Miss Muffet slumped against the trunk of a dead tree, cradling her hands in her lap. Every part of her body shook. The last thing she remembered—if memory even meant anything here—was the Spider’s legs drawing spirals in the air, voice slithering through her bones, and then the world going into a complete whiteout. The air was cold and reeked of ozone and ancient cheese. She tasted blood at the back of her throat.

  Her vision wouldn’t focus. The fear gauge in the HUD pulsed with a life of its own: bright red, then down to a brittle orange as she forced herself to count breaths.

  “In,” Stewart commanded, voice tight as a tourniquet. “Four-count. Hold. Out—steady, Norris. It can’t touch you right now.”

  She didn’t trust that. She never trusted anything here, but the handrail of Stewart’s voice kept her from tumbling all the way out. The panic ratcheted down, molecule by molecule, until she could unclench her fists.

  Her inventory flashed for attention. She flicked her wrist, scrolling through the list:

  - Three vials, labeled “COAGULANT—REVISED”

  - Satchel of curd rations, contents: 53%

  - Copper coin, pitted but whole, labeled with a blue star in her own handwriting

  Everything else had been stripped or scrambled by the encounter. Even Muffet’s robe was different—no longer the ceremonial thing from her exile, but a patched-together mess of utility fabric, heavy with dirt and sweat. The wrist seal was swollen but intact. She thumbed it for comfort, then pushed off the tree trunk and surveyed the world.

  The terrain was a nightmare diagram—webwork of trenches and fungus towers, every surface matted with silk. The clearing ahead was ringed by tuffets. Real ones this time, not just echoes in the dirt. Each tuffet stood at least waist-high, upholstered in a patchwork of blue, gold, and off-white that reminded Muffet of institutional cafeterias and failed elementary schools.

  “Next step?” she asked, voice gravelled.

  “Recon the clearing,” Stewart replied. “There’s a pattern to these placements. If the scenario is stable, it will serve as a resource cache or a checkpoint. Don’t trust the first one you see.”

  She moved, legs stiff and not entirely under her command. The first tuffet up close was a horror. The cushion had rotted through, its surface pocked with the burrows of larvae. A single perfect mushroom grew at its center, cap pressed up against a milk ring. On the cushion: three vials, stoppered and stacked, but all of them cracked open and dry. There was a blackened stain where the liquid had leaked out, eating a trench into the foam.

  She reached for the top vial.

  The HUD blinked, then doubled. A stuttering jolt of heat ran up her arm and snapped her into a memory not her own.

  The world around her blurred, then reset. She was looking down at her hands, but not. They were smaller, paler, fingernails bitten raw. She (no, not she—Echo-Muffet #42, as the HUD announced) was writing furiously in a book, smearing the ink as she went, cross-referencing formulas with a kind of desperation. The words pulsed at the bottom of the page:

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  “THERE MUST BE AN OUT. THE PATTERN REPEATS, BUT I AM NEW.”

  There was a sound—soft, then sharper. The scribbling stopped. She looked up, mouth a silent “no,” but the threads came anyway, snaking in from above, catching wrists and ankles in a heartbeat. The body jerked back, the book toppling off the tuffet, spilling its last words into the dust.

  Back in her own body, Muffet gasped, dropping the broken vial. The memory fragment faded, but left behind a ghost of fear that ticked her gauge back to orange.

  Stewart was right there. “That was a ghost. Not real. The scenario’s running copies of itself. Try the next tuffet, but be ready for more echo bleed.”

  She wiped her palm on her robe and moved to the second tuffet. This one was cleaner, the fabric still plush under a crust of mold. On the seat: a folded paper, creased into a triangle. Muffet flipped it open. It was a hand-drawn map of the clearing, but everything beyond the perimeter was crossed out in looping red marker. At the center, a spiral: the same as the seal on her wrist. The paper was damp with old tears.

  She pocketed it and kept moving. The third tuffet was stripped to the frame, all fabric gone, the underlying foam chewed to mush. On the crossbeam: a single lock of white hair, tied with a thread of gold. Next to it, a needle, still sharp.

  She touched the lock, bracing for another echo.

  This time, the memory was brief—a flash of sensation, no context. A girl’s voice, trembling with exhaustion, saying, “If you remember, run.” Then a needle in the arm, a spike of pain, and the sense of falling backward into a pit.

  She staggered, caught herself. “How many of these are there?”

  “Forty-two,” Stewart said. “At least, that’s the count on record. It’s not really you. Each one is an iteration.”

  “Is that supposed to help?”

  He paused, as if searching for the line between comfort and clarity. “If you can see the edges of the loop, you can start to break it. That’s all I’ve got.”

  She nodded, then checked her fear gauge. It hovered at 38%, the lowest since she’d come out of the whiteout.

  Fourth tuffet. The surface was intact, but sticky with spilled milk. Muffet sat anyway, letting her body remember what it felt like to rest. No memory hit this time, but as she scanned the horizon, she saw the other tuffets—each one occupied by a version of herself, all frozen in their last moments. One scribbled on her skin with a marker. One drank from a vial and retched. One simply stared at the sky, mouth open, waiting for something to fall in.

  She looked away.

  The fifth tuffet stood alone, off-axis from the rest. It was the smallest, barely a stool. On top: a copper coin, identical to the one in her own inventory, but polished and untarnished. Next to it, a scrap of fabric with a single word, burned into the surface:

  “NO.”

  She pocketed the coin, then looked back at the clearing. “It’s a graveyard,” she said. “Every failed run ends here.”

  “Not every run,” Stewart corrected. “Just the ones that resist too hard. There are other paths. They want you to try again, but not to remember the last time. You’re breaking the script.”

  “Feels like losing,” she said.

  “Only if you give up the memory. Use it.”

  She took the advice, even if she didn’t believe it. She lined up the inventory again, running her thumb over the labels. Three vials, one half-eaten ration, two coins, and a map she didn’t trust.

  The fear gauge was steady now, the red edge gone.

  She stood, rolling her shoulders, and stared out over the rest of Tuffet Hollow. The world didn’t look any different, but the echoes were quieter. Stewart’s presence was more background hum than drill sergeant now.

  “Next step?” she asked, voice not relatively steady.

  “Move north past the line of tuffets. The scenario resets there. Expect another presence, but not the Spider—at least, not at first.”

  She checked the map, ignoring the spiral at its center, and took the first step away from the circle of memory. The world was still ruined, the sky still painted with clouded glass. But it was hers, at least for the moment.

  And for now, that was enough.