‘The fuck was that?’ Sham cried out as he sat bolt upright on the hard and uncomfortable cot.

At his side, Mona was also coming to, rubbing her eyes and blinking her consciousness back into reality. Standing by the door, Tripe was already awake, deathly still and staring at the warehouse beyond. ‘If I had this back then…’ he mumbled.

‘Yeah,’ Mona said, dipping her head to her hands and cradling it gently. ‘I know. Worse than the first one. I—’

‘How can it be?’ Sham said aloud. ‘How can it be?’

‘—don’t like this. Don’t like this at all. If the second is bad, then—’

‘The Fringe… how can the Fringe be there? Be here?’ Sham tapped at his temple.

‘—what about the third vial? The fourth?’

‘You counting on our glorious fucking leader letting us have another one?’ Tripe muttered.

Sham’s head whipped towards him. ‘You say something, Tripe?’

Tripe turned back to the room, opening his mouth as if about to give an answer. But none came, and eventually those lips closed again once more.

‘You said something about the Fringe?’ Mona asked, clearly in an apparent attempt to divert the attention away from Tripe’s bitter commentary.

Sham stared at Tripe a moment longer, then broke the eye contact. ‘Yeah. The Fringe. It… it wasn’t supposed to be there. It wasn’t supposed to be like that.’

‘Like what? I didn’t notice…’

‘It swallowed it. Swallowed it. It… how can we… how can we beat them if we can’t use the vials?’

Mona approached slowly, cautiously, her eyes narrowing as she considered Sham. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

‘Sounds like you’ve just had a bad trip, mate,’ Tripe said. ‘But I guess we all did. Command had me taking orders. In the form of… in the form of my mum?’

‘Probably something unresolved there,’ Sham mumbled.

‘Yeah,’ Mona said, ‘and they made me complete some nightmarish… nightmarish obstacle course.’

Sham and Tripe turned to face her, each raising an eyebrow. ‘Obstacle course?’

‘...It was more intense than that makes it sound.’

‘So you didn’t…’ Sham started. ‘The Fringe didn’t take the skill from you?’

‘Fleet of Foot’s been nattering in my ear all this time, so… no. I don’t think so.’ Mona turned to Tripe, asking him the same question in the form of raised eyebrows.

‘Recollection’s kinda been in charge. But, yeah. It’s there. Commands in my skill list. You sure you ain’t imagining all this? Have you even checked your own list?’

‘I…’

‘Check the list, Sham,’ Mona said. ‘Maybe this panic is all for nothing.’

‘OK!’ Sham fired back, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. ‘But it won’t be—’

SKILL LIST

Command (Common)

Hardened Liver (Common)

Reasoning (Common)

Seasoned (Uncommon)

Heart of Janus (Rare)

Magnetism (Legendary)

Recollection (Legendary)

‘—there.’ Sham froze. ‘Huh.’

‘It’s there? Just a bad trip, was it?’ Tripe heaved himself back towards the door.

‘It’s…’ Yes, it was there. But that didn’t mean there weren’t questions to answer. He knew what he’d seen; the Fringe consuming Magnetism. Or consuming its form, at least—if not the skill itself. And he certainly hadn’t heard from Magnetism since waking up. In fact, he hadn’t even heard from—

‘I’m here,’ Recollection cut in. ‘Just… thinking.’

OK. So if only Magnetism’s voice had been taken by the Fringe, then consuming the vial was what had given the void the chance to do so. But… how? And why do it at all? And why would the Fringe have made its way into Sham’s mind, but neither Mona’s nor Tripe’s?

Instead of finishing his sentence, Sham strode for the door. ‘Got to go.’

‘No!’ a voice cried behind him.

The resistance leader stopped on the threshold of the room in the warehouse rafters, and turned back to the woman who’d spoken.

‘No,’ Mona said again. ‘I’m not having you keeping stuff from us again. You didn’t tell us about the voice, and now you’re not telling us about… about what, Sham?’

