One second of nothing.
Then Eminem. Then the road. Then her voice, the same words I have heard six times now.
"Take that one. It's shorter. My boss uses this route all the time when he drives from Alaska instead of flying. Trust me."
"Okay," I say.
I turn onto the offroad path. Her route. The one she suggested in every loop, the one I have fought, fled, ignored, and broken guardrails to avoid. This time I just take it.
I am tired in a way that does not have a bottom.
Six loops of dying. Six loops of watching her die in ways that should not exist outside of nightmares. The fighting has not worked. The running has not worked. Whatever this is, it does not bend to effort. So today I do not fight it.
The wilderness closes in on either side, the road narrowing, and we settle into something that almost resembles peace. Eminem plays through the loop's familiar opening bars. I do not skip it. I let it run.
"Seriously?" she says, the same line, right on cue. "Eminem?"
"What's wrong with Eminem?"
"Nothing, if you're stuck in 2002."
I almost smile. The familiarity of it, the small comfort of a conversation I have now heard enough times to know by heart, lands somewhere softer than it should.
She switches to Billie Eilish. The mood goes darker. We drive.
An hour in, she glances at me. Properly looks, the way she does when she's clocked something. "You look exhausted."
"I am," I say. It is the most honest thing I have said to her in six loops.
"Want me to drive?"
I look at her. At the offer sitting there, simple and warm and completely unaware of everything underneath it.
"Yeah," I say. "Actually, yeah."
We pull over. Switch seats in the gravel shoulder, the Yukon wind cutting cold across the open doors, and there's something almost domestic about it, the two of us trading places in a marriage four days old. She adjusts the mirror. I sink into the passenger seat and feel my body remember, all at once, exactly how tired six deaths can make a person.
"Comfortable?" she asks, pulling back onto the road.
"Getting there."
She drives well. Steady hands, controlled speed, the same quiet competence that lives under everything she does. I watch her profile against the window for a while. The line of her jaw. The small furrow that appears when she concentrates. I am trying to memorize something, though I could not say what, or why it feels urgent to do it now.
"You can sleep, you know," she says, eyes on the road. "I've got this."
"I don't want to miss the trip."
"You're not missing anything. It's just trees for another two hours." A small smile. "Sleep, Clyde. You look like you're about to fall over."
I don't decide to close my eyes. It happens the way exhaustion happens, arriving all at once after pretending for a long time that it wasn't there. My head finds her shoulder somewhere along the way, and she doesn't shrug it off. Just keeps driving, one hand briefly leaving the wheel to rest against my hair for a moment before returning.
I sleep.
Or something close to it. A gray, formless rest that has no dreams in it, no fence, no daffodils, no countdown. Just her shoulder under my cheek and the hum of the engine and the road passing beneath us.
I do not check the clock once.
I do not know what time it is when the explosion comes.
There is no warning, no flash filling the windshield, no half second of understanding before the moment arrives. The detonation happens somewhere to our right, the way it always does, and the shockwave crosses the distance and reaches the car faster than either of us has time to register as a threat.
The blast does not crush the cabin. Does not lift the car or throw it from the road. What it does is simpler and worse. The force of the explosion sends a fragment of metal, torn from some structure down that road, tumbling through the air at a velocity that has nothing to do with intention and everything to do with physics. It enters through the driver's side window in a spray of glass.
It passes through Olivia's neck first.
The fragment does not slow as it does. Severs the carotid artery, the jugular, the trachea, all of it in the same continuous motion, and continues forward on the same line it arrived on, through the open space of the cabin, and into the side of my own neck where my head still rests against her shoulder.
It takes mine the same way it took hers. Same artery. Same vein. Same single motion of metal that does not register the difference between one neck and another, one person and another, only the resistance of tissue and the speed at which it is moving through it.
I do not feel it happen.
That is the part that does not make sense and also makes more sense than anything else that has happened in six loops. There is no pain. No white-hot tearing, no bone, no scream caught in my throat. My eyes are still closed against her shoulder. My body does not understand what has occurred to it. For one full second, maybe two, I am still simply asleep, my head still resting where it was resting, the engine still humming beneath us as the car drifts, unguided, off the gravel shoulder.
I open my eyes once.
The windshield is intact. The road beyond it is still moving, still scrolling forward under a car that no longer has a driver doing anything to steer it. Olivia's hands are still on the wheel. Have not moved. Will not move again. There is blood, more of it than the wound alone explains, already soaking into the shoulder of her jacket where my face had been resting a moment ago, and somewhere underneath my own jaw I can feel warmth that I understand, distantly, without urgency, as my own blood beginning to leave my body.
I stare on as i see Olivia bleed out as she herself has lost consiousness already.
I do not feel afraid.
I do not feel anything that resembles the previous six loops, the panic, the grief, the rage. There is only the strange stillness of a body that has not yet informed its mind that something irreversible has happened.
The car drifts off the road and into soft ground at a speed too low to do further damage, rolling to a stop in the tundra grass with the engine still running, Billie Eilish still playing low through the speakers, Olivia's hands still resting on a wheel she is no longer turning.
I look at her face. Her eyes are open. Not afraid. Not in pain. Simply open, fixed on the road ahead as if she is still driving it, as if some last instruction her body received before the moment happened is still being carried out by muscles that have not yet caught up to what occurred to them.
"Oli," I say. My voice does not sound urgent. It sounds like a man speaking to his wife in a quiet car.
She does not answer.
I do not understand, even now, that this is the moment I am supposed to be afraid of. The thought simply does not arrive. What arrives instead is something closer to relief, the bone deep kind that comes after a very long day, the kind that asks for nothing more than to finally stop. I feel fulfilled as a whole as we keep on driving on in an empty road as if in our staircase to heaven itself.
My vision dims at the edges first. Not violently. Like a room slowly losing its light.
I rest my head back against the seat. Olivia is close enough that if I reached for her hand I could still take it, and some part of me does, fingers finding hers on the wheel, still warm, still exactly where they have always been.
I do not think about the what is to come.
I simply stop.
There is no darkness this time, not the way there has been before. No falling. No screaming wind of unconsciousness arriving like a verdict. Just a slow fade, the engine humming, her hand under mine, the road outside the window finally, finally still.
Then light.