Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A tan, beat-up pickup truck rolled to a slow stop on the empty road out of town. Max took a tired breath. “Why did…”

Chloe was looking back at her with the usual concern, her blue hair a shock against the grey-orange of the morning sky, her frown turned half-upwards. “Because we just drove past what’s left of the hospital, and you look like you’re about twenty seconds from spilling your guts all over my dash.”

That familiar tone was all that kept Max from actually breaking down just then. Chloe’s face softened up, fear apparent at first but quiet, deep understanding drowning out everything else.

“I guess this is when…”

Max nodded. “You always stop in the same spot.”

A brief wince and a startle. Chloe took a moment to recover. “Geez, Max, how many times?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Okay…” Chloe absorbed, breathing and nodding as their gazes parted. “Okay.” They both stared out again at the empty road, and then at the gently-glowing, cerulean blue butterfly that landed and folded its wings on the hood of the truck. “So, this is your ticket back, right?”

“Yeah…”

Chloe’s voice was a little awkward, a little hoarse. “See me on the other side?”

“You know it.”

Max focused her eyes on the butterfly, a smile reaching her eyes as it fluttered in place.

Yes, I’d like to try again.

“Thanks for being here,” Max made sure to catch Victoria as she tried to sneak away, earning herself a narrow-eyed glare but shrugging it off as the false threat display it was. “I… don’t know why you always show up here, but it means a lot.”

Victoria’s eyebrows reached for her platinum blonde, pixie-cut hairline. She clearly wanted to either call out the use of the world always, or accuse Max of acting like a sleep-deprived zombie at her best friend’s funeral – probably in those exact words, if previous timelines were any indication. She managed to hold it in this time, instead continuing to eye Max with disturbed suspicion until Kate interceded between them to ambush Max in a tearful hug.

Max responded with a shaky breath, as the harsh sunlight filtered through the trees and painted the well-tended grass beneath their feet. “I’m glad you’re here too, Kate. So much.”

Shifting as if in response to that, Kate wiped away tears and fixed a blonde strand that had fallen out of her bun, then leant back over Max’s shoulder. “…Oh, Max, look!”

Of course, meaning the blue butterfly that had landed on Chloe’s casket. “I know, Kate,” Max whispered. “I Just want to… a little longer.”

She could never hide the finality in her tone. “A little longer what?” Kate asked at the edge of dawning concern.

Max pulled away, but shook it off. “It’s nothing. I’ll see you again soon, Kate.”

Yes, I’d like to try again.

It still freaked Max out how little of the storm could be heard from inside the Dark Room.

That couldn’t keep it off the minds of David and the two officers, slowly growing distracted by what must be happening to all the people outside. And who it was happening to.

Mark Jefferson, as irritable as he seemed at the intruders trespassing upon his underground studio, soon broke out into quiet laughter at the thought of being among the town’s only survivors. Not even being handcuffed and held at gunpoint seemed able to deter him.

Victoria gently sobbed, wrapped up between Max’s and Chloe’s arms as the three sat in silence along the opposite wall.

The butterfly phased down through the bunker ceiling, landing in the middle of the coffee table.

Chloe exchanged a dark look with Max, and offered only a stern nod at the latter’s wordless admission. Max took Victoria fully into her arms, soothing her former enemy while Chloe stealthily got to her feet, walked over to pick up a heavy tripod by its legs, and continued toward Mark.

David noticed his stepdaughter’s intentions too late. “Chloe, don’t!”

Chloe swung. Jeffershit’s neck snapped. Victoria breathed easier. Max focused the butterfly.

Yes, I’d like to try again.

“Geez, Max, how many times?”

It was becoming harder even to find the words, to not let the relentless ages show on her face. Chloe looked as stricken and scared as she had back in the diner, the time Max had proved her powers. Overwhelmed by the scope of the possible, expanded now twicefold or more that of the first leap from the normal to the supernatural.

“Look… even if it’s not me… at some point you have to let go, right? Choose something to stick with? I don’t… I won’t be mad, but you’ve gotta live your life, Max. Don’t wait up for me.”

A gust of wind passed over the hood of the car, paling in comparison to that which had wrecked the town. “I guess I could try living with myself,” Max mumbled darkly, as she looked down at the butterfly. “But either way, I think I know I’ll just end up back here.”

Yes…

“Chloe… clearly meant a lot to you. I just worry that…”

Max braced herself. With Kate, there were a lot of ways this could go.

“…that you’re about to shut me out because you don’t think… you don’t think I’ll understand, or approve of how much you… and that’s not true, that’s…” Kate reached out for Max’s hand, froze in the silence and birdsong of the cemetery grounds, and pulled it back. “That’s just not true at all.”

Max felt bad that she didn’t believe Kate, but she’d seen enough times the way this town treated Chloe. The worthlessness, the inevitability it seemed like everyone saw in her. And how they treated Max, too, with kid gloves and false sympathies, as she grieved for someone they were certain she was always better off without.

She might never forgive them for it. She turned back around and the butterfly was waiting for her.

…I’d like…

She found Chloe in the basement, huddled next to the washer-dryer, her box of secrets open at her feet and three photographs held tight in her hands.

Hands that began shaking once Max released her hold on time, allowing it to flow forward again. From ringing silence, the heart of the storm was violent on her ears.

Chloe looked up, eyes going wide. “Max…” she breathed as barely a whisper.

Max nodded, weeping with a guilt that ran deeper than even Chloe would realize now. She opened her eyes back up with the bleakest of smiles. “I guess you were expecting someone else…”

By the crease down the middle of one of the photos Chloe was holding fast to, in her last moments, it was likely enough.

“The fuck yeah I was!” Chloe scowled, then laughed. “The fuck, am I hallucinating now?”

“No, I’m…” Max knelt down shyly at Chloe’s side, hugging her camera bag. “I’m here. For real, Chloe” She smiled. “Hella cereal.”

Chloe blinked in surprise. She slapped a hand on Max’s shoulder, as if to confirm she was solid, then scowled suddenly and slapped her harder. “What the fuck, Max?” She was laughing and crying all at once. “The one time you really should be living it up in Seattle like I always hated you for. Five fucking years, Max! Why do you have to be back here just to die with me?”

Max looked into her eyes, really looked, enough that Chloe couldn’t help but meet her gaze, breaths evening out. “I can’t leave you here. Not alone, not again. I don’t care what tries to keep us apart, five years or five centuries. If it’s going to end at all… this is how.”

There wasn’t any time for more words, just for Chloe, pulling Max into her arms as the storm began to rip the house apart at the foundations.

Even in the monochrome grey of imminent death, time frozen with such finality that even Max couldn’t move except to think or to rewind, the blue butterfly glowed brightly with color as it fluttered into view.

…to try…

Rain fell, soaking the soil, mud flowing down in tiny rivers to fill a shallow grave alongside two corpses – one six months old, the other twelve hours.

“She’s dead, Max!”

For, likely enough, the thousandth time. Anyone else at this point might have simply, mechanically, made the mental note – this, one of several hundred scenarios where Chloe Price ends up exactly here. Bright blue hair, rough and jagged to frame her face. Tiny, neat red hole in her forehead. Belatedly joining, in death, the missing girl she’d spent the last few months of her life searching for. The universe, it seemed, wanted to be poetic.

“Get… get it together, Caulfield! We can’t stay here!”

Sobs wracked Victoria’s voice, but not because she cared about Chloe – no one truly did except Max, which at one point she supposed had been the root of the entire problem. High wind tore through the trees and battered them both. Victoria’s hand was still clutching at Max’s shoulder, impatient. Max couldn’t blame her.

Not with the constant lighting reflecting its eerie glow through dark skies.

“I have to stay,” Max said. “It’s my storm.”

“What are you even talking about? No, it’s not your fucking storm!” Victoria snapped, regaining a bit of her old, vicious self, if only momentarily. “There are professionals for these kinds of things! We need to get out while we still can!”

Moving for the first time in minutes, reaching slowly into the pocket of her hoodie, Max palmed the keys to Jefferson’s car, and held them out. “Go,” she said.

“What!” Victoria half-snapped, half-choked.

With a light sigh, Max turned to face the scared girl behind her. “I’m not leaving Chloe. Go.”

Victoria’s face screwed up. She looked down at the keys, then back up to Max. For a moment, she struggled, as if she might refuse, yet ultimately narrowed her eyes in a scowl and snatched the keys away quickly. “Suit yourself!”

She stood up and walked back toward the car, making it about halfway before she turned around and stared. Max met her eyes, but said nothing, while Victoria tensed and shivered and shook her head. Something reflective that must have been a raindrop ran down her cheek.

“Screw you, Caulfield!”

Max looked down at Chloe’s sprawled form as she heard Victoria stomp off, the car engine start, and then the sound of it pulling away down the road. It didn’t matter. Victoria wouldn’t last long in these conditions, and neither would this timeline. And whatever Victoria thought was happening here, there certainly weren’t any professionals on giant, spontaneous, anomalous time tornadoes.

…wait. Were there? The thought occurred to Max casually. She hadn’t really considered that before. It seemed ridiculous, but she shrugged it off. Fuck it, she could have maybe at least tried to figure that out at some point.

Oh, well. Something for the next time around.

Bright, glowing azure entered Max’s vision, the butterfly struggling far less than it should have in the winds. Smiling, Max held out her finger, giving the creature a perch as it came to rest.

…again.

“Coffee?”

Monique Dupre reflexively rolled her eyes at the word. Out of everything from the old Staten Island office that had found a permanent home on the HEAT Seeker, the American-style coffee machine was the one thing she took offense to on principle – for its presence on what, so many years ago, had technically begun its service as her sailing vessel.

A cold breeze swept over the deck, and Monique looked across at the steaming mug, then up to meet the slightly teasing gaze of Dr. Nick Tatopoulos. With a minute shrug she took the mug into her hands, if only to keep warm. Then took a sip, if also only to keep warm. No, she wasn’t developing a fondness for the disgusting concoction. The French knew what real coffee tasted like. Americans brewed the human equivalent of motor oil.

A couple boulders bounced their way down the cliff face across the water, and Monique tensed, caught between the mug in her hands and the black, lime green, and silver heavy tranquilizer rifle leant up against the mid-tier rear deck’s red safety rail. In an actual emergency, she would’ve dropped the mug without question, but the creature up on the rocks was merely adjusting its footing, no immediate threat.

Nick watched her conflict knowingly. He would likely consider it progress that the weapon was simply placed within reach rather than in her arms and continually held at the ready. And only a tranquilizer gun in the first place, at that. Monique had, admittedly, begun to let her guard down around these creatures, but would never do so completely, no matter how many years they had coexisted on this island in peace.

She began plotting her likely retaliatory move against the creature that had wandered into proximity, that being Crustaceous Rex. Like an armored cuttlefish, walking on a pair of oversized King Crab arms capped with four-pronged, talon-hooked pincers, the orange-green crustacean-cephalopod hybrid prowled the upper echelons of the rocky seaside cliff, never seeming to let the HEAT Seeker out of his watchful gaze. Several tranquilizer bolts to the lower-perched foot would cause the awkwardly bipedal creature to lose balance and likely fall, mirroring the descent that had finally knocked him unconscious during the first engagement in Jamaica. If it didn’t have the same effect this time, she could follow up with—

“He’s just curious,” Nick tried to assure. He’d accompanied his words with an elbow to her upper arm, a gesture to which Monique responded with a sharp glare, as if to remind him she might be liable to draw a knife and slide it between his ribs in retaliation. She actually only had three knives on her person – a number that, a decade ago, she would have considered woefully inadequate. Nick smiled back, with a long-settled-in familiarity, and returned to gazing up at Crustaceous Rex with his newfound adoration.

…unless you plan to adopt it?

Monique shook her head and only smiled a little at the echoing memory.

An arm settled across the back of her shoulders, and she mentally gave herself the credit of having long suppressed the reflex to twist the offender into either a throat punch or chokehold – to the point she now didn’t even perceptibly flinch at the contact. It was only Dr. Elsie Chapman, sidling up to her left side in an attempt to offer a calming presence, an easing of tension.

It wasn’t completely unsuccessful.

“They wanna know what’s going on,” Elsie backed up Nick in partial jest, also momentarily entranced by fascination. “Cooped up on this island all these years, we’re their only entertainment.”

“Yes,” Monique spoke drily. “Perhaps we might even be as entertaining as King Cobra found that security patrol.”

Those men had been held hostage for several hours, penned in by a loop of serpent coil, throughout which the snake mutation did nothing but observe his captives as one would fireflies in a jar. Admittedly, they had been released unharmed once the creature grew bored, and at no point had King Cobra used his adhesive venom spray. The incident was nonetheless fresh on everyone’s minds, not the first nor last time in recent months that the island’s mutations had displayed a new and, in some cases, decidedly less predatory interest in their human captors.

“They’ve been watching Zilla interact with us for almost ten years now, it was bound to—”

Nick was cut off, as the sound of the HEAT Seeker’s mounted crane retracting its coil caught their attention, and all three of them casually turned to observe the results of their mid-morning task.

Dr. Mendel Craven silently tapped at his palm computer, controlling the crane just as he directed the robotic assistant he was currently retrieving from the depths. In a moment, the yellow exploration rover NIGEL broke the water’s surface, several of his many limbs clutching around a damaged, steel-grey canister with some barnacle growth marring its surface.

Nick had a considering look about him as he watched the crane swivel back above the deck and begin to lower the robot. “How about this. Twenty says we won’t be graced by one of Randy’s usual interferences during NIGEL’s situation report.”

Elsie crossed her arms, eyes focused. “I’ll take those odds.”

Interferences was putting it diplomatically. Privately, Monique suspected there was more amiss than simple hostility to the ongoing, one-sided prank war between the team’s information specialist and its roboticist than there appeared to be, but alas, she had no proof.

“Underwater deterrent beacon: retrieved,” NIGEL announced in his usual monotone, somewhat nasally filtered voice, as he released the object to the deck.

“So far, so good,” Nick observed with a smile. “There’s only so many ways you can tamper with a robot’s vocal protocols before you start running out of ideas.”

Mendel approached the machine while it was still suspended slightly above the deck, and began removing its submersible attachments in favor of the standard treads-and-tricycle-wheel land configuration. NIGEL continued reporting all the while.

“Damage: Outer casing puncture. Cause: organic lifeform. Internal damage: minimal.”

Monique narrowed her eyes at the tear in the cylindrical probe. It had obviously been damaged by one of the creatures, but most likely not by intention. It was a glancing blow, too powerful for the metal to have withstood. But which creature would have ventured so close?

“Genetic sample taken. Analysis: inconclusive. Is it made of lemon juice? Doorknob. Ankle. Cold.”

Mendel stood in place for a moment, his eye twitching. Then his face contorted in an impression of a reddened kettlewhistle for another several seconds until he threw his fists down and let loose the expected shout.

“RaaaaAAAAAANDY!”

“M’whut?” Randy Hernandez popped up from behind the crane base, biting the ends off a handful of sour gummy worms in a motion that gently threw his dreadlocks about in the wind. His confusion, it needed not even be said, was false, the lie broken by a blatant conspiratorial grin.

Elsie laughed, laying out a hand, palm exposed. “Pay up, Nicky.”

It was the sort of moment that Monique found a unique fondness in, despite the childishness and chaos that it meant had once again overcome this group of… eccentric individuals she had found herself indefinitely chaperoning. She had to remember that, apart from a basic knowledge on how to operate an energy rifle, her teammates were still civilians, experts in largely academic fields. Had circumstances been different, they might by now have settled into teaching positions with respect to their various specialties. She supposed that, out of everything that had brought and kept them together, this semblance of the status quo of their early y—

Without warning, Monique’s mental resistance training kicked in, her fingertips flying to the acupressure spots on her temples, behind her ears and jaw. She needed to hold on, dig her claws in, but it wasn’t enough, it wouldn’t be…

It is dark, and I have been searching.

Something… something was happening. Had happened. Would happen. Did happen. It was there, but it was slipping away…

But you cannot find the door.

She’d almost lost it. One moment had ended… and the next, no… No. It was fighting back, more powerful than any intrusion she’d been trained against. A tidal wave when compared to a breeze. It could not stay in her mind, no matter how—

Turn the knob, and run through the door.

Monique grit her teeth, tightly narrowed her already-closed eyes, a roaring chorus building behind her force of will.

TURN. THE KNOB.

One moment had ended, and a thousand had begun, had…

AND RUN. THROUGH…

And then…

THE DOOR.

And she saw it.

As if it were some… disturbance in all reality, but anchored to a time and place. A center of strain and fragmentation on some plane beyond the physical, with many invisible tendrils reaching out to create secondary, tertiary, quaternary disturbances all contributing to some hammer being drawn back, tightly wound and ready to snap.

And she saw herself, within one of these satellite ripples about to form, that had formed and also, soon would. She saw that it was more than this… thing could take. An upper limit.

Something powerful enough to have been holding back all of reality itself, was about to break.

And already had.

“Alfred Hitchcock famously called film ‘little pieces of time,’ but he could be talking about photography, as he likely was.”

Having to hear Mark Jefferson’s voice the moment she entered consciousness was the last truly terrible thing about starting every new loop right here—well, aside from not being in the same room as Chloe immediately, which might as well have been the universe’s most cruel joke aside from all the other ones. Max swallowed down the shudder that coursed through her.

It certainly wasn’t the moment she would’ve picked out if she had the choice – days too late to save Kate from getting drugged at that party or Chloe from getting dosed in Nathan’s room, months too late to save Rachel from getting murdered and Chloe from having to lose her, and for that matter, years too late to save William from dying in that car crash – not for lack of trying, on more counts than Max would ever admit, but she’d sworn for the last of too many times that she wouldn’t put herself or Chloe or anyone else through the consequences of trying to change anything from before the beginning of the loop.

And so, Max was stuck trying to make the best of this world of pain, where only Victoria Chase could be saved completely from the evils that stemmed from Jefferson’s darkly twisted photography passion project – a dangerous obsession with shattering human innocence before the camera’s lens – as long as Max intervened before the next Vortex party on Thursday. But Jefferson himself, fear through traumatic memory notwithstanding, had become less an obstacle and more of a speed bump. An annoyance. A distinctly human problem, solvable enough Max had done it on her first loop, a stark comparison to the supernatural threat that constituted the real reason she’d lived out this week hundreds of times already. Jefferson was nothing, and Max would no longer let him overshadow the rest of the company her eternal life kept sending her back to.

In front and a little to the right of Max’s seat was Kate Marsh, and despite how fragile her situation was currently, she was the truest friend and ally that Max already had in her corner from the week’s very start. To the left was Victoria Chase, and… actually, Max wasn’t quite sure why Victoria came to mind next, since not only was the Queen Bee of Blackwell still at the height of her vindictive campaign against anyone and everyone she could find a way to knock down a peg – Max especially – she was also Nathan Prescott’s closest friend and had been a hardcore Jefferson groupie since at least four years prior, and was thus usually among the last to believe the truth about both of them.

But Max supposed she’d seen enough sides of Victoria to nonetheless feel strangely comforted by her presence. Similar things could be said of second-bully-in-command Taylor Christensen at the same table, who had a kind heart buried not nearly as deep, but was just extremely loyal to Victoria for reasons Max understood and accepted. Then, almost in a line across the front row of desks, were Alyssa Anderson, Daniel DaCosta, and Stella Hill – staunch friends and supporters of Kate, more than willing to go to war for her when it counted – and Hayden Jones, who… was practically useless in a crisis owing to some very skewed priorities, but he was far from the worst of the Vortex bros, and Max couldn’t quite bring herself to call him a creep with Mark Jefferson in the same room.

You’re surrounded, asshole, Max thought to herself as, only a few seconds into this new loop, she pulled out her cell phone and began typing.

Her teacher – who, fittingly enough, insisted on lecturing from the center of the circle of desks, took notice. “Now, Max? What is so important that you need to be texting in the middle of class?”

…So you’ve chosen death. Yet again.

She kept a deadpan expression, not looking up once from her phone. “I’m telling Mr. Madsen where the Dark Room is.”

Jeffershit was startled only for a moment, keeping his classy cool with an awkward, yet wary sort of smirk. “I’m… I’m sure that, as part of the school staff, Mr. Madsen is well aware of where we develop our photographs.”

“No, I meant the secret one in the bunker under the Prescott barn. Where you take all the drugged and kidnapped students after the Vortex Club parties. Sorry for the confusion.”

Slowly, shakily, Kate turned around in her chair.

Max pretended to stop in the middle of her typing to ponder something. “You buried Rachel Amber by the old Pacific Steve’s signpost, right? In the American Rust junkyard?”

Jefferson finally recovered enough to hastily try to turn things back around. “Isn’t it a little disrespectful to make up rumors about missing students?”

“She’s only missing because you’re a total screwup who gave her too high a dose of GHB.”

“Nathan is the one who fucked up the dose!” Mark snapped, clenching his fists, and only realizing his mistake when the room erupted in gasps. Max met his eyes enough to see that he was panicking now, slipping further and further every time someone skidded their chair an inch farther back toward the walls of the room. “Now, now!” he put his hands up. “Max is… is leaving out some crucial details, you see. I… I have a vision!”

When that only earned him the opposite reaction to what he was hoping for, he finally gave in to pure frustration, focusing on Max as the source, the cause. He scowled and rushed at her.

Max prepared to roll back time and dodge, but she didn’t have to.

Alyssa had picked up and swung her chair over her head and whacked it into the back of Jefferson’s skull, sending him stumbling. Max smirked, gripped the edges of her table, and shoved it forward, catching him in the midsection and knocking him back as he fell. Jefferson cracked his head open on the table behind him, blood running back across its surface to fill the carved, graffitied letters that spelled out RACHEL AMBER 4 EVER.

Over Jefferson’s corpse, and still holding up the chair, Alyssa traded a determined look with Stella, who had clearly been about to attempt something similar. No one spoke.

Max completed her post, stood up, and left the classroom.

Randy Hernandez stepped back, his eyes going wide as the roars from what must have been every last mutation on the island broke out in unison.

Crustaceous Rex’s cuttlefish mouth had split open four-ways like a tiger lily, his creaky-door-hinge howl bellowing out from his high, cliffside perch. From behind him on the grassy, level part of the hill, King Cobra had reared up and spread his spine-edged hood, fangs bared as he let out a raptor roar. There was a warbling buzz building in the air, and Randy had to cover his ears at the violent vibrations that could only have been the giant bat’s sonic screech.

Alerts were going off on the whole team’s cell phones. “Is this a breakout?” Elsie asked, looking at hers, while Nick traded one look with Mendel that had the roboticist reaching for the side panel on NIGEL’s upper-rail canister. The emergency speaker-broadcast Zilla call joined in with the rest of the monstrous cries, all while Randy’s jaw dropped at seeing King Cobra swing his head around to the side, with enough force to send Crustaceous Rex scrambling for purchase on the rocks.

“Whao! Those two haven’t duked it out in ages!”

Retaliating, Crustaceous Rex twisted around on the many pivot points of his jointed legs and wide shoulders, then reached up with his four main tentacles, ensnaring and compressing parts of King Cobra’s hood as he tried to either keep himself from falling or pull his foe down with him. King Cobra slithered frantically around on his coils, trying to back up and shake off the extra weight. C-Rex kicked off and swung briefly below the cobra like a pendulum, until he managed to dig in his claws on a vertical face, walk himself one step at a time up onto the grassy cliff top, then dig in again and ram forward into King Cobra with a headbutt.

“Down! Down! Down!” Nick screamed, alerting Randy to the two fast-moving shadows as they passed over the HEAT Seeker – the giant bat in a midair dogfight with Queen Bee, the two of them breezing past each other high above while a stray blast from the sonic screech tore into the water’s surface. A spray was sent up on deck while a wave crashed against the side, rocking the boat with the impact and sending everyone scrambling.

Randy dove for cover and slid, head down with his hands over his eyes, but when he slowed to a stop and finally pried them off he was looking out towards the open ocean, a smile crossing his face.

The waves were swelling, the surface soon broken by the forward swept tips of two prominent, knifelike back scutes. “Heck yeah, the Z-man will keep ‘em in line!”

“Mendel!” Nick shouted from somewhere behind. “Get NIGEL working on repairing that beacon, once Zilla breaches the perimeter, we need to get the deterrent network back online ASAP!”

“On it!”

NIGEL rolled past Randy, shouting “Must construct additional pylons!” as he raced to the deterrent beacon, which itself had rolled against a safety rail and gotten stuck there.

Water cascaded down blue spines and grey scales as Zilla, the team’s raptorlike mutant iguana protector, surfaced off the HEAT Seeker’s bow, but something wasn’t right from the get-go. The big guy had his hands to his ears – long, slender, taloned fingers held cagelike overtop of his skull as if he was fighting a nasty headache. After a shake or too, though, he looked up, saw what was happening, and lunged over to the base of the cliff to start climbing.

“I’m not sure that beacon’s gonna help, Nicky,” Elsie announced as Zilla stretched out limb after limb, performing a vertical lizard-crawl up the cliff face toward the warring mutations. “Subsurface scans are tracking El Gusano, and it looks like our humungoworm’s just booked it straight for bedrock! He’s tunneling underneath the seabed!”

Mendel gulped. “Past the seismic deterrent grid?”

Nick froze up, stillness in chaos as he hit the realization. “They’re panicking.”

Randy ducked on reflex as Queen Bee buzzed the HEAT Seeker’s radar mast. “Panicking over what?”

