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Being stuck in a time loop is the loneliest thing in the world. Effie keeps it to herself the first couple times she goes to sleep on the ninth day of Quiet only to wake up on the ninth day of Quiet. At first she wonders if she's just gotten her days mixed up, since life in Vertumna is so freaking monotonous: go to class, help Auntie Tammy in the creche, hang out with Ary and her friends, work a shift at her dad's bar. Her daily routine has only gotten more boring since her older sibling Gren left for their expeditions apprenticeship. She wishes she could tell Gren about this weird time loop thing, but families are only supposed to use official channels to contact apprentices, and even then only in case of emergencies. Apparently this is so apprentices can get used to long stretches of isolation and self-sufficiency in the Vertumnan wilds.
Effie understands the reason for the rule, but she doesn't have to like it. Nothing that happens in her life feels real until she tells Gren about it. When Effie got her first period in the middle of a sportsball match, she ran crying to Gren for comfort and an emergency wad of napkins. After her first kiss, she told Gren before she wrote about it in her diary. Gren is the prism through which Effie views the world, and now they're gone. The time loop is real, though, even though she hasn't told Gren about it. And it doesn't seem to be spontaneously fixing itself.
The first person she tells is her girlfriend Ary. They're lab partners in science class, so Effie relates the strange tale in a furious whisper when they're supposed to be setting up their table. Ary laughs at first, so Effie has to convince her it's not a joke. Then she has to convince Ary she's not started smoking stardust with the delinquents who hang out behind Geoponics, where the perennially herbaceous aroma masks the smell.
"That's wild, babe. What are you going to do? What does your mom say?"
"I dunno what I should do. And I haven't told her yet," Effie admits with a furtive glance towards her mom writing on the board at the front of the classroom.
"Okay, so there's your first step."
"What could she even do? It's not like she's a time travel expert."
"Uh, Effie, she's literally a research scientist. It's her job to study weird shit. She could probably help you design a bunch of experiments to figure out why it's happening and how to stop it."
"I wish Gren was here," Effie mutters. Ary reaches across the table and squeezes her hand. "I know, my love."
"Effervescent and Estuary, I see a lot of talking and not a lot of science happening at your table," Solana calls, loud enough for the entire class to hear. Effie blushes and sinks lower in her seat as the other kids chortle. Her mom doesn't want to show favoritism, so she's extra strict with Effie on days when she's teaching. It's like the opposite of being the teacher's pet, except worse because the teacher grills you at home, too.
"Girls? Do I need to split you up?" she prods.
"No, Professor Solana," Effie and Ary chime in whiny adolescent unison.
"And you wonder why I don't want to tell her," Effie hisses as they make a show of assembling the materials and reading the lab assignment. At least they make quick work of the project, as Effie's already done the experiment five or six times by now.
The second person Effie tells is her dad. She's always found it easier to talk to him compared with her mom; Rex is all warmth and understanding where Solana is coldness and questions. Effie knows her mom loves her, of course she does. But there's always a distance that feels almost clinical, like Solana is a thousand miles away and Effie is just one of millions of specimens in her lab. Besides, there's hardly any competition when one of your parents is part-dog and literally the embodiment of those old Earth golden retriever memes.
Rex and Effie are cleaning up the bar after yet another slow, mellow shift on the ninth day of Quiet. She broaches the topic tentatively, expecting more doubts and accusations of drug use like she got from Ary. But Rex doesn't seem surprised at all. He just hums thoughtfully, plops down on a bar stool, and motions for her to sit next to him.
"That sounds really scary, kiddo. Have you told your mom yet?"
"Why is everyone asking me that!?" Effie cries. "Just because Mom's a scientist and I'm a freak of nature doesn't mean she'll be able to help me with…whatever this is."
"It's not just because she's a scientist. And you're not a freak of nature. We didn't want to scare you in case it didn't happen to you, but your mom and Grenadine have had similar incidents. Time slips, Mom calls them. You likely inherited it from her."
"Mom and Gren? Why didn't they tell me?" Effie's using the singular they — completely unsurprised that her mother would hide something like this from her, utterly dumbfounded that Gren is even capable of it. They tell each other everything, or so Effie thought.
"It's not exactly an easy thing to talk about," Rex says gently. "How many Quiet ninths have you had before you told me?"
Effie doesn't like the answer to that question, so she ignores it.
