Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Juliet stretched again. It wasn’t nearly enough to work the remaining knots out of her neck, but she’d stood under the burning stream of the shower earlier with less success. The mirrors upstairs had fogged up in pale imitation of her brain. Restless sleep. Only two nightmares. That was an improvement. At least she was clean. Fresh pajamas, loose ponytail. She rubbed her eyes.

Away, sleepy-jackets!

She’d opened the kitchen and living room curtains, allowing morning light to stream through the sheer drapes. Felt like an improvement from so many mornings spent in darkness. Outside was the cold, faded white of yet another overcast day.

She caught herself tensing. Her stomach again. Holding it in. She relaxed her diaphragm and released her breath in a slow, controlled exhalation. Held. Filled her lungs slowly, deliberately. Held. ‘Box breathing,’ the book called it. Conscious awareness leads to forced relaxation, eventually leading to actual relaxation. That was the theory, anyway.

Her fingertips brushed the cold, silky touchpad of her long-requested notebook, opening another video detailing emerging drama around MCCP. Well, same drama, different angles, different news items. New ‘events’ seemingly orchestrated to drive the regular beats of a preferred narrative forward. Whatever. Same shitty news lurched on as though Chloe hadn’t decisively responded in her TV appearances already. Before her so-called arrest. Before everyone ignored it and piled on anyway.  

What was even the point? How had the opposition so decisively brushed aside Chloe’s successes? They ignored her. Prattled on with ghosts of their original talking points, affiliated news stations repeating the same messages in lockstep like nothing had happened. Shaping perception of reality through repetition.

Not everyone was buying it.

One late-night comedy talk show host made the pattern plain in a clip that had since gone viral. She silently rolled first one network show, then a second, and another. In the end, the screen was checkered with hundreds of news broadcasts, the newsreader’s voices a word-for-word chorus of synchronized scripts lambasting Max, Chloe, and the threat of MCCP. The comedy host concluded, “All the regional network stations you see are owned by one company.” The same company that owned her program, as it turned out.  

Juliet clicked on the following clip.

BBC, this time, covering a raid by government authorities in Italy. Behind the grim anchor, shots of cordons at the entrance to another MCCP office. Knots of uniformed people loitering, awash in the flashing lights from compact patrol cars. A line of officers carried document boxes to plain white Euro-style vans blocking the avenue. “Investigation ongoing.” Which probably meant they hadn’t found what they were looking for.  

Good.

The bottom scroll said something about allegations of unregulated biological research, but who even knew anymore? Juliet knew that some of it was bullshit, which meant it was all bullshit as far as she was concerned.  

She shrugged, wincing at the knots her movements twinged in her neck and shoulders. Nothing she could do. Flipped the browser back to another tab, another doom scroll of written news articles.

A few brave publications went their own way. Some going so far as to call the whole thing an obvious sham by the powers-that-be to suppress desperately needed clean energy tech. They were met with rebuttals by other pubs and writers, some who played the other side, and some who tried to play the middle, waiting to see where the ‘evidence’ led. Like anyone could independently distinguish real from fake ‘evidence’ at this point.

Meanwhile, social media was its usual persona, arguing in circles over every minute detail floated in the mainstream - often at the expense of the bigger picture. Manipulating, stirring everyone to chaos, was apparently as easy as layering on more and more details in subsequent articles or stories, leaving everyone to argue over this or that bit of minutiae. Hard to see the forest when the trees kept throwing leaves and needles at you.  

That only applied to the parts of social that weren’t straight-up conspiracy-centric, of course. Everywhere, memes and shitposting. Flaring, spreading, and burning out, the apparent nuts were mostly on MCCP’s side - but for ‘reasons’ Juliet would have laughed off as crazy as recently as a few days ago. They were still nuts, but that didn’t make them wrong in spirit. Part of her was cheering them on, misguided as they might be.

Even Alex asked if the two of them were aliens. I thought she was kidding, but…I guess some people really believe it?

Juliet shook her head, giving up, minimized the browser. There was a conspiracy against them, but it had nothing to do with alien space wizards and everything to do with ordinary money and power.  

She went back to the thumb drive icon in the upper right corner. Rubbed the trackpad in a lazy circle before landing on the drive. Clicked. Nothing. Clicked again with repeated results.

She’d been lying awake in the dark blue of early morning when the delivery drone arrived. Less visible in the off hours. They’d finally delivered the small notebook she’d requested, a charger, and a fresh burner. She found everything on the doorstep, insulated from the cold and snow by a blanket conforming to the shape of the wire basket. She discovered a mobile-to-USB data connector in the bottom folds and a printed note to wait for Ian before turning anything on.

Yeah, right.

She hadn’t had any independent luck opening the flash drive but hadn’t hoped too much.  Hard to be disappointed if you don’t expect too much.  

God, when did I become such a cynic?  

That  day. Yeah.  

No…probably started before that.  

Even as a child, she was often knee-jerk skeptical. It was easier. Set her apart. If she was the one questioning, always disbelieving the answers, other kids would have to cave or defend. Whatever path they took, they wouldn’t have the chance to think critically about her.

Unfortunately, knowing her lists of roots and triggers didn’t make her an effective auto-therapist. She wasn’t an objective observer of herself in the present and couldn’t be sure if she was improving or bottling.

If only cynicisms were the worst of it.  Juliet shuddered, pushed down a sudden, violent flash of images. Thought she’d had a handle on that. Wasn’t even the same theme as her latest nightmares.

Distract.

Her finger slid upward again. What a nice change of pace to have a notebook screen to scroll around instead of her burners.  

It wasn’t a super-inconvenience to only have web access on a phone or anything, but more screen real estate allowed her to spread things out a little. A more open perspective. Less neck strain. She glanced at the stairs.

Kids were still asleep. They’d all had a late night. Played a few board games, then closed out talking over a couple of the more positive tube videos exploring how sci-fi the world could look on the other side of a real fusion economy. Meanwhile, scribbling away on their stacks of loose paper.  

Juliet collected the drawings before going upstairs to sleep, left them in a pile on the ottoman near the heater. Ember the Cat made them her bed. She hadn’t moved in her overnight slumber.

Juliet tilted the screen, clicked back to the tube sites. Stifled a laugh when a reporter’s camera panned to a forlorn “Church of Max” banner sagging between purple pool noodles over a makeshift camp that had sprung up in the dirt field across from their Vegas HQ campus. A few bedraggled netizens in blue friar cosplay slouched in their lawn chairs below it, a stack of hand-lettered flyers visible on a box-store plastic end table between them. Several parked motor homes blurred into the background.

Chuckled to herself, punchy after so little rest.

She glanced at the burner.

Full charge. It pulled juice through the data port from the notebook, which was plugged into the wall  Cool.  She didn’t want miss Ian when he texted. Knowing him, that could be anywhere from seconds to days away.  

He was frustrating like that.  

She bonked the touchpad a little harder than expected, finger skidded, closing the window by accident. Reopened it.

Loops. Frustrating to always be on hold. Helpless.  Wasting time.

A thump from upstairs.  

Ember looked up to the sound, cheek fur on one side hilariously flattened after a whole night of warm, peaceful sleep.

Jealous. What’s it like to have one brain cell and no worries in that cute fuzzy head of yours?

They’d be down in a few minutes. After their teeth were brushed and faces washed if previous days were a guide.

She had some rustic potatoes cut and prepped with suspicious herbs she’d found in a drawer earlier. Eggs were in the fridge, which was still warmer than the air outside. And they had some uncooked bacon left from the day before.  

A few more minutes, and I’ll get things started.

She opened another video, a live stream from DC, where now familiar lawmakers issued a joint statement decrying the continued lack of committee access to MCCP’s incarcerated co-founder.

Jeremy saw trouble from as far away as the north lot.

As one of the hundreds of subtle breaks from the hierarchical cues of prior corporate cultures, MCCP had no designated parking areas for execs. Which was fine; he tried to get steps any way he could. But today, he regretted parking in the open lots instead of the underground garages with their elevators. Would have been better to enter the main building through the tunnels below. 

Resigned, he adjusted his glasses and straightened up for the gauntlet ahead.

As a representative and symbol of MCCP, he had to assume his physical bearing on his walk in would be recorded, broken down, and analyzed by the 24-hour closed loop between social and mainstream media - as a proxy for the health and morale of an MCCP in the midst of defining the future, as well as a multinational existential crisis.

Unhurried but serious.

Advice delivered in the voice of an old mentor now passed.

Ahead, loose throngs of people gathered on sidewalks, roadways, and landscaping outside the main MMCP entrances. A medley of styles was on display - from protest-casual and animal onesies to heat-inappropriate business attire. More signs leaned against bushes than were hefted aloft, but messages on them ran solidly from pro to con, designs from professional to cartoonish.

This crowd was disconnected from the larger body of protesters and counter-protesters that had slowly grown along the streets surrounding their extended campus blocks over the past few days.

He passed two local news vans, one partially blocking a minor access road. Both had their doors open, white curlicue antennas extended to the sky.

As Jeremy stepped up to the final walkway to the nearest atrium door, a cameraman leapt, blocked his path while a reporter shoved a mic to his face. “Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Hoffman, can you give us a word?”

Stirred to action by the first camera team, others joined in. More than a few stringers and streamers with handheld vlogging gimbals or phones followed, some frantically tapping screens to wake devices or get things going. A few in the motley collection shouted words of encouragement, others derision. The remainder on the periphery appeared only partially interested, unsure who the newcomer was.

Jeremy greeted them all with his finest executive-neutral smile.

Another network news team joined the fray, rushing from their place near the lobby entrance.  

Questions fired at him in a 360-degree overlapping rush. 

“Why haven’t the authorities released Ms. Price yet? Have they formalized charges?”

“Is there any truth to the rumor MCCP was secretly modernizing Russia’s military?”

“Did Michaels commit murder for insurance fraud, or was it a love triangle?”

“When are the feds taking control of your facilities?”

“How long has Caulfield been cheating with Insta’s Charlotte & FantAssy?”

“Is it true that your African reactors cause cancer?”

“What’s hidden in your basement?!”

“What can you tell us about the new securities fraud allegations against the two founders?”

“Did you guys stage the New Year’s terrorist attack yourselves, or did you have help from the government?”

And on…

The situation inside the open main lobby didn’t appear any less adversarial. Fewer cameras, more lawyers and investigatory agencies at first glance.  

Jeremy wondered how many of their visitors had been similarly bombarded on the way in. Or dissuaded from entering, given all the recording devices?

He resisted pushing past the most aggressive duo between him and the entrance. It wasn’t the first corporate crisis of his career, although it was among the least deserved. At least when thinking about the capital ’T’ truth of it all.

Appearances.

He gave his full attention to the quietest reporter in the crowd. Said, “We’re happy to address any reasonable questions in an organized fashion later today, but please, it’s rude to block access for our guests or ambush our employees on their way in. Give people a chance to have some coffee? And your uplinks are blocking the fire lanes over there.”  

At that moment, a young woman sidled in from behind, linked arms, and slid him a large manila envelope. Whispered, “Sorry. These are delivered,” before she broke away, snapped a confirming photo, and retreated.  

Somewhere in the back of his mind was John’s…no…should be Ty’s voice now, reminding him that she could as easily have held a weapon. That he should always mind his bubble. And Jeremy’s inevitable inner reply that projections matter, and MCCP security shouldn’t be on the field visibly manhandling press or civilians. Max would have altered their courses upstream if anything life-threatening was in the works.  

Unless it was first pass, in which case…well…that wouldn’t matter anyway.

Whatever, we can’t have all these folks blocking the entrances.  

Aside from the disruption, the de facto permission that signaled would be a magnet for all the other groups to pull inward from the perimeter streets like some festival at stage-time.  

