She giggles and shakes her head. "Not that I felt immediately - but I can grope around."

"Flashlight will be faster." She steps over to the closet, opens the door all the way... Nothing on their level, but - "Can you give me a boost up?"

"Yup." She steps over.

And with her help -

There's a bag on the top shelf, shoved into the very back corner farthest from the window, in the same nook the woman had hidden in earlier. It hadn't been visible from the floor, and Lily needs the boost up to get it comfortably.

Nothing else in here. She hands the bag to the woman - "Can you really carefully feel through this in case there's anything useful?"

"Yeah."

She takes it out to the main room, to prop near the window so she has a bit of streetlight when going through it.

And she takes the flashlight to search the other rooms, such as they are. Peers in cabinets more in depth, in the linen closet, in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom... Nothing else, and she has a creeping feeling time's growing short.

Perhaps -

The wind. It's picking up.

She jogs back into the main room - into the bedroom, turns the flashlight off and sets it down - "We're about to snap back!" she calls out, and -

She's already gotten the bag securely closed, its contents accounted for, and attached by every strap and buckle she could find on it to her body.

She'd followed the other woman when she jogged past, and the wind's thrashing around them, whipping her hair into her face even though it doesn't seem to be disturbing the light mess -

She grabs her hand.

Lily pulls her in, holds on tight -

And the time stream rights itself.

The wind stops.

The woman stiffens -

She'd already secured the gun in a case in the backpack, fortunately, because blood trickles down from her nose - and she begins to seize, not collapsing so much as failing to have any continued ability to keep standing.

What - 

Lily catches her, cursing, and - the mud's deep enough to drown in, it's not safe to lower the woman down -

All Lily can do is try to hold her.

She stops seizing, eventually. It feels like she only goes still an eternity later, though probably - hopefully - it wasn't quite that long.

She doesn't rouse after.

Lily does not like this. Not one bit.

There's not a lot she can do about it, not right now.

Nothing, in fact, except carefully get the bag off of the woman and onto her own back - without dropping the woman, which is difficult - and start dragging her toward the tunnel entrance.

It's a long distance.

It's a longer distance, after, to somewhere she can even in theory rest. The mud's a bit deeper, here. Thicker, and the air is freezing in a way it wasn't before she shattered time when she suspects she wasn't supposed to have. She'd be going numb, even if she wasn't covered in mud, even if she hadn't recently woken up from being choked unconscious - even if she wasn't carrying someone heavier and taller than her in a way that puts uncomfortable pressure on her shoulder - 

And there's hazards under the mud.

It's mostly pure luck that Lily thinks to prop the woman against the wall and get all her papers and her knife and everything she doesn't want getting wet into a plastic bag inside the backpack before she trips and soaks herself in wet mud.

That happens...

Maybe twenty meters from the platform. She thinks.

It's getting hard to keep track. Her head's going fuzzy, and a sane her who wasn't half frozen (who wasn't terrified) would probably have ditched the woman to drown.

She's not even thinking about how insane doing this is, though.

Just...

One foot at a time. Careful. One trudge, one breath, her vision's going grey and her head's floating and she just -

Needs - 

To -

Keep going.

She doesn't remember getting them to the platform, not really. It's all a distant haze.

Climbing up hadn't been easy, and she'd passed out on the frozen concrete basically as soon as they were secure enough to not immediately drown.

It's not a safe place to do that.

She's too cold to care.

Lily's Dream, Age 13

She's at summer camp. It's sometimes hot and muggy, sometimes decent, but it's a stay away and she can spend the whole summer in a cabin with no working electricity or plumbing and none of her family anywhere ever, not until summer ends, and the camp counselors are mostly teenagers and young adults and if they know - let alone care - about Lily's parents being rich they haven't shown it. 

She's made friends here, or she thinks she has. Lily's never really been sure what people mean by friends, since the word gets used for a lot of different things. 

But they're sitting around a campfire, singing songs, and Lily's face is warm and her body's finally getting relaxed, and she can see the stars, and she's on top of the world. 

Lily had respected exactly one adult in her life, and he was six feet under, and she didn't care at all about the camp rules, so when they started telling ghost stories, and the stories about a nearby abandoned factory bubbled up late in the night - 

Lily had wanted to check it out, of course, and she'd browbeat another girl in her cabin - one of her friends - into going with her. The other girl's scared, but Lily's confident, and amused at her fear. 

That's because she doesn't know what will happen next, of course, but even if she did - her feet wouldn't be able to take any other path. 

