Shera just had to believe that he was somewhere in the university. The university staff was on the lookout for intruders, so she just had to believe he knew how to outsmart them. Then it was just a matter of searching hard enough.

He wasn't in any of the spots Shera had shown him. He wasn't in any of the places she would have gone. He was in the attic of one of the big lecture halls, accessible from the projector room. He was sitting in the back, surrounded by piles of yarn.

"We were all worried about y-you."

"I just needed some time to myself," he said.

"Should I leave?"

He took a while to answer, but he eventually shook his head, so Shera stayed and sat next to him. He had his hands out in front of him, a long loop of yarn intertwined with the fingers on both hands. As he pushed the yarn around with his thumbs, it criss-crossed over itself into an increasingly elaborate pattern.

"I'm getting worried about that yarn lock," he said, filling the silence. "I still haven't seen the one inside Mirkas-Ballam, so I don't know if it's going to be a problem if we try to break in."

"When I heard you'd taken the yarn, I was worried you'd decided to… um…"

Lukai didn't say anything, but it was hard to ignore the long strings of yarn draped over one of the wooden boards in the ceiling, for which there was no apparent purpose, except the only one Shera could think of.

"I would go to Unkmire," he said, finally acknowledging Shera's implicit question. "I actually thought about… tying myself up here. Tying myself up with a yarn lock of my own. The university would have to bring in an expert to cut me out. I could observe and… learn some tricks for how to cut through one of these things."

"O-or you'd just be stuck forever."

"Well, the worst case is I'd be stuck until the end of the loop, right?"

"Right," Shera said.

(That still didn't explain why there was yarn hanging from the ceiling.)

"Do you want to t-talk about… it?"

"Yes," he said. She waited. "But I don't really know how. It's not the Unkmirean way. What do I say? Your friend already said everything that needs to be said."

"Isadora's not really my friend. I d-don't like her very much."

"Oh. I had wondered that, actually. Is there history between you two?"

Shera shifted on her uncomfortable wooden seat. "Not really. I d-don't know her that well. The first time I met her, we were partnered up for an exercise on freezing and boiling water. I had a hard time getting it, and of c-course she got it instantly, a-and she kept acting like she didn't know why anyone couldn't get it. When I finally got her to explain how she was doing it, sh-she had all these random, difficult steps with the aura that weren't the instructions at all. And she just told me, of c-course the original instructions were incomplete, y-you were obviously supposed to do all th-this other stuff because w-what else would make sense? D-don't get me wrong, I'm glad she's helping. She's the sharpest person in our class, and it's not even close. Myra's right about that…"

"Well, I don't doubt her ability at all," Lukai said. "She was right about everything—that sketch in the police file—it was just as I remembered. The perpetrator at the village. I really don't have anything to add."

"But I want to hear what you have to say about it anyway," Shera said.

"If you want to know what the logician's motive was, you'll need to ask my godfather," he said. "He spoke with him a lot. I barely talked to the guy."

"Yeah, but you can st-still talk about what's important to you."

Lukai bit his lip. "I don't know where to start."

"Can I ask a qu-question?"

"Sure."

(Shera now had to think of a question.)

"You seemed upset when you learned he was already dead," she said. "Why? Do y-you want to find him and demand answers? Or do you want revenge? Both? Something else?"

"I always tried to avoid thinking about this," Lukai said. "In that moment, in Ealichburgh, I was thinking, I don't have to answer that question. He's already dead, so it was out of my hands. It was such a relief. A relief until Isadora pushed the issue so suddenly. Then I got frustrated."

"Are you frustrated at me for pushing it?"

"No," he said. "Maybe a little."

"We might actually meet him in a future loop, y-you know," Shera said. "Though that's not why I asked."

"You really just wanted to know, didn't you?" There was a bit of a quiver in his voice.

Shera nodded. "It's okay if you don't know. If you want to just talk about the yarn locks or something else, that's okay. But would you think about it?"

"Since you care about the answer," he said, "I'll think about it."

◆◆◆◆◆

Since so few people had known the princess's whereabouts, it would probably be some time before her death was confirmed. Meanwhile, Myra rushed to gather information on the hotel attack before the next crisis would inevitably strike and she would be pulled somewhere else. The hotel had been reduced to nothing, and an estimated eighty to a hundred people had died, including one individual hit by debris from outside the building. Four were injured.

The forensic crater expert was there, the old guy with a slide rule on his belt, scribbling away at his notepad. Every once in a while, he looked down to perform a careful calculation, and then he got right back to scribbling.