“P-p-per-haps… they sense it too…”

Shock rolled through Randy’s veins as he noticed Monique, crouched down near the starboard safety rail with her hands around her head just like the big guy. He was across the deck in an instant, but reeled back to caution as he set a hand on the shoulder of the resident superspy – though she clearly wasn’t feeling so super at the moment. Monique was looking up at him with that drained, desperate confusion that only ever happened when an unexpected weakness or failure had truly shaken her.

Randy knelt beside her and steadied her, thankful for the years of wising up and listening that meant he could now meet her on her own terms, be the calm and trusted presence she needed him to be, especially in a state like this. “What’s happening?”

“It’s slipping!” Monique mumbled, her eyes halfway to rolling back into her head. “I don’t remember everything but… we were constant, and now we are variable. But it is too much.” She refocused and looked directly at Randy. “How you say… the last straw.”

Queen Bee crashed into the giant bat midair, both mutations letting loose startled screeches as they spun around on each other’s momentum. Queen Bee was clinging on with her four front legs and awkwardly trying to hammer at the bat with her larger back legs, while the bat writhed and tried to twist away, until he finally managed to kick the bee’s thorax with his feet and split them apart again.

“Something is about to happen,” Monique said, her words ominous. “It… has happened, once, but will…” She shook her head. “Something that will tie us to events within the epicenter.”

“The epicenter of what?” Randy pushed, as Zilla finally made his way to the top of the cliff. With one of his learned, oddly-human gestures, the reptile thrust his arms to either side and attempted to hold Crustaceous Rex and King Cobra apart with his palms. When that couldn’t keep them at bay, he ducked under the sea amalgam’s reaching tentacles and delivered a heavy tail swipe to the snake, circling on his feet with the motion as King Cobra was knocked back. He gave C-Rex a warning roar before lunging into a grapple. Part of the cliff’s edge crumbled away during the struggle, and broke into dust and large, rolling boulders on the way down.

“The epicenter of… of…”

Monique fell unconscious, falling into Randy’s shoulder as he struggled to hold her tight with one arm and grab onto the railing with the other while waves from the landslide crashed into the boat. Across the upper deck, NIGEL announced “beacon smoke, don’t breathe this!” He had his backhoe arm and one of his side limbs hooked into the safety rail to brace himself parallel to the wedged deterrent beacon, as he used a buzzsaw limb to cut away parts of the damaged casing.

Then, suddenly, he pulled his buzzsaw back an inch and stopped it. His head swiveled a few times, then held still.

“Priority Alert: Randy Hernandez.”

There were confused looks all around, and Randy paled as his own phone buzzed with a notification.

“Is it just me…” Elsie spoke up from a different part of the rail, “…or was that one normal?”

“I didn’t program that,” Mendel said, reading his palm computer with confusion. “I can’t… access it either…”

“No, no, I did it!” Randy held up a hand as the waters briefly calmed. “I had NIGEL scanning the world wide web for mentions of…” He gulped.

“For mentions of what?” asked Nick, his face doing that thing where he wasn’t sure how serious he should be about what he was asking. “Is this related to the breakout? Is this about SCALE? Winter?”

“No! Nothing, Jefe!” Randy tried, reaching for his phone and hoping it was another false alarm. “Just for… for stuff that might be similar to…”

He went suddenly quiet, as he read the first line of the post NIGEL had highlighted.

“Randy?” It was Mendel’s voice, and from the look on his face, he’d guessed it first, somehow. There continued to be a lull in the chaos, and all eyes were, at least for now, stuck solidly on Randy.

He shook his head, looked down at the alert, and read aloud. “’My name is Max Caulfield, and on Friday, October 11, 2013, a…’”

“Mother Nature at Three O’Clock!” Elsie’s voice wavered, becoming more stricken with terror at every word. The cloudy sky darkened to a shadowy vortex in mere seconds, and the funnel spiraled just as quickly, touching down amid dozens of simultaneous bolts of lightning.

“’…a massive tornado storm system, with lightning and high winds, will completely destroy the town of Arcadia Bay, Oregon. I have been…’”

Ghostly silence, as the four of them walked alone down the middle of the cracked and torn-up street. Cars were flipped over and piled up on top of one another, broken signage hung off buildings with most of their windows shattered. “The whole city looks like a…” Nick paused, stricken by the enormity of the scene. “…like a war zone.”

“’…repeatedly, sent back in time…’”

Confusion passed between the small gathering, standing at the entrance to the ruined theater. “I know this is gonna sound crazy, but…” Elsie stumbled over her words, as if frightened of them. “What if… we’re in the future? I-m-m-maybe we’ve been caught in some sort of time vortex?”

Nick’s curiosity had faded with each claim, drawing ever closer toward the final, hard scowl that crossed his face now. “You’re right. It does sound crazy.”

He turned around, intending to keep walking, but Randy rushed over and caught his arm, stopping him in place. “Now-now… wait a minute, Jefe! Everything has been kinda whacko since we went through that storm cloud!”

“’…to today, Monday October 7, 2013…’”

Reunited at last, five shadows stretched out across the floor of the underground tunnel network, as the group passed under an archway and into a darkened chamber occupied by the stone-carved image of a too-familiar mutated lizard. “Most statues are memorials,” Nick said, now beyond fear and uncertainty and instead, holding stoic in solemn mourning.

Future Mendel, grizzled and weary, nodded his head. “He died a hero, Nick. Allowing millions to escape during the Second Great Siege. But even he was no match for the DRAGMAs.”

“’…and for more loops of this week than I can count…’”

Roars from the frenzying swarm outside continued to filter in. Randy was breaking out in a nervous sweat with his hands gripped firmly to the heavy future laser gun, the support strap digging into his shoulder as he glanced nervously around the slowly-buckling walls of the resistance bunker. “If this dude Insley built ‘em, he must know to stop ‘em!” he pleaded shakily, managing to grasp onto that hope as he narrowed his eyes in defiance.

Future Hicks, robot arm and all, shattered that hope with an anger borne of a deep, personal hatred for even the spoken name. “Insley’s dead! By the time we tracked him down, it was too late, the military was in tatters! I freed every mutation on Monster Island, nothing helped! The DRAGMAs adapt too quickly, time is not on our side…”

Elsie perked up suddenly, intense ferocity in her eyes. “But it might be on ours! That time storm may still be raging out there! If it brought us forward in time, maybe… it could take us back!”

“’…I’ve been trying to find a way to prevent this disaster.’”

Randy stared through the lenses of his binoculars, timing the lightning strikes that curtained in synchronous bursts between the swirling darkness above and the swell of the rolling fog below. “I never thought I’d be so happy to see bad weather!” Elsie cheered in relief from beside him, her red hair blowing like a flag in the wind. Suddenly a screech rang out from behind the HEAT Seeker, and Randy turned with a gasp to watch the winged, skeletal, saurian creature bearing down on them. He swore this DRAGMA looked even bigger and meaner than the other ones.

It screeched again and again, as if its maw was filled with the cries of anguish of millions of its victims, its dragonlike wings beating the air as it chased the HEAT Seeker through the barrier of fog and into the eye of the storm. Its sunken eyes were narrowed with cruel purpose as it made a pass at the boat, front claws tearing what was left of the roof and top deck to shreds as they plowed through. Randy ducked on reflex alongside Nick and Elsie, while Monique kept a purposeful hold on the steering wheel, still up in the cabin of a boat that had suddenly been made a convertible.

Randy looked up from the prow just as the DRAGMA rounded on them, gliding in a steep banking maneuver to turn and face the HEAT Seeker head-on. For a moment it loomed over them, hovering in place on beating wings. Then a bolt of lightning struck the creature from behind, even the apocalyptic mutation proving no match for the fury of the storm as its back armor erupted in flames, its body convulsed, and it let out one final cry as it plunged down into the swirling waves.

“’This is a call for anyone with related knowledge or experience to please send help!’”

Randy finished reading and looked up, meeting attentive eyes that could probably already tell what he was about to say. What was evident, whether they wanted to believe it or didn’t. Whether they wanted closure, or for the past—the future—to just leave them alone.

“The storm,” he said shakily, eyes wide like he’d seen a ghost, and maybe he had. “It’s back!”

The world flashed like it was on fire, because this was it, wasn’t it? What Monique was talking about. A call for help, and of course they’d answer it. Everyone looked up, only to see the blue, sunny morning sky flickering into an overwhelming sea of orange. Like flame, swirling in lighter and darker shades of itself that approached black or white, but only through a faded lens. It flickered back and forth, back and forth, like reality itself was in the process of glitching out.

Zilla cried out as Crustaceous Rex wrapped him up in tentacles, a tug of war to get free only sending the big guy further out of balance. King Cobra hissed as he lunged back into the fray, circling the pair and coiling up around them. Once he’d bound them both together, he loomed his head high over them, fangs bared as if to strike, but C-Rex and the Z-Man proved too unwieldy in their struggling. Only King Cobra seemed to notice the three of them losing balance, even further panic flashing across his serpentine face, but he couldn’t untangle himself fast enough not to be dragged along with the others, as all three tilted and tumbled off the cliff toward the sea.

At the same time, the two fliers crashed into each other again, the buzzing growing more frantic as Queen Bee got her head caught in the shroud of the giant bat’s wings. They were angling toward a fall, but didn’t have time to make it there themselves once Zilla, C-Rex, and King Cobra slammed into them from above. All five mutations crashed into the water in a large pile, sending up a wave that immediately knocked the HEAT Seeker almost fully on its side.

Randy held Monique tight while hooking his arm back through the railing, Nick shouting “Hold on!” as the boat careened. The sky solidified in swirls of orange, then began to close in, a dome around them that had begun to shrink. In seconds, everything went white.

It was Friday, and the wind was kicking up.

Max sat on the sand in the cold dim light, with her hood pulled up to keep the swelling sea breeze out of her hair. And because that had become her habit, around a few hundred loops ago.

Usually, most everyone who noticed assumed Victoria had finally shamed her enough to break her, just like she did to Kate, so it was easy to get away with hiding her expression at least some of the time. Your face is so intense, Max. And that had just been loop one…

It was also because, right now, she was just hiding in general. She’d been hiding all week, checking her phone every few minutes to see if anyone had answered her call for help. Thinking about it, she checked again.

Nothing.

Not a single reply, no interactions whatsoever. Not even anyone dropping in just to call her story crazy, which was starting to get unnerving.

Waves rolled in towards shore, starting to get choppy with the wind. No storm yet. It was even sort of pleasantly cool, the rain at a light spray that one could’ve mistaken as coming off the water. The rustling of the trees was getting to moderately scary levels, however.

Once again, she quietly hoped everyone had had a good week. As Warren and probably Brooke would’ve said, this ‘urn’ was a ‘wipe’ from the beginning, but sentimental as always, Max had still played about in the shadows to steer things in better directions – Jefferson dead, of course, but also his crimes exposed and Nathan arrested. Kate getting regular visits from Stella and Alyssa, Warren set up with Brooke, and Chloe… well, Chloe a complete missed connection, probably at home grieving Rachel, none the wiser that Max was even here in Arcadia Bay. She wouldn’t lie to herself and imagine Chloe was having any kind of good time this week, but getting her attention would’ve made it a lot more difficult for Max to do what she needed to.

That, and as a rule Max tried to avoid spending weeks with Chloe that she didn’t intend on making any effort at all to keep permanent. The ‘week that would always be theirs’ had turned into a dozen, a hundred, maybe approaching a thousand weeks that were only Max’s.

She checked her notifications again – still nothing. What a waste of five days. She sighed, knowing the storm was almost here.

Amid the surrounding rustle of the trees, a harder, closer motor sound cut sharply into her ears, distinct enough to make Max look about in confusion.

Something was caught in the wind – no, struggling against it. It was dark, and moving quickly and erratically enough in the low light that Max’s first thought was a bat, but then it stopped to hover like a dragonfly, just for a second until the wind took it again. Max swore it had been looking right at her, but that thought was lost as the wind struck it against a wooden jetty post, with an audible cracking sound that made Max sincerely hope it wasn’t anything alive.

She got up and fought the wind herself as she hurried across the beach, to the line of partially sand-buried posts and rocks near the water, where the breeze was still trying to flip over the small object as it rested on the ground. Max picked it up, careful of a few sharp points, and recognized the black and orange frame even with two rotor-mounts snapped off.

…Brooke’s drone?

A pair of headlights lit up the beach and shone over the water, the sound of a car engine overcoming the wind just in time for Max to turn and watch it appear through the trees and pull down the drive, stopping just before the sand. Six people quickly piled out of it.

“Max!” someone was screaming – Kate?

“There you are, Caulfield!” – Brooke.

“Max, what are you doing out here! It’s freezing!” – Alyssa.

“Maximus! Whaddup?” – Warren.

Max spotted a magenta hoodie and realized that somehow, Stella had been dragged into this, but the last voice was the one that really caught her off-guard.

“You better have a damn good explanation for why I’m out in the rain, Caulfield!”

…Victoria?

People sometimes went looking for Max, if she went missing. It was a fact of life, for someone who’d tried hard to be a caring friend to everyone she met right up until she’d started experiencing time non-linearly – and most of the time, kept on doing so even after. The care people had for her, or her former self, could be enough to override whatever strangeness Max displayed in the classroom, and there was usually some amount of strangeness. But she couldn’t quite recall this combination of people ever having taken place before.

They’d rushed down to meet her, Kate going for a hug immediately and a disappointed Warren stopping short because Kate was already hugging her.

With disgust, Victoria marched up, ignored Kate, and tried to tug Max away by the arm. “Quit it, we need to get her delusional ass back inside! This weather’s only getting worse!”

“She’s not delusional!” Alyssa shot back with a scowl.

“We can debate that somewhere dry!”

“’s too late,” Max muttered flatly.

Only Kate had heard. “What do you mean, Max?”

With the arms around her loosening up just enough, Max looked down, eyeing the timer she’d set on her phone. “Four.”

Brooke looked at her skeptically. “Four what?”

“Three.”

“Max?” Warren worried his brows. “What is this?”

“Two.”

“Max…” Kate looked scared.

“One.”

A flash of light and thunder lit up the beach like a giant camera flash. Stella and Brooke stepped back in shock, having been looking in the right direction the moment the storm appeared, already a fully-formed twister nearly the size of the town itself. The rest all heard the roar of the wind in an instant, and Max was left standing in serene calm, the wind battering her hoodie, while the others began to shout and panic.

“We’ve got to get out of here!” Warren screamed.

“You can’t outrun it.”

“Max is right,” Brooke spoke with wide eyes, making the others go quiet. “Look at the size of that thing, and that close… we’re dead already.”

Max chuckled drily. “You don’t know the half of it.”

Somehow, as everyone took turns processing their imminent deaths, their eyes also took turns landing on Max. Somehow, they found the time to look at her with concern.

“I can’t let her die,” Max broke down, falling to her knees. Kate and Warren were at her side in an instant. “I can’t let her die like that.” Stella was hovering close, Victoria hovering a little bit farther back, as if done intentionally. “But none of you deserve this either. You all deserve better.”

Warren was starting to piece it together, even from just that. He was always good at jumping to the most farfetched, sci-fi conclusions that happened to be right. “Who can’t you let die?”

“Chloe,” Max breathed. “The storm wants her dead. But it can’t have her.”

She turned to look at Kate.

“But it can’t have you when you’ve struggled so much and have so much to live for.”

Kate shed tears as Max turned to look at Stella.

“And it can’t have you when it all just stopped hurting, and you’re still caught on the edge but you have a chance to turn your life around.”

Stella went wide-eyed for a moment as Max looked at Brooke.

“And it can’t have you when you’re stuck weighing yourself down with jealousy when… trust me, you don’t even need to be.”

She shared a bit of a bleak smile with Brooke before turning toward Victoria, who’d been inching half another step away.

“It can’t have you, Victoria, when all you’ve ever known is caring too much about what other people think of you.”

Victoria flinched away from the comment, stopped herself with a shiver of vulnerability in her eyes, but kept the rest of her face impassive as Max finally turned to Warren.

“And no, it can’t have you either, Warren,” Max shook her head with a smirk. “You’ve always been a great friend, especially when it counts.”

“Hey, there’s a… weird boat out there!” Alyssa called over the roar of the storm, from where she stood a few yards up the beach looking out over the water.

Max saw it too, more-or-less a white and slightly rusted mid-sized fishing boat, except it was raised out of the water on some kind of hydrofoils that were allowing it to travel fast – fast enough it could fight against the pull of the wind. It was still wavering, though, angling back and forth as it tried to escape the storm’s orbit. The ship’s bow was painted with angry eyes and shark teeth.

“Holy shit!” Warren exclaimed, standing along with Max. “That’s the HEAT Seeker!”

It’s the what?

“There’s something…”

Alyssa was cut off as a loud, muffled and distorted scream pierced the air as it got exponentially closer, somehow produced by a piece of yellow-and-grey debris that must have been swept off the deck of the ship by the wind. Horrified, Max watched it slam right into Alyssa, and the whole world started flickering in blended colors and sounds as she refused to let time progress and instead, willed it backwards.

“—t’s the HEAT Seeker!”

“There’s something…”

“Alyssa!” Max screamed, as she ran and tackled the girl to the sand.

The yellow thing flew over them, the scream cut off as it slammed into a tree and broke into several pieces. Max looked up and saw the pieces sparking, one of them waving a thin, claw-ended limb in the air before it shorted out and collapsed. A small, yellow sphere with several lenses and an air filter sticking out of it rolled back down the beach, electronic static forming words as it lost power.

“D-DON’T F-F-FEEEEEEED FISH STICKS TO A SeeEEEeeeEEEEAgull…”

On the ground, Max held Alyssa in a slightly awkward hug, then after a few needed breaths, helped the stunned girl up to a sitting position. The others had rushed over too, making a loose circle on the windswept beach. They all seemed to have something to say, but Max reached for Warren first, grabbing him stiffly by the shoulders.

“Warren, this is important! The boat. Who are they?”

The boy just stared for a moment, hesitating under Max’s intense gaze, but he recovered quickly. “They’re called HEAT – Humanitarian Environmental Analysis Team.”

Max’s heart leapt, like it hadn’t in a long time, at the words environmental analysis. She took a long, relieved breath that Warren noticed. “They can fix it. Maybe…”

“Uh, I think it’s a little late…” Warren glanced, with a wince, at the broken robot, then worriedly back at the ship being thrown about by the waves.

“No, I just sent a vague S.O.S. this time,” Max clarified, rambling as her voice sped up from a new plan kicking into gear. “Who knows how long it took them to see it? Now I know they have a reason to believe it and come here to help, so if I reach out to them directly back on Monday, they might get here with more time left…”

“You’re not making a lot of sense, Max…” Brooke studied with narrowed eyes. “The storm’s already here… unless you’re saying you’re caught in some kind of—”

“Time loop,” Max confirmed, her smirk showing a hint of wildness as Warren and Brooke shared a skeptical glance. “Don’t ask me how many loops, I lost count somewhere around two-hundred-and-forty. I’m about to start the week over again from 3:50 PM on Monday. You won’t remember—”

“Max? Can I… have a moment?”

She turned, and smiled with warmth and sadness at the scared, hesitantly trusting face that could have pulled her attention from the equation of life itself. “I always have time for you, Kate.”

Kate’s eyes showed her flicker of reaction to those words, a revelation she was filing away for a later she knew she didn’t have. “I… I know you… seem to think you’ll get another chance at this week, to live it all over again, but I can’t really believe that, Max. So…” She made one more nervous glance at the approaching storm. “Can I… can we…”

The waver in her arms gave away her intentions, and Max held her. Held Kate against her while the wind whipped at them both, while farther down the beach there were trees already being roughly uprooted into the swirling skies. In the darkness of solace in each other’s shoulders, the storm’s roar was joined by something animal – a bellowing, screeching, wailing sound that incredibly, Max didn’t recognize from the many hundreds of times she’d basked in the might of this tragic symphony. Neither one of them decided first – it was both herself and Kate as one that opened their arms and beckoned the others to join them in their final moments.

Alyssa, Stella, Brooke… Max even made a point to sling an arm around Warren. She reeled Victoria in herself, not ending up with more than their hands clasped when all was said and done, but Max held onto that hand with the most impossible love for a self-made pariah, that could only come from seeing her in places she’d never been.

The butterfly landed on Victoria’s shoulder, just in line of sight with Max’s eyes. Smiling as she watched it flutter, Max accepted its gift with more eagerness, more surety, than she’d had in so, so very long. Will this be the last time?

She felt it beginning, the slight blur and shake in the space around her that would lead to the first few notes of a rewind but instead, snap her back in time completely. Everything was already slow and echoey when Warren started to speak.

“One more thing you should know about HEAT is that they actually specialize in—”

“What?” Max’s own voice reverberated with an even more distorting echo as Warren’s slowed to a complete stop. “Warren, what are you—"

Max woke up in class.

Randy’s eyes blinked open, as he found himself lying flat on the deck of the HEAT Seeker, an open blue sky above him. He was sweating like a high fever, and his ankle felt like it had a bullet in it.

Groans of pain surrounded him, and with a yell of his own from the effort, he rolled over to see the others nearby, all struggling in similar states. Out of all of them, Monique had managed to bring herself up on palms and knees, but by her expression and the way she was shaking, that was only because she was Monique, who always acted like pain was a suggestion.

Only a few seconds later, Randy managed to get himself to his feet, the pain subsiding strangely quickly. He looked around for any signs of that burning orange sky. He didn’t see any, but what he did see was even weirder.

Monster Island was gone. On one side of the HEAT Seeker was open ocean, and on the other was a longer stretch of land that looked to be part of an extended coastline, with high cliff promontories jutting up at the left and rightmost edges of view and an inlet-curved stretch of sandy beach in the middle. The cliff on the leftmost side had a lighthouse perched on its highest point, and there was a small port town built at about the middle of the bay’s edge, a few rows of single-digit-story buildings lining the docks along the beach and more houses nestled in blocks up into the forest. An older-looking building with a tall tower in the middle loomed higher on the hillside, a sentinel to the wooded mountains beyond.

Whatever time the team was taking to process this was interrupted when the water shot up in a geyser off the boat’s port side, Queen Bee’s wings beating rapidly as she shook off water. A moment later, a bigger splash erupted starboard, the sun glistening dramatically off the sheen of water that ran down King Cobra’s deep indigo, crimson, and pale gold scales where his serpent coils wrapped around Zilla alone. Zilla struggled to throw him off, the two mutations rolling and spinning at the water’s surface, until King Cobra’s bared fangs shot out a twin spray of venom glue that splattered over the Z-Man’s eyes, momentarily blinding him.

“Hey, no fair!” Randy scowled in disapproval, swinging a fist.

“Mendel! Get the solvent tank!” Nick shouted, clinging to the rail in front of him to watch the scene.

King Cobra sprung off of Zilla, coil arches rolling above and below the surf as the snake gained distance from the big guy’s aggressive but aimless claw swipes. It was only then that the new surroundings seemed to occur to both King Cobra and Queen Bee, the two mutations angling their gazes toward the distant shoreline. Queen Bee raced off first, making a, well, a beeline toward land with a wake spreading beneath her, and King Cobra slithered after, snaking along the water’s surface with similar speed.

Randy dropped his shoulders as he watched them approach the town.

“Well, that can’t be good…”

Her magenta hoodie sharply contrasting the grey, lightning-filled sky, Stella Hill climbed to the top of the tower on Blackwell’s main building, fixing one end of a long rope around her waist and the other at the base of the pyramidion cap.

She’d almost brushed it off when she’d overheard Max talking about all this shit earlier, but now here she was, watching a massive tornado tear through the football field. Cars were flying out of the parking lot, trees were being torn up out of the ground, and Stella felt the wind in her hair, a huge grin from ear to ear as she spread her arms wide.

“Don’t you dare undo this, Max!” she shouted with glee, useless against the roar of the storm. “Don’t you dare—” She quickly swiped an unanticipated tear out of her eye. “Don’t you… don’t you let them guilt you! Don’t you put the needs of this shitty town above someone it would hurt like that. Don’t you ever!”

Pieces were flying out of the building now, but the tower and the rope were holding, keeping Stella tethered even as she was torn off her feet and drawn at an angle up toward the storm. It was almost like she could reach out and touch the funnel cloud itself, feel the exhilarating rush of water as it tore the skin off her bones. Instead, she spread her arms again and pretended to fly.

“You take that girl and RUN!” Stella cackled to the heavens, as the tower started to buckle and the tornado rumbled even closer. She was drifting close enough to see beyond the surface, a glimpse at the inner depths. At rushing water and entombed thunder and…

Stella narrowed her eyes in confusion.

The storm had… something big moving inside it. A dark shape she could still only see in silhouette, but that somehow resided almost peacefully amid the swirling chaos, as if it were at home there. Just this huge, dark, moving shadow.

A shadow that had wings like a dragon.

Chapter Text

“—famously called film ‘little pieces of time’ but—”

You mean like all the times you’ve been in little pieces?

“—because of her images of hopeless faces—”

Can’t get yours out of my head sometimes, Victoria…

“—could frame any one of you in a dark corner—”

Sigh. Eyeroll.

“—and any one of you could do that to me—”

Never know, Mark. Maybe I can fit it into the schedule…

“—was not the first to use images for… selfie-expression—”

Ugh. You ruin every joke you touch. I even like Victoria’s better…

“—and yes, Max, I see you pretending not to see me.”

