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There was - in that highly liminal space between one breath and the next, one heartbeat between life, death, and the everlasting flow of time - a feeling of anxiety that overcame her in these moments. She worried that this wouldn’t work, that her power would never really kick in. She wondered what would happen to her, should she fail to restart. To come back. An eternity of walking around, endless, unchanging, a frozen world her prison.
Max wondered if that would be her personal Hell. It certainly was one of the worst that she could think of. Maybe it was the best that she could hope for, too. Either way, she wasn’t certain, not really, and wondering about the nature of it all, the unpredictability of it, the fact that it might not last; it was enough to give her chills and a shiver that felt all too real, a bony finger running up her spine. Of course, none of the worry mattered. Time would always restart as she hopped back into herself, it would always keep ticking, eventually, and when she lowered her hand back towards the table it became self-fulfilling. The Universe had, once again, righted itself.
Max rolled her shoulders, cracked her neck. There was never any cause for worry. Abject horror had propelled her into this situation, but the anxieties she held over her powers was completely her own and fading now that she’d landed.
Mark Jefferson stood, stared, alone at the front of the classroom. His body was swathed in dark clothing, his piercing eyes roving out across them all. He was looking for fresh meat now that his latest and greatest toy had been dethroned, denuded and made impure. She’d returned, he’d grown bored, and Max wondered just when he decided on the next. Was it the moment that Victoria spoke up to answer Max’s selfie-fueled question? Or had it been prior to that? Max didn’t know; he didn’t have a file ready, yet, not for Victoria or herself. But he would, soon. The only question couldn’t be answered, and she didn’t have the time - and the irony was not lost on her - to figure out exactly how, and when. If she knew it, understood the timeline, then she might have stood a chance at stopping it. Possibly she could, instead, just forestall it long enough for him to wait until it was too late. The Storm would wash him away, she knew that, and if she could keep ahold of Victoria then maybe that would be enough.
Unfortunately, time and repetition had taught Max that it wouldn’t happen to her. It would occur in another branch of the multiverse, not this one. She was simply never that lucky.
Max stuck to the plan, even if calling it a plan was a stretch. It was more of a routine. One second, blink. The second rolled, forwards and then back. She appeared beside him, breathed and steadied herself. The class would never remember any of this, and if someone managed to catch that one single blip where she’d existed, they’d think themselves mad. Or perhaps they’d just shrug it off as being tired in a boring class. Max would be back, sitting in her seat, blinking as if she’d just come out of a nap. Jefferson might feel faint for a moment or disoriented, but he’d just keep on with teaching. Max moved, Max returned. One moment and all the pent up rage, violence, anger, all of it gone, for now. Everything that had built, fallen.
It was somewhat surprising to her, still, that she was capable of this. Max knew she was light, small, and held swiftness over strength. But she wasn’t unathletic at all and had made pains since she was young to remain somewhat ready for a sprint, a swim, or some other such activity. Endurance was useful, even when not applying it to rewound murders. What she hadn’t known, when younger, was that bending the rules of time would make her grateful for all that. Mostly she’d just gone on with it, and done so grudgingly. People would look at her and see a wallflower; hell, she’d looked at herself and agreed. Not now. When others expected that of her, it was useful.
And now that hidden wellspring of power had an outlet besides the curling of her hand.
The bell rang throughout the school and Max turned placidly to leave, rising and then stalking out; Jefferson watched her go, displeased, and Max shoved him out of her mind as she headed towards the parking lot, bumping shoulders with a muttering Nathan as she did so. The rest of the students that she passed along the way were useful in their own rights, but not now, and for that reason she could hardly care less about their existences. They were a means to an end, and right now it was postponed. She had a plan, a vision, and no matter if it was callous, or realistic, she stuck to it. She’d see this through today, just as she’d see it through tomorrow, and on and on until thousands more had passed.
Chloe was, predictably, strutting back and forth before her truck, hands wedged deep into her pockets, and beanie pulled low. Her blue hair was askew beneath it, a flick covering her left eye, boots kicking gravel and dirt into oblivion as she paced. It never seemed to change, and Max had come to develop a little idea around this situation. Chloe had never actively wanted to do this. No matter how much she later tried to deny it, and no matter the fact that she did go through with it, she didn’t want to, and needed to psyche herself up enough that she could.
Psyche herself up enough that she could tip Nathan past the scales of sanity.
Max slowed and watched, wondering how close to right she was. Chloe just wanted to be out, gone away, fucked off to fuck knew where; Chloe didn’t want to be alone, here, confronting the one person who had hurt her - and by extension, Rachel - so much.
A flicker of sympathy passed over Max’s conscious mind before she squashed it down, brutally. Sympathy could, like so many other things, be dealt with later on. Right now she needed to avoid it, avoid sentimentality - even though that wasn’t really true, was it? What was this except one long, drawn-out exercise at the behest of sentimental fear and loss? - and get the job done.
“Chloe!” Max barked out, her voice rough, fast, rousing the punk from her internal musings and beckoning her back towards the realm of the living.
The blue-haired woman stopped in a gasp, her eyes widened to comical proportions as her lips, frustrated by the lack of time to think, stumbled over a half-hearted exclamation of ‘Who the fuck are you?’ before Chloe realised, painfully, just who it was that had called out to her. Following that was a string of expletives, profanities, half-hearted glares and tepid anger, the brushfire dulled down through the years to fine embers. Then they were off, both of them safely ensconced in the least safe ride in town. Max relaxed back into the moth and rodent-eaten seat, content on letting her mind slow down for the next hour or two.
