It wasn’t fair.

  Jeru flexed his fingers as he leaned back in the chair he’d created inside the room in Penelope’s mind. While her mind was defenseless against him as far as what she thought, he could hide in his own little bubble and keep himself secluded from her.

  He knew that Penelope longed for the privacy that he could have, which made him feel guilty every time he entered this space, but there were things that he could only do in here.

  The room wasn’t decorated with much. When he’d first discovered the space in the mind of the first looper, he’d thought about outfitting it with all the luxuries that the loopers would never get to experience unless they took a few days off between floors in the city. His guilt hadn’t let him keep most of those for long, so he’d pared them down to a comfortable chair, a desk, and a scrying crystal.

  Magic was a tricky thing. Given that he had shut Dinmar off from the rest of the universe, no one should have been able to scry into the future, but considering he came from the future, he’d given himself a tiny window he could peek through. Cirdor wasn’t strong enough to find it and he doubted Penelope would even know what to look for. Considering it was connected to the surface, the Demons wouldn’t have access to it unless there was a floor break and those same Demons were able to hold the surface, which was something he always reset when it happened.

  The main reason for the window was because he needed to know if it worked. Every time he looked through the crystal, he’d seen the same fate. Alex disbanding the Guild to turn millions of Weres loose on the Demons. By the time the fighting was over, most of the universe was dead.

  It was the future that he’d come from and the one he was trying to avoid.

  He’d shared that future with Nate. It had been why his friend had finally decided to sacrifice himself to give Penelope a chance to change the future. But so far, every time he’d looked, the future had remained unchanged.

  The scrying crystal was a simple object, only able to see forward in the timeline that they were on. A reset would potentially change things, but considering how simple he needed it to be, he’d focused on a single point in time. The point where his other friend turned the Weres loose to hunt down the Demons.

  He was able to draw enough mana to look at the crystal during each reset and only for a moment before things reset. He wanted hope to know that if things unfolded the way they’d planned, the future would be saved.

  His heart fell when he saw the red-haired Human decapitate the WereDragon. It was the last Were lord to fall and his death had freed all of the Weres from the control of the Guild. Without the magic binding all of the Weres to serve the orders of the Were Lords, the Weres had run rampant through the universe, turning people every chance they got and killing many of those that they couldn’t. In some ways, the monster that had been unleashed to take care of the Demons was almost as bad as the Demons themselves.

  With a wave of his hand, the crystal grew dark. This run wasn’t going to work out either.

  “Dad, what am I doing wrong!” Jeru grabbed handfuls of his black hair in frustration. He snorted. Even with as many years under his belt as his father, he was still begging for insight from a man who couldn’t hear him.

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  “She’s still going to lose…” Jeru sighed and leaned back in the chair. “What can we change? She’s done the jobs better than everyone before her. Her mastery of spells is on par with some masters. Her drive is unwavering!” He slammed his fist on the table. “What else can she do!”

  The walls were silent as his voice died against them.

  “It has to be because of the resets…” Jeru rubbed his chin. “I know the resets will interfere with the scrying crystal. So she’s got to have some more resets that she’s going to do…” He leaned his head back. “This is why I need her to accept that there are going to be losses! Knowing her, she’s going to force a reset the first time someone dies…” He shook his head as he thought about the Council in Dinmar.

  While it hadn’t mattered during the fourth-floor time period, there were cultists in the city that had to be taken care of. Nate had learned that the hard way and been forced to do a full reset because going back to the beginning of the floor hadn’t been back far enough.

  “Ugh, so much to do!” He stood up and stomped around the desk. “And yes, Dad, I know that you think pacing never solved anything, but sometimes exercise helps the brain!” He stopped and chuckled. After all this time, he found himself missing the one person he’d never spent enough time getting to know. Even if there was a way to save himself, and there wasn’t, his father was one of the few people who wouldn’t still be alive when the timer expired.

  “Sacrificing yourself for the greater good is a family curse, isn’t it?” Jeru wiped a tear from his eye. He had to compose himself. While Penelope would think that only a moment had passed, he could stay in this bubble for hours during a reset. So while he had plenty of time to mask the pain and loss he was experiencing, he needed to use it to make sure she didn’t feel the hopelessness that was plaguing him.

  “It’s a good thing that I made sure the archdemon was the only one who could end the loop.” Jeru chuckled. “Because I would have pulled the plug on this fiasco decades ago.” He took a few deep breaths to help center himself. Watching Penelope go through the mind-numbing motions of raising her jobs had given him a little hope that she would stick it out even once the runs became weeks or months of doing the same thing just so she could make a different decision that might not work out.

  “Of all the loopers, you’re the one who repetition wears on the least.” Jeru shook his head as he sat back in his chair. Nate had looped for over five hundred years and he doubted that Penelope would loop for less. Nate had gotten tired of training jobs after the first loop of learning about each one. The things that the previous looper had found to be boring or insignificant, Penelope met with determination and commitment. It still amazed him that the two of them had ever paired up, considering how opposite they were.

  He leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling. Looking through the crystal only served to make his depression worse and he’d thought about just destroying it thousands of times, but it being available to look into the future was a tiny sliver of hope. And that was the only thing that was keeping him sane. The smallest chance that he’d be able to glimpse this crazy scheme of his changing the future.

  He closed his eyes for a moment as he gathered his thoughts and arranged the information that Penelope was going to need once she reached the beginning. Things weren’t going to be easy until she figured out a way to save Emory Dixon. He had no idea how they were going to do that, but it was one of the pressing problems that he was going to have to help her either figure out or come to terms with him being an unfortunate casualty.

  The walls shuddered, letting him know that reality was about to piece itself back together.

  This wasn’t the last loop and he knew there were probably hundreds more to follow, so he put a smile back on his face and pushed the hopelessness that was weighing him down out of his head as much as he could.

  She needed him to be strong and that was exactly what he was going to do.

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