(AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN…) FINALLY, SOME ANSWERS!

Using the loop as a tool had seemed clever at first, almost empowering in a grim and desperate sort of way. Every reset stripped away a little more uncertainty and replaced it with information, however incomplete or unsettling that information might be, offering another chance to test a theory, to adjust her approach, or to pry a little more truth out of a situation that would otherwise be impossible to untangle. In theory, it was a kind of advantage. In practice, it was exhausting in a way Taylor should have already expected.

Whatever novelty the process once held had long since eroded, worn down by sheer repetition until only the grind remained. Learning anything this way meant collecting snippets rather than full answers, which was very exhausting, and every attempt ended the same way, with pain followed by a reset that erased everything except her memory. Progress came at the cost of dying over and over again, and even when it worked, it never felt like a victory so much as survival by the narrowest of margins.

Death itself no longer frightened her. That particular fear had also been blunted, but still, the pain remained. That brief and overwhelming agony that seized her whole awareness before the world snapped back to the beginning. No matter how accustomed her mind became to the idea of dying, her body never learned to accept it.

And beyond the pain, there was the time.

Minutes spent listening, minutes spent provoking, and minutes spent watching the same faces act in the same ways, over and over again. All of it added up, even if she was very good at ignoring the effects at the moment. As she made her way toward the front of the bus for what had to be the umpteenth time, Taylor found herself wondering how much time she had truly lost to the loops by now. Weeks, perhaps, or maybe even a month or more. There was no reliable way to know. The question lingered in her thoughts, but she clung to it anyway because it gave her something to focus on besides the dull ache of exhaustion pressing in behind her eyes while she set her plan into motion.

The plan itself had not changed from the one she already had. Taylor knew the woman was being forced to act under the threat of death, and whatever she was being made to do would kill everyone on the bus, Taylor included. All Taylor had to do was continue what she had been doing for several loops now, pushing hard and fast, lying with absolute confidence about what she supposedly knew, and relying on the woman’s guilt and terror to fill in the gaps she could not reach on her own.

That, more than anything else, was what made it so tiring. The emotional labor of intentionally provoking another person’s terror, over and over again, weighed on her in a way that no amount of looping could dull, even though it was now normalized.

Even so, she had a good feeling about this loop.

She could not have explained where that certainty came from, only that it settled over her with an odd calm as she forced her exhaustion aside and closed the last few steps. The woman was already near the front of the bus, already tense, already on the brink, and Taylor drew in a breath before letting it all loose as words.

“How dare you?” she screamed, her voice cracking with a fury she did not entirely have to fake. “We have families too. Why are you trying to kill us all?!”

The effect was immediate. Recognition flashed across the woman’s face, and for a moment she froze completely, shock locking her expression into something almost vacant. The rest of the bus followed suit as conversations cut off mid sentence and unease swallowed the space whole. Even the engine seemed louder in the sudden quiet.

Then the woman moved.

She lunged toward Taylor with a suddenness that sent a jolt of adrenaline through her, and for a split second Taylor braced herself for violence, for a blow or a desperate attempt to silence her. Instead, the woman collapsed against her, hands fisted in Taylor’s clothes as her body shook with sobs loud enough to drown out everything else.

“I cannot stop it,” she cried, her voice breaking apart. “She implanted the bomb in my head. I cannot take it out.”

The words struck Taylor harder than any punch ever could, and in that instant everything slid into place with horrifying clarity. The loops, the inevitability of them, the woman’s terror and apologies, and her absolute certainty that it was already too late all aligned into a single, unbearable truth. This was it. This was how she died. This was how they all died, every single time.

The implications registered almost immediately among the other passengers, and Taylor stood frozen as the bus erupted into pandemonium around her, barely registering the noise as people shouted over one another. Some demanded proof, others insisted it had to be a sick joke, but all their voices rose over one another in panic and disbelief. Someone screamed at the bus driver to stop, to pull over immediately, while several passengers fumbled for their phones with shaking hands, already dialing emergency services.

It did not matter.

There was no time left for it to matter. Whatever technology was used to create the bomb, whatever condition caused it to detonate, they had already crossed the point of no return.

Her world ended in pain, and then the loop reset.