As they pulled into the Madsen driveway, Max smiled. The smile dropped off, though, as the scene became yet another that she had seen before. If she was honest it felt somewhat like coming home, and the rush of emotions she would flow through at this moment never seemed to change; there was a spark of pity for the girl that she’d left behind at that funeral, and the woman who had once been a second mother to her; there was white-hot anger at the man who’d come home to roost. She would happily throw in a bottle of ‘This is the first place I kissed you, where I killed you,’ and then it would all be complete.
Max jumped out of the truck with as much gusto as she could manage, feet furiously tearing up the path towards the door. When no second door managed to reach her ears, she turned, glared, and waited. Chloe seemed steadfast in her desire to remain inside the truck.
This moment was one that could change, a moment of flux. Sometimes Chloe would follow her along directly, other times she would stay behind and mope. There were even more instances where she’d simply light up a cigarette, flip Max the bird, and then slowly, agonisingly slowly, suck on it until it was all ash, all dust.
Then she would hop out and slap Max as hard as she could, eyes wet with unshed tears.
Luck seemed to be on Max’s side though, as Chloe rolled her eyes and then hopped out without pulling her lacking pack of cigarettes from her pocket. Max breathed out in a sigh of relief. She had learned, over time, to duck out of Chloe’s reach, but sometimes she was too tired to really be on her game, and the blue-haired wunderkind would manage to strike her.
Whenever it landed, it stung. Badly.
“Oh Maxi-pad,” Chloe grumbled, pushing past her to open the door, keys jingling all the while. “Years, years with no reply, and now you’re just popping in like nothing’s changed at all.”
Max shook her head and resisted the urge to argue back. It was a hard task, but she won. Barely. It was, in fact, so hard that she ended up stopping, gripping onto the bannister and fighting to keep her breath even, stable. One second, two, onwards off to ten, fifteen, twenty-six. When she was reasonably certain that she wouldn’t end up blowing out, up, on the girl she’d come to save, Max continued up the flight of stairs. Chloe, as if not noticing the lag at all, grumbled and led on.
The next few hours were, in Max’s multitude of experiences, relaxed. Usually. She settled easily into the role of truth-teller, explaining some things, showing off when Chloe disbelieved her, and getting the woman to calm down. It was simple in statement but rather hard in execution, even if it was supposed to be relaxing. Chloe’s moods were never stable, and she was hardly readable. She was just as liable to storm off onto the roof for a smoke, pointedly ignoring Max, as she was to sit down on the ground and giggle senselessly as Max gathered more - and more, and more, and how many bloody lighters did she have? - lighters into a small pile, all without ever getting up from her seat on the floor.
So far into the show it seemed alright, but as Max reached for the seventh lighter - this one lodged underneath the bed, in between the box that held Rachel’s mementoes and an old, rolled-up copy of a punk-rock magazine - she heard a noise she hadn’t been expecting. A car door slammed shut outside; the heavy thud of boot-clad feet hurrying, pounding against the ground below; a door opening wildly before crashing shut. Max stared at Chloe’s door and waited, wondering if this was worth a rewind and some gentle avoidance. Perhaps it was better to get Chloe out of here now that David had arrived, unexpectedly early and in whatever mood he was liable to be in.
Angry, she decided. He was most liable - as always - to be angry.
David had always followed a pattern before; Max would nudge Nathan as she left, and David would come home late. He was too ingrained to authority, to that routine, to change his responses. His work schedule was regulated, and bumping Nathan pushed him to take some extra time after his shift was over, finishing someone’s work because he needed to stew. Now, it seemed, he’d decided to come home early. Max wondered if she’d hit Nathan especially hard this time, or perhaps too light, and thus fucked it all up.
Maybe. Did it warrant further investigation? Yes. But that could be saved for the next go-round, assuming this one went as well as all the others.
A second passed while Max waited, patiently, watching first as Chloe’s face began to blanch and realisation settled in. Another second passed before Chloe was urging Max to get up, to hide, to climb inside the closet and pretend she wasn’t around. Max simply smirked at the suggestion - and it’s annoyingly physical euphemism - and then glared daggers at the door, eyes lit to blue lightning as David finally, furiously, stepped through the threshold. His face was red, nearing purple, eyes two coals and free hand clenched into a fist.
“Chloe, where the hell is it?” he yelled, voice gruff, every puff of air released with drill-instructor precision. Predictably it began to lead to a fight when Chloe feigned amnesia about the missing firearm, and when he finally noticed Max staring quietly at him, it only seemed to incense him further.
Max paused the world and used the time to think. She’d already broken the mould once, simply by creating circumstances that led David here so soon. Why not go further?
Unsticking reality, Max asked a question that she’d been planning on asking later, viciously eating up David’s surprise as she did so.
“Why do you have so many cameras, David? Why are they all around the house? Do you really think this place is a hive of scum and villainy? Or maybe it’s just that you’re a paranoid old hack.”
