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Book One:

The Illusion of Choice

Part Two:

Bae Over Bay, Interrupted

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October 11th, 2013 – Current Timeline (Evening)

At first there was darkness, then, ever so slowly, the light began to bleed through that shadowed veil. A throbbing beat pulsed through the world, yet there was no pain, only a tingling sense of numbness. The light grew, and with it, a cold crept in, easing over that numb tingling, until all that could be perceived was that soft white chill.

A hand had been below her shoulder, easing her off the pavement, its companion slipping beneath her other shoulder. Another pair of hands had gripped her, one at  her ankles, the other sliding under her left leg bracing it and wrapping around her knee. Those hands had held there, pulled there, bound there. Max had bucked and thrashed, and fought against those restraints as the icy patter of rain bled down in cascades upon her. Rivers of rain had sheeted down off from her rising form, hauled up against her volition; and she had screamed into the storm, screamed in frustration and in pain, as her leg roared in protest and her head pulsed under the fading pressure of time.

The cold persisted, although the light faded in and out, the world an inconsistent blur. Form coalesced from nothingness, then descended back within that same empty meaninglessness. That shifting form pulsed like the throbbing beat that had become life’s rhythm. In and out, focused and blurred, until at last the beat slowed, and the form held, and through the blurring light, a hallway took shape.

Max had continued to thrash and shake as those hands had bound tight to her, and then she had felt herself pressed down to a hard flat surface. Pain had run up through her leg, and she had felt the bruises knotting up over her trampled limbs. Then the restraints, the true restraints, came. She had felt them cinching over her legs and waist and a harness slipping down over her shoulders, and she had bucked against them, straining against the tightening belts.

Voices had rung out around her, screaming through the howling winds, and yet she had not understood them; heard them as little more than chaotic drumbeats in the cacophony of the surging crowd. All around her, a deluge of students and faculty, strangers and rescue workers had billowed about, a constant wave of panic ebbing beneath the growing intensity of the looming storm.

As the light dimmed and the hallway solidified around her, Max bolted up, and let out a great sigh of relief. She patted down herself down and found herself free of restraint. Yet the cold deepened, and she took note of how it washed over her back as she sat up and felt the naked chill of open air against the flesh of her spine. Max reached behind her, finding the loosely tied open-back of her garment, and as her focus faded in, she was greeted with the staple, multi-toned blue of the standard hospital gown that had replaced her clothes.

Realizing that she had been stripped bare of her garments and changed into hospital attire brought a blush to Max’s cheeks along with a rush of embarrassment and anger that she had lost such control of her person; that someone without her knowledge or consent had stripped her and then dressed her in this gown. She tugged it tighter, wedging it closed, as if somehow that meager act could remove the shame and violation that she felt.

It did not. Soon, the tears came, and the solidified vision before her blurred once more. She dabbed at her eyes, trying to will away the tears. She was stronger than this; had been through so much. She would not let herself cry at so simple a shame, so small a wrong. She choked back her tears, and dabbed some more, fighting to clear her vision. Yet her head swam in a great fog, and she realized that the drugs were still pulsing through her system.

The drugs? His drugs? No , she realized. Pain meds. Strong pain meds. 

Her leg no longer screamed, and the pressure in her head had dulled; she felt no pain, yet the world felt buried beneath a thick cloud, there but fogged over and soft. She willed herself forward through the haze, struggling to force form through the drug-induced mist. Try as she might, present and past blurred in that haze, and soon she sank back into that parking lot, and into the chaos of the storm, and the panic that had surged beneath those roiling clouds.

“Hold the bus, Ms. Ward.”

Max had been unable to see the speaker, but the voice had held a soothing authoritarian tone, an odd contradiction that had immediately helped Max place the voice to none other than Mrs. Grant.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can be,” Mrs. Grant had continued. “Okay?”

Max had not been able to understand Dana’s response. It had been drowned out by the rising patter of the falling rain. The storm had intensified since she had collapsed, and Max hadn’t known at the time how long she had been out; how long she had been crying in Kate’s arms before those EMTs had hauled her up onto the gurney. The world had been fractured, nothing more than snippets — flashes of cognizance and shards of broken time.

