In place of hellfire was hair of the same color attached to an all-too-familiar face and weight that pressed down in unfamiliar gravity Anya’s legs could not withstand. She fell to her knees in the grass just outside the base, her head still staring at David’s horrified face illuminated by floodlights beneath the still-black sky.

  “What are you doing?” He yelled.

  She could see the dawning realization on his face that she couldn’t do it anymore.

  “Close the doors!”

  But she couldn’t.

  But she had to.

  Her legs forced her upwards in spite of her mind’s inability to process the situation. Once again David’s head was ripped from its neck with spine intact by some disgusting collection of worms and hooks amid a mass of mutilated flesh. His hair was a bloody red, the stump of his neck spraying blood every which way to cover the upper torsos of the beast with yet more, though it of course already had that oozing from every open surface in bountiful supply.

  Her arms forced the doors closed with ease. Her eyes looked them over to check their pallor, but she couldn’t see them. The only thing she could see repeated in her mind was David’s head being ripped off again and again and again. The stump of his neck separated at the left side first, ripping and tearing like fresh bread or perhaps the first miserable cut of a slaughtered pig still struggling to hold onto life. Would this happen every time? Wait. It had happened before?!

  The dawning realization nearly made her break down and scream, but there were more pressing things to be taken care of. If she really was in a time loop as it seemed, then this was a chance to start from fresh. If she really was in a time loop that would mean the opportunity to watch… herself and the others die a thousand times.

  Anya’s legs bounded forward without conscious thought, eyes finally registering that indeed her skin had returned to its prior pale but still human state as the concrete shattered redly with chips of what must have been rust. She did not bother going to the first comms room, as this would delay the overall journey to the primary comms room, where it was clear they needed to gather first. It would delay her by some minutes, but given the situation it would be better to lose a few now than many minutes later.

  Her mind was racing in a thousand thoughts, but for the moment it was hyperfixated on one thing: what to do next. Melissa was the first order of business. She needed to join the others directly, and with Melissa alive Raethor would have no reason to decay. With Raethor alive to command them and Melissa around to help them recover, it would be significantly easier to wield Synarchy. Lulululu would augment Melissa instead of the driver, and Melissa would restore each driver in turn. They may even be able to bring nutrients along both for Synarchy to consume directly and for themselves to replenish their—

  Anya’s stomach grumbled and she almost tripped from the lost concentration. It would seem that even in this timeline her hunger followed her, and in focusing on it Anya realized the hunger felt like death. Not in a metaphorical sense, in the sense she might literally die without a meal. It was an almost supernatural hunger, as though something in her soul had been stolen away and converted to energy. Now her body demanded the nutrients required to replenish such a cost, and to deny it would certainly mean spiritual death. It was a patriotic necessity that she have fifteen cheeseburgers in the next thirty minutes or she and her country would both die.

  Her mouth watered and she wondered if necrites could be eaten as Henry had proposed. Surely they could be fried up with a little butter— no! Better yet they could be deep-fried and eaten like a corndog! More than just blood was dripping on the ground. Her saliva ran thickly though for whatever reason she didn’t thirst. But the thoughts of food had distracted her for long enough to arrive at the closest primary comms room.

  Ordinarily it would be a challenge to open the doors, but Anya punched the skin lock and it kindly opened for her. She didn’t hesitate putting herself into a chair, and the base didn’t hesitate in throwing her living corpse down as it blew out her senses in connecting herself to its nerve without first strapping into one of the two stools in the fifty or hundred by ten or twenty IMPERIAL FREEDOM UNIT room whose every surface was covered in writhing veins and open flesh.

  Her body crumpled to the ground in a heap with the all-consuming pain of the body giving way to something greater than itself. It was a disorienting experience as always to find one’s vision sprawling out beyond what the brain could process. Halls and halls and halls and the dining hall and the cheeseburgers in the cafeteria and the blood covering every visible surface in the Central Command room..?

  Anya’s lips opened on the walls and her eyes covered every surface of the ceiling, but many of them were blinded. The many tongues told her what the thousand eyes confirmed— that the whole surface of the room had been painted red with blood and the floor covered in corpses. Yuna, Luther, Henry, and Yuna were all dead, and Raethor was grievously wounded. Melissa’s tan skin was covered in blood, and her uniform had been stained almost entirely the same color. Her neon blue hair was tied up in a bun as she worked, and her green nails contrasted sharply with the coiled black-white snake tattoos that wrapped her arms. It was as if the snakes’ fangs were ripping Raethor apart. But in fact it was the opposite— her venom was antithetical to death. She was hunched over Raethor, tending to his many gunshot wounds, ranting to herself about how insane the situation was.

