Having accomplished nothing all week, Melody Quick sat under her writing desk in the still dark, banging the back of her head against the radiator, the metronomic clunk, clunk, clunk a desperate entreaty to whatever was out there.

  Assuming that anything was listening at all. Assuming that she could be heard over the raindrops pattering against her window, the sweeping winds howling across campus, the unprecedented storm which had suddenly burst over Uptown without warning or establishment in any prior iteration, under whose torrents her hopes had been mulched apart more quickly than if they had been stacks of waterlogged newsprint.

  And how real could her conviction have been in the first place, if it could be so easily undone by nothing more than simple rain?

  No. No, it’s not the rain. It’s the—

  “—divergence that pisses me off. It’s the fact that, like, things that I thought were constants, turn out to not be constants, without me having done anything.”

  “Well, um, I think anything you do is an interference, Mel.”

  “Melody.”

  “You keep your memories, don’t you? So your head ain’t the same each time. That difference alone propagates into everything else.”

  “No, that’s … No. My head’s in my head. I’m talking about how stuff is different even if I stay in my room and do nothing. Sometimes the sun’s out today. And other loops it’s cloudy.”

  “You can’t exist in a vacuum. You’re not isolated, even if you’d like to be. You look in different directions and you’re catching different photons. That’s not nothing. That’s a disruption of order, man. You are the variable,” concluded the physics undergrad, taking another hit from his can of aerosol cheese.

  Melody, uncomfortable with the implications of such a theory (namely, that every thoughtless minutia of her doing caused deviations, no matter how trivial her actions), preferred over it her own view of chaos, one in which she played no part in anything, where only entropy ruled, likening it to—

  “—a pinball machine, right? Like, the launch is always the same but the way it falls down the board each time is different. All chance and no skill. September, first day, always starts off the same, mostly, but after that there’s only randomness. Sometimes, it even—You know what always pissed me off when I was a kid? Whenever I launched the ball and it went immediately straight down the um, the lanes on the side before I had the chance to even hit the ball. And it’s like, shit. Token wasted. You know what I mean? You ever play pinball, Amy?”

  “Peen … ball. What this is mean, peen-ball?”

  “You know … With the flippers, and the ...” Melody tapped the sides of an invisible cabinet. Amy shook her head. Melody pulled a plunger and pantomimed an imaginary ball’s journey up, down, though ramps and bumpers and kickers, emulating the sounds as best she could, which was not very good at all, but the girl across the cafeteria table only smiled politely, displaying no further understanding.

  “The point is, if the alternative is to be the cause then I’d rather there be no causes at all. Because chance is out of my control. And I’d rather know things are out of my control than to think every little thing I do matters. Is that … I mean, is that weird? Does that make me fucked up?”

  Amy smiled uncomprehendingly and gave a thumbs up to Melody, who fantasized about introducing the British exchange student to the game (the closest she came was the time she rushed into Amy’s room with a pinball game on her phone: “Amy! This! This is pinball.” “Ah, this, how you say, ludo?” “No, it—well yes, in this case it’s also a video game, but there’s a physical machine that ...”), to the strobing lights and digital score displays that flashed in some of her earliest memories—of New Circadia, of the First Division, of the mall arcade where she and her brother waited for their mother while she shopped—vague remembrances of standing next to her older sibling, her hand clutching the fabric of his pant leg, staring up in wonder and admiration at his face from below, his expression scrunched in effort and awash in flashing multipliers as he tried for a higher score, while around them the digital cacophony of cabinets stuck in attract-mode loops blared.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  But that place had long since closed down, along with the last of its kind. And Melody would never again experience that same admiration for her brother she’d felt then.

  Unless …

  “—unless I head there, I’ll never know, right? You know that it’s like, six hours by flight from New Circadia to Somnhaven? You ever think about how big the Continuate is? Even getting to Somnhaven from here, by train, that’s like, an entire day gone. And”—awkward, nervous chuckle—“it’s not like I have a lot of days to work with. Or maybe I do. Does it count if it’s the same days? Ah …

  “Anyway, that’s where he is. He dropped out of school and I haven’t seen him in a long time, I … I think he’s working at—Say, you know, I really gotta stop coming down here at this hour, there’s only ever scraps left … God, what is this? Is this supposed to be … chicken? I can’t … Anyway, my brother, he used to come back during the holidays, but … I dunno. He just stopped. He stopped. He … Yeah.