"Well, do they know what causes it? Can they make it stop?"
"It can't be stopped completely, but Mom has found ways to manage it. You should really talk to her about it. She knows much more than I do."
Effie doesn't like that answer either. "I guess I don't have a choice with Gren gone."
Rex reaches out to ruffle her hair, and Effie leans into the touch. "Look, kiddo. I know Mom can be a bit prickly, but you don't exactly make it easy for her. You two are more alike than you think."
"She doesn't make it easy for me!" Effie insists. "She's ten times harder on me than anyone else in class, and she makes me call her Professor Solana even though Professor Larkspur doesn't make Celi do that when he teaches. And I worked really hard on that poem I wrote for Vertumnalia, but all she said was well done. That's it! It's like she thinks nothing matters but hard science."
"It can be hard to be tender with the people we love the most," her dad says simply. "She loved that poem, you know. She just didn't know how to tell you. "
"That doesn't make any sense," Effie grumbles.
"Just talk to her. Or you can keep trying to solve it yourself, since that seems to be going well for you so far."
"Dad!" Effie slaps him lightly on the arm, half in despair and half in jest. He ruffles her hair again, stands up, and starts making her favorite mocktail.
The third person Effie tells is her mom. Ary was right, in a way, because Solana immediately tries to ascertain how the time loop works by peppering Effie with questions. How many times has she lived through the ninth day of Quiet? What time does the day reset — midnight, whenever she falls asleep, or some other time? Does she see or hear anything strange, like hallucinations or snippets of the past or the future? Did anything important happen on the original Quiet ninth, before the time loop started?
Effie's face reddens. She doesn't know the answer to most of these questions, so it feels like she's failing one of Professor Solana's infamously grueling pop quizzes. She explains as best she can while her mother takes notes, barely looking at her.
"You should have come to me earlier." Solana glances up at the clock; Effie's waited until mid-afternoon in order to give her mother time to decompress after class. "It's too late to do much today. I want you to stay up as late as you can tonight to see what happens. Then come get me as soon as you're awake in the morning and explain it all to me again. At least then we'll know where, or rather when, the seams in the loop are."
"Oh…okay?" Effie feels as if she's being dismissed, but she still has so many questions. "Um, I told Dad and he mentioned that this happens to you and Gren too. Is that true?"
Solana looks up from her notes and her gaze softens. "I'm sorry, Effie. Sometimes I forget how confusing it can be at the beginning."
"At the beginning…?"
Solana pinches the bridge of her nose. "It's a long story, so you might as well sit down."
That's how Effie learns that her mom is some kind of interdimensional space entity who can sometimes see flashes of her past lives or parallel universes or alternate timelines or… something. Even after lifetimes studying herself, Solana still isn't quite sure what the time slips are or why they happen. Grenadine's developed a slightly different version that shows them flashes of the future, but only in the current timeline. And now Effie has gotten stuck in a time loop.
"They're all different variations, but time slips all the same. I suspect the method that works for Grenadine and me should help you too. But it takes time and patience to develop, so you might have be stuck in Quiet ninth for a little while longer," Solana says.
"Yippee, more Quiet ninth, my favorite," Effie says sardonically. She's surprised when her mother laughs.
Over the next few weeks of Quiet ninths, Effie and Solana establish that the time loop resets exactly at midnight. When Effie tries to stay up past midnight, she blacks out. The next thing she knows, she's miraculously back in bed with the watery sunlight of another stupid Quiet ninth filtering through her window. They discover that minor injuries, haircuts, and piercings all reset along with the time loop. Each ninth day of Quiet is a clean slate, another opportunity for Effie to disappoint her mother by failing to master the method.
The method turns out to be a form of mindfulness meditation. According to Solana, the goal is to ground yourself in the present moment. She uses a lot of scientific terms and strange metaphors that Effie doesn't understand: creating a tether with your breath and letting the faulty spacetime drift around you, being aware of the fourth dimension, trying to use irregularities of space to jolt time back into behaving. At the same time, all of the talk of breathing and focusing on your senses sounds awfully mystical, completely unlike Solana's usual clinical brusqueness. Regardless of whether it's attuning to her inner eye or grasping quantum physics, Effie can't get the hang of it.
"You need to focus, Effie!" her mom says in frustration for the thousandth time.