‘I… I think I’m exposed. Vulnerable.’

‘To Enoch?’

Sham shook his head. ‘No. Much worse. To the Fringe. You two… you keep planning how we take down Warren. Get Verd to set us up for the next Loop. I’ll meet you there, at her apartment. You can fill me in on the plan then.’

‘You gonna trust us with that?’ Tripe asked. Sham didn’t need to roll a Reasoning check to work out that it was rhetorical. A dig.

‘Do it,’ Sham said, nodding pointedly to Mona. ‘I’ll see you then.’

As he turned back to the door, Mona called out, ‘Wait!’

He paused, again, on the threshold.

‘What are you gonna do?’

Sham smiled a sad smile. ‘I’ve seen what happens when the Fringe takes hold of a person. We’ve all seen Julya. We’ve all seen her getting worse with every Loop that passes. With every day. If she hasn’t lost her mind already, then she’s right on the cusp of it. If that’s my fate, then…’ He paused, glancing down to his dirty shoes, finding himself unable to make eye contact as he mumbled the next few words. ‘I’m gonna go find out how long I have.’

Day 5

There was only one person, really, who might be able to give Sham the answers he sought—Julya. But this was a woman in constant flux, eternally running, escaping the agents of the Legion that Enoch Chambers sent after her. Not to catch her, of course—Enoch needed her to play her part on the ninth day—but to keep her desperate. To keep her angry.

And Sham had no way of knowing where she’d be at any particular time in any particular Loop—with one exception. On the evening of the fifth day, every Loop, they had a standing appointment at the Vermillion Cup down in Lower Harbour. That had been two days from the moment Sham had set out to get answers, however, and he hadn’t wasted his time in the meanwhile.

Yes, it was possible to waste time, even in a Loop. He didn’t have eternity; not only for Riot’s sake—who he still really needed to speak with—but now for himself, as well. Only now did he realise that even if the Loop reset any physical harm that could come to him, he might not make it out intact. And just how long he had was still very much up in the air.

So he’d left End Street with a very specific destination in mind: the Library of Haven. The great library was the closest thing that this city had to a monastery—a stone structure that didn’t actually loom over the rest of the buildings in the Diplomatic District, but possessed a certain intimidating quality that made it seem taller anyway. In an effort to value this great building, the government had the brickwork regularly cleaned, with those responsible giving the task a level of attention that suggested that they too took pride in their work. Sham couldn’t help but wonder how annoyed they’d be to learn that they were trapped in a time loop, and this huge effort was being undone every nine days.

‘Yeah. Maybe keep that to yourself.’

Sham had entered the great foyer for the first time in his life to find it lined with bookshelves so tall that they required rolling ladders to reach the tomes on their top shelves, and the aisles full to the brim of scholars—all of whom were wearing the fine suits and dresses associated only with the Sunrise, Commercial and Diplomatic districts, of course.

There, he’d gone to work, doing his best to ignore the snarls and curious glances from men and women of this city far posher than him—and perhaps more “worthy” of using the library. It took him a moment to work out the system, especially when the smirking librarian wasn’t the least bit helpful, but soon enough he found what he was looking for: a numbered shelf reference, where he would find information relating to the Fringe.

Considering it was the greatest environmental catastrophe in Haven’s history, there really wasn’t all that much information on it. Sham had found only a few shelves of books on the subject, and—as if designed to piss him off—they were next to two dozen shelves filled with books about Haven’s history of firefighting. This was an important subject in a city as densely packed as Haven, of course, but Sham would’ve thought the Fringe might warrant a similar amount of information.

Setting his irritations aside, Sham had begun to leaf through the books one by one. He learned about the Fringe’s impact on agriculture as it consumed farmland—or at least, that’s what people thought it had consumed, as nobody could quite remember. He learned about how it had impacted key transport route across the sea, damning the Harbour District—which had been so reliant on this trade—to even more poverty than before. And he learned about the psychological impact of the Fringe upon Haven’s citizens. Or, rather, upon the Sunrise District’s citizens, as apparently only they had been worthy of study.