Probably inevitable; a matter of days.

He continued, “You’ll have to excuse me - I have a full day. We’ll ask you all to move back to public property soon. And we will be scheduling time with some of you later today. Thank you - that’s all for now.”

“Mr. Hoffman!”  

“Mr. Hoffman, please?”

Choosing which questions to answer, if any, was part of the training. But a scolding felt more appropriate. Jeremy resisted the urge.

He considered the implications of pushing the press away from the building and out to the same zone as the central bodies of protesters. In that vacuum, the carnival atmosphere emerging around the campus, and the protesters themselves, would become the story. But it couldn’t be helped. In many ways, they already were. This gathering couldn’t remain so close.  

The reporters and vloggers reluctantly fell behind as it became clear he wouldn’t play along.

Pushing on, he slipped through the busy lobby, semi-packed with a more professional-looking crowd. It was quieter than outside, at least. Wasn’t sure that made it better. The tension in the hush and hurry reminded him of the long-ago aftermath of an unprovoked, fatal student stabbing in an academy library. That sense of stunned observers adopting new fears after witnessing an entirely pointless and unexpected doom.  Waiting for the other shoe, realizing it could step on anyone.  It pained him that he had that association to draw from, but everyone had a beginning to their past. At least his made him uniquely qualified to help guide MCCP through the here and now, operationally speaking.  

He recognized a few faces in the lobby. Those waiting represented a mix of lawyers, nervous vendors or partners, or law enforcement investigators waiting for a specific appointment or party to address various concerns or allegations. 

Unfortunately, but predictably, Jeremy had already heard rumblings that a couple of new projects were off to a slow start amid all the suspicious allegations. Nothing direct, more that outside orgs were reluctant to commit to a timeline with a controversial partner that might have potential career, brand, or cause-damaging implications. A nervous pause here and there. It would be the norm until things settled down. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be contagious. Another topic for the exec team, but ultimately, only time and further unfolding of events would solve it. Everyone had their own necks to look out for.  

Reaching the reception area wrapping around the central core of the lobby, he leaned in and whispered to one of the receptionists, “Good morning. If I might trouble you to make a call for me - we’ll need a more structured perimeter outside today.”  

Apologetic, she replied, “Sorry, sir - security’s working with LVPD to push everyone back to the boulevards ahead of the flashmobs, but they said it might take an hour to get all the city barricades placed.” Her desk phone, already blinking furiously, rang again.

“Of course - thank you,” Jeremy nodded and proceeded to the elevator.  Already on it. Good. And someone thought well enough ahead to let LVPD play the bad guy for the cameras this time.

He glanced at the envelope he’d been handed outside. It listed the address of a law firm in Chicago. Another opportunistic subpoena or lawsuit for the cartoonishly growing pile.

Max appeared somewhere between the hidden sniper and his target, the six-year-old son of a local lawyer and political activist.  

In the future she'd jumped back from, the child reportedly lay dead on the playground's asphalt, a fountainhead for twin rivers of blood. 

Through the shrieking, wailing, the gated private school would be locked down, and the remaining children of comparatively fortunate parents would be doubly traumatized recounting their stories to interrogating authorities. Soldiers from the national army tasked with local policing were not the most nurturing post-event handlers for terrified children.

The long-term consequences of his murder wouldn’t impact the world's future in any historical sense. A boy would die at this time in this place. His consciousness, connections to family and community, and potential to influence anything around him would be forever lost. His parents would grieve for the ragged hole in their hearts but reluctantly silence themselves in fear for their remaining children. The community would quietly, impotently rage. Other youngsters present would carry the traumatic memory of his brutal murder indelibly forward through the remainder of their lives, watercoloring their view of the world, its risks, and its people.

One boy's life would end, but the effects were applied far beyond, forever dragging behind those who survived.  

Damaged wings…so many.

The event's immediate targets were the victim's parents, but the act was brutally public. It would serve as a warning for other activists, agitators, politicians, or the inconvenient regional media.  

The patterns were all too familiar.  

Dark turbulence.  

Applied violence.  

Brute force influence.

Nothing personal.

Just another victim.

Another dead kid.

For Max, another tiny grain of sand cascading down a monstrous dune below a broken hourglass.  

So small.  

So many.

On seeing the boy safe and happy below, she clenched her fists and returned her gaze uphill. Within breaths, she'd calmed. Dialed back her anger - if not her deep disappointment. It was always hardest when children got hurt. Or worse.  

Happy thoughts, happy thoughts. It's why I'm here.

Shake it off.  

It was quiet. The rich green hills sloped gently, caressing the wide stream defining the valley floor below. The air carried the dampness of the rainforest, the subtle mix of new life and decay.

Beautiful.

They'd be higher up.  

She scanned the undergrowth, but nothing obvious leapt out in her stillness. The forest was enormous, an undifferentiated wall of life over a thick carpet of rot. She'd find them eventually.  

I have time.

Her mind sought diversion as she set about this methodical, mechanical, but necessary step in her solo rescue mission. No choice. No thermals, no satellites, no comms in the freeze. She had somewhere to be on either side of the moment, so it was how it had to be.

It had been more than a week since the powers that be detained Chloe on an 'indefinite national security hold.' Another week of denial of counsel, denial of progress, of contradictory media bullshit. Another week of protests, internet outrage explosions, of looming legal actions by a scattershot of national governments, regulatory bodies, law enforcement - and even a growing number of private entities listing off some grievance or breach. Another week of sharks and piranhas, not so much working together as propelled by similar impulses.

Seven days since she and Chloe had taken up their nightly walks through natural environments, calm spaces, far from enclosing walls or chaos. Deceptively similar to the otherwise peaceful hillside she presently searched. Seemed like beauty and horror existed around every corner of the Earth.

Their escapes were meant to get Chloe's natural body outside to stretch, but that was thin excuse. They needed time together after Iceland, a regular low-key forum for ongoing conversations. Reconnection in some ways. New connections in others. Of course, they missed each other, too, despite Chloe's constant remote presences around HQ.  

Some nights on the lam were guided by their usual silly nonsense or food-related adventures, while others skewed deeper, more important.

The latter brought ups and downs. In part because she and Chloe were deeply invested and entwined with each other and the circumstances surrounding them. And with the fundamental philosophical and moral perspectives recently under discussion. The rest were due to the simple complication that they each carried centuries of knowledge and memories, studies, learnings, understanding of each other, and…well, at times, it could be a bit like two seasoned psychiatrists, married, sparring with each other with full awareness, analyzing from opposing sofas. Each further aided by their particular brand of variable control of time or perception. Or, maybe it was more like friendly prosecutors and defense attorneys sharing a dinner table. Full-circle to 4d-Go. Or full-sphere, maybe? Anyway. They ran the risk of descending into unconscious gamesmanship, but at least they shared that understanding and aspired to correct for it.

Chloe, for her part, was throwing off equal parts gratitude, adoration, a broken heart for Max's more challenging experiences, and a skeptical hard-assery about one or two of those more contentious topics. She gave Max no quarter on issues surrounding Roland Stirling, for example. But even in that, Chloe displayed a subtle maturity. She accepted Max entirely and made it clear she was there for her, but was unabashedly critical of some of Max's choices was all.  

Kate would have said something about hating the sin.  

Oh, fuck. I need to call her back.

Shit. Mom and Dad, too!

Mental notes. Dot dot dot.

Chloe had grown a lot. Even so, Chloe being disappointed in her in any century was pretty much the worst thing Max could endure. Not that she had any plan to unring that particular bell. Promises about respectful mutual continuity around their disagreements, after all. But there'd been some rough sledding, deservedly. She always felt safe, if simultaneously super-uncomfortable under Chloe's more critical gazes. 

Chloe surprised her, however, when the topic turned to Max's complicated and largely unaddressed grief over her total, if unintentional, abandonment of OtherChloe and an entire timeline of progress. Her jump back.

While Chloe had previously shared deep insecurities comparing herself to her T-0 predecessor, it hadn't occurred to Max that Chloe might harbor similarly complex feelings of loss for someone she hadn't technically met.  

"I love her too, you know. She gave everything Max. Cheat codes. God-mode tools for me, for us…she packed up her private memories from your life together like a present — all so I could take care of you. So you wouldn't feel so alone. She loved you so much. I'm in awe of her. Of course. She's way too cool and intimidating as fuck, but she's also like…the most badass big sister ever. I feel connected to her in ways I can't describe — and…I guess I miss her in my own way. I get it. I don't know…I can't really find it in me to be jealous of myself…of her. Not after all she's done for us."  

That was it. And that was that.  

Max had expected to walk on eggshells while managing the pace of her sharing, her cry for help, against Chloe's open feelings of insecurity and her changing emotional headspace. That kept Max from opening up on planet Steve before all this sidetracking went down.  

But Chloe's self-confidence, perspectives, and emotional intelligence were all racing forward, thanks to new information, her stubborn resilience, self-directed introspection, and the kickstarts from that same OtherChloe. Shortcuts that had taken nearly two-hundred years of personal development in T-0.

Chloe was emerging into a new self each and every day by thoughtfully reflecting on the ongoing flow of experiences and events from her life and those of her predecessor. By lurking in the collective data stores and subconscious of the internet. And more recently, by absorbing the cube-delivered personality and decision overlays of her recent self - from hundreds of grueling, extreme bad-branch layers right next door, all filtered, blended, and mosh-pitted through time-dilated computational self-analysis. She was already unique - different from her old self but worlds apart from OtherChloe. And so soon in the timeline.  

She, too, had become unique in all the worlds.

As a result, Chloe openly related to Max's sense of loss without hesitation. Outwardly unthreatened, she'd proven thoughtful, insightful, and wholly supportive. Which was of unimaginable help to Max. It freed her, gave plenty of welcoming emotional space, and granted Max permission to begin to unbury her most profound feelings of loss, regret, and responsibility. Permission to acknowledge the scale of the separation she'd suffered after centuries alongside the first love of her life.  

Chloe still felt the occasional insecurities, of course, but it was a question of context and degree. She was forever in Max's corner. Said as much.

It was a start. Max was so thankful; it felt like they were at least back in familiar territory with each other. More than that, even with such fearfully held secrets finally out in the sunlight after such deep time. Max felt good about where they were, and Chloe seemed to as well. Minus the jail part. 

Aside from joint efforts escaping the occasional up or downward spiral during their walks, Max was Max, and Chloe was Chloe. They were a team. They'd work through anything together - because, of course they would.  

Even Chloe in bad-branch-central reassured me everything would be okay.

It felt like standard stuff for any high-functioning couple. Bumpy made smooth. Only amplified by everything that made them them, with their simultaneously old and new relationship, their individual intelligence, blind spots, and high emotional awareness - filtered through the responsibilities they'd taken for themselves of trying to move the world from the way it was to the way they knew it could be once again.

Night to night, their walks and discussions weren't always easy. But the tone they took, the support Chloe embedded in her point of view, was a welcome relief to Max after all her worry. Enough to make her feel silly for hesitating. Doubting.

But…would yesterday's Chloe have reacted the same?  

Perhaps not. Maybe this timing was just right. Who could say?

One downside, their nightly escapes tended to go on all night, leaving precious little room for sleep.

Max stretched her arms overhead and yawned.  

Back in the moment, back in the forest, she wiped the scratchy remnants of insufficient rest from her eyes.  

She wasn't sure if that sudden bright spark that broke her from her mental reflections had been real or imagined. Shook her head and changed direction anyway.

She hadn't gotten much downtime after the previous night's meanderings, either. Tactical error, despite a plan to call it early to catch up on z's. Chloe had been hungry for Korean street food, but the other side of the Pacific was in daylight, with predictable effects on Max's always-sketchy circadian rhythms. 

Awake in the dark that morning, Max promised herself a well-earned MaxTime nap later.

