"Josephine!" Bina shouts, having tried to speak up several times during the rant and failed. "That's great, but you're missing something. If it's a fundamental property of the universe, why does it need people to work?"

Josephine seems taken aback - 

And for a moment, so fast it's barely noticeable, the sky isn't so perfect anymore. Is dark and yawning like teeth - 

And then the sky is blue and lightly clouded again. Like it always was.

Ant glances up, and then back down, shaking eir head. "Bina's not wrong. That seems... Too easy."

"It requires people because that's what made the effects work."

She seems to be getting frustrated, or perhaps angry, shoulders tight and jaw tense.

"But there haven't always been people so-" Ant has no idea where ey was going with that, but it seemed important.

"Look, I don't know, okay? I don't know! And I don't appreciate being lectured on it! The other Bina got quite huffy with me as well..."

She crosses her arms over her chest and looks away. She seems upset, now, like she doesn't know whether to start shouting or to cry.

"Thought I was the teenager," Ant mutters to Bina.

Josephine gets up and walks away, staring into the distant sky.

The air's still and heavy and hot, almost liquid, and the engines have developed a soft, high pitched whine.

Bina sighs and drags a hand down her face. Gives Josephine a moment, but - 

This is coming to an end.

She's developing a sense for this now.

"Forty watts," she says. "You said the experiment would get only forty watts, when we talked. A whole crowd for a lightbulb."

"Don't you know how exponents work, dear? Forty-seven people is forty watts. Forty-eight would've been eighty - why I didn't look. Forty-nine, and you have a hundred and sixty. Seventy three people? Over two and a half gigawatts. Sixty seven million lightbulbs. It'd be an easy job, too, for those seventy three. Just staring. They could work in shifts. Power the entire world."

"-Almost too good to pass up."

"I couldn't! Imagine it, clean energy, easily more than we could ever use! It'd be enough to end scarcity, to launch us ahead into a new age - "

"...To get the botfly's image in every science textbook," Bina says, mouth dry.

"Alien space bug. Ruling the human race. Or eating it."

"Oh, I'm sure that's not how it'd go - " she says, voice far away and almost dreamy.

"Wait - No. Look." They're low on time. Either Bina's about to wake - or she should wake - and: "You've spoken to Three, and to the others. You remember the other loops? Have you talked to them?"

"Oh. No. Maybe. Your Three, she pulled me forward, but this is my first time in this dream... You anchored me here. Gave me this." And she touches the red scarf around her neck. "You left it behind this time. In two pieces. You don't, usually. I gave you one back, with the note. I kept the other, for a time..."

She seems vague, eyes unfocused.

"That doesn't actually explain anything!" she shouts, then - 

There's a growl.

It's not the engines.

It's the sky above them.

A cloud splits, grows teeth, turns into a gaping green maw - 

There's no time left, but Bina has one last question.

"Josephine!" she shouts over the wind, over the dying engine. "You have to tell me how you died!"

"Oh. It's the funniest thing. I don't remember."

And her smile is a skull's smile, her flesh gone, her clothes except the brilliant red scarf long rotted rags - 

Ant grabs Bina's hand again, staring up at the sky.

"I'm no thief, though, and this is yours," Josephine says, beginning to unwind the scarf from her neck.

"Won't you die?!" Bina shouts.

"Oh. I can't stop what's coming. It merely held me together long enough for this. And I am many things, not all of them good - I guess I never really figured out how to be a nice person, I never saw the point - but. I will not take this from you."

She laughs, dryly. "And for death - did you think it merely killed us? It did a great deal more then that. It killed every part of us. Up and down, left and right, forward and backward. It undid us. Excised us from the time-line. There has never been a woman called Josephine Dubois ne Gallieni, not anymore. There has never been a company called Astre Sucre. There has never been a major beet sugar industry in southern Quebec."

"All the things I've done. My experiments. My writing. My husband. My friends. Not simply gone. They never existed." Her voice, though soft and coming from a skull, is intense, and filled with despair. "My parents had no children. We were erased."

"Everyone there, everything nearby, gone. We are a hole punched out of history. A page cut from a book."

She holds out the scarf.

And Bina takes it.

(This is awful.)

Ant leans closer to Bina. "I'm sorry." Because it seems like the right thing to say.