David shook as she finished speaking, his cheeks and lips turned to a feral grimace, a stubborn vein atop his forehead pressed to the max. She wondered just how long that bit of circulatory system could continue on without bursting, exploding. Max stared at it, the pulsing ugliness of it, fascinated as her continued silence egged him on further. When he finally gathered enough of his mind to walk forward - one massive leap for douche-kind - she stepped up, still staring him down, and laughed.
What happened next wasn’t exactly what she’d planned when this impulsive little mood overcame her. Max even wondered, briefly, if it would be better to rewind this all away. The indecision lay still for a moment before she decided. This wasn’t what she’d had planned, but his presence had set things off into a tangent that she couldn’t have predicted or accounted for. Max had, lately, fallen back on resorting to tried and true methods with very clinical, small tweaks. David’s bruised ego, his PTSD, these were things that she could leverage to move others off the board later on during the week, and a potential way to keep Kate safe. Now, it seemed, she’d be removing him from play.
The crack that echoed in the room - rolling backwards, the acoustics of this shitty little bedroom so abysmal that it made her ears ring - was the first opening to silence. The look of pure dread, abject fear, terror etched onto David’s face; she loved it. His craggy features were suddenly dropping as he realised what he’d done, and that had Max laughing again. Even Chloe seemed thrown off enough to giggle, her body rocking back on her heels and mouth twisted into a sinister, if surprised, grin.
David retreated when the neurons traversing his mind finally gave in, accepted what he’d done as fact. He backed up, out and into the hallway outside of Chloe’s room before pulling the door roughly shut behind him.
Coward.
“Chloe, can I borrow your cell phone?” Max asked, just now beginning to feel the spreading heat and pain from David’s slap.
Chloe, starstruck, awestruck, heart falling in love all over again, handed it over.
---
As the strobing lights of the police car disappeared into the distance, blue and red illuminating the trees and houses around the bend in the road, Max smiled. It was an earnest, honest smile, one of the first that she’d had in who knew how long. It wasn’t forced, it wasn’t close to fake, and it seemed infectious. Chloe’s own grin had Max’s growing, a little loop of happiness.
Max had gone through so many loops and never once had something like this happen, and the pure novelty of the moment was amazing. It was something new, something enthralling, and it meant she couldn’t fall back on what she’d already had planned. Joyce had arrived not ten minutes ago, her cheeks covered in flooded mascara after getting a lovely little phone call from her daughter - ‘Hi Joyce! Your fucktoy is getting hauled off, better hurry, he’ll be gone soon!’ - and hands shaking.
Now she was reduced to a crying mess within the living room, and Max couldn’t find it within herself to care. Whatever sympathy she would have felt for the woman was gone, dead as dust. David had been physical with Chloe before, and Joyce had never listened; she’d ignored all the signs - and her own daughter - for so long, and that meant she’d earned some of this heartbreak.
By the time she’d given her statement to the officer who’d arrived - not Berry, Max didn’t think she’d have been able to keep herself from smarting off if it’d been him - the sun was beginning its descent. Max slowly walked back up towards Chloe’s room, hand in hand as if they were children again. By the time that the jitters of her little off-script moment had subsided, Chloe was ensconced on the bed and smoking, Max was sitting in the computer chair with her hoodie off - lost amid the pile of discarded clothing that littered the floor - and the snow had just begun to fall. A halfhearted comment on it had Chloe looking towards the window, cigarette forgotten as she looked out in wonder, exclaiming at the oddity of it all.
“So, what should we do now?” Chloe asked her, pulling back from the glass to resume her relaxed position. Max reclined under that gaze, a little envious at how easily this version of Chloe was taking things. “You’re the master time manipulator, Max. Come with me if you wanna live, all that bullshit. So, what happens? What do we need to do, huh?”
Max’s mouth opened, closed, mind far away and body failing her. She could drop all of it at once. Fact check with Chloe tomorrow, run her around town to Rachel’s ad-hoc grave and then push off from there. Or, she could lead Chloe on the roundabout route. The first option had the benefit of getting it all over with somewhat quickly and stuck closer to her original plan. The second would allow her to control the rate of information that Chloe ingested. The first would get Chloe pissed off tomorrow, or saddened beyond belief, or send her into a murderous rage. The second option would leave her more stable, but with David removed could she still count on what she’d wanted to do?
Max knew she needed to save Kate tomorrow, or at least try. That could, possibly, be accomplished by a prepaid phone call and a hauntingly good amount of false emotion. She’d just need to convince someone that Kate’s father was ill, and needed her to call.
Simple enough.
But would toting Chloe around without the backdrop of David at the school have further consequences?
Max stamped her foot. “Fuck it. You’re not going to like this, but you need to hear it. Rachel’s dead.”
Best drop the bomb as soon as she could.
Max waited for an interruption, condemnation, a furious rebuttal that ignored all sense or reason.
None came. Instead, it seemed that Chloe was closer to passing out than blowing up.
“We need to call the police again, but we can’t do it from a cell phone. Rather, not one we own. You up for a trip into town?”
Silence, once again, met her words.
And then the waterworks began, and Max fell easily into her role of keeping all of Chloe’s pieces together.
