less than 0.001%,” Iz said.


    “Did you just make that number up?”


    They sat for a while and played a card game for a bit. Then they skipped rocks for a bit, trying not to disturb the pond’s occupants. It reminded Myra of Nathan, and she remembered how frustrating it was that she couldn’t take the risk of talking to him. Cynthia had probably suggested the game thinking it would cheer Myra up, but it ended up having somewhat the opposite effect.


    ◆


    “Iz, I’ve been thinking…” Myra said once she and Iz had a moment to themselves. “I can’t help but feel you do think this beaver journal has to do with the time loop.” Iz was quiet. “After all, you believed my story right after I showed you the book.”


    “Once again, Myra, I was disbelieving your story.”


    “Right, right.”


    “Well… I did think something like that, yes.”


    “Why?”


    She put a hand to her mouth, thinking for a bit. “Well, point one, because something on the scale of the time loop could only be caused by an enormous irregularity. And there aren’t many irregularities bigger than this beaver dam.”


    “Sure. What’s ‘point two’?”


    “Well, there’s the giant clock.”


    Myra blinked. “What giant clock?”


    “The giant… mmm… you read the journal, right?”


    “There was no giant clock.”


    Iz gave her the ‘really?’ look and flipped through the journal, then shoved it in Myra’s face, pointing to a specific paragraph.


    <blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid rgba(204, 204, 204, 1); padding: 0 15px; margin: 10px">


    Theodore claims to have made a breakthrough. After pouring over our data for a while, he seems to have concluded that the water is moving around in a cycle, roughly twice daily, like the tides. He said the water was moving clockwise around a particular point, and he went to inspect that point.


    </blockquote>


    Myra read through the sentence a few times. “Wait… Oh… Twice a day… like the hour hand of a… clock…?”


    Iz was smirking.


    “Hey!”


    “What?”


    “Don’t smirk at—I thought it was the fucking tides! He says it, he says it’s like the tides—”


    “Myra, it literally says clockwise in the next sentence. Clockwise. You know. Like a clock.”


    “I mean, that could be a coincidence,” Myra insisted. “There are only two possible directions. Clockwise is just an etymological coincidence. And also, hour hands aren’t some pure ontological concept! They’re human-made!”


    “So? Anomalous phenomena mimic human-made concepts all the time. Just look at Bear Trap Canyon. That’s not the problem.”


    “Oh. There’s a problem?” Myra didn’t need to argue against the idea if Iz was going to do it for her.


    “There’s no such thing as time magic, is there? If there were large time anomalies, there’d be small time anomalies, too. And there aren’t.”


    Myra frowned. “I don’t know if that logic holds at all. Naturally, large anomalies should be able to do things small anomalies can’t.”


    Iz scratched her head. “Maybe.”


    So that’s why Iz believed me this time, Myra suddenly understood. Iz believes time magic is impossible—but then she learned about the beaver dam and this ‘giant clock.’ And that gave the idea, at the very least, a path to feasibility.


    “You know what, I think I’m going to call one of the sages that went on this trip,” Myra said. “I tried to do that before, but when I did, it was near the end of the loop and they’d already gone to Ralkenon.”


    ◆


    They could start with anyone named in the journal (well, other than the emperor, probably) (and other than Jen Rebanko because they had no idea who that was). Myra started with Linda Zeawak, Sage of Seafaring. Myra did not even remotely remember Linda Zeawak’s phone number from eight loops ago, but fortunately she’d had the presence of mind to grab Massiel’s contact book at the same time she’d taken the journal. She dialed the eighteen-digit phone number and waited.


    “Hi! I came across this interesting book. It describes a trip to a large beaver dam in the Miirun wetlands where you found a giant red vine. I was wondering if you could tell us about it!”


    “Who the hell is this? There’s no such book you’re describing.” Linda Zeawak asked, her tone harsh and gravelly. “Where’d you find this book?” That was certainly an interesting question to ask about a book that she also said didn’t exist.


    “I found it in Emmett Massiel’s house.”


    “Who the—Hazel, is that you?”


    “Um… yes! This is me, Hazel Ornobis.”


    There was a spell of silence. God, that was a bad idea.


    “You aren’t Hazel Ornobis,” she predictably observed. “I don’t know who the fuck you are, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She spoke very quickly and hung up immediately.