  “And, plus, Somnhaven’s far, sure, but it’s not like, far far, you know? It’s not like I’m venturing outside the Third.”

  And the supernumerary, sitting across the way from two tables down, looked to her left, then to her right, paused, looked behind her at the vast and empty cafeteria hall, turned back, and then pointed to herself, and asked Melody, “Sorry, are you … Are you talking to me?”

  “And besides, what’s the worst that can happen? He does nothing? Another loop starts? That’s—Would that really be the worst thing?”

  But Melody knew the answer to that. Even if she refused to say it out loud, she knew. Just as she knew that the fear was not in the Ninth itself but in its coming. Because what if—

  “—he doesn’t believe me? What if he … What if he tosses me aside and looks at me like I’m some … some mental case and—yeah, kinda like the way you’re looking at me now—and, and tosses me in the loony bin? His own sister! Which is fine for him, he’ll forget all about it come next loop. But what about me? What about me?”

  And the film major stared at her, bemused, as if he had been the one to lose the thread, and then said, after a long pause: “Um, sorry, we’re still—you wanted time loop plots, right? Here’s the ones I was telling you about. You got your classics, your sci-fi fantasies, your existential dramas, and uh, I threw in some episodes of random TV shows that utilize the trope.” And he handed her his stack of hand-curated kinographical picks, which she took back to her dorm only to discover that: number one, her laptop had no optical drive (though she could’ve sworn that she’d burnt CDs with it before, so … what the fuck?); two, the player in the floor’s common area worked fine but she couldn’t hear the tiny CRT television over the constant roar of the communal coin-op washer and dryer; and three, after finally pirating the list of recommendations over the university’s network and binging through them, in bed, on her laptop, over the course of an entire iteration, that there was no answer to be found in fiction, nothing to be gleaned from the many worlds within movies and television. (To say nothing of literature—as desperate as she was, Melody wasn’t so lacking in dignity as to read a book.)

  It was true, the film and physics students had been useless—though by no means more so than those who came before and after—the professors and scientists, undergrad philosophers, mental health practitioners, random weirdos on the internet—and if every single person whose brain Melody had picked shared but one extra thing in common it was that they had never met Ms. Quick, who, from the beginning of the Eighth iteration, had stayed in her room, sneaking out of her room in the hours between three and five in the morning to subsist on vending machine snacks and refill her thermos from the kitchenette sink, her avoidant withdrawal the product of, at first, manic brainstorming, which involved writing on her window with a permanent marker and winding red string around pegs on the dorm-standard corkboard above her desk while drinking cup after cup of cold instant coffee; and then, later on, as the week wore on without progress, one of agoraphobic anxiety; and then, finally, one of total dejection after that fucking cloudburst, that goddamn divergence (which, to its credit, wasn’t as egregious a divergence as Jake showing up at Rick’s—which was to say, no bats had been swung yet, no windows broken) came along to bring her to her current state: crouched under a desk, listening to the tapping of rain against a blacked-out window that reeked of Sharpie, beating her head against a radiator, above which sprawled a tangle of red yarn and paper that looked more at home in the basement of some angry loner who kept stockpiles of reverse-osmosis water and army rations while he composed his thousand-page manifestos detailing the various collusions between Syllabary and the telecom cartel and the RNA and the unseen few who ran them, peeking out every so often through slits cut into the black garbage-bag curtains that shaded his ground-level window, eyeing the unmarked Societal Sanitation vans parked outside that were, he knew, listening to the conversations of the unknowing and sleeping masses, to the inner thoughts and private ruminations of the citizens of the Continuate, and to the unanswered invocations (clunk, clunk, clunk) of one girl in particular who, lost in time, had squandered the first week of a month she meant to break free of, and whose head, burdened with the persistence of memories nobody else shared, was beginning to hurt very, very much.