---
Watching from the sidelines of the forest was a horrible, terrifying experience. Already they’d been caught out at least five times, and each had needed Max to rewind, impatiently, back to where they could branch out. Now she just had to hope that no wandering officer would get the good idea to check their little patch of real estate. Usually, whenever the police were finally called, she would be back at Blackwell. Now, instead of that comforting space - that wasn’t so much comforting as it was familiar, a location she knew inside and out and filled with people she could easily manipulate should the need arise - they were here. Now it was nearing midnight, and they were both bundled up in oversized hoodies, and black beanies, watching from a copse of sparse trees as Arcadia’s finest began the arduous task of putting the remains of Rachel Amber onto a stretcher and then into the back of a waiting vehicle emblazoned with ‘Coroner’ on its sides. Chloe was alternately swinging between shock and rage, shaking as she cried but silent beyond that.
The woman’s tears had dried while Max remained in thought; mostly she attributed Chloe’s sudden bout of stillness to shock, even if it seemed to be lasting a bit longer than Max had imagined it would. She supposed that Chloe had already cried herself dry over the past few months; she’d been left believing that something had happened to Rachel, but unable to prove just what that thing was. Now she knew that Rachel had died, had been murdered, and now here she was.
Absorbing, or at least trying to.
As the police finished up and the lights faded out into the distance, again, Chloe stood and shook with rage, fear, unmitigated hurt. Max followed, kicked at loose stones and junkyard debris, hands stuffed into her hoodie pockets, and head bowed to the ground.
The body might have been removed, but still, she thought this place a graveyard. She would let Chloe lead this moment. She deserved at least that much.
“I’ll fucking kill him,” Chloe growled, after minutes of barren silence. “I’ll just shoot him, and then that Prescott bitch too.”
The tirade continued on and Max remained silent, her feet scuffing up dust and the doe conspicuously absent. A quick glance around proved that they were alone, completely and utterly abandoned by the rest of the forest wildlife and those few things that were wild but not life. Each time that she’d returned here before, the doe had been waiting. An unremarkable deer except that it’d been immaterial. Max hadn’t seen it anywhere near where they’d been hiding, and since she’d managed to bypass the threatening vision of the storm in all its horrid glory, it appeared that she’d not technically seen it at all this loop around.
Branch. Split. Reality. Whatever the correct term was, Max didn’t know. But the distraction of thinking on it - naming a supernatural phenomenon, all by herself! - was a welcome change of pace when compared to the scathing remarks coming out of Chloe’s mouth; everyone would leave, everyone would lie, and all the heavy tones that were inspired by that line of thought. Max knew firsthand that thinking like that was a one-way ticket, one that invariably ended poorly.
She nipped it.
“Let’s get them both. We can take them down.” Max twisted in place, micro-rewinding a pebbled that she’d picked up, the stone appearing to hover above her palm in Chloe’s straight-through timeline. “We bring them both down, and I don’t much care how except that we avoid being implicated in a murder, alright?”
Max’s statement - and temporal trickery - had startled Chloe into silence, and now she stood ramrod straight, dumbfounded as tears leaked down her face. When she spoke, it was in a reedy, stuffy voice; the tune held just barely under control.
“Do I even know you, Max?”
---
Tuesday morning brought with it a headache crashing into Max’s left temple, and a pain in her side that could only be explained by a knobby elbow and rather tumultuous sleep that lasted far too short. She’d once again been plagued by nightmares, though she took some comfort in all of last night's terrors having been created by run of the mill stress. No time related, mysterious-power-driven monstrosities that left her confronting a twisted version of herself, over and over. Max blinked into the morning light and stretched, left arm rolling up and over Chloe’s chest and neck, the older woman reaching to grab, and then hold tightly, onto Max’s hand.
“Thanks, Max.”
Max craned her neck and looked up, still letting Chloe hold her hand, and quizzically blinked into a sombre face. “You don’t need to thank me, you dork.”
“I do. So, thank you. Thank you for not leaving again. And thank you for telling me.” Chloe’s voice was a hushed whisper, lost amid the twittering of birds and the gentle hum of cars passing by outside. Her eyes were wet, body shivering.
Inside of Max’s heart, somewhere far, far below the surface that she’d left behind who knew how long ago, something came to life. It compelled her to reach out and hold desperately to Chloe’s side, to pull and tug until the taller woman had been crushed into a hug that left her gasping.
They both lay there together for a few minutes more before Chloe’s rumbling stomach had them both rolling off of the bed and straining to pick up clothing that had been tossed every which way. Chloe avoided passing over any of Rachel’s old outfits, and instead, Max found herself mixing and matching until she’d been dressed in baggy, skater jeans, and a tank top that was covered with ravens. A zip-up hoodie just as black as the night before was enough to complete the look, and she spent a few moments staring at herself in the mirror. She’d never worn this before, not once in all the prior attempts. It was refreshing, almost relaxing to be feeling something new. A few seconds passed before she turned and saw Chloe standing, staring, eyes wide at being caught and face turning pink as she turned to her own clothing.
Max paid her back.
If Chloe was at all upset or perturbed by Max’s hungry gaze, she didn’t show it. She shuffled from foot to foot as she dressed, quickly, into a near carbon copy of the clothing that she’d worn the day before, all of the colours now inverted.
Their footsteps rang out together on the stairwell, thundering down squeaky steps until they’d stopped, colliding with one another and holding fast before the oddity in front of them.
It appeared that Joyce had never slept. A cigarette was held tight between her fingers, eyes downcast to the dining room table. Her head was held up only by a thumb and index finger, hair askew and eyes rimmed red. An amber glass of liquid sat before her, and Max wondered for just a moment at how sloshed Joyce must be, and how long it had been since she’d moved.