  “I swear on my granddaddy’s corpse you’re all sons of whores!”

  “What happened here?!” Anya’s hundred voices demanded. Melissa did not respond.

  Chris’ voice was already strange to hear from all directions in a single body with two ears, but now his Spartan tone could be heard from all directions through all ears as a kind of overwhelming and internal static.

  “Peter decided Luther couldn’t be trusted and killed him, so I killed Peter and Henry tried to kill me. He failed, but only because Yuna blocked the shot.”

  Luther’s corpse was riddled in bullets. It would seem Peter had taken far more than one shot, and Anya had a feeling more than just a little fighting had taken place. The quantity of blood that dripped from the ceiling was far in excess of what four bodies could produce.

  “And what happened to Raethor?!”

  “He sustained grievous injury deescalating what happened after.” Will reported. Jesús, Alex, and Alissa were also in the room, but said nothing. Will and Jesús were across from the siblings, but all shifted their weight in place as if to say the tension hadn’t faded.

  “Hold on, I'll be right there!”

  She ripped the nerves from her arm, having only just inserted them in a single location rush to connect to the base. Blood trailed her every step, but they were not delayed by torpor and hunger. Adrenaline had injected itself deeply within her brain, and taken over all other physical and situational prerogatives. There was to time for other thought only—

  Raethor was dead when Anya arrived at Central. Melissa was still holding the body and it was clear from her face that she was exhausted. Bees whispered in Anya’s ear that she, too, had started coughing up blood, but tried to hide it for Raethor’s sake. Now, like him, she was dying.

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  Anya walked over to Chris and put her hand on his shoulder. He winced, clearly uncomfortable with the physical contact and Anya’s physically imposing presence (being six inches or more taller than him), so she quickly removed her hand. The words were soft.

  “What happened here?” The voice said, defeated.

  Chris didn’t answer. Jesús walked up behind Anya with Will in tow. He didn’t place his hand on her shoulder, but almost tried, stopping only because he was also a bit shorter than her and the gesture would have been awkward. Will could have done it, but he wasn’t speaking.

  “You spent too long in the kitchen.”

  “What?”

  “What he’s trying to say,” Will began, but Melissa interrupted.

  “Where the fuck where you? Fondling your rifle tenderly to avoid actually fucking using it!?”

  Anya didn’t clean her rifle more often than anyone else.

  “What?”

  Melissa wasn’t in shape to speak, but she tried anyway. Will interrupted her.

  “We returned from the other timeline first.” He said.

  Anya’s head started spinning and she fell to the ground on one knee.

  “You remember it?” She asked weakly.

  “Yes!” Jesús began, “Your white skin was living proof of the nature of the master rac—”

  “Shut the fuck up Jesús.” Melissa shouted. “You’re fucking Hispanic.”

  “So… what happened after Judgement? Did anyone else survive?” Alex asked, him and his sister having moved over to join the others in working out what had happened in the first iteration of this time loop.

  “No.” She guessed he was unable to see the others had been folded in on reality in the same moment he had.

  “I see.”

  “I walked into the city and found all the inhabitants burned to ash but left in the shape of statues of people, and on my way the sun rose but it was like it had already gone out. It had turned black and in place of light and warmth there was only coldness. The grass turned pink and the dirt turned sky-color. The sky itself was yellow-white.”

  “What color was your skin after the other colors inverted?” Jesús asked, anticipation eager in his voice. Anya didn’t answer him, but in doing so he understood implicitly that she was confirming his expected answer.

  “JAJA! THE WHITE RACE—!”

  “Shut up, Jesús.” Anya demanded. He complied.

  “Where was I?” Anya mumbled, distracted.

  “The black sun.” Alex answered. “What happened to the necrites?”

  “It burned everything but them.”

  Their faces hung low. Even the salvation of a ticking clock was only for their own damnation.

  “But you survived!” Alissa tried to salvage. Anya gestured at herself and quickly eviscerated this optimism. On the other hand, Anya’s temporary survival implied it was possible to outlive the ticking clock.

  “What killed you?” Will asked. Anya didn’t answer. They knew.

  There was a long pause before Anya continued speaking. “The necrites lost interest in me when I entered the city, and they began consuming the statue-people. It turned their flesh white and these greater necrites seemed to be friendly, but they had no mouths or faces. I went to the old flesh mill and tried to stop them, but they… they ate….”

  She started sobbing into her hands. They knew and let her cry. The silence was only broken when Anya herself asked the next question.

  “What happened here?” She had asked it a thousand times by now.

