Lyra pulled a Pulse out of the box and examined it between her fingers. For far too long.

I stayed quiet along with her, watching her every move. Would she grab the box and try to run? Take a handful of Pulses and leave me the rest? Or maybe tell me more about them?

I expected her to ask how many there were. That's what I would have done. Sometimes I'd wanted to count them myself. Mostly on nights I couldn't sleep. But that urge always faded somewhere around the first thousand.

Lyra finally took a breath, and I held mine.

"When did you get them? And who gave them to you?"

She tore her gaze away from the note dedicated on the underside of the box's lid and looked at me.

That question dragged me back years. For a moment I was standing outside the orphanage again. Five years old, cheeks sticky with tears, snot at my nose. I remembered my mother's curly hair, her dark eyes behind her glasses frames, her back. Walking away from me. Blue jeans and a leather jacket. Left foot, then right, in steady rhythm, giving my sobs a fixed beat to follow.

Then just the first night in a strange bed among other strange children, like me. My quiet crying against the loud screaming of the other kids. I spent another ten years in that orphanage. Long enough to start hating it even more than I hated my mother.

"Vey?"

Lyra's voice pulled me back into the room. From the way she was looking at me, I could tell my face had given away more than I wanted it to.

"Why should I tell you who gave them to me?" I asked, trying to steady my shaking voice.

"Because you don't even know yourself where they came from."

"I didn't say that, and besides, it's not true," I lied.

"You didn't need to say it." She nodded toward the open box and the note on the lid. "If you knew, you wouldn't have brought me here."

She was right, of course. She'd seen the same vision after her Pulse that I had, but unlike me, she hadn't had to guess at names for things. She knew their real names. And I wanted to know them too.

"Why do you want to help me?"

"Maybe you'll give me a discount." Lyra smiled and tossed the Pulse back into the box. It landed on the pile with a soft clink.

I didn't believe a word of it. In my world, there was no such thing as "maybe," and I doubted hers worked any differently. Help was just a transaction, priced in a currency people usually only discovered once it was too late.

She didn't want a cheaper Pulse. She wanted information, and she had to have her own reasons for it. Reasons that were none of my business, but that could still be traded on.

And trading was something I was good at.

"You tell me what you know about the vision, and I'll tell you when I got the Pulses," I answered, with much more confidence now.

"Just when?"

"For now."

Lyra pressed her lips together. "And why should I trust you'll tell me the rest afterward?"

"You shouldn't."

This time it wasn't a lie. I didn't even know myself who'd sent me the Pulses, though I had no intention of mentioning that.

"Same as I don't know you won't come back here with someone else and I'll have to run," I continued, and the thought sent a sharp pang through my chest. "So each of us only gets enough that betraying the other one isn't worth it."

Lyra smiled slowly.

It wasn't trust. I didn't need that. It was enough that betraying me would cost her just as much as betraying her would cost me.

"So when?" she asked.

"I was fifteen," I began, my eyes drifting somewhere past her, "thirty years ago. That's when they released me from the orphanage. It was a Friday afternoon. My lucky day."

"And I'm supposed to believe they just hand out hundreds of years of life as a parting gift there?"

I stopped short. She'd only wanted to know when, not how. But I'd been suppressing this story inside me for decades. With every word, some piece of that childhood grievance drained out of me, and I felt lighter than before. Screw it.

"A courier delivered them. Waiting for me right outside the exit."

"June eighth," Lyra read the date off the note on the box. "Is that the storage date?"

"Yeah." I nodded. "Someone sent it the same afternoon my mother abandoned me. That box had been waiting for me for ten whole years."

Lyra quickly pulled her phone from her purse, and it was only once she opened the Loop that I noticed her hands were shaking. I watched the screen over her shoulder. She scrolled through Nox's old fragments until she stopped on one of them.

The Loop's First Poet. What did he leave behind?

She started the video. For a moment she just searched for the right moment, and fragments of Nox's words drifted confusedly through the room. It seemed like she was doing this more for herself than for me. Finally she found the section she was looking for:

On June eighth, 2040, the last results of the resonant snail experiments were logged. A day later, the project had no members left. It was officially dissolved. All that remained were meeting notes and fragments belonging to a man who, according to Corven, never existed. The Loop's first poet.