Greatest trick you ever pulled was convincing me to still be scared of you.

As it was, Max was feeling hopeful enough about this loop that she decided she’d reserve his demise for a later, secretive one that wouldn’t involve any students getting manslaughter charges if time progressed past Friday. Instead, after giving a bewildered Kate a surprise hug, she practically force-fed Jefferson her photo submission and that tacky bullshit John Lennon quote—okay, maybe she was being a little harsh on John Lennon, but see above: Jefferson and ruining things—then booked it out of the classroom, sliding her hood up and leaning against the lockers in the hall. She’d bought herself a few minutes before the shooting, and pulled out her phone. Just that last bit of info from Warren, and then she’d contact HEAT directly.

[Humanitarian Environmental Analysis Team]

[What do I need to know about them?]

[I think I saw some freak weather the other day.]

[looking for an expert opinion.]

[That’s… what’s an annelid again?]

[Wait Warren, wdym by BIG trouble?]

Out of the corner of her eye, Max saw Nathan shadily enter the bathroom. Shit, she’d taken too long, it was almost time! She’d have to do this next part in person.

Or maybe she just wanted to.

Max put away her phone despite more notification tones going off, and slipped on the improvised painter’s mask with a voice changer Warren and Brooke had built for her on another loop. Keeping toward the lockers and out of easy view, she moved closer to the lobby with eagle-eyes focused in on the bathroom door.

When Chloe made her appearance moments later, Max ran full speed across the lobby to stop right in front of her.

Then she wound back time.

Then she darted a quick circle around behind Chloe, rewound, ran in front, rewound, and repeated the process until it would look to Chloe like Max had spontaneously flickered into being right in front of her. On the last stop, she quickly grabbed Chloe’s hand and pulled it towards her.

“Chloe Price. Come with me if you want to live.”

Hey, it’s a classic! And it gets the point across.

The point of the voice changer, and another point for the hood, was that Max had tried to divert Chloe away from the bathroom about a hundred different ways, and in result, had found that if Chloe recognized Max, chances were extremely high that she wouldn’t listen to a single word until she got her anger out. And chances were also high that ‘getting her anger out’ would end with her storming off. Sometimes into the bathroom. It was literally easier to convince her she was in some kind of sci-fi conspiracy thriller than to get her to cooperate with Max Caulfield. You’re five years too late to ask me to listen to you, or some variation thereof, was the favorite. It was deserved, too, but also really annoying when Max was trying to save her life.

This way, feeling more surprise and shock than anger, Chloe couldn’t do much but be led along towards the front lobby doors, the brightness of the late afternoon sun shining in on them.

“H-hey, what gives!” Chloe finally worked up the sense to respond, now struggling back against Max’s grip. “You better explain to me right now—”

“Nathan Prescott has a gun,” Max emphasized, turning enough to give Chloe a peek at the teched-out filter mask but not her eyes hidden under the hood.

When Chloe was taken aback, but clearly not fully deterred, Max let go of her hand with a sigh but stepped back to look at her sharply, hiding her face in the glare from the outside light that framed her hooded figure.

“I know about Frank Bowers. I know about Rachel Amber. I know about the fucking lamp. And I need your help because in five days, all of Arcadia Bay is going to be destroyed by a gigantic—”

“Snake?”

Max choked.

What? This is going WAY off script. Is she high?

She shook her head slowly. “No, Chloe, it’s a tornado.”

Chloe’s eyes were wide and glazed, unblinking in the dazzling light.

“I’m looking at it, and I’m pretty sure it’s a snake.”

“Chloe, what are you talk…” Max trailed off as the lobby entrance, formerly bright from the sun, started to fall into shadow. She turned slowly, at first disbelievingly, to find that her attempt at dramatic darkened silhouette framing had been upstaged.

Far across the Blackwell courtyard, the street, and the football field, rising up from behind the gym grandstands and into the path of the sun, was a gigantic indigo, red, and beige-colored snake. Its fangs were bared, its lips curled as if in a smile, and the purpose of the retracted sheaths of flesh against the upper part of its neck—tipped with many long, curved points at the outer edges that looked almost like more fangs—was revealed when it expanded the skin to form the spike-tipped hood of a cobra, further broadening the shadow it cast towards the school. When the screams started, Max swore its grin got even wider.

…Dog, am I in the nightmare again?

Without thinking, she had her camera in her hands, snapping a dramatic portrait of the cobra framed by the sun. She felt a small, irrelevant but satisfying flicker of accomplishment as she added the photo to her journal.

Run for your lives, giant squirrels…

A hand on her shoulder brought Max back to reality, the one where panic was quickly spreading in the crowd that had moments ago been moving towards the doors. Chloe looked at her with a fright, a hopelessness, that wouldn’t have been out of place in a memory of the lighthouse in wind and rain. “Yes, it’s a great shot, but shouldn’t we be booking it? Hiding? You’re the one with all the answers, what do we do now?”

Max hoped Chloe didn’t see her moment of startled hesitation, or the fact they were both panicking to nearly the same degree. Okay, let’s assume this is real…

The fire alarm hadn’t gone off this time, so most of the students were still inside.

When the fire alarm didn’t go off, the only people who would already be outside now were…

…Shit.

The snake had slithered across the road, and was turning southward, towards the dorm building. Max put a stern hand on Chloe’s shoulder. “I need you to stay right here.”

“What?” Chloe looked freaked.

Max winced. “I’ll be back sooner than you think.”

“Wait, where are you—”

The next thing Chloe would see was empty space in front of her.

Max hoped she didn’t take that too badly.

Okay, so maybe,

perhaps,

by some small measure, ‘run to the dorms quickly to block the entrance and keep Max from getting in out of spite’ wasn’t the smartest of Victoria’s recent plans.

Wait, no.

It was a good plan.

It was a brilliant plan.

Just, forgive her for failing to account for the GIANT FUCKING SNAKE slithering through the dormitory grounds.

Victoria felt her heart beating in her chest, Taylor and Courtney shivering to either side of her, as they hid like squirrels in the bushes along the outside wall.

Because the universe, apparently, had a twisted sense of humor, and currently the three of them were barred entry, on account that the doors were now blocked by some quick-drying wood glue bullshit the snake had reared back and launched out of its fanged jaws like it was a fucking paintball gun. Not that the building would necessarily be considered safety – if the snake slithered up on top, it might crush the whole darn thing with its weight.

“Would you cut it out with that whimpering!” she sharply whispered to Tay and Court, not out of meanness but desperation. “What if it hears you?”

“Sorry-sorry!” the two whispered in near-unison, dutifully making an effort to be quieter for her sake but still holding back heartbreakingly terrified sounds that accompanied frightened tears.

Victoria was clinging to the fact she had an audience, and to the theoretical idea of a reputation that would still matter once all this was over, and also to the lie that the snake being so big meant it wouldn’t care about people so small. She hadn’t actually seen it eat anyone yet, just shoot that glue stuff, slowly progress its coils around the grounds like a train making frequent stops, and loom menacingly. It almost seemed like maybe it really wasn’t hungry at all, that maybe it just wanted to revel in the fear and the chaos it was sewing.

…to the extent that Victoria thought she could parse the intentions of a GIANT FUCKING SNAKE.

“The snake knows it is a sunrise, a statue cut of jewels. Err, but it has no arms to hold a mirror, and sees in others a means to perceive itself. It reminds Samuel of you, Victoria.”

Victoria pressed her lips into a thin line, everything else blank.

Yeah, that was just what this situation needed.

She’d forgotten that creep of a janitor was hiding with them behind the same line of bushes. She was already missing a few seconds ago when she’d still been forgetting.

But she had to admit, with the way the snake almost looked to be grinning, maybe Samuel had a point. It was an impressive sight, those deep azure scales on its back with stripes of bright crimson down its sides and pale gold on its underbelly. It would make for a beautiful photo… or a nice messenger bag and a pair of shoes.

The snake moved again, shifting its coils enough that it cleared the line of sight between Victoria’s hiding spot and the bench farther off to the right… and between Victoria’s stunned eyes and the wide, terrified eyes of Kate Marsh, laying underneath said bench and silently quaking with fear.

Their eyes were still locked when Max Caulfield appeared right next to the bench – Victoria couldn’t see her face, but that was Max’s dumb hoodie and messenger bag. And she’d appeared. Out of thin air. What. The. Fuck.

Max carefully got Kate’s attention, then reached a hand under the bench to rest it on Kate’s, lingering a while before whispering something too quiet to hear and waiting for a nod before guiding Kate out from underneath.

The first thing Kate did was point right at Victoria, but Max glanced over and nodded as if she knew already – only seeming surprised at the fact Victoria was looking right back at her. She whispered something back to Kate and pointed toward Samuel’s maintenance room, then stayed put and glanced back and forth between Kate and the snake until Kate had hidden herself in the shed-like space at the building’s corner, holding the door still slightly ajar to peek around it.

Max then quietly jogged the distance to the line of decorative foliage, freezing up and staying still for another moment while the snake moved away to patrol around the back of Blackwell’s main building. Max crept between the plants, and only then was her face visible.

“Caulfield, what the fuck are you wearing?”

Max rolled her eyes, and pulled down something Victoria would have sooner imagined that Kari girl wearing while she tagged the parking lot. “Light steps,” Max insisted harshly, then beckoned the group forward, gesturing Kate out to join them as they rounded Samuel’s room and continued along the side of the building out of sight.

In the shade of the trees, halfway to what Victoria hoped was a surefire escape, Max tapped her on the shoulder.

“What, Caulf—”

Victoria froze when she saw Max’s face, only inches away. Hardened. Fucking. Steel. It was wrong.

“If anything happens to Kate,” Max said calmly, with a death glare, “I am feeding you to the snake.”

Then she disa-fucking-ppeared, leaving Victoria shivering. And that wasn’t even the part she was left thinking about, because why the fuck was her face like that?

Chloe was honestly taking it pretty badly right now.

Not only had that mystery girl disappeared right in front of her very eyes, now she was caught between the giant mutant cobra terrorizing the outside of the school, and the giant mutant mustache terrorizing the inside of the school. Was it dumb of her to still be scared to shit of being caught by David while there was a monster attack going on? Maybe. Right now, the step-prick was busy trying and failing to keep some semblance of order among the students still in the building, so at least he was distracted. Maybe he wouldn’t notice Chloe trying to become one with the glass windows around the entryway, waiting for…

…who was she, anyway? She knew already it was only going to get her hurt, but Chloe couldn’t shake the detail that the hooded girl was the same height and build as Rachel was. That Rachel is. Except Rachel wouldn’t be caught dead alive wearing that hipster hoodie and bag combo. Or… using a polaroid camera?

No. No, it… it can’t be.

“Is… this for real?” Someone voiced shakily from really close by, pressed up against the glass beside Chloe. “Oh no! Is that Brooke?”

The voice was vaguely familiar, but Chloe couldn’t think of the girl’s name. Brooke was a name she knew, but couldn’t remember a face. Another girl pushed through the crowd and squeezed in on the other side of her, aiming her phone camera through the window. “Oh my God, what is that?”

That was… Juliet? Chloe thought.

The first girl – a cheerleader, judging by that neckline – turned around and tried to tiptoe-hop above the crowd. “Mr. Madsen! Mr. Madsen, please!”

Chloe panicked.

Without thinking, she had her hand over the other girl’s mouth, pushing her back toward the glass, bugged-out fear and surprise in both their eyes. “Wait—Dana?” She pulled her hand back.

“Who are…” Dana was very confused for just a moment. Right. Blue hair. Throws people off. She got it eventually, though. “Chloe? Chloe Price?”

“Shh! Don’t say that too loud!” Chloe winced and looked over her shoulder. No step-douche… yet.

“I realize you’re not supposed to be here,” Juliet cut in, showing an emotion that, like Dana’s, puzzlingly wasn’t total hatred or indifference, “but can we get back to the real story? Hello? The Giant motherfucking snake out there? What’s wrong with you?”

“You mean what’s wrong with Step-ass! He’s gonna ask why I’m here, and I’m gonna have to tell him why I almost just got—OH FUCK, Nathan!”

She quickly scanned the crowd again, somehow getting Dana and Juliet to join in on the activity. No Nathan either… that she could see. Does he really have a gun? Would he really have…

“What about Nathan?” Juliet couldn’t help prying.

“Is that Warren too?” Dana cried, back at the glass.

Chloe finally looked, and oh, yeah, that was Brooke, in a grey hoodie, backed up against a tree over on the other side of the statue fountain. She was holding still, covering her eyes, and a boy in a black shirt with a neon blue stripe across it was sneaking across the grass, out in the open like an idiot, slowly heading towards her.

“You! Away from the doors!”

Shit. That was David, heading right for her. Should I help Brooke and that guy? That’s a good enough excuse to book it, right? Maybe I should take my chances with the snake…

Chloe panicked again.

She was out the door, racing across the grass to intercept… Waldo, was it? She’d gotten close enough he was looking at her with shock – no, I don’t know what I’m doing either – when she heard a loud screech, from Frank’s RV pulling out of its space in the parking lot, way off on the north end of the grounds. The snake popped its head around the south side of the building like it was playing peekaboo, and quickly shifted its coils around underneath its neck, mashing down what was left of the shade roofing from the breezeway between the main building and the dorms. One coil loop turned from horizontal to vertical and a long part of its tail started to rise up in the air…

Mystery girl appeared right between Chloe and Waldo, an arm up behind each of their shoulders.

“JUMP!” she commanded.

“Max? Whoa! You look—"

“MAX!?”

Max pushed them both forward, and combined with stumbling leaps, Chloe and Waldo-man slid to a rough stop in front of Brooke, who uncovered her eyes just to look surprised. Chloe spun over quickly, locking desperate eyes with Max just as the snake’s tail slammed down right on top of—

…On top of where Max had just been, because she appeared right behind Chloe with one much gentler hand on her shoulder and one on Waldo’s.

There was another screech as Frank’s RV narrowly escaped the tip of the snake’s tail landing in the parking lot, and sped off down the road. The snake let loose an annoyed velociraptor roar, but quickly lost interest, falling back to passively surveying its domain.

Chloe turned around. “Max? Is that really—”

“I know I have some explaining to do,” Max said quickly and guiltily, but urgently. She awkwardly pulled off the painter’s mask and threw down her hood, revealing unfamiliar, untied chin-length brown hair and bangs, but those same freckles Chloe never forgot. Just when Chloe thought she might have been staring too long, Max shook her head and pointed. “Please can we do this later? I need to figure this… out…”

Chloe followed Max’s distant, pondering gaze back to the middle of the courtyard, which was absolutely destroyed. The statue in the middle of the fountain was bent over at an embarrassing angle from part of the snake’s tail having fallen across it, and the grass was littered with monochrome fragments from those tacky display pieces. “I… guess the snake must really hate that new famous prick teacher’s shitty eyesores. At least it has some concept of taste…”

Speaking of, Chloe tasted her foot in her mouth too late, wincing hard as she turned toward Max.

“…aaaaand I’m just now realizing that teacher’s class is probably why you’re back in Arcadia Bay. Sorry, Maxaroni. Me and my big damn mouth…”

Max blinked herself out of her focus, and looked at Chloe with wide, humorless eyes. “No, no, you’re right, Chloe. His work is totally shitty. The shittiest.”

Chloe narrowed an eye. “Jesus fuck, Max, you don’t have to grovel.”

Brooke finally regained her senses. “Can we just focus on how we’re getting past King Cobra?” She glanced warily toward the road. “Maybe we should—”

Max teleported in front of Brooke, looking suddenly out of breath. “Not… in the open.”

Brooke retreated further into the tree, now back to being a little scared. “How are you…”

“…doing that, Max?” Waldo finished, clearly amazed in a puppy-looking-at-bacon sort of way.

“Time travel,” Max deadpanned, and ignored them to creep closer to the snake’s tail and start contemplating it again.

“Time travel,” Chloe repeated, rolling her eyes with a shrug. “Why the fuck not?”

“Yeah, but what kind of time travel?” Waldo decided was the most relevant follow-up question.

Max turned around to glance between him and Brooke. “You understand it quickest if I say I’m like Wyoming. I still don’t know what that means.”

Waldo’s eyes widened even further. “Do you make the—”

“I don’t make copies,” Max cut him off, then pondered. “At least not that I know of. Except maybe one really mean one, but I’m pretty sure she was just a figment of my imagination. I’m also stuck in Groundhog Day but it’s five days. I call it Otter Week.”

“Wait, wha—”

Max disappeared and reappeared in the middle of the group. “Okay, so you see where King Cobra’s tail goes over the statue, and there’s that little slope back down to the ground?”

“Are we really just calling this thing King Cobra?” Chloe had to ask.

“That’s his name,” said Waldo.

“Guessing no one was feeling creative that day…”

“We’ve been over thi—oh,” Max paused. “I’ve been over it. Sorry, nevermind. Anyway, we need to go through the gap on the—”

She suddenly moved about an inch to the right.

“—left side of the fountain. Alri—”

Two inches backward, and her nose was bleeding.

“And don’t touch anything!”

Down on a knee, panting, both nostrils stained with blood.

“That includes lifting your head up too early at the end and accidentally tickling the scales, Brooke.”

Right at Chloe’s side, letting out a long-ass sigh, plucking a leaf off her jacket shoulder that must’ve gotten stuck there when she’d slid in the grass.

“Alright, we should be good!” she announced faux-cheerily, then started to grumble under her breath. “Last time, everybody… I hope.”

They carefully made their way down the hill, avoiding the road and sticking to backyards if they could. Tall fences made that pointlessly difficult, especially when they went right up to the denser part of the woods, but finding something heavy and breaking through would probably just draw more attention than they wanted. They were still walking through random peoples’ backyards, and a giant snake was really such a localized type of disaster that some people might not even know anything was happening yet.

There should really be a special… siren, or broadcast. Alert system? Maybe they had those in Japan, or New York. Not fucking Oregon, anyhow.

Samuel seemed to know where he was going, at least—or, according to Samuel, the squirrels knew where they were going, and he was just listening. Whatever. Running from a giant snake, the squirrels probably did know where they were going. Certainly more so than Courtney, who was currently topping the list for most-likely-to-start-panicking-and-get-us-all-killed. Second place, Victoria would probably give to Kate, but she was really more of a most-likely-to-do-something-stupid-like-try-to-go-back-and-help.

Hence, and for absolutely no other reason, why Victoria Chase was tightly clinging to Kate Marsh’s hand, intent on dragging the depressed churchmouse on her heels toward safety if it became necessary. It had almost come to that at several points, as Kate just couldn’t seem to stop herself from looking backwards at every opportunity.

But they were going forwards, Victoria kept insisting with increasingly rougher tugs on their joined hands. Because whatever anime pilot episode bullshit was happening to their school right now, the universe hadn’t seen fit to give Victoria the crucially plot-important snake-vanquishing powers she was so obviously destined for. She’d just have to make the most of being a bystander. Hell, if anyone around her was the protagonist, it had to be—

…fuck. It was Caulfield, wasn’t it?

Victoria whipped her head around, taking another narrow-eyed look at what turned out to just be another low-angle view of the back of the snake’s hood as it loomed. Some part of her had half-expected to see her photography arch-rival buzzing around the thing’s head, delivering blow after critical blow while leaving multicolored, sparkling streaks of light across the sky.

Maxine, I swear, if you get to be a Magical Girl before I do, I’ll… I’m going to be really fucking pissed.

“…Victoria? I’m… sure whoever it is, they’re going to be okay.”

It was the first thing Kate had said the whole way, and it was a complete lie. She couldn’t have convinced one of Samuel’s squirrels she actually believed it. Victoria gave her a sharp, knowing side eye, and Kate flinched.

“You… looked sad.”

That was even more startling. Not because it was said with the same cadence as ‘it’s a warm day in Antarctica,’ but because Kate did seem to, reluctantly, think that one was true.

“I did not look sad,” Victoria snapped.

Kate was taken aback, confused and skeptical, a question on her tongue.

“And I wasn’t thinking about something altruistic, like a person. I was thinking about something dumb and selfish, like my reputation.”

Kate squinted harder, and looked like she was about to raise a finger, but eventually decided to leave that one alone.

“Uhh, Samuel?” Taylor voiced shakily, and it took one more startled turn to realize she was frozen in place, watching the sky.

The buzzing sky.

“Don’t look now, but…” Her trembling arm rose slowly, pointer finger already extended. “…does that one remind you of Victoria too?”

Where they stood between a pair of two-story homes, a shadow passed over the group – the shadow of a large, loudly buzzing bumblebee, whose dark silhouette hovered into view directly above, looking right down at them.

Victoria wasn’t sure who screamed RUN! first – for all she knew, it had been herself. She was bolting through well-tended lawns and leaping over low walls into gardens or onto paths, Kate still pulled along and just barely keeping up behind her. At some point, she lost track of the others, but found them again with a brief moment of total fright as both herself and Kate were grabbed by the shoulders from behind and swiftly yanked into shadow.

Taylor and Courtney had pulled them under a raised side porch, the space underneath only tall enough to sit or kneel and the ground consisting of dusty, dry soil. It was the last place Victoria would’ve chosen for a hangout, thought she wouldn’t have put it past Nathan, given some of his other choices.

She found herself still holding hands with Kate, sitting side by side against the back wall of wood slats. Courtney’s sobbing had been successfully muffled with her head cradled against Taylor’s chest, the blonde’s fearful eyes looking to Victoria’s in a silent agreement to stay sane as long as possible. Samuel held three squirrels in his arms, somehow.

Distantly, the bee was still buzzing around overhead.

“It… wants me, doesn’t it?” Kate mumbled. “Like the snake.”

That would have been concerning, if Victoria was a person who got concerned. Which she wasn’t.

“The bee doesn’t know what she wants,” Samuel said instead, notes of wistfulness swirling in his scared eyes. “A queen with nothing to rule: tragedy, or opportunity? There are different kinds of loneliness, and different kinds of togetherness.”

“Don’t psychoanalyze m—the bee,” Victoria corrected quickly, harshly. She glared at Samuel, but froze suddenly as the buzzing stopped.

Not drifted away, stopped. In fact there was a lot of nearby crashing and smashing and a warbling woop woop that made Victoria wince.

A few moments later, the sunlight filtering through the porch’s support beams began to waver, as the dark brown, rigidly-armored, bristle-spiked legs of the giant bee started plodding along the ground in the yard in front of it.

Taylor hitched a breath, clutching Courtney tighter. The bee kept walking on its hooked, three-clawed feet, slowly and with a bit of a wobble, and eventually its tan-colored head drooped down into view, a mouth with four little mandibles and a proboscis-like spike in the center. Its black antennae angled up and out of view but the wider, frond-like ends hung sharply back down into it, and wide on the sides of its head were the lower parts of narrow, yet bulbous, bright red compound eyes that glinted in the late afternoon sun.

The bee turned its head, and scrambled to also turn its body, the movement showing off the bulkier pair of back legs with longer reach and only two hooked claws at the ends. It was facing the porch, and inching closer to try to get a better view underneath.

Helpless to run, to hide, Victoria stared wide-eyed at the monstrous queen bee, which stared back at her – and there was nothing symbolic about it, not a thing.

It was Kate who snapped first.

“Leave them out of this,” she begged. “Leave them out of this!”

To everyone’s shock, she broke free of Victoria’s hold and launched herself towards the bee, prompting several things to happen in quick sequence.

First, without thinking, Victoria lunged herself after Kate. Second, the bee itself lurched backward in surprise, getting as much distance from Kate as possible without uprooting its clawed feet before the distinctive sound in the air heralded its wings beginning to beat once more. Third, Victoria caught Kate by the wrist and tugged her back, at which time the bee was already lifting itself off the ground and ascending quickly away.

“What the hell was that?” Victoria demanded, pulling Kate back against the wall. She’d locked the girl tight in the cage of her arms. Kate had let go of whatever determination she’d had in an instant, and had melted into the steady embrace, sobbing. They weren’t going to think too hard about it.

Kate was still the bible-thumping hypocrite who’d had too many drinks at a party, whored herself out to half the school, and faced her justified comeuppance on video for the world to see.

Victoria was still the petty, amused instrument of said comeuppance, who’d watched Kate’s life become more and more of a living hell but was far too deep in it now to be having second thoughts.

But for the moment, neither of the two was being devoured in the stomach of a giant insect.

Chloe snuck along the side of the pool building, then down the short stairway to the parking lot, passing close to the snake’s tail which had destabilized part of the brick wall to the left and still had its tip resting across the street exit.

“We still need to find a way to get King Cobra to move his tail!” Waldo whispered.

Max flickered in place. “Leave that to me. And, better take cover over between Warren’s car and that white pickup.”

“Who’s Warren?”

“The guy you always text after I kiss you on a dare to let him know I’m not available.”

“…Wait, Max, what?”

Max winked at Brooke, giving her a quick thumbs-up, then disappeared.

Chloe added that to the list of things she was going to process later, and hastily scanned the parking lot. Max was elbows-deep in the open hood of a blue pickup truck, pulling out jumper cables and towing them across the pavement toward King Cobra’s tail. Cover, she mouthed insistently, and though still very concerned, Chloe backed away, picking out where the other two were hiding and going over to join them.

Max set down the cable clamps with their tips just barely resting against the multicolored scales, then vanished and was inside the truck. The ends of the cables sparked, and King Cobra jerked his tail a few feet to the side, but it was still blocking the exit.