Yet Max had understood the storm. She had seen it raging above her, the dark clouds rolling in, flowing on the unseen wind, as their tears fell over Arcadia Bay. This was not the storm; not The Storm, but something different; something new, something that had boiled into a frenzy spurred on by  its own innate violence, its own bubbling potential of destruction. The wind had screamed through the crowd and lifted up on that gurney, and Max had been able to see through the chaos at last spotting the modest silhouetted frame of Arcadia Bay Hospital on the other side of the surging masses.

Tents had littered the parking lot, and makeshift beds had laid empty, or had fallen, discarded and tossed about in the winds. The parking area had become some sort of rescue zone straight out of a disaster film. Then there had been pain and grief, and Max had pushed up against those restraints once more until all logic and sense vanished on the cresting wave of loss and hurt. The parking lot and the hospital had become no more, stolen away as consciousness bled out, again.

One hand still cinching closed her loose gown, Max gripped the handrail of her gurney with her free hand, steadying herself and swallowing back the swirling cacophony of memory and fear seeking to dislodge her hold on reality.  The pelting rhythm of the torrential rain from those flashes of memory faded into the smooth pitter-patter of the distant softer raindrops of the present against the glass facade of the hospital entryway. She couldn’t see that windowed foyer, yet Max felt certain that it waited nearby.

Other noises mingled with the silky chatter of the quieting rain, forming a unique chorus in the hall around her. Max could hear the hum of medical equipment, and the ins and outs, of mechanical respiration as somewhere machines forced life into stilled lungs. Footsteps, hurried and purposeful, belted out a new drumbeat, while the gentle babble of voices whispered and shouted, mingled and melted together to form their own choral arrangement.

The visuals of the hall solidified once more, and spoke themselves of chaos come and gone. Multiple gurneys lined the walls on both sides of that hallway, breaking only to allow for entry into rooms, or for parking allotted to haphazard placements of medical equipment and crashcarts; yet more than half of those gurneys lay empty, soiled linens still haphazardly thrown over their vacated backboards or cushions. If a spare stretch of wall did peak out, unclaimed by gurney or cart, then more often that not a harried back leaned against it, the drenched and ragged form of some survivor propped there for a brief respite, or curled up where wall met floor, huddled into itself and seeking comfort in a tight ball of bandages, dirtied clothes, and hugged knees. Occasionally a nurse or a doctor marched through, yet Max could not tell one from the other. What color coordination or wardrobe might once have distinguished the delineation had long since fallen away, the scrubs all bloodied and dirtied and the illusion of hygiene long since discarded.

Nearest at hand, Max saw a heavily bandaged patient lying on his or her own gurney, few spots of skin or flesh visible without great effort. Where Max could make out person from bandage, the skin on her neighbor appeared reddened or, in other cases, blackened and charred. An IV drip fed down past a cuffed wrist, and into the crook of that bandaged arm, and the dull beep of a nearby monitor sounded with the strong rhythm of the patient’s heart.

“Jasmin,” a voice yelled. “Jasmin Jones?”

The name rang a bell somewhere in Max’s kaleidoscopic tangle of timelines and memory, but she could not unbury that connection.

“Jasmin Jones?”

A gaunt patient hobbled into view, propped up on one crutch. He peered over a nearby gurney then hobbled forward some more, until he spotted Max, sitting up in her gurney and staring his way.

“Jasmin Jones?” he asked again, his free hand holding out his phone to show a picture of a young girl, Max’s age or maybe a year or so younger, her hair done up in a long, black braid. She looked familiar, and Max thought that she had seen her in Blackwell. Ms. Hoida would have known her, Max thought. Perhaps Juliet. Yes, Juliet would know her. And she was certain then that she did know her, or at least of her. Jasmin was on the yearbook staff, wasn’t she?

Seeing that recognition dawn in Max’s eyes, the man leaned closer.

“You’ve seen her?” A desperation clung to that voice, and Max wished that she could sooth it, but she could not.

“No, not here,” she said, noting the crestfallen slump in the man’s shoulders as he sagged against her words. “I’ve seen her around Blackwell, though,” she continued.

“Yeah,” he said, swallowing. “That’d be her.”

