"Eight thousand four hundred and twelve."
Vera's hand freezes on the file drawer.
"That's how many times I've failed, right?" Callum shoves the folder across the desk. The number sits there in neat typewriter font like it's nothing. Like it's not his entire life reduced to a failure count. "So which loop is this? Because the file says nine, but those numbers don't match."
Vera closes the drawer. Doesn't look at him. "You don't understand what you're reading."
"Then explain it."
"I can't."
"Can't or won't?"
She finally turns. Her face is careful. Too careful. "Callum, there are rules—"
"Screw your rules." He's on his feet now. The archive feels smaller than it did five minutes ago, all those shelves pressing in. "My mother's name is on that list. Next to my birth date. You knew she was involved and you let me walk around campus like an idiot for four loops."
"Five," Vera says quietly.
"What?"
"This is your fifth loop. Not your fourth."
The air goes out of the room.
Callum sits back down. His legs just sort of give up. "I don't remember a—"
"No one does. That's how the wipe works." Vera pulls a second file from the drawer. This one's thicker. Older. The edges are yellowed and someone's spilled coffee on the cover. "Loop memory is unstable. Every reset, you lose pieces. Sometimes whole runs. The experiment counts every iteration, but your conscious memory only holds the ones that... stick."
"Why do some stick and others don't?"
"No one knows."
Callum reaches for the thick file. Vera's hand slams down on top of it.
"Not that one," she says.
"Why not?"
"Because you're not ready."
"I'm twenty-nine years old, I've died at least five times that I know about, and my dead mom is apparently part of a time magic experiment that's killing eight hundred people a day." His voice cracks. He hates that it cracks. "When exactly do I get to be ready?"
Vera's jaw tightens. For a second he thinks she's going to throw him out of the archive. Then she pulls her hand back.
"You have eighteen minutes," she says. "Evan starts the circle at six forty-seven. The ward destabilizes at eleven fifty-three. If you're still on campus when it collapses, you die and reset and we have this conversation again."
"So tell me what I need to know in eighteen minutes."
"It doesn't work like that."
"Then how does it work?"
She stands. Walks to the far end of the archive where the shelves turn into a solid wall. Callum's been down here three times now and he's never noticed that wall before. It's stone. Old stone. The kind that belongs in a castle, not a 1970s academic building.
Vera presses her palm against it.
Nothing happens.
She closes her eyes. Presses harder. Her lips move but no sound comes out.
The stone ripples.
Callum's out of his chair. "What the hell—"
"Quiet."
The ripple spreads. The wall isn't solid anymore. It's like looking at water, except vertical, except the water is gray stone and it's bending in ways that make his eyes hurt.
A seam appears.
Then a crack.
Then a door.
Vera drops her hand. She's sweating. "We have fifteen minutes now. I just burned three holding that open."
"Holding what open?"
"The part of the archive they don't want you to see."
She steps through.
Callum follows because what else is he going to do.
The air on the other side is different. Colder. It smells like copper and old paper and something else, something that makes the back of his skull itch. The walls here are covered in symbols. Not the neat academic runes from his Intro to Glyphwork textbook. These are jagged. Desperate. Someone carved them fast and angry.
"Twenty years ago," Vera says, and her voice echoes wrong, "a man named Nolan Greer tried to reverse a death."
Callum's heard that name. Associate Dean. Teaches one graduate seminar a year and spends the rest of his time in faculty meetings.
"His daughter was in a practicum accident. Summoning circle malfunction. She died in the hospital three hours later." Vera runs her hand along the wall but doesn't touch the symbols. "Greer was one of the best time mages in the country. He thought if he could isolate the moment, create a contained loop, he could go back and fix the circle before it failed."
"Did it work?"
"No." Vera stops in front of a second door. This one's metal. Reinforced. There's a lock, but the lock is melted. "He trapped forty-three students and five faculty members in a three-day loop trying to save one girl. By the time the Department of Magical Regulation broke in, most of them were catatonic. They'd lived the same seventy-two hours over and over for six months."
"Jesus."
"The DMR shut him down. Banned human-loop experiments. Greer lost his tenure, his daughter stayed dead, and the university paid out settlements for a decade." She pushes the metal door. It doesn't budge. "But Greer didn't stop."
