(AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN…) SAY PSYCH RIGHT NOW III

It took a few more deaths before the pattern became impossible to ignore.

At first, Taylor resisted the conclusion with everything she had, telling herself that she was grasping at coincidences simply because she needed something, anything, to blame. The loop had a way of doing that to her, of encouraging meaning where there might be none, because the alternative was admitting how little agency she truly had. But the repetition was relentless, and repetition had a way of carving certainty into her thoughts whether she wanted it to or not.

The woman was always there.

Every loop, every return to the bus with its familiar groan of metal and overlapping conversations, she appeared in the same place near the front. She stood gripping the same horizontal pole, her knuckles pale with tension, her face drawn tight with the same raw and disproportionate distress. She spoke the same words in the same order, her voice rising and breaking at the exact same moments, her visible panic rippling outward until the rest of the bus gradually fell quiet around her.

Taylor tested it at first with small changes, the kind that felt safe enough not to draw attention. She sat in different seats, stood instead of sitting, boarded the bus a little earlier or a little later, lingered near the door, or hovered in the middle aisle. None of it mattered. The woman remained, unchanged and unchanging, like a fixed point around which the entire loop revolved.

So Taylor watched her.

For loop after loop, the number lost to time and repetition, she did nothing but observe. She memorized the woman’s posture, the way she was hunched in on herself, the way her fingers trembled as they tightened on the pole, and the slight hitch in her breath just before her voice cracked. She listened so intently that she could recite the woman’s words alongside her, matching cadence and emphasis perfectly.

It did wonders for her mental health, in the bleak and bitterly ironic way that everything about the loop seemed to.

And yet, for all that scrutiny, she found nothing.

There were no visible devices on the woman, and she made no strange gestures, or suspicious movements, or signals that hinted at some hidden motive. There was also nothing overtly parahuman about her, nothing that screamed danger. There was only fear, thick and suffocating, pouring off her in waves so intense that Taylor almost felt she could taste it in the back of her throat.

That was what finally broke her patience.

The lack of answers gnawed at her more viciously than ignorance ever had. If the woman was responsible, then how. If she was not, then why was Taylor so certain she was connected. The questions piled up until the frustration became unbearable, until the idea of simply sitting there and dying again felt worse than whatever consequences might come from interfering.

So, in the next loop, Taylor stood up.

She moved forward before she could talk herself out of it, her heart pounding as she closed the distance. The woman was in the middle of her usual tirade, her voice trembling with desperation as she spoke to no one in particular.

“…You don’t understand. You think this is a good thing, but it’s not. It’s going to—”

“Hello,” Taylor said.

The sheer abruptness of her interruption, combined with the strange normalcy of the greeting, shocked the woman into silence mid sentence. It did the same to everyone else too. Conversations died away, the rumble of the engine suddenly seemed too loud, and heads turned as eyes fixed on Taylor as though she herself were something unfamiliar and unsettling.

For a moment, no one moved.

Stunned by her own success, Taylor forced herself to keep going before the moment slipped away. Her voice came out calmer than she felt, carrying clearly through the unnatural quiet.

“Why do I keep dying?”

Confusion rippled outward immediately. Faces creased in disbelief and concern. Someone let out a nervous laugh, clearly unsure whether this was a joke in poor taste or something far worse, while a man near the window frowned and opened his mouth as if to ask what she meant.

Taylor did not look at any of them.

She kept looking at the woman.

And the woman looked back at her with recognition.

Understanding dawned in her eyes with terrifying speed, followed almost instantly by a horror so profound it wiped every other expression from her face. Her breath hitched, and her grip on the pole loosened as though her strength had suddenly deserted her.

“You know,” the woman whispered.

It was not a question.

Taylor swallowed and nodded anyway, even though she had no idea what the woman thought she knew. Lying, she had learned during the Sophia Hess loops, could sometimes be the fastest path to the truth.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

The woman’s legs gave out.

She collapsed forward, dropping to her knees in front of Taylor with a sound that reverberated far too loudly in the enclosed space. Her hands came up, clutching at Taylor’s pant legs as sobs tore free from her chest, raw and broken and utterly unrestrained.

“I’m sorry,” she cried, over and over again, the words blurring together into something barely coherent as tears soaked into the fabric. “I’m sorry. She made me do it. She made me do it. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

The bus erupted into pandemonium after that. Shouts rose as someone tried to pull the woman back, demanding to know what was wrong with her and why she was apologizing. Taylor barely registered any of it. Her attention remained fixed on the woman at her feet and the singular, damning phrase that echoed over and over in her mind.

She made me do it.

That was how Taylor died.

But she was not frustrated this time.

It had taken a while, far longer than she wanted to admit, but she was finally getting somewhere.