The dark was wet, cold, and loud.

  The current seized them like a giant's hand, yanking them into a roaring blackness. Eliz tumbled, weightless and blind, the freezing water stuffing itself into her mouth and nose. Her injured shoulder screamed, a white-hot brand in the numbing cold. The world became a chaotic torrent of sound—the deafening rush of water, the distant, fading shouts of her companions, the thundering of her own heart against her ribs.

  She fought the panic, the soldier's discipline forcing her limbs to move. Don't fight the current. Find its rhythm. Survive.

  She broke the surface with a ragged gasp, the air somehow colder than the water. Phosphorescent fungi clung to the cavern ceiling high above, providing a ghostly, blue-grey illumination that made the rushing river look like a torrent of liquid smoke. She saw Gideon ten yards ahead, being swept around a bend, his arms flailing. Mira was closer, clinging to a protruding rock, her face a mask of terror. Of Jax and Rourke, there was no sign.

  "It leads to the flooded chamber!"

  Her own words echoed in her mind. How had she known? The certainty had been absolute, bone-deep. Not a guess. A memory. A memory of a moment that had never happened.

  The rock she was hurtling toward—a jagged spike of black stone in the middle of the river. She knew, with that same impossible certainty, that if she hit it on the left side, it would gash her leg open. A wound that would fester and kill her in three days.

  She twisted her body in the churning water, a desperate, graceless contortion. The rock rushed at her. She missed the left side, but her right hip slammed into it with a sickening thud. Pain blossomed, deep and bruising, but the skin didn't break.

  I remembered.

  The thought was more terrifying than the river.

  She grabbed the rock, her fingers finding a slippery purchase, and hauled herself partly out of the water, shivering violently. Mira was staring at her from her own perch, eyes wide.

  "How did you know?" Mira shouted over the roar. "About the passage? About the river?"

  Eliz had no answer. A lie formed on her tongue—lucky guess, intuition—but died before she could voice it. The truth was a chasm opening inside her.

  A dark shape surged through the water toward her. Rourke. He grabbed the rock beside her, hauling his massive frame up with a grunt. His pale eyes scanned her, then the cavern ahead.

  "Jax is gone," he growled. Nothing more. A simple, terrible report.

  Gideon had managed to grab a ledge on the far wall. "This way!" he yelled, pointing downstream where the cavern narrowed. "The current slows ahead! There's a bank!"

  He pushed off, swimming with strong, stubborn strokes. Rourke plunged back in after him. Eliz and Mira followed.

  The river did indeed widen and slow, depositing them onto a gravel-strewn bank of black sand. They crawled out, coughing, shivering, a bedraggled and battered remnant of a team. Gideon immediately checked his Still-Fire device, cursing as he tapped it. The needle was still dead. Mira slumped against the wall, her bandolier of dark crystals looking like a string of dead eyes.

  Eliz scanned the bank, her heart hammering. To the left, a pile of bleached, smooth stones. To the right, a curtain of hanging moss. And directly ahead, the dark mouth of a smaller, dry tunnel.

  She knew this place.

  She knew the pile of stones hid the skeletal remains of a long-dead cave fisher. She knew the moss concealed a nest of venomous glow-spiders. She knew the dry tunnel was their only path forward, and that fifty paces in, the ceiling would collapse if anyone stepped on the unstable patch of gravel just inside the entrance.

  "I need to tell you something," she said, her voice raw from the cold and the river. It sounded foreign to her own ears.

  Gideon looked up from his useless tech, his expression grim. "If it's another hidden door, save it. We're unarmed, half-drowned, and lost."

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  "It's not a door." Eliz took a steadying breath, the damp air scraping her throat. "It's... this. The river. The rocks. That tunnel." She pointed. "Fifty paces in, the ceiling is unstable. A patch of loose gravel on the left triggers a collapse. We need to stay to the right."

  Silence, broken only by the drip of water from their clothes and the distant roar of the river.

  "How," Gideon asked, very slowly, "could you possibly know that?"

  Eliz met his gaze. The truth was madness. But the world had already gone mad. "Because I remember it."

  "You've never been here."

  "I have." She looked at her hands, pale and trembling. "Not... in this way. Not in a way that makes sense. But when Hester's... things came, I knew about the passage behind her. I knew it led to the river. Just now, I knew that rock would cut my leg if I hit it on the left. I know about the spiders in that moss and the dead thing under those stones. It's not knowledge. It's memory. Like a song I've heard a thousand times."

  Mira pushed herself up. "Temporal echoes? From the distortion field? Maybe you're sensitive..."

  "This isn't an echo." Eliz's voice was flat, final. "It's too specific. Too actionable. It's a memory of things that haven't happened yet. Or... of things that have already happened, but differently."

  Gideon stared at her, his engineer's mind wrestling with the metaphysical absurdity of it. "You're saying you're... foreseeing? Like a prophet?"

  "No. A prophet sees a future. This is..." She struggled for the word. "...familiarity. With this future. This exact one. As if I've walked this path before and am walking it again."

  Rourke made a low sound. "Loop."

  The word hung in the cavern air, small and devastating.

  "Don't be an idiot," Gideon snapped, but there was no heat in it. "Time loops are Tempos fairy tales for apprentices."

  "Are they?" Rourke's pale eyes were fixed on Eliz. "The old clock-mender. She said your thread was 'knotted up around itself.' 'So many loops.' She saw it."

