Hana Greaves had died three times this morning, and she still could not remember how the fire started. Each time the world snapped back, she woke in the same rusted bunk, layered metal panels ticking as they cooled, her silver jumpsuit scorched black across the left shoulder. The handheld in her fist flashed a wrong year, then another. She pressed her palm to the burn. It was warm, always warm, as if the fire had just touched her. But the fire was the one thing the loop refused to show her. "Start where it hurts," she muttered. "Start where—" She never finished. She already knew the sentence didn't help. She had built a tool for exactly this. A compact scanner sat on the bunk's fold-down shelf, its viewing screen dark, its dials waiting. If her memory was gone, the burn itself might still hold the answer. Heat leaves a signature. She peeled off the jumpsuit and clamped the scorched fabric under the lens. The screen woke. Numbers climbed. The reading spiked into a range she had never logged before, hot and strange, not chemical, not electrical. "That's frost," said a voice behind her. Hana turned. The old woman stood in the bunk's hatch, faded denim, frost still glinting in her white hair. Three days out of a cryo-pod and she blinked at every light like it burned. Vera Doss. The one person who kept appearing in the loop, always at the edge, always watching. "You've seen this," Hana said. It wasn't a question. "You were there." Vera nodded slow. "Every time. You don't remember, but I do. The pods don't reset me clean." She stepped closer and tapped the screen. "That vine. The crystal one, with the spores. You reached for it. It flared white. Burned you before you touched it." Hana's stomach dropped. A crystalline vine, translucent, threaded with luminous spore clusters. She had walked past it a hundred loops. She had never once suspected it. "The reading matches," Hana said. She turned the dial. The signature on her jumpsuit and the frost in Vera's hair were the same cold wavelength. "It's not fire. It's the vine discharging. It scorched me and threw us both back." Vera's mouth tightened. "So it's the plant doing this. To both of us." "To both of us," Hana repeated. The words settled wrong. She had thought the loop was hers alone. It wasn't. She grabbed the scanner and the ruined jumpsuit. The moment she couldn't remember finally had a shape: a vine, a flare, two people caught in the snap-back. She knew where to start now. But knowing the cause changed the problem. The vine was still out there, still charged. To break the loop, she would have to walk straight back to the thing that killed her—and this time drag a half-frozen stranger with her.

Hana half-carried Vera across the ice. The old woman's boots dragged. Her lips had gone gray. The cryo-frost still slowed her blood, and every step cost them time they didn't have. "Faster," Hana said. "We have to reach the vine before—" She never finished. She knew the loop's clock in her bones now. Vera stumbled and dropped. Her knees hit the ice hard. "Can't," she breathed. "My legs won't answer." She blinked up at Hana, slow, like the sky was too bright. Hana grabbed under her arms and pulled. Vera slid a few feet, then stopped. She weighed too much. The vine sat far across the plain, spores glowing pale. Hana would never drag her there in time. "You'll snap back frozen," Hana said. "Every loop, worse." Her voice cracked. Vera was the only one who remembered. If Vera died here, Hana would wake alone again, guessing. A shadow crossed them. Hana spun. A man stood on the ice, thin as a blade, robed in dark cloth hung with clocks. Pocket watches swung from chains at his chest. His eyes glowed purple. He walked without haste, as if he owned every second. A six-legged beast trailed behind him, broad-backed and patient, breath steaming in the cold. "You're fighting the wrong thing," the man said. "You fight the clock. I bend it." He crouched by Vera and pressed two fingers to her throat. "Chronwell. I've watched your loops turn. You never make it this far." Hana didn't trust him. His smile sat wrong. But Vera was slipping, and this stranger moved like he knew the loop's inner gears. "Then help," Hana said. "Or move." Erasmus Chronwell lifted one hand. A watch on his chest ticked backward. The air thickened. Hana felt the loop's pull stretch, like a rope pulled slack. The snap-back she always felt coming grew distant. "A few minutes," he said. "No more. I stall the reset. You use it." He nodded at the beast. "It carries her faster than you drag her." Hana understood. She heaved Vera up and draped her over the beast's wide back. The animal held still, steady under the weight. Vera clutched its fur with numb fingers. "Go," Chronwell said. His eyes never left Hana. "But know this. Nothing I give is free." Hana slapped the beast's flank and ran beside it. Its six legs ate the distance. The vine grew closer, spores flaring white. For the first time, she was going to reach it with Vera alive. They stopped at the vine's edge. Vera breathed. Frost still clung to her hair, but her chest rose and fell. She had made it. Hana turned to thank the chronomancer. He was already watching her from across the ice, hands folded, patient as the beast. Whatever price he meant, he would collect it. But Vera lived, and the vine was finally in reach.

