1
By the time I stopped counting loops, they stopped feeling like separate nights and more like rehearsals.
Same script.
Same cast.
Different mistakes.
My notes weren't on paper, but if they had been, the margins would've been full of things like:
"Rope can be tied faster."
"Driver never looks left at corner."
"Shaved head flinches when kid's name is mentioned."
The more I watched, the less interested I was in "stopping" them and the more interested I was in how cleanly the pattern could flex.
At some point, the obvious next step arrived:
why always watch the actors from the audience?
Why not try the stage?
2
The driver was the softest slot in the machine.
He didn't make decisions. He waited, drove, smoked, waited again.
He also had the least contact with Angel.
The board hadn't objected when I broke his colleagues' faces or knees, as long as the roles got filled.
So I picked a loop and went to meet him early.
19:40, auto place. The "Auto Repair" sign still half honest in the fading light.
He was out back, behind the building, smoke curling from his mouth, phone in one hand, talking to someone who made his voice softer.
"…no, I'll be late again," he was saying. "Tell Ma I'll bring the money on Sunday. I know. I know. Yeah. Yeah, okay."
He flicked ash, sighed, pocketed the phone.
As he turned the corner back toward the front, I stepped out of the shadow of the dumpster with a question ready on my tongue.
Waiting for the universal hand to shove me away.
Nothing came.
Interesting.
"Excuse me," I said.
He glanced over, gave me the reflexive once-over adults give teenagers near their place of work.
"We're closed for regular business," he said. "Come back tomorrow."
"This isn't about the shop," I said.
It took him half a second too long to register the pipe in my hand.
3
I didn't have to hit him hard.
Back of the knee first, like I'd done with Jacket before. The joint folded. His weight went sideways. His head met the wall on the way down.
He made a sound that was more air than word.
I took the keys from his pocket, the cap from his head, and his jacket from the nail he kept it on by the back door.
His blood stayed on the concrete. The board didn't twitch.
I dragged him behind the dumpster, checked his breathing once, and left him there with his own cigarette still smouldering near his hand.
It wasn't mercy.
It was curiosity: how far could I go before the loop shook its head?
So far, no shaking.
4
The van's driver seat fit me better than I'd expected.
The wheel felt big under my hands, but the pedals were where I needed them to be. The dash lights wavered between green and orange, familiar in the way all cheap electronic light is.
I adjusted the rear-view mirror and saw my own face looking back in the driver's cap.
For a moment, I almost laughed.
Demon Kurozawa, chauffeur.
I pulled away from the curb and headed to the factory yard as if I'd been doing it for years.
No invisible pushback. No sudden vertigo.
Apparently the board didn't mind if I took them closer to the crime.
It objected when I tried to remove pieces, not when I helped position them.
Useful.
5
They treated my presence like it made sense.
At the auto place, shaved head and fake payphone climbed into the van without a second look.
"Let's go," shaved head said. "He's already out there."
I grunted something neutral and pulled into traffic.
The world outside the windscreen was one I'd walked as a bystander half a dozen times now. As a driver, it felt narrower. Tunnelled. Streetlights flicked across the glass in a regular rhythm, a metronome counting down to the same point.
Angel didn't see me when we rolled up to the curb near her route.
From behind the wheel, I watched her more like they did: a figure at the edge of the headlights, a moving target whose timing mattered more than her name.
Shaved head got out. So did fake payphone.
I kept the engine idling.
They blocked her path. Exchange of words, shift of weight, same pattern with different details.
Her face flashed once in the side mirror as they grabbed her. Mouth open. Eyes bright.
I'd seen that expression before, from the sidewalk.
From this angle, it looked flatter. Smaller. More containable.
The van rocked as they pulled her in.
"Go," someone barked.
I went.
6
The inside of the van was louder than I'd imagined when I'd watched it from the outside.
Movement. Breathing. A brief scuffle that ended with a dull thump and a choked sound.
"You're fine," one of them said. "Relax. It's just for a while."
I didn't look back.
Not out of respect.
Out of discipline.
The board had made it very clear what it thought about me touching the centre piece.
So I kept my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road and drove my mother to the place where I knew she'd be tied to a chair.
The word "mother" sat in my head like a label on a file, not like a feeling.
Angel was the girl in the circle of light.
I was learning how to get her there.
7
At the factory, the script continued.
Yard. Side door. The same tall shape of the building against the sky.
I pulled up where the driver always did and killed the engine.
The doors slid back.
They dragged her out.
She stumbled, nearly went to her knees, caught herself.
Someone cursed.
Someone laughed.
I got out and joined them.
