Day 4

[LUCK] UH OH: SYSTEM ERROR

Recalibrating...

Sham was awoken by his bed collapsing beneath him. One of the legs—the one at his head away from the wall, inconveniently—buckled beneath him, sending Sham tumbling towards the floor and hitting his temple on the corner of his bedside table in the process.

He staggered to his feet, dazed by the blow to the head, and touched at his temple. His fingers came away… sticky.

Blood.

Who would’ve thought he’d suffer more harm in his own bed than when he’d been sneaking into the warehouse of a shadowy organisation? Certainly not Sham.

He grabbed at a dirty cloth, pressing it to his head where the gouge must have been, stemming the flow of blood. It stung.

Sham hissed through the pain as he pulled himself to his feet, scouring the inside of his apartment for that old flat cap he had somewhere. He found it—in his underwear drawer, no less—and used it to hold the filthy bandage in place.

‘Remember your eighth birthday, Sham?’ the voice croaked.

‘What?’ he replied. That was about all he could muster when talking to disembodied voices.

‘You slipped and fell, didn’t you? Awkward boy. Slams his head on the ground, cuts it. Hurts it. Blood everywhere. Ruins the whole day. You remember, Sham?’

The memory began creeping back, clouded at first as it emerged from that alcohol-marinated brain of his. But then, oh-so quickly, full of colour. Full of life. Full of… pain.

‘I remember,’ Sham said, managing to wrap the words around an unexpected gulp. ‘Any reason you want me to?’

He waited, still, listening out for the bodiless voice, but no answer came.

‘Right,’ the time traveller muttered, ‘Well I’m glad we did that.’

He listened out again for a rebuttal, and heard nothing. Nothing except the four tiny feet of an unwelcome guest. Sham turned to the source of the noise, but could see nothing. The rat was in the crawlspace; just what he needed right now.

It would have to wait, Sham decided. There were a little over five days until the Target unleashed her power, and he was… well he had no idea how close he was to finding her, but he suspected the answer was “not very”. That was the thing about investigations, Sham supposed—they weren’t like the old detective books he read as a kid; in real life, you didn’t know how close you were to solving it until it was over.

Sham stood from the floor slowly, using the broken bed for support as he heaved his heavy limbs up. He was truly feeling the activity of the past few days, his body groaned with an achy pain with every movement. All this wasn’t good for him. He wasn’t built for this. Not since he’d got sick.

Only once he found that he could, Sham took a shower in the form of a splashed face, grabbed the nearest and least foul-smelling clothing options, and stepped out the door.

And then back inside again; out there, it was raining hard, and Sham hadn’t dressed for the occasion. Such foul weather could only make his investigation harder. It would make those he spoke to more closemouthed, more miserable. It would make travel around the city more difficult, slower. It would make today a nightmare on a cataclysmic level.

Sham hated the rain. He really couldn’t express that enough.

He took a deep breath, and, now dressed for the weather, stepped once more into the torrential downpour. As he made his way down the external staircase, he grabbed at the handrail to support him, not fancying his chances of not slipping on the wet metal in his worn shoes. He twisted around the corner of the stairwell, still gripping the rail, and the movement tore a rip in his jacket sleeve.

‘Gods… damn it!’ Sham cried aloud, already ticked off by the poor weather but now even more so.

[LUCK] OOPS: SYSTEM ERROR

Recalibrating...

As if in answer, the gods made him slip. His arse collided with the hard floor, leaving it not only sore, but wet, too. It was truly rotten… luck.

Ah.

Sham didn’t need the voice in his head to tell him what he’d forgotten. He could remember on his own the scribbled message on the boono he’d consumed yesterday. The price that had to be paid.

Bad luck to follow.

The message was only ominous in hindsight. Only terrifying now that Sham was grasping the truth of it. Luck had been in his favour yesterday—and it had been a good thing too, considering all the crazy he’d gotten involved with—but today… it would conspire against him. It would even out. It was the price.

Sham closed his eyes, letting the rain wash over him, and embraced it. He hated it, sure, but it was going to be the least of his concerns on this particular day. All he could do was continue the investigation and try to stay out of trouble. Try. And hopefully succeed.

At least the place he was headed to was surely safe. Surely lacking in dangers of any shape and form. It was considered a church, after all.

The Church of the Loopkeepers was nothing like the temples of old. There were no towering columns, no intricate stained glass, no foreboding statues depicting strange messiahs. No—there was nothing of the sort in the area of the city unaffectionately known as the Crater. This district—once the old marketlands, before the Commercial District had its modern function—had been levelled in the war. None of the old buildings remained. It hadn’t been blown up, but the structures toppled by the fires had never been rebuilt, leaving… well, “the crater”.