“Well, that didn’t do much…” the guy Chloe was starting to suspect was actually named Warren voiced disappointedly.

“Just you wait,” Max countered smugly from right behind them.

“You know, I could’ve helped you out with the car shit…” Chloe muttered.

“You did.”

Chloe tried to wrap her head around that statement, only for a loud buzzing sound to drown out the attempt. Also, a fucking giant bee flew in behind the Blackwell building’s tower, circling around to hover just overtop of the parking lot.

“Whoa,” Chloe whispered with a bit of a smirk, taking in the reflective red, segmented eyes on the creature’s tan head, its burnt orange thorax with four big spikes on its back above wing-level, and the yellow armor plates shielding the upper sides of the segments on its large, dark abdomen. “The real queen bee of Blackwell. Looks like Bitchtoria’s got some competition!”

“How do you know her name?” Warren asked innocently.

“…Bitchtoria?”

“No, Queen Bee!”

“…Please don’t tell me that’s this one’s actual name. Whatever happened to bitchin’ monster names like Destoroyah?”

“Didn’t take you for a kaiju nerd,” Brooke cut in skeptically.

“I’ve spent years wishing one of them would just come back and smash Arcadia Bay to all hell, I figured I should at least know what my options are!”

The conversation was finally drowned out by the screeching match between the two creatures, Queen Bee communicating with a kind of bubbly, squeaky-wheel chittering to counter King Cobra’s raptor roars. King Cobra reared back and spat out a wad of glue, which went low, picking up the horizontally parked red pickup in a bounce before also hitting the vertically parked one in the space two over from Warren’s car, sticking them both together like Katamari and sending the end result crashing through the woods behind them.

Queen Bee gained altitude, darting in a zigzag to avoid more glue attacks before retaliating by angling her stinger forward. Three smaller spikes in a vertical line above the stinger itself started launching and replacing themselves extremely quickly, a machinegun fire of six-foot-long javelins that porcupined the entire courtyard.

King Cobra let loose a pained screech, lifting up the part of his tail that Max had gotten him to move and revealing a spike that had pierced into his scales there. He retracted his coils back away from the parking lot, and Queen Bee chortled victory.

“Now’s your chance!” Max commanded, and doors to Warren’s car started opening and closing.

Chloe was halfway into her seat when she noticed Max was missing. “Max?”

Max was outside the car, glancing back over her shoulder with guilt as she ran diagonally across the lot. “I still have to—”

She was cut off, because her knees gave out, and she started to stumble toward falling.

“Go!” Chloe ordered Warren, leaping out of his car as it started to skid away. She heard more than saw when it managed to flee the scene, all her focus on catching up to Max and catching her before she hit the ground. Blood from Max’s nose ran down onto Chloe’s sleeve. She looked faint. “Max! Max, wake up!”

Max looked at her once, eyes scared and tired, then fell unconscious.

“I’ve got you, Max…”

Chloe looked around desperately, all while King Cobra’s tail lashed across the sky in an attempt to swat down Queen Bee. She spotted her truck, still intact—or, as intact as it had been before—at the other corner of the parking lot.

Nathan Prescott wandered into her line of sight, and their eyes met.

“Fuck!”

“You!”

Queen Bee ducked low under a glue shot, her dangling legs swinging through the air just above Chloe’s and Nathan’s heads.

Nathan looked up, wide-eyed. “What the shit?”

He reached into his back pocket. Chloe froze at the glint of silver, and was brought back by the sharp sound of the gunshots, Nathan firing wildly into the air toward the house-sized bee that probably wouldn’t have even noticed him otherwise.

Queen Bee looked at Nathan, let out a chitter from four thin mandibles splaying into an X-shape, and swooped towards him, nearly skewering him with the end of her stinger as he leapt and dove for the bike rack.

“You don’t know, who the fuck I am, or who you’re—FUCK!”

Flying back around, Queen Bee scored the pavement with her stinger, carving up a path of disturbed earth and tarmac that left Nathan and the faded red car in the corner tumbling away to one side, Chloe’s truck tilted slightly uphill on the other. Seeing her chance, Chloe ran to the door, climbed in, and quickly and awkwardly belted Max into the passenger seat.

She drove down the incline and out through the lot, not looking back.

So, inevitably, the two monsters had met and started fighting. At least it sounded that way. The noises of the two screeching back and forth echoed down the hill to where Victoria and the others must have been a third of the way to the town – it was hard to tell with all the tree cover.

A blue minivan passed down a distant street, turned horizontal to drive across to the nearest one, but turned again in a zigzag to keep going downhill, all the while inching cautiously as if whoever was driving was trying to make it run quieter. Courtney had tried to wave them down, but dropped her arm disappointedly while muffling a desperate scream of frustration. Taylor held the brunette tighter, clearly using the fact she had someone to take care of to stave off a full breakdown. Victora supposed she must be doing the same thing, with Kate now permanently kept close under an arm – not that Kate seemed in the mood for offering any complaints about the situation.

They walked the remaining distance to the road, stopping to glance at the blue car as it drove away. Weirdly enough, there was a second blue car down there, this one a larger and more boxy van, and it was headed in the other direction, coming up the hill towards them.

“Oh! Oh!” Courtney raised her arm again, hopping on her toes as she waved at the new vehicle. “Over here! Over here! Please!”

The van, with heavier offroad tires but in all other respects a pretty standard blue van, rolled to a stop just in front of them. A window rolled down, and a Hispanic guy in his probable thirties, black hair tied up in dreadlocks, leant out on an elbow. “Yo. What’s shakin?”

For a moment, even Courtney was quiet, taken aback with the casualness of the statement. Aside from the first guy, there were five more people inside the van, as far as Victoria could see – well, four more people, and something she might have assumed was a piece of inert science equipment if it hadn’t angled its head toward her at the same time the people did.

“So, hey, uh…” the guy leaning out the window continued, a little awkwardly. “Any of you folks seen a… really tall snake, or a thirty-foot bumblebee, or a giant bat, or a big… lumbering… crab-squid thing?” He held his hand out, fingers down and fluttering in what was probably supposed to be an imitation of wiggling tentacles.

Taylor hitched a breath, shocked still. “Oh God, there’s more of them?”

“Yeah…” Victoria shook her head and answered, reassured at least a little bit when she saw the dark-haired woman inside the van preparing some sort of weapon. “The snake and the bee, Blackwell Academy.” She pointed back uphill.

“Pardon me,” Samuel spoke, taking a step toward the van, “but do the squirrels speak to you, too? Or… does something else?”

Under a piercing, one might say interrogating gaze, the guy at the window gave Samuel a perfectly understandable look of distinct creeped-out-ness. “Uhh…”

“S-sorry, forgive Samuel.” Samuel stepped back away, hands up in surrender. “You just look… as though one stung. You all do, today…”

“That, I, uh, will… definitely get back to you on later!” the guy said in reply, winking awkwardly and giving a double-finger-gun salute. He had a cadence in his voice that suggested he, of course, intended to do no such thing. “Sorry, gotta scram!”

The van quickly drove away, continuing up the street toward Blackwell.

“Wait! First could you take us… aww.” Courtney deflated in yet another disappointment.

“It’s okay, Court, we’re safe now,” Taylor said, insisting a little too hard and with a little too shaky of a voice for it to be entirely believable. “We are safe now. We are!”

As she finished talking, the van filled with people rolled backward down the hill to stop in front of them, the window rolling down again and the same guy leaning out. “Oh, and, uh… don’t freak out at the one who’s coming up behind us, okay? The big guy’s on our side.”

Before anyone could ask a sorely-needed follow-up question, the van was speeding up the hill again. At the same time, a screech of tires resounded from much farther downhill toward town, and Victoria turned to watch in time to see the smaller blue van complete a sharp, sudden turn away from the main road.

Into the spot it had recently vacated, a grey, three-toed dinosaur foot large enough to have crushed it stomped down and left an imprint in the pavement.

“What is that? A fifth one!” Taylor shouted, her voice going up in pitch.

The creature continued up the road, revealing more of its grey, scaly appearance with shaded hints of purple and blue here and there. A build like a T-rex, but with longer, leanly muscled arms and a lower jaw with an underbite that gave its head a boxy, squared-off shape. Back fins that were forwardswept like cresting waves.

“It’s Godzilla!” Courtney wailed.

“No, it’s… it’s just Zilla…” Victoria found herself muttering.

Taylor looked at her. Followed by Kate, and then, finally, Courtney.

“Zilla.” Victoria repeated, sighing. “A species that attacked New York in 1998, and was mistaken for Godzilla by reporters—something that confuses me to no end because the two monsters look completely different…” She paused, eyes darting nervously between the confused looks Taylor and Courtney were giving her. “…which is an isolated piece of information I picked up independently, by chance, not from having any deep interest in the topic whatsoever.”

Taylor had a brief, subtly saddened glint in her eye like she might have been open to hearing more, but the heavy stomping growing closer broke up any moment that might have been forming. Instead, the five of them awkwardly shuffled a few steps back from the road, eyes glued to the giant reptile as one massive foot trailed through the air, toes curled back.

The ground shook as the food dropped, toes spreading out on the pavement. Victoria stumbled, taking a surer hold of Kate as the girl pressed further into her on reflex. It was fascinating to see the scaly hide up close, for as long as the creature spent in taking another step with the farther-away foot before the nearer one lifted up again. The imprint was several feet deep, and easily longer and broader than the van that had just been parked in that spot.

The real Blackwell Bigfoot. Or soon enough, anyway.

Victoria watched warily as the giant, scaly, gator-ridged tail swung around in the air above them, nearly taking out a telephone pole but reversing like a cracked whip at the last second, alternating direction with the creature’s stride. Kate had been paying Zilla an even more focused, deliberating attention, as if she was trying really hard to reach some unvoiced decision about it. To Victoria’s relief, at least, she didn’t try to run towards it. She just watched, wide-eyed with the others, as it continued up the street toward the distant tower of Blackwell Academy.

…Our school is fucking DOOMED.

Chapter Text

The HEAT van rolled up the street, passing houses and trees on inevitable approach to that older, historic-looking building that seemed to dominate the hillside even from afar.

“Arcadia Bay.” Nick shook his head at the wheel. “Can’t be a coincidence we ended up here, after that SOS. What can you tell us about this Blackwell we’re headed for?” He shot the question back at Elsie, who was scrolling through her phone.

“Blackwell Academy looks to be your run-of-the-mill classy art school,” Elsie replied, squinting at something she was reading, “with an oddly popular home football team and, from what I can tell, a really confusing class-year makeup. And oh—they have famous photographer Mark Jefferson on the roll as a full-time teacher.”

“Fascinating,” Nick replied drily, “but there might be a chance we can lure the fighting onto that football field. Keep collateral damage to a minimum.”

“Easier said than done,” Monique warned, placing a full clip in her tranquilizer rifle.

“No sweat!” Randy disagreed. “Z-Man’ll do all the heavy lifting, you’ll see! And, uh…” He sobered up a little. “…Max Caulfield’s profile says she attends Blackwell, so we might need to crash hard and set up shop for a while. It’ll be just like your old college days, eh, Nickels?”

Nick let out a long sigh. “Please, don’t remind me. Anyone manage to contact General Hicks?”

“That’s a negative,” Mendel answered worriedly, hefting the dual-canister backpack of venom solvent onto his shoulders. “NIGEL’s sending signals out through broadband, wi-fi, satellite, you name it, but we’re not receiving anything at all from Site Omega command.”

“Uh oh,” Elsie grinned. “Looks like the teacher’s gonna be fifteen minutes late to class.”

“Good, cause I hate to tell you this now,” Randy joked as the van hit the final stretch up to the top of the hill, “but I didn’t do the homework.”

A glance at the football field told Nick something had already smashed its way through the middle of the bleachers and dragged itself a rough trench across the grass, easily taking out the chain-link fence bordering the road on the other side that intersected the main campus grounds.

“Searching for subject,” NIGEL announced, swiveling his head around from the back seat to try to aim his many lenses toward the windows. “Searching, searching, searching, searching, searching, searching, searching, searching, searching, searching, searching, ARGH SNAKE A SNAKE! SNAAAAAAAKE! OOOOOOOOOO IT’S A SNAKE!”

Nick swore he heard Mendel quietly chuckle at that one, but it was quickly superseded by a headshake of resigned frustration, at least in the short moment it took to process that NIGEL had been correct. King Cobra had risen into view, rearing up and spreading his hood to partially block out the view of the Blackwell tower. Luckily, he was facing away, turning his neck quickly to keep track of the other creature buzzing back and forth past him.

“Secondary subject able to fly in multiple directions, and need only be fired in the general vicinity of primary subject. The ammunition will take care of the—"

Nick floored into the curve that rounded to the school-side of the field and skidded the van to a halt. No sooner had the doors opened than Randy had handed him one of the beige and grey, twin-barrel laser rifles, Elsie taking a third while Mendel remotely lowered the van’s back ramp to unload NIGEL. Monique had the heavier tranquilizer prepared, waiting for her opening as the group’s most skilled sharpshooter.

Nick sized up the situation, watching as Queen Bee expertly dodged King Cobra’s glue shots and retaliated with warning salvos of stinger darts. “It looks like they’re vying for territory.”

“It makes a certain kind of sense.” Elsie stepped up at Nick’s right. “They’ve awakened in an unfamiliar environment.”

“Yeah…” Randy wandered up at Nick’s left. “…so have we.”

SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENK!

The sound of a familiar roar caused the two mutations to abandon their battle and face the third approaching from the right, King Cobra twisting his neck around to fully display his hood and bare his fangs. Queen Bee looked more uncertain, her slow hover carrying her slightly backward and away from the unfolding confrontation, until her wits seemed to come to an accord and sent her veering on a diagonal to ram King Cobra from behind.

Both reptiles reacted in shock as the insect’s legs hooked in and began to drag King Cobra across the demolished courtyard. Zilla got his wits about him and brought his tail around to deflect King Cobra to the side, Queen Bee becoming untangled in the scuffle as the shadow of a stretched-out snake fell across the roadway.

“Back! Back! Back!” Nick urged, though King Cobra’s neck had already missed where they’d been standing by a clearance of a few yards, his head landing with his hood splayed out on the football field’s center line.

“Guess Queen Bee’s bugging out!” Randy shouted, his voice muffled a bit as King Cobra’s straightened body coiled back into the shape of a winding river. The giant bee had indeed taken the moment to flee the scene.

A problem for later, Nick thought, as the edge of one of King Cobra’s coils passed dangerously close to the parked van.

The cobra had finally gathered enough coils near his neck to lift his head back up off the ground, his fangs immediately spraying several wads of venom back up the hill towards Zilla and the school building. Zilla handily sidestepped and dodged the first, which ended up splattering across the front doors instead while a lone man outside the building ducked and rolled out of range.

The second venom spray stuck to Zilla’s right forearm when he tried to deflect it, but it didn’t slow him down, a three-toed foot sinking into the crumbling set of steps at the road’s edge as Zilla kicked off high into the air above. King Cobra reeled in surprise, attempting to scramble out of the way only for Zilla to land with a foot pinning him down in the middle.

“Now’s our chance, fan out!” Nick ordered, taking position on the partially-cracked road with Elsie and Randy at either side.

King Cobra sneered and twisted his head around to face his opponent, but Zilla grabbed on with both hands and held the serpent’s jaws closed. At that moment, several green bolts passed at an angle high over Nick’s head, the tranquilizer darts embedding at several points in the striation of red scales along the side of King Cobra’s neck.

An eye widening, King Cobra brought up the lashing end of his tail and coiled it around Zilla’s throat, pulling the lizard away enough to free his coil from underfoot. Immediately, the snake reared back, pulled in his hood, and dove headfirst into the ground, a cloud of dirt kicking up as he burrowed deep and, in doing so, dislodged the tranquilizer darts from his hide.

Zilla roared in frustration, and attempted to bite onto the fleeing snake only for the tail to whack him in the side of the head, sending him stumbling about in a daze. Before King Cobra was fully underground, his head emerged again from between the halves of the bleachers, his jaws clamping down to tear away a section of them before rearing back to smash the splintering chunk of metal across Zilla’s face.

“Run!” Randy voiced for everyone else, as it became apparent the shards of broken bleachers sent off from the impact were currently sailing in their very direction. Nick turned around with the others running beside him, a clatter of metal beginning on the road and continuing into the shunks of splitting earth as aluminum spears embedded themselves into the small hillside. Only when the sounds ended did Nick turn around, the members of HEAT still backing away over the remnants of the Blackwell courtyard.

“Hey, at least they’re fighting on the football field!” Elsie snipped, as she brushed her disturbed, bright red hair out of her face and retook her readied grip on the rifle.

Glancing aside to ensure the others had made it out unscathed, Monique continued backing up toward the building and resumed her view down her weapon’s scope.

King Cobra arced up high over the still-stunned Zilla, then dove again into the ground, kicking up more dust this time but once it cleared, the creature’s intentions were obvious – it had pinned a now-prone Zilla under a tightening coil of its serpentine body, which was anchored into the earth on both sides. Its head emerged yet again from elsewhere on the field, fangs bared and hood spread out in victory.

Monique aligned her reticule with the vulnerable interior of the snake’s mouth, and began applying her finger to the trigger.

Only to feel a sudden tug on her upper arm that sent her spiraling into motion.

“Hand that over, girlie, I’ve got combat—”

The voice cut off as an elbow and then a kick took the wind out of its source, the uniformed man stumbling backwards into the standing wooden board behind him. If he’d intended to react further, the thrown kunai blade embedding in the wood only a half-inch from his ear brought him to a sudden stillness.

Monique held her eyes narrowed for another moment, but sighed and rolled them as it passed, and she was able to mentally catalogue the mustached school security guard as not an enemy, but simply an idiot.

“Stay. Down.” She ordered.

Speechless and wide-eyed, the guard continued to hold his hands up in surrender.

Monique looked back to find King Cobra was currently weaving his head back and forth emitting cries of panic, a larger cloud of obscuring dirt now being kicked up in earnest by Zilla’s own burrowing. In moments, the entire football field seemed to collapse in a sinkhole, King Cobra’s screaming head dragged down with it.

Everyone eyed the dust cloud, which persisted for almost a full minute, until at once, the familiar shape of Zilla’s back scutes rose up out of the middle, and King Cobra was seen scrambling off to the left of view.

Zilla roared in triumph, prompting King Cobra to weakly rear up and let loose a short bark of a roar back toward the large iguana. Zilla lurched his head a measure backward with a strange expression, then barked in reply.

King Cobra turned at once to directly face Monique and the other members of HEAT, causing a sudden chill to roll over the apparent full extent of the gathered humans and perhaps even to Zilla, but the snake only made another half-hissed vocalization, turned back to Zilla, and repeated it.

Zilla snorted, lifted a foot, and slammed it back into the loose soil to accompany a louder roar of finality. With one last sneer, King Cobra turned and slithered off into the forest, disappearing into the trees – to Monique’s frustration, as she’d almost managed to line up another shot.

“Uh, jefe?” Randy spoke up, scratching his head as the others stood perplexed in the ensuing silence. “What do you think they were talking about?”

Chloe skidded nervously out onto the road, for once wishing her truck didn’t make so much damn noise. Her eyes flicked to the rearview mirror at least once a second, sometimes more, terrified she’d see that snake staring right back, or the bee divebombing for the kill.

Fleeing from a giant monster was something she’d once daydreamed about, the surreal horror of something looming, a natural disaster that had an attention span. A volcano or a tsunami or a hurricane that could single her out specifically. But she’d always imagined it would be cathartic, driving away unnoticed while the rest of the down had to deal with a pissed-off freak of nature or folly of man getting its rage on.

Of course, she had also always imagined she’d be driving away with Rachel.

Now, she had an unconscious Max Caulfield in her passenger seat.

At least the bleeding had stopped, and she just looked zonked out. Was that from her… powers? Time… travel? She said she knew things…

She said she knew about Rachel.

Fuck, what did Rachel have to do with this? Did Max meet Rachel? Chloe hoped so. Hoped there was some kind of… superhero, time traveler secret organization crap and Max and Rachel were working together. Yeah, that must be it. Maybe it was why they both disappeared…

Chloe couldn’t think of anything else to do but bring Max home. No one was around, so she got Max up to her bed, laying down, and cleaned the blood off her face.

She took a moment to just breathe. Chloe felt safe, for now, even though if she let herself think about it, she definitely wasn’t. Not with step-dick on his way home, or with giant monsters running around that could smash the house flat. She was thankful one window was small and far from the bed, and the other was blocked by the flag draped over it. It made her feel less exposed.

Max’s phone was sending off rings and text tones like it was trying to play a song. Chloe frowned, thinking over the implications. Should I… answer? Is that my business? Even just to let her friends know she’s alive?

Then Chloe’s own phone dinged, and she was a little surprised. Who the fuck would be texting me right now?

[yeah yeah im fine]

[hbu?]

[ur not high]

[well I don’t know maybe you are]

[but that shit was real as fuck]

[…yo justin? who were you supposed to say that out loud to?]

[dana? that’s fine I guess…]

[surprised you even asked]

[lol talk later justin]

[yep]

[yeah shes fine, just asleep]

[we got out of there a little after waldo and brooke]

[hey did that bee get nathan?]

[dammit]

[not if you know that prick like I do]

[you know me, cant wait to get out of blackhell]

[NO EMOJI]

[…rather not get into it]

[wow thanks]

[question is david madsen still at the school?]

[shit gotta go!]

The door had slammed just a few seconds ago. She had time, but – problem – Max was unconscious, and Chloe knew full well she didn’t have enough time to pick her up and hide her somewhere. “Max, wake up!” she whispered frantically, trying to shake the girl awake.

Shit! Shit!

“What’s going on in here?” David demanded as he pushed open the door. “Why is—”

He was at least taken off-guard by finding someone else in Chloe’s bed, and in Chloe’s arms.

“Why is she here? Why do you have—"

“She’s Max Caulfield,” Chloe sneered defensively. “She’s an old friend, I’ve known her forever. I was meeting her at Blackwell today, before—”

David’s face turned strangely fearful in an instant. “You were at—”

“She’s just a little zonked out from stress,” Chloe snapped. “Just leave us alone.”

David took a step back, his hands up, as he considered Chloe with some fake sympathy he’d put on, probably in case Max woke up while they were talking. “I will. I’m glad you’re both okay.”

“Sure you are, prick. Guess things would be a lot easier for you if I were snake food.”

“You don’t mean that, Chloe, I—”

“Get out of my room.”

Miraculously, David did just that, the door quietly closing behind him. Chloe let out an exhausted, shivering, relieved breath, and fell down on the bed next to Max.

What a long, fucking day. Even if it had only been a few hours going from sixty to one-hundred-and-ten. It felt like ages ago, back when her worst problem was getting enough money from Nathan to pay off Frank. And Nathan… had actually had a fucking gun. Who would he have used it on if Queen-Bitch-the-ten-times-as-badass hadn’t shown up?

No brownie joints for guessing that one, Chloe…

Her awed, shaken eyes drifted back to the girl sleeping quietly beside her. Unconscious like that, she could almost still be the same old Max Caulfield. Five years later—or, five for Chloe and however many it had been for Max. Time travel and all…

“You hella saved my life…” Chloe whispered, finding she was smiling for the first time in… oh, who the fuck knows? The point was, Max was back, and it was doing things to her she wasn’t—

“Chloe?”

It was just a sleepy murmur, but Max wrinkled her cute face as she shifted awake, like a kitten or a baby seal. Only when her eyes blinked open did some of that old, hurt weariness come back to ruin the perfect moment—no, not ruin. She was still Max, and it wasn’t like Chloe could talk either, after how these last five years had changed her. But unloading all of that on Max could wait, or… or, no, Max already knew, right? She kept saying—

“Where—when am I?” asked Max, looking scared. Maybe not scared, really, but… desperate. Longing. Lost and safe at home all at once, a kind of vulnerability that Chloe had to admit shook her really deep. It wasn’t just the way she’d always dreamed and hoped Max would look at her if they ever saw each other again, it was so much more than that. A little scary, even.

“You’re… you’re in my room. I know it looks a little different…” Chloe shook her head as she processed the rest of the question. “You passed out in the parking lot. I got you in my truck and we high-tailed it out of there. You were… bleeding…”

Max wiped below her nose, seeming surprised to not pull her fingers away covered in blood. “I haven’t had to use my rewind that much in… in a long time. Usually I know how the week plays out and just use that…”

“You’ve lived this week… however many times before, but… you didn’t know about the snake? I’m confused.”

“So am I,” Max agreed, her eyes going distant before she shook it off with a kind of subdued madwoman laugh. “It’s new. New things are happening. I don’t believe it either.”

So yeah, Max still looked a little out of it. As she stopped to consider Chloe, a little similarly to how Justin and Trevor usually considered her, her face changed to a slightly more sobered frown.

“There’s probably… a lot you want to ask me about.”

There was a pain in her, as she preemptively started to draw into herself, and it was almost enough to make Chloe want to put aside her burning questions, but she couldn’t. “Max… where’s Rachel?”

It was there, on Max’s face, before she’d even finished the question.

No. No, no, no…

“She’s… where is she, Max!?” Chloe wanted to shake her, but her arms wouldn’t comply, as if they already knew it was pointless. Her eyes pooled with tears at the same time Max’s did, and she felt her voice crawling up the octaves. “Rachel?”

