They open the slip together and the ink is rewriting itself as they watch, the date crawling forward one minute at a time. 'It's correcting,' the other Mara whispers. 'The loop is fixing the mistake. When the dates match, one of us stops existing.' Mara checks her watch. Two minutes to match.

Mara makes a choice. She shoves the package back into the other woman's hands and runs for her car. 'Wrong date means it's not my problem yet,' she shouts. 'Fix it on your end.' Behind her, the other Mara screams her name. Then the scream cuts off, mid-word, into silence. Mara doesn't look back. She drives, and the slip on her seat is blank now, like none of it ever happened to her.