"Hey, uh," Myra said, approaching slowly. "Busy month?"

"Hoo boy, missy, you tell me. I don't think I've seen anything like my entire career."

"So what's the verdict?"

"Verdict?"

"I mean… what happened?"

"Giant rock hit the hotel. Lotta people here saw it."

"But like… did the rock disappear afterwards?"

"Ah." Something seemed to click for him. "You're asking how this compares to the crater that killed that poor cyclist." He scratched behind his ear. "That was a real puzzler, all right. No sign of the projectile anywhere. But this one's all much more straightforward. See this here—" He bent down and picked a rock off the ground, burnt and blackened with jagged, sharp edges.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

"That's the rock that fell on the hotel?"

"Just a piece." He gestured around the area, and Myra could see other similar pieces among the debris.

"Was it a meteorite?"

He shook his head. "The lab already got back. Says it matches any old rock you'd find in the forest. Naw, this was an attack, no doubt about that. Not a well-hidden one. What's more—I'm increasingly sure that the final trajectory as it came down was controlled."

"What makes you say that?"

He tapped his notepad. "We got a lot of eyewitness reports here. The projectile did not take a natural trajectory. It hung in the air too long before rapidly accelerating downwards. Did you young ladies see it?"

"I did," Myra said. "And my friend, too…"

"It sort of came out of nowhere," Iz said. "And then it was several seconds before it landed."

"And it had like a… tail?" Myra said. "Like a comet?"

"That tail was fake as all hell, if you ask me," the old expert said. "Wanted to make it look faster, more real…"

"What would you need to pull off an attack like this?"

"Any mage could pull this off with enough training, I'd think," he said. "High-speed telekinesis of this caliber… I'd say the skill isn't common, but it's far from unheard of."

High-speed telekinesis, hm…

"Is there anything that ties this attack to the crater from a couple of weeks ago?"

"Other than the location… there's not a whole lot. I s'pose I'd wonder, if they could pull off something so slick down at the park, why's the hotel so sloppy? As far as meteorite murders go, the M.O.'s are night and day. But that other attack is still a complete mystery to me. I wouldn't put a light bowl of chicken stock in my opinion on it, if I were you."

◆

Malazhonerra's death did eventually make the news that evening, again via a bulletin that provided basically no information Myra didn't already know (though it did at least say she had died in the hotel catastrophe, rather than leaving her cause of death mysteriously blank).

Nobody even knew who was going to take up the crown. There were some random relatives that Myra heard thrown around—some second cousin of Kurtwell Raine, or the sister of Humperton's late wife—but none of these seemed particularly likely to Myra. Even if someone could pull out a line of legalese out of their ass that could be interpreted as referring to one of these people, they all had virtually no backing.

Meanwhile, after talking things over with the group, she decided to go ahead and agree to an appointment with the director of Mirkas-Ballam (though this was annoying and complicated due to the stupid way she'd arranged for communication with Vikram). There were still too many vague and confusing points about the drugs, as illustrated by one particular conversation with Iz.

"I think I know how this all works," she said in an optimistic start. "How Ben could use the drugs to wipe your memories of the time loop."

"Yeah?"

"You said before that you tried taking stimulants right before the end of the loop, but they didn't do anything. Ergo, the time loop took most of your brain state, all your encoded memories and whatnot, but it did not copy this additional chemical treatment."

"… Yes."

"Okay, so. Now imagine that it's the end of the loop. Someone like Ben injects the red drug and the green drug, and uses them to overwrite your brain with this 'photograph' of your brain from a month ago, causing you to lose one month's worth of memories. But, according to Vikram, your brain is going to regain all those memories if the green drug goes out of your system."

"Then the end of the loop comes," Iz said. "The time loop copies your brain back to the beginning of the loop. This causes all the drugs, the red, the green, whatever, to leave your system immediately. But the 'brain state' that gets copied back, all the synaptic connections or whatever, is the one you were in right then, at the end of the loop."

"You think that the loop itself is making that memory change permanent?"

"Exactly."

There was some logic to it, but all this depended on the specifics of the weird green drug persistency thing. What Myra had been imagining was that, since the green drug was temporary, your 'original' brain state without any lost memories was the 'more permanent' brain state, and thus, it was that brain state which would be carried back in time at the boundary of the time loop.

That had just been an assumption, though, one she hadn't even realized she was making. Was it even possible to get clarity on this point? Hey, how do your novel drugs interact with a time loop? That simply didn't seem like a question Vikram would know the answer to.