    Myra turned to Iz. “Did you hear that, Iz? She flipped out! We’re onto something.”


    “We should try the others…”Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    They did try the others. They tried Marcus Bora, but right as she thought she was about to speak with him, there was an interruption, and she was suddenly hung up on. She called back and got a busy signal. She called Theodore Kettle and got another busy signal.


    Hmm…


    “Uh, they’re all busy…”


    They tried again a few hours later, and that time, the phone just rang and rang without anyone picking up, for all three of the sages.


    “We should keep pestering them,” Iz said. “Maybe send them a threatening letter? We have to act like we know more than we do, though. I’ll draft something up.”


    ◆


    Although they were busy working on the beaver dam project, Myra still intended to get Iz’s takes on all the murders.


    “What about the cyclist murder?” she asked while they relaxed in Iz’s living room, looking at their wall of clues.


    “Well—” Iz bit at her fingernail, looking up from her draft letter. “Frankly, this one’s the most bizarre to me. The laser murder is obviously connected to the time loop. The massacre is confounding, but it’s not too hard to think of political motives. But then we have the crater thing—I can’t even come up with a story. It’s deliberately conspicuous, yet nothing comes of it. At once, it seems like it’s at the center of everything, connecting the phone call to the sage’s house and the hotel where the princess is staying, and it also seems to have to do with nothing. You said they don’t even identify the guy without you poking around?”


    “That’s right.”


    “He’s a nobody,” Iz said.


    “Do you at least have any ideas about how this strange murder method was enacted?”


    Iz bobbed her head at an odd diagonal. “… Yes and no.”


    “Let’s hear the ‘yes’ first.”


    “Well, you said you were baffled by the fact that they never found any trace of the projectile. That might not be too hard to explain, though. We know from the reports about the trebuchet assaults that the culprit is capable of accelerating objects to high speeds.”


    “69 times the speed of sound,” Myra added, remembering Jay Thrustma’s commentary. Iz looked at her funny.


    “Right. So the culprit could pick up any old rock at the park, accelerate it, smash the guy’s head in, and the rock turns to dust. And that dust wouldn’t stand out in forensic analysis because it’s already from the park. With me so far?” Myra nodded along. “In that sense, it’s simple. The culprit shows up and kills the guy with one of their usual offensive moves.”


    “It does sound simple. I guess that’s it, then?”


    “Yeah, but—” She bit her lip, hesitant.


    “What’s wrong with it?”


    “I mean, nothing, really. But I want to clarify something. You said it’s consistent—how consistent?”


    “It happens every single loop.”


    “Yeah. And at the same time every day?”


    “It’s always reported the same in the paper. And it’s always at the same place too, at least every time I went and physically checked. Shera and I were curious about the trees, so we took note of the tree that he’s next to—”


    “By the way, does the crater ever overlap with the trebuchet break-in?”


    “No. Sometimes it’s earlier, sometimes it’s later, but it’s never intersected.”


    Iz nodded. “If it is the same person, they can obviously get around the empire quickly. They could ambush him wherever the hell they want. But they always pick that specific place and time no matter what else they’re doing that night. That’s odd, isn’t it?”


    “Maybe they don’t want any other loopers to realize the crater was a looper-related murder?”


    “I have a hard time believing that, though. They obviously don’t care about making waves with these trebuchet assaults. And if they don’t want to draw attention to Carmac Sermanol’s murder, why do something so flashy in the first place?”


    “You could make the same argument about the event hall massacre.” Can you, though? As soon as she said it, Myra wasn’t so sure.


    It’s mostly all the same, but the exact position of the princess on the table is always a bit different. In Loop 4, her right arm was mangled differently than it had been before.


    Iz had a different argument. “The event hall massacre has a lot of specific circumstances. Whatever the culprit’s doing, it probably has a lot of planning behind it. And I think—sorry, this is more of a gut feeling than anything, so make of it what you will—the massacre means something to the culprit. It’s set up that way for a reason.”


    “No, I get what you mean.”


    “Anyway,” she went on. “All this is to say: I think that the perpetrator of the crater murder isn’t the looper after all.” She lifted her glasses to rub one of her eyes. “I just thought they were gonna be the same because of the projectile thing. That’s what’s got me hung up on this.”