Callum's starting to see it. "He's running the campus loop."
"Yes."
"And my mother—"
"Was part of the first test cohort." Vera finally looks at him. Her eyes are hard. "She was a graduate student. Temporal magic research. She volunteered."
The itch in Callum's skull gets worse. "Volunteered for what?"
"A two-hour loop. Controlled environment. Nothing dangerous. Just proving the theory worked." Vera's hand is shaking. She shoves it in her pocket. "Except it didn't work. The loop destabilized. And instead of two hours, she got trapped for—"
"How long?"
Vera doesn't answer.
"How long, Vera?"
"We don't know. When they finally pulled her out, she couldn't speak. Couldn't recognize her own face. The loop had burned through her memory, her identity, everything. They put her in a medical facility upstate and she disappeared six months later."
Callum's hands are fists. He didn't tell them to be fists but there they are. "You said disappeared. Not died."
"I said disappeared."
"Why?"
"Because no one ever found a body." Vera pulls a key from her pocket. Not a normal key. It's made of something that looks like glass but bends like metal. "And because three people reported seeing her on campus the week before Greer started the current experiment."
She slides the key into the melted lock.
It shouldn't work. The lock is slag.
But the door opens.
The room beyond is small. Empty except for a circle carved into the floor. Not a summoning circle. Callum's seen enough of those to know. This is something else. The symbols spiral inward, tighter and tighter, until they vanish into a single point in the center.
A trap.
"Greer thinks he can fix it," Vera says. She won't go past the threshold. "He thinks if he runs enough iterations, collects enough data, he can find the moment where it all went wrong and pull her back."
"That's insane."
"Yes."
"And he's killing eight hundred people a day to do it."
"Yes."
"So why haven't you stopped him?"
Vera's face does something complicated. "Because I can't hold memory outside the loop. Every time I try to leave campus, I forget. By the time I'm ten miles out, I don't remember why I left. I come back and it starts over."
Callum stares at her. "You're trapped."
"We're all trapped. You just got here late."
Something moves in the circle.
Not a movement. A shift. Like the air just remembered it was supposed to be somewhere else.
Vera grabs his arm. "We need to go."
"What was that?"
"The loop boundary. It's thin here. Sometimes things bleed through."
"What things?"
The shift happens again. Stronger this time. The symbols on the floor start to glow.
And then Callum hears it.
A voice.
Faint. Distant. Coming from the center of the circle where there's nothing but empty air.
"Please," the voice says.
Vera goes white.
"Please," the voice says again. It's a woman's voice. Shaking. Desperate. "If anyone can hear me—"
Callum takes a step forward.
Vera yanks him back. "Don't."
"That's—" His throat won't work. "That sounds like—"
"I know."
"My mom used to—when I was a kid, she used to—" He can't finish. Can't breathe.
The voice is crying now. Soft. Broken. "I've been here so long. I don't remember what I look like. I don't remember my name. But I remember I had a son. I remember that. Please. If he's out there. If someone can tell him—"
The glow flares.
The voice cuts off.
The circle goes dark.
Callum's on his knees. He doesn't remember falling.
Vera's pulling at his shoulder. "We're out of time. Callum, we have to—"
"That was her."
"I know."
"She's in there. In the loop. She's still—"
"I know." Vera's voice cracks. "But if we don't leave now, you'll die and reset and you won't remember any of this."
Callum looks up at her. His face is wet. When did that happen. "How do I get her out?"
Vera doesn't answer.
"Vera. How do I get her out?"
She closes her eyes. "You break the loop."
"How?"
"I don't know. No one's ever done it."
The building shudders. Somewhere above them, someone screams. The ward is starting to collapse. They're out of time.
Callum stands. His legs are shaking but they hold. "Then I guess I'm going to be the first."
Vera looks at him for a long moment. Then she nods. "Loop ten starts tomorrow. If you make it through tonight, find me. I'll tell you the rest."
"There's more?"
"There's always more."
She shoves him toward the door.
Behind them, in the circle, the symbols start to glow again.
And his mother's voice whispers one more time: "Callum."