An awkward silence stretched between the two, then the man glanced up, his attention diverted by movement at the far end of the hall: more false hope.

“You see her, tell her her dad’s looking,” he said, then hobbled on down the hall to his next lead.

“Of course,” Max mumbled, knowing he had already moved on and would never hear her, yet answering him nonetheless.

The pain had not subsided, so much as one minute it had been and the next it had not been; though it was less a being and unbeing, than it was a lapse in time – a flash from one moment to another, the gap between erased through the numbing tonic of the mind, of repression and deletion.

A doctor had loomed above Max, or perhaps he had been an EMT or a nurse. Hell, he could have been janitorial staff for all Max had known or could make out in the fog of her clouded brain at the time. Yet she recalled him speaking, and, just as muddled, she remembered Mrs. Grant answering him.

“Is there anyone that can stay with her?” he had asked. “A parent or a guardian that you can reach?”

“They’re in Seattle, I think,” Mrs. Grant said. “We’ve tried, but everyone is calling out or attempting to at least.”

“A friend then? She’s already medicated, but we’ll have to put her under to tend  to her leg. When she comes to… well, she’ll be a bit out of it, and we don’t have the staff to spare.”

“No. No one.”

“I don’t have time to insist, but in lieu of other options, I’d prefer you stay.”

Yes, stay, Max had thought. She had wanted Mrs. Grant to stay; for a friendly face to be waiting for her when the fog cleared.

“We’re short on trained drivers,” Mrs. Grant said. “I have to get the kids out that I can… while… while the roads are passable.”

The doctor had nodded, but Max had wanted to shout, to scream for Mrs. Grant to stay, but she had been unable to find her voice. It had hidden under a layer of cotton mouth and candied thoughts.

Mrs. Grant had hurried down the hall then, shouting back over her shoulder as she did. “I’ll find someone! I will!”

Max hadn’t believed her though. She had tried to shout back, succeeding only in miming the words, her voice still trapped.

Don’t leave, she mimed. Don’t leave me! Please. I don’t want to be alone.

‘Max,’ another voice pleaded; a memory of a dead timeline, of a future that would never be. ‘Please… don’t leave me. I… I don’t want… don’t want to be alone.’

‘Never,’ the Max of that first timeline had lied, before fading out into that damned bathroom and that spiral of false binaries.

Max wept, even though she no longer understood how she had the capacity for tears. She had seen too much pain in too many timelines, and yet thoughts of that Victoria still managed to break through the barrier that had gradually formed, the armor that had been forged in jump after jump and death after death.

The barking of a dog tore Max from that most recent flash of memory as bit by bit the gaps from that parking lot to this hospital hallway began to fill themselves in. She knew that bark. She knew that dog.

“Pompidou,” she mumbled, coming back to her senses, jolting up in that hallway. Across from her the burn victim still remained in that crowded, yet eerily abandoned hospital passage, yet now he seemed to be her only company, other gurneys emptied and the stragglers that had rested against the bare sections of wall now gone. The patter of rain persisted, however, as did the hum of the hospital machinery and the a cappella of the murmurs of staff and patients in other rooms and other halls.

Her voice did not rise above that soft din, but the barking continued, and so too did its familiarity, until at last Max spotted Pompidou, jumping excitedly on his back legs and clamoring as he tried to make it onto the gurney that held the burn victim nearby.

“Someone get that damn dog out of here!” The shout echoed down the hall, though Max could not find the person who had yelled for the dog’s removal.

She did, however, spot a familiar face turning the bend at the end of the hall and coming her way. The man had a high forehead and close-cut dark hair that should have made for a stern visage, and yet the slight uptick of a smile at the corner of his mouth, softened the blow. Officer Berry had always been kind to Max, no matter the timeline, and so she felt her heart lighten ever so little at his approach.

“Officer Berry.” Max attempted to speak, but her words still came through a layer of cotton and dry mouth, little more than a whispered rasp, and the officer did not yet appear to notice her.

“You touch my dog,” the burn victim said in his own raspy growl, “and I’ll get off this gurney and shove that baton up your ass.”

Officer Berry’s hinted smile vanished.

“Frank, calm down. No one is going to hurt your dog.”

“Better not.”

