by FiredriceX
On his eighteenth birthday, Eli Lin discovers that his parents have been raising him for slaughter. The people wearing their faces are not human. Their skin hides black chitin, barbed tentacles, and mouths made to tear meat. They have cared for Eli for eighteen years for one reason: human flesh tastes best when it comes of age. They kill him at the dinner table. Eli wakes up the day before. At first, he believes he has been given a second chance. He avoids his house, seeks help from a trusted teacher, and tries to warn his classmates. Then the teacher opens the same inhuman mouth. Another death sends Eli even farther into the past—and every attempt to escape exposes a new layer of the lie. His parents are monsters. Some of his teachers are monsters. Some of his friends may be monsters. And the surviving humans are not citizens. They are livestock. Each death gives Eli more time and one more chance to test the rules: who can be trusted, what the creatures really are, why he alone remembers dying, and how far back the loop will send him next. To escape the farm that has been his entire world, he must turn repeated deaths into evidence before fear and guilt destroy his ability to tell human from monster. But the deeper he digs, the less certain he becomes that the loop is saving him. Something may be using it to lead him somewhere.