There's someone else with them, though - another friend, perhaps.

"Is this - significant, too?" she asks, quietly, as the three girls all slip through the fence together.

She looks about the same age as them.

"...Yeah."

She stares up at the factory. There's something wrong about it, the way it sits in the landscape, the location it's at. The size it is, given the ghost stories say it was a bread factory, and all the employees burned up inside. 

The way it smells, still, but not like bread. Like sugar coated marshmallows, thrust in a flame until the sugar catches on fire. Like barbecue. 

The bricks are soot-darkened, and the moon doesn't penetrate inside. Their flashlights barely do.

(The other girl is so, so scared. Lily had been making fun of her last time, to drown the creeping unease in her chest. She isn't making fun now, and when the other girl freezes, and sweeps her flashlight around in sharp jitters...)

(Lily had leaned behind her and whispered 'boo,' once.)

She turns her flashlight, now, the beam steady, and tries to find whatever the girl was looking for. 

She takes deep, even breaths, and sees burned trails of black on the floor. Like something being dragged. 

She sees streaks of what might have been tar, once, or thick mud. 

"We should be quiet," she says, in a low murmur. The other girl is shaking, and Lily takes her hand. 

The other girl hadn't been willing to ask to leave, once, despite her fear. She was more afraid of laughter than monsters. 

Lily turns them back toward the exit, says, in that same low murmur, "Watch your step, and don't look back."

It's a magical sort of thinking, a mythological sort of logic. Monsters can get you even if you close your eyes. Death will drag you under, no matter how hard you keep your gaze fixed on the light. 

Lily tries not to think about that. 

(There's voices. Women arguing. Lily hadn't understood them once, given she didn't know French yet.)

(She does now.)

Do you realize what you've done? How much entropy - 

I had to. Everything was - jumbled. Your patterns, everyone else's, the entire damn place. So I moved it all. 

There will be consequences. You know this. 

It's fine. I know what I'm doing - I put down an anchor. Nothing significant happened here, and I've forward shifted the temporal shadows anyways. If they manifest, it'll be past the point of viability of the loops.

A problem for future you is still a problem. 

It'll never get that far. The damage to my timeline isn't severe, and I've spoken to the one after me - the loops degrade fast, so. We're fixing it now.

Oh dear. Please tell me you're not mucking with your own timeline again. That's dangerous, and I warned you not to. 

What do you mean? I've never mucked with my timeline, and you didn't warn me of anything -

The maybe it wasn't you who got my message. Which one are you, anyways? I'm not sure if you even came in my office, though you girls have rarely diverged that much by then...

I don't know. Early on, I guess, but I haven't managed any contact with the loops before me.

Oh, so you're the one whose fault this is. 

She feels dizzy, listening. 

Because -

Because something significant does happen - the entire place creaks and groans like a tower about to tumble down, to scream apart in the wind -

Because the lines of the factory are wrong, the size is wrong for a bakery in the middle of nowhere - 

Because -

The place had collapsed, hadn't it?

Shouldn't it have collapsed by now? Creaking, and then a sudden crack while they were frozen listening to the women, the ceiling falling in and Lily desperately scrambling for safety, and Lily hadn't even known French and she realizes she has no idea if the other girl does - 

Because the other girl didn't make it out. 

There's more to the conversation, probably. Important clues.

The factory is perfectly silent. No creaking. No groaning. 

She tightens her hand on the other girl's, and she runs.

She doesn't look back.

She won't need to.

Could anything else have been chasing her?

(The corpse has grown, sinews spreading, fleshing bubbling up, bones stretching. It's a horrid thing, large and out of proportion to itself and the world it moves through. It's very, very quiet.)

And a girl who was never supposed to be here runs beside Lily.

She does, however, look back.

She trips.

The girl Lily's hauling - the one she can't remember the name of, perhaps never knew the name of, even though she got her killed - 

The girl screams, short and sharp, as their third falls, and she yanks away, tries to help, and makes a keening, distressed noise.

Lily turns too, inevitably. 

The corpse fills the hallway, and every shadow, and every potential of it, looming over the other piece of her.

She looks hungry, if a deformed monster of bone and mud and ash could be said to hunger. She's paused, but only briefly.

There's nowhere for her prey to go.

If she stops to think, she'll break. 

So she doesn't. 

She lunges forward, grabs her friend's shoulders and drags her back, shoves her into the girl who was supposed to die here - 

"Run," she says, like leaving one dead girl to the care of another makes any sense at all -

And she breaks into her own run. 

Not away, though.