“Fuck, Frank.  I was just going to take him for a walk, and give the staff a break for a minute.”

“Fine. But you better bring him back, or I’ll come find you.”

“Jesus. You ever shut that bluster off? Accept a good deed for once.”

“Whatever.”

With that the officer rummaged through a bag at Frank’s feet, pulled out a leash and clasped it to Pompidou’s collar. As the pair passed Max’s gurney, she reached down a hand to scritch the dog’s head.

“Careful he don’t nip off your fingers, girlie.”

“Pompidou would never,” Max managed, and the dog, excited for his walk, seemed to agree, nuzzling into Max’s hand.

“Awfully familiar with my dog for some bitch I don’t know…” For a moment it seemed as though Frank had more to say, but the words were stolen in a fit of coughing.

“You’re that Caulfield girl, aren’t you?” Officer Berry asked, pausing as Max petted Pompidou.

“Yes, sir,” she managed easing back into her voice, though it still rasped through her dry throat.

“I thought so. You come to the diner a lot with Chloe…” he paused averting his eyes and hitching his breath at that name, then continued. “…and that Amber girl.”

Max felt her eyes water. Here, here she had known both Chloe and Rachel. Here all three of them had been friends. She wondered what that had been like.

“Yeah,” she managed.

“I’m sorry,” he said, bowing his head. He didn’t mention her then, but Max knew that Officer Berry was offering his condolences over Chloe’s death. Max could have sworn she heard a sniffle over by Frank’s gurney as well, but she didn’t call it out and no more followed.

“Thank you,” she mumbled.

Max wanted to say more. She wanted to ask what had happened, but she also knew that she should know, that this Max would have known perfectly well what had happened. Still she was in a hospital; maybe that would give her a little latitude with which to work.

“What… what happened to her?” She asked.

“Fuck girlie, you got a broken leg, not a broken head.”

“Shut up, Frank.”

Frank growled to himself but complied with the officer nonetheless.

“You don’t remember…” Officer Berry started, pausing as if searching for a word.

“Max,” Max offered.

“Right.” Officer Berry nodded. “You don’t remember, Max?”

“Not really. Frank there got the right of it, I suppose.” Max coughed, attempting to clear her dry throat. “Head’s about as broken as my leg, I guess.”

“Hmm.” Frank snorted, but both the officer and Max ignored him.

“With all the… chaos of the evacuation, you really want to hear this now?” Officer Berry asked.

The evacuation , Max thought. Well, at least that was one piece of the puzzle.

“Yes,” she said.

Pompidou barked and tugged at his leash, and Officer Berry seized on the excuse.

“Okay then,” he said. “How about this? I’ll take this dog out —”

“Pompidou,” Max interrupted.

“Pompidou, yes.” Officer Berry nodded. “I’ll take Pompidou out and give the staff here a break, then I’ll come back and we can talk, okay?”

“Okay.” Max didn’t feel okay about it. She wanted him to tell her right now. She could feel the anger rising, and that unstoppable force within her surging for release. She had used it so many times to brute force an answer that she needed ( wanted ), but she also knew that sometimes it was best to proceed with caution. There would be time for force later. There always was.

“Good.” Officer Berry made to leave, then paused. “Your teacher really should be here.”

“They had to run,” Max offered. “But they were sending someone to check in on me, I think.”

“Hmm.” The man glanced about the emptied hall, spotting no one save for the two of them and Frank in his gurney. “Okay, then. You, you need anything? I can bring you some food or something when I come back.”

“Some water would be nice,” Max said, noting the dry rasp still itching at her throat.

“Of course. And if I see that teacher of yours, I’ll send them back.”

“Thanks.”

Max relaxed back down onto her gurney, the strain of sitting up for so long taking a larger toll on her body than she would have expected. It seemed that this Max had been through a lot more than she had realized before the jump, and whatever had caused the evacuation ( Rachel ), Max was certain that she had been at the center of it.

Suddenly another flash threatened to steal her into the past, as Max reclined back onto the hard gurney: images of her alone; images of her being wheeled through the halls of Arcadia Bay Hospital; bright lights and masses of doctors and nurses, all pushing in.