  The chill that ran through Eliz then had nothing to do with the cave. Hester's words. The sweet, vacant voice. So many loops.

  "Impossible," Gideon whispered, but he was looking at his dead device, at the cavern around them, calculating odds, probabilities. An engineer's faith in cause and effect warring with the evidence before him.

  A faint, scraping sound echoed from the dry tunnel.

  They froze. It was not the sound of rockfall. It was the sound of something dragging. Slowly. Deliberately.

  The Unwoven had followed them. Or something else had.

  The debate was over. Gideon stood, his face hardening back into its familiar lines of grim resolve. "Right side of the tunnel. You lead," he said to Eliz. It was not a request, and it was the greatest leap of faith he could possibly make.

  She nodded, pushing the paralyzing terror of her own realization down into the same locked room as her other fears. There was only the mission. Only survival.

  They entered the tunnel, Eliz in front, her body vibrating with a strange, dual awareness. The tunnel was new, dark, unknown. And it was also as familiar as the path to her own chambers. She knew its slight incline, the smell of old fungus, the sound their footsteps made. She led them unerringly along the right-hand wall, her eyes seeing the safe path in her mind before it existed under her feet.

  Behind them, the dragging, scraping sound grew subtly closer.

  Fifty paces. Just as she remembered, a section of the left wall and ceiling was a chaotic jumble of loosely packed stone and earth. A single misplaced step would bring it down. They edged past, holding their breath.

  The tunnel began to slope upward. The air grew slightly warmer, drier. And a new sound filtered down—a low, rhythmic, mechanical thump-thump-thump, deeper and more visceral than the palace's heartbeat. It was the sound they had followed. The source.

  They emerged not into another cavern, but onto a narrow, natural stone balcony overlooking a scene from a nightmare.

  Below them was the vast space Eliz had glimpsed through the door. The Cathedral of the Unmaking. It was colossal, carved from the living rock of the underworld. The ceiling soared into darkness, but the space was lit by the same bruised-purple energy that pulsed from a central machine.

  The machine was not metal and glass. It looked organic—a vast, throbbing heart of crystalline filaments and pulsing light-vessels, all built around a central, rotating spindle of solid shadow. Dozens of thin, silver threads—like the one Hester had used—were attached to the spindle, winding and unwinding in a hypnotic, terrible dance. And seated in concentric circles around it were people. Dozens of them. Old, young, men, women. All with the same glowing purple eyes, their hands moving in a blur of repetitive, meticulous motions—knitting, un-knitting, weaving, unraveling. A silent, insane choir conducting the symphony of un-creation.

  Around the perimeter, more of the shuffling, needle-armed Unwoven stood guard, their hollow gazes fixed on nothing and everything.

  "This is it," Mira breathed, horrified fascination in her voice. "The locus. They're not powering it with magic. They're using… attention. Focused, twisted human consciousness."

  "They're using people," Gideon corrected, his voice thick with disgust.

  A movement below caught Eliz's eye. Near the base of the machine, a figure in dark robes was observing the workers. Tall, thin. The emissary. He tilted his head, as if listening to a distant sound, then slowly, deliberately, turned his cowled head upward.

  Toward their hiding place on the balcony.

  He couldn't possibly see them in the dark. But he knew. He had always known.

  The Chronicler. The title surfaced in her mind, fully formed. The hidden enemy who remembered the loops. Was this him? Was he here?

  "Time's up," Rourke grunted.

  From the tunnel behind them, the scraping sound was suddenly loud, immediate. A pale, needle-tipped hand grasped the edge of the opening.

  And from below, the emissary raised one of those long, pale hands and pointed directly at them.

  The reaction was instant. A dozen Unwoven guards broke from their posts, their shuffling gait quickening to a horrifying, jerking sprint, heading for staircases carved into the chamber walls.

  They were surrounded.

  Gideon grabbed Eliz's arm. "You remember this part too? How do we get out of it?"

  She searched the frantic, unfolding memory-scape. The attack from behind. The guards coming from below. The machine thrumming. The emissary pointing.

  And then, a new memory—sharp, recent, and not her own. A flash of green light. Jax's phosphor stone, floating in the river, just before he went under. And his hand, not grasping for help, but pointing down, toward the riverbed.

  "The river," she gasped, the memory clicking into place. "Jax! He wasn't swept away! He went under deliberately! He found something!"

  "There's no way back to the river!" Mira cried, as the first Unwoven emerged from the tunnel behind them, its needle gleaming.

  But Rourke was already moving. He wasn't looking at the tunnel or the guards. He was looking at the balcony floor. At a pattern of cracks in the stone. With a roar that echoed in the vast chamber, he brought his heavy boot down, not with brute force, but with precise impact on a specific spot.

  The stone gave way with a crack. Not a collapse, but a controlled fracture. A section of the balcony floor, directly over a secondary channel of the underground river they had just escaped, splintered and fell away, revealing the rushing, black water ten feet below.

  Jax’s final message. A way out. Not up. Down.

  "Go!" Gideon shouted, shoving Mira toward the hole.

  The Unwoven from the tunnel lunged. Eliz ducked a silver needle aimed at her throat, felt it whisper past her ear. She turned and jumped into the freezing dark for the second time that day, the emissary's silent, pointing figure the last thing she saw.

  As the water closed over her head, another memory slotted into place, clear and cold as the river itself:

  This is how the loop ends.