Hana Greaves's Arc

Chapter 4 of 6

Vera sat up on the ice, clear-eyed at last. The poison was gone. But the vine still glowed at Hana's back, and Chronwell's tower still watched from across the plain. Waking together meant nothing if they woke into the same trap. Hana pulled her cracked handheld from her belt. To break the loop, she had to find where it began. The device tracked temporal signatures. It should show her the exact moment the vine first fired. The screen flashed a year that made no sense. Then another. Numbers rolled and stalled and rolled again. Hana slapped the case. "Come on. Give me one clean read." The crack ran deep across the display. Every timestamp came out wrong, decades off, useless. Vera leaned over her shoulder. "That thing's lying to you." She squinted at the scrolling dates. "Says twelve years back. Then forty. My pod's clock did the same. Frost gets in the wires." Hana stopped. Vera had woken in a cryo-pod. That sealed module sat half-buried in the ice, its own clock running the whole time, untouched by the vine's discharge. A second timepiece. One that hadn't been fried by the loop. "Your pod," Hana said. "It logged everything. Every reset it slept through." They ran to the module. Its frost-lined shell steamed in the cold. Hana wiped the round window clear and found the port. She jacked the handheld in. The pod's memory dumped across her broken screen. Raw. Steady. A log of every temporal spike the vine had thrown since Vera first froze. Hana's device couldn't read years. But it could read gaps. She lined the pod's clean timestamps against the vine's pulses. The pattern locked. Each spike sat exactly nineteen hours apart. She counted backward, spike by spike, to the first one. "There." She pointed at the earliest mark. "That's the start. That's the true beginning of the loop." Not the moment her sleeve burned. Something earlier. The vine had fired once before Hana ever reached it. Vera read the number over her shoulder. Her face went hard. "That's the day I woke up. Three days back." She touched the frost in her hair. "Somebody opened my pod. Somebody fired that vine on purpose." Hana looked toward the tower. The clock faces stared back. Chronwell hadn't just trapped them at the vine. He had started the loop, at Vera's pod, three days ago. That was the anchor she had to break. But the pod held one more thing. Hana pried open its lower hatch. Inside, wedged in foam, sat a compact device with glowing rings around its barrel. A portal gun. Chronwell's people had stashed it here. "He left a door," Hana said. She lifted it. The rings hummed to life in her hands. "Now I know where the loop starts. And now I've got a way to reach it before he does."