Max pushed back, forcing the images aside. She knew enough. She didn’t need anymore gaps filled between now and that parking lot. She needed to know what had happened before, not then.

“Frank,” she said, throwing the name out like the cast of a fishing line, letting the lure bob there in the water as she waited for the burned drug dealer to take her bait. William used to take her and Chloe fishing, she remembered, as she laid there waiting. You had to have patience, she recalled. But every so often, you reeled that line in just a little more, flashed the bait one more time.

“Frank,” she said again.

“What,” he growled.

“Could you fill me in on a few things?”

“No thanks. My dance card’s full up.”

Did you expect Frank to be easy. No, of course not. Max needed to play to what decency still remained in that man, whatever scrap of it there was. She knew that he had been friends with Chloe once, not just Rachel. And he had seemed hurt at the mention of Chloe’s… her death. Playing that card was a low blow, but it was also the only card in Max’s hand.

“For Chloe’s sake.”

“Bitch move, that.”

Maybe so, but will it work…

“I know,” Max said. “You know Chloe would have played that hand as well, though, right?”

“Damn straight, she would have. Girl had no sense of self preservation.”

Max bit at her lip. Yeah, Chloe definitely lacked that. Hence she was gone… again.

“Fuck. Look, don’t go all waterworks on me and shit.”

Hmm… who would have thought that was the card to play. Guess I had more in my hand than I thought.

Max sniffed. “I’m not crying,” she said, careful to make sure her breath hitched and that her sniffling came out far less concealed than it should have been if she were really hiding her tears.

“Fine. I’ll help, I guess. But you don’t get that hand again, understood?”

Max nodded, then realized Frank wasn’t really looking her way. “Yes,” she added. “Understood.”

“So what do you need to know? Not too clear on much after the fire, myself.”

“The fire?”

“Damn, girlie, how hard did you get hit on that head?”

“Pretty hard, I guess.”

“So…” Frank let his voice trail off, and for a moment, Max wondered how much pain he was in. Here she was with a broken leg ( and time nausea ) but otherwise relatively unhurt, and she was asking Frank, of all people, for help, while he lay bandaged and burned, and she didn’t even know how bad off he was or wasn’t.  She knew that she should feel ashamed, and yet, Chloe wasn’t alive here, which meant this timeline would not last. She’d photo jump out or force a hard return, but no matter what, she would not let it remain; so in the end, her sympathies did not matter. Frank’s pain did not matter. This was a weigh station and nothing more.

“Yeah,” Max said, hoping to prompt something further from Frank. Apparently the nudge succeeded. Thank fuck, Max thought, keenly aware of the Victoria whom had gifted her that phrase, much as that first Rachel had gifted Chloe with ‘hella.’

“So,” Frank continued. “What’s the last thing you do remember?”

Huddling in a lighthouse, Max thought, drenched, and shivering, and cuddling with Chloe as we stared into a photograph of her and Rachel, and hoped that in sending her back in time we could save her life, Rachel’s life, and the lives of nearly two thousand Arcadia Bay residents, while preventing a storm the likes of which the world may have never seen.

“Not much,” Max said, instead, figuring it was the safer answer. Revealing her time powers was always a tricky affair, met with unpredictable results, and Frank wasn’t really Max’s idea of a trusted confidant. Still, she needed to offer him something. “Chloe,” she began. “Chloe was still…”

She stumbled over her words. Even after all this time, talking about Chloe, thinking about her dead and dying, it still halted her, broke something inside of her with each admission of that reality.

“…alive,” Frank finished, after a drawn out pause. “‘Fraid you’ve lost five or six days there, girlie.”

“Max.”

“Yeah, so you’ve said. Mighty hard bump on the noggin, that one.” Frank turned as he spoke, and Max caught a hint of unburnt flesh on the far side of his face, where the bandages parted; yet she could also clearly make out the stains of those bandages there at that border, and could only imagine the wounds beneath that wrap. One eye was completely covered in those wraps, the other stared out from under his bandaged forehead, pristine, if not slightly glassy. That eye fixated on her, as if staring through her lies.

“It could be the drugs,” Max shrugged.

“Meaning it’s neither. What sort of game are you playing at — ” he started, only then the world rewound, Max flexing her fingers and tugging those threads. After the briefest of tugs, she released her grip and let time return to its normal flow.

