Chapter 28 · After the Ninth Minute

The reset hit different this time.

Seren woke on cold tile with Ian's blood still wet on her hands. Except it wasn't. Her hands were clean. The detonator sat three feet away, blinking its patient red countdown. Eight minutes fifty-one seconds.

But she remembered the blood. All of it. Sixty-three loops of it. Three years of missing Tuesdays. The way Ian's face had gone gray when he crushed the anchor. The sound it made. Wet. Final.

She pushed herself up. Her head didn't hurt. That was wrong. That was new.

Every other reset had felt like waking up drunk. This one felt like waking up with someone else's entire life downloaded into her skull. She knew things. Ian's apartment code. The smell of his coffee. The exact number of times she'd died by bullet versus blade versus drowning. Forty-seven, twelve, four.

She knew she'd loved him. Three years ago. Before the memory wipe. Before she'd signed the authorization telling him to kill her if she ever came back wrong.

She'd come back wrong.

"Ian."

He was slumped against the server rack ten feet away. Same position as last loop. But last loop he'd been upright. Talking.