"I'm trying!" Effie cries. They've been doing deep breathing for hours now, hours upon hours spread across dozens of the same interminable day. Effie has long since memorized the speech she uses to explain the time slip to her mother first thing in the morning. She now instinctively walks in time with the breathing pattern she's supposed to emulate; she's memorized the sights, sounds, textures, and smells in every nook and cranny of the Colony. It doesn't matter. No matter what she does, Effie can't ground herself enough to get her mind out of the rut.
"How does Gren do it?" Effie asks. She's convinced that if Gren were here, they would have some secret trick that would magically make the method work. Despite her efforts to translate advanced scientific concepts into terms her teenage daughter will understand, Solana has lifetimes of experience dealing with time slips. Gren, like Effie, only has this one life. Maybe they hold the key to cracking it. Gren has kept a secret before, as Effie is painfully aware, so maybe they kept one from their mother too.
"Gren does it the exact same way. I taught them and I can teach you too. Now try again," her mother insists.
"I'm tired, Mom." Effie collapses from her straight-backed, cross-legged meditation pose and rubs her aching eye sockets.
"Okay, let's take a break. We'll crack it soon, I'm sure." Her mom has never been a good liar, but Effie appreciates the effort all the same. In her morning briefings, she's started underestimating how many days she's been stuck in the time loop. Effie is ashamed to admit her failure to her high-achieving mother, even though she knows Solana will forget everything at the strike of midnight.
"Mom, have you ever thought about… What if when the time loop resets at midnight, all my progress on the method resets too? What if I'm just not good enough and I can never improve, so I'm stuck forever?" Effie presses her knuckles into her eyes to staunch the tears.
"Effie, look at me." Solana kneels and reaches out a tentative hand, then pulls back like she's afraid her daughter will bite or hiss. "I don't like to talk about my time slips with you and Gren because some pretty dark things happened. But I have accomplished a lot of miracles across a lot of lifetimes. I've cured plagues, ended famines. I've saved people from death. We will get through this. I will save you. I've saved people hundreds of time before, and you are no exception. I will save you if it's the last thing I do."
Effie falls sobbing into her mother's arms.
"What's holding you back, Effervescent? Tell me. I can't help you unless you tell me." Solana holds her daughter and rubs her back like she hasn't since Effie was a very small child.
Effie doesn't know what to say. She doesn't think there's anything holding her back, just her own idiocy and incompetence. But then her mom twines her fingers around a little curl behind Effie's ear. Gren does the same thing with the exact same strand of hair. They call it their favorite curl. On the day Gren left, they tugged it gently one final time before pulling away from Effie's embrace and striding off into the wilderness.
"I miss Gren," Effie sobs.
"I know you do. I miss them too," Solana murmurs soothingly. "But there's nothing we can do about it. Let's leave it there for today. Why don't you go find Ary? We can try again tomorrow."
Effie sniffles and nods because she doesn't want to tell her mother that tomorrow will never come. For Effie, it's always today. She's lived through enough todays that Gren's apprenticeship should be over by now, but it's not. The pain of their absence has never abated, only grown sharper as each Quiet ninth pushes the day of their return further away. That gives Effie an idea.
The fourth person Effie tells is Gren. It takes days of planning and a favor from Effie's hacker friend Helix, but at 12:01 on the ninth day of Quiet, a rogue transmission is dispatched through the expeditions comms system.
To: Grenadine, Expeditions Apprentice
From: Effervescent
SOS. I've developed a time slip. Stuck in a time loop that makes me relive Quiet 9 over and over again. I told Mom and Dad. The method isn't working for me. I've tried everything. It's been a long time, too long. I need your help. Time loop resets at 00:00 every night. If you leave now you should hopefully make it back in time.
Please come if you can. I feel like I'm going mad.
Once the message is sent, the only thing left to do is wait. Effie tries to go about her day as normal, eating breakfast and telling her parents about the time loop and allowing her mother to poke and prod her in the laboratory before class. She makes a half-hearted attempt at grounding herself and doing the breathing exercises, but she knows she's just waiting for Gren. She hasn't realized it until this very moment, but she's always been waiting for Gren.
Effie eats her lunch on the Colony walls so she can keep watch. She's playing a game on her holopad when she hears a commotion and looks up to see a solitary figure approaching the walls. The guards aren't expecting anyone, so they raise their guns warily at the intruder.
