Long-press a paragraph to send danmaku
The restricted section smells like dust and old ward-work. Callum's got twenty minutes before the circle activates again, and he's elbow-deep in Greer's publication history because breaking the thing didn't work, so maybe understanding it will.
The papers are all time magic theory. Temporal anchoring. Recursive event structures. Nothing about summoning until he hits a co-authored piece from twenty-three years back.
Then he sees the second name.
E. Ash.
His hand stops.
Elena Ash. His mother's name. Right there in the author line under Nolan Greer's, in a paper about isolating discrete time frames for experimental observation.
Callum's been in four loops. He's died three times. He thought he was getting used to the unreality of it.
This makes it real in a way that punches the air out of his chest.
He flips the page. The acknowledgments section lists a grant from the Department of Defense, Signals & Anomalous Communication branch. That was his mom's unit. The one she vanished from when he was nine.
He reads the abstract twice. It's dense academic magic theory, but the bones are simple enough: they were trying to create a contained loop. A single day, repeating, isolated from the main timeline. For training purposes, it says. Safe failure states.
Safe.
Callum laughs, and it comes out bitter enough that the enchanted silence ward flickers.
Footsteps behind him.
"You're not supposed to be in here." The voice is calm. Female. Not a student.
He turns.
The woman is maybe fifty, mixed Asian, wearing a Thornwell staff pin and an expression that says she already knows exactly why he's here. Her eyes drop to the open journal in his hands.
"You found it faster than the last one," she says.
"The last what?"
"Looper." She steps closer, and Callum sees the faint scarring at her temples. Magical trauma. Old. "You're the eighth person to notice the reset. Most don't make it past loop six."
Callum's pulse is a hammer. "Who are you?"
"Vera Sun. I run the restricted archive." She nods at the journal. "I also survived the first version of this experiment. Barely."
He looks down at his mother's name again. "When?"
"Twenty years ago. Greer and your mother ran a prototype loop here. Volunteer basis. It was supposed to last one week, span three days of subjective time. Controlled. Reversible." Her mouth thins. "It wasn't."
"What happened?"
"Forty-seven people went in. Sixteen came out. The rest are still in there, as far as I know. Greer claimed catastrophic collapse, sealed the project, memwiped everyone who survived." Vera taps her temple. "I got most of mine back. Took years."
Callum's hands are shaking. He sets the journal down before he tears it. "My mother."
"Didn't come out. Officially she transferred to a classified posting overseas. Unofficially?" Vera's eyes are hard. "She's one of the sixteen still in the loop. Or she was, twenty years ago. Greer's been trying to fix it ever since."
"Fix it."
"He thinks if he runs enough iterations, collects enough data, he can collapse the loop without killing everyone inside. So he built a second one. Bigger. Used the whole academy as the anchor."
"He's insane."
"He's desperate. And he's careful. He's been wiping memories, adjusting variables, testing different catalyst triggers. The summoning circle your roommate is drawing? That's the current iteration's collapse condition. Greer's been tuning it for three thousand loops."
Callum's vision tunnels. Three thousand.
"How many—" His voice cracks. He tries again. "How many times have I done this?"
"You? This is your fourth. But the loop's been running for years of external time. Greer's gotten very good at cleaning up." Vera pulls a folded paper from her pocket. "You need to get to the old archive. Sub-basement three, under the north tower. The entrance is sealed, but if you're a looper the wards should read you as authorized."
"Why?"
"Because the first loop is still running. And if you want to get your mother out, you'll need to collapse both."
Callum takes the paper. It's a hand-drawn map, edges worn like she's been carrying it for years.
"What about Evan? The circle activates in—" He checks his watch. Fourteen minutes. "If I don't stop him—"
"You can't stop him. You tried last loop. The circle self-repairs."
"So he just dies?"
"He dies every loop. So do you. So do I." Vera's voice is flat. "The only way to save him is to break the loop. And the only way to do that is to go down there and finish what your mother started."
Callum's jaw locks. Evan doesn't know. He's up in the dorm room right now, angry and self-righteous, thinking Callum's paranoid. He's got fourteen minutes left of his life and he doesn't know.
But his mother's been stuck for twenty years.
Vera's watching him. "You have to choose. Chase him and die with him, or go down and maybe break all of this."
Callum folds the map.
His hand burns.
He yelps, drops the paper. The burn spreads across his palm, white-hot, and when he flips his hand over there are numbers seared into his skin like a brand.
2-7-7-4-1-9.
His mother's service number.
He hasn't thought about it in years. She used to write it on the backs of his school notebooks in Sharpie, joking that if he ever got lost he should tell them he belonged to E. Ash, 277419, Signals.
The pain fades. The numbers stay, faint and silver.
Vera exhales slowly. "That's new."
"What the hell—"
"The loop recognizes you. Bloodline key, probably. Greer must have coded her signature into the access protocols." She picks up the map, hands it back. "You're running out of time."
Callum looks at the numbers on his palm. His mother's numbers.
Twenty years.
He shoves the map in his pocket and runs.
The north tower is on the other side of campus. He's got twelve minutes, maybe less. His phone buzzes. Text from Evan: *Where are you? Circle's almost charged. Feel weird.*
Callum keeps running.
The tower's old section is cordoned off, yellow tape and a Facilities sign that says Structural Assessment in Progress. He ducks under the tape, takes the stairs down three at a time. Basement one. Basement two.
The air gets colder.
Basement three.
The hallway ends in a steel door. No handle. No keypad. Just a ward-sigil etched into the metal, pulsing faint red.
Callum presses his palm against it.
The silver numbers flare. The door shudders, and the red sigil splits into gold.
The door opens.
The room beyond is dark except for a single magelight, floating over a circle that looks like Evan's but older, more complex. The air tastes like ozone and blood.
And from the shadows, a voice.
"You lasted longer than the last one."
Callum freezes.
The voice is male. Familiar.
Associate Dean Nolan Greer steps into the light.