Max’s hands squeezed onto hers tight, and she felt sick at the gesture, the final confirmation it was. She couldn’t remember who moved first, but Max’s arms were around her, and her arms were around Max, and the image burned into her stinging, forced-shut eyelids was of a fucking deer standing in her room.

“Lower! To the ground!” Nick was calling out through that megaphone. Even after all these years, Mendel Craven was still nervous to be standing so close.

Zilla took a frighteningly long moment to respond, but as he eyed up both his adopted father and Mendel standing beside, he finally relented, and held his forearm down until it was only a meter or two above the grass.

Gulping, Mendel held out the silver, pistol-shaped sprayer and soaked the now dirt-encrusted remains of King Cobra’s glue venom with the antidote solvent.

“When you’re done powerwashing your, er, lizard…”

The school’s principal – a tall, bald, black man named Raymond Wells – was doing his absolute best to present the illusion of composure. After almost an hour spent un-gunking the school’s entrances, reassuring panicked students and staff, trying again and again in vain to reach out to Hicks or anyone else back at Site Omega, and generally taking command of the situation while Zilla continued to watch over the school grounds like a newly-claimed territory, the entire team was at least thankful the man didn’t seem quite as resistant to their efforts as his security guard had been before Wells had sent him home.

As for NIGEL’s localized atmospheric readings of airborne hydrocarbons in Wells’ immediate vicinity… Mendel supposed the man’s vices need not come up in conversation, so long as he remained cooperative.

Zilla pulled back his cleaned arm and huffed out a snort, apparently in approval.

Then he spun on a heel to walk away, the end of his tail clipping NIGEL and sending him tumbling a half-dozen bounds across the courtyard grass.

“Ahh!” Mendel grunted, clutching the sides of his head as he rushed after his creation. “NIGEL!”

It was almost a reflex at this point, part of Mendel having become resigned to some terrible accident inevitably befalling the robot just about any time something remotely exciting happened. But really? Things had been going so well!

He knelt at the machine’s side, noting NIGEL’s head was still moving around even if he was off his wheels and treads. After a frantic examination that gradually receded to a calm one, Mendel was able to determine that this time, at least, the damage was limited to dents, scrapes, and only a few components warped out of proper alignment.

“It’s okay, NIGEL.” Mendel rubbed the sphere of the robot’s head. “I’ll get you back on your feet in no time…”

With Randy’s help tipping NIGEL back upright – maneuverability shaky but sufficient for now – the rest of HEAT was able to catch up to Nick and Elsie, currently making their case to Principal Wells as they headed back toward Blackwell’s recently-de-venomified entryway.

“Weather phenomena?” Wells was asking with a distinctly skeptical expression.

“Yes, we’ve…” Nick tripped over the lie, “…received knowledge of strange readings coming from the area around Arcadia Bay. We believe it’s what attracted the mutations here. If we could be given a space to properly investigate—”

“I’ve heard nothing of any kind of strange weather…” Wells hesitated as he once again set wary eyes on Zilla in the distance. “…but I’m certainly concerned about these… mutations, you call them?” He narrowed his eyes again. “Especially this one you seem intent to keep on Blackwell grounds.”

“Hey, the Z-man ain’t gonna hurt nobody!” Randy insisted, offended, but Monque held him back.

“What Randy here is trying to say, is that we’ve been monitoring Zilla closely for fifteen years now. If he were a threat, we would have dealt with him long ago. If mutations concern you, you should be even more so, were this one to depart your grounds while the others are still on the loose.”

Wells buckled under the pressure, as Mendel might have guessed. He was looking more than a little overwhelmed right now. Thank the pressure of the job and disastrous timing, this probably wouldn’t have worked if they hadn’t caught him tipsy.

“Believe me, I do see your point… okay, fine, what do you want?”

Elsie smirked. “If Blackwell would oblige, and perhaps accept some generous help cleaning up this mess, we do need somewhere to set up shop while we figure out what’s turning your little town into mutation central.”

“Preferably somewhere with pre-existing lab equipment,” Nick added. “We’d also like to talk to one of your students. We believe she may have pertinent information about the mysterious weather patterns we’re looking into.”

Wells was lucid for a moment. “Only if this student is willing to come forward of her own accord. We do have strict confidentiality concerning…” He looked at Zilla one more time. “…whatever this situation could be classed as. God, I need a drink…”

Mendel, for once, only pretended to sneeze, hiding a chuckle.

“Of course, of course,” Nick agreed, his hands up. “But we’re fairly certain your student would be willing to talk with us, considering she reached out to us initially.”

Wells appeared intrigued, even suspicious, but shook it off with irritation. “Very well, get on with it. Does the student in question happen to have a name?”

“How did she…”

Chloe’s lip trembled at the thought of even saying the word.

“How… did she die, Max?”

Max looked particularly troubled at answering, but settled with a sigh and darkened eyes. “It was an accident, and I hate that. And you hate that. But there’s only one person to blame, for everything, and I promise you, he will pay.”

Chloe wanted to scream. To break down crying until she could breathe even less than she could right now. To throw shit and break it and tear her room apart, to lose herself in Max’s arms. To yell and rage and beat Max senseless until she had the name of that motherfucker she had the audacity to hide from her.

But with just one look, shy and gentle Max Caulfield had beaten her to all of it, and more. There was the weight of the universe, and a thousand lives of screaming heartbreak and torment in those eyes, and it scared Chloe shitless. Doubly so, as the potential caught up with her.

“How…” she tried with her words, still barely keeping it together but managing a lighter, if nervous tone. “How many times have we enacted our… frighteningly brutal revenge?”

“Enough I actually wish I couldn’t remember all of them.”

Chloe, about now, wished she could remember at least one. “You’re really not gonna tell me who this bastard is?”

“I will,” Max promised. “Before we get within a mile of him again, because you need to know, but I can’t have you on the warpath, Chloe.” There was a desperation in her eyes Chloe couldn’t look away from. “If you go after him, he kills you. I can’t go through that again.”

“What, like today?” Chloe startled herself with the straw she grasped at, teeth bared. “It’s Nathan fucking Prescott, isn’t it? Max, is it?”

Max looked nervous, and distant. “Nathan’s… part of it, I won’t lie.”

Chloe’s I fucking knew it was silenced by Max’s pleading look and shaking hands.

“I’ve killed him a couple times,” she dropped with a blank stare, “for everything he did to us, and I’ve let you do it, too. And maybe I wouldn’t exactly shed a tear if I end up solving all this without finding a way to keep him alive, but… at the same time, he’s just being used and manipulated by everyone. He needs access to good doctors and therapy, but his dad seems like he would rather just let Nathan get worse. He’s obsessed with setting him up for some kind of fucked-up destiny. He literally uses that word. Nathan’s done truly horrible things, but honestly, I don’t know who gets to decide whether he’s really beyond saving. Probably someone a little less biased than we are.”

Chloe was pissed, but Future Max of Endless Wisdom had stricken again. “I think I… knew some of that, you just pick it up from being in that prick’s presence. But no way does that excuse—”

“It doesn’t,” Max stated firmly, yet somehow gently at the same time, setting a hand over Chloe’s when she tried to turn away. Because Future Max just had to know everything, didn’t she? “I saw the picture he took when I broke into his room. Sometimes I let Warren beat him until he cries.”

“Warren?” Chloe couldn’t hide her shocked smile. “That nerd kid? Damn. Sorry you had to find out like that, though. I have a feeling it was…” Chloe considered the way Max had been looking at her ever since waking up. “…that it was pretty rough.”

Max shook her head, becoming a little wistful, and a little sad. “That’s not when. You took me to the lighthouse on the first loop. Right around now you would’ve been telling me, and I would’ve been telling you about my powers for the first time. It should start snowing soon.”

Chloe tilted her head at the non sequitur. “Snowing? But it’s like eighty degrees outside…”

She trailed off as her eyes drifted to the window, in time to catch the first of the falling flurries. Snow. It was really snowing. Maybe after today, she should’ve just expected that one to come true without question.

“I’m telling you, he just rubs me the wrong way, is all.”

“And I’m telling you, not every middle-aged hipster with glasses and a goatee is secretly a manipulative supervillain who’s out to get you personally… Nickels.”

Nick crossed his arms and gave Elsie the side-eye. Randy would admit that photography teacher guy had been a little too skittish when they’d introduced themselves, seemed like he wanted out of the conversation as fast as possible.

“I concur with Dr. Tatopoulos,” Monique muttered with a little sneer on her breath, but since she hadn’t said it loud enough for the other two to hear, Randy was pretty sure she meant it more as a vibe thing than actual security advice.

They’d taken a short walk away from the entrance on the north side of the building, where they could at least keep an eye on the Z-man as he loomed gently through the surrounding forest. It was quiet except for the occasional heavy footfall, the low crackle of snapping branches, and a few birds calling out – some from a distance and others from nearby, in panic.

The sunset and ocean breeze brought everything to a strange sort of serenity, and Randy found himself having walked out of earshot of the rest of the group, without realizing. He was at the forest’s edge, staring absently into it as if it held secrets deeper and more ominous than hundreds of the usual sorts of animals and now one big, unusual one.

“I think yours is in there too.”

The sudden voice from far-too-close creeped Randy the fuck out, and he stumbled on his feet, one of them still especially sore from however he must have injured it when he fell down on the deck of the HEAT Seeker. It felt like it was flaring up again.

The janitor next to him backed up, palms forward placatingly. “Oh, Samuel is sorry. He’s just returned, you see. So much to clean…”

“Uh, yeah… I guess so.” Randy scratched his head. “But uh, not around here, so… shouldn’t you be getting to it?” He made a general gesture toward some of the damage visible around the other sides of the school building.

Samuel got quiet for a moment, his eyes focused. “The loop is a snare, Randy. Spirits watch over the land… though, they may lead you down the path of lies.”

“…Where we’ll find the deeper truths,” Randy added, perplexed as the words left his lips. He knew that phrase, somehow, instinctively, but he couldn’t remember where he’d heard it before.

They both returned their gazes to the deep expanse of trees, oblivious to the flurries of snow drifting down around them.

David Madsen watched the local news footage with heavy breaths, the new security cameras he’d been planning to put up this evening forgotten now in a box on the floor near the couch.

Giant monsters.

Everything he’d been doing to protect his family, the students… how the hell was he supposed to deal with this?

Only when he couldn’t bear to look at what he was seeing on the screen anymore, did he notice the snow falling outside the window.

Sunlight flared through the windows of the Two Whales Diner as Joyce Price scrubbed down the counter, only looking up when she heard shouts of alarm and awe from the street outside.

Something large was surfacing just offshore, waterfalls cascading from its forest green, shelled back, down its two wide-bowed, crablike standing limbs, and off the snout of a pod-shaped mouth with large squid-eyes behind it.

Joyce stepped back. Sure, Arcadia Bay had its bigfoot rumors, but this thing was bigger than a whale! It could crush the whole town! It had two small tentacles hanging from either side of its neck, and four larger ones hanging underneath between its shoulders like a cow’s udder, all six of them writhing and reaching up into the air, and…

…and swinging playfully through the falling snowflakes, as its big eyes sparkled and its four-petaled mouth parted with joy in a sound like a creaking metal door.

Well, Joyce thought, sponge forgotten in a hand at her hip as she settled into a hesitant smile. Ain’t that somethin’…

Warren Graham still had his hands in vice grips around either side of the steering wheel, knuckles white from the pressure. Ultimately, there’d been nowhere to go but right back to the Blackwell parking lot – at least once he’d had time to fully process the identity of the mutation that had almost flattened them.

Zilla wasn’t dangerous, at least not on purpose. He could tell himself that, believe it in his heart, but it was another thing entirely to try to calm down when HEAT’s giant lizard mascot was standing in the forest just behind the school. He’d turned his head and looked at Warren’s car a few times, but didn’t seem to react.

Warren still wasn’t getting out of the car.

After a while, the equally-quiet Brooke seemed to accept neither of them were going to work up the courage to do that anytime soon. She leaned across the console and put her head down on Warren’s shoulder, surprising the boy. He still wasn’t moving, though. Not while Zilla was still surveying the school grounds and the windshield was getting foggy and wet from – wait, were those snowflakes?

Kate Marsh sat in her room, still as ice.

Maybe part of her had always reasoned that things of scripture wouldn’t really happen, at least not in the world she lived in. That all the grandiose and wicked things in her beliefs were things she would only truly know after death, and never before. And she knew that monsters were real, that true giants had walked the Earth when she was too young to remember and that still-huge ones like this snake even existed today.

But with that devilish red that lined the cobra’s sides, running up to outline its jaws and the hornlike sharp upper points of its nostrils… framing its sunken, poison yellow eyes as the protruding gums displayed its flesh-rending teeth, and as a red tongue with many barbs along its sides hung loose through the gap between its lower fangs…

As it had loomed above her, with a sickening grin, head and neck moving like a vertical column or a statue as a slithering body ushered it slowly forward…

All of Kate’s instincts had told her, this was a Hellbeast. A vile servant of Satan, an emissary of the Devil himself.

And who could it have been sent for…

…if not her?

Tired of Pompidou’s barking, Frank Bowers slammed open his RV door and stepped out onto the roadside, bong in hand, gently telling off the dog before pausing as he noticed the snowfall.

Suddenly, the snowflakes all danced in a sharp gust of wind, a shadow passing overhead and the sound of swift motion stinging Frank’s ears.

With a yelp, Pompidou rushed past Frank’s legs to get back inside.

The bong shattered on the pavement as Frank watched the giant bat spread its wings in a glide, carried on air as it soared away and disappeared into the forested hills.

Victoria tapped her foot, waiting for the girl ahead of her to clear the way.

She stepped up to the bulletin board, now home to a list of the entire student body, beside boxes waiting to be checked. As she marked off her own name along with Taylor’s, Courtney’s, and Kate’s, she found her eyes drifting to Max’s, already checked.

She wasn’t sure why she was holding onto the breath that she finally let out, once she saw that it was. It was even kind of weird to think of Max as just another, vulnerable student after seeing her today. Something very strange was going on with Max Caulfield.

And as she noticed snow—fucking snow—falling around her, Victoria Chase decided she was going to find out what.

Framed by golden light shining through the tall window in his office, Principal Ray Wells penned the agreement, knowing he was going to need a drink after this.

Across the desk, Dr. Niko Tatopoulos gave a reassuring smile, looking over the document that would grant his team access to the grounds and a temporary research hub in the science lab.

The snowfall, dammit, was probably a sign.

Mark Jefferson quickly finished packing up his laptop and camera equipment, quietly grinning. Giant monsters were certainly an unanticipated setback, but not a dealbreaker. Certainly, Nathan’s dear old dad would insist the End of the World party proceed as planned, and until then…

Mr. Jefferson almost laughed.

Until then, he had just the perfect place to ride out the storm.

Nathan Prescott snapped photo after photo of the massive, three-toed footprint sunken into the grass.

The stupid lizard who’d made it wouldn’t mess with him, even if it was right there on the other side of the school building and would probably be back soon. None of these stupid monsters would. They would learn what kind of trouble they were messing with if they did.

Something else caught his eye, as he climbed the hill to get a shot from above. Reflecting on the Tobanga was a scorpion almost as big as his shoe, hanging lifeless onto the side. There was a dark, morbid beauty to its beetle-like bulk and the blue-grey sheen of its armor, the perfect subject to take his mind off the rest of the bullshit. Nathan almost managed a smile as he took the shot, snow flurries beginning to fall down around him.

Only when he looked down at the camera screen did he realize, the scorpion wasn’t in the photo.

A blue-winged remnant darted across the sky, above the green treetops and through the snowfall, sensing a memory deep in the heart it had been given…

Chapter Text

Rachel Amber

Age 19

PLEASE CALL WITH ANY INFORMATION

CALL: Arcadia Bay Sherriff’s (555) 388-6020

ADDITIONAL INFO:

It wasn’t the first time Monique had seen this poster – far from it. Copies were scattered all over the darkened hallways of the school, some even grouped together in clusters or overlapping each other. Outside, dozens had been found among the wreckage and debris near the main entrance, and a solid wall of them had almost completely covered the announcement board.

There was no logical reason for so many to be placed with such redundancy.

This was not the work of someone thinking logically.

Monique could already form a mental picture of the culprit. Young. Desperate. Feeling powerless in all other avenues of finding answers, as pertained to a lost and very dear companion.

Time stilled in the darkened, empty hallways of Blackwell Academy, as Monique became lost to her wandering thoughts. She could almost hear the ghosts of laughter, see the spectral images of smiles, all the things she imagined would have given life to this place in its daylight hours.

This was not a life Monique had lived.

Her upbringing had been what many would consider unethical, though she knew others would still consider it a blessing. Human connection, human comfort, had been sharply limited – pseudo-parental assurances from Philippe being largely the extent of it. She had been alone, encountering a few acquaintances only in adulthood and never fitting in anywhere for long until she’d been assigned to watch over HEAT.

That, of course, had been its own journey, with its own merits. An eclectic group, from different walks of life, somehow finding unity through purpose and proximity.

But Monique knew that wasn’t the same as the sort of bonds that were forged here. Companionship through shared experience, at a time of youth and vulnerability. Among HEAT, Randy had been the closest to her own age, and she’d been stumped and confused about how to pursue such a bond with him for the longest time. It didn’t help that back then, Randy hadn’t been the easiest person with which to navigate her inexperienced inclinations toward friendship.

The girl, Rachel Amber, stared back at her from the poster, whispering secrets and comforts Monique would never know.

She shook her head. It was pointless to dwell on such things. The secrets Monique sought would not be found between the photocopied writing scrawled on this sheet of paper. With a turn on her heel, she marched back toward the lobby. Surely there would be a lock to pick, and answers lurking somewhere behind.

The fishtank bubbled in the Blackwell science classroom, the windows made solid walls by the night outside and a propped-up skeleton lurking in the darkened back half of the room. Mendel Craven gave it the side-eye once, but returned to his work, adjusting the overhead lamp that stood now on the raised dias near the teacher’s desk.

A few parts had needed to be replaced, but NIGEL was looking good as new in almost no time at all. Mendel rebooted his robotic companion and stepped back, watching as readouts scrolled on his palm computer and multicolored lights flickered to life. NIGEL’s head twitched, then swiveled slowly as he catalogued the surroundings beyond the small, illuminated workspace.

“It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.”

Mendel laughed quietly to himself. He’d still never admit to the others that he’d grown fond of Randy’s tampering in NIGEL’s software. Not that a few of them didn’t already know it would happen eventually – apparently, Mendel’s future self in the alternate timeline had reprogrammed NIGEL’s voice permanently to mirror Randy’s.

Speaking of time, Mendel began to notice the other presence in the room. He hadn’t heard the door click, but he usually didn’t. “How’s the perimeter looking?” he voiced with a smile.

Monique strolled out of the shadows, a serious look on her face and a manila folder stuffed with papers held in her left hand. She slammed the folder down on the teacher’s desk, a few paper corners sliding out at odd angles. “Suspect. False files, obvious corruption, but that is only the start of it. It gets… stranger.”

At a brief moment of doubt Mendel couldn’t suppress – it was a quaint little seaside town, what could be so wrong about it? – Monique slipped a particular sheet of paper out of the folder and shoved it into his hands.

For a moment, Mendel thought he was looking at one of those Rorschach drawings, but then he realized it was a printout of a scanned piece of paper covered in handwriting. Messy, frantic handwriting. The same phrase over and over, and a name he recognized just as much as anyone who’d been in the Blackwell building for more than a few seconds.

“Rachel… in the… dark room? What?”

“There are more things happening in this town than a supernatural storm.”

Suddenly feeling a lot less comfortable in the presence of the skeleton in the back of the room, Mendel put the paper down and gulped. “You think there’s a mutation involved?”

For HEAT, that was a daringly hopeful thought more than a fearful one. Statistically, most people who went missing due to mutation activity were found alive. Humans, on the other hand, didn’t have nearly so spotless a track record – not to mention anything else it could be. But Mendel supposed if he had to be inside a horror movie with someone, he’d definitely pick Monique.

The thought only half-reassured him.

“Unlikely,” Monique stated grimly, then sighed. The hardened focus in her face softened. Whatever dark secret she’d caught the scent of, she didn’t have any more answers, yet. And she didn’t expect Mendel to have any, either.

This was only part of why she was here, Mendel knew. He’d been expecting Monique to try to catch him alone at some point, ever since Randy had read them all Max’s message.

Mendel moved away the chair he’d been using while working on NIGEL, and half-leaned, half-sat on the edge of the teacher’s desk. A moment later, Monique joined him, leant shoulder-to-shoulder with a silent, shy affection she’d deny if called on it.

Mendel had gotten used to these meetings, even if they hadn’t needed to have one in years. Monique was the only one of those who’d returned from the future who’d managed to keep a level head through the worst of what came after. Even Mendel, the odd one out, had looked to her for reassurance quite a few times. She’d never been entirely stoic, entirely detached and unaffected, but she’d been a rock, a voice of reason, through it all.

“Situation: Domino,” Monique ground through her teeth in a mumble. “Status?”

“Happily, I have nothing to report,” Mendel said, managing a little smile.

“My observations concur,” Monique spoke back flatly, “but I will be keeping a close watch, as I presume, will you?”

Mendel nodded, the motion carrying. “I’ll be on the lookout for any changes.”

They both sighed, in tentative and nervous relief. The others were doing fine, as far as apparently either of them could tell. That was good. Mendel hoped that would continue once they actually caught up with Max and had to relive the past and future in greater detail.

He hoped, but he had his worries.

Brooke watched the feed carefully as her drone strafed patterns over the rolling waves.

“Do you see anything?” Juliet pressed urgently, her voice almost shrill. Brooke groaned.

How had she ended up here, anyway?

Logically, she could work that out in seconds. Brooke was the one with the drone, Warren was the one with one of the only working cars left, and Juliet was the one who wouldn’t take no for an answer when there was a story involved.

But as to how all of that had realistically added up to the three of them staking out the wharf at around an hour before sunrise, Brooke could only blame a temporary total blackout in judgement.

And maybe a little bit on a staunch refusal to let Warren and Juliet try this on their own.

“Brooke! I asked you a question, do you see it yet?”

“No, for the last time,” Brooke drawled out, her voice gravely from exhaustion and salt. “This camera isn’t even that good for night vision anyway.”

She was partially lying on that, but Juliet didn’t need more reasons to pester her.

“I’m telling you, C-Rex is worth the wait!” Warren encouraged as only a nerd could. Pot kettle and all that, but Brooke could at least claim she had a working sense of self-preservation.

An alert from Juliet’s phone broke the ensuing silence, and she sat back, Brooke very aware that her space was no longer being crowded. It was odd that the moment of peace actually lasted more than a few seconds, and even odder when Juliet broke out into a hearty chuckle.

“…Holy shit,” Juliet whispered with glee. “You have got to check out what Victoria just posted.”

Brooke arched a brow toward her hairline. At a time like this? What could have possibly drawn Juliet’s attention away from a potential monster in the bay?

Warren already had his phone out, though. May as well see what all the fuss is about…

Setting her drone to hover idle over solid ground, Brooke started the video, Warren already far enough along to be echoing Juliet’s sharper jeers will a duller, less focused amusement. She was naturally skeptical, but had to admit it was in fact worth her time once she realized what she was actually looking at. A cruel, bruised part of her was grateful for the boost to her satisfied vindication, as she watched her-holier-than-thou-ness Kate Marsh go in for another—

The phone was yanked out of her hands, and she jumped back, startled. Warren and Juliet were clearly in her vision, so who—

Her wide eyes found a tall figure looming over her in the darkness, scowling and holding the phone out in one hand to see its contents for herself.

“She was clearly drugged.”

“What?” Brooke still managed to snap back with sharp denial – in the moment, more affronted by the leap-to-defense than at being snuck up on by the admittedly scary woman prowling outside in the dark. Warren’s whispered whoa suggested she was someone Brooke should probably be able to identify, but it was slipping her mind.

The mystery woman narrowed her eyes more fiercely, dropping the phone back into Brooke’s hands. “If I can recognize the symptoms in a giant lizard, then surely I can recognize them in a schoolgirl at a party.” She said party like it was a dirty word. Her anger didn’t last, though. It folded to something sadder, but still disappointed. “You should be better than this. You should be taking care of each other. Not everyone has this chance, you know.”

Catlike, she eased herself over the low wall the three students had been camped out behind, and took a few steps onto the wooden pier, scanning the dark waves.

Brooke exchanged a curious glance with Warren, then Juliet. She could see the dawning guilt on their faces, and begrudgingly decided to let this one go. It was petty anyway, and deep down she knew already her fight wasn’t with Kate.

“We will have the situation under control shortly,” the mystery woman announced, all extremes of emotion gone from her voice. “Get back to your school. It could be dangerous out here.”

Chapter Text

Traveling so much around this country dealing with mutations, Monique Dupre supposed she had grown accustomed to the concept of the classical American diner, and the fine example of local… ‘cuisine’… it represented.

This one had soft, but repetitive and incessant music playing, while drunk fools complained about beer despite it being nearly nine in the morning, and a television mounted high on the wall, which played an interview with a climatologist whose unfortunate surname she shared with the most ecologically destructive monster to have ever threatened the Earth. But at least, here, there were no… children. Ugh.

And no Mendel, to inevitably complain about the hygienic state of the silverware. Or to inadvertently slice apart the entire establishment with a prototype high-intensity laser…

Probably unwise to mention that story in the near future.