    ◆


    As far as the newspapers were concerned, it had been a relatively quiet loop thus far. Myra was checking the paper every day to make sure she didn’t miss any trebuchet intrusions, but there had been none this loop (and Myra was incredibly grateful that this fact hadn’t caused Iz to doubt her).


    This changed on the third day of their vacation, when there was an unexpected news item. Myra, in fact, had almost dismissed it, thinking it was Miirun-local. She asked Iz about it, and then Iz had looked puzzled, pointing out the same announcement in the empire-wide Halnya Times.


    To get to the point, the government was planning to run some kind of ‘test’ at midnight. A test of what, exactly, was completely unspecified. The only detail they had was that it would involve something very bright originating from somewhere in the city, and that it was perfectly safe and nobody should be alarmed.


    “They’re doing this in every major city?” Myra puzzled in disbelief. “That has never happened in any loop I’ve seen. I mean, maybe I missed it when I was in Unkmire… It definitely didn’t happen last loop, though.”


    They went out onto the town to inquire about it, but nobody was particularly curious about the ‘test,’ let alone able to tell them anything about it. Hell, it took a while for Myra to even impart to Iz how much this event squicked her out. Late at night, then—partly out of paranoia and partly in the name of intelligence gathering—she dragged her two friends out to the mountainside, overlooking the valley. Far from the action, but with a good view of it.


    The moon at this point was a sliver crescent, and it was difficult to see anything. In fact, it would have been outright impossible to make anything out without the soft glow of the lantern trees on the mountainside on the opposite side of the valley. The trees as they were, though, they could see the shadow of something—something like a pillar or a spire rising up from the small town.


    It rose, ever so slowly, over the course of ten or fifteen minutes. It was too slow to actually see it in motion, so it was some time before it was tall enough that the girls were convinced it wasn’t just their imagination. It was definitely rising.


    Then it was bright.


    A blinding bright blue flooded the sleeping town, probably waking up half its population as it did so. It was vast: it reached the spot they were sitting, just barely, and the same grass they sat on lit up softly.


    It lasted a minute, then it was done, and the spire let itself back into the ground.


    “Wow, that was bright, all right,” Cynthia said.


    The whole event had pretty much been exactly what the newspaper had said would happen.


    “I… I don’t know what I expected,” Myra said.


    “What was that a test of?”


    “Iz, what building was that coming out of?” Myra asked.


    Iz frowned. “It’s just a random imperial bureaucracy building,” I think.


    ◆


    Sadly, random imperial bureaucracy buildings were not the sorts of things that were healthy to mess with. Iz managed to dig up the information that the building had been erected around 5 years ago by a governmental department with a name that sounded like it was designed by a committee to be as forgettable as possible. Short of another suicide run, that was all the information Myra was gonna get.


    They woke up early to catch a train. On the way back to Ralkenon, they were going to stop at Ealichburgh so Iz could take a look at Carmac Sermanol’s door or try to find a safe way to break in. Iz wanted to walk to the station, and Myra wanted to teleport; they compromised by teleporting only to avoid walking uphill.


    “I’ve been thinking—” Iz said.


    “Typical Iz,” Cynthia cut in.


    “I’ve been thinking about what you said, about how I never believed you before.”


    “Eh, don’t worry about it,” Myra said. “All I really need to know is how I can convince you next loop.”


    “Well, that’s what I was thinking about too…” Iz said slowly. “And I’m pretty sure it’s this. Just do what you did this loop. It’ll work, I’m sure of it. We don’t need to go on vacation or anything, just do it on campus… Introduce it as a hypothetical, wait a bit, then show me the journal. I’m dead certain it’ll work. I’m gonna be honest, I’m sorta flummoxed you seem to have done this by accident.”


    “I knew it!” Myra said. “It was the journal that made you believe me, after all!”


    “It was—yeah.” She sounded a little embarrassed. “Yeah, the journal helped. Just do exactly what I just said.”


    “All right. And then you’ll help me investigate, like you’re doing now?”


    “Of course.”


    “Would you go with me to make money off the prediction bazaars?”


    “God, that’s far. But sure. I’ve always wanted to go to Tzurigad.”