The vine glowed at Hana's back. Vera lay against the beast's flank, breathing shallow, her lips still gray. Frost clung to her white hair. The cryo-poison was winning. Hana knelt and pressed a hand to Vera's cheek. Cold. Too cold. She had reached the vine at last, but the woman who remembered every loop was slipping away in her arms. "Stay with me," Hana said. "You're the only one who knows what's real." Vera's eyes opened a crack. "Told you," she breathed. "Lights too bright." A trucker's dry joke, even now. She'd said it the first loop, blinking up from the ice. Hana almost laughed. Then Vera's head lolled. A sound rose across the plain. Boots. Many boots. Hana turned. Figures marched from the direction of a tall tower, its clock faces staring down like eyes. Chronwell's people. A dozen of them, then more, robed and armed, closing on the vine. They wanted it. They wanted her and Vera too. Hana understood the price now. Chronwell hadn't saved Vera out of mercy. He wanted them alive at the vine, cornered, ready to collect. She had no gun. She had a cracked handheld and a dying friend. But the vine was hers. She'd died on it a hundred times. She knew its burn. "Come get her," Hana shouted. "Come through me." The soldiers spread wide. Hana grabbed a thick vine stem and ripped it loose. Spores flared white in her fist. The nearest soldier lunged. She swung the stem across his face. He screamed and dropped, skin smoking where the spores touched him. The others hesitated. They feared the vine as much as she did. A snarl broke the pause. A gray beast with two heads bounded between Hana and the soldiers, hackles raised, four eyes fixed on the robed men. It had followed Chronwell's pack animal across the ice. Now it stood over Vera, teeth bared, guarding her. "Good dog," Hana breathed. She swung the burning stem again. A soldier fell. The two-headed beast snapped at another and drove him back. For a moment Hana held the line, one woman and one strange animal against an army, the vine roaring light behind them. Then the vine pulsed. The spores flared to blinding white. Hana felt the loop's pull yank hard. Chronwell's stall had run out. The reset came. But this time was different. As the light swallowed her, Hana pressed the burning stem to her own scorched sleeve and held Vera's cold hand tight. If they touched the vine together at the reset, maybe they'd wake together, remembering. The world snapped white. Hana opened her eyes on the ice. Her sleeve smoked, fresh-scorched. Same moment. Same loop. But beside her, Vera sat up, frost in her hair, eyes clear and awake. "Still here," Vera said. "And I felt that one coming." For the first time, Vera had woken strong. The poison hadn't followed her through.

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."