What Sham didn’t find was…

‘Anything useful?’ Recollection correctly guessed.

He had left the library disillusioned, but increasingly with the feeling that the information was out there, if kept from him. Who knew just how much the government was controlling—or even changing—the information held within the library?

And so, on the evening of the fifth day, as Sham sat nursing a rapidly cooling pot of tea, he felt no more equipped to investigate the matter as he had two days earlier. But that was that, and even a perfectly brewed pot would not make up for it.

The woman he’d come to meet sat down opposite him at their usual booth, and kept her mouth firmly shut.

‘Hi,’ Sham ventured.

Julya nodded her own greeting.

‘How are you doing?’

She shrugged. ‘Do you really… want an answer to that question?’

‘Are you asking if I’m just being polite?’

Julya nodded once more.

‘I’m not just being polite. I care, Julya. Seems like you need someone to.’

The woman stared into the middle distance, her eyes glazed over.

‘Like I said before, I know you’re a victim in all this. To the Fringe. I—’

‘What’s this about?’ the woman asked, her eyes suddenly hardening at the mention of that word. ‘Two Loops in a row… We don’t normally… I don’t normally get to speak to someone so often.’

A pang of sadness hit Sham’s stomach at that. He wished he could do something to comfort her. To make her feel better. It was hard seeing someone—one of his people, from the Harbour—like this. The gods knew they’d suffered enough.

‘An opportunity to see if you really have that Magnetism skill, maybe?’

Recollection was right, of course. This could serve them both. A successful roll could prove to Sham that he could still power up the artificial way, and it might also allow him to give Julya just the smallest ounce of comfort.

‘Hey, I—’ Sham started, reaching forward to place his hand on Julya’s arm.

[MAGNETISM] A FRIEND IN NEED: SUCCESS

You don’t expect the sad smile that crosses Julya’s face as you place your hand on her arm. She doesn’t flinch away. She looks at you, in the eye, for the first time since she’s sat down.

‘—know all this fucking sucks for you. I know there’s probably nothing I can do, but if you think of anything, you let me know. Alright?’

‘So it does work…’ Recollection mused.

Julya’s smile trembled at the presence of some dark thought, but stabilised itself once more. ‘I… I will,’ she said.

Sham let the thought remain in the air for a moment longer, before asking the inevitable question. ‘I need to pick your brains on something. On…’ He gestured to her head. ‘Well, you know.’

The smile faded away once more, but Julya nodded. ‘Do it,’ she said. ‘I can handle it.’

‘When you take the vials, before you…’

‘Explode.’

‘Yes, before that. When you take them, do you hear from them at all? Do they exist as separate entities, in your mind?’

Julya narrowed her eyes, shaking her head. ‘No, there’s only… it.’

Sham noted the avoidance of the word “Fringe”. ‘And do you get a sense of… like…’

‘It takes them. I feel it. With every vial, it grows stronger. More powerful. The…’ She hesitated. ‘The Fringe doesn’t cause the destruction, but it rides it. It rides that power that its consumed for itself. But it lets me use it, too.’

Sham gulped, nodding. ‘OK.’

Julya only stared on.

‘I… I took a vial earlier. Magnetism—’

‘Should you be sharing all this with her?’

‘—and it… It… died? The Fringe was there, I think. The Fringe… ate it.’

‘But you still have the power,’ Julya said. ‘You can still use it.’

Sham nodded.

Julya stared into space for the longest time, her eyes glazed over once more. Just as Sham was considering prompting her, pulling her back into reality, she opened her mouth to speak once more. ‘I ain’t think you’re gonna like my answer.’

‘Tell me,’ Sham said, and echoed Julya words from minutes earlier. ‘I can handle it.’

‘You said, last time we were here. You said I put my hands on you. That the Fringe brought you inside my mind. What if… what if you didn’t make it out unscathed? What if…’

Sham’s heart dropped. ‘I brought some of the Fringe back with me.’