1
The next time the corridor filled with them, I didn't watch as long.
Same men. Same chair. Same rope. Same stupid naked socket waiting for its moment.
Angel's breathing hit that ragged edge again. Jacket man's voice skimmed over the surface of it, calm and practical. The bag of tools made its little glass-and-metal song as they unpacked it.
I stayed until the bulb went in and the light dropped over her face.
I'd seen that part.
"Okay," I murmured, more to myself than anyone, and pushed away from the wall.
The weight that lived in the air noticed the intention and pressed closer, like a hand on the back of my head, ready to shove.
"I'm not touching your centrepiece," I told it inside my skull. "Relax."
It didn't, but it also didn't throw me out.
I slipped away while they were still busy tightening knots.
2
The building had two sets of stairs.
The men had come up one route with Angel; I used the other, moving fast but not loud, taking steps sideways where my weight wouldn't complain.
Downstairs, the concrete swallowed most sound. Their voices upstairs dulled to a background murmur, like neighbours through walls.
I reached the side door in time to see the driver finishing a cigarette.
He flicked it away with a neat snap of his fingers and headed to the van, hands in his pockets. No hurry. Night's work started; he was on standby now.
The engine turned over with a lazy grumble and settled into a low idle.
I watched him sit there, lit by dashboard glow, for a count of thirty, then turned and walked out through the main gate.
If I wanted to know where they went after they were done, this loop was the time.
3
He didn't leave for a while.
I leaned against a vending machine two streets over and tried to look like a bored teenager arguing with his own reflection.
Some point later, around when my legs started to twinge, the van rolled out of the yard.
I let it pass, eyes down, then fell in behind it at a distance.
The city at that hour had hollow spots: patches where even the bars had shut and only cleaners and the truly lost moved around. The van threaded through those, taking side roads and cutting through back streets with the confidence of someone who'd done it often enough to stop thinking.
I followed on foot, using walls and corners as cover.
They didn't bother to check their rear view for pedestrians.
The van stopped outside a low building with a metal shutter half down. Not a house. A unit with a sign in front that promised "Auto Repair" in faded letters.
One by one, the men climbed out.
Jacket. Shaved head. Fake payphone. Driver.
They moved stiffly, not from guilt. Just from long hours and hard work.
The shutter rattled up and they vanished inside.
I stood on the opposite pavement and counted windows. One light came on in the back. Someone laughed. Someone opened a fridge; the faint clunk carried out.
No one came to the door to smoke. No one staggered away alone.
If they had families somewhere, they weren't going to them tonight.
4
Another loop, I tried a different approach.
Instead of watching where they slept, I watched where they began.
Back at 19:38, I went straight to the auto repair place.
Shutter half up. Interior lit by harsh lamps. Two cars on lifts, their guts hanging open. A radio muttering in the corner. A calendar with a girl in a bikini pretending to care about motor oil.
Fake payphone sat on a crate, eating noodles from a cup.
Shaved head lay on a creeper under a car, wrenches within arm's reach. Jacket was at a workbench with a ledger.
The driver came in late, tossed keys in a plastic tray, announced that traffic was bad near the station.
It was the kind of place you take your car when you don't want receipts.
I stayed across the street, half-hidden by a stack of tyres outside the building next door, and watched their evening routine.
Nobody mentioned Angel.
Nobody mentioned anything like "tonight's job."
They didn't talk like monsters.
They talked like men who were broke and annoyed at taxes.
At one point, a little kid in a hoodie ran up to the front of the place and bounced on his toes until shaved head came over and ruffled his hair.
"Tell your mother I'm working late," shaved head said.
The kid rolled his eyes and sprinted off.
I filed that away. Not for mercy. For leverage.
5
Killing the van hadn't worked.
That had been one of the early experiments: knife under the chassis near the convenience store, cold rubber under my hand, soft rip, air hissing out.
Angel walked. The van didn't come.
I'd felt a thin, ugly satisfaction right up until the moment a different van turned onto the street from the other side.
Grey instead of white. Different dents. Same timing. Same number of men inside. Same plate pattern, just new digits. They didn't even look annoyed. The universe had apparently built spares.
When they grabbed her that time, the reset came a little later, as if the loop was letting me admire how little difference I'd made.
Damage to tools, then, didn't matter as long as the pattern held:
Girl. Street. Vehicle. Factory. Chair.
Fine.
If I wanted to test what the board cared about, I needed to move from objects to people.
6
I picked the easiest one first.
Fake payphone was the one who stepped out to intercept her on the street, the smiling man with his hands held open.
Take him off the board early and see what moved into the space.
At 20:10, two blocks from the convenience store, he left the auto place and cut through an alley, carrying a plastic bag with snacks and something that clinked.
I followed.
He stopped under a flickering light to open a can and leaned against a wall, shoulders loosening.
I picked up a brick.
It fit my hand better than it had any right to.
One step. Two.
He looked up at the wrong time, caught sight of me, frowned in confusion.
"Do I know—"
I hit him in the face.
The brick met his nose with a soft, wet impact. He went down hard, limbs folding under him. The can rolled away, leaving a thin, shining trail on the concrete.
He tried to say something. Teeth made it difficult.
I watched him for a second.
My stomach didn't drop. My pulse didn't spike the way it had when the dog's jaw had closed around my arm. This felt cleaner. More controlled.
I checked my hand. A smear of blood on the brick, a few flecks on my cuff.
Data, not stain.
Truck-brain part of me whispered, He has a kid.
