Dawn had been something going not quite right behind the mountains, a hum of tuneless amber and violet warping like sheet metal. The voices carried in that static had been too faint and distant for radios to catch them as more than whispers, words surfacing out of context and diving back into a dire migraine drone. She daubed a sparse lilac skyline across the canvas, filling in the places where the peaks wouldn’t hide it, filling them in, too, by omission. The blank white where they should have been.

She had watched them break day by day, year after year, dissolving from solid, believable reality into that fragmentary transmission of themselves. Every time she had let one of those days slip through her fingers, she had been accepting that she couldn’t put off the end forever.

She could retrace hours, pace back and forth across a day, but once she let it slip away, it was gone for good. She frowned at the canvas, but that countdown was close to deafening now in the back of her mind, the beat of her heart. Thirty-seven minutes left before that day passed beyond her reach. Two minutes after seven in the morning was a one-way turnstile as far as her power was concerned, a gate that time locked impassably behind her.

She couldn’t rest until it was locked behind her. Until she had thought it all over one last time, everything she could have done differently and everything that could still go wrong. Once she let that day go, they would all be another irrevocable step closer to the end.