"Don't shoot!" Effie yells. She jumps off the wall and rolls her ankle when she lands, but that doesn't stop her from sprinting straight into Gren's arms.
"You came back," she whispers into the familiar old coat which originally belonged to their gran.
"Of course I did, Effers." Grenadine cups Effie's face and inspects it. "Well, you don't look any older. No new wrinkles to speak of. My favorite curl hasn't turned gray yet."
"I feel older!" Effie insists with a giggle. She pulls Gren's arm over her shoulder and leads them through the Colony gates towards their mom's lab.
Solana is surprised to see her eldest child, but dispenses a hug for Grenadine and a scolding for Effie in short order.
"Right, we don't have much time. Let's get to work. Effie, why don't you show Gren what you've learned so far?"
Effie takes a deep breath. "Actually, I don't think working on the method is what I need." The words are difficult to say, even though she practiced them all the way up until midnight last night.
"Of course it's what you need. The method is the only thing that works with time slips," Solana declares.
"Hold on, Mom," Gren cuts in. "Let her speak."
"I want to talk to you…to both of you. It's why I invited Gren back. I realized that what I'm struggling with isn't the method. I need to understand…I mean, I need to tell you that I feel betrayed and hurt. Why didn't you tell me about the time slips?"
Grenadine and Solana share a glance, which only makes Effie feel more excluded.
"I'm not a kid anymore! You can trust me!" she cries, painfully aware that she sounds exactly like a petulant child.
"It's not that we don't trust you, Eff," Grenadine says soothingly.
"You told Dad and not me," Effie insists. She has to stop herself from crossing her arms to complete the full tantrum effect.
"I only told Dad because…" Gren pauses and turns again towards Solana.
Their mother shrugs. "Just tell her. She's right, she's not a child anymore."
Gren kneels next to Effie and takes her hands. "The first flash forward I ever had was about Dad. I saw…I saw his death. I was scared and confused because he didn't look that old, hardly any gray. I didn't understand what I had seen or what it meant. That's when Mom and Dad told me about her time slips and his lifespan."
Effie's vision goes blurry and there's a strange ringing in her ears. "What do you mean about Dad's lifespan? What does that mean? Mom?" She whirls to face Solana.
"Dad will have a shortened lifespan because of his canine genetics. He's known for most of his life and is at peace with it," Solana explains.
"What? What do you mean? How shortened? When will he die?" A new anxiety grips Effie, a vice tightening on her heart. Is this what it feels like to be Solana and Grenadine? Maybe there are worse time slips than having to relive a slightly boring day over and over again.
"You don't need to know that," Gren says softly. "I know it, but I don't want you to know it. I wish I didn't know it. Sometimes people tell lies and put distance because they're trying to protect you."
Effie has already cried a lot today, but she cries some more. Now she wishes they hadn't told her and she had just figured her own way out of this stupid time loop. "I don't want Dad to die," she moans between shuddering gasps.
"None of us do. But the day is coming, and dreading it only makes the days we have left with him a little worse. Believe me, darling, I've lived through it. Many times." Solana's voice trembles. For the first time, Effie fully comprehends how painful her mother's many lives must be. Like an eternal time loop that lasts a lifetime.
"So you've seen him die in other lives? You knew about his lifespan and you still married him in this life, knowing what was coming? How do you do it?"
Solana smiles and reaches for the tiny curl behind Effie's ear. "I learned that you can't hold on too tight. Time passes, things change, people die. That's the nature of life. We can worry about it, or we can accept it and spend our time the best way we can. I've chosen to spend my time in this life loving your dad and you two. I don't regret it, even though I know the outcome."
Effie absorbs this wisdom with newfound respect and awe for her mother. "I guess that's my problem. I've been holding onto Gren too tightly."
"Well, I am pretty great," Gren quips. They've always had a gift for breaking the tension with a perfectly-timed joke, and this is no exception. The three of them laugh so hard they start crying all over again, leaning into each other and clutching the stitches in their sides.
"Hey, let's go find Dad. He'll be excited to see Gren's back. Let's do something just the four of us," Effie suggests. "I can practice the method again tomorrow."
"I think that's an excellent idea," her mom says, and Grenadine agrees.
Effie spends the rest of the day with her family. It's a Quiet ninth she doesn't want to end, but she knows it will eventually. And that's okay.