But there was a bigger problem.

"Ben never brings the green drug at the end of the loop, though. So he would never be able to… overwrite my brain in a way for your theory to work."

"What?" Iz seemed utterly thrown off by this fact. "Why didn't you say so?"

"I'm sure I did. That was the whole weird thing!"

Iz scrunched her face up and rubbed her forehead. "Damn it. What the hell? He doesn't bring the green drug even at the end of the loop? What's even the point? Are you sure he didn't bring it? Maybe you just didn't notice."

"No, I'm… pretty sure. There was no green drug in the event hall, either."

"Okay, well," Iz said. "Are you colorblind? Maybe he had the green drug, but you thought it was red."

"I'm not color-blind!"

Iz forced her to take a color-blindness test. She wasn't color-blind.

There were still more possibilities, Iz told her. Maybe Mirkas-Ballam always switches the color-coding from their original plans, but only towards the end of the loop, and Myra never spoke to Vikram late enough. Or maybe the green drug gets mixed in with one of the other ones.

The brainstorming session was interrupted, though, as Myra suddenly got an incoming call from Nathan on her radio. (They had finally gotten two-way radios for everyone in the chaos of trying to coordinate across the city.)

"Hey, I think you need to come by the hotel," he said. "Someone's here you'll want to see—"

◆

Myra went on her own, so she was there in an instant—or around eight seconds, rather, just as long as it took to set up the teleport. Nathan was staking out from the balcony of an unoccupied apartment from across the river. There was a pretty good view of the hotel, or what remained of it, and the various parties, mostly reporters and city officials, scrambling around. Thankfully, there weren't many police.

"I didn't recognize him at first," Nathan said. "But he has this way of walking around like he's the most important person ever, so I started paying more attention to him, and I finally realized I've seen his photo before…"

Duke Henrick Penrilla was an elderly man in a dark tailcoat, standing quietly with hard lines in his face, together with another well-dressed woman with lightly graying hair, who was kneeling to the ground, sobbing over a large black sack. It didn't take Myra long to realize that it was a body bag.

"Oh, yeah," Nathan added. "They were with some other guy earlier, but he left, I'm hoping he comes back…"

"I'm going to set up an eavesdropping spell," Myra said. As soon as she did, she was bombarded by the hoarse voice of the woman flailing around on the ground, a firehose of words that came one after another without pause.

"It's all that's left of her this city destroyed her we shouldn't have let her come here go on that hike shouldn't have let her talk to her at all she was always dangerous impulsive …"

The duke wasn't looking at his wife, just staring straight ahead at the wreckage.

They didn't have to wait long for the mystery man, who arrived on foot from the main street. The person they were waiting for was a short man, bundled up in a cloak and hood appropriate for the cold, but in a way that mostly obscured his face.

"… all that's left of her …"

"What did you learn?" The duke asked.

"… all that brat's fault I knew she was nothing good …"

"I spoke to the analyst," replied the hooded man. "He believes it is surely the fault of a skilled, deliberate attacker." Wait. Was his voice kind of familiar? Who was that?

"… who killed my daughter …"

"And what of the city?"

"… I bet she knows she always knew I could never stand her but what could I do …"

"There is little pretense to sue the city," he replied.

"… they'll all get away there's always nothing you can do …"

"Find one."

"… can't say no don't go with her can't say no to her no …"

"Not a fortnight ago, a man was killed just down at the park. You could say the city didn't take it seriously. They should have… evacuated the area in case of additional meteorites."

"… all that's left of her this is all that's left of her this is all that's left of her this is all that's left of her …"

"Would a judge agree with me?"

"… and my husband talking about the law like the law still exists …"

"Would you like to join in the conversation, dearest?"

The duchess whipped to her feet. "Like the law still exists!" she said again. "The empire's dead! Nobody knows who's going to succeed Kurtwell! The sages won't hold things together, and you are toast—" She glared at the hooded man. "—more useless than ever, you owe us everything, and what do we get?"

"Cecelia!"

"I should leave," the hooded man said, "before we're seen together with your wife saying these things."

"Okay," Myra muttered. "Now, I have to fucking know who that is."

As he shuffled away, back towards the main street, Myra didn't move from their stakeout. She summoned up a gust of wind, just enough to knock the man's hood off. In surprise, he caught it and pulled it back down, but not before she saw enough, just enough for his voice to finally click into place. It was Justice Philium Krasus.

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