    “And you’ll investigate the murk bogs with me?”


    “Er… don’t push it, Myra.”


    Myra deflated.


    “Sorry,” she said, seeing Myra’s expression. “But that’s kind of a ridiculous thing to ask, isn’t it? Even accounting for everything… You can be at ease because of the loop, but I… you know?”


    Myra was quiet. Her friend was being reasonable, but it also came as a huge disappointment.


    “I mean, you can still call me and consult,” she said. “No matter what, I won’t leave you to do something dangerous like that on your own.”


    “It’s fine… Though—” Did I not mention this yet? “—I won’t really be on my own, ’cause I’ll have Shera, so you don’t have to feel that bad.”


    “Er, Shera?” Iz did a double take, face warping in confusion.


    “Y’know, Shera Marcrombie? She always believes me without very much trouble.”


    “Her? You mean that—” She cut herself off, then blinked several times. “Well, all right. I’m glad someone’s got your back.”


    “I’m still not really following what you all are talking about,” Cynthia said. For better or worse, Cynthia was never the type of person to call bullshit to someone’s face. She was more likely to just act confused. “But like… if this… thing is serious, wouldn’t it make more sense to help Myra with her thing?”


    “It’s important to be skeptical in the face of a time looper,” Iz said. “They have infinite tries to manipulate you into whatever they want.”


    “So you’re saying that if Myra really needs your help in Unkmire, then she should keep trying more and more devious ways of manipulating you?”


    Iz furrowed her brow. “No, that’s not what I’m—”


    “Uh, hold up,” Myra said, holding out a hand. “What’s going on here?”


    She had to cut the conversation in its tracks. The group had turned the corner, but they couldn’t even look at the station, which was blindingly bright, crawling with a vast number of police officers in their shining golden uniforms.


    “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Iz growled sharply. “Is the station closed?”


    “Maybe,” Myra asked, eyes already starting to water. “Let’s just get out of here before we get sunburned.”


    “Shouldn’t we at least ask what’s going on?” Cynthia said.


    “I’m not talking to the police,” Iz muttered.


    “Yeah, but you want to know what’s going on, right? You can stay here.”


    Cynthia did approach while they waited from around the corner.


    “They just barked at me to get out,” she explained when she got back. “Train’s closed. But I also heard them talking about some kind of hunt… And they searched my luggage with some kinda enchantment.”


    “A ‘kinda enchantment’?” Iz repeated.


    Cynthia shrugged. Iz bit one of her nails.


    “We should get outta here.”


    Cynthia snapped her fingers, something in her eyes lighting up. “Hey, could we take one of the carts to the next city down?” She looked very excited about the prospect.


    “Um… maybe.”


    They walked back the way they came. A weird test last night, all over the empire… and now some kinda police operation, shutting down the whole town? Myra had a very bad feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Hold on, I wanna check something,” she said.


    Splitting off from the group, she teleported a ways outside the village, near the mountainside.


    And off in the distance, almost exactly where the trio had been last night…


    It was crawling with officers. They were impossible to miss, obviously. She reached down to get her binoculars out of her luggage, then thought better of it, realizing how pointless that would be given the circumstances. No, I’ll just go back to my friends so we can get out of here.


    “Yep,” she said quickly, “we need to take the carts—”


    What?


    She had tried to teleport back to her friends, but she hadn’t gone anywhere. She was talking to the empty air, and her blood ran cold as she felt the disruption field—


    The deep voice of an adult woman spoke behind her. “You seem awfully interested in our activities, lady.”


    She nearly leaped 180 degrees around. There were two of them, absolutely blinding at such a short distance. She couldn’t make out details of either of them. Desperately, she tried to teleport away, trying every trick she’d been taught, but whatever they’d blanketed her in was more powerful than anything she’d had to beat before.


    “Um—”


    “We’re searching your luggage.”


    “Uh, go ahead, I don’t have—”


    They plowed ahead, ripping her suitcase out of her fingers.


    They threw out her robes, dresses, and underwear, tossing them on the dirt. They carelessly tossed aside her binoculars, which made a large crack as they hit the ground. Why are they here? I don’t have anything on me, do I…? They found her passport, grunting with mild recognition as they inspected it. They also tossed it onto the dirt.