Hana gripped the portal gun. Its rings spun and warmed her palms. But she needed both hands to fire it, and the gun took time to lock a target. Across the ice, dark shapes spread out from the tower. Chronwell's soldiers. Their boots crunched closer. Vera stood behind her, still shaky on her feet. Hana could not open the door and guard Vera at once. "Move," Hana said. She grabbed Vera's arm and pulled. A crushed bunker sat half-sunk in the ice nearby, its metal buckled, its roof caved in. Hana shoved Vera through the dark doorway. "Stay low. Don't come out." Vera dropped behind a slab of cracked concrete. Frost still clung to her hair. Hana knelt at the bunker's mouth and worked the gun. The rings began to hum. A number climbed on the barrel. Thirty seconds to lock. The soldiers raised their rifles. The first shots cracked off the concrete beside her head. She flinched but kept her hands on the gun. One soldier broke from the line and ran the wrong way. He turned and fired at his own people. A young man, Chronwell's badge stitched on his chest, his uniform torn and scorched. He dove into the snow between Hana and the others. "Vaylen?" one of the soldiers shouted. "You're dead for this!" So he'd been one of them. Now he was shooting at them. The man crawled to Hana and threw down a metal frame beside her. He hit a switch. A wall of glowing light snapped up, a clear shield humming in the cold. Bullets struck it and burst into sparks. "Work your gun," Marcus said. His voice was flat, tired. "I've wanted out of Chronwell's cage for a long time. This is how I leave." He rose behind the shield and fired over it, driving the soldiers back. The gun's number hit zero. A blue tear opened in the air before Hana, spinning at the edges. She could see through it, ice and gray sky, three days back. "Vera!" Hana called. "Now!" Vera scrambled from the bunker. Hana caught her hand. Marcus held the line, the glowing barrier flaring under fire. He did not look back. "Go," he said. Hana pulled Vera through the tear. The cold snapped shut behind them. They landed hard on fresh ice. The tower stood farther off here. The vine had not yet burned. The soldiers were gone. So was Marcus. Vera sat up, breathing hard. "We made it." Hana stared at the empty snow where the man had stayed. She had reached the loop's start. But she'd left someone behind to hold the door, and the gun's rings had gone dark and cold. One charge. She'd spent it. There was no jumping back now.

Hana sat on the fresh ice and shook her cracked handheld device. The screen flashed a year, then another, then a wrong one again. She had jumped back through the portal to the loop's origin. But she could not prove it. The numbers on the little screen jumped and stuttered. If she'd missed the mark, even by a day, the vine would fire and snap her back with nothing gained. She needed to confirm the moment before the spores lit. "Vera," Hana said. "I can't read it. The screen's dead behind the crack. I need—" She stopped. Her hands were shaking too hard to finish. Vera pointed across the ice. A man walked toward them from a wrecked hauler, a leather satchel bouncing at his hip. A dry sprig poked from the band of his wide hat. He moved slow, blinking at the gray sky, reading it like a page. "You two look lost," the man said. "Miles Ashford. I carry news between the camps. Been walking these flats longer than I care to count." He eyed Hana's scorched jumpsuit, then her flashing device. "That thing's fried." "I need the date," Hana said. "The exact one. Right now." Miles tipped his head at the tower on the horizon. "Third morning since the cold snap broke. I mark the days by the ice melt and the courier drops. You're standing in it." He named the day. It was three days back. The origin. Relief hit Hana so hard she almost dropped the device. She had landed right. But the flashing screen would fail her again the next time she needed it. She needed a real display, not a dead one. "Your device," Miles said. He crouched and studied it. "Screen's the only broken part?" "The guts still work," Hana said. "Just can't see them." Miles jerked a thumb at the wrecked hauler. "Old cockpit's in there. Dials, screens, half of it cracked, but some still light. Pull a panel and splice it in." Hana ran to the hauler. Inside, a battered control board hung from bent brackets, worn dials and cracked screens crammed together. One small readout still glowed faint green. She pried it loose, stripped the wires, and wired it to her device. She held her breath and thumbed the switch. The salvaged screen flickered, then steadied. Clean numbers. The date held firm. No more flashing. She could finally trust what her device told her. Vera gripped her shoulder. "Now what?" Hana watched the far tower. Somewhere inside, three days from now, Chronwell would fire the vine and lock the loop. But he wasn't there yet. She had arrived before him, with time to spare and a screen she could read. "Now we stop him before he starts," Hana said. "We find the vine before it burns."