The new regime had promised that they were ushering in an age of prosperity, of course. Like the old monarchs had never allowed. But here the city was, almost a decade later, and still wealth only seemed to flow in one direction—towards the people at the top. If the current government had actually fulfilled their promises, this so-called Crater would have been built over long ago. It was funny how quickly principles died in the face of true wealth.

Not ha-ha funny, of course.

Sad funny.

But funny none the less.

So, in the face of all this devastation the “church” of the Loopkeepers was little more than a bunch of huts surrounding a dying bonfire. Its flock was perhaps more of note than the buildings themselves—and perhaps the flock was what a church really consisted of, at the end of the day—dressed in their flowing emerald robes, each of them covered in strange markings. No. Not strange markings. Tattoos. Just like the guy Sham had come across in his search for Kryl.

Sham approached cautiously, sizing up the members of the church more and more with every step. They seemed… normal? Not the social outcasts he’d been led to believe over the past couple of weeks. Not the criminals that the Citizen’s Police had hunted. Not vermin, which was the most malicious description of them that he’d heard.

He picked out a member of the crowd of Loopkeepers who seemed less busy than the rest. The young woman sat still, on a log, her eyes gazing in to the steaming embers of the bonfire, the rain pelting her robes.

Sham approached slowly, his eyes on the woman and not on the ground. As such, he didn’t notice the loose log, and he tripped, sending himself staggering forwards and falling to the floor. He pushed his hands out instinctively as he toppled, and found them pressing into the burning embers.

[LUCK] HERE WE GO AGAIN: SYSTEM ERROR

Recalibrating...

He hissed as he pulled himself away, and turned to see the woman already on her feet, rushing over to him with a pail of water.

‘What bad luck,’ she said, her voice silky smooth.

Sham forced a smile as he pushed his hands into the cold water, the liquid stinging his fresh burns. ‘Tell me about it.’

He looked back up to the woman holding the bucket, and saw upon her face a peculiar smile. ‘We heard you might be coming,’ she said.

‘Oh?’ Sham replied. ‘Who from?’

‘A lost lamb.’

Right. Cryptic answers. Just what he needed. And also, somehow, exactly what he should’ve expected; this was a church, after all. ‘I… see,’ Sham mumbled. ‘And did they tell you why I’d be coming?’

The young woman grimaced. ‘Because you’re looking for them, are you not?’

Sham jolted his head up, pulling his vision away from his burnt hands and instead to the woman in front of him. ‘You don’t mean Kryl?’

The woman nodded. ‘Kryl, yes.’

‘Do you know where he is? Where I might find him?’

‘No.’

Sham sighed. ‘Look. I’m kind of on the clock here. Time’s running out. Can I—’

‘Are you sure you don’t have all the time in the world?’

‘Can I speak to whoever’s in charge here?’ Sham asked. ‘My questions, they’re important. They—’

‘Yes,’ the woman said.

‘Yes?’

‘Yes, you can speak to the person in charge. You’re doing so right now, in fact.’

Sham took a step back, sized the woman up once more. She was young. Early twenties. Far too young to be leading an organisation as large as this, surely. He’d been imagining—

‘What?’ the woman asked, interrupting his train of thought. ‘You were expecting older? Age is no substitute for wisdom. And I may not be as young as I look.’

The time traveller shook his head. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but I really don’t have time for these games.’

‘There that word is again.’

‘In a few days, there’s going to be an act of domestic terrorism,’ Sham said, his tone hard, expecting these last two words to shock the woman in front of him into answering his questions. ‘And I think Kryl might be the only one who can stop it. Do you understand? I need to find him. It’s a matter of life and death.’

The woman’s expression didn’t change, staring patiently on as she waited for Sham to finish. ‘I can’t help you,’ she said, and then—before Sham had a chance to interrupt—continued, ‘We all have a part to play. And mine is not to help you in this, even if I did know where he was.’

‘So… you don’t?’ Sham replied, the woman’s circular language driving him increasingly insane. ‘You don’t know where he is? You can’t help me at all?’

‘The police… they leave us alone if we don’t attack the mechanisms of power. When we try to change things… that’s when they come for us. That’s when they call the members of my church criminals. Vermins. And Kryl… well, he’s not just trying to change one thing, he’s trying to change everything. So of course they’d be looking for him. If he’s still out there, this time, it’s because he’s hidden himself so well that even they can’t find him.’

