text: Lilia gasped. She woke with the light of the swirling satellites in her eyes, peeping in through the window of the bed she slept in: the Aaldian farmhouse. She knew the pane of the window only too well.
  
  She grabbed at her stomach where her wound was, but found her tunic untouched, her skin whole. No blood. No torn clothing. Silence, outside. Then the bark of a dog. A breath of wind. The creaking of the old house.
  
  Namia barrelled into the doorway, signing at her: "Going?"
  
  Lilia's heart pounded hard. Sweat soaked her back. "Namia!" she said, and hugged her close. Namia wriggled from her grasp.
  
  "Going?" Namia signed again.
  
  Lilla stared at the window. Still dark, very dark, the same time she had woken the morning before.
  
  She heard Maralah, Roh and Kadaan already awake and conferring in the kitchen, in Saiduan. Zezili lay beside her, not asleep but staring at the ceiling.
  
  "Are you ready?" Zezili asked. "I never feel tired. It was nice to just sit here for a minute, I guess."
  
  Lilia just lay there, trying to still her racing heart. Namia shook her again.
  
  "Not yet," Lilia said. "Just… sit here with me awhile."
  
  "I'm so bored," Zezili said.
  
  "Go kill something," Lilia said, slipping her shoes on. The floor was cold. "Just… Not a person. And not too far away, obviously."
  
  Zezili sighed.
  
  Lilia went out into the kitchen where Maralah, Roh, and Kadaan stood. Maralah and Roh held cups of hot tea.
  
  "Awake already?" Maralah said.
  
  "I've changed my mind," Lilia said. "Maralah was right. We need the sleep."
  
  "But everyone will be awake, then," Roh said.
  
  "It's all right," Lilia said. "I've learned… I know that there aren't any omajistas in the temple, not in the Assembly Chamber. They've been called away. And if we wait, well… if we wait, there will be even fewer people in the temple, come morning. We can all go in together. We don't need a second distraction."
  
  "When did you learn that?" Maralah asked sharply.
  
  "Trust it," Lilia said. "Taigan and I won't go in by ourselves. We'll come through the gate with the others. I know for certain no one will be there."
  
  Maralah and Kadaan exchanged a look. "This is all very unexpected. Did you have some kind of vision? Or have you lost your nerve?" Maralah asked.
  
  "It could be called a vision, maybe. I just… I have new information. You were right. Anavha needs to sleep. You, the men, all of us. Tired people make mistakes."
  
  "When do we move then?" Maralah said. "You said yourself we're very much out of time."
  
  "Just before noon," Lilia said. "Most people will be going down to the banquet hall for the noon meal."
  
  "That's… a lot of missing hours, Li," Roh said. "You were so urgent before."
  
  "Please, just… could you trust that I know better? Maralah agreed."
  
  "I agreed that we needed more sleep," Maralah said, "especially Anavha. But another ten hours or more?"
  
  "What do you suggest?" Lilia asked.
  
  "Dawn," Maralah said. "That's another three hours."
  
  "Roh?" Lilia asked. "Kadaan? Do you agree?"
  
  "I'm good with dawn," Kadaan said. "I'm heading back to sleep, then. Roh?"
  
  "In a minute," Roh said.
  
  Maralah shook her head. "You can't go shifting this plan around," she said. "Any more changes–"
  
  "It's going to need to be flexible," Lilia said. "There's so much we don't know."
  
  "To bed again with me, then," Maralah said, eyeing them both one more time before she left.
  
  Roh said, "What happened?"
  
  "I can't… I can't really explain it."
  
  "Try."
  
  "You won't believe it."
  
  "There's a good many things I wouldn't have believed two years ago," he said. "I'd believe them now."
  
  She sat next to him at the table, so they almost touched. Reached for Maralah's abandoned cup of tea. Sipped it. Bitter.
  
  "We lost," she said.
  
  "We seem to do that."
  
  "No, I mean… It was like I'd done it, the whole plan. And it went terribly."
  
  "A dream?"
  
  She rubbed her hand against her stomach, where the wound had been. "I don't think so."
  
  "So, you have a better idea of how to do it this time?"
  
  "I know how to do it differently."
  
  "Did we live? Any of us?"
  
  "No."
  
  "Well," he said, standing. "Whatever we do this time will certainly be better than that."
  