Monique also noted the presence of several of the same missing persons posters that had metaphorically grown like ivy over Blackwell Academy, surreptitiously merging with the establishment’s native flora – advertisements for the town’s apparent pastime of creature-watching, from whales to the ever-elusive bigfoot. She hoped neither herself nor Elsie would need to clarify that the concept of a Crustaceous-Rex-watching tour was highly inadvisable.

At that thought, the door chimed and Elsie herself strolled back in, stowing away her radio. “No sign of the bat or Queen Bee, they must’ve both found some local woodwork to crawl into, but Nick spotted some large furrows from the air that might mark King Cobra’s new digs. Unfortunately they’re near the only road out of town, so once word gets out…”

“I suppose any news is… news,” Monique remarked, as she debated how to ask the question she needed to be tactful about asking. “Anything else to report, in regard to Dr. Tatopoulos?”

She momentarily thought she’d been subtle, but Elsie’s smirk-slipping-into-a-frown was knowing, teasing, even pitying. “No one’s got the time travel heebie-jeebies just yet, Fry-in-the-Sky, but you’ll be the first to know… honest.”

Monique let her face fall blank, suppressing a roll of her eyes. Elsie certainly had a… ‘way with words,’ as one might say.

They took their seats in a booth farther toward the unoccupied end of the diner, Monique’s fingers absently tracing the graffitied algebra equation carved into the corner of the table. Elsie held her menu up, and Monique mirrored her, considering eyes glancing across the tops of both documents.

Elsie still appeared to be taking their newfound situation well, even in the uncertainty of why or how they had been brought here. Even considering the potential of this mission to dredge up an experience they’d spent the better part of a decade putting behind them. Monique couldn’t detect any outward signs of distress. Elsie seemed to be enjoying herself, no doubt mentally citing some American pseudo-proverb involving a ‘flow’ or a ‘stride.’ Her eyes still displayed the pause of memory, but they were full of optimism, alight with interest, and…

…and suddenly, looking right at her, as a menu dropped slightly to reveal a teasing grin.

“You’re monitoring me again.”

Monique gulped nervously, caught. “It is in the interest of the team—”

“It’s in the interest of the team to pass on whatever knowledge we can, on account of being the only available experts on this kind of problem,” Elsie countered, looking serious. “That we know of. Last thing any of us want is to leave this ‘Max’ high and dry if we could’ve offered a hand. We’ve pulled it together before when we were needed, and we can do it again.”

The conversation trailed off as a woman with pinned-back blonde hair and thin hoop earrings exited from behind the counter and approached the table.

“Well, how are my two monster-whisperers this fine morning? Keeping the peace between fishes big and small in our humble bay?”

“Certainly hope so,” Elsie greeted. “And good morning to you, too…” Elsie squinted, trying to read the waitress’s nametag, which appeared blank.

“Joyce, please.” The woman waved a hand. “Everyone here calls me that anyway—well, the ones who don’t call me mom. Which between you and me, turns out to be a few more people than just my daughter. So I take it we’re in the all-clear to have breakfast, and not be breakfast?”

She chuckled, and Elsie laughed along with a knowing smile. “Appreciate the praise, but humans aren’t exactly on this one’s menu to begin with. We finally got through to Arcadia Bay civil services, and had them put a hold on all road construction in the area. C-Rex shouldn’t be attracted to the coast anytime soon.”

“Road construction?” Joyce asked with a curious look.

Monique continued staring plainly at the menu. “Crustaceous Rex eats tar.”

“Tar?” Joyce mockingly scowled. “Well I certainly hope you two young ladies have better appetites!”

It was a good sign, Monique remembered, that Elsie at least hadn’t been looking at the menu with judgement or wariness. “I’ll have… starfish pancakes, two slices toast, please,” the redhead announced cheerfully.

Monique arched a brow. “Not the crab cakes?”

“Feels a little insensitive.”

Max drifted awake in the coral-pink glow of Chloe’s room in the morning.

Is it… Wednesday?

No… yesterday was Monday. It was still only Tuesday, now. It was just… confusing. She didn’t smell like chlorine. And Chloe had an arm across her stomach.

And she had soooooooo many texts.

Dog… those monsters? It was all… real?

She realized, then, she had to pay attention to things now. She had to pay a lot of attention. Things were going to very different on this loop and… maybe loops after? Max still wasn’t sure how giant monsters had shown up out of nowhere on Monday, just a few minutes in, when she hadn’t even done anything yet. She’d only texted Warren about HEAT, she’d never even actually called them…

Shit, I was supposed to call HEAT!

Just as she looked back her phone, another notification dinged, sending her thoughts into a frenzy as the words registered.

[They’re here?]

[I didn’t, but thx, Warren. Tell them I’ll be right there.]

[Is Brooke with you?]

[Just an educated ;) guess.]

Max didn’t like the idea of waking Chloe, but the clock was ticking. She couldn’t believe she’d wasted a whole day already! Using her powers so much must’ve really taken a lot out of her. But there was still time…

She started to gently shake Chloe awake, and when that didn’t work, frowned and started being not-so-gentle. “Chloe? We need to leave, Chloe!”

“…R-r-rachel?”

Max felt her heart sink, causing a chain reaction when Chloe saw the state of her face and immediately lost her sleepy smile. She looked on the verge of crying again, but at the last second it twisted into anger, then fizzled out with a sigh.

“Chloe?” Max half-pleaded, knowing it was inconsiderate, but she couldn’t afford to wait any longer. “Would you… be able to drive me to Blackwell now? I wouldn’t ask, but it’s literally about stopping the apocalypse.”

Chloe pouted overdramatically. “No food?”

“I’m really, really sorry…”

“Fine,” Chloe relented, a half second before they both would’ve inevitably broken into smiles. Chloe rolled out of bed with most of her usual gusto, and before either of them knew it, the sound of both her truck doors slamming closed heralded a mission in the making.

“They’re called the Humanitarian Environmental Analysis Team,” Max began as they set off down the road. “That tornado I mentioned? On the last loop, I put out a call for anyone who might have experience dealing with similar time-related weather phenomena, and HEAT were the ones who answered. Somehow, they’re here on this loop without me even doing anything, like they got… sucked in, just because they got here at the end of Friday last time. Hopefully, with their help, we can come up with a real plan to deal with the storm.”

“…And, I assume, figure out what all those giant monsters roaming around Arcadia Bay have to do with any of this?”

“That too.”

“And, on the way there, you can tell me all about Max’s first time! Getting to know me again, that is. Since, you know, I wasn’t around for it… unless, wait, did we?” She shook her head quickly. “Not that, never… nevermind. Unless we did, in which case, I need to know all the deetz!”

“No, no, Chloe, we…” Max’s smile dropped as she saw a flash of… something, in Chloe’s eyes in the review mirror. “Not for lack of want, I just… I haven’t been in the mood.”

“Not for lack of—” Tires screeched. “I mean, what? Why… why not?”

“I’ve been a little busy saving your life,” Max countered with an eye-roll and a smile. Chloe looked skeptical, so she sighed and added what she hoped would suffice for the rest. “It also… always feels like it’s a little too soon after Rachel.”

Chloe silently nodded. “You might be right, there… but I hope you know, timelines or not, for me it still feels like I’ve loved you for a thousand years, Max, so don’t hold back on my account. It’s enough… it’s enough to know you feel the same.”

Max did know, from what must’ve been a hundred conversations that had brought them here. It still hurt to hear Chloe’s voice break like that.

“So,” Chloe deflected with impish glee, “How did we meet again after five years, before you were saddled with the gift of foresight? Or…” Her renewed positivity faded fast. “…or, you’ve totally had this conversation with hundreds of other me’s, haven’t you? Must get a little old after a while, huh?”

“Yeah…” Max let out with a wince.

They rode in silence for almost a full minute.

“We really met in the Blackwell parking lot,” Max began. “You never saw me in the bathroom, and I didn’t even recognize you with the new look. I was getting hassled by Nathan, and you drove up and almost hit him with your damn truck.”

“Just almost?” Chloe let out a fit of laughter. “Are you sure? That doesn’t sound like me…”

“I was kind of in the way,” Max giggled. “I have to assume that’s the only reason. I was a little dazed, climbing up to lean on your hood, but seeing you face-to-face through the windshield… it was a pirate reunion at first sight.”

Walking up the side steps into the main Blackwell campus courtyard, even destroyed as it was, still gave Max a comforting sense of familiarity. Especially when she saw Justin and Trevor hanging out by the main steps near the road.

Until she remembered what day it was.

“Huh?” she exclaimed aloud, rushing over to the pair with Chloe in confused, jogging step. “No Two Whales today?”

The skater boys exchanged a curious look. “Nah,” Trevor spoke carefully. “We were gonna, especially since now, classes are cancelled while everything that was totally trashed gets fixed up, but we figured with all the giant monsters running around, it was safer to hang around here.”

Oh. Max was probably going to have to factor that in to other changes she noticed going forward.

…Wait, why is Blackwell safer than anywhere else?

Before she could ask, a cheer and loud rolling wheels on the pavement cut into the catchup conversation the boys were having with Chloe. All four of them stepped aside as a man Max didn’t recognize shouted with wild abandon, tearing down the sidewalk on a land windsurfing board, complete with sail. He wore a teal jacket, with thick white stripes out over the shoulders and down the sleeves, over a white tee, dark grey shorts, and tennis shoes. His skin was medium brown, and his dark hair was tied into short braids, currently blown back with the wind as he rounded a sharp sidewalk corner by adjusting the sail.

“Who’s that?” Chloe asked first.

“One of the new people,” Justin confidently clarified.

It took Max a moment. “Wait, you mean HEAT? The scientists? One of them’s a skater?”

“A totally retro skater,” Trevor said, crossing his arms, “such a showoff.”

The strange man zigzagged back through the courtyard, then jumped the steps at the far side, ramping off an intact piece of flat awning from the shaded breezeway and disappearing into the courtyard behind the dormitories.

“Guess that’s where we’re going too,” Chloe gestured with a hooked thumb. “Later, skaters.”

“While, wild-child!” Justin and Trevor waved goodbye, already in Max’s proverbial rearview as she made her way toward the dorm building.

The farther sidewalk, the one that ran across toward the view of the Tobanga, was crowded with a small gathering of students, but the jacket-wearing man had diverted onto the diagonal, now standing with his board at rest near the shadow of the graffitied tree.

“Wh-whoa! Holy shit, Max!” Chloe grabbed her shoulder, directing her attention up the hill instead.

There were trees down from yesterday’s monster invasion, but the object of Chloe’s – and in hindsight, the other gathered students’ – attention was the protruding silhouette of several rows of reverse-shark-fin bony plates. Max spotted where the plates shrank to stubbier spikes along the inert tail that curled in front, and followed the other end to a lizardlike head, the profile similar to a steam engine with an underbite jaw and some spiky ridges flaring out below the mouth corner. The scales on its body were silver-grey, countershaded like a shark with a purple tint on its underbelly and a stunning cobalt blue in the reflectivity of its back plates. The creature’s eyes remained closed, but its nostrils flared with activity.

Alive.

Another monster was sleeping just up the hillside.

Max took a photo, and then stopped to worry. “Why… why is everyone acting so normal about this?”

“I think that’s… Zilla,” Chloe identified carefully, then rolled her eyes and slapped herself on the head. “HEAT, duh! That does sound familiar!”

“Huh? Chloe… what?”

“He’s one of the ones who’s weirdly cool with humans. I remember reading about him traveling around the world with some science team, like their personal pet, or bodyguard.”

Max nodded along, processing all that and then giving this… Zilla another, still nervous but fonder pass at observation.

Glad to see someone’s keeping watch over Blackwell. I’m pretty sure we need it…

By the lack of screaming, the other students seemed like they’d gotten used to the giant iguana’s presence. Most were busy snapping pictures with their phones, but Daniel DaCosta was drawing in his sketchbook from his seat on the bench, and Evan Harris was leaning over his tripod, setting up a more complicated shot. Confident that things would be okay for now, Max headed over to the mysterious HEAT member, who appeared to be smiling fondly at all of Zilla’s new fans.

“Excuse me, are you with HEAT?”

“You got it!” the man said, with seemingly endless energy given how many people had probably already asked what he was doing here. “Randy Hernandez, High-performance Environmental Action Team!”

Walking up beside Max, Chloe turned to her with a side-eye. “I thought you said it stood for—”

Randy waved a quick, playfully disappointed hand. “Yeah, yeah, no one knows my acronym was first. And hey, Nick doesn’t always get it right either.” He put up a conspiratorial hand to whisper. “One time? He said ‘Ecological.’ Super embarrassing. So, uh… what can I do for you?”

“I’m Max Caulfield.”

Randy frowned, and his eyes went ghostly. “You saw the storm too?”

The words still struck her with surprise, even though she should have known she was about to hear some variation. “Every week.” Max managed a half-dark smile. “This is Chloe, she’s with me. I’d like to get a conference going with your team as soon as possible.”

Randy scratched his head awkwardly. “Monique and Elsie are in town dealing with a monster sighting from last night, and Nick went out in the chopper to try and find where the rest of our uninvited guests are hiding out. Mendel’s still… somewhere around here, working on NIGEL, but I’ll give the others a call to get back pronto. It’s been a long fourteen years wondering if we’d ever get any answers. We’re operating out of the science lab, you can set up whatever you need there. I’ll bring everyone together as soon as I can, and you better explain everything.”

Max sighed, a little annoyed at any delay, even a minor one. “Sometimes, it feels like I’ve been waiting just as long. I’ll be there.”

Randy pulled out a communicator that looked like an old, blocky, military olive green flip-phone, and Max and Chloe stepped away as he began chatting up whoever was on the other end.

Chloe slapped an eager hand on Max’s shoulder. “So now that we have some time to kill before your big meeting—"

But Max’s eyes had wandered up to the dorm building and its tower. “I need to go see Kate.”

“Okay,” Chloe stepped back, startled. “I’m the one you’re breaking time and space for, but the first moment we get to ourselves, you’re all over some other—”

“Chloe!” Max pleaded. “I… I don’t even know if I have to. Everything’s so… so different, I’m sure Blackwell has plenty of other things to talk about now, and there’s no classes, so no having to face everyone today, but… it’s Kate. I’m sorry that it’s… not really my place to be able to tell you any more than that, but can you please, please just trust me, especially on this?”

She expected anger, or more hopefully, reluctant concession, but Chloe’s eyes just looked… kind of hurt, kind of exhausted, but mostly apologetic, without any fight in them.

“Look, Max? I’m just saying shit. I know you’re the expert here, and pretty much everything you say is gonna be right. I’m just not… real happy about that, just yet. I’m annoyed. But if you’ve gotta talk to Kate, then you’ve gotta talk to Kate. That’s Kate Marsh, right? She’s cool.”

Max took a long breath, relieved but still feeling guilty. “Thank you, Chloe.”

From around the corner near Samuel’s shed, Victoria Chase watched with a suspicious eye as Max and… Chloe, was it? marched up the recently-cleaned front steps and into the dorms.

What the hell is she up to now?

[Just overheard some weird shit re: Max Selfie]

[Some meeting with the lizard freaks going on in the science lab soon]

[Any of that spy camera tech come with microphones?]

Victoria stared at her phone. She honestly hadn’t expected him to be on board so fast. Nathan had been… distant, lately, and as soon as Victoria had started typing, she’d realized she couldn’t really put into words why she was so determined to find out shit about Caulfield. There wasn’t anything obvious to be gained from it other than finding the truth for its own sake, satisfying her own curiosity. Something Juliet Watson would be all over, but Victoria Chase would have trouble justifying if confronted. She didn’t get obsessed, she played others for their faults, with the cards in her own hand carefully hidden.

Maybe that was it – the infuriating idea that someone else might, in fact, hold all the cards now.

That Caulfield might.

That Max. Fucking. Caulfield, shy hipster extraordinaire, was at the center of something that meant she was suddenly all buddy-buddy with a respectable – if perhaps not entirely professional – research team that studied pseudo-kaiju like the ones that had just turned life at Blackwell upside down. And that whatever the big secret was, it sounded like there was another layer even past that.

Kate’s room was… better.

Relatively speaking. The clothes on the floor were still there, and the mirror was still covered, but the blinds were at least open to let sunlight in, and Kate looked up when Max entered. She saw Kate look at Chloe a moment before the door closed.

“Hi, Max, it’s good to see you,” Kate said, looking at her instead once they were alone. The sentiment appeared genuine, but Max was still on edge, especially when Kate looked closer at Max’s face and started to frown. “Is something wrong? You look… intense.”

“No, it… it’s just been a rough couple of days,” Max admitted without admitting.

Kate nodded faintly, something flashing in her eyes. “Who’s with you? I think I’ve seen her a few times before…”

“That’s Chloe,” Max said, smiling a bit on instinct.

“The Chloe?” Kate was momentarily wide-eyed, even deeply stricken and unsure, but suppressed it. “Chloe Price is… is your Chloe? That’s… that’s… so, you finally talked to her?”

Max nodded, sitting at the edge of the bed while Kate turned the chair to face her. In that time, Max caught a glance at Kate’s desk, spotting a new drawing in that dark, messy pen-line style. It was King Cobra, but with his fangs, clawed frill, and overall more demonic features emphasized. Chloe would’ve probably loved it on a shirt, but here…

“It’s good that you have a friend now.”

Something in Kate’s smile set Max even more on edge than her wary consideration of Chloe. “You’re my friend too, Kate. I’m always here for you, if you ever need.”

“I know,” Kate said like an admission. “That was so amazing how you found me yesterday, under the bench. I was so scared…”

Kate was shivering at the memory, and Max couldn’t resist any longer. She stood up, and found the action immediately made Kate drop the hesitance in her shoulders and fold into Max’s arms. She heard a few sobs, and felt Kate’s arms warmly returning the hug. It didn’t last nearly as long as Max wanted it to.

“I think I really needed that.” Kate wiped tears from her eyes. “You always make me feel so blessed.”

“Anytime, Kate, I mean it,” Max offered, then furrowed her brows. “How are you, after yesterday? I hope Victoria wasn’t too much trouble…”

“She can be a… a not nice, sometimes, but she was good to me then, more than I thought she would be. I feel like maybe you had something to do with that.”

At Kate’s little fiendish smile, Max couldn’t help returning it.

But Kate sighed, now retreating a little again. “Maybe I’m only saying that because no one at school is talking about the video anymore. But… my family already saw it, and…” she looked up with pleading eyes. “I know that wasn’t me. Would you believe me, if…”

“I believe you, Kate. The things they were saying you did…” Max shook her head firmly. “You wouldn’t have done that, not unless you were… poisoned, or drugged out of your mind.”

“I think that’s what happened!” Kate snapped, like she’d been hoping someone would believe it for a while, and Max knew she had. “But… maybe it doesn’t matter.”

Max stared. “It… doesn’t?”

Kate put on a smile. “I know it… it’ll pass. Maybe recent events have put things in perspective. I’m just happy we’re all safe and no one got seriously hurt yesterday.”

Max’s relief was uncertain. “That’s… a good way to look at it. But I do believe you, Kate. And I’ll prove it, as soon as I make sure everyone’s safe.”

Kate giggled. “I like your confidence, Max. But you are the real Blackwell hero, after all, at least to me. I believe you.”

Max went in for one more hug, hiding her face in Kate’s shoulder so the other girl couldn’t see the pain and treasured love in her broken expression. And just for a moment, a hurried press of arms and a curl of Kate’s neck closer into her own, it almost felt like Kate was returning the embrace with the same sense of loss and desperation.

“Be careful, Max,” Kate insisted when they parted. “It looks like you haven’t had much sleep.”

“I know,” Max waved off, faking an embarrassed smile.

Kate’s smile looked genuine, her mood truly improved, but Max still spent a moment staring into the surface of the closed door after her, as if it would offer answers.

“Not getting your friend in on this?” Chloe half-whispered, half a question and half a strongly implied Earth to Max.

Max slowly shook her head, and started walking back down the corridor with Chloe at her side.

“It never seems like it takes all too much to convince her,” Max spoke softly. “But then I find her later… it makes her really conflicted, with her faith, and all, she just tries to hide it. She puts a lot of trust in me, but it’s a lot to ask of her.”

“You’re bringing me in, right?” Chloe asked only a little nervously. “Cause I’m totally on-board with Super Max. I’ll even be your sidekick!”

“Absolutely, Chloe,” Max giggled as she bumped Chloe’s shoulder, hoping the gesture felt as natural as all the earlier times. She let herself get a little nervous next. “But there are a few other people I’d like to be there when I explain everything, since they’ve been helpful a couple times before.”

“Building a hero team already? Anyone I know?”

“Warren, Brooke, and Ms. Grant. They usually catch on to the time travel logic faster than anyone else I’ve tried.”

“Huh.” Chloe seemed a little struck. “Haven’t talked to Ms. Grant in a while. That’ll be weird. Good weird, I hope. Maybe she’ll be impressed?”

When they exited the dorms, the commotion had grown, as a scientist with ginger-orange hair in a beard and ponytail followed a yellow rover robot along the sidewalk and through the crowd.

“Everyone step aside, please. Science in progress.”

The man was wearing a yellow turtleneck with brown slacks, and overtop, a white lab coat that hung loose off his semi-round, semi-slouched frame. The robot, Max recognized as the one that had been sent flying off the boat in the storm. Looking similar to an automated space rover, the yellow machine rolled forward on a set of treads, but had a single motorbike wheel at front. Part of the yellow frame stood tall like a rounded archway to wrap around a horizontal, dark gray tube that made up the bot’s upper section, widening to a tank or canister shape as a counterbalance in the back and staying narrow where it extended forward to connect to that round yellow head, with multiple eye or sensor lenses and a filter mouth. Max could see two thin arms attached behind the base of the archway, and a third larger one mounted behind the treads like a backhoe shovel, but it looked like there might be at least two more extendable limbs still folded along the robot’s sides.

Both of them stopped at about the middle of the path, the man tapping on an unfolded palm computer to get the robot to make a ninety-degree turn and face up the hill. “Rest assured, students, as I, Doctor Mendel Craven, have assembled the ideal ambient sound regiment to ensure Zilla will remain calm and passive during the course of our stay.”

Dr. Craven was slightly more of what Max had imagined, if a bit dramatic. He’d introduced himself with a hand to his heart, but otherwise seemed absorbed in that palm-computer and shy of eye-contact, probably pretending to ignore the crowd around him as much as he could.

“Uh, hey, might want to step back,” Randy urged, walking among the students with his palms up and eyes nervous despite a shaky smile. “The doc’s inventions and the big guy? Don’t really mix.”

Now Dr. Craven looked up, eyes splashed with ire. “I’ll have you know, I calibrated this composition perfectly!” Looking Randy dead in the eye, he pointedly tapped down at a control, which caused the robot to jerk to life again and start climbing the hill.

A few splinters of broken branches crumpled under the treads, but otherwise the robot’s ascent was unhindered. Halfway up to the mostly-intact tree line, it started playing a mellow, folky guitar rhythm that had Max faintly nodding her head. It was the sort of thing she would listen to.

Zilla’s eye popped open just a bit, revealing amberlike orange with a black slit pupil. Even from a distance, Max noted the pupil flickering with curiosity toward the source of the noise.

“Calm!” Dr. Craven said coldly, probably both a command and a statement of demonstration.

Without warning, Zilla’s curled tail flicked a little to the side, sending a spray of debris up into the air, arcing over the trees and down toward the foot of the hill. The main object, a large boulder easily five feet in diameter, fell directly onto the robot, crushing it down the middle with a sharp edge and sending a few pieces of mechanical arms flying. One of several smaller rocks kicked up by Zilla’s tail skipped off the sidewalk and flew into the crowd.

“Ouch!” Someone screamed.

Max immediately recognized Alyssa’s voice, the purple-haired girl stumbling and clutching at her shoulder, appearing as though she were horrifiedly registering an intensely painful injury, possibly a fractured bone.

Zilla’s reaction to the human cry of pain was to crane his head up off the ground, eye shocked wide, like the cat that hadn’t realized the glass would shatter when it pushed it off the counter, but Max was already pulling at time to wind it backwards. She watched the smaller rock skip in reverse, then jump up along with several others and the large boulder, as if all catapulted on converging trajectories toward the spot on the hill where Zilla’s tail was curling back up around him.

Max rushed over to Alyssa, tapping on her shoulder. “Alyssa! Move!”

“Um… sure, Max,” Alyssa agreed, like she usually did, while giving Max a very weird look.

“Uh, Dr. Craven?” Max shouted a little less surely. “Move your robot back! Now!”

Startled at being addressed, Dr. Craven stared blankly for a moment, but shrugged a little and tapped at his keypad. The robot stopped, reversing its treads and starting to back up down the hill, just as Zilla’s tail flicked.

The boulder landed with the same sharp edge pointed downward, sinking into the ground and planting itself in place, only rocking enough backward to stop an inch shy of the robot’s filter-nose. The smaller rock deflected off the sidewalk, and hit no one as it landed at a skip-and-roll through the grass closer to the dorm building.

Max let out a quick breath of relief.

The incident seemed to get Randy’s message across to the other students, and slowly, the crowd began to thin out.

Alyssa was still looking at her weird, but there was gratitude there too. “Thanks Max, that was… you know, you look really—”

“Intense?” Max rolled her eyes. “Just… tired. And happy to help.”

