"Next?"

"In your loops. What happens now?"

Kenji wiped his face with the back of his sleeve. His voice came out rough.

"In an hour, Daniel and Haiz find me. We come from the same direction, but they catch up to me near the rockfall."

"And Jaxon?"

"Same hour. He and his team enter through the tunnel on the right. We meet here, at this junction, almost exactly when his team starts arguing about which path to take."

"Two tunnels then."

"Three, counting the one we came down. Left, right, and the way back. The way back closes once the run formally begins."

Ayla studied the three openings. Her gaze settled on the left tunnel.

"After we meet, what then?"

"I team up with Daniel and Haiz. They are stronger. The goblin nest is on the path I take with them, but we have the numbers and the trait grades to clear it. Jaxon and his team take the left tunnel, because Kael does not trust Daniel and the feeling is mutual."

"And the left tunnel has the goblin horde."

"Yes."

"That is where they die."

"Yes."

Ayla turned the information over slowly. Her birthing point was down the left tunnel. She knew the path.

Her siblings had been eaten by the goblins there. And the goddess... her chest tightened in a way she did not have a name for.

"Did you team up with Jaxon’s team in any loop?"

Kenji hesitated.

"Yes."

"How many?"

"Six. Seven. I stopped counting after a while."

"And?"

"We died every time. The horde came for them no matter which tunnel we took. Once I rerouted us through a path that did not even appear near this tunnel. The goblins still found us. They are drawn to that team somehow. I do not know why."

"Then why did you stop helping?"

He went silent. The silence stretched. Ayla let it. She had learned that humans often filled silences with answers they had not intended to give, if she only waited long enough.

Kenji’s jaw worked. His gaze fixed on a point of damp on the cavern wall. What could he say? That after the third loop he had stopped seeing them as people?

That after the fifth he had begun walking past Jaxon at the junction without looking him in the eye, because looking made it harder?

That the goal had only ever been to break the loop, and the Outers had not been in that plan, just a tragedy in their own right?

He had told himself it was practical, that their deaths were not his fault. Survivability depended not only on strength, but also on luck. They simply didn’t have either.

"I did try," he said at last.

It came out smaller than he meant it to. Ayla watched him without sympathy. She was not asking to hurt him. She was asking because the answer mattered to her, though she could not yet articulate why.

Perhaps it was because of Jaxon’s memories. When she focused on those memories, she started to think like him.

After knowing the fate of his team was death, regardless of the path they had taken, this memory created an unwillingness in her.

She let the question drop. Her thoughts moved elsewhere.

’If I go to the left tunnel, can I find her again?’

The goddess had been alone when Ayla devoured her. If the loop reset the world this far back, the goddess might still be there.

She might still be alive at this exact moment, dragging her dying body through the cracks in the ceiling, waiting for a death that no longer needed to come.

What would happen if the goddess survived? She did not know. She wanted to know.

"Let us go there," Ayla said. She pointed at the left tunnel.

Kenji’s gaze sharpened.

"Why?"

She lowered her eyes. The motion was small and unconscious, and he understood she was about to lie.

"Okay," he said.

Her head snapped up.

"Okay?"

"Okay."

"You do not want to know why?"

"I assume you will tell me when you want to."

She narrowed her eyes at him. He kept his face neutral. Inside, his thoughts moved fast.

She has a reason. A reason she does not want to give. Whatever made her must be down that path, or whatever she remembers from her birth.

’If I follow her there, I might find out what she actually is.’

He had wanted her dead an hour ago. He still wanted her dead. But now, beneath the want, a colder thing was forming.

If he could not kill her, he had to understand her. Understanding was the closest thing to control he had left.

"Lead the way," he said.

Ayla studied him a moment longer. She did not entirely trust the easy agreement. Then she shrugged, because suspicion was a lot of work and the tunnel was waiting.

She stepped into the left passage. He followed three paces behind, close enough to keep her in sight. The tunnel narrowed quickly.

The walls grew damp, then slick, then warm. Ayla’s bare feet made small wet sounds against the stone. Kenji’s boots did not.

They met three goblins along the way.

The first stepped into their path with a notched blade and got two steps further before a thread cut its head from its shoulders.

Ayla did not even slow her stride. The second tried to flee. A spike of compressed heat caught it between the shoulder blades and dropped it before it cleared the next bend.

The third saw the second die and surrendered, falling to its knees with its hands raised in a gesture it had probably learned from watching humans beg for their lives.

Ayla paused in front of it. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

"What do you want me to do with this one?" she asked.

"It is a goblin."

"I know."

"They do not surrender. It is mimicking what it saw."

"Then it is a mimic, like me."

"Not like you."

"Are you saying I am special?" Ayla glanced at him over her shoulder, a smirk playing on her lips.

Kenji kept his face straight. Ayla then considered the goblin. The goblin considered her with wet, terrified eyes.

After a moment she tilted her head, and a single thread slipped between the creature’s ribs and stilled its heart.

The goblin horde was not yet in motion. Its appointed time had not come. They moved through the empty tunnel without resistance, and Ayla felt the path narrow toward something she remembered.

The walls began to look familiar. The angle of a particular crack in the ceiling. The arrangement of three small stones near the base of the wall.

The smell of the air, mineral and faintly sweet, like a flower pressed between pages.

Her steps slowed. Ahead, the tunnel opened into the chamber she had been born into.

Ayla followed through the openings into the altar in the middle of the chamber. The goddess was missing.