Sveta was perched on one of the hands in the alleyway, three hundred and sixty-seven centimeters above the ground.

“There’s no point,” he told her. “He’s not there anymore.”

“People visit graves, even if they don’t believe the person is there looking down on them.”

“Or up at them, I imagine,” he told her.

“I’m loving the snark,” she told him. “Now go give it a shot, Five. You wanted me to help you break out of your mold and see if we couldn’t get you to a better place. This is me doing that. Go. Vent your emotions. Go be angry. Or connect to the part of you who liked the part of him that was friendly or decent. If that was ever a thing.”

“This, standing at thirty-four point oh-seven-nine-six degrees north, one hundred and eighteen point three-six-one-two degrees west, is a boy named Five who does not do emotional.”

“Give it a shot,” she told him. “You came all this way, and you said he won’t be here for that much longer.”

Five turned, and walked back over to the man.

“I don’t know if you heard,” he said. “They’re going to kill you.”

The man briefly met his eyes, still too lost in his own head to recognize anything, or respond to anything.

“Breaking time effects apparently creates a ninety-four point one percent chance that the person or people within trigger or second trigger the instant they’re out. We’re not seeing many more broken triggers, but they’re still wary, still making sure they can communicate with the person on the other side and prepare them.”

He shifted his weight a bit. The wind was blowing through the alley, and it felt nice. It was cool, with what would be the first hints of spring, but Earth Bet wasn’t really in a state for ‘spring’.

“They’re not inclined to let you out, Jacob. They intend to collapse the effect and kill you in the process. They’ve already started elsewhere. You’re second to last, and at the rate they’re going, accounting for travel time, it will be another seven weeks, and three days. In the meantime, you get your ruins. You get your blood. You get to be king of your own desolate little world.”

He looked back at Sveta.

She motioned for him to continue.

Sighing, he kept talking, “I’m not sure what to say, and I don’t like not being sure. For much of my life, including the glimmers of my father’s life that I sometimes remember, your Kurt, I knew exactly what I was doing and where I belonged. I had goals, I met those goals.”

The man within the time effect writhed, hands clutching at his opening stomach wound as if he could stop it from happening. He staggered, and hurled himself against the invisible wall, cracking his head open. It was quick and violent enough that Five was startled.

The time loop carried the man back to his prior iteration.