As the scent of disinfectant mixed with the sweet metallic tang of rainbow candy floods my nostrils, I recognize this familiar pain of revival—the sensation of sutures rubbing against the lung lobe beneath the third rib on my left side, fractured when Selina pushed me down the exhaust pipe in the last cycle.

"Mom's eyes are moving! Dr. Ken, did you see that?" Lyra's voice filters through like it's coming from behind stained glass windows of a cathedral. My eyelashes, glued together by crystalline secretions, barely open my field of vision: the classical clock tattoo on my daughter's collarbone pulsates, its hour hand trembling between VII and VIII.

"Cognitive restoration program completion at 92%. This time, you woke up six hours earlier than the last cycle." Dr. Ken's pen tip pierces the medical record, ink bleeding into the hues of the sunset on the day Gabriel fell. I fixate on the nutmeg-colored stain on his lab coat cuff—a remnant of the secret recipe I ruined in the 37th cycle, a scent that should have belonged to 2019.

Lyra presses the rainbow pill into the crescent-shaped indentation in my palm: "You almost succeeded in rescuing Aunt Ariana, until the motorcycle exhaust pipe..." She abruptly falls silent as Dr. Ken's glasses reflect light across her carotid monitor. The numbers that pulse there lie, translating the gang bullet piercing the fuel tank into a steady 68 bpm.

"We found this in Damien's basement." My daughter forces a cold metallic object into my unhealed broken fingers—Gabriel's pocket watch case, its inner layer smeared with seabed silt and my menstrual blood. The cracked glass of the dial spells out Ariana's mouth shape before she sank: "They're in the church cellar..."

The serrated pain deep within my skull arrives on schedule. This time, the memory flashback carries gasoline and sandalwood: seventeen-year-old me waking up on Dr. Ken's examination bed, counterfeit hymen repair gauze taped to my inner thigh. He had already begun sketching spacetime curves on the medical records, while I busied myself carving the 47th cycle mark on the wall with his drawer's Swiss knife.

"Emma, it's time for your medication." The glass rim Dr. Ken hands me bears double lip prints, belonging to the forbidden fruit we tasted in 2015 and the conspiracy we forged in 2038. As the rainbow pill explodes on my tongue, I taste Gabriel's last words on the motorcycle's rear seat—not "I love you," but "The tape is in..."

The basement exhaust pipe suddenly echoes with a variation of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," Lyra's iris rings begin to flow like auroras. The code between Selina and me is still alive, but this time the melody carries two extra semitones, signaling an insufficient number of corpses in the tunnel to meet specimen requirements. Dr. Ken's breathing pattern shifts, the outline of the gun bulging in his lab coat pocket is the same one that pierced my uterus in the 15th cycle.

Outside the window, the rain carries ashes from the 2018 church fire. I count the trembling frequency of the hour hand on Lyra's tattoo, awaiting the pain of the 49th cycle. This time, I must remember how to use Dr. Morris's pocket watch gear assembly to wedge the rainbow pill into Gabriel's cranial sutures...