Page 231 of The Fall

I sink to the bench, dropping my head between my knees.Breathe, Torey. Breathe.The rational part of my brain, the part that understands physics, insists this is all bullshit. This is my mind creating a pattern where none exists. Right?

But if someone looked deep inside of me, cast light on my retinas as if they were a projector, would they see how each of my memories are a fractured double helix?

How do you know which moments are real and which are only shadows? Maybe every memory splits—one strand living forward, one looping back—so every time I blink I am slipping between them.

Dread rises like floodwaters inside me. What if I never left that night? What if some piece of me is still falling with Blair’s blood on my hands?

My questions circle endlessly, eating their own tails.

The ice beneath Blair’s blades sends up a fine spray as he pivots hard. There’s a shape to this dread. It feels like… like approaching some invisible line where everything changes.

Or ends.

We don’t have much time. We’re running out of time, Blair and I, and every moment brings us closer to?—

To what?

Rage floods through me. This isn’t fair. None of this is fair. Why trap me in this loop of knowing-not-knowing, remembering-forgetting? Every neuron in my skull should be cooperating, should be giving me what I need, but instead they’re feeding me scraps and shadows and the constant, gnawing certainty that Blair?—

That Blair what?

Fuck.Fuck.

Are my memories even real, or is my damaged brain inventing bullshit? Am I remembering a future that hasn’t happened or constructing one from fragments of fear? This doubling could be my brain misfiring. Head injuries do stranger things than this. Maybe this slow dissolution of the line between what’s real and what’s imagined is exactly what a failing mind feels like.

But these flashes cut through me like memory, and they always have, like scars I carry from wounds I haven’t received yet. Or have I?

Stop. Stop thinking.Helplessness seeps into me like venom.

Blair glances over at me between drills, making sure I’m still here, still whole. How many times has he looked at me exactly like this? How many times will he?

And underneath it all:What if this is the last time?

What would it mean if all of this has happened before?

It means… it means somewhere ahead lies the end; somewhere ahead lies a darkness that will rip apart everything, and if this deja vu, this looping, is showing me however we got there, to darkness and falling, then?—

The dread in my stomach doubles, triples, fills me up completely.

If I’m sliding along tracks already carved into time, and if this moment has already been lived and I’m following some script, then every choice ahead is already made. Every word is already spoken.

Every ending is already written.

Last time, that ending was me waking up in a Vancouver hospital with a year cut out of my mind. I woke in agony with a hole in my soul, a vacant space where Blair used to be.

I squeeze my eyes shut and count: four seconds in, hold for four, six out. It doesn’t help. I try to peer through the next drill, the next whistle, the next smile from Blair, but the future stays murky.

All I have is this slow unraveling.

Fragments surface and sink: Blair’s voice screaming my name, the taste of copper, cold water rushing in.

The guys run another drill. I know, Iknowwhat will happen: Hawks will cut left, Hollow will miss the pass but recover, Blair will correct his stance with that subtle shift that means he’s compensating for someone else’s mistake.

And it happens, because I am…

No, Torey, time doesn’t work like that. Events line up, one after another. Nobody gets to skate backward through a game.

Time feels like water circling a drain, and Blair is the center and the circumference of everything that matters. The way he adjusts his grip, the exact angle of his smile; these details burn themselves into me twice, once as they happen, once as echo. But an echo of what? When?