“How long can you keep this going?” Englebert asked her.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’ve never repeated something more than a few times. But for quite a while, I think.”

Tombs burst out of his tent, baffled and angry. “What are you doing?” he shouted at Ymeene. “Stop that!”

“Why should I?” she said. “I’m saving all our lives!”

“You’re only delaying the inevitable,” Tombs replied. “I order you, by authority of the council, to desist immediately!”

“A pox on your council!” said Millicent Neary. “You’re nothing but liars!”

Tombs had begun to enumerate the punishments that awaited anyone who defied the council’s orders when Eustace Corncrake marched up to him and pulled his nose, which caused Tombs’s face to turn inside out. He ran away yelping and threatening recriminations, his head all pink and soft.

Ymeene kept looping. The peculiars rallied around her, cheering her on, but worrying quietly that she would not be able to keep it going forever. Ymeene shared their concern: she had to repeat the loop every three minutes, so she could not sleep—but eventually her body would force her to, and the army that loomed perpetually in the distance would close in and finally crush them.

After two days and a night, Ymeene could no longer trust herself to stay awake, so Englebert volunteered to sit beside her, and every time her eyes fell closed he would nudge her. After three days and two nights, when Englebert began to fall asleep himself, Eustace Corncrake volunteered to sit by his side and nudge him, and then, when Eustace began to lose his battle with sleep, Millicent Neary volunteered to sit by him and drip water on his face whenever his eyes closed—so that eventually the whole camp of peculiars were sitting in a long chain, helping one another to help Englebert to help Ymeene stay awake.

After four days and three nights, Ymeene still had not missed a loop reset. She had, however, begun to hallucinate from exhaustion. She thought her lost brothers had come to see her, five goshawks flying loops of their own above the camp. They screeched words at her that made no sense:

Again!

Another!

Again! Again!

Loop-the-loop to double its skin!

She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head, then drank some of the water Millicent Neary was dripping on Eustace Corncrake. When she looked up again her ghostly brothers were gone, but their words stayed with her. She wondered if her brothers—or some part of her own, embedded instinct—were trying to tell her something useful.

Again, again.

The answer came to her on the fifth day. Or rather an answer: she wasn’t sure if it was the right one, but she was entirely certain that she wouldn’t last another day. Before long, no amount of nudging would keep her from sleep.

So: she reset the loop. (She’d long since lost count of how many times she’d made that sun peek out from behind that cloud, but it had to be thousands.) And then, just a few seconds after having looped the loop, she made another one—inside the first loop.