But before light could break over HQ, Chloe, already hard at work in at least four locations, forwarded Max the regional news blurb breaking this current incident. This intentional tragedy, only moments ahead of her relative present, didn't merit US or international media attention. Louder noises clamored for limited spotlights. But Max accepted this jump back, this quiet addition to her rounds, without complaint.  

She came here to save a life and to spare a community the loss of a loved one. Simple as that. They were people she'd never meet, who'd never know that she'd been there or that anyone had been in harm's way. If she did her job right, anyway. Just like tens of thousands of times before. 

Max had confided to Chloe, only hours prior, her frustrations at not being much help with MCCP's current shitstorm of circumstances. Especially after the lousy path she went down, created, when trying to change things initially by calling off her interview with Juliet. 'Useless' wasn't exactly the right word, but their tribe was under actual, sustained attack, and it felt like all Max could do was maintain a few shabby wormholes and maybe stand by to rewind some memory cubes back if it all got out of hand.

Passing along this lead was Chloe reminding Max that MCCP was one means to an end, not the center of their universe.  

In a way, reminding them both that their mission wasn't its preservation but the everyday lives it was constructed to serve and advance. Outward focus, not in.

It's not just an office, Max objected. It's a concentration of people and resources who know the truth. It's our engine for changing the world.  

"Who are all lifelong professionals. We built in self-defense. Let them do their work. 'sides, it's not the only engine we got, goob," Chloe lightly teased before signing off.

She's right. Course she is. We’re not alone. Another thing that's different now - it's okay to step back and let others help where they can. Where I can't. That was the whole point in surrounding ourselves with people who were way more intelligent than we…well…than I am, anyway. Not just about the division of labor and scale. They have judgment, contacts, and expertise built over their short lifetimes, entire careers.  

That work just takes a lot of work.

Still, would have been nice if there'd been some latent superpower or wand lying around for Max to abuse. Some easy button for red tape, lawyers, and mass public opinion she could smoosh. It didn't feel right, leaving so much of a burden to others.  Frustrating.

She took a pause.  

Felt a sense of moment.

To each, their strengths.

She gazed through the emerald treetops to the bright blue sky above. So clean. Clear. Optimistic, even.  Is stopping to appreciate this sort of thing too self-serving?  Moments were still moments.  Mental health check, yo. Wasn't like the time she lost in them had any repercussions. Lingering was okay.  

Seemed like every hard lesson she'd ever had was internalized in the freeze. They boiled down the same couple of themes in the end, too.  'Never take anything, anywhere, or anyone for granted. You can only do your best, but don't give up.'

Maybe it's as essential to take in a distraction or two. Appreciating something lovely instead of focusing on the horror that brought me here. Seeing the way things should be. Happy thoughts, remember? It's a necessary form of self-care.  She allowed herself a slight nod of agreement.

There was already so much ugliness out there.  

And they were so close to positive tipping points on so many fronts.

She thought back to what Kate had written in her most recent email.  

'A wise friend once told me that we have to make time to refuel ourselves if we're to remain a bright light for others.'

Which was basically Kate repeating back something Max had said to her once upon a time.  Speaking of self-indulgent…quoting myself back to myself through another person.  

I can't wait to meet her new bun-bun, Patrick!

Distracted.  

In MaxTime, varied flows, from ultra-slow to hyper-accelerated, still held all the wonders. Nothing bad ever happened in MaxTime. These private interstitial moments, hidden worlds, were hers and hers alone and as much a part of her lived experience as normal-speed reality. It would be nice to share this vibe with Chloe through something other than just holo. It wasn't the same.

Though, this particular type of freeze was all the more beautiful for what its presence signified to her - a reminder. A gift. A silent opportunity for her to scrub an all too common brand of shite from the face of the world and leave something shiny behind. In this case, a life. And everything it touched from this moment forward.

Course, skipping around in time could be isolating too. Not in a good way.

Her work, this work only Max could do, was a wonder - but it was exceedingly lonely sometimes. And sometimes, the darkness she saw, fought, took its toll on her. Of course. How could it not? Small sacrifice for the hidden impacts her efforts had on the happiness and experiences of others. Least it all felt a little more manageable now that she could be open with Chloe about her feelings. She didn't have to feel…well, didn't have to carry everything alone anymore.

Max shrugged the loneliness away.  

Worth it in the end.

Nothing bad lasts forever.

But everything, good and bad, ends eventually.

The incomprehensible magnitude of the metaphorical sand dune took center stage in her mind's eye.  

Maybe it would be enough if I could fix everything in the world.  

She shook her head, defending against her unbidden thought.

Be real. Know your limits.

One starfish at a time, Quixote-san.

Benefit of lifetimes of inner dialog - she'd developed some effective self-correction mechanisms to keep herself on track.

Whatever. I  am  the long game.

She felt goosebumps at her last thought for reasons she couldn't explain.  So cringe.  Laughed it off in the way people do to minimize the significance of their most heartfelt emotional reactions.  

Ends…ends. Ends didn't have to come so soon for everyone. Helping the good things survive longer. That could be enough sometimes, couldn't it? She'd seen so many come and go over the centuries. People. Friends. Strangers. She glanced wistfully at the distant playground below. All this, all this effort was about protecting a flame that could, at best, only burn for so long. But little lights multiplied, grew, and together, became something else against the vast darkness.

Ahhh well. Like the old days in our faraway branch. When there's nothing you can do, do what only you can. Which usually means throwing more back into the sea while we wait.

'Nuff time wasting.  

Shut up. You know what you mean. 

Where is this dude? Jeeze. Gotta be getting close. Running out of hill up there.

Ahead, bright static rods, verticalized pinpoints of sunlight, tunneled through the dense canopy near the peak, speckled the forest floor. Lovely town, pleasant little valley. Idyllic but bordered by trouble on three sides.  

Too bad it didn't stay peaceful. That's the other job, right? Protecting people's smiles? Letting everyone else take things they shouldn't for granted.  

Hup!  

Pick it up, Super-Invisi-Max. Not the only life on our plate today.

She stretched again. Resumed. Wasn't feeling very 'trial and error' when she first arrived. If she'd let the shot play out even once, it would have made the process of finding the shooter much quicker, but no reason to watch in person as the kid died. Her extra time in the freeze was irrelevant in the face of that. She understood the sequence without putting the child or herself through the experience directly. She saw no issues taking extra time to better curate her long-term memories while helping engineer a different outcome for everyone else.  

Even if…well…sometimes it didn't feel enough to save a life. Even if nothing bad lasted forever, 'bad' lasting one moment longer was sometimes too long. Depending.  

The shot, the one that killed him, was the end of a thought process someone had. It would be more efficient for everyone if she could send back a message of her own - to discourage others from recasting similar tragedies in the future.

Maybe.  

But that was its own crux. Can of worms. Whatever.

Disasters were easy. Whether natural, emerging from negligence, or purely random-ass wrong time and place accidental. Leave a warning in advance. Fix something. Move something. Wake someone up. Create a delay. Reroute. Block a path. Destabilize snow cover while it's still manageable. Extinguish a spark before it becomes a raging fire. Interrupt a fragile chain of events in such a way that nothing at all happens. There were no intentions behind disasters. Encountering them didn't weigh on her soul in the same way.

People were harder. They had reasons, emotions. They had plans. They did shit on purpose, did shit to each other on purpose, and their chains of events were adaptable in the face of disruption. Sometimes, one interruption wasn't enough to change the eventual outcome, even at this small scale. People worked so hard against their collective self-interests.

She didn't know or care about the whole back story here today, whatever small powers or politics led up to it. Words might make sense of it, but nothing could excuse it.  He's just a kid.

Autopilot, low immersion, she let time roll forward and back in super slo-mo at sub-second increments, looking for movement or presence. Pushed closer to that moment.

There.  

Opposite direction from that reflection from earlier, which was probably just a soda can or something. An orange flower bloomed bright inside a distant wall of green.  

There it is.

The instant she didn't want to go beyond.

Gotcha, jerk.

Full stop.

Her target, well, targets - two assassins apparently - were further uphill, firing down toward the school between hanging vines and thick foliage. They seemed too young for this. Mid 20's, maybe.  Not like there's a best age for murderers or anything.  One rifle. The shooter had a spotter alongside him to call out estimates or adjustments for range, wind, and whatever else shooty-people did when they weren't Chloe. It was difficult to identify them even when she knew where to look. Both men wore camouflage, blending with the shadows and deadfall.

Mind focused on her task, she mouthed, "Not today, my guys. Not today."

She rewound, pushing the bullet backward before calling a halt, then re-reversed again, pulling it slowly toward her. She drifted uphill, closing the final distance to the imperceptibly racing threat. She intercepted its path while it was no more than arm's length from the barrel. Time crept forward. Back. Forth. Back. Forth. Max's personal jog-wheel on reality.  

Waka waka.

Old joke. 

The oscillating bullet inscribed its inches-long line of travel, ping-ponging back and forth through the basic four dimensions.

It was close to her, this intentionally manufactured thing. Near enough to watch it corkscrew around its axis all slow-mo-like. Near enough to catch the cone of air gathered ahead of the destructive projectile, its rippled shifts of atmospheric dislocation trailing and expanding behind as it left the fire that gave it life…death.  

She'd experienced the surprise, the horrible nothing, the sudden bone-searing pain of being shot so many times, down so many failed branches. It was always different. It wasn't that she was nervous being in its path. But it wasn't entirely abstract, this physical little asshole.

Designed. Made.

Meant for a person.

For a child.

And too familiar.

In a rare admission borne of her ongoing introspection, she wasn't entirely sure that she objectively cared if these specific guys lived through the next few minutes.  Yes, but also no?  

They echoed so many other gunmen she'd encountered over far too many centuries of life, smeared together into an entirely unnecessary villainous archetype that never changed.

Yes.  

But also, no.

Chloe would argue that stain of indifference was the lingering legacy of Max's voluntary playtime with Roland.  

But if that were true, why was she doing all this?  If it was just indifference, which it isn't. Not at all.  

Then what? Why did she always try so hard? Why did she care so much? Was it because she felt something personal about the unknown boy? His unknown community? Or was it some higher ideal like the meta cause and effect of positive versus negative ripples around the world? Or was it somewhere lower? Was she just angry at bullies who would willingly disrupt and destroy the lives of innocent people, and that made her more than willing to teach them a lesson?  

She was wise enough, or at least old enough, to understand that emotions were an effect, not a cause. So, where was her grounding? Where were these specific combinations, constructions, of emotions coming from?

She didn't have a clear answer.

In the end, Stirling remained as much symbolic as actual. 

So, maybe it was a little of everything.  

She was still human, a feeling person. She objectively wished for strangers to live happy, meaningful lives for their own sake. She wanted to exist in a world where that was the default for everyone - or at least to live in one where people didn't get fucking shot all the time. Besides, she was allowed to feel sad, frustrated, or even angry at the mean, hateful, or cold things some people could do to others. This didn't come close to the worst she'd seen, which was its own incurable sadness somewhere deep.  

But as horrible as things could be, as many as there truly were, these kinds of acts were still relative outliers this early in the timeline. There was so much more beauty, even in the least sophisticated, most mundane lives.  

Maybe she couldn't be everywhere. But she could be here. Now. Choose this over that.  

She glanced back down the hill. And again to the men who would kill a boy on a playground.  

Yes, but also no.

Best she could do.

Regardless, she'd be careful with the attackers' lives. Even if that courtesy wouldn't extend to comprehensively preserving their total physical well-being or their continued tenure in their chosen professions.  Details.

