The air in the lab was scrubbed of everything but the scent of ozone and the quiet terror of the men working within it.

  Cecilio Dawn entered the primary observation deck without a sound. He didn't need to announce himself; the atmosphere shifted the moment his shadow hit the glass. The lead researcher, a man who had spent thirty years studying the biological impossibility of the Hellbloom, visibly paled.

  "Director Dawn," the researcher said, his voice hitching at the edges. "The replication sequence is... it’s resisting. The cellular structure refuses to stabilize without a living anchor."

  Cecilio didn't look at him. He stared down at the specimen—the dark, bruised red of the bloom recovered from the rail heist. "The failure is not in the science," Cecilio said, his voice a low, melodic threat. "It is in the resolve. My daughter never required a stable environment to produce results. She was the most efficient error I ever corrected."

  He watched the bloom pulse. "She understood that time is a resource to be spent, not a mystery to be feared."

  ---

  Miles away, Ives sat in the dark of her apartment, the glow of her cigarette the only light. She flicked her wrist—a sharp, circular whisking motion in the empty air. It was a phantom reflex, a memory of a time when twirling her fingers could rewind the world.

  Nobody could have predicted the ability the bloom would grant her when she first ingested it. It wasn't forced; she had taken it, and the world had warped in response. As a teenager, her father had seen the potential in her gift and made her train to become a weapon. They had called her Fehlerteufel—the 'error devil'—because she could create glitches in reality by looping a section of her field of vision for ten seconds. Pause, rewind, play. She had been an assassin who could fail a dozen times in a single minute and walk away with a clean kill, her targets never realizing they had already won and lost a hundred times over.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  The memory of the mansion always started with the heat.

  Cecilio had been gone—predictably, conveniently. A rival syndicate had come to collect a debt he had no intention of paying. Ives had moved through the hallways, dismantling a dozen men with her loops, resetting every time a bullet grazed her skin. But they hadn't come just to kill; they had come to erase.

  The explosion in the west wing had been too sudden. Ives had found her mother pinned beneath the charred remnants of the grand staircase as the fire roared. Ives had twirled her fingers.

  Loop.

  The fire receded. The explosion un-bloomed. Ives dragged at her mother’s hand.

  Loop.

  She moved faster, but the clock was fixed. No matter how many times she reset the moment, the spark that ignited the fuel was eleven seconds away—one second beyond her reach. She had lived those final ten seconds for an eternity, watching her mother’s eyes realize the futility of it.

  "Stop," her mother had whispered in the center of the thousandth loop. "Ives. Let it go."

  ---

  In the present, Ives crushed her cigarette into the tray. Her ability had lapsed years ago, the bloom ability having expired and left her body shortly after 6 years, but the "twirl" of her fingers remained when she flicked her ash.

  Toussaint walked into the room, sounding far too chipper for a man who had been bleeding out in an alley hours ago. His healing had finished the job, leaving him restored.

  "You look like you're ready to run through a wall," Ives said, her voice smooth.

  Toussaint smirked, adjusting his jacket. "I'm ready. What's the next mission?"

  Ives didn't answer immediately. She looked at her hand, the fingers that used to hold time still twitching with that old, useless muscle memory.

  Her eyes turning toward the window.

  Under her breath, so low he couldn't hear, she spoke the name that used to mean a miracle.

  "Fehlerteufel."