Loop-brain part of me answered, Yes, and now I know he can't take that street at 19:50.
I put the brick down beside him, neat as putting a cup on a saucer, and walked away.
7
Nothing reset.
The air stayed the same thickness.
The clock on a nearby storefront kept its time.
Interesting.
I went to the abduction corner.
Angel approached on schedule, bag in hand, eyes on the crossing signal.
The van rolled toward its mark.
No man stepped out to pretend concern.
For a moment, I thought I'd found a seam in the script.
Then shaved head got out instead.
He moved differently. No fake friendliness. No palm-up gesture. He just put himself in her way and spoke low, one hand near his jacket pocket, weight on the balls of his feet.
Angel's shoulders tensed.
She tried to dodge. He stepped into her path.
The van's door slid back.
They grabbed her with marginally less finesse but the same end result.
She fought harder. They hit her sooner.
The loop let all of it run.
Watching from the shadows, I realised two things at once:
Roles mattered. Faces did not.
And it bothered me far less than it should have that I'd possibly changed whether a small boy had a father to go home to.
I waited for the shove back to 19:38.
It didn't come until much later.
8
Another try.
This time, I went after Jacket.
He left the auto place last, locking the door with two quick turns of the key and pausing to check the street before heading toward the van's usual parking spot.
I stepped out from between parked cars as he passed.
"Evening," I said.
He barely glanced at me. "Not interested."
"Good," I said. "Makes this easier."
He had just enough time to register the pipe in my hands before I brought it across the side of his knee.
The sound it made—joint, metal, body—felt almost abstract. He collapsed sideways with a strangled noise, hands grabbing for the leg.
Pain does something strange to men who think they're in control. It makes their faces look young.
He reached for his belt. I stepped in and kicked his hand away, then swapped the pipe for his own knife.
Small, sharp, businesslike.
I put it against his throat, mostly to see what would happen.
His pulse beat under the blade.
"You're going to be late," I told him. "And I wanted to see what the loop thinks of that."
He tried to spit at me. It came out as a messy thread.
I considered finishing the line, opening his neck, seeing how the board would scramble to plug that hole.
Instead, I flicked the knife open, cut the strap of his watch, and let both fall into his lap.
"Find a new schedule," I said, and walked away.
9
Angel still ended up in the chair.
Different line-up this time.
Shaved head took Jacket's place at the centre. Fake payphone stayed down the corridor, trying too hard to act like he wasn't smaller without the taller man near.
I watched from my usual spot as they tied her down and lit her up.
The system didn't care which hand did the work.
Only that the work got done.
The feeling that gave me was… complicated.
On one level, it made the world feel more hopeless. Take one of them out, and someone else stepped cleanly into the slot. Try to save her early, and time redrew the path.
On another, it simplified the problem.
I wasn't fighting them.
I was fighting the shape of what they did.
Shapes could be learned.
10
I started to enjoy it.
Not the part where Angel begged, exactly. That was noise I tuned out as much as I could, like static on a line.
But the structure? The testing? The way I could poke one point and see how the night flexed to absorb it?
That scratched something deep.
Loop after loop, I made small changes:
Moved a spanner from the corridor into a stairwell.
Result: shaved head swore and sent the driver to fetch another. Delay: thirty seconds.
Swapped the good rope for one that had frayed spots.
Result: it snapped halfway through tying her ankles; they retied it with more knots, angrier. Outcome: the same, plus bruises in new places.
Unscrewed the bulb in the socket before they arrived.
Result: fake payphone climbed on the chair, muttering, put it back, then wiped his hands on Angel's shoulder like she was a rag.
None of it changed the core.
Bound girl. Circle of light. Men orbiting like ugly planets.
The leash only twitched if I got near that centre.
Everything in the outer ring was fair game.
11
You'd think breaking a man's face with a brick or his knee with a pipe would feel like crossing a line.
It didn't.
It felt like touching the edges of a map with my fingertips.
Finding out what lay outside the parts marked "here be dragons."
On one loop, I stayed with fake payphone long enough to go through his pockets.
Wallet. Cheap phone. A photo of the kid in the hoodie, gap-toothed and grinning, arm around a woman who looked like she'd aged ten years faster than her body.
I put the photo back.
Not because I felt bad.
Because I might need him afraid of losing them later, and it was easier if he didn't know I knew.
On another, I watched Jacket try and fail to walk properly on the leg I'd hit in a prior loop. The night compensated by making him lean on the others more, barking orders from further back, letting his men do more of the hands-on work.
The loop didn't heal them between runs.
Interesting.
We remembered together.
12
When I went back to the chair after a few rounds of this, Angel's fear looked different to me.
It wasn't cleaner. It certainly wasn't prettier.
It was… structured.
I could see the exact moment she realised talking would not help. The moment she ran out of threats and bargains. The moment she stopped pleading to be let go and started pleading for it to be over.
The first time I'd seen that, I'd felt a distant obligation to recoil.
Now, I felt something close to recognition.
The men liked the part where they had power in a simple way. Direct. One action, one flinch.
I liked the part where I had power in a complicated way.
Across loops. Across roles. Across versions of them they didn't even know they were living.
They didn't get to remember their mistakes.
I did.
And that meant the day was becoming mine in a way it had never been Angel's.
"Not yet," I told myself, sitting in the dark just outside the light's reach.
My palms had half-healed crescents from where my nails had dug in earlier.
"Later."
I watched them play out the scene again, tying and tightening, and took mental notes on how I would do it better.