Nobody questioned why I was closer this time. No one said, "Hey, that's the kid from the corner." In this loop, I had always been here.
The only person who looked at me like something was wrong was Angel.
Her gaze flicked over my face in the half-light and snagged.
Not recognition. Something quieter. The brain's way of saying, this pattern doesn't quite match the others.
Then Jacket barked an order and her attention snapped back to him.
We went inside.
8
The corridor felt narrower walking it in their line.
I'd always seen it from the static point, back against the wall, the frame of the scene already set.
Moving through it as part of the group made the space shrink and elongate at the same time. Footsteps multiplied. Shadows stacked.
We reached the scrape marks on the floor.
Chair went down. Bag on the ground. Rope out.
It was almost disappointing how smoothly my body slotted into the routine.
I knew where to stand, how to lift, when to step back so I didn't get hit by an elbow. None of it had been taught. All of it had been absorbed by watching and rewatching.
Jacket nodded at me once, brief approval, as I held the chair steady while they forced Angel into it.
I felt the pressure in the air tighten, a silent warning.
Not yet, it said.
I wasn't trying to change the core. Not this loop.
For once, the leash and I were in agreement.
9
Up close, tying rope felt different than watching it.
The fibres rasped against my fingers, rough where they'd been frayed by too much use. The movement of Angel's wrists under my hand had a heat to it, a desperate strength I hadn't registered from three metres away.
"Hold still," I said quietly, because that's what they always said to her.
Her fingers jerked.
I looped the rope around, caught, pulled tight.
The knot sat exactly where I'd seen it sit in half a dozen runs. Muscle memory borrowed from someone else.
If the universe objected to me taking one of their hands, it didn't show it yet.
Light went on overhead as fake payphone screwed the bulb into place.
Angel flinched at the sudden glare.
Her pupils shrank. Her jaw bunched.
I stepped back out of the circle.
The leash eased a fraction.
10
From the ring just outside the light, I could watch them and myself at once.
Jacket in front, talking in that calm, infuriating tone. Shaved head hovering at her shoulder, restless. Fake payphone at the edge, laughing at things that weren't funny.
And me – closer to the scene than I had ever been, but still technically in the outer orbit. Hands marked by the same rope burns theirs had. Breathing just as steady.
I'd expected to feel… something.
Guilt, maybe. Revulsion at cooperating.
What I felt instead was a kind of clarity.
They weren't special.
Any of them.
Plug me into their pattern and it continued without missing a beat. Take one of them out, and someone else stepped up. The board cared about the moves, not the pieces.
My chest stayed flat, but somewhere behind my ribs, a thought clicked into place.
If that was true, saving Angel by deleting these four was a waste of effort.
Someone would always fill those roles.
Unless I changed what the roles were.
11
I tested the boundary once.
When shaved head leaned in too close, hand lifting like he meant to slap her again, I moved on instinct.
Just a half-step, enough that his arm brushed mine on the way up.
The pressure hit me like a vice across the shoulders.
Not enough to knock me over. Enough to say, wrong kind of interference.
The air thickened. My vision tightened.
I froze, let his arm pass, let the slap land.
The weight retreated.
Interesting.
It wasn't punishing me for being near her.
It was punishing me for trying to redirect what the scene considered its main line.
I slid back half a pace, filed that away, and didn't try again.
Not in this run.
Not yet.
12
Later, when they moved further down the corridor with their bag of tools and left Angel under the bulb with a single guard, I stayed put.
Same as before.
Shadow just outside the circle. Back against the wall.
This time, though, the guard's shadow was mine.
Angel's breath hitched.
She tested the ropes.
Her eyes tracked the space, glancing over me once and then away, not sticking for long. In that glare, all of us looked like strangers.
I watched her.
I watched me.
I thought about how many times they must have done this before the night they picked her. How many chairs. How many lights. How many girls whose names never made it into any file.
The knowledge didn't make me want to stop the pattern.
It made me want to own it.
The night wasn't just the worst thing that had happened to Angel.
It was the most precise thing that had ever happened to me.
A system.
A sealed loop.
Rules you could learn by bleeding on them.
"Later," I reminded myself again, the word now less about justice and more about design.
When the scene had played out as far as the board would let me see and the smell of what they did down the corridor started to seep back, the reset finally came.
Dust in my mouth. Walls peeling away.
Bank clock. 19:38. Wrapper. Dog. Students.
Everything in its place.
Except me.
I looked at the street I was supposed to walk, the route she'd take, the van's eventual parking spot.
For the first time, it didn't feel like I was trying to break free.
It felt like I was being handed the world's cruelest instruction manual and told:
Here. Learn. You're going to need this.