    Then, finally, they pulled out the item at the very bottom of her trunk. This item was different. They didn’t toss it aside—rather, they held it with almost reverence.


    They didn’t open the book, not even to glance through. Instead, they took out some kind of elastic band covered in runes, and they bound the book shut.


    “Well, well, well,” the woman said. “Myrabelle Prua-Kent. You certainly have a lot of explaining to do.”


    ◆


    They took to her a cold, metal room at the police station where they chained her to a chair. They grilled her for hours. Why did she have the journal? What was she planning to do with it? Who else did she tell about it? Who did she plan to tell about it? Of course, the officers didn’t offer her any sunblock or eye protection, and they didn’t take kindly to her closing her eyes or even squinting. She answered as best as she could while her eyes seared in pain.


    Myra picked a story and stuck to it, that she had obtained the journal from her father shortly before he was arrested, and that while she didn’t know how he had acquired it, one might guess—well, she let them draw their conclusions. As uncomfortable as it was to bring up her own father like this, it was very convenient as a misdirect.


    To her relief, the first interrogator seemed to accept this story. To her perturbance, he left, and then she was visited by a much higher-ranked officer, one with a much greater sense of skepticism. This officer believed that Myra was also responsible for the sage’s death—which in retrospect was a natural accusation to make—and it wasn’t like Myra could just ask the guy to go check his security logs without heaping even more suspicion on herself.


    Things were looking increasingly bad, and Myra was strongly considering another Time Looper’s Exit. The main problem was that the police had searched her and taken her razor blades and poison pills that she kept on her for this purpose. She was left contemplating ways to accelerate the furniture of the room relative to the reference frame of her head. She was limited in what she could do while she was chained to the chair though, and there were massive magic-suppressing fields that made it virtually impossible to cast an effect more than half a meter from her person.


    Even as she racked her brain for possibilities, she knew she wouldn’t really do it. Even if it was temporary… she didn’t want her friends to deal with that. When she had killed herself in the vault, she had smashed her face in so that she would be hard to identify. It was already too late for that. Even if she found a compelling way to violate physical mutual exclusion principles using the corner of the table and her skull, she wouldn’t do it.


    Besides, there was a chance she would be interrogated by Linda Zeawak herself, or maybe one of the others. If they cared about this so much, maybe they would want to speak to her personally. That was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up.


    ◆


    That didn’t happen.


    A woman walked into the room. She was, quite mercifully, not wearing a shining police uniform. She was tall with dark olive skin, dark black hair to her neck, with a very hard face and heavy black robes. She was wearing thick sunglasses, and if it hadn’t been for that, Myra might have noticed the subtle familiarity of her face before she introduced herself.


    “Good morning, Myrabelle. I am Major Sensa Ferara, in service of military intelligence. I’ve been overseeing the search for this book that you stole. You’re probably wondering how long we’re going to keep you here.”


    “I was starting to wonder, yeah,” she said.


    “Well, I have good news.” She smiled. “We’ve been able to confirm your story.”


    “Oh. Um, you have?” Huh?


    “Yes, we’ve gotten all we need from you. If you’d just follow me.”


    She gestured to the door.


    “S-sure.”


    She followed the woman out into the hallway, heart pounding as delayed realizations hit her. Even out here, the oppressive suppression fields were still active.


    “Would you like to use the bathroom?”


    “I don’t need to go.”


    “Don’t be silly, you’ve been cooped up in here all day.”


    Putting a commanding hand on Myra’s back, she forcibly guided her towards the women’s room.


    The women’s room had a strange setup. There was a wire running across the room, tied to the inner lock on one end, and hooked to the toilet handle on the other, nearly taut. From the handle, it then ran directly into the toilet bowl itself.


    Separately, there was a large rope resting on the toilet tank.


    “What is… this?”


    “I suppose I don’t mind explaining,” the woman said, blocking the doorway. “When I shut the door, the wire will at the same time flush the toilet handle, while also twisting the lock, thus locking it from the inside. Then the entire wire will be flushed down the toilet, erasing its existence from the room.”


    “I see…” said Myra, resignation creeping into her voice.


    “You had some very nice razor blades on your person,” she said, reaching into a bag and taking something out. “So we can do that, or we can use this rope, like I had planned. What’ll it be?”