The first time she was born, the world felt enormous.
The second time, it felt familiar.
By the hundredth, it felt like a cage.
She always arrived the same way: a gasp, a cry, a rush of cold air. The same fluorescent lights. The same nurse with the mole on her left cheek. The same father who wept with relief. The same mother who whispered, "My little miracle." Every detail was identical, down to the pattern of rain on the hospital window.
And every time, she remembered.
Not immediately. The memories returned slowly, like sediment rising through water. A flash of a past birthday. A déjà vu so sharp it made her dizzy. A nightmare that wasn't a nightmare at all, but a memory of a life she had already lived. By age six, she always knew the truth: she had done all of this before.
She had lived this life hundreds of times.
She had died hundreds of times.
And she had awakened in the same crib, in the same room, in the same body, again and again.
At first, she tried to perfect it. She saved her childhood dog from the accident that always killed him. She studied harder, loved deeper, apologized sooner. She became a doctor in one life, a musician in another, a recluse in a third. She tried every path she could imagine, but the ending was always the same: she died, and the world rewound.
Eventually, she stopped trying to win. She tried to escape instead.
She ran away at twelve. She refused to speak. She tried to break her own fate with reckless choices. But the world always nudged her back into place, like a hand guiding a marionette.
Coincidences became suspiciously precise.
Accidents happened exactly when they needed to. People said the exact words she remembered, even when she begged them not to.
It was as if the universe itself was reading from a script.
And she was the only one who knew the lines.
By her three hundred and twelfth life, she had grown tired of the performance.
Tired of pretending she didn't know what would happen next.
Tired of watching the same sunrise, the same heartbreaks, the same tragedies play out like a rerun she could never turn off.
So in her three hundred and thirteenth life, she made a decision.
She would break the script.
Not in small ways — she had tried that. No, this time she would shatter it. She would make choices so drastic, so unpredictable, that the world could not possibly correct for them.
And at first, it worked.
The dog she saved lived longer than he ever had. Her mother, who always died young, survived her illness. A childhood friend who always moved away stayed. The world wobbled, like a spinning top losing balance.
Then it began.
People hesitated before speaking, as if listening to instructions she could not hear. Shadows stretched in directions the light did not allow. Strangers stared at her too long, their eyes unfocused, as if trying to remember who they were supposed to be.
And sometimes — only sometimes — she caught glimpses of something behind them.
A flicker. A distortion. A shape that did not belong to any human silhouette.
The world was improvising.
And something was watching.
One night, as she walked home along a street she had walked a thousand times, she felt the air shift. The wind stilled. The streetlights hummed in unison, a low, vibrating note that made her teeth ache.
Then a voice spoke behind her — a voice she had never heard in any lifetime.
"You've wandered too far from your path."
She turned.
A man stood there. Or something wearing the shape of a man. His face was familiar, but not because she knew him — it was familiar the way a dream is familiar, or a memory from a life she never lived. His eyes were wrong. Too still. Too deep. As if they were windows into a place with no light.
"We need you to return," he said gently, almost kindly. "The cycle depends on you."
Her heart pounded. "What cycle?"
He tilted his head, as if confused by the question.
"The one you were made for."
The streetlights flickered. The shadows behind him rippled like water.
And for the first time in hundreds of lives, she felt something she had never felt before.
Not déjà vu.
Not dread.
Not resignation.
But possibility.
She took a step back. Then another.
"No," she whispered. "Not this time."
The man's smile didn't reach his eyes.
"Then we will have to correct you."
The world around her shuddered, as if reality itself were inhaling.
And she ran — not from fate, not from death, but from the beings who had been waiting for her to break the loop.
The ones who needed her to repeat the same life forever.
The ones who were finally awake.
The ones who were coming… for her.