Didn’t know I could trust you at first, did I? I still ain’t really sure why I gave you the job the first time to begin with. The last poor fuck who dropped into my lap—what was his name, Kryl?—tried his level fucking best to kill me a few times. Even succeeded a couple of times. Just enough that he realised it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to how the loop played out.

But then you come along, and instead of doing you in before you could return the favour, I offer you a job? Why? Some fucking about with skills—or boono—I’d guess. It didn’t matter. Soon as I came to my senses I sent some people after you, didn’t I?

You what?

Oh. Yeah. Just the first time. After that… well, I knew you’d come through, didn’t I? And no detour off to see the Old Bill that time, neither. Felt funny about giving you the vial that first time, and I wouldn’t’ve if Gres hadn’t been about. But when I realised you remembered… Well, then suddenly you were my ticket out of this fucking nightmare.

Look; let me turn the clock back a few dozen loops. Let me give you some bloody context.

‘Still ain’t see the signal, boss,’ one of Asa’s associates whispered.

It was dark. About as dead as night could be. Asa hadn’t seen a single soul for the best part of an hour, and only a handful in the hour before that. Most of the city was sleeping, but out there, somewhere, an automobile chock full of boono vials was approaching. He couldn’t have chosen a better hour for some good old fashioned robbery if he’d sorted the schedule himself.

Asa fingered the weapon on his holster; an old revolver that he would’ve replaced if it hadn’t been his Dad’s. Something about this particular weapon felt right, for lack of a better word. Like none other would fit.

Asa’s people fidgeted, shuffled from foot to foot. Their target was running late. Shouldn’t have been a surprise; when did the mechanisms of government run on time? ‘Give it time,’ he said, and the shuffling stopped.

Minutes passed. Silence except for a shout on a distant street; nothing to do with them. Asa stared out of their vantage point between the shutters of an abandoned store, his eyes piercing the shadows to the end of the street. And then…

A flash. Another. A third.

A tilted mirror, reflecting the light of a gas lamp to Asa and his crew.

The signal.

‘Boss, I—’

‘Hands on weapons,’ Asa ordered. A satisfying slap of flesh on metal followed.

The automobile turned the corner, beams pouring from its front to light its way, casting long shadows across the cobbled streets of the Commercial Zone. It trudged on, closer and closer with every turn of its wheels. As the distance between Asa and their target grew narrower, the noise seemed to grow louder. Until…

An older woman shuffled into the street. Each step seemed a pain to her. Each movement of her legs difficult. She hadn’t had this much trouble walking when Asa had given her the first half of her payment.

The boono-laden automobile screeched to a halt as the woman crossed its path, its driver shouting at her, ‘Move out of the bloody way!’

The hired woman stopped right in the centre of the road, turned, and stared blankly at the driver. When he shouted again, she didn’t respond.

As the automobile’s door opened and the driver’s foot met road, Asa and gang jumped into action.

The next few seconds were a blur of shouts, of raised weapons, and the driver’s surprisingly quick surrender. Asa had one of his associate disarm the man, throwing his revolver into a nearby gutter.

‘You got another in the back?’ Asa asked, nodding to the cargo area of the great hulking machine.

The driver didn’t respond.

‘He said… you got a mate in the back of your vehicle?’ one of his employees reiterated.

The man, hands raised into the air, nodded.

‘Armed?’

Another nod.

Asa waved three of his employees to the rear of the automobile, and after taking a second to gather themselves, one of them wrenched the door open.

Three shots followed.

One—a round fired from inside the vehicle, clipping a woman in Asa’s employment on the shoulder.

The next two were fired by Asa’s associates, one from the woman who’d been hit, and were followed by the telltale sound of a body hitting the floor. A heavy sound; the bloke inside was dead before he hit the ground.

‘You aite?’ Asa called out to the injured woman.

She clenched her teeth, touched at her wound. ‘It’s alright. Barely got me.’

‘Good. Dump the body.’

Asa turned back to the terrified driver.

‘You got two options,’ he said. ‘You can either run, or—’

Asa didn’t have to finish that sentence, because the driver was already fleeing. At this point in the Commercial Zone, it would be best part of half an hour before the driver could muster any reinforcements. By that time, Asa and commandeered vehicle were long gone.