"The first poet?" I whispered, surprised. My Pulses had always been a mystery to me, but it had never once occurred to me that they might connect to the Loop itself. I mean, sure, they came from it, but my theories about how they'd ended up with me had leaned more toward dealer parents, a rich uncle, or maybe an affair with consequences. Definitely not Loop engineers spending their afternoons in meetings.

"Nox went looking for him," Lyra answered, pausing the fragment. "But he never found out who he was, or where he disappeared to. Same as everyone else from the project — the one that, within a few months, turned into the Loop and let people live forever."

Just a select few people, like you, I wanted to correct her, but I swallowed that bitterness the same way I used to swallow my tears back at the orphanage.

"Why didn't he just ask Corven?"

Lyra set the phone down on the floor and crossed her legs.

"He did ask him. But Corven claimed he only joined the Loop after those experiments had already ended. Nox eventually gave up the search, because the trail just went cold. After all those years Nox spent practically obsessed with it, you're the first lead that actually goes somewhere."

"Me?" I didn't understand.

Right then, her phone rang, cutting our conversation short. I glanced quickly at the screen and saw the name. Nox. Lyra swiped to reject the call and gripped the phone tightly in her palm.

"I need to talk to him," she said, standing up. "But not now, and not here."

"Wait, hold on," I called after her, grabbing her wrist firmly. "You have to tell me more. And you can't tell anyone about the box. Anyone!"

She turned around, and the look on her face was more determined than before. She tried to hide it, but I could tell that whatever the reason she'd left Nox, she still wasn't indifferent to him.

"Don't worry, I'll come back," she said, slipping out of my grip. "I'll come see you tomorrow, and I'll know more, I promise."

Then she checked her phone again and shoved it into her purse. Her head had to be spinning from all this new information, just like mine was. I believed she'd come back, because there had been more than one vision, and she'd only seen a fraction of it. She'd be curious. And she'd pay. If not, the bouncers would deal with her. And if there was trouble, I'd have to disappear. It wouldn't be the first time.

The door clicked shut, and I was alone in the room. That feeling of emptiness was suddenly worse than it had ever been before.

My thoughts raced wildly. How was my mother connected to the Loop? Had she even known about the Pulses? Had she really sent them? I tried to recall every detail of that day again, but it had been so long ago...

Then I replayed the whole conversation with Lyra in my head. From her arrival, through the visions, through the moment I'd opened the box in front of her, all the way to the end of our brief meeting.

The mix of adrenaline and happy hormones slowly faded, and my feet started landing back on solid ground. Suddenly this whole thing started feeling like a really stupid idea. I'd learned something more about myself, but at what cost? Until today, I'd lived right at the edge, a line I'd never once crossed. I'd been reasonably safe in the bar with the Pulses hidden under the floor. No one else knew about them. But now everything was different. Lyra knew about them, and from the sound of it, she was about to tell Nox. One of her last sentences echoed in my head again:

"I need to talk to him, but not now, and not here."

Why? Why couldn't she talk to him in front of me? What was she hiding? Would she just call the cops, and I'd have to run?

I needed to find out more. Before it was too late. So I quickly hid the box back under the floor, pulled my hood over my head, and ran out after her. My shoes clicked down the narrow hallway leading from my apartment to the bar.

"What's going on?" the bartender shouted after me, but I left him behind without a glance. I pushed past the guests with their heads buried in their phone screens and shoved open the door leading out to the street. The fresh wind carried a salty scent of the sea, and streetlamps lit the road in soft white light. I felt sick to my stomach. I hated the street.

I looked around, trying to spot Lyra's brown coat. She couldn't have gotten far. Next to the club glowed the sign of a pawn shop, ONE MORE WEEK. In its window, tucked among phones and wedding rings, sat a single child's shoe. I jumped up onto the windowsill of the display. I needed a better view, and Lyra was getting farther away with every second.

My eyes darted over the people below me. Heads buried in phones I ignored first. Lyra had no reason to watch the Loop while walking — she hadn't haggled with me over the price of the Pulse, so she clearly had plenty of money, and relying on the Loop's lottery couldn't possibly make sense for her.

She couldn't have driven her own car here; it would have been far too conspicuous. The vast majority of the population didn't even know how to drive. Watching the Loop while driving required attention the Loop itself siphoned away. Instead of cars, people watching the Loop moved along in lanes. Like two flocks of sheep, screens where their shepherd's crook should have been. That shuffling gait always terrified me. The street's absolute silence, broken only by the clatter of hundreds of shoes. No scents, no smells. Just that sea wind.