“Okay…”

As Alyssa departed with the other students, Max walked back over to the remaining, smaller group consisting of Dr. Craven, Randy, Chloe, a starstruck Warren and Brooke who looked like they were all over the roboticist and his returning creation, and now Max herself.

“How… how did you know that was going to happen?” Dr. Craven asked, dumbfounded.

Max took one more glance to make sure they were the only six people (and one robot) in earshot, and shrugged. “I reversed time.”

“You… reversed time?” Craven repeated with an arched brow.

Max nodded.

Craven looked thoughtful, then shocked, then blissful as he patted the robot softly on its metal head. “You reversed time… to save NIGEL?”

Max was taken aback a little by the scientist’s change in tune. “I… guess?”

Randy darted around behind Max to stand at her other side, gesturing at her with layed-out palms. “This is Max Caulfield. I think she’s gonna be your favorite.”

Craven’s reaction notably wasn’t as darkly haunted as Randy’s had been, but he seemed stricken nonetheless. “We’ll have to coordinate our findings right away!”

“I’m only explaining it once. When your team gets back.” Max shared a nod with Craven, then turned to Warren and Brooke. “You two can join in if you want. You’ve been some of my go-to experts on this stuff for… a really long time.”

Warren looked super hyped. Brooke looked skeptical and expectedly salty, but intrigued.

“Who’s Nigel?” Chloe asked, looking back and forth.

Craven had a glint in his eye, immediately gesturing to the robot. “Only one Next-millennium Intelligence Gathering Electronic Liaison.”

Chloe’s eyes went adorably skyward, her lips moving as she worked out the acronym. “Nmigel?” she said aloud, and seemed to delight in ruining Craven’s mood immediately.

“That’s what I said!” Randy gave Chloe finger-guns and a smile.

Chloe laughed. “Sure thing, Hpeat.”

Randy froze, thought it out, and ended up joining Dr. Craven in an identical crossed-arm glare. Max quickly snapped a photo of the two of them side-by-side, causing them to startle, and then glare at each other with the same intensity.

Michelle Grant was busy updating the hallway bulletin boards with class cancellation announcements when she heard light footsteps.

“Hey, Ms. Grant. Are you busy?”

She started to smile as she turned towards Max’s voice, but dropped it to worry once she saw the girl’s face. “Max Caulfield? Are you alright?”

There was a hint of an eye-roll, but it disappeared immediately. “I’m fine, Ms. Grant, just… didn’t get enough sleep.”

“I’d think my favorite student would know better,” Michelle playfully scolded. “And no, I’m not too busy, having been kicked out my classroom and all. Not that I’m bitter. It’s a pleasure to host such a renowned team of scientists, even if I’m not too sure about their guest outside.”

Max winced a little. “I’m actually putting together a presentation for HEAT today, in your classroom, once they’re all back here. I’d like for you to sit in, if you can.”

Huh. Well that was a surprise. “I did hear they were asking about you. But my, my, my favorite student already a teacher! What’chu have to teach us, Max?”

There was something feisty and full of life in Max’s smirk. “Something you once told me that if it was about it, I should sign you up.”

Michelle knew she was wearing one of her very confused smiles, but it was just as warm. “Something tells me this’ll definitely be worthwhile then. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Max frowned strangely at that, but she seemed to blink it away with another thought. “Oh, and Ms. Grant? Speaking of, if you’re still doing that petition, I would like to sign it please.”

…I knew there was a reason you were my favorite.

The front of the science lab had a wide, slightly elevated stage where Ms. Grant’s desk sat in the middle, with three chalkboards arranged together on the wall behind it. The one on the right was smaller, with the majority covered by the periodic table poster, but the main two were long and rectangular, easily spacious enough for Max to pick up chalk and a ruler and start drawing a basic timeline running just a little above the bottom edges.

With thick vertical dividers, she split the timeline up into five days, the middle three of equivalent length with Friday vaguely shorter and Monday only about a third the length of the others. At the very beginning, she made a smaller mark and labeled it 3:50 PM, then made another mark only a short distance along, labeling that one 4:04 PM.

“What’s that one for?” Chloe asked innocently, maybe just to put her voice to something since she’d been awkwardly watching Max draw for at least several whole seconds.

“That’s… when you get shot,” Max said slowly.

“Oh.” A long pause, then a faint, strained laugh. “Heh. 4:04: Chloe not found!”

Max almost laughed, but only at how morbid it was. It looped back around to being funny—as in, it was funny how much her heart hurt.

“Hey, so… is the whole class gonna know that’s when I died? Cause that’s a little…”

“I think they’ll have to,” Max muttered somberly. “I’ll… try to keep names out of it, or if I can’t, at least take a while to work up to it. That’s not the only thing I’m not completely happy about sharing. But maybe more significantly to figuring all this out, 4:04 is when I first unlocked my reset and maybe also my rewind, or… just when I discovered my powers as a whole. I’m marking down all the power times, as well as when all the apocalyptic signs happened.”

Max made her last note for Monday: another check at 6:47 PM. For Tuesday, she winced and marked 11:08 AM, then 6:41 PM. On Wednesday it was 5:30 AM, 9:21 AM, 4:15 PM, and 4:21 PM. She only put a single mark down for Thursday, that being 8:03 PM, and one for Friday, at 9:50 AM. Then, leaving just enough room for the time to be readable, she drew a squiggle that started small at the end of the line and widened into a squiggle tornado that ate up the right edge of the right board. She added a few lightning bolts around it for effect.

She’d just finished up when Warren and Brooke entered, the former gravitating to his usual seat three rows back on the hallway side and the latter taking the spot next to him. Instead of desks, the science room had black-surfaced lab tables, and HEAT seemed to have set up most of their equipment along the window side. Chloe gave the first two arrivals an awkward wave, while Max nodded absently and started writing in big letters at the top left corner of the board area.

“Chloe Price, what a surprise!” Ms. Grant exclaimed happily, the next arrival. “I saw the van pull into the lot and the chopper land on top of the pool building, so I think we’re about to begin.”

“Hey… Ms. Grant.” Chloe was even more awkward now, hands interlaced and held low as she shifted on her feet.

“She’s an old friend,” Max explained. “And kind of the key to all this…”

“A surprise to see you here at Blackwell,” Ms. Grant clarified, looking Chloe in the eye with a raised brow. “No surprise at all to find’ya in a room with the best scientific minds around. I always knew you had it in you, and I always wished I could’ve done more.”

“I… think you’re giving me more credit than I’ve probably earned, just yet,” Chloe stuttered. “But thanks… Ms. Grant.”

Ms. Grant took the table in front of Warren and Brooke, leaving the closest to the board for Chloe. Just then, a number of footsteps in the hall along with the roll of treads heralded the final members of Max’s audience, on approach.

In the lead, walking through the door first and looking half-impressed, still half-nervous at the presence of the others, was a tall man with short brown hair in parted bangs, a maroon red button-up hanging over a pale green shirt and army green cargo pants. “Dr. Niko Tatopoulos, radiobiologist and… let’s say, amateur storm chaser,” he greeted with a smile, like one authority on a subject might greet another. “You can call me Nick.”

Max supposed those with time travel experience were a pretty rare thing, overall. She smirked and took his hand. “Max Caulfield, involuntary chrononaut.”

“Did someone say cronut?” Randy called from behind Nick, his mouth full with the missing half of some kind of prepackaged muffin cake he was already scarfing down.

“As I’m told, you’ve met half my team already,” Nick waited as Randy and Craven crossed the room, followed by Nigel. “This is—”

“Dr. Elsie Chapman, paleontologist and animal behaviorist,” a middle-aged woman with a spring green sweater, brown slacks, and long, wavy, bright red hair stepped forward to take Max’s hand. “Since we’re making up titles too, let’s add on weather behaviorist and call it a day, shall we?”

The members of HEAT, as predicted, formed up in the desks along the window side of the classroom, leaving one last woman waiting in the door frame. She wore a velvety black sweater over a lilac turtleneck crop top and dark wash blue jeans, and her jet-black hair was in a cut only slightly longer than Nick’s, her eyes bearing inherent coldness and distance over lips stained with black lipstick. There was an air of mystery about her – in the well-lit hall, she’d somehow found a shadow to linger in – but what surprised Max most was how this woman met her on her level, in a much different way than Nick had.

“Monique Dupre,” the woman greeted in a thick French accent, a hint of surprise in her voice as she effortlessly read the multiplicity of haunting truths hidden behind Max’s faux smile and blank stare.

A silent understanding passed between them, the only two present who could fathom the gravity and despair that dwelt in this place. Monique carefully closed the door, then crossed the room to join her teammates, and Max stepped back to the center of the raised stage.

“And this,” she spoke toward HEAT, indicating the seats on the hallway side, “is my team. Chloe, Ms. Grant, Warren, and Brooke.”

Several members of HEAT still looked nervous. It was obvious they still hadn’t spoken to anyone outside a tightly-knit group about whatever they’d seen. Max knew the feeling, but the quicker they got the wheels rolling, the better.

Chalk between her fingers, she loudly tapped the board three times behind her. “What you’re about to hear,” she spoke loud enough to have undivided attention, “does not leave this room. Not that anyone would believe you, but it’s still important.”

It earned her a few weird looks, but she was leaving it at that. She’d already decided she wasn’t going to include Mark Jefferson or the dark room in the ‘course material.’ She’d solved that part of this week many times before, it was the storm she needed help with.

“With that out of the way, I now welcome you all to…” She turned around and pointed to what she’d written in the upper left. “…OTTER WEEK 101…” She turned back around with a wild smirk, but spoke plainly. “…a refresher course on the Arcadia Bay time loop.”

“Awesome!” Warren cheered, having been anticipating this. The outburst caused Ms. Grant’s skeptically narrowed eyes to briefly widen.

Brooke stayed skeptical as her eyes shot to the timeline Max had drawn, but shifted to worry soon after. “What’s that all the way at the end?”

Max glanced behind her at the tornado drawing, glanced back, and spoke in deadpan. “That’s the reason it’s a time loop.”

Warren’s eyes widened, his fist lowering. “Not… awesome?”

“Very not,” Max confirmed with a small nod.

Ms. Grant had graduated to intense concern, perhaps directed at Max’s wellbeing. “What are you saying, here, Max?”

Max looked up at the clock, then guesstimated a 10:00 AM mark on the timeline, where she drew a dense asterisk, followed by a down arrow from above that she labeled YOU ARE HERE. She then stepped over toward the Monday end and pointed.

“What I’m saying, is that here, at 3:50 PM on Monday, October 7, several hundred versions of this week ago, I had a vision in class about a massive tornado that would destroy the town. Since that week, the signs thereafter have been consistent, and are thus predictable.”

She stepped aside, and pointed at the last mark on Monday. “As you may have seen or heard, there was a snowfall last night at 6:47 PM. That was only the beginning.” She continued to walk down the timeline. “Tonight at 6:41 PM, there will be an unscheduled eclipse. On Wednes—"

“Not anymore.”

Max froze at Chloe’s interruption, turning around slowly. “What do you mean?”

Chloe, however, looked extremely embarrassed, glancing over her shoulder with a tense posture, as if only now reading the room. “Well…” she weakly pointed at the board, right where Max was. “It’s not an unscheduled eclipse, because now… it’s scheduled.”

Max’s eyebrow twitched, but she couldn’t hold in the laugh. “I guess you do have a point. Moving on, on Wednesday, animals around the bay will begin to die en masse, starting with birds falling out the sky at around 5:30 in the morning, and ending with a pod of whales washing up on the beach at 4:15 in the afternoon. On Thursday night, there will be two moons in the sky beginning at 8:03, all of this leading up…” Max moved out of the way of the storm drawing with lightning and struck chalk against it. “…to the storm’s arrival on Friday morning at 9:50 AM. It’s spontaneous, with no buildup, slow-moving to the point it looks like it’s standing still, but appearing right up close on the water when it’s already too late for anyone to escape. Swirling clouds, lightning, fog… it pulls boats out of the bay and whales off the beach to hurl them at seemingly specific landmarks. It leaves the town in tatters, a death toll in the hundreds, and vanishes just as quickly when it’s all over. I’ve seen all this, and can be here to tell the tale because waaaaaay back at 4:04 PM on Monday…”

Still standing near the storm, Max pointed with her chalk.

“…just fourteen minutes after my vision, I discovered I had the ability…”

In a light overhand throw, she tossed the chalk across the stage, letting it bounce anticlimactically on the wood. Smirking, she slowly walked over to where it had landed, but rather than pick it up, stood in place and rewound time to when the chalk was in the middle of its arc. Letting time resume, she swiftly caught the piece of chalk, twirled it through her fingers into her palm, and crossed her arms with a stern glare at the mostly-shocked room.

“…to control time. Any questions?”

Chapter Text

“…to control time. Any questions?”

Victoria had several.

Hidden unnoticed on a cluttered shelf in the science lab, the camera-microphone setup had a full view of the chalkboard and almost everyone’s seats, and an excellent pickup of Max’s audio from all the way at the front of the class.

In Victoria’s dorm room, with several bags of popcorn and wine glassed now abandoned half-full, Victoria, Taylor, and Courtney watched the live feed on the small phone screen with their jaws hanging open.

“That… has to be a camera trick, right?” Taylor spoke of the moment Max had thrown the chalk from one end of the stage and caught it from the other, appearing to glitch in position. “They’re fucking with us. They know what we did and they’re fucking with us.”

Victoria slowly nodded, not having the heart to remind them that yesterday, Max had done the same thing in person. Maybe they hadn’t even noticed, or they’d blocked it from their memories.

“Yeah, there’s no…” Courtney laughed off a chatter in her teeth. “There’s no way Max Caulfield is a literal god… right? Cause we’d, like, be totally screwed…”

“She’s not a fucking god,” Victoria snapped, because whatever she chose to believe here, she was pretty sure at least that much was true. “No one gets to just… escape all this life bullshit and be free from responsibility. Not even Max doesn’t-even-have-to-fucking-try Caulfield.”

“But what if she hates us?” Taylor cried, between the intermittent grind of her chattering teeth. She put her head in her hands. “What am I even saying? She does hate us! We always mess with her just because we can, and with all her friends, and Kate… fuck, Max is friends with Kate, we are screwed!”

“Only if this is real, which it’s not!” Victoria snapped, making Taylor wince with hurt.

Outwardly, Victoria clenched her fist. She didn’t mean to snap. Or rather she meant to, but she didn’t mean for it to affect Taylor like that. If she thought about it, it was easy to see what Taylor’s biggest fear was – simply vanishing one day, courtesy of Max, and thus leaving her mother alone in the hospital, no one left to visit her, worrying over what must have happened to her daughter.

Would Max… really do that? Did she even know or care about Taylor’s mother, or any of their lives outside being the big bad school bullies? Victoria frowned, then winced and shook her head.

It didn’t matter, because none of this was real, so there was no point in treating it like it was. She turned her attention back to the video feed, where the redheaded scientist she hadn’t caught the name of was asking about the whales, and Max didn’t seem to have the answers she was looking for. They exchanged a few more words Victoria didn’t catch because her mind was racing, and before she even realized, it was that semi-awkward brown-haired guy on the stage instead of Max.

“Zilla had just chased the Giant Jellyfish out of the New York Harbor – we called it a Giant Jellyfish, it was truly more of an amalgam of various sea creatures and arthropods, with a highly toxic jelly spewing attack. We were following along in the HEAT Seeker – Elsie, Randy, Monique, and I. Mendel had been feeling ill, and remained back at the Staten Island research facility.”

Nick let his gaze pass once again over his audience. All those years ago, the story he and his team had given Major Hicks was something fabricated, believable. They hadn’t told anyone but Mendel what really happened. Not even Audrey. But now, Nick was about to reveal the whole truth to several complete strangers, and the weirdest part of it was, there was a very real toss-up as to whether it was even the more fantastical of the two experiences being laid out on the table.

He reminded himself the hardest part was over. The subject of time travel was already at play in the discussion at hand. He almost shook his head at that, never having believed he would find himself with that kind of lead-in.

Briefly, his hand gestured to Max, who had taken a seat beside Chloe and now watched with eager, encouraging eyes.

“The storm was just as you described – from dark clouds to a full-on waterspout in seconds. Enormous, with lightning touching down all around it, kicking up fog from the ocean’s surface. We were already too close when it formed. Monique reported instrumentation failure almost immediately, and we were drawn into the system.”

Max paled. “You went inside the storm?”

“It was like its own, isolated section of the sea, lit up with near-constant lightning strikes. Walls of dense fog seemed to roll up and down the interior of the wind funnel, and obscured all sides. With instrumentation down, we don’t know for sure how long we were inside, but it happened fast, maybe sixty seconds tops. Monique set us a course, and the denser fog seemed to roll away, letting us back out into open water.”

Taking Max’s ultra-focused intensity as a good sign, Nick nonetheless sighed and quietly braced himself. Now for when things get weird…

“After a few minutes on the outside,” he continued, “Randy reported the return of instrumentation, with the exception of radio communications. Or, we initially assumed it was an exception. Truth was, the radio was working fine, there just weren’t any radio signals out there to pick up. Sonar had also failed to re-establish a lock on either Zilla or the jellyfish, and we spent about two hours sailing close to the storm’s vicinity in a sweeping search pattern. During that time, we observed that the storm was maintaining an exact position on the ocean without drifting in any direction. Elsie suggested Zilla might have returned to his underwater lair near our research facility, so we headed in that direction, encountering standard atmospheric fog from then on.”

“Basically, the lab was trashed,” Elsie thankfully picked up at his hinting, drawing the room’s attention to where she was seated at the front window desk beside Monique. “But the real kicker was the kelp and algae we saw in Zilla’s underwater lair once we got the camera feed back online. In short, it would’ve taken decades to reach that growth stage, and it certainly hadn’t been there when we left. That was our first real clue…”

“And the next clues were gull-wing car doors making a comeback and a theater that got trashed in the middle of showing Ghostbusters 10,” Randy cut in with crossed arms.

“What all this means is that the storm sent us forward to the year 2022,” Nick quickly revealed. “We confirmed this with the human resistance fighters we encountered, including an older version of Mendel here, from whose perspective we had never returned from the sea that day we encountered the storm in 1999. We saw the ruins of New York City for ourselves, and learned that in that future timeline, the entire world had been overrun in the year 2004 by genetically created mutations called DRAGMAs.”

“Hold on, hold on, what?” Chloe stopped with frantic hands, her pencil having just snapped on the page in front of her. From a few jokes cracked earlier, Nick understood it was a rarity for her to be taking notes during a lecture, but she was filling that role while Max listened intently. “Okay, back up, what’s a DRAGMA?”

“Democratic Resurgence Against a Global Mechanized Armageddon,” Mendel explained. “Except there’s no evidence their creator, Jonathan Insley, actually consulted with others on the project, nor that the D.R.A.G.M.A.s were built with a way to attack technology specifically, without just wiping out the human race as a whole. So it’s kind of a misnomer.”

Chloe nodded. “Got it. Draagma,” she pronounced snarkily with the extra ‘a’ given emphasis.

“They exhibited traits of several ceratopsian dinosaurs, crossed with unknown arthropod DNA,” Elsie elaborated, “plus a few design elements that must have been custom implemented, like a five-limbed body structure, wing membranes that resembled dragons from western mythology, and a sulfuric-acid-based circulatory system. Somehow. They were highly adaptable, demonstrated unhindered triphibious locomotion, and based on the regenerative abilities Future Mendel described, I’ve privately suspected that at some point, Insley must’ve acquired a sample of Organizer G-1, or perhaps a less genetically aggressive alternative.”

“But then Elsie figured out we should try to travel back through the storm,” Randy cut in, “and guess what? It was still hanging around right where we found it. This huge DRAGMA chased after us though, managed to follow us in, but then the storm was like, wham, and a lightning bolt caught it right in the back, and it fell in the water. After that it was smooth sailing, almost like the storm was already disappearing once we decided to go back.”

“It did vanish in total once we we’d returned to 1999,” Nick continued, “dropping us right back into the same fight between Zilla and the jellyfish. We met back up with our Mendel, and managed to locate Dr. Insley’s lab on Long Island. We had to fight through Insley’s proto-DRAGMAs, with Zilla’s help, but we managed to destroy every last one, along with Insley’s research and project data.”

The wine and popcorn bags had been given attention once again. At least this part read more like a bad sci-fi movie than Max’s freak snowstorm fanfiction from earlier. Victoria was already mentally poking at plot holes, like how the hell they made eight more Ghostbusters movies between 1999 and 2004 if the latter year was when the world was destroyed. Unless it was one of those bullshit title things where they called it ‘10’ for some reason despite it not being the tenth film.

Max had listened to Nick carefully, taking in every detail. “So, were there two timelines, or three?”

Something troubled passed over Nick, a drop in his confidence. “Thought you’d pick up on that. We don’t know, and… try not to think about it. The best we’ve ever looked at it, it’s possible the four of us were originally supposed to die in the jellyfish battle, and then the HEAT Seeker would’ve been sunk and never discovered, so that would negate the difference between hypothetical timelines one and two. If sending us to the future significantly changed it…” he exchanged a look with the others on his team, some of which looked similarly troubled, “…that would open up a lot of questions that are complicated, and that we’re not sure we want the answers to. We’ve gotten used to the idea that everything that changed from the DRAGMA timeline to the current one was the result of us stopping Insley, and anything else is just wishful thinking.”

…Wishful thinking?

Max narrowed her eyes in thought, but Nick had moved on to another question Max was also eager to know the answer to.

“We also need to establish how we got here.” Nick looked at Max, clearly at a loss for answers. “From our perspective, we were dealing with a situation at Site Omega, also known as Monster Island South, when one of Randy’s web search algorithms picked up your S.O.S. We’d just made plans to investigate, when Zilla and the other mutations tumbled off the cliff in to the water next to us, and then… something… winds and a bright light, maybe an aspect of the storm itself appeared and swallowed up the boat. The next think we knew, we were drifting on calm waters out in the bay, trying to get our bearings, except then a few of the mutations resurfaced and started heading for the town.”

Trying to puzzle it out, Max could only shrug worriedly. “I… I’m sorry, I’m not sure I have a good answer. I sent that S.O.S. on the last loop before this one, and… well, I think you must have sailed all the way to Arcadia Bay that time, maybe you got the message later or maybe that was just how long it took, but in that loop, you were just showing up offshore when the storm was already here. But if you don’t remember then… when the loop restarted, you were somehow… caught up in it? Because you were here when it ended? That’s never happened before, people have left and showed up in Arcadia Bay and not affected the reset. Wait, did NIGEL start on the beach when you woke up, or was he on the boat with you?”

Mendel seemed to consider that an odd question, but recovered quickly. “On the boat.”

Max nodded. “Then it was an area effect, that somehow brought in the versions of you, the HEAT Seeker, and the nearby mutations that existed on Monday, even if you were across an ocean at the time. It doesn’t quite add up because you have enough memory to have gotten my S.O.S., which should mean you were also sent back in time by at least a few minutes or so. And I’m also still confused why the version of you that made the journey never sent any reply to the S.O.S. during that loop, or why no one even responded to it at all, or, come to think of it, why my parents haven’t sent me any worried texts about Blackwell being at the center of a mutation attack…”

Victoria absently checked her phone, not that she expected her own parents to care. They had, in fact, sent her a half-assed warning to be careful, no doubt pretending for just a moment to be a little concerned. Or maybe it just wouldn’t be good for publicity if their daughter got eaten.

After some quick searching, though, she couldn’t find any news articles pointing to the mutations’ appearance, barring local nonsense like The Bay Bud Weekly (which seemed especially vindicated for some reason) and Juliet’s trash rag The Arcadia Bay Beacon. Several national sources mentioned yesterday’s snowfall, however, which seemed a weird thing to focus on under the circumstances.

Max waited patiently in her seat as Elsie Chapman stepped up to the board next.

“First of all,” Elsie spoke with a nod directly at Max, “I had the most enlightening conversation outside the diner today, and I want to add something.”

Uncertain, Max gave permission with a small nod, but mostly with her eyes.

Elsie looked back at the board, pointing with her chalk at the Wednesday marks. “You have the whales, and the birds, but you’re forgetting…”

She walked all the way to the left edge, and a little bit above Max’s timeline, drew a horizontal arrow pointing off the side of the board. She drew a few duplicate arrowheads behind the first to emphasize distance, and wrote, to go with it, FISH DISAPPEARING.

Max blinked. “Oh! I… I never thought of that…”

Could that be from when I saved William? Or… did it not have to do with my powers at all?

“Just something to ponder,” Elsie said with a smile, then walked back to the storm side of the board, and drew a large Venn-diagram in most of the available space on that half. She labeled the left side 1999 (-2022) and the right side 2013. “What I’d like to assess is the seeming disparity between our two storm encounters. For instance, why was the storm acting mostly as a passive conduit for time travel when we encountered it, calm enough to sail right through it, whereas now, it’s throwing its weight around to tear up anything that gets close and wipe a town off the map?”

On the left side of the diagram, she wrote passive*, and on the right, active. Max supposed that asterisk was for the lightning bolt.

“I don’t think it’s unreasonable to at least consider that the storm has some sort of intelligence, or at least intent, and try to work out why it’s changed its behavior so drastically.”