Thinking through her options, she concluded it would be mindlessly easy to trap the bullet in a bubble, rotate its direction, and land it safely in the dirt. Or shift its frame of reference to something slightly more astronomical, sending it burning up through the atmosphere. Or apply slightly more gravity. Or warp space along the path, sending it off in a tangential direction. Or age it forward into a powdered spray of lighter atoms, disconnected and dispersed to the wind. Or redirect it somewhere safer through a wormhole pair or…any of the thousands of actions she'd taken a thousand times in countless places.  

It might have represented a dark intention, but it was only a small gathering of atoms under some very minor amount of momentum, after all.  

But people were fragile. Life…was fragile.

Even thwarted for the day, the shooters would have more intentions waiting. And there were always more bullets. Always. And there would always be more guys behind these guys, waiting to project force or cause harm to others for any number of complicated and irrelevant reasons.

The world had plenty of happy assholes and asshole organizations that had nothing to do with the EvilCorp SuperDick Networks. If anything, the former was probably necessary for the latter's evolution. Tackling some of the independents as they popped on radar was an unfortunate ongoing necessity - one that felt like whack-a-mole sometimes. That would remain true for a while. Least until their grand plan of society-shifting moves could have the intended effect of starving the oxygen from this kind of bullshit behavior. 

Those days couldn't arrive fast enough.  

Time to accelerate.

Back to the moment within a moment. Back to basics. She need only deflect the projectile by a tiny amount to ensure everyone's safety below. But if she could deflect it while exposing the hidden men, she could probably keep them from taking that second shot. The authorities would have little choice but to show up and do the rest, like maybe their jobs. Perhaps that would lead them upstream. Probably wouldn't. If she could disrupt them with flair, that was always a bonus to her mood.  

But…would it be wiser to steal their weapons or move them to some random spot on Earth, leaving everyone else below undisturbed? Or would she be back on this same hillside the following day, having this conversation with herself about another pair of lackeys?

What is  enough ?  

What does this mean?

What am I…leaving behind?

Soph, haunting her thoughts again.

Is it…is it sufficient effort to cancel their shitty behavior and let the natural everyday positive background ripples emerge, to collide and amplify?  

Or do I leave a story?

Hope?  

Or fear?

A simple warning?

Or just…unawareness, with a side of confusion at the unknown, like usual?

Usual, but not always. Accidents happened. Slip-ups. No. Not always accidents. She'd let people see from time to time. Why had she? It was often in such a way that there was nothing solid left behind, nothing that could be proven, like with the people they'd rescued from the freighter. Sometimes, if she accidentally slipped up in an otherwise perfect rewind, Chloe would send in digital cleaners to properly erase any electronic footprints. Max had left memories, experiences - but not records. Not often. But why? Wasn't ego. Testing the waters?  

Leaving glimpses, but never enough.  

Quiet, Soph.

Nothing lived beyond internet rumors that no one took seriously. Max had well-considered reasons for not upending global society, culture, religions, but…

Maybe…try something new. Perhaps this time, she could create a local mythology to act as a danger sign for other would-be assholes instead? Angry spirits?  Cute and angry rainforest sprites protecting children? Warning implied?

Staying invisible, while necessary for all kinds of fundamental reasons, made things needlessly complicated sometimes. Chloe often lamented their lack of superhero pose practice.  Chloe's superhero poses are pretty good already, though.

Tangent.  

What to do?

Wasn't like she was in a crowded public space or a city or anything. She didn't necessarily have to hold all the way back, did she?

I mean, these guys are okay shooting schoolkids, so…yeah? Leaving them anywhere this side of the dead-line is okay for them, isn't it?

Before going any further, before deciding their fate, she had another curiosity to satisfy. Would these monsters look like monsters? Deep in their eyes. Or would they show signs of self-disgust or hesitation before deleting an entire human person from the world? Wouldn't be the first time she stopped to check. If she was honest, she wasn't sure what she was looking for in them - what would be different from any other times. But it felt important that she know. Beforehand.

But no, as the moment became inevitable for them, as the gunman squeezed the trigger, both men's expressions remained casual and entirely unconcerned, as she'd sadly guessed they would be. This wasn't an exceptional event for them. Which suggested hard hearts and a tragic repeat. Given her frame of mind, that alone required an overt response. But overt didn't have to mean deadly.

No, these guys were just tools, in both senses of the word. And somewhere behind them was the petty local douchenozzle who'd directed all this nonsense. He was her real target.  Probably a 'he.' Like…99.8% of the time.

These everyday enforcers misdelivering anguish…maybe they were at the end of a long chain of events themselves, escaping threats or demons. Complicated layers brought people to places they might never have wanted for themselves. She knew that well enough.  

But some lines shouldn't be crossed if you valued anything at all.

A lesson she'd been revisiting and taking to heart.  

That feeling, 'Right and Wrong - 101', led her younger, more innocent - or perhaps less complete - self to reverse course, to confirm her humanity by choosing office supplies over gunfire only years before.  

It was that feeling she'd lost to anger and hatred with Stirling alone after everything he'd done to Chloe.

'You don't have to forgive. You don't have to forget. But you do have to let go to move on.'

The memory, the brain-feel of Soph's calm inner voice…again. 

Max should feel the same thing now - that these guys meant something to someone. They were sons to mothers and fathers. Maybe had brothers or sisters, friends, lovers. She should feel some minor revulsion at what she might take from them if she wasn't careful. But knowing what came next, their decision to kill a child…understanding what that shot ultimately took from someone else's world made meaning those feelings difficult. Even for her. Was that a failure of empathy on her part? Or just the right amount, once she factored in people (and choices) on all sides of the equation?

Philosophical tangent, but either way…replacing one harm with another isn't symbolic of the world we're working toward.  

Full stop.

If she couldn't muster sympathy for them, she could at least choose to act differently for her own sake. As an example for others. And for Chloe's faith in her. And maybe through repetition, she'd regain something she'd lost along the way to losing her way. 

'Collateral damage' was a stupid idea, no matter the side.

Hard mode, then.  

Like it was ever a choice.

Resolute, her route decided, she dedicated herself to additional hours of MaxTime, discovering and clearing their immediate area of sizable insects, birds, and animals out in the open or who might get hurt in what followed.  

While she worked, her mind chewed at flavors of her current pressing reality. Chloe, MCCP, the layers of bad guys, the world. T-0, T-1. Subloops. Some thought-loops, but mostly open noodling. Not looking for an answer so much as ensuring she remained open to questions.  

In time, at least Max's sense of it, questions faded along with the noise in her head. She found a calmer place, an unfussy awareness of her personal presence in the repeat motions of her tasks.  

She located another bird in its nest. In softly rolling instants, she lovingly detached it from the high branches, teleported the mother and her eggs to an empty limb on the other side of the valley, and re-secured the nest from a pocket full of twist-ties.  Safe and sound. Still within calling distance of her foraging mate.

And again, to a walking stick bug.

And again, to a small, local monkey family.

And again…and again…

Once she'd finished her prep, she surveyed, took a sip from her bottle, and returned it to her old bag. Returned to her starting point between the baddies and their target. Ground she'd now covered thousands of times.

More emotionally distant and circumspect, she was attentive entirely to the now after half a day alone in the time-sliced forest. Relaxing her shoulders, she extended her hand toward the slowly rotating shard of projected death. Meeting the sniper's scoped eye between her heartbeats, she paused, advanced time forward through the microseconds until he blinked, giving his lids a last chance to protect his eyes. 

She slipped through base reality so quickly only the aftermath would register with the gunmen. Assuming they remembered anything at all.

Hand out. Slowly rolling forward.

Max increased her immersion - but only at the very tippy tips.  

Inches ahead of the bullet, she snapped her outstretched fingers with a quiet 'pop.'

Reduced her immersion again and folded downhill to the brick wall surrounding the school grounds. She needed to make sure it all went as she'd pictured. She had guesstimates from plenty of since-erased open-desert practice controlling this particular technique. Should be close enough. Although, there was that one time she'd gone superluminal with the snap, vaporizing everything within a hundred miles… If she fucked up in a similar way here, it would be an easy reset for take two.

To check before events progressed too far, she compressed vertical walls of air into convex standing pressure gradients, co-opting otherwise empty volumes into a compound telescopic magnifying lens zooming in on the bullet. Perfect training, their old spyglass games - and her time spent disassembling and cleaning the fungus from rediscovered camera lenses in some sideways future. The round uphill fuzzed in and out of focus as she adjusted the density, ratios, and spacing.  

Light sheared and broke at the edges of the expanding shockwave she'd left behind. An air explosion without a bomb, the foggy edges of the uneven blast from her time-shifted snap raced outward at a snail's pace, clarified, then nudged the projectile safely off the path of its intended target.

Good.  

With that confirmation, she dispersed her makeshift air scope with an over-dramatic wave. Stuck her hands in her front pockets, chin up, and returned to real-time.

With a sudden return of sound, the hillside exploded toward her, leveling and tearing away ground cover, shattering trees mid-trunk, and violently throwing everything outward. The destructive blast carved a radial debris pattern that removed vegetation over half the sloping hillside. The forest flattened outward for a hundred yards around the sniper and his spotter, leaving them in the center of the new clearing, their bodies dusted, utterly thundered, wholly incapacitated.  

Her pink hoodie billowed violently behind, dragging at her.

Like a meteoric airburst, the massive boom echoed through the surrounding hills. Birds of all shapes and varieties leapt to flight across the region as leaves and branches shook in sympathy. And probably some in double surprise, finding themselves very suddenly transported to unfamiliar trees not an instant before.

Max peeked over her shoulder. Back on the playground, the children, including the boy, picked themselves up. Knocked off their feet by the weakened remnants of the expanding high-pressure wave, they scrambled to cover as teachers frantically waved, sheep-dogging them to safety indoors.

The gunmen survived. In prone positions so near the epicenter, much of the force had traveled over them. What fraction of the blast they ultimately took had instead squashed and bounced them into the ground, leaving both severely pummeled.  

Max left their brains concussed, bodies and organs bruised, eardrums burst, and eyes bloodshot. Rivulets of blood ran from their ears and countless scratches marking the urgent rush and scrape of small debris. Red rivers flowed through dust in microcosms. In trade, a kinder alternative to the rivers of life they'd intended to call forth from another living human.

She wasn't naive enough to think their unknown boss would simply listen to her random, innocent plea against violence. While secreting herself from view, the display she left behind was to make an…impression - so the big, rotten cheese behind the scenes would more seriously consider the warning note she planned to leave. Theatrics, sure, but messages often proved more effective once she had people's attention.

As for the shooters, they'd recover. Eventually.

Maybe more than they deserve. But.

Not all about them.

Max wouldn't have let them die regardless, and she knew herself better than all that - but she'd become more sensitive about examining her motivations and feelings than she might have been without Chloe's ruthless cross-examinations of late. Tough love. She understood why it was necessary, signed up for it, so no complaints. It was an essential check on how she chose to use her abilities as she helped shape this new reality from behind the scenes.  

Nobody's perfect. Least of all, me.

Folding uphill a final time, Max wrote a single word in their native tongue and pinned it to the spotter, assuming her message would eventually find its way back to whoever had sent them.  

"no."

Couldn't get much more straightforward.

A dozen personal Max-hours to save a life. No critters were harmed in the making of this future. All green, right?  

She looked around to confirm.  Green…oh…right. Sadface dot gif.  

Her one regret was her uncharacteristic destruction of innocent vegetation in trade for her warning about the boy's safety. Fast-growing, but they'd been alive too. Dense, healthy, and shelters for entire micro-ecosystems. Seeing the destruction manifest in the world made her choices' obvious but unconsidered consequences plain yet again. 

Fail.

Poor trees.

Did I need to go so far?  

No, it's fine. New skills, 'member? I'll come back to resurrect them, bridge 'em forward in a few weeks when no one's looking. Move all the critters back. Ones I can find again.

