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.