Lyra had to live nearby. Otherwise she'd never have found her way to me. I was small fry — I didn't need to get rich off Pulses. I just wanted to survive as long as possible. Pay rent, get some food, but definitely not an apartment in one of the skyscrapers around here.

Where would the wife of one of the richest men in the city live? And where would she go, if she'd kicked him out? To a friend's place?

Then it hit me, and my eyes landed on the tip of the Aureola. The skyscraper whose slender lines were crossed by neon light pulsing from its base all the way up through every floor, converging at last at the tip of its antenna high in the clouds.

I broke into a run and merged into one of the lanes, weaving between the watchers and their fragments.

"Hey!" one of them shouted at me after I elbowed him in the ribs. He staggered and crumpled to the ground.

"Sorry," I yelled back at him. He'd been wearing a grease-stained white tank top. A cook or a laborer, I figured. Though his body looked a little too sculpted for a cook. I couldn't afford to waste more time on him and took off running again.

The screens lining the street displayed the latest trend. I passed them as fast as I could, but even so, I caught myself watching. A bearded man dressed in a bright green tuxedo, wearing a helmet with a red plume. Playing piano and singing something about peaches. It was bizarre. It was the Loop. And somehow it worked, or it never would have become a trend.

The raised entrance to the Aureola was already in sight. I glanced left and caught the lit lobby with its massive seating. A brown coat flickered past the lobby's glass windows.

Lyra.

I was about to break from the crowd and follow her when the Loop's chime sounded. Two deep, soft tones. They vibrated through the space around me, and through my chest as well.

The gazes around me lifted from phones to the screens. The world seemed to freeze for a moment, people started whispering to each other, and for an instant everything almost looked the way it must have, before the Loop.

The chime's last tone faded, and a woman's voice rang out from the screens.

"Our newest winner is Verina Fair. Congratulations, Verina. We're calling you right now. Please accept the call and share your joy at winning Pulses with us."

A long tone announced the ringing. Nothing happened for a moment, but then a melody rang out through the quiet street. Just a few steps away from me.

God.

Not now. Not here.

I checked the Aureola's lobby to my left. Lyra had walked past the main entrance, heading away from the skyscraper. The lottery result meant nothing to her.

People started clustering around the winner, raising their phones over their heads. Everyone wanted her in their own fragment. They believed it would help them win a Pulse too. I didn't believe that, though maybe that was only because I didn't need to win.

I tried to push my way out of the crowd, but the anonymous bodies around me pressed inward, toward the ringtone. They squeezed me, stepped on my feet, dug elbows into my ribs. I had no choice but to move with them.

The ringing stopped, and a blonde woman appeared on the screens around us, her face lit by the glow of her phone screen. The people behind her clapped and filmed her with the same fervor as if Nox himself were standing there.

"Excellent," the host's voice said from the screens. "Tell us a bit about yourself, Verina. What do you do?"

The woman smiled with the nervous laugh of someone hoping the people around her would be reasonable. She glanced behind herself, then back at her phone's camera.

"I'm a teacher," she whispered, and the people around her started clapping.

"But that's wonderful," the voice from the screens said, in a much higher tone than before. "Raising the next generation is one of the most important jobs there is. Please stay where you are."

Police sirens started sounding in the distance. It would be over soon, and then I'd run.

"Two thousand!" a shout rang out from the crowd. "I'll give you two thousand for that Pulse!"

I watched on one of the screens as Verina turned toward the voice. Someone in the crowd shoved her, and she flinched, crouching down. Fear mixed with helplessness spread across her face.

"What will you do with your extra time, Verina?" the friendly voice from the screens asked, then immediately added: "We ask everyone celebrating to please let the police vehicles through."

The sound of sirens grew louder, and I felt like the crowd around me had gotten so dense that I wouldn't be able to draw another breath after this one. Then, suddenly, the pressure eased. The sweaty man next to me collapsed to the ground, and within a second someone else filled his spot.

Something gripped my ankle.

I looked down and my heart clenched with horror. The sweaty man was lying beneath me. Bubbles of spit at his mouth, a pool of dark blood beneath his throat.

The grip loosened.

The man beside me was standing on his back, raising an arm, a blade flashing in his hand. He didn't wait. With a second strike he hit a woman with greasy black hair in the throat, and she collapsed onto the sweaty man. He stepped over her, and I watched his back.