And if the bad guys notice our little switcheroo back to a fully healed forest, that might make them even more concerned, right? So…win?

Sorry happy tree-friends. Your sacrifice is only temporary. Pinky swear.  Max reached down and pinky-tapped a shredded branch.

As the first local soldiers arrived on the scene, Max took to the skies en route to her next scheduled constellation of starfish. Her physical presence and departure went all but unnoticed.

Chloe occupied a bench near the center of the large, monochromatic dining hall, exposing her back to the wide-open fire doors that defined its entrance.  

A line of women, an emerging source of life and color, snaked to the left, passed the inmate cafeteria workers spooning and slopping food onto their trays. 

Nestled between painted block walls, each dull, stainless steel table seated four.  

Chloe had been among the earliest in line for breakfast, extending by one her record for the total number of days sitting alone.  

Surface thoughts meandered through new sensory information.  

Something weird about these eggs.

She let herself accelerate, continuing her recent habit of expanding small pockets of downtime to progress her thinking. And to put process to her feelings.

Her subsurface thoughts coalesced around her most familiar familiar.  

…Max.

Always.  

Her minds had been miles north of elsewhere, with at least one of them laser-focused on her favorite ‘other’ all week.  

Evaluating Max, their future histories, sideways timelines, the permanence or fluidity of choices on reality versus their hidden cumulative effects on Max’s heart…the consequences of secrecies in particular, and even Chloe’s roles in the midst of all of it. Good and bad. Everything. Over and over. All at once.

She’d been on her best behavior that first night Max opened up, successfully resisting the screaming chorus of voices inside her head. Instead projecting a necessary semblance of calm and a united front of love, empathy, and support.  

Max needed that. 

But pausing, leaving space for Max to come closer on her own, had also allowed Chloe to understand more than she’d intended about the unthinkable heartbreak and hardship Max had silently endured over what would have been the next few hundred years.  Universe, take 0, anyway. Fuck all that shit now.

For too many years, Chloe and OtherChloe had independent assumptions about what might have gone on with Max behind that curtain. But she wasn’t prepared for the brutal reality of what Max had voluntarily lived through, participated in so many times. The actual, visceral specifics. It was different to hear Max tell her stories. Different enough that it broke Chloe’s heart all over again.

If she could swallow all that collected pain in Max’s place, she would. Of course, she would. And because of that, she understood Max’s impulse to edit and keep certain events, choices, and loops all to herself. Even while arguing against it. Chloe also accepted that her mental health would have suffered far more than Max’s in any trade, given where each began. Didn’t make it fair.

Nothing was simple as black and white. There was plenty of blame if blame had been the currency between them. But it wasn’t.

Playing the support role that first night was the right approach, but Chloe had required vigilant internal effort to modulate her outward displays of disappointment and revulsion, her uncompromising rage, at Max’s serial murder spree targeting Roland Stirling not two years prior.  

Unwavering support unmixed with righteous condemnation.  

For a long while, Chloe wavered as those opposing poles coexisted in equal measure within her. Yet, the tenuous balance she found between equal weights of extremes hadn’t been one of peaceful equilibrium.  

She strove to balance compassion with tough love when it mattered but struggled from the start. There’d been way too much to unpack in Iceland. This left them with a few increasingly uncomfortable conversations on subsequent nights, where Chloe found other moments to ask questions, listen, or express her sadness, worry, and anger at certain decisions Max had made. She had to return Max’s trust and sharing while living up to their promise to come closer, process things together. They both had feelings and reactions to share, but balance remained imperfect and elusive.  

So, Chloe exhausted herself over tens of thousands of internal hours of parallel processing cycles when they were apart, chewing through her collective memories, recriminations, concerns, and doubts - replaying conversations, thinking through the churn repeatedly from every possible angle. At first, it was all accelerating circles. A finely chaotic knot all her own to work on. But knots could be loosened and eventually undone with patience and effort. Or, as she later confirmed, with enough brute-force computation.  

Thinking as only she was capable, Chloe reached certain pragmatic conclusions without firing off the unproductive conversational arrows that would only have made Max feel worse.  

First up, she inferred from Max’s stories that Chloe’s squishy human fragility, her long lifetimes of weakness and vulnerability, had been a massive anchor on Max over the years and, in fact, lay at the heart of every one of Max’s wanderings into darker territory.  

Every single one. Without exception. 

From rescues to retributions, dire circumstances to impossible choices that compounded over centuries, Max had only ever lost herself in response to something awful being done to Chloe. With consequences far worse than Chloe’s worst fears earlier in this timeline.

That wasn’t Chloe or OtherChloe’s fault, just the inevitable, sequential hum of cause and effect. Not that that made it burn less.  

Even acknowledging her present conflicted unwillingness to transcend her evolutionary limitations, it was clear that Chloe 1.0, and OtherChloe to a point, remained the sole cause of DarkZone Max. It was uncomfortable to see it play out across their histories.

Chloe as the damsel, the perpetual victim.  

Max as the battle-tainted hero fighting bloody monsters in the dark while losing a part of herself with each new fight.

Max would never say that. It wasn’t how she framed their pasts together nor what she believed; Chloe was sure. But Chloe couldn’t deceive herself. The truths were open for anyone with even a half-brain to see. And Chloe had so many half-brains it was hard to keep track of what they were up to sometimes.

While realizing her place in the hierarchy of cause and effect humbled and disappointed Chloe, it proved to be an instructive and ultimately hopeful insight that eventually reset her assumptions about her role and where she should go next with Max. In a solution-oriented way.

Back in their beginning here, everyone had been so worried that the bad guys might find a way to leverage power over Chloe or others to turn Max toward their dark purposes. Talents, hell, even Chloe herself. It hadn’t occurred to any of them that Max might go darkside, even in a limited way, all alone.  

So, immediately following Max’s Icelandic revelations, Chloe read her only job as guidance and directive support. Listening, yes, but applying all her influence and actions toward preventing Max from repeating past errors in judgement, for everyone’s sake. With the endlessly revisited emotional trauma loops and baggage-dragging, heavy-lifting late nights that long journey might entail. Max had her own knots to gently work through after all; another insight shared and examined.  

But.  

But. The terrain had shifted - no, had been shifted - significantly between their old shared pasts and their modern present. As had their path together toward the future of this branch.  

From their new transparency breaking down old secrets to Max’s continued growth, from Chloe’s gifts to recent years of level-ups…Max wouldn’t…no…couldn’t find herself trapped in those kinds of helpless ‘no-way-out and no-good-options,’ ‘gotta-save-her anyway’ headspaces ever again.

Max had too much freedom of movement now.

And there were no mechanisms left in the ‘verse for locking Chloe down against her will.  

She remained incarcerated in the present because it was more convenient to let her meat suit hang out in storage than it would be to explain how she walked out of prison while maintaining the public illusion that they were in any way ordinary people.  That was the difficulty modifier, the hard secret they were trying to hold together. Although Chloe could probably find a way to charm their way through if she had to. She’d developed a much better understanding of people lately. A much better understanding of a lot of things.

Because instead of slacking off, of coasting on Max’s tail, Chloe, former damsel, had worked hard to catch up - to stand alongside her hero. Not reaching her equal in terms of overall power-scaling, but that wasn’t realistic or necessary.  

Objectively speaking, Chloe Elizabeth Price had grown to become the second most powerful force on earth.  

Which meant leaving Max’s only demonstrated weakness, her only dark-side trigger, to rust behind them in the dirt.

While it didn’t strip away all self-examination, criticism, or doubt, that reasoned admission had finally liberated Chloe from her deepest fears for Max.  

And then, reminding herself who and what Chloe Price was - who and what she was connected to; of the words said to her when she was first gifted the legacy of hundreds of years of memories and nearly a hundred-thousand-years of advanced, self-and-AI-guided development…

“Take care of her.” 

…Always.

That was the trust placed in her by OtherChloe. That was the purpose for the gifts she’d been handed like some badass goddamn inter-dimensional super-baton. But that goal had been what Chloe wanted for herself even before being gifted a means to shortcut her journey from tag-along victim to co-hero.  

Removing the possibility of meaningful threats against Chloe was enough to keep Max from falling again. She was confident of that. Maybe that’s what OtherChloe had in mind all along. They were already way beyond that threshold, though, leaving Chloe free to push on.

Dwelling…served little purpose.

Which was to say - her conclusion, her real job, was to help Max move forward, not back.  

To achieve, not regret.

Out of a sense of fairness, that meant Chloe had to keep getting stronger, more capable, so she could help shoulder more of the work while Max healed from her past and regained her sense of mental and emotional well-being for a productive future.

Some flavor of that notion had always fueled Chloe’s struggle for agency - a responsibility to expand her capabilities. She’d lifted milk jugs for weeks to better give first-grade Max a boost up their favorite tree before it was a fort. Chloe had read every detective manga she could find in fifth grade so she’d be better at working things out on the fun ‘super-mystery days’ her dad put together for her and Max.  

It was the direction she’d chosen with renewed sincerity years before, stuck in LA traffic with a sleeping Max beside her. Nothing had changed about that pivotal choice. Well, other than everything about Chloe. Which was her point of conclusion.

And, fears aside, she understood in concrete terms that she’d thus far tapped only the merest fragment of the potential gifted to her.  

If only she were brave enough.  

If only she didn’t still feel like a lost daughter so much of the time.

Downside of racing so fast, so far ahead, she risked leaving her self behind.

Not that that would distract her from their mission, the choice of their hearts - which was all about the future. 

Anything retro was dead-horse territory at this point. Including, she reluctantly accepted, any over-focus on Roland Stirling’s multiple unhappy endings.  

Thankfully, through their conversations, Max had also grown to understand that Chloe didn’t want or need a shiny, edited life experience. Especially when that effort had left Max so isolated and vulnerable. She’d keep her word through any resets. 

But breaking the cycle was far more straightforward than Chloe had previously dreamed. It was an architectural shift - it meant a co-equal partnership. Co-equal sharing of thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Co-equal responsibilities. Co-equal sharing of consequences, mistakes, and their feelings about them. That could only happen from this moment forward and wasn’t reached by saying it was so. It was only achieved by pushing, striving, and showing up and doing it every day. It had taken a lot of independent soul-searching and communal back and forth for them to arrive there together. But here they were. 

They weren’t done putting it to action, not by a long shot, but it had become clear to Chloe, throughout her processing, that the best way forward was to go forward.  That was important. Learning and healing from the past without dwelling on it. That was where she would guide them both.

When Chloe reached those conclusions and identified her directions, she recalibrated everything.  

She cast aside a great many self-inflicted burdens. It felt like the two of them had passed through another filter on their way to becoming better versions of their future selves.

And through it all, Chloe found a new and more peaceful equilibrium regarding her fears for Max and the state of their path ahead.  

Awareness catching up with reality, maybe.

Because when Chloe looked hard at herself, with love and honesty, she finally, humbly acknowledged that she was fully half of Max & Chloe.  At least on paper. She could change things too. Wishes were wishes, but nothing was stopping her from airdropping in anywhere in the world and making things better all by herself. If she had to.

No one needs permission to save their world.  

And realistically, either of them could do so on their own if it came to that.  

Together was where Max & Chloe belonged. Of course.

Even if Chloe struggled with her uncertain nature, her selfish desire for self-continuity as she continued to explore and evolve. Even if she didn’t have the total plan down yet. But she wasn’t alone either.  

Greater openness made that journey together easier, as the emerging details buried across stories of another world ultimately convinced Chloe that she could safely retain her faith in Max. That had been a critical stumbling block for more than a few cycles before it had fallen away.