  Will began to speak. “We woke up at Central and fighting immediately broke out when Peter started shouting about how Luther had betrayed everyone. The shooting was over in an instant, and only stopped because Raethor threw himself into the crossfire to demand it end. If he didn’t have the Imperial Mandate I don’t think it would have. We’re unharmed because it was mostly concentrated, but if it had been allowed to go on much longer none of us would have been spared. I had already drawn my rifle, but hesitated to kill my own comrades.”

  “What about you Jesús, did you shoot anyone?” Anya’s question was clearly implying Jesús had helped shoot Luther, perhaps even posthumously. He gave a suspicious glance around the room, but

  “I’m hurt you would even ask that.” was his answer. She didn’t see any point in antagonizing him when Luther was already dead and she’d be able to ask him directly the next time around…

  It was in this moment Anya understood the gravity of the situation. She was trapped in a time loop of some eight hours and it seemed to have compressed this time around. If it continued to compress she might end up with nothing— only the act of dying beneath the black sun and reincarnating in time to die again. But even if she lived long enough to see it, how was she possibly supposed to avert this fate? Knowing something was going to happen was an entirely different matter to stopping it. Knowing a bullet had been fired was an entirely different matter to averting the sensation of being shot. You could watch a finger pull the trigger but if you weren’t fast enough and the bullet was already in the air… Well, you had always and already been shot. There was no act you could take to prevent it, only wait, and this waiting would be over before your body could even process that this always and already was now.

  The lurch was ordinarily not so pronounced. A death sentence was most comparable, waiting in front of the firing line, but those had been abolished some years back because it would damage your internal organs. It was much more efficient to simply harvest them from a living subject, as otherwise you’d have to provide external life support. But it wasn’t like the situation had anything to harvest from them. What good would it possibly do to kill all life? Anya certainly couldn’t think of any. Even if it was a locally-directed country or continent-level spell, she couldn’t see how its range could be limited to anything less than an entirely planetary hemisphere. There were many countries on the other side of the planet, but none of the empires would be spared by such an act. It would be much more efficient to infiltrate and execute the Emperor, but even in thinking that Anya’s chest tightened and her neck tensed. That must have been why infiltration was impossible.

  Still, it didn’t make sense to use a planetary weapon to strike down one empire. Then again, she hadn’t been harmed in her state of new flesh, and neither had the necrites. But as far as she knew her empire was the only place capable of manufacturing the necrosis bomb. As such, it should be impossible for another country to create necrites, even if the bomb had been improved to such a state that the produced beings could live past the rotting of their tongues and sloughing off of their skin. The beings created by the necrosis bomb had been quick to die, and human until the very end. Necrites were clearly supernatural… but the naming was suspiciously similar and Peter had been the one to name them. Was he as such aware of how the necrites were produced? He was also very keen to kill those whose flesh had begun to transition to the white state. Was there any danger in it? Anya herself had been reborn, but her mentality had seemed to stay the same. That wasn’t necessarily true, as one’s perception of one’s own mind was very different to another’s, but at the same time Anya felt like herself in this moment and was judging herself in hindsight. There was no reason to suspect the new flesh made you feel any differently than normal. Yuna had an entire leg replaced and had been a level-headed soldier for years, as had many others.

  But the Most High had also seemed aware of the situation. They had promised salvation but delivered none. Even Synarchy had not been enough. Even Judgement. Had they promised to unlock Pleroma and Colossus? She couldn’t possibly imagine how those weapons would operate, but if they did… well, Colossus had already threatened to doom the world, and Pleroma was on an entirely other level. It may have been on its own plane of existence for how weighty it felt in their world. Yet it felt like it would instantly kill her if Anya touched it. The risk was high, and if she guessed wrong about its nature could lose another hour to the creeping loss of time. The only other option was Colossus.

  “Where have Peter and Lululululu gone?”

  The others acknowledged her return to awareness and Chris answered the question with the full vibrance of his Spartan bee-like voice.

  “To find a way out.”

  “Have they gone to the heavy-weapons facility?” she asked immediately.

  “No.” Alex answered quickly. “You’re the commander, remember? They couldn’t turn them on if they tried. Besides, the Most High hasn’t activated them.”

  “Fuck.” Melissa said weakly. “See you guys on the next one, I’m not going to make it this time around.” It had been a dying gasp. How she could possibly remain so calm while dying was beyond Anya, but none of the others even acknowledged her passing. How could they? Why should they? If this really was a time loop as it appeared there was no reason to mourn the dead. Even if it wasn’t, they were soldiers and all of them had already prepared for and conquered death. There was no bridge to the Rubicon they hadn’t already crossed.