‘Big haul, lads,’ Asa declared as he opened the rear doors of the automobile back in the warehouse on End Street. ‘One of you crack out the whisky, eh? Time to celebrate, I reckon.’

‘On it, boss!’

‘Err… boss?’ a voice called out from the back of the van.

Something about the man’s tone made Asa’s stomach drop. ‘What is it? The boono? Something wrong with it?’

‘Well that’s just it, boss. This vial, here, it don’t say “luck”, it says “fluke”.’

Asa furrowed his brow. Silence swept over a warehouse that had been merry just a few moments earlier.

‘A misprint?’ someone suggested.

Asa strolled on over to the back of the automobile and pulled the vial from his employee’s hands to see for himself. Fluke, it said. Not luck. And not in the scribbling handwriting so often seen on boono vials but in official-looking, stencil-printed lettering. At the bottom of its label was a logo he didn’t recognise. CP, it read. BE ALL YOU CAN BE.

‘This…’

‘This ain’t boono,’ Asa mumbled, saying it aloud as though trying to convince himself.

He ordered another crate opened. Pulled from it a vial that said “Recollection”. There was no boono equivalent for this skill. This could only mean…

‘Fetch Gresley,’ Asa said. ‘I think we’re gonna need to make some changes to our deal.’

‘The deal stands, Mr Cuttle,’ Gresley said. His voice was la-di-da enough that Asa still wasn’t entirely convinced it wasn’t an act. ‘When the queen reigns, you will be able to openly trade in your “boono” product. You, and you alone, in return for your cooperation. That is the deal, and I am not permitted to—’

‘Oh, mate,’ Asa said, ‘the lay of the hand has changed, though, innit? This’ — he gestured to the stolen automobile — ‘changes everything. Boono is done, if what we got here is real. And based on our tests so far, it fucking is.’

The posh bloke looked Asa up and down, taking him in. Taking him seriously, for once, maybe? Asa responded by turning away and ambling over to the window of his office, putting his back to Gres. A power play.

There wasn’t any doubt about it. Not really. The moment that Asa had read the Recollection label, he’d known he was gonna take it. And here he was, only hours later, with a new entry in his Skill List. A legendary grade Recollection skill. It was funny, really; with one twist of fate all his fears about going the way of his dad had faded to nothing. These vials had real value. More than boono. More than Gres had the imagination to really understand.

‘Just what is it that you are after, Mr Cuttle?’ Gres asked.

‘Asa.’

‘Just what is it that you are after, Asa Cuttle?’

‘Close enough,’ a voice said.

Asa whipped his head around, searching for the third man in the room. He saw nothing.

The posh man raised an eyebrow at his panicked movement. ‘Something the matter?’

Asa shook his head. ‘What am I after? Exclusive rights of distribution, your sort call it.’

‘Well, that is essentially what we have already agreed upon. Your product—’

‘No,’ Asa interrupted. ‘Not of boono. Of the new stuff.’

Gres pursed his lips, wasn’t happy about it. But with a sigh, he relented. ‘Fine, Mr Cuttle. Have it your way. But I will need a few of those vials, now, to seal the deal.’

‘Fancy yourself a little stronger, do you?’

‘Not me,’ Gres replied. ‘But perhaps we might make ourselves an assassin.’ The man ambled to the door, then stopped on the threshold, looking back. ‘There is one more thing.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘There will be a sailor on Plenty Harbour tomorrow night. He has something we need, and demands one of your crates as payment. You will see to making the necessary arrangements?’

Asa nodded. ‘Sure.’

‘Good chap,’ Gres said, rapping the doorframe twice as a goodbye.

The week that followed seemed consequential until suddenly it didn’t.

On the 13th day of Harvest, Asa watched as an explosion erupted from the Tower. Yellow light swallowed it, then the entire Diplomatic quarter, then more and more of the city. The sounds of an enormous hurricane billowed around Asa’s ears as the massive amounts of energy were released. With no chance of escape, Asa closed his eyes and allowed the yellow light to take him.