The big picture remained the big picture. Max, under the worst possible circumstances, through unparalleled layers of emotional and mental trauma spread over unimaginable timescales, had repeatedly shown a deep and abiding care for others, a consistent strength of character and judgement, and the extreme mental and emotional fortitude to keep trying, to keep going, when everything around her - people, their world - appeared broken beyond hopelessness.  

Never once giving in to external demons, Max had pushed herself far beyond any rational breaking point. She’d repeatedly sacrificed everything to secure a hopeful reality for others across countless centuries. For Chloe. Over and over, through as many times as it took. A trend that continued through the present day - even after sacrificing everything in T-0 for this new beginning.

Even as Max…even as she brushed aside tears for what might have been, had she only seen through the lies they’d likely whispered into her unsuspecting, defenseless little head before that fateful jump. Tears for the world and the love she lost when she ‘abandoned’ OtherChloe to her original branch, believing it to be at its end.

But Max didn’t abandon anyone. She never had. That was the point Max still didn’t understand. Or maybe she didn’t believe it. Either way…

Chloe was only now beginning to understand the lonely depths of those closely held regrets, the anguish Max carried while stubbornly denying herself any right to feel them.

The Welsh have a word. Well, they have a whole-ass language, but there’s one idea of particular relevance.

Hiraeth.  

It didn’t have a direct translation but describes something akin to a deep homesickness for a home you can’t return to or one that never was. A longing, a nostalgia, a sadness in the heart acknowledging the irretrievable loss of a place, a time, a people, an identity, or even an entire encompassing reality that can never come again.

Knowing it was beyond reach didn’t diminish her wish to return. It hurt Chloe’s heart that she could do so little to help soothe that part of Max.

It wasn’t a perfect analog. That word and its meanings were specific to Wales, Welsh culture, and the traumas their people endured. 

Other words existed. The Portuguese had saudade. The Germans had Sehnsucht. In Cameroon, the Bakweri tongue had erzolirzoli.

None were the same as each other, and none translated perfectly, but none felt as close as the example of Hiraeth for the kind of word that might be needed to act as a bridge between what Max felt in her heart every single day and Chloe’s understanding of it.

Yet, Max soldiered on. Even after all of that, after internalizing every fucked up call, every lost branch of progress, of resigning herself to moving on every time she exhausted all possibility, but couldn’t save someone…even with all her firsthand memories of the absolutely brutal, selfish worst that people could do to each other, Max’s faith and hopefulness for humanity - and for a future yet to come in this branch - somehow shone brightly.  

This world doesn’t deserve her. Or her faith in them.  Chloe regretted that particular thought as soon as she heard it. 

Chloe might have augmented brains, but Max had enough heart for the whole world. And then some. It was the reason Max struggled with herself so much. It was a part of her own internal checks and balances. Even if imperfect.  

More recently, Max had gained firsthand knowledge that she could fail herself. Horribly. Completely. She learned that she was capable of intentionally inflicting hurt on others. Not as a means to save herself or others but for its own sake. For retribution.

Speaking of internal demons.  

Max confided that she had her own twin mirrors to contend with - remorse for the meta of going down that murderous rabbit hole with Stirling in the first place while also honestly acknowledging that she didn’t feel any particular guilt for ending his life in the abstract - especially after everything he’d done to Chloe. Max wasn’t being petulant, just honest.

For her part, it didn’t matter if Chloe counted Max’s failures with Roland as ‘one time’ or as one additional bad choice at each new mortal erasure. It wasn’t something Chloe had the power to forgive or undo. And Max had already recognized her mistake and its effect on her, and she’d long stopped going back. Even if she remained apathetic about reversing her final visit.

Chloe didn’t have a deeply felt argument for why Max should reverse it.  At least not one that didn’t begin and end with the long-term effect of that decision on Max.  Cause, fuck that guy.

Chloe still believed in her heart that Max had to strive to be the absolute best of all of them. But in critical ways, Max herself had already won the battle for her soul. No one does anything alone, and sure, Sophie had been the one to guide Max out of that particular darkness - but Max let herself be guided. She changed her direction, took the steps independently, and kept going.

Chloe only had to look at her own mixed past to know perfection wasn’t realistic. For anyone. People grew by failing to be their best and trying harder the next day. And Max had done both when pushed to unfathomable extremes. The consequences of Max’s failures could be catastrophic, but quickly corrected and ultimately erased from all but her personal lifeline. Her scars were also reminders, even if Max, and now Chloe to a lesser extent, were the only ones who could see them. Which was why the ‘healing’ part of the plan had to take priority.

Sophie had her insights, of course, but she’d done more than her part already.

Chloe conceded that as contradictory as they’d been to everything she stood for, maybe Max’s side trips with Roland had at least been useful - to teach or remind Max of how she could fail if she wasn’t vigilant.  Like some…fucked-up anti-mass-murder vaccination…to ensure that as she became ever more powerful, she wouldn’t become too self-assured, wouldn’t lose her humility, her humanity. Wouldn’t regress to become the kind of kid who would torture ants with a magnifier - the sort of kid Max loathed, hated with all her tiny rage as a child. At least something positive might come out of those fucking death loops of hers.  

And perhaps, one day, it would become a starting point for Max to feel remorse for not feeling remorse at ending him in the abstract - as a necessary prerequisite for forgiving herself for something she wasn’t yet seeking forgiveness for.  

Max would get to that final point in her own time and effort. Chloe knew her wife. That final gap closure would hit Max hard someday, and Chloe would do her best to help her to understand, heal, and move past it.

Thinking clearly, objectively, there was still no one Chloe would trust more with the kind of power Max held. The unwavering mental glyph of trust that formed above her image-sense of Max was more than enough.

Because, beyond all of that, the deeper analysis wasn’t lost on Chloe. If T-0 Max, at her absolute weakest and worst, trapped in a messed-up branch and an endless escort mission with a shitty, fragile companion, could pass through so much darkness, isolated, hidden, damaged, yet still emerge as the bright, occasionally sarcastic T-1 derp she was, with her improbably positive outlook and her active commitment to the mission they shared…well…Chloe could only imagine the future they could build with the world as they put all that behind them and strove toward better versions of themselves.  

And that meant…there were future versions of themselves that Chloe couldn’t help but believe in as strongly as Max did.  

More head math naturally led to certain conclusions. However many there were, across however many loops, all working together - not just trying to recreate Max’s old home in the future of another timeline - but surpassing it in every possible way. Without that global destruction and everyone dying in the middle part. That was the gift Chloe would give Max if she were able. Together, this early in the timeline, they had that chance.  

What the world needed wasn’t so much different than what they needed. Expectations. Honesty. Empathy. Respect. Opportunity. Help. The occasional ass-kicking reboot. Or robot. Mediation. Acceptance, forgiveness, and healing.  

It didn’t matter who or when. Individual journeys always multiplied into the collective direction. Which was the heart of Max’s faith in Applied Butterfly Wings.  

Chloe stopped.  

Re-considered that last bit.  

Unconsciously deconstructing.

…individuals as components…emergent, re-emergent systems…

An old Depeche Mode chorus she shouldn’t have any reason to care about bounced through her head from somewhere. Ancient memories.

“You can’t change the world…”

She merged the output with one of a hundred parallel brains thinking away on their other troubles. A few metaphorical wheels clicked into place between them. Maybe something of that foundation, of basic-ass butterfly wings, could lead them out of their current global MCCP crisis’ as well.  

Can you recolor some defining pixels if you can’t edit the whole picture directly? Change the mood?

Hmm.

Fun with chain reactions?

Food for tonight’s walk.  

Speaking of food. Pleh.  

The physical world around her called for renewed attention as a comedy sound effect in her head rang out, ‘Proximity alert.’

Juliet startled when Ember leapt from the ottoman, noisily scattering papers in her wake.  

Mira bounded down the stairs, landing at the bottom with an exaggerated ‘boom.’ Soon followed by Emily and Jason, as Juliet stooped, recovered most of Ember’s launch debris off the floor.

“Morning, Jules!” Mira said with bubbly enthusiasm. Emily smiled, and Jason gave her his characteristic teen-guy head nod before looking away. Rosy faces all.

On cue, Ember let fly a sad cat ‘mew’ from the kitchen.

“I got her,” Jason offered.  

“Cans are in the bottom cabinet, next to the fridge. Thanks.” Juliet collected the last of their scattered drawings from the night before. She glanced through them to ensure they were all right side up - and froze.

She clutched one, crumpling it in her grip as the others fell away. Her free hand covered her mouth. She was somehow on the ottoman, though she hadn’t remembered sitting. Falling?

Tumbling in her head.

The drawing from the night before - it was of her. 

And Dana.

And Zach.

And a man around their age she didn’t recognize, holding hands with Dana.

The lines on the paper were clear. No interpretation required. No ambiguity. It was all of them. Together.

“…how…?”

An on-campus illustration, at Columbia, with all four leaving class in the sunshine, laughing, smiling. A place, save Juliet, they’d never reached in life.

A tear rolled from her eye at the serendipitous beauty of this casual, innocent moment captured on paper. A cruelly impossible moment. 

She darkened. Part of her grew conscious she’d stopped breathing but couldn’t exert enough influence over her body to restart.

She didn’t know about the stranger, but Zach and Dana were long dead. Ripped away from her years ago by the freak storm that destroyed the heart of Arcadia Bay. And her own with it.

She’d never mentioned them to her houseguests…so why? Who? ???

Chloe slammed back to the present moment, an all-out assault on her senses. Every sound painted pictures in the air - of objects, textures, movement, relationships between people and things…light waves overburdened themselves with chaotic information of renewed activity. All the crashing, scraping, swishing movements. Air rushing into lungs to fuel a hundred chaotic heartbeats. All in contrast to her quiet control over the ordered chaos of her inner spaces, only perceptual moments before.  

She tuned her attention thresholds to a more reasonable level.

Her nose twitched.  

Ew? Right. These eggs.

The ‘food’ on her tray carried a semi-industrial scent, the rising sharpness of fresh kitchen sanitizer. A brief analysis from the tip of her tongue confirmed a slight chemical contamination of the powdered eggs.  First batch of the day.  Enough to taint the flavor, but nothing harmful to even an ‘ordinary’ person.

Whatever.

She sidetracked her brain again, checking her use of ‘ordinary,’ when another woman dropped down opposite her, tray clanking to a skidding halt. Despite the benches and tables being bolted securely to the concrete floor, the vibrations of her indelicate landing carried.  

A super-fancy imaginary ’number of days eating alone’ sign fell over in Chloe’s local brain. Complete with cartoon sound effects.  

Foomp.

Here we go.  

Chloe saw her coming, of course, even in ultra-slow-mo. The comic-alert. Slivers of reflection all around resolved into a coherent visual shell in some part of her awareness. Plus, the cameras. Plus, the light-field sensor patches growing, blending in with the everyday wall surfaces all over the complex, courtesy of the meta-material-shifting machinations of her migrating army of alliterative micro-minions.  Om nom.

Positioning her back to the open doorway earlier was a silent invitation, a message of confident indifference, not carelessness. No one posed a physical threat to her here, weapons or not.

As Chloe appeared to ignore her, a huff escaped her new breakfast BFF. The woman’s voice had the throaty crackle of a lifetime of smoke inhalation. “You’re Price,” was all she said. Her eyes sharpened, studying Chloe’s reactions.  

Furthering the cartoon vibe that began with her internal ‘proximity warning’ message, a hush fell across the cafeteria. Even the scrape of utensils faded away. It seemed everyone’s attention focused on the duo, only without anyone looking directly at them.  

That was a peculiar art, relying on peripheral vision to focus intently while not appearing to look at anyone specific. Listening as hard as they could. Vibe check. Chloe understood the purpose in a place like this. High awareness without inviting confrontation. Which, taken with other inputs, confirmed…

Heavy.  Envoy?  