“Morning,” Joyce slurred in greeting, side-eying them both. “Make sure you eat something, Chloe. I called in.”
It was, to Max, a rather lax opener. Surely the Joyce she knew - from countless resets, innumerable memories - could come up with something better than that, something to express how sorry she was at having ignored her only daughter for years.
But this wasn’t that Joyce, and Max ran with it, letting the moment play out.
Chloe, her good mood evaporated, flush with anger and a little courage, swiped up Max’s hand and dragged her back from out of the kitchen, tugging her off towards the truck. The doors of the beast shook when they were closed, little specks of rust falling all around them. A second or two passed before Chloe could get the ignition to catch, and then they were pulling out, speeding off down sleepy streets towards the one surefire place to pick up a good meal this early in the morning.
As they pulled up into the parking lot of the Two Whales, Max gave Frank’s listless RV a once over. The second passed, and she moved on. He’d played his part in this whole mess, she supposed, but he didn’t deserve someone knocking through his home right now, or screwing with Pompidou. Rachel had been found, David was off the playing field, and Frank would either continue on normally or find another way to be obtrusive. She’d leave that hornet’s nest alone until interaction was necessary.
The payphone on the inside of the diner was an old, beat-up thing, and it was the same one she’d made this call from hundreds of times before. Now she picked it up and dialled the number to Blackwell, and forced herself to sound as sad as she could while Chloe looked on in awe.
The lie was a simple one; call and tell the administration that something tragic had happened to Kate Marsh’s father and that she needed to contact him straight away. No, she couldn’t hold, and no, she couldn’t be called back. She needed to go; Kate needed to call. She had done this so many times before, but each call had been spearheaded by David being a prick or at least remaining present enough on staff at Blackwell to help prevent her tragedy. Now that he was gone she wondered if Kate would end up ignoring the call, or ignore the urgency in it - she’d never called this early before, usually, it was always offset by an hour or so, and Kate was more aware of her need for help - to instead call back later, after the die had been cast. Either way, now that the phone was resting back on its hook it wasn’t Max’s problem, and she could only ride the wave to see where it crashed.
With that task completed and a few of the diner’s seedier patrons glaring at her with creepy eyes, Max returned to the booth that Chloe had taken, surprised at their odd positioning. No matter what, no matter the timeline, she had always ended up with Chloe facing away from the door and herself looking up towards the lighthouse. Now, for whatever particular reason, they’d swapped.
“So, what’s next on the plan, what do we do?” Chloe asked her, lazily browsing through a menu that had been dropped off by a not at all happy looking waitress who had likely been called in due to Joyce being indisposed.
Max watched the new face wander away with their orders and shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s no real plan, not now. We have a general framework that we can work off of if we want to get it all started today, but since we’re off script, I don’t know if we should follow it. We can just do everything today, I suppose.”
“And you can just rewind if we need it, right?”
“I’d rather I don’t have to,” Max answered.
“But if you need to, you can. Just, boom, roll it all back and then tell me what to do. I’ll just need to be quick with David’s, well, you know.” Chloe looked around them as if one of the patrons would suddenly develop super-hearing or ESP.
“We’re not using the gun.” Max shook her head, turning to stare out the window.
Chloe’s face turned red and hot. “I thought you said we were taking them down, Max. That means down.”
A flare of anger burst to life within Max’s chest, liquid and seething, that old familiar temper coming back. She’d managed to tamp it down as much as she could over the countless resets, but eventually, always, it would manage to rear its ugly head.
“No. Like I said, we’ll bring them both down, but we’re not getting implicated in some shitty scheme that gets us both locked up. I don’t want to keep resetting this week, over and over, again and again, even if you’re pissed. I’m pissed. I have to keep going through this hell because things fuck up, I change things, and suddenly new things all fuck up. Suddenly nothing is right, and the only option is to go back and do it again, so no, we don’t go off half-cocked on this, okay?”
Max’s spiel kept on, changed a little, was worded differently over a few, short rewinds. It was unkind, harsh, and definitely over the top. But by the time that she was finished all their food had been delivered, and Chloe was sinking back meekly into her chair. Her blue eyes were downcast, and a look of contrition had fallen across her features. It hadn’t been Max’s intention to shame her that badly, but she’d learned a long time ago that Chloe responded to shame when it was deserved, and took what Max said to heart, even if she was pig-headed and stubborn about it and everything else. Max wanted this done right, done once.
The silence stretched between them until Max could no longer stand it. She dug into her food, silverware scraping against the faux-porcelain plate.
“Look, we do this the right way, we fly through it. We get justice for Rachel, for Kate, for everyone else that they’ve ever hurt. Justice for you, too.”
Chloe rocked back and forth, side to side, the booth squeaking under her weight. A conflicted look arose for just a moment before she nodded and raised her glass.
“Here’s to doing it the right way, once. Let’s send these assholes to Hell.”
---
By the time they arrived at the barn, it was well past Max’s second class of the day, and she’d gotten more than a few worrying texts from her classmates. Luckily one of them had been Kate, and Max followed that text up with one to Dana, asking her to watch over the blonde as the rest of the day dragged on. Kate had remained in her dorm, on the phone, and Dana had nothing to report beyond that. Max presumed it was her father that Kate was talking to, and hoped that it would be enough to keep her safe. When they were planning on next would remove Jefferson, or at least inconvenience him until she found a more permanent method. She could get some sort of justice, however small that was.
