Chapter 8 · The Loop Cracks

"You think you can break me?" Kira slammed her fist into the cell wall. Blood smeared the stone. "I've died forty-three times. Forty-three. You want to know what that does to a person?"

The guard outside her cell didn't answer. He never did. Same blank face, same shift change in six hours, same keys jangling at his belt.

"Hey." She pressed her face to the bars. "I'm talking to you."

Nothing.

"Fine." She turned back to the wall. Her knuckles were already healing—one of the perks she'd kept from loop seventeen, when she'd killed that alchemist in the third round. Accelerated regeneration. Not fast enough to matter in a fight, but enough to notice.

Enough to know something was breaking.

She'd woken up wrong this morning. Not the usual jolt of awareness, gasping in her bunk with phantom pain screaming through her chest. This time she'd opened her eyes slowly, like surfacing from deep water. The cell felt different. Smelled different. The mold in the corner had spread another inch.

"That's not supposed to happen," she said to the empty cell. "The loop resets everything. Everything."

She crouched down, studying the mold pattern. Yesterday—or the last loop's yesterday—