  "What if there's no way out, Roh?" she blurted.
  
  He paused. "What do you mean?"
  
  "What if this is all one big loop, one long cycle, that can't ever be broken? What if we are fools to try?"
  
  "We'd be fools not to," he said.
  
  Lilia fell asleep at the table. It was Zezili who woke her, just before dawn.
  
  "Hey," Zezili said. "Everybody said you delayed the plan?"
  
  Lilia yawned, trying to snatch at her dreams, but she had slept soundly, no echoes or memories.
  
  "That's right," she said. "Be flexible."
  
  Lilia woke Taigan up. He stretched and yawned and stilled as she told him the new plan.
  
  Taigan frowned. "You and I won't go in the front?" he said. "That's so disappointing."
  
  "I'm sure," Lilia said, giving him a long look that only made him shrug. She shivered at the memory of him burning the temple down around them, nearly murdering her on the stair. Taigan, ever the same in his unpredictability.
  
  The others gathered around the table, making tea and pulling yams and turnips from the coals where they had been roasting since the evening before.
  
  Lilia erased what they had mapped out a few hours earlier and said, "I've had some time to think. I still agree that the fire on the plateau will draw them out and create a distraction. But I don't believe it's necessary for Taigan and I to pull Kirana out. If we wait long enough, she will have left her chamber for the day."
  
  "Probably for the fifth temple, though," Maralah said. "If she beats us to it–"
  
  "We want her to."
  
  "Why?" Roh said.
  
  "Because once her jistas are in place, they're locked into the mechanism. And that also means she can't use them."
  
  "How the fuck do you know that?" Zezili said.
  
  "I have… sources," Lilia said. "All of her jistas are going to be concentrating their power there. She won't be thinking about defense in there because we won't have shown our hand too early. She'll have no idea we're coming."
  
  "We still have to make sure no one is in the Assembly Chamber," Roh said. "It will be busier during the day."
  
  "Not if Kirana is gone," Lilia said.
  
  Maralah shook her head. "We don't know that."
  
  "The Kai's living quarters are there," Roh said. "Her family could be there, and soldiers to guard them–"
  
  "My contact can clear out the soldiers," Lilia said.
  
  "Her family–"
  
  "If they are there, we'll deal with them," Lilia said. "They are the least of our concerns. We still go in through the ceiling. We still step through the circle."
  
  "Are we agreed in this?" Maralah asked.
  
  Lilia held her breath.
  
  Zezili said, "I'll do this whatever way kills the most of them."
  
  Roh leaned over to Anavha, translating.
  
  "How precise can you be?" Lilia asked Anavha. "Could you open a gate right on top of the table? Or right inside the door?"
  
  Anavha considered that. "I could get you onto the table, yes. Or very near it."
  
  "We act quickly," Lilia said. "If we are fast enough, focused enough, they will have no time to counter us. I know that now. I was… overthinking. I'm sorry. Kadaan and Roh go through Anavha's gate first, pushing out a defensive wall to mask the sound and keep others out. The rest of us, we make a circle around the table. There will be a raised green circle beneath it. Step right onto it and hold hands."
  
  Taigan snorted. "And then what, we sing religious songs?"
  
  The phrase sent a knife of fear through Lilia. She thought of the loop again, the possibility that all of this was going to end the same way. "Fast," Lilia said. "No thinking. I want to practice it, right here, around this table. Anavha?"
  
  "Are you serious?" Roh said.
  
  "Yes," Lilia said.
  
  Anavha took them all outside, and opened a gate just above the kitchen table. They ran through the exercise three times. The third time, they were all through and in place in just twenty seconds. Lilia chewed at her fingernail after she finished the count the third time, wondering if that was going to be fast enough. Perhaps, perhaps not. Surely it would be fast enough to keep Taigan from burning the whole temple down around them. She could hope.
  
  "That's as fast as it's getting," Maralah said. "We're losing time. If someone else gets up on that dais before you–"
  
  "If someone's up there when we get in," Lilia said, "we'll have enough free jistas to knock them off. Our focus is on getting me on that pedestal, no matter the cost."
  
  "And then we close the ways?" Maralah said.
  
  "Yes," Lilia said. She didn't know what else to say, because she had no idea what she was actually going to do this time, knowing precisely what came next.