The woman glared as the seconds dragged on. She appeared accustomed to being answered right away.

Chloe wasn’t surprised by the visit. Her identity, her presence, weren’t secrets. She’d anticipated contact from the local powers that be a lot sooner. Only, when she appeared more vulnerable. Days sooner. Like in the communal showers. Somewhere they could more easily outnumber, threaten, or maybe even try to kill her - if they were working for the anti-Scooby gang. Or if they wanted to extort her for protection money or whatever, given who she was. Or, maybe when she was alone, lost in thought, they’d lope up, and…  Okay, yeah. Like now. Whatever. Shut up.

After a pause that threatened to stretch far beyond its definition, Chloe casually agreed that she was, in fact, Price. “Yup.” She resumed eating, slowly lifted the egg-like substance to her lips. In her movement, a tangle of hair fell from behind her ear. After reaching negative follicular apogee, the rebel locks reversed on their own, tucked themselves back where they’d been, hands-free.

Hard blinks from her visitor.

Chloe snickered inside. 

OMG, I’m such a fucking child.

Eh. She’s holding it together.

Okay. lol. She’s alright. Let’s get this out of the way.

The other woman stared as though testing her eyes, her expression guarded. Every wrinkle, every crease on her face reinforced the impression of a hard life of overt alertness. Of self-conscious scowling.  

All serious-pants. Geez.

But Chloe couldn’t miss the minor physiological signs during their mutual examination either. Capillary expansion across her cheeks. Increase in BP and heart rate. Bio-electrical field going all fight or flight through the metal table. Her rapid pupil response. Microscopic tremors in both her hands and jaw. She masked a good front, but below the surface, Chloe’s guest was nervous, possibly afraid.

Which meant she had some level of understanding and wasn’t likely to be self-destructively stupid. Credit where credit was due.

Chloe continued her munch-munch-munch in silence. Aware, but chill. Neither staring nor looking away. Unthreatening. De-escalating through inaction. Letting their collision unfold.  

Maria…that was her name…glanced down from Chloe’s hair to her rolled-up sleeves, gaze settling on her exposed skin.  

Chloe’s sharp, colorful art contrasted strongly with the blurred roughness of her tablemate’s layers of prison blackwork. Chloe kept its animation loop slow so as not to distract her guest too much.

The woman’s attention darted to Chloe’s other arm, with its array of sub-dermal holo-projectors, its nearly invisible flow of curves, lines, and rings, its complex waves of indents and dimples.  

Chloe suspected an intelligence behind her eyes that went beyond street smarts. Quickly confirmed with a pass through her prison records, prior transcripts. In another life, with another start, she could easily have lived a very different one.

Chloe debated firing up her arm holo, just for funsies. Decided against it. Mood check.

Meanwhile, leaving initiative to her guest.

Finally, Maria nodded, slumped. Resigned, her review over, she concluded, “You already know who I am.” Took a rapid bite of her meal to cover.

“Yup,” Chloe repeated, returning her nod.  

Maria didn’t ask the usual follow-up questions. How, why, blah blah. Accepted without further comment. Like she already had her own ideas about what was what. She seemed disappointed with herself that her sharp posturing hadn’t gotten an initial rise out of Chloe, though. After finishing her first bite of sausage, Maria continued in conversational tones, “This is the part where I tell you I’m not the only one owes you a favor. That ‘cause of what you and your honey did over New Year’s, and ‘cause of what’s goin’ on out there now - word’s come down from high. Long as you’re here, every one of us is personally responsible for your protection.”

Wait - wut?

Huh?!  

Not at all the direction Chloe expected.  

Recalibrating.

Ohhhhh.  

Huh.

Chloe allowed herself a subdued smirk as the picture further revealed itself. She took another bite. The resemblance was there now that she more properly scanned. Another quick cross-check through the Eastern Core confirmed. Maria was third-cousin to Marietta, the kidnapped wife of one of the Vegas shooters Max had rescued alongside their daughter Nessa. Seemed like literal lifetimes ago.  

Got it. World keeps on shrinking.  

That distant family connection probably kept Maria from bristling under such outlandish orders while granting her as much confidence as possible, given the circumstances.

That particular ‘someone’ higher up the chain must also have a connection to one of the others they rescued that night. Only thing that added up what Maria said. ‘Family’ further explained how Maria could find herself a local nexus of that same power. Closed loop. Made a certain amount of sense.  

The Big Bad had chosen the original party gunmen for their current or former ‘gang’ affiliations, with the intention of leaving them holding the bag in any investigatory aftermath. Thus, the kidnapped victims used as leverage over them had also been extended family to someone. And at least one ‘someone’ out there held sway over some portion of the inmate population of a random US prison. Unexpected, but fell under the general heading of ‘should-be-normal-by-now’ ripples.  Only three degrees of Bacon required. Mmm. Bacon… Well, ew here, but mmm in concept?

Maria stared, appraising Chloe. Continued, “But…you already know what I’m talking about, don’t you.”

Chloe didn’t confirm or deny.

“And this is where…this is where you tell me you don’t need anyone’s protection, huh.” Maria raised an eyebrow briefly, smiled, and looked back to her breakfast. “I ask if you want a weapon, you try to say something cool like ‘I am the weapon,’ and then it gets all weird. Right?”

Chloe smiled. Each of them calculating in their own way.

Still, the conversation was turning out to be a reasonably minimalistic affair on Chloe’s part. Especially given the implications behind Maria’s words. If Chloe had been anyone else, that promised safety line alone would have brought immediate and enormous relief. The words she’d used were specific - that Chloe wasn’t just to be left alone, but others had to intercede before anything happened to her.  Personally responsible was probably exactly as scary as it sounded to the inmates. And probably a giant pain in the ass for everyone here, which meant most couldn’t wait for her to leave.

Chloe saw proof of Maria’s words in the barely visible pocket outline of a crude plastic shiv her people had stripped away from another convict earlier that week. The one intended for Chloe. It had been a toothbrush in an earlier life, passing from inmate to guard to storage, then from guard back to inmate only days before.  

She’d remotely watched that morning’s confrontation with the shiv-holder in real-time, low-key curious. Once again, she didn’t respond to Maria’s question.  

Didn’t seem like her tablemate was waiting for an answer this time. Maria continued to eat in silence. Finally, looking away, as though reassessing the nature of her directives after meeting, she added, “How ‘bout this. We’ll keep ours out of your way, and you try not to unalive any loners that slip up or slip through, huh?” She finally warmed to a small, grim smile. “Make us all look bad for missing ‘em.”

Chloe shrugged, happy to let Maria’s people handle any minor threats. Not that she’d reduce her baseline vigilance, and not like anyone here was any real threat anyway, but it was one less thing to have front and center. Chloe finally assured with a nod, adding only, “My fight’s outside.”

More at ease, Maria stood, knocking the table twice. “But you don’t fight for yourself. Or alone.” Confirming her understanding of at least some of the stakes and current events blazing across the news from beyond the prison’s walls, Maria collected her half-empty tray. Offered, “I hope you enjoy your time in our lovely villa. And I hope for everyone’s sake it’s brief. Find me if you need anything special, and if we don’t speak again, bendición de Dios to both of you, chicas mágicas.” She laughed to herself as she turned to rejoin other presumed faction leaders at a table across the room.

Whatever tension the room held was released with the detent her knock and departure signified, as conversations and background movement gradually resumed around them.

Chloe shook her head. Maria had said the last with honest respect, not as a joke.  

But…seriously? Magical Girls?  

  Thinking back to that night, how it must have seemed to the little girl, Nessa. Retrospect. Probably where it came from. Stories first retold from a child’s point of view, then repeated like lore from one extended family member to the next. Chloe had seen the holos. That terrifying moment of their abduction by strange men. Sensing her mother’s fear, amplifying her own. The lightning and fog and monster men. She and her mother restrained, helpless. Hostages and bait in a doomed attempt to secure a power their captors feared but comically underestimated.  

Max - rolling in like some fearless fairy avenger in sneakers and a short blue dress. Gently, carefully releasing them, then imprisoning the bad guys in floating crystal spheres. Transporting Nessa and her mom through a magic portal from that super-scary mechanical danger dungeon to some enchanted indoor forest full of cute animals and hot cocoa.  

Yep. I can see how that ref might have come up. We definitely qualify as sufficiently advanced science…

The girl’s mom had called Max an angel back then, but with all the dark shit she and Chloe had lately revisited across timelines, maybe 魔法少女 was closer to their truth after all.

Juliet slid from the ottoman to the floor. A multitude of emotions washed over her. Regret, sadness, joy, love…

… anger.  

It was some sick, cruel joke, after all.

Had to be.

Emily, unaware, proudly offered, “That’s one of mine.”

Juliet locked eyes with her. Reclaimed the ottoman. Snapped, “Why? Why did you draw this? Them?”  

Emily blanched at Juliet’s harsh tone, her face a pastiche of surprise, hurt, and confusion. She glanced at Mira and back to Juliet as quickly.

Mira moved forward, gently shouldering Emily behind her. She tried to take hold of Juliet’s gaze.

Emily’s voice wavered; she scrambled over words, trying to explain. “Are you mad at me? You know them, though, right? It seems like you know them? Isn’t that good? I wasn’t sure if they were real people when I looked at it after…” Her voice trailed weakly, “I never…know…”

Juliet pressed without thinking, “Why would you draw them, specifically, though?” She was on the verge, spinning, lost.  What the hell?

Emily flushed, stammered.  

Jason returned to the room, bumping alongside Mira, adding to the wall of Emily’s defense. “We talked about how that works for us, well, me and Em anyway - we work without seeing it. Not until we’re finished. We explained it a few nights ago. ‘Member?” His voice lowered as he spoke. “We don’t have direct control.”

Juliet looked away, suddenly conscious of how they were reacting to her - aware she was coming at them out of nowhere, but still, she remained torn. She held in her hands a carefree vision of life similar to those she’d tortured herself with over these past couple of years. Images of numbing loss at each prior stage of her present and for their future lives together. A life that remained for Juliet alone. Visions identical to the one in her hand, a ‘what might have been.’ The ‘what ifs’ always lurked in the background of her daily life.

Emily slipped forward between Mira and Jason, addressing Juliet. “I’m sorry if I did something wrong, Jules. I mean it.” Almost pleading. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Last night, when we were all talking, before my hands went, I saw you when you thought no one was looking. I was just…I was sad about how sad you must feel inside to make that face you make sometimes.”

Emily’s sincerity hit like a thrown brick. 

Juliet softened at once. She was being an asshole.

Em continued, her words running together, “Only for a second though, that look, I mean, it’s not there all the time. I don’t know. You went through a lot, so I was thinking…I hoped maybe I’d draw something that would make you smile. That was all I wanted. I’m sorry I made a mistake.”  

Juliet had been living an illusion where she couldn’t always see the overwhelming dark cloud the missing had left in their wake. Now she’d pulled her houseguests into the middle of that without any time for a thoughtful explanation. The drawing caught her off guard, and she’d just reacted.  

It’s not just me in my head here.

She looked back at the page, the lines Emily had drawn…their faces.

A tear fell from her cheek and landed on Dana’s.

Numb, Juliet began anew, “They…um…they were my best friends…”  …but they’re dead now, she finished without saying the words.  That was the day the world went away.

“I’m sorry, Jules. I really, really am.”  

Jules scanned the kids’ faces, looking for any sign of amusement, cruelty, or deception. She wasn’t getting any of that from their reactions. Mira and Jason had jumped in somewhere between the immediate defense of Emily and a growing sorrow that Emily had inadvertently stepped on a land mine with Juliet. It could have easily been one of them if their stories were true.  

Emily was genuinely beside herself.

Juliet shook her head.  No, I’m sorry… but before she could say the words aloud, the burner on the table shrieked.