Before them, the barn looked just as innocuous and disused as it ever did, and Max had a hard moment of reflection before deciding on a course of action.
“He has cameras in there. I don’t know if they’re all wired up to Sean Prescott or just Jefferson, so we play it safe. We see a camera; we destroy it. We see a fibre line; we cut it. We find any hub; we obliterate it. Jefferson is supposed to have a full schedule today, and so does Nathan. With any luck, we won’t be disturbed until we’re good and ready.”
Max unclicked her seatbelt - ragged and threadbare as it was - and turned to look at Chloe. She was white-knuckling the steering wheel and staring out past the window, her bottom lip caught between her teeth.
“We’ll be careful the whole time, no matter what. We hear something strange, we hide. If I need to rewind because someone showed up, I’ll tell you, and then we’ll improvise. Alright?”
Chloe nodded and yanked her keys from the ignition, shoving them down into a pocket and opening her door.
“Yeah,” Chloe gulped, face as white as a sheet despite her earlier bravado. “Let’s go.”
---
The outside of the barn seemed just as dishevelled as before. Sheet metal covered one side, the grass was overgrown everywhere around them except the spaces where tire tracks were visible clearly leading inside the front of the barn. But it was on the far side, under cover of rotted eaves, just above a pile of broken tractor components and bushes, that Max caught sight of the first camera. Usually, she never needed to visit this hellhole. Usually, she would leave it to the authorities, or find another way to deal with it that left her unharmed. This was, surprisingly enough, the first time she was directly looking for the cameras. There, above them both, was a single black line that followed the curve of the wood and disappeared into a small, black bowl. The exterior was so starkly new that Max wondered how she hadn’t seen it before and smirked at having actually found it so exposed.
Max followed the cord, and Chloe followed her.
“So, how do we knock it out?” Chloe asked, tossing a pebble up at the black dome.
Max pulled at long grass and leaves, exposing where the black plastic met the ground. “See if you can find us a sharp piece of metal. Something that we can sever this with. I don’t keep knives with me.” Max wiggled the cord, “Easiest to just cut this and be done with it; the actual camera doesn’t need to be touched.”
Chloe nodded in response and hopped off around the left side of the barn, rummaging around the corner until, a minute or two later, she returned. In her hands she held a warped piece of metal that was corrugated and fresh, one end of it mangled into an improvised blade. She wiggled her eyebrows and held it up proudly for Max to inspect.
“What do you think?”
Max looked it over and nodded, Chloe noticing and them jumping into the air at the indirect praise. Her fist was pumped up towards the sky, and the jagged edge of the metal came down into the meat of her thigh, catching her jeans and pulling red.
Max rewound it on instinct, stepped forward instead to grab at the safe edge of the metal. “Good job, Chloe. This should work just fine. On three, okay?”
Chloe nodded, holding onto her - safer - edge, and on the count of three they both thrust it forward into the ground, nearly severing the line in one go. Another slam had it twisting, the line fully cut, and then they threw the metal to the ground. They could grab it back up whenever they needed it, and the past few moments had proved that Chloe was still wanted by the Universe.
“Fuck yeah,” Chloe jumped, first pumped up into the air. “One down, who the fuck knows how many more of them to go.”
---
Inside of the barn brought them two more cameras, and each of them were dispatched easily enough. The same method as the first, but safer - so much as Max could allow - now that Chloe knew how sharp the metal was. When Max finally lifted away the false flooring that covered the entrance to the Dark Room, she blanched. She’d done this so many times, so often, but never so early. So many permutations and she’d ended up here.
She felt sick to her stomach. Knees unsteady, Max knelt and waved off Chloe’s hands. She wondered when this nightmare would end. She knew where this led. She knew who died and how. She knew that Chloe had died here, elsewhere, countless times. She knew Nathan and Rachel and Victoria had joined her.
Max took a shuddering breath, stood, and headed in.
---
The camera on her phone wasn’t as good as Max would have hoped for, but she’d left her own polaroid camera back at Chloe’s house. She took wide shots, as much as she could, not caring at all for the composition. Right now was the time to gather evidence, not observe the lighting and how it made everything seem so impersonal. She’d do what she’d come here for, and then blow it open for the police. Max took great care only to grab Rachel’s binder when Chloe wasn’t looking; her friend’s - lover’s? - eyes were scanning the walls, gently prying up boxes and opening drawers, looking around for wherever the recording lines came in and a way to destroy them.
They moved forward, as one, from the front entrance and then through the back. Besides the main computer that Jefferson seemed to use, Chloe found a server hidden inside a false bottomed cabinet, wires cutting through the back of it and out into the walls. A quick pull of cords shut it down, and Chloe finished it off by dragging it out, deftly pulling hard drives that simply clicked into place.
“Want to do the honours?” Chloe asked, setting the rest of the little server onto the ground.
Max didn’t hesitate one second. In one fluid she stomped it down, smashing the plastic and electronic components until bits of black and green were scattering out across the floor. When it settled back into a stable position she struck again, repeating the process twice, three times until there was nothing of it left to go back together.