“Mighty hard bump on the noggin, that one,” Frank said, turning his bandaged head as he spoke to reveal that pristine eye and its probing gaze.

“Hurts like, hell,” Max said, rubbing at her head, and realizing as she spoke that there was no lie in that statement. Her head ached, the strain of multiple timelines, returns, jumps, and rewinds, begging her to continue her rest, as the pain meds began to wane. “Pretty drugged up and don’t remember much about what happened, other than a few snippets of being trampled, but I’d guess my leg bent in the wrong direction was more noticeable than a bump to the head.”

“I ‘spose,” Frank said, nodding a little and thankfully rolling his head back to stare up at the ceiling, and with that act, hiding the demarcation between his bandage and his untouched skin. “What happened with Chloe,” he began again, his voice shaking ever so slightly as he did, “it, well they didn’t, Blackwell and the Arcadia PD, they didn’t reveal much. Everyone knows that Prescott kid was involved. Shot her in some dank bathroom in that elitist prep school of his. No one’s saying why, and for the life of me, I don’t know what Chloe was doing mixed up with a prick like that.”

“So it was Nathan,” Max said, more to herself than to Frank.

“So you remember?”

“Not really, but he and Chloe have a history. Sort of figured when I heard.”

“Eh. Mind enlightening me? Chloe and I weren’t on the best of terms of late, but that crazy bitch deserved better than what she got. I wouldn’t mind knowing — ”

Max tugged once more on those threads of time. She probably didn’t have to, but she’d long since given up on the notion that her rewind had caused The Storm, and she didn’t have the patience to fumble through another lie with Frank if she didn’t have to. So, she pulled on that weave, and watched until Frank’s head once more turned to face her own, and then she let go.

“I ‘spose,” Frank said, nodding a little and thankfully rolling his head back to stare up at the ceiling. “What happened with Chloe,” he began again, his voice shaking ever so slightly as he did, “it, well they didn’t, Blackwell and the Arcadia PD, they didn’t reveal much. Everyone knows that Prescott kid was involved. Shot her in some dank bathroom in that elitist prep school of his. No one’s saying why, and for the life of me, I don’t know what Chloe was doing mixed up with a prick like that.”

“When was this?” Max asked.

“Monday afternoon. It was before Blackwell let out, but not by much.

“And Nathan,” Max said. “Did he admit to everything?”

“That prick, no. He hasn’t said a lick, or if he has, it hasn’t made the news. Not with the world going crazy and all.”

Huh. So it was one of those timelines, Max thought. She hated the ones where Nathan kept his mouth shut. They always made it so much harder on everyone involved, especially her, if she decided to stay for a while. It always meant Jefferson went unapprehended — at least for a time. Max chewed on that possibility for a moment, until another key phrase stole her attention.

“The world’s gone crazy?”

“Yeah.” Frank coughed, and then coughed some more, until he was bent over and began hacking and clearing at his throat, a wet gurgle peeking out from just under each cough. She wasn’t going to get much more out of him, not unless she rewound all the way back to the beginning, and just so happened to remember Chloe being shot. It was a viable option, but she didn’t feel like traveling that path if she didn’t have to.

“How’s the world gone crazy?” she asked.

“Don’t mind me coughing up burnt lung over here,” Frank said, not even bothering to look at her, still bent over, his back to Max, as he tapped at his chest and coughed some more.

“Sorry, Frank. I just…”

“…need to know? Yeah, you shits always need something.” Frank laid back down with that, easing his head onto his tiny hospital pillow. Before Max could say a word, a nurse cut between the two of them, slowly pushing an empty wheelchair ahead of her. Max listened to the faint screeching of the wheels (in desperate need of oiling), as the nurse ambled past. Slowly that squeak faded into the distance, and Max returned her attention to Frank, making to speak. He held out his hand, waving her off.

“No. No need. Just about at my limit, girlie.”

“Max.”

“Yeah. You said. So, to make a long story no less fucking long, while the town was panicking over a school shooting, and the Prescotts were probably busy calling in a decade’s worth of favors, the world decided to go batshit. That night, it snowed. Not a hint of cold, and the snow, it just doesn’t care.”

