WEBVTT
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Caloroga Shark Media.
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Hello and welcome to Twelve Nights, a Christmas paranormal romance thriller.
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This is episode three, Midnight Variations.
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Loop eighty nine, and I can see things I shouldn't
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be able to see. It started small flickers at the
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edge of my vision, like catching movement in a mirror
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that wasn't there when I turned around. By loop seventy,
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the flickers had shapes. By loop eighty the shapes had meaning.
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I'm seeing between moments now, the pause between one second
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and the next, stretched out like taffy full of things
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that don't belong in normal time. Right now, standing in
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the bathroom with marsy sharpie in my hand, I can
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see three versions of myself layered on top of each other.
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One is writing on her arm, One is already at
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the gas station talking to Elias. One is dying pinned
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against a guardrail, watching blood spread across her blouse like
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a blooming flower. All of them are me. All of
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them are happening right now in the spaces I'm learning
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to see. I blink and they're gone, just me in
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the mirror, dark circles under my eyes that shouldn't be there,
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because my body resets every loop, but something about me
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isn't resetting anymore. Something is carrying forward that goes deeper
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than skin Loup eighty nine. I write on my forearm
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threshold sight getting stronger, saw the Collector in Loop forty
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seven sixty three eighty one. It's watching. It knows you're
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changing Elias eighteen forty seven, Cholera debt Walker. He saved you,
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he loves you. I pause, mark a hovering over my skin.
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That last part is new, not something I've written before,
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or maybe something I've written dozens of times and kept forgetting.
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But it feels true, truer than anything else I know
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about this impossible situation. He loves me. He's loved me
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for hundreds of loops, watching me die, watching me forget,
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showing up at the same gas station at the same
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time every night to have conversations I won't remember. And
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I'm starting to love him back. That's the cruelest part
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of all of this, not the dying, not the cold
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or the fear or the endless repetition. It's falling for
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some one across fractured time, building something real out of
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moments that keep getting erased. I capped the marker and
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head for the parking garage. Elias knew something was different
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the moment I stepped out of my car. I could
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tell by the way his posture shifted, hopeful, cautious, like
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a man who'd been disappointed too many times to trust
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good news. You're early again, he said, I'm always early now.
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I crossed the frozen pavement to stand beside him, closer
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than I usually did, close enough to see the fine
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lines at the corners of his eyes, the slight silver
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threading through his dark hair, signs of age that shouldn't
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exist on someone who'd been twenty nine for almost two centuries.
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I'm remembering more almost everything, I think, at least from
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the last twenty loops or so. That's not possible. And
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yet I held up my arm showed him the writing.
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I've been keeping notes, but lately I barely need them.
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It's like like the resets aren't reaching as deep as
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they used to. Elijah stared at my arm, then at
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my face. Your eyes, he said, softly, what about them?
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They're different. There's something. He reached up almost touched my cheek,
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then caught himself the almost touch that was becoming our
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signature in the old language. We'd call it threshold sight,
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the ability to see between moments, to perceive time the
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way the collector does. That's what's happening to me. I'm
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becoming like it. No, you're becoming something else, something I've
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never seen before. He shook his head. In all my
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years of walking debts, I've never met a human who
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developed threshold sight. It shouldn't be poss Maybe dying eighty
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nine times changes a person. He didn't laugh. Maybe it does.
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We stood there in the cold, breath fogging between us
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inside the gas station. The clerk was reading a magazine,
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utterly oblivious to the impossible things happening in her parking lot.
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Christmas music drifted through the windows, silent night, tinny and distant.
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Tell me about the woman, I said, He went very still.
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What woman, the one who tried to save you a
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century ago. I didn't know where the knowledge came from,
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a fragment, from a loop. I couldn't fully remember a
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whisper in the space between moments. You mentioned her once
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loop thirty something. You said, she tried to free you
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and ended up bound herself. For a long moment, he
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didn't answer, Then quietly, her name was Clara. She was
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a spiritualist in Boston nineteen twelve. She could see things
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most people couldn't, not threshold sight, but something adjacent, close
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enough to perceive me. When I came to collect a debt,
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you fell in love with her. No, he said it firmly,
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but there was pain underneath. I cared for her, admired her.
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She was brilliant and fierce, and she saw the Collector
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for what it was, not just an entity, but a system,
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a machine that fed on human suffering. She wanted to
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dismantle it. What happened. She found a way to sever
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my bond, a ritual, old magic, something she'd pieced together
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from fragments and folklore. It should have worked. His jaw tightened,
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but the Collector doesn't let go easily. When she tried
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to cut my chains, it took her instead, made her
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a debt walker in my life place, she's still out there,
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still bound. No, she broke herself free eventually. It took
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us sixty years, and it cost her everything, her sanity,
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her humanity, most of her memories. Last I saw her,
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she was just a shell, a ghost of the woman
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she'd been. He looked at me, and his eyes were haunted.
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That's why I haven't tried to break your loops loan.
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Every attempt to fight the Collector directly ends in destruction.
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It's not malicious, it's just vast incomprehensible, like fighting gravity.
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So we just accept it. Die forever, reset forever, never
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get out. I didn't say that, then, what are you saying?
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Before he could answer, the temperature dropped, not gradually the
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way cold usually arrives. This was instant, absolute, the kind
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of cold that stops your heart, that makes your bones ache,
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that feels less like weather and more like presence. The
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Christmas music from the gas station turned to static. The
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lights flickered, buzzed, went dark, and in the darkness something spoke,
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Sloane Marchetti. The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, from
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inside my skull and outside the universe, from the space
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between one second and the next, where things like the
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Collector lived. You are changing, evolving, becoming something new. I
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couldn't move, couldn't Breathe beside me. Elias had gone rigid,
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his face pale in the dim light. Don't engage, he whispered,
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whatever it offers, don't your debt, Walker gives poor counsel.