And that’s when he awoke.

Nine days earlier, he found himself. Four days before the deal on Plenty Harbour. Three before the vial heist. But nobody else seemed to remember a gods-damned thing.

At first, Asa retrod the same old path. He heard about the “boono” shipment. He plotted his robbery of the transport vehicle—in just the same way, why fix something that wasn’t broke? He arranged for a third party to meet with the foreign sailor on Plenty Harbour. Only one thing changed—Gresley’s agent turning up at his door and demanding enough vials to kill a prime minister.

Asa did almost everything just as he had before, and what was he rewarded with? The same explosion that erupted from the Tower, swallowing everything in its wake, including him.

And then he woke up again.

Already it was clear where this was headed—that the explosion, or something related to it, was looping the city back in time. None seemed to remember. Not at first, at least. But then a church formed, only a handful of members initially, but growing every time the Loop swallowed them. Other people that remembered.

Asa made the journey to Crater on one of those earlier Loops. He watched the church from afar, their young leader, the terrified flock. Asa couldn’t join them, obviously—his employees would laugh him out the warehouse if he became a religious man—but he wanted to know how they were handling it all.

Truth was, they weren’t. They weren’t handling it at all. Asa knew what it looked like when people were kidding themselves, and these people had the signs of it all over them. And that wasn’t all they were showing signs of; these people were looking for voices that weren’t there, were twitching at some invisible interruption. These people had the voice in them, too, plaguing them as it had been Asa for the past few weeks. Telling him things he didn’t want to know. Making him remember the things he’d done to other people. Making him… weak.

It took a good few more Loops before Asa finally went to the source of Haven’s destruction and inevitable… un-destruction. Before he finally took a trip to the Tower.

He watched from afar as it happened. The woman that Gres had sent his way, the woman who had returned to him Loop after Loop after Loop demanding the vials, the woman he’d dared not refuse for fear of pissing off his new allies… She was the root of it all. It was her drinking the vials that was the source of the great explosion. Those vials held enough power within them to tear the city apart, and enough to throw the lot of them back in time to an earlier, safer state.

On the next Loop, he tried to keep those vials from her, but she forced her way in. On the one after, he moved the vials, kept them hidden, but the woman found them. On the one after that he never stole the vials to begin with—but, of course, she did.

Nothing, it seemed, was enough to move the city’s fate away from destruction and reanimation. Nothing would stand between that woman and those vials. There was nothing that Asa could do alone to stop it.

That was where Kryl came in.

They were civil, on the first Loop. Asa, as always, kept his cards close to his chest, didn’t let the snobby bloke know that he remembered the Loops. Kryl tried to buy the vials from him, back then. Like anyone had enough money to cover what those vials were worth. Like anyone could pay Asa enough that he wouldn’t need to worry about Gresley and his master.

When Kryl returned on the next Loop, he took a different tack. An apparently fluked-up Kryl tried to steal the automobile full of vials from right under Asa’s nose. Unfortunately the boono seemed to run out just as one of his employees spotted the intruder, resulting in a round to Kryl’s skull.

But there would always be more chances. The next time Asa saw Kryl—a few Loops later, by this point—he came with weapon in hand. Asa hadn’t had the time to react before the trigger was pulled, giving him only a half second to wonder “just how the hell did he get in here?”.

Asa’s death, however, didn’t seem to free them from the Loop either. Whatever happened in his absence had led to the same woman getting those vials, using them, destroying the Tower. And he woke right back up where he always did, on the morning of the first day.

There looked, increasingly, like there was only one way out. That in order for the Loop to be broken, Gresley’s agent would have to die. Asa couldn’t bear it any more, and if the only way to stop it was to kill someone… well, he’d done more for less in the past.

This left only one problem: how could he be seen to stop an attack on the Prime Minister? How could he save Enoch Chamber and not have a queen and her army wishing for his head? If the exploding woman needed to die, then someone else would have to do it. A puppet, perhaps. Someone gently nudged in the right direction. Someone just evil—or just mad—enough to be able to justify taking a life.

And that’s when Sham Tilner showed up.