Panic seized me, and I couldn't manage to breathe, let alone scream. Standing half a meter to the side, it could have been me lying in that pool of blood on the pavement. That closeness to death completely wrecked me.

I tried to force the old man beside me to move, to squeeze through the bodies in the crowd, but I was too weak to shove against dozens of bodies pressing in around me.

"Please," a voice whispered beneath my feet.

It belonged to the woman with the greasy hair. All it would take was kneeling beside her and pressing a palm to the wound.

A police unit stopped their cars just a few dozen meters away and began clearing a path from my right side. I looked in that direction and, holding my breath, watched more bodies fall and the attacker move toward the woman.

"Once again, we wish our winner today a wonderful rest of her day. Don't forget to celebrate properly," the host recommended, and the call ended.

"He's got a knife!" a man shouted a few steps away from me.

The crowd reacted instantly, starting to part. Police officers moved toward me, clearing a path.

"I need that Pulse more than she does!" the man with the knife shouted, pushing forward.

"You can look forward to the Loop's next lottery drawing next week. And now, back to today's trends," the voice from the screens announced flatly.

"Help," the woman with the greasy hair whispered again. I bent my knee, about to help her. My eyes met hers. Desperate. The kind that would keep me from sleeping tonight. I lifted my head back toward the Aureola. Lyra was just vanishing around its corner.

I wanted to throw up. At myself. At what I was about to do. My eyes went damp. I had never let anyone die before. But my heart already knew that was exactly what I was about to do.

"I'm sorry," I whispered, wiped my nose on my sleeve, took a breath, and screamed at the top of my lungs:

"He ran into the Aureola!"

"What did he look like?" one of the officers shouted at me, shoving his way past.

"White tank top, dark hair. Muscular."

He was the first person my mind had conjured up in that moment. And right after, I wished it hadn't been him. He'd seemed like a nice guy.

The officers pushed on toward the Aureola, and people cleared out of their way. I didn't wait around, and ran after them. A few heartbeats later I was standing at the corner of the neon skyscraper, carefully peering around it.

A narrow back alley, lined with AC units, dumpsters, and vents. At its entrance, Lyra stood leaning against the wall, right leg bent at the knee. Her phone was at her ear, and she was listening.

"Yes, the same date," she said into the phone. "And Corven was there."

She paused.

"No. First tell me who knew about the child back then."

Then she said nothing more. After a moment she slid the phone back into her purse, and I pulled my head back sharply behind the corner, hurrying toward the road to blend back into the crowd.

"I'm innocent!" a shout rang out from the street. It was the man in the white tank top. Hands behind his back, two officers flanking him. Paramedics were crouched over five bodies in the middle of the road. The woman with the greasy hair? Dead. Same as all the other bodies. The crowd once again dutifully flowed around them.

Verina was climbing into a black car with a flashing light on top. Far happier than she'd been a moment ago. Off to collect her prize.

I turned discreetly back toward the Aureola and spotted Lyra through the lobby's glass. Heading for the elevator.

On the screen above the Aureola, the evening's new trend lit up.

"Oh, shit," I breathed, pulling my hood down as low as it would go over my forehead.

My face stretched across four floors of the Aureola.

"White tank top, dark hair. Muscular," my enlarged mouth repeated.

Then came footage of officers wrestling the man in the white tank top to the ground.

ALERT WOMAN HELPS CATCH ATTACKER!

In the background of the shot, I caught a glimpse of the real attacker's back. Still holding the knife. He watched the innocent man's arrest for a few moments, then vanished from frame.

I knew it would only be a matter of time before someone else noticed him, and the alert woman turned into a liar.

Hood pulled low over my forehead, I made my way back to the bar. Only a few buildings now separated me from the Aureola. Close enough that I could still hear the police sirens.

I sat down on my bed and tried to think about what to do next.

I should run. Pack up the Pulses and vanish before anyone recognized my face. That's exactly what I'd done every time people started asking too many questions.

Except this time, for the first time, someone had actually offered me answers.

Lyra knew Corven, my visions meant something more to them than just dreams, and she'd just been asking Nox who could have known about me thirty years ago. Christ. She knew more about me than I knew about myself. And had she even really been calling Nox? Not a single name had come up in that conversation.

Whatever the truth of it was, I decided to stay.

Not because I trusted Lyra.

But because I couldn't run away again from the one lead that had finally found me on its own.