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He has always been sentimental inefficient. The darkness shifted and
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I saw it the collector, not the glimpse I'd caught
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in Loop forty seven, a flash before impact avoid where
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a face should be. This was the full thing, and
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my threshold sight showed it to me in terrible clarity.
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It was made of moments, thousands of them, millions maybe
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fragments of time that should have ended but didn't. Human
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lives stretched and folded and compressed into something that was
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almost a shape. I could see faces in it, hear whispers,
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feel the weight of all those stolen seconds pressing against
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reality like a hand against a window. You perceive me good,
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That will make this easier. What do you want? My
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voice came out steadier than I expected, the same thing
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I always want, balance, debt, the natural order maintained. It shifted,
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and for a moment, those compressed faces seemed to turn
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towards me, a chorus of the dead and the dying
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and the never quite finished. Your loop generates significant energy,
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more than any single soul has produced in centuries. I
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am reluctant to release it, but you are evolving beyond
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the loop's capacity to contain you. Soon you will remember everything.
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Soon you will see as I see, And a soul
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with threshold sight cannot be harvested, cannot be contained. A
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pause heavy as centuries, you will break free eventually. It
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is only a matter of time. Hope surged in my chest,
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sharp and painful. Then let us go. If I'm going
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to break free anyway, I did not say I would
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allow it. The cold deepened beside me. A Lias made
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a sound pain, maybe or fear. I could see frost
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forming on his eyelashes. I am offering you a choice,
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Sloane Marchetti. Work for me as your debt walker does,
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use your threshold sight in my service. In exchange, I
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will end your loop and allow you to live, truly
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live in linear time once more. And Elias, he remains bound.
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His debt is not your concern. That's not Alternatively, the
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collector shifted again, and I felt its attention focus on
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me like a spotlight made of ice. I can collapse
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the loop now permanently. You will die your final death
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at mile marker forty seven, as you are always meant to,
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and your soul will move on to whatever waits beyond.
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Clean simple the natural order restored those are my only options?
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Serve you or die. There is a third option, but
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you will not like it. I waited you could break
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the loop yourself. Your threshold sight grows stronger with each iteration.
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Eventually you will be able to see the mechanism that
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binds you, the debt your lover paid to trap you here.
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If you can find that debt and sever it, the
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loop will end and you will both go free. My
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heart was pounding. How do I sever it? The debt
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was paid in blood and desperation. A man watched a
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woman die and could not bear it. The only way
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to break such a bond is to reverse it. The
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collector's voice dropped, almost gentle. You must choose to die, Sloane,
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not by accident, not by fate, by choice. You must
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stand at the threshold between life and death and willingly
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step through. That's insane. I've died eighty nine times. You
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have been killed eighty nine times. There is a difference.
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A death you choose carries different weight than a d
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death that happens to you. Another pause. Your debt walker
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knows this, he has always known. Ask him why he
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never told you. The cold receded, The lights flickered, back on.
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The Christmas music resumed, picking up right where it had
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left off, as if nothing had happened. I turned to Elias.
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He wasn't looking at me. He was staring at the ground,
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shoulders hunched, and in the yellow glow of the gas
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station lights, he looked older than his centuries, tired in
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a way that went deeper than bones. You knew, I said, yes,
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all this time, you knew there was a way out,
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and you never because the way out is you dying.
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His voice cracked, you choosing to die, and I couldn't.
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He finally looked at me, and there were tears in
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his eyes. I've watched you die three hundred and eighty
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nine times, Sloane. I've memorized every version of your last breath.
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And you want me to ask you to do it
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on purpose, to stand in front of that guard rail
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and choose to let it kill you. It might not work.
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It might not work, he agreed. The collector could be lying.
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It probably is. It doesn't want us free. It wants
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to break us, twist us into something it can use.
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The clock on my phone read eleven fifty one. The
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pull of the loop was stronger than ever, dragging me
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toward the car, toward the highway, toward the crash. I
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couldn't escape, but for the first time I fought it.
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Dug my heels in stayed. There's something the collector didn't say,
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I told Elias. It said the debt was paid in
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blood and desperation, Your blood, your desperation. But it also
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said the bond goes both ways. Sloane, what if I'm
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not the only one who has to choose? He stared
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at me. The pull was getting stronger, and I could
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feel time itself starting to bend, the loop, demanding its
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dew figure it out. I said, find another way, because
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I'm not choosing to die, and I'm not choosing to
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serve that thing. There has to be a third option.
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There isn't always a third option. There is if we
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make one. I got in the car, drove to the highway,
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hit the ice at mile mark of forty seven, and
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felt the world spin out from under me. But just
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before impact, I saw something new, A thread, thin as
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spider silk, glowing faintly in my threshold sight, stretching from
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my chest to somewhere beyond the crash, beyond the loop,
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beyond everything, A thread connecting me to Elias, and in
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the instant before everything went dark, I understood the debt
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wasn't just his, it was ours, and the only way
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to break it was to share it. The office Christmas
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party ended at eleven. I opened my eyes at my desk, gasping,
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and I remembered everything, not fragments, not shadows, everything ninety
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loops of dying and living and falling in love with
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a man trapped in time, the collector's offer, the choice
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I refused to make, and the thread, the impossible, beautiful
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thread that connected us across every reset. I grabbed my
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coat and ran for the door. This time I wasn't
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going to the gas station. This time I was going
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to find another way.
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Yeah,