If she rewound to enjoy it a few times, Chloe didn’t need to know. They would pull files from the drives later, before alerting the authorities and make sure that no one even knew that they had been there.
---
Max sat back and enjoyed the satisfying crunch of a chocolate-covered granola bar. She was hungry. Starving. All the time she rewound was experienced in a linear motion, and the excess of the day had caught up to her. A cardboard package of energy bars was rapidly disappearing, and Chloe ribbed her every time she reached down for another.
She didn’t mind. They both deserved to let off a little steam now that everything was in motion.
It hadn’t been hard to get another burner cell phone from the local electronic pick-me-up, along with an external hookup for the hard drives. Chloe had snipped and clipped, dragging everything where it needed to be while leaving them both conspicuously absent from the footage. After that task was accomplished, Max had rewound her way to dropping everything off at the local police station, and her phone calls had quickly set officers off on the hunt. A car was dispatched posthaste, and other uniformed officers started up a caravan.
Chloe had stepped in and gotten Max to agree to a waiting period, some twenty minutes or so, before going back up to the barn. Parking within walking distance had been easy enough, as had winding their way through thick pockets of the forest to find a suitable hiding spot. Both their bodies were humming now, Max eating, Chloe watching, the both of them run through with nervous energy and anticipation.
It was up to Arcadia’s finest to actually follow through, and from the flurry of activity, Max had a hard time believing they wouldn’t.
“Thanks,” Chloe spoke up, startling Max from her reverie as she wound her fingers between Max’s. “Thank you.”
Only a few of the cops remained by the second hour, and more than a few black cars showed up bearing agents wearing FBI, ATF, and other initials that Max only half understood. A few of those agents came back out, shaking and sweaty, hands on their knees and lunches in the dirt. Max couldn’t really blame them for that reaction. She’d seen it, lived it.
To think that all of this had been going on, here, in a sleepy little town on the edge of the earth, it was nearly unthinkable.
When it seemed to be well in hand, more vans showing up and cadaver dogs arriving, Max stood and pulled Chloe with her. Together they stepped back towards the truck, solemn and pleased.
“Now we just need to worry about the storm,” Max said, swinging Chloe around an oak tree.
Chloe tugged back, pulled her hand free from Max’s tight grip. “You sure? How bad is it?”
‘How bad is it,’ as if the plan description of ‘Total and absolute devastation’ could even cover it. Maybe, Max thought, there wasn’t a proper way to describe it. Maybe it just was. A force of nature, retribution and anger.
“Everything is knocked down, and everyone is dead. It doesn’t fit with the damage though, but they are, believe me. I’ve looked.” Max condensed as they walked, hand on her elbow and eyes bent to the ground.
“So, what do you want to do?”
Max shrugged. “I was thinking that we should find a tornado siren. I mean, Arcadia’s gotta be big enough for one, right? Tornados happen in every state, they’ve got to have at least one here, somewhere. Maybe set off all the fire alarms in town early in the morning. But a siren would be easier. Less of a mess, and I don’t have to freeze everything for too long.”
Too long. Too long, long enough for her recurrent fear to return, that she’d freeze the world and find she couldn’t unstick it.
Chloe was silent for the remainder of their walk back to the truck, her head shaking as she thought. The doors were opened violently, and Chloe merely grumbled as she tore up the ground beneath them.
---
“Max!”
The girl in question perked her head and ears as the voice came barreling at them from the far end of the dorm. It was less of a shock than Max would have imagined - though for a second she had slipped back to other voices, and less kind inclinations - but there Kate was, healthy and whole. She was waving as she sprinted, her heels lost somewhere behind her and loose bun coming apart into streamers of blonde hair.
“Max,” Kate panted, her hands on her thighs after she finally caught them. “You missed so, so much! Oh! Before I forget, I told your teachers you were feeling sick, and I’ve got most of the work, I’ll drop it off in a bit. But that’s not the important part!”
Max guessed, and guessed right. She let Kate spill it out slowly, walking them both through what she’d missed all day long. Chloe was quiet as she listened, her hand stuffed down into her pockets and body leaning up against the hallway wall while Max fished out her keys and led them all into her dorm room.
“Jefferson was arrested, and Nathan!” Kate exclaimed, her voice too high pitched for what Max could deal with right now.
It opened the floodgates though, and as Max settled herself down atop her bed, Chloe joined her and held her hand. Kate - never one to discriminate, not once since Max had known her - didn’t bat an eyelash at it and continued on, hopping onto Max’s futon and regaling them with their teacher’s capture.
“I think it was Officer Berry that actually ended up handcuffing him, but someone else needed to keep him still because he tried to run, but-”
On it went, and as the hour ticked over, and the story finished, Max found herself drifting off. Kate was exhausted by her retelling, one hand left atop her necklace and the other bunching and releasing a pillow thoughtlessly. Chloe moved them both through the required motions; questions that needed answers, expressing shock at just the right moment. There was no sense in playing it odd, Max knew that, but she also lacked the energy. Chloe seemed keened into that though, and Max gently stroked the back of her hand as it became clear they were coming to a close.
“So,” Max finally broke in, stretching her arms into the air until all the joints of her shoulders and elbows had cracked. “How was your day? Besides all the excitement, I mean.”
Kate smiled somewhat forlornly, turning to look out Max’s windows towards the trees and skyline just barely visible in the distance.