Sham put his heads in his hands, then regretted it immediately, the burns from the dying fires igniting upon contact. ‘To confirm, then: you don’t know where he is, but even if you did, you wouldn’t tell me.’

‘As I say, we all have a part to play.’

‘In what?’ Sham replied, his voice strained with the increasing desperation of a man seeking answers and getting none. ‘A part to play in what?’

The woman smiled. It was warm, kind. ‘In the Loop,’ she said. ‘The one that you’re just starting to remember.’

And then before Sham had a chance to ask just what the fuck that meant, all hell broke loose.

They came en masse, a dozen members of the Citizen’s Police pouring into the encampment at Sham’s rear, another dozen ahead of him. Each of them carried revolvers in worryingly shaky hands, their trembling fingers hovering over the trigger as they each pointed them at the nearest member of the church’s flock. It wasn’t difficult to tell which of these men and women were in charge—not just because they weren’t wearing the typical burgundy uniform, but because they emitted an air of authority.

This man approached the woman Sham had been talking to with an intense glare—one that the head of the church returned in kind. ‘You are Ariel?’ he barked.

The church leader paused before responding, looking the man up and down and taking in perhaps all that Sham had already noted—the missing earlobe, the multiple holsters, the freshly pressed black uniform. ‘Josiah,’ she replied.

The man—Josiah—raised an eyebrow. ‘Have we met?’

‘In another time,’ Ariel responded. ‘In another place.’

Josiah said nothing more to the church leader, only turning away and barking to one of his reportees, ‘Get the civilian,’ and then to another, ‘Guard her.’

A man in burgundy took great glee in approaching the head of the church with his weapon raised, a wide grin on his face and matched by his sparkling eyes. It took Sham a moment to realise that he recognised this man—five days from now, in another timeline, he and Mona would called him Captain Dickhead.

Sham took a moment to kick himself that he’d been caught up in all this. Surely, with the Recollection skill, he should’ve remembered this happening. Should’ve known to avoid it. What was the point in having this skill if—

‘Can’t remember what hasn’t happened before,’ the voice jeered.

Huh. That was right. This—a police raid on the Loopkeeper encampment—he would’ve heard about. Would’ve been all that those in the Harbour District would talk about, at least for a day or two. The residents there always took a particular enjoyment when the boot of the law came down on someone else for a change.

‘You’ve changed things, Sham,’ the voice continued. For a moment there, it almost sounded like someone he knew. He could feel his subconscious stirring with a growing distress, and put the thought out of his mind. It was better to live in ignorance.

Then another familiar face arrived, and everything started to make sense. As Riot approached the surrounded Loopkeeper encampment, she locked eyes with Sham, then narrowed them. She hadn’t accounted for his presence there. And Sham hadn’t accounted for her when considering his impact on the rivers of Fate.

‘Is this her?’ the man in black asked Riot, pointing to the church leader.

Riot nodded. ‘She’s the one.’

The woman now confirmed to be Ariel shot Riot a look. Not one of anger, or despair, but one of acceptance. She even flashed her a forgiving smile.

‘What are you doing here?’ Sham asked of Riot.

The woman’s eyes, only upon being interrogated, darted away from Sham. She gave no answer.

It was the man in black who acted next. He flashed a nod to Captain Dickhead—whose real name was still unbeknownst to Sham—and thus began the arrest.

‘I’d read you your rights,’ Josiah said, strolling casually up to the church leader and then coming to a stop so as to loom over her, ‘But I think you already know you don’t have any.’ He punctuated the end of this sentence by heaving up a globule of saliva and spitting it at Ariel’s face.

The church leader’s expression didn’t falter, her stare didn’t break.

This only seemed to anger Josiah more. ‘In fact…’ he said, ‘Why don’t we arrest all your friends, too?’

‘On what charge?’ Ariel replied.

‘Oh, same as you—kidnapping and suspicion of murder.’

Another green-robed church member wrestled with his arresting officer. ‘Murder?’ he reiterated. ‘Of who?’

It was Riot who responded. ‘Of Kryl Resnuc.’

As Sham began to understand what had driven Riot here—what had caused this change in the timeline—he felt strong hands grab his wrists, wrestle them behind his back. ‘I’m not—’ he started, meaning to tell the officers that he wasn’t wrapped up in this, but he was cut off by one mighty blow to the back of the head.

‘Bad luck indeed,’ the voice said.