“It’s always seemed obvious to me,” Max began, feeling uncomfortable, unnerved, and fearful. She coated her nerves in steel and pressed on. “The storm exists as a consequence of altering time. It gave me my powers, somehow, or… I guess I used to theorize my powers created it, but if it already existed before, then maybe they just… attracted it. Or they’re all part of the same thing. Either way, the storm is only here because I used my powers, so obviously one solution would be to go back to 4:04 PM on Monday and undo the change I made to the timeline, but I can’t stress this enough—”

“Maybe not obviously,” Randy spoke up, studying the board intensely. “If you had the storm vision at 3:50, and that’s where you reset to, it’s looking a heck of a lot like that’s when this whole thing revolves around. 4:04 might even be unrelated…”

“It’s not unrelated,” Max spoke solemnly, shy eyes voicing silent apology as she glanced over Chloe, who she realized was taking this all very… weirdly. “I’ve seen what happens in an unaltered timeline, as far as when the storm should’ve arrived, and it doesn’t. Undoing 4:04 stops the storm. But as I was about to say, we’re not doing that.”

…And why the fuck not?

Sure, if she was remembering the earlier conversation right, that was when Chloe had died. Big deal, one trash dropout for the whole town. Even if-if-if Victoria believed for one second this was about real life and not some made-up story, it should’ve been an easy decision.

She waited for… for anyone to disagree, to call Max out on the stupidest thing she could’ve said.

But no one did.

Warren, Brooke, Chloe, and maybe Ms. Grant, from what could be seen of the backs of their heads, looked like they might have at least pushed the question farther, but they were cut off by the faster responses from the HEAT members – complete and unwavering support and trust in Max’s judgement. Even Max looked surprised, dropping whatever seething vitriol she’d been composing as an attempted defense.

And Victoria was pretty sure no one had mentioned Chloe dying since before the others had even arrived, making it extra stupid. They didn’t even know what they were agreeing to!

“You’re the one with the powers,” Elsie insisted, smiling at Max’s surprise but offering bleak sympathy behind it. “You know time best right now, we’re here because you asked for our help. And we’ll put that down as another tentative difference, because as far as our experience is concerned, it looks a whole lot like the storm wanted the timeline changed.”

On the left side of the diagram, she wrote wants to change timeline(?), on the right, wants to preserve timeline(?), and in the middle, gives ability to change timeline.

“Unless we’re looking at this all wrong, and the storm doesn’t really have an opinion one way or the other.” She frowned, only half-noticing. “Maybe the storm is indifferent, and it’s human emotions that make choices and consequences seem cruel. Or it’s the reverse, and the storm really does just like messing with people. But the idea that it functions to preserve the timeline… doesn’t hold up, unless the DRAGMA apocalypse was something it made an exception for. I’d modify that to a kind of steward of the timeline, with the prerogative to make certain changes based on its own judgement, or the judgement of some higher intelligence or instinct. It’s not like the Earth doesn’t have other guardians that act independently on their own will, but serve specific functions. Or have the capacity to go rogue, which I’d say we should also tack onto that hypothesis, if we’re going to entertain it. Max’s description, compared to what we saw, certainly sounds like just that.”

Mendel made an audible gulp, then looked embarrassedly at all the eyes suddenly on him. “I’m sorry, but ‘we’re fighting a rogue god’ doesn’t exactly give me confidence.”

“That’s just one possibility,” Elsie countered. “Max, when you say the storm targeted landmarks, what exactly—”

She paused, because she’d caught Max looking up at the clock instead of paying attention – the blank expression that greeted her afterward did little to reassure her.

“…Max?”

“Sorry, Dr. Chapman, uh… what were you saying?”

Elsie worried her brow. “You seem a little distracted…”

“Does it have something to do with 11:08?” Brooke spoke up, eyes squinting in confusion as she examined the chalkboard.

Turning around, Elsie noticed the indicated time – not one of the ones Max had explained. She looked up at the clock herself, and saw that it was already almost 11.

“S-sorry,” Max mumbled, then stood up. “I need to step out for a bit.”

Chloe looked at her with obvious worry, but Max was moving quickly, the room silent except for the bubble of the fish tank and the door closing behind her.

Max sat at the end of the diagonal bench, longways, holding the umbrella handle with her hands in front of her knees, leaving it at just enough of a tilt that she could peer up at the dormitory roof. The rain was harsh, the air cold.

With the exception of Zilla, still resting on the forested hill, grunting occasionally but appearing unperturbed by the downpour, Max was alone out here.

And she hoped, this time, it stayed that way.

She hadn’t been able to get it out of her head, the idea of Zachary barging into the classroom to announce the news. Nevermind that it was a different classroom altogether and there weren’t any regular classes being held today.

In the end, Max didn’t end up alone, but she couldn’t complain.

Chloe splashed loudly along the path, then leapt up on the bench behind her, wrapping her arms and legs around Max to fold herself under the umbrella’s safe harbor. Her head nuzzled in over Max’s shoulder. There was rain in her hair.

“What happens at 11:08?”

Max just kept staring at the building. “I… I shouldn’t. Like I said, not for me to say.”

She felt Chloe faintly nodding. “So it’s about… Kate, right?”

Was I that obvious? “I don’t think it’ll happen now. Too much has changed.”

Chloe took a long breath, and a long pause, the silence weighted now with the things she’d heard in the classroom. “You could be over and done with all this…”

Max was waiting for that. “As far as I know. But I can’t do that, Chloe. I’d destroy the town first. I just… know I couldn’t live with that either. Which is why I’m still here.”

“Hundreds of times?” Chloe asked in gentle disbelief. “I know this week is… is a lot more than us hanging out at the Two Whales, and in the junkyard… and no matter what you say, I can tell you’ve had to go through a lot worse than collecting bottles for me.”

Unable to hold it in, they both chuckled a long laugh, together, at that one.

Chloe sighed. “You can’t just drop it on me that your stupid teacher—who I’ve never met, which is so fucking unfair and anticlimactic—is the villain in all this, who got Rachel killed… and expect me to believe this week isn’t hell for you. That you’re putting yourself through it again and again because… because I’m really worth that much to you?”

“If you die, Chloe…” After so long, Max still found tears. “…you die alone, with everyone in your life having left you, with the last thing you hear being someone shouting that no one would ever miss you… and with the one person who could’ve reached out to you having been too scared and nervous to even let you know I was back in Arcadia Bay. I don’t know what decision the storm expects me to make, but it’s not that. Never that.”

More silence, but Chloe sobbed another breath. “Max… I’ll alw—"

“Don’t say you’ll always be with me,” Max insisted, closing her eyes. “I mean… I would hope you meant it, but you shouldn’t feel indebted to me. I’m doing this because it’s how I feel, and because you deserve better. What you do with the rest of your life is up to you.”

Chloe hugged her closer, holding her that way for another minute or so while the rain poured, before shuffling just a bit to reach her pocket. “It’s 11:11. Good sign?”

Max reassured herself of the empty roof, and let out a breath of still-tentative relief.

But there was no Jeffershit outside the classroom today, waiting to show he was against Kate and prove to be the last straw in her hopelessness. That incident—how similar it was to any of Jefferson’s other victims, Max guessed she would never know—was the reason it had been at this exact time. Without it…

“Chloe… could you do me a huge favor?”

“Hang around here, just in case?” Chloe said, like she’d been ready and waiting, but Max felt a change to nervousness though their entangled limbs. “But uh, no offense, Maxipad, but that might be a little suspicious, right? Me in the dorms, being expelled and all…”

Max looked down, conveniently at the handle of the umbrella she was motioning to hand over. “They won’t… notice you on the roof.”

“The roof? Why would—”

Chloe froze, and after cautiously untangling herself from Max, absently fidgeted with the bracelets on her wrist. With a moment’s lingering, a moment’s understanding, she offered up a truly fond, warm, brave smile that Max had just turned to meet, and took the umbrella. “Sure thing, I’ll guard the roof, Max. Pirate’s honor.”

“Text me SOS if anyone shows,” Max whispered, moving at a slow start to back away off the bench because she didn’t want to stop meeting Chloe’s eyes.

Max re-entered the classroom to find Randy was now up at the front of the class. At the top of the board with the storm on it was now written PLAN? and below it, a short, bulleted list that read:

TOTS 2.0

BFGs

Max’s POT

She blinked. “I was gone for like fifteen minutes, what have you done?”

“Oh!” Randy greeted. “Howdy, Maxaroozers, we’ve just been brainstorming possible solutions to your tornado problem while you were gone.”

Max side-eyed Max’s POT again. “And how’s that going?”

“Not so bad! I think we’re already pretty close to an idea of how to fight the storm.”

Max could only blink again. “Fight… the storm?”

Randy narrowed his eyes. “That’s why you called us, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but… you say it so casually? Like this is something you do on a regular basis…”

Randy put on his not to brag face. “Well, I wouldn’t exactly say regular basis, but we’ve totally killed a tornado before.”

Max’s eyes went wide, just as Dr. Craven hopped up on the stage, a hand firm on Randy’s shoulder and a mirthful smirk as he took the spotlight.

“Which brings us to Plan A: a little something my dear colleague Randall has so helpfully dubbed Taming Of The Shrewster 2.0.”

It was like he was scoffing at the dramatic name, while also getting really into it.

“Ah, here he goes again…” Warren muttered from the crowd, though he seemed excited.

Dr. Mendel Craven had a wide, feet-planted, fist-clenched stance like he was about to break out into either a boxing match or a guitar solo, but he just started technobabbling with fire in his eyes and all the enthusiasm of a high-stakes rap battle.

“In our previous encounter with the Shrewster, a mutated masked shrew that had become fused with a tornado in a wind-nuclear-fission weather experiment gone wrong, I was able to construct a High-Pressure Infusion System, which vented high pressure directly into the twister’s low-pressure core, destabilizing it from the inside. To solve the current crisis, I’ve proposed that we build a similar device on a larger scale, packing an even bigger punch that will dissipate the time storm once and for all!”

Max couldn’t help but slowly crack a smile throughout the performance. She knew this was why she’d called them here, but… it was something else to see it in action. To see them working the problem, brainstorming what could potentially be actual, real answers.

Craven had ended his speech with a decidedly apropos fist struck into his palm, but Randy reversed the hand-on-shoulder gesture, his face declaring let’s not get ahead of ourselves. “But we also have to remember this isn’t any run-of-the-mill weather pattern. I know, I know, ‘all things are within nature, even if it’s a kind of nature we don’t understand yet,’ but for lack of a better word, this is a supernatural time tornado. Which brings us to BFGs, or the Big Future Guns.”

He picked up a piece of chalk and made a crude sketch of what looked like a high-tech blunderbuss with scopes mounted above and below the barrel.

“We still have some of these things stored on the HEAT Seeker, and in addition to being super effective against baby DRAGMAs, they’re also… time artifacts, or paradoxes, or something like that. Future Craven gave them to us in a 2022 that doesn’t exist anymore, so even just their existence in this time might be something we can figure out how to use against your storm.”

“In conjunction with the High-Pressure Infusion System,” Craven added, with an upturned snobby look and a finger in the air.

“But still,” Nick interrupted the squabble, not moving from the desk but giving Max a thoughtful look. “We’ve come to the conclusion that the best option we have right now against supernatural forces is probably going to be—”

Randy cut him off with a sharp tap on the board, his chalk ending up right at Max’s POT.

“Option 3: your Powers Over Time.”

“Ohhhh.” Max finally got it, and faintly nodded.

“Yeah, I was gonna say…” Brooke mumbled and trailed off.

“Please,” Ms. Grant scoffed, “no one in their right mind would dare accuse Max Caulfield of peddling substances—”

“Uh,” Max spoke up, suddenly awkward. “In a lot of timelines Mr. Madsen actually—”

“Didn’ch’a hear me say ‘in their right mind?’”

“Ohhhhhhh snap!” Warren fist-pumped. “Ms. Grant with the zingers!”

“I only speak what’s true.” Ms. Grant crossed her arms, but didn’t stop grinning.

Max returned the grin knowingly. “If I get David suspended, you tell him you ‘didn’t need a surveillance camera’ to see that one coming.”

“As helpful as this is,” Monique deadpanned aggressively, “I believe we were about to discuss the potential usefulness of your abilities?”

Ms. Grant calmed her laugh, and Max basked in the fleeting joy before getting solemn and moving toward center stage. Mendel and Randy retreated to their desk by the window, the former preparing to take notes.

“I’ve identified three, or… maybe five or six abilities,” Max explained, planting herself within arm’s reach of the chalk-drawn timeline, “some or all of which might just be different versions of the same thing, but for the sake of convenience, I gave them different names. The previously discussed event at 4:04 PM on Monday…” Max indicated that point on the timeline. “…is when I first discovered my powers as a whole, consisting of rewind and a possible variant of that called reset. When I rewind, I stay in the same place relative to the Earth, while everything else around me goes backwards. I can rewind up to a loose limit of five-to-ten minutes, and if I’ve moved position in that time, I can appear to observers as if I were teleporting. There’s also a bit of a fuzzy aura around that, where if I’m trying to be sneaky, people around me won’t notice me move, almost like their brains fill in the gaps or something. It’s just that at this point I usually don’t care much about being sneaky. When I reset, on the other hand, it starts off like a rewind but everything flashes white and I wake up again at 3:50 PM on Monday, back in my seat in the photography room. That’s the only time or place I can go to with reset, and it’s actually the first thing I did. I only started properly rewinding around… maybe 3:53 or something, a little after the first time I reset.”

“I already have…” Monique looked like her eye might be twitching. “…many questions, such as how any of that makes rational sense, even forgiven the concept of time travel, but for the moment, I suspect…” belatedly, she looked around at her teammates, her expression softening at the sight of collective nods. “…that we are eager for you to continue.”

“Okay, then.” Max gulped as she looked at the timeline once more. “Here, at 11:08 on Tuesday, I unlocked what I consider to be my second power: freezing time. It’s… pretty much what it sounds like, everything freezes still around me but I’m still able to move.”

“Like to stop a rocket from hitting your face!” Warren chimed in, awestruck.

“If… that situation ever came up in Arcadia Bay, then sure. The only thing to really note is that using the freeze seems to interfere with rewinding directly after it. The first time, it took almost seven hours to get my rewind back, but now it just keeps me from rewinding back through the point where time froze. I can still photo jump through it, though.”

“Photo jump?” Elsie asked, skeptical but curious. “Now, what exactly does that entail?”

Max pointed to Wednesday on the timeline. “It’s what I call my third power, even though it miiiight not technically be? Wednesday was also when I discovered that I kinda… can’t die? That if I’m about to die or, I assume, get an injury that would kill me, time just turns all grey, everything freezes including me, and the only thing I can do is rewind. I guess that’s a separate power, but I was kinda focused on the photo thing, since that happened right after.”

“You’re immortal?” Warren’s jaw dropped.

“And yet, you’re still more concerned with photography,” Brooke snarked – though, she actually looked impressed by that, go figure.

“’Focused,’” Randy contributed with a snide smirk, causing Max to think a minute, then roll her eyes.

Ms. Grant looked at first, aghast, then very concerned. “Max, how exactly did you die, or almost die, to figure this out?”

Dontmentionthebeansdontmentionthebeansdontmentionthebeans…

“Beans,” said Max.

Silence, as several people took turns mouthing the word beans.

“You died from… beans?” Brooke finally asked.

“No, I won’t elaborate.” Max turned around to point at the board. “At 4:21, I discovered through looking at an old polaroid photograph that by focusing on the image, I could send my present-day consciousness back in time to occupy my body from the time when the photo was taken. It only works if I, myself, was present in that time and place, suggesting it’s really more of a function of memory and the photo acts as a visual anchor point. When I’m, for lack of a better phrasing, ‘inside the photo,’ I only have access to a limited physical space, which is bordered by, like, a… orange glowy wall thing… and tends to scale to include my immediate line of sight or the dimensions of the room the photo was taken in – another thing that suggests it operates on memory. The third thing is that I only get about ten-to-fifteen minutes at the most to make changes before the whole space closes in on itself and I get sent back to a version of the present where any changes I’ve made have already taken effect.”

“That…” Warren shook his head. “It sounds like a can of worms. Maybe a can of wormholes…”

Max made one very emphatic nod. “Correct. I really, really try not to use this ability unless I absolutely have to, and I’ve basically sworn off going back to change anything that happened prior to the loop itself. I—”

She was cut off by the sound of a chair sliding on the floor, as Dr. Craven wordlessly stood back up from his seat. Randy rolled his eyes – he, Nick, Elsie, and Monique all seemed to know exactly what was happening. Craven took a piece of chalk, found an empty space on the board, and wrote, neatly:

Time Traveler’s Causation Bias

Max narrowed her eyes. “It’s not a bias, I did cause those things…”

“Yes, but that’s not what it’s about,” Craven insisted. “You’ve seen cause and effect in a way no human being is meant to perceive, like staring directly into an eclipse—which no one here should be doing tonight, I might add,” he demanded, taking an aside to wave the chalk like a stick at the audience. “You see the beginning and the end of the chain of events, juxtaposed in stark contrast, but you miss out on all the steps in the middle—and in doing so, take the fault and the blame away from every person who made their own conscious choices based on circumstances, placing it all on yourself as if it were your own intent from the beginning. Am I that far off?”

He wasn’t. In fact, he was scarily knowledgeable, a wild card thrown in when Max was just getting used to the idea that HEAT’s experience with changing time had been overwhelmingly positive and nothing like her own. It was like getting lectured by Nightmare Max, but from the opposite point of view, and now she kinda wanted to throw the two of them in a room together and see who won.

Max glanced briefly at the other members of HEAT, and realized she might have been wrong before. Monique certainly was in a class all her own, but the rest still looked back at Max with older eyes than they usually let on. They’d all seen things no one else would ever understand. Maybe the only difference between her and them was that they’d had each other.

She glanced at the present members of her own assembled team next, and found the beginnings of shocked sympathy, too, from minds that could process the idea of time travel to the extent they could probably guess at the kinds of things Max had had to deal with. She knew Warren would inevitably be skeptical at the idea of continuing the loop, and continuing to alter time in the first place. They all would, if she gave them long enough to ponder. But they would still help, no matter what decision Max made.

“We’ve all been there, kid,” Randy voiced softly, easing away the silence rather than breaking it.

He didn’t seem like he was going to say anything else, and neither were the others, but it was enough to get Max back on track. “It was… not a great experience, and I changed it back. But I learned that whenever I photo jump, the past self I leave behind will act as close to I did before as possible, even though I feel like I would either remember blacking out for a few minutes or have memories of thoughts from the future that I didn’t have before. But autoMax can be snapped out of it if, while I’m in the photo, I tell someone else to give me instructions after I leave. Then it’s… well, according to Chloe, she can definitely tell when I’m not ‘me,’ but it might just be because she’s Chloe and she knows me well enough. I’ve never been face-to-face with an autoMax, let alone a snapped-out one, so I wouldn’t know.”

Warren raised a hand. “You’ve never had me or someone else take video and show it to you?”

Max shook her head. “I try to avoid using that power altogether. It’s never really come up on a loop where you were helping me out. But, speaking of which…” She pulled out her camera, turned it around, and snapped a selfie, before adding the shot to her journal.

“Okay, so now, are you…”

Max smiled and shook her head at the question. “From my perspective, at least, I’d still have to live out all the time until I go back and inhabit my photo self, but I’m not planning on going back to this moment unless I have to. I just like taking checkpoints whenever I remember.”

Warren grinned. “I gave you that name for them, didn’t I?”

Max tried to think back. “Probably? Anyway that’s about it for my powers…”

She looked around the room, and beside Dr. Craven, who’d retaken his seat, found Monique looking like she had some sharp comment on her tongue. Max nodded at her to speak.

Monique bit down the sharpness, though, and spoke calmly. “That is all? You gained three core abilities on your first experience with this week, but none on the subsequent ones? Nothing further throughout hundreds of loops?”

Max timidly shook her head. “A few of them have changed or become more refined, like the freeze affecting my rewind less. And I’ve always sort of inconsistently been able to take objects back with me through rewinds. Like, on Monday in the first loop, I took a hammer in my hand back in time – it didn’t duplicate, it must’ve appeared like it teleported into my hand – but later when I tried to do that with a photo I took, it didn’t work. But then it worked for photos the rest of the week, and I even have photos in my journal right now that I took in a nightmare. Eventually I learned how to take objects through photo jumps and resets as long as they fit in my bag. But nothing really new happened after I first learned photo jump.”

“And why do you think that is?” Monique pressed.

“I… kinda figured my powers were just done,” Max admitted with a shrug.

Monique rolled her eyes. “Presume they are not, what could have changed? What key difference was there between the events of the first loop, and those of subsequent ones?”

“I… was experiencing things for the first time?” Max started to grow nervous. “I got my powers when… when things happened, during that week. Like discovering the death thing when I was about to die. It almost seemed like I got whatever ability I needed to, in order to react to what was happening. After the first loop, I already knew most of what could happen, and how to stop it beforehand. Besides reset, I didn’t even need to use my abilities nearly as much, since I could just act on foreknowledge.”

Monique cautiously examined Max, and again, pulled back whatever her next words would have been, softening them with practiced intent and sympathetic eyes. “Then I believe… we need to know under what circumstances you discovered the rest of your abilities.”

Max sighed. “I really—”

“We can ask the others to leave, if you wish,” Monique said delicately, apologetically, gesturing to Warren, Brooke, and Ms. Grant as she spoke, “but I do believe it is necessary.”

Max waved a hand as she heard someone from her side of the room starting to get up. “No, I… I can do it.” She paused, collecting herself. “It’s just… a lot.”

She took one last look around the room, finding curious and concerned eyes, most of them patient but attentive. Max gulped, and inhaled regret with a wince.

“…Okay. Okay. I… so, I want to make it clear, this is going to concern personal details about me, and about people close to me, and…” She looked at Warren, Brooke, and Ms. Grant. “…and for you specifically, about some people you might know. You’re about to hear things you won’t like. Even things you might feel obligated to report to authorities that are no longer relevant. I’m serious, if I say something, and you have to think ‘why didn’t you go to Principal Wells with this?’ the answer is probably that I tried, and it didn’t work.”

Ah, now it’s getting good…

Victoria smirked to herself, shifting to get comfortable on her bed with her phone close in her hands because Taylor and Courtney had stopped paying attention a while ago. She ignored the part of her insisting she was just about to hear another made-up story, in favor of the one clinging to Max’s every word, intrigued and frowning at the way Max’s distress and pain was visible even small-scale on the wide-shot camera feed.

“At 4:04 PM on Monday of the first loop, Chloe was shot and killed, right in front of me. At 11:08 AM on Tuesday, Kate Marsh jumped to her death, from the roof of the Blackwell dormitories. On Wednesday, there’s… not really an event, per se, but Chloe found out something about Rachel Amber that made us have an argument, which led us to the subject of her father who died in a car accident five years ago…”

Victoria felt suddenly sick.

Max was speaking fast, brushing over details, and Victoria had half-grown bored enough at having to re-hear the sadface punk story that she’d even started putting the pieces together on a technical level. Max got her first two powers from witnessing death, and her third was at least associated with one dead person, two if Victoria’s and everyone else’s suspicions about Rachel Amber were correct. And those deaths needed to be specific, important, because there was no telling how many people Max had seen die in the storm, and she obviously didn’t have a hundred more powers, so—

Kate Marsh jumped to her death, her mind repeated.

Oh.

That was where that sick feeling was coming from.

She wasn’t sure how long she lay there, chilled to her center, telling herself it was all fake and wouldn’t even be her fault if it wasn’t. It was apparently long enough for everyone in the science lab to get through their initial shock and horror. At least the first round of it.

“Chloe was at Blackwell on Monday…” the Brooke on the video spoke up, doing pretty well at hiding the shake in her voice. “So were you.”

Ms. Grant nearly exploded. “There… was a shooting on school grounds? God, Max… who shot her?”

Max was trying to leave out that detail, clearly, but with enough pressure, she relented.

“Nathan Prescott did.”

“No, the fuck he did not!” Victoria screamed aloud.

Taylor and Courtney looked startled, giving her wary glances, Taylor’s being a bit more immediately sympathetic. She’d spared them by turning down the volume, so neither of them even knew what she was reacting to.

Victoria sighed, shook her head, and shut off the recording app. It was all bullshit, some sick prank or whatever, and she wasn’t going to be dragged along any further.

It was fake!

She still needed a moment to breathe.

The hallway was empty. Victoria closed the door behind her, and leaned against it. The rain and cloudy sky outside the windows gave everything a dark, dreary coldness that only heightened the urge to curl her arms around herself and weep. She found her eyes wandering down the hall, to Kate’s door, and some part of her briefly entertained the fantasy of taking those five steps on the carpet and knocking, playing the concerned friend. Offering an unwarranted apology simply as a peace offering to confirm for herself that Kate was safe and alive.

Victoria shook her head, steeling her face into a scowl. It was all a lie, maybe intended to draw that exact reaction from her. Max had her going for a while, but she should’ve stopped before daring to suggest that Nathan would fucking shoot somebody. Where would he even get a gun?

Her phone dinged, and as she pulled it from her pocket, she found herself smirking at a fact she should’ve already remembered, that it was way past 11:08 already.

[It’s certainly an hour and a half of Maxine rambling about bullshit things that don’t make any sense!]

Shit, she should’ve made it sound less appealing. As ridiculous as it was, she didn’t really like the idea of Nathan watching something that accused him of murder. Victoria stood there, looking down at her phone.

I could just… delete the video, couldn’t I?

That was an option humans had, right?

But not Victorias, apparently.

What am I getting myself into?