“It was alright. Good, actually. It was good. I talked with my father a little this morning before class. He helped me come to realise a few things, tamp down on, well, the stuff with Victoria. It’s not solved or anything, but he gave me some distance. I can see it better now than how I did before.”
Max smiled at that, genuinely and fully. No matter how many loops she ran, no matter the pain of all the resets, each had featured an attempt to save Kate. She was innocent of all the horrors here, Max had decided, except that she’d been unlucky enough to be touched by them. She deserved more, in Max’s estimation, than to be driven to even think of going to the roof.
The successes were less than she would have hoped for, but this one buoyed her spirits.
---
Max sighed, deep and long. With a drowsy yawn, she leaned effortlessly into Chloe’s side, the chill of autumn bearing down on her.
“So,” she said.
“So,” Chloe answered.
“So, so?” Max turned her face up, ignoring the darkening in the sky as a false moon slid before the Sun.
“So, so, so.” Chloe relaxed and wrapped an arm around Max’s shoulder. “We’ve managed to take care of Jeffershit and the Prime Douche, and that fuckstick Nathan. You said the storm comes when, Friday? We’ve a few days to just relax now, right?”
Max nodded. “Yeah, we should. But we’ll need to go find a warning system and figure out how to turn it on. Start it up early, maybe three in the morning. It might help us if we also find a way to kill the Vortex Club party, but with Nathan gone, I’m not sure they can keep it going as is.”
It would be an easy enough plan, Max assumed. She knew that she could take Wednesday and Thursday as planning days. She’d never gotten anything accomplished this fast, not all of this. It was always Thursday before she was ready, before she had time to think, and it was rarer still for key players to be off the board with no chances of coming back.
All because she’d bumped into Nathan a different way.
Normally she might still have to deal with an unhinged Nathan, his mind deteriorating as he wreaked havoc. Jefferson would sometimes find a way to slip his bonds and come back for her. Other times David would be a pain, so obstinate that she was stonewalled. Sometimes it was even Chloe doing all the blocking, so mercurial and easy to piss off.
“We just need to be ready to move,” Max spoke up, her voice whisper quiet as the Sun returned. “We need to make sure we have a hold on Joyce and some way to make the rest of the town actually listen. If they decide to remain or ignore it, I’ll figure something out.”
“Why?”
Max opened her eyes and turned back to face Chloe, her face screwed up in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“Why do you care about the rest of them?” Chloe asked.
Max spluttered. “W-why? Because they don’t deserve-”
“Well, the way I see it,” Chloe interrupted her, voice getting loud and high as emotion coloured her words. “I say that if they stay, they deserve it. Someone who can’t see a magic fuck-off tornado coming from the bay deserves what happens. If they hear the sirens, if they see the storm, it’s not your problem .”
Max felt a flood of warmth invade her cheeks as she tried - floundering - to retort. “Yes, it is-”
“No!” Chloe stomped her feet, swung a fist out against the air. “They are not your problem. They’re people, and they’re all capable of making their own decisions. Do you know how many times I’ve wished for this shithole to be wiped off the map? Turned to glass, blasted to bits, whatever. I wanted that, all the time. Ever since you and Dad left me, it’s all I’ve wanted. Fuck this town, fuck these people. We aren’t responsible for them, you least of all. We don’t owe them. They let a predator lurk around, the police are all in Prescott’s pockets. They went through all of this, all this performance , today, just because there was too much. It’s overwhelming, no matter how much Prescott is paying them. He doesn’t have enough money to wipe out the corruption, the drugging, the kidnapping, all of it!
“So,” Chloe settled down, shifting and buzzing with pent up energy. “They make their own decisions, their own choices. We help them set it up, and it’s up to them to follow through. And if it has consequences they don’t like, fuck ‘em. Not our problem. You give them a choice, notice, whatever. It’s up to them to make it, not you. You can’t be the one to do that. You should never have had to do it in the first place.”
Max tried to formulate an answer, opened her mouth, closed it just as swiftly as Chloe continued her tirade.
“You’re not some god, Max!” Chloe exploded into the air, limbs manic, grin feral. “You’re not fucking Atlas, even if you have all that power.”
Chloe reached down and grabbed Max by the arm, one motion hauling the shorter girl to her feet, leaving Max hopping with the force of it.
“The world wants to end? Fine!” Chloe screamed, turned in a circle before grabbing at Max’s hand again. “Let it end! Fuck ‘em!”
Now Max was buzzing, teeth gnashing, eyes wide, body shimmering as Chloe bounced, raged, threw her hands into the air and led them both towards her truck. The necklace around her neck - one bullet for each of them, each of them alive in turn, dead, mixed, broken and scattered before the winds, the cosmos, and expanse that Max had tread again and again with no solution in sight - jangled and bounced, beanie torn from her head and clutched tightly as she waved it. The tirade continued on as they moved away, off, towards whatever might come to pass.
“I’ve done what I can, and I don’t know what’ll happen,” Max whispered, again and again, a mantra low beneath her breath, atonement in every syllable. It was a memory of another Tuesday and all the horror it had wrought, a memory of all the times she’d been here, and of how special this one instance of difference truly was.
Max was tired. How long had she been at this?
A memory occurred to her, as Chloe blasted music and tires squealed, abrupt acceleration dragging them from the parking lot.