Well, that’s new, Max thought. Usually if Chloe died, the snow never happened.

“Fuck,” Max said.

“You don’t understand the half of it. See, girlie, it didn’t just snow; it was fucking white out conditions — like deep north, thick of winter, you’re battening down the hatches for the long haul, snowed in type of snow. Only, of course, it’s still something north of seventy degrees out. Me, I’d been parked up at Blackwell that afternoon, and with the police and the ambulances, and all the craziness, I hadn’t been able to get out of Dodge before the snow came, and once it did, well, I wasn’t going anywhere.

“And that’s when the fire started.”

“The fire?”

“Damnedest thing, really.” Frank paused, drawing in a pained breath. “You mind, seeing if you can’t find me a doctor or a nurse or something? Whatever magic they’re pumping through these veins, that shit’s wearing weak.”

“Yeah, of course,” she said, knowing she would do no such thing. Max had more important matters to attend to, and this Frank would be reset soon enough.  “First, how did we get from a fire to here?”

“Beats the hell out of me.” Frank winced and sucked in a breath against the building pain. “See, my dumb ass, I saw that fire — it was coming from the dorms. That’s where it started. I had a… a…” Frank paused once more, although this time he seemed to be mulling over his words more than he was fighting against pain, at least against any physical pain. “… a friend inside,” he finished. “I had a friend in there, and, well, my dumb ass charged right on out and into the fire.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah, girlie. Not my smartest move. Well, it obviously doesn’t go so well for me, and now here I am.”

“And the fire?”

“From what I hear, it tore through Blackwell and the Bay. Emergency crews flew in from all up and down the West Coast to fight the blaze. Spread up the hills and ran rampant for days, then just up and quit sometime Wednesday. That’s when the rain started. Now, everyone’s flipping out about some storm, and half the town’s been evacuated or some shit. Now, what say you get off that lazy ass and get me a nurse, eh?”

Max nodded, and swung her feet over the side of her gurney. Her left leg screamed in protest with the motion, which is when she noticed the cast holding her lower leg together; it wasn’t one of those thick, plaster casts that you see on TV, but slimmer, more modern. And pink. Why the fuck is it pink? What sort of gendered nonsense is this?

“Thank you,” she said, still focused on her cast. She eased onto her feet, careful to place her weight on her good leg, but apparently not careful enough. As she shifted her balance, she leaned too far to one side, and suddenly her weight bore down on her bad leg, and she screamed as the pain flooded up through her system. Obviously her cast wasn’t meant for support.

She fell to the ground, landing hard on her ass.

“You okay, girlie,” Frank started, but she had already determined that she was done with this conversation. She flexed her hand once more, grabbed ahold of time again, and pulled. A pressure surged in her head, and the world ran backwards, until the nurse with the wheelchair reversed past Max. Once the nurse was a couple of steps back, Max released time.

“Yeah, you shits always need something,” Frank started, then halted, catching sight of Max laid out on the floor instead of up on her gurney. Before Frank could say a word, a nurse slowed to halt between the two of them, pushing an empty wheelchair ahead of her. As the nurse sputtered to a stop, obviously equally stunned as Frank to Max’s sudden shift in position, Max reached up and grabbed onto the chair.

“You mind helping me up?”

“S-s-sure,” the nurse stammered, reaching down an arm, still baffled by what she had seen.

“Thank you,” Max said, hauling herself up against the nurse’s grip and settling into the chair. “And Frank here will be needing some pain meds, soon,” she added, feeling mildly benevolent after a rather fruitful conversation.

The nurse shot Frank a quizzical look, but he only cast back his own puzzled expression.

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about, but I’m not one to turn down a little extra dose, doctors willing. But hell, I thought you were in a hurry to find out what happened. You’re just going to up and run, girlie?”

“Max.”

“What?”

“My name’s Max, not girlie” Max said and wheeled off, all too aware that the repetitive squeak of her wheels undercut her dramatic exit. Oh well, Make do with what you have , she thought, and wheeled off down to the bend in the hall, leaving a bewildered nurse and Frank in her wake. She’d learned what she could here; but now she needed to fill in the remaining gaps. And when that was done, she had an aspiring model to find.