Jade didn't go home after school.
She needed air. Distance. A mental firewall between her and whatever the hell Noah Blake was.
So she walked.
Past the bus stop. Past the corner store. Past the shortcut she always took. Her boots hit the pavement in rhythm with her heartbeat, somewhere between "impending heart attack" and "paranoid squirrel."
The book: Temporal Logic & Causality, was still in her bag. Heavy. Like it was made of secrets and regret.
By the time she reached the park, the sun was bleeding orange into the clouds. Jade collapsed onto the swings. Her bag hit the ground with a thud. She needed to think. But every time she tried, her brain threw static at her like a broken TV.
~Noah: you're looping again. aren't you?
Which means this isn't the first time.
Which means… how many times has she already died?
She rubbed her face. Her palms came away damp.
Then her phone buzzed.
[Voice message received: You (1 week ago)]
What?
She never sent herself voice messages. That was serial killer behavior. But it was there. Timestamped and sealed like a black box after a plane crash.
Her stomach flipped as she pressed play.
~"Hey, Jade. If you're hearing this, it means you've looped. Again. You won't remember everything. You never do. But listen, don't trust Noah. Not yet. Not this time."~
Her own voice. Cracked. Panicked. Terrified.
~"They erased something. Check your sketchbook. Look for the girl in the mask. You drew her last time. You said she always shows up right before you die..."~
Click.
The message cut off.
Dead air.
Jade stared at the screen. Don't trust Noah. They erased something. Girl in the mask.
She yanked her sketchbook from her bag and flipped through. Coffee cup doodles. Half-done dragons. A drawing of Noah she really needed to burn. And then... there. Near the back.
A page that didn't look like the others.
Drawn in frantic black ink. A girl with long hair. A cracked white mask. Her eyes, visible through the holes were Jade's. But wide. Hollow. Like they were staring through the page.
She didn't remember drawing it. But her hand did.
The shading. The strokes. Every detail screamed Jade Carter. Except… she had no memory of making it.
[THUNK.]
She jumped. A sound behind her.
The park was empty.
[THUNK.] Again. Louder.
She looked back down at her sketchbook. The drawing was gone.
Blank page. No mask. No eyes. No ink.
"Nope," she whispered. "That was there. That was real."
But reality was glitching again.
[THUNK.]
She stood up. "Who's there?!"
Silence.
Then a voice.
~"You're remembering out of order."
The voice came from everywhere. Not human. Not robotic. Like a chorus of broken mirrors humming from inside her skull.
"SHOW YOURSELF!" she shouted.
~"You weren't meant to wake up. This loop wasn't scheduled."
Her heart hammered. "WHO ARE YOU?!"
Silence. Then...
[buzz]
From: Blocked Number
Loop count 4 Stability: 62% Subject anomaly detected
She dropped her phone. Her hands were shaking too hard. The grass swallowed the glow of the screen.
Then, a whisper. So soft it might've been a memory ~"She's watching you."~
That night, Jade sat in her room with every light on.
She couldn't sleep. Couldn't stop thinking about the voice. The drawing. The message from herself.
She picked up her sketchbook again, desperate for proof. Flipped through every page. Nothing.
Until the last one.
At the bottom corner, barely visible, was a scrawled sentence in her handwriting:
~"You already died three times."~
Her chest tightened.
She didn't know what scared her more, the fact that it sounded like a warning, or the fact that it sounded like a memory.
[Knock knock.]
She jumped, turned her head very slowly and looked towards the window.
Her room was on the second floor.
She crept toward it, heart thudding, half-expecting to see her own face with hollow eyes and a mask.
But it wasn't.
It was him.
Noah.
Perched on the edge of her fire escape like a ghost in a hoodie, moonlight brushing the sharp edges of his cheekbones.
He looked up at her through the glass... calm, almost shy. One hand lifted in a soft wave. His other hand clutched something small, a paper flower, folded from notebook.
Jade hesitated, then opened the window.
"Are you stalking me now?" she asked, trying to sound sarcastic, but her voice cracked halfway through.
Noah blinked like he hadn't expected her to actually open it.
"I didn't mean to scare you," he said. "I just... I wanted to make sure you were okay."
"Why?" she asked.
He paused. "Because you look like someone who forgets how to ask for help."
Jade didn't know what to say. Her throat tightened. The wind picked up, brushing past both of them like a secret it didn't mean to share.
Noah looked down, then handed her the paper flower.
"I found this in your locker," he said quietly. "It was from another loop. You folded it. Wrote something on it. But the ink's gone."
Jade took it with shaking hands.
"I don't remember this," she whispered.
"I know," Noah said, eyes locking with hers. "But I think... you meant it for me."
They stood there, in the quiet hum of the night, two ghosts of themselves, holding on to pieces of a story they hadn't finished writing yet.
And for the first time that day, it wasn't the loop or the déjà vu that scared her, it was how much she wanted to trust him.