Mira jumped.

Juliet barely noticed. Looked Em in the eye, shook her head, and whispered, “No, sweetie.”

Jason reached behind them, picked up the phone, and answered. After a pause, he opened a folder on the notebook, clicking an application. He announced, “It’s Ian. Uh. By voice.” He rotated the notebook toward the group.

Everyone turned in surprise. Text-man had a voice?  

They left the moment behind them unresolved as they were pulled forward along a path that seemed to have been set in motion for them.

“Hello, everyone.” Ian’s voice was pitch-shifted, scrambled, and electronically disguised.  

Of course.

Jason warned, “We’re broadcasting video from our end, just so…ya know…”

At hearing Ian’s fake voice, anger flared again in Juliet. Her doubts roared back without intention- Ian brought them together here. Was it just to fuck with her? It had to come from somewhere - she held the drawing up to the camera. Voice cold, she said, “Explain this.”

Ian peered through the camera at the drawing. Enhanced.

He'd researched Juliet's entire life before making first contact. Thus, he'd recognized at once the faces alongside hers in the sketch she held. Happy. Smiling. Filled with life - but in a time and setting they never reached. Excepting the second man. A quick face-lookup led to an otherwise unremarkable student ahead of Juliet's year, currently attending CUNY. It didn't appear that the two had previously crossed paths, on campus or off.

He'd also researched the kids he'd sent in his opportunistic two-for-one gambit. Delaying Juliet's inevitable departure and blunting her downward spiral caused by his failure to get to her in time - while temporarily sequestering the children out of harm's way. He was familiar with their talents from the intercepts. It's why he'd gone to such trouble to locate them, help them escape. They could draw people and things found in remote places in real-time.  

He understood what happened with the drawing mechanically, but that didn't give him the explanation Juliet sought. 

"Question," he stated. "Which of you was the artist of this?" Another black swan?

"That was me, Mr. Ian," Emily spoke up, poking her head from behind Mira on the camera feed.

Ian made a series of quick deductions. She'd drawn people who weren't here. Who weren't…here here. It was a contemporary setting, not a historical one. So, if their abilities were accurately described, the people in the drawing existed in this setting and time…somewhere. It was the only way Emily could have pulled this image together with anything other than visual-keyed telepathy of Juliet's thoughts, and there hadn't been hints of additional talents. Occam. It had to represent reality if they were consistent with their gifts. But not real here. Leaving Emily as…a girl…who could see and draw…what?  Alternates? Across the boundaries themselves?  

Was her gift, then, exactly as the others? Auto-drawing centered?  

Or was there some greater vision that she couldn't yet process consciously?

Did she see and then block from conscious awareness, or did she draw without seeing, as the boy did?

If the latter, would she always?

There was something he'd forgotten.  

Had it been so long?

It didn't change things. Juliet was his mission. At least, his most active means to his ends.

Fascinating though.

He did a double-take. There was something there after all - it was coming out of sequence.  

A faraway story opened up. A tale, nearly folklore, of a woman whose point of view reached beyond world lines. Recognition flooded him. He made the connections. He'd had it right after all! He held his voice - there were no words. And absolutely no one who should hear them. Emily was that person. 

The first cartographer.

She wasn't the reason he was here - safeguarding her wasn't why he'd found them, brought them here. Not in that way - he hadn't known. How could he?  

Circumstances aside, Ian appreciated that the universe could still spring such lovely surprises in its own defense. But that meant he suddenly had two extremely complicated mission objectives of nearly equal importance, each essentially running on improvisation, with a 30% chance of failure for one and not enough time for the other.

We're already running razors after all the mistakes.

This present was built by blending intentions with accidents and chaos. 

I can't fail now.

He pondered briefly. Thought through Juliet's reactions thus far.  

His plan with her was predicated on sharing 90% truth and a final 10% misdirection. That was believed necessary to create the tension to motivate Juliet at various critical points and effectively steer Caulfield for her part later. They both had to agree, and their timing would be vital. It's why they'd prepared the contents of the drive as they had after its secret construction - but after all the prep, there was always a chance Juliet wouldn't believe anything.  

The files were chosen to present a truth. Juliet had been the most likely receiver, but the precogs inside MCCP had concerns that interference might prevent her from being the one. That was nearly true and nearly his fault had he not recovered her himself. In their head start, his accomplices had to consider alternate candidates, some of whom had wildly different ideological tolerances, personalities, and motivations. Ian was there to herd whichever way it went and close the gap to make things specific for whomever.

Increasing those odds was why the precogs worked so hard in their material selections, but there were specificity limits due to the unknowns.  

For Juliet, in particular, facts had to be source, raw, and clearly evident, but she'd have to feel she'd worked for them to overcome her natural skepticism. But everything about that plan went sideways when the extraction team fell behind. The timing was off, and what was supposed to be a calm pickup - and a skeptical, balanced, and predictable Juliet - turned into a bloodbath. The effect on her psychology was predictable at a human level, but it threw all their calculations off bubble. It would make some truths that were previously a given much more difficult for her to accept while making others that were going to be more of a process viscerally evident out of the gate. It was all jumbled back to front.  

And with the insiders' jobs done, with their work erased from the memories of all but one, there was no reaching out for help adjusting. Ian was left on his own to fill the gaps.  

The public perception and legal issues swirling in the background with MCCP remained unrelated to his mission. Still, they had proven helpful in laying some preparatory groundwork and eventually creating urgency with Juliet. He was using that crisis, and her access to information, actively shaping what the online news algos served up to her feeds to advance his goals with her.

He'd adapted the children into the plan when he decided to use them. Inserting them into the house helped restore a sense of grounding and normalcy in Juliet. It didn't return her to her prior pre-trauma state. But it would allow him to appeal based on reason and personal emotion rather than the unpleasant next option of amplifying her fear and paranoia to hysterical levels before sending her desperately on her way. It was a kinder path, but kindness didn't guarantee success. Failure would mean failure. There would only ever be one shot at aligning these moments.  

There was also a non-trivial chance Juliet might believe everything he said or shared but refuse to go in the end out of fear, doubts over the outcome, or general self-preservation. That's why he'd been controlling her circumstances, working on her motivations this whole time - positioning her for protective instincts, subtly nudging her into a place where she'd accept the role he needed her to play. But he could still fail there too. She was strong-willed but also in a fragile position. Bringing in the children worked to anchor her, but she would need the motivation to cast off that anchor herself to proceed. Each solution led to the next problem. The precogs were always looking ahead into shifting branches - but his improv may have created a future too far.  

Even Caulfield would only be a means to an end. While more reliably predictable, she could catastrophically torpedo his plans at any point before execution. Thankfully, not beyond that point of no return. The goal, the final thresholds, would place events beyond her ability to undo. 

All of this…difficultly…these layers…these deceptions - were to avoid Price. There would be no recovery if she'd caught wind of anything in advance.  In terms of priority, keeping Price in the dark - and on her own unmodified path for the present time - was far more critical than Ian's primary mission. Circumnavigating her made everything a million times more complicated than it had to be, but he had no choice.  

So with all that, he looked hard to find the benefits in the wildcards he'd come across. With Juliet, the children had been effective at delaying action while attenuating some of her spiraling trauma symptoms - except now, against all expectations, they'd handed him something even more novel to work with.  

Sometimes the multiverse cooperates in ways I can't begin to understand.

Emily, Jason, and Mira were proof points for certain truths of the world Ian needed Juliet to see. But that drawing - what it implied, what it might mean to Juliet - with some prompting - was perhaps worth a few additional percentage points of certainty in the end. Or it could unravel everything if not correctly handled. So it ever was. He had to be careful with her, was all.

Another adaptation.

Another change in strategy.

It might work better than what he'd had in his pocket only minutes earlier.  

Time would tell.

He noted the world clock. It was minutes past the designated time.

The thumb drive lockout expired minutes ago.

Juliet waited for Ian.  

He'd gone quiet after Em took credit for her work.

Finally, he said, "There is explanation for everything. But you must be the person to decide what you think and what to do."

More cryptic nonsense? Or?

She held her tongue, picked up the notebook, and carried it to the breakfast table. She quickly arranged the chairs to form a semicircle, allowing them to see the screen.  

The kids joined her.

"Okay. Explain."  

After a pause, Ian continued. "If you select the drive icon, you will find the lock removed."

Her mouth felt dry. "Was it that easy?"

"Let us learn of it together," he replied. "I have a screen-share in a separate window, so I can also be seeing what you see."

She clicked the drive. It opened in the usual way. Boring. Without drama or ceremony, as though it had never been locked. Within, she discovered a simple directory of folders. She quickly scanned them while she triggered a quick screen capture with the keyboard, just in case.  

ANNUAL REPORT

ARCHIVES

CORRESPONDENCE

EMPLOYEE ONBOARDING

EVILCORP

EXTRAPLANETARY RESOURCE GUIDE 

INTERROGATIONS

MAX-X 1.0

MISSION LOGS

ORIENTATION

OUTSIDE MEDIA

PERSONNEL

PHOTOGRAPHS

PRESS INTERVIEWS

SCHEMATICS

TIMELINES

VIDEO

readme_rtf

The file window was arranged so clicking a folder would open the contents in a new panel to the right, and any subfolders would continue to open new frames, allowing for quick, non-linear navigation through the trees.  

Juliet clicked the readme text file. According to the file-size column, the rtf was enormous. On further inspection, after a slight opening delay, it only contained the same master list of files nested under folders with time/date information. No further explanation.

"This must all be internal company data," she repeated, reminding herself of their provenance. She clicked into the Annual Report folder at the top. The filenames indicated a combination of documents, spreadsheets, and presentation decks for MCCP for the most recent year. She clicked into a couple of docs at random. They eventually opened to various financial summaries, burn rates, patent filings, performance data about shell and subordinate companies worldwide, and something about endangered species. Straightforward corporate summary documentation, plus other stuff. She wasn't an accountant or lawyer but had a basic grasp of the kinds of things public companies filings included. Time spent with the Journal and all. Despite MCCP being private, companies ran on plans and checks against objectives, and this appeared to be a lot of that at a reasonably high level.

She clicked out to the left into the Press Interviews folder. Subfolders listed publications, primarily technical or science-oriented. Opening a couple showed a pattern of contents, including past interviewee names, interview dates, further subfolders with prep materials, interview recordings, and the resulting articles or post clippings. Basic corporate media prep and tracking stuff.

Nested among the other folders was the Journal. On examination, it held the same pattern of subfolders. She tapped into the interview recording section and was greeted with audio and video files of various formats, all roughly the same duration. She launched a video file. It was the interview she and Elliot had with Max. The interview that concluded only moments before she'd been passed the very drive containing the recordings.

Buffering heavily, the video picked up from the opening of the elevator onto the forested floor where they'd interviewed her. The visual was in motion, as though shot from handheld or drone cameras, constantly moving, multiple angles - it looked like an edited TV show or movie. Juliet saw nothing of the sort while there, but there was probably some science behind how they could do that. It didn't seem like a reconstruction - the video was as sharp as the screen would allow, extremely clear and detailed. She scrubbed to the right, fast-forwarding through the footage. It appeared to cover the whole interview, from start to finish.  

A wave of relief washed over her. Thinking aloud, she said, "We don't need to recover my audio or notes from the office. It's all right here. I could verify its authenticity myself."  

She'd had no real plan to try to retrieve them. Had long considered them lost.

Ian didn't reply.  

The kids were pressed in, watching everything, scanning ahead.  

Mira pointed to the left of the screen. "What's that?" Her finger landed on the Extraplanetary Resource folder.

Juliet clicked over, brow furrowed. "I…dunno. What…is this?"

The folder contained other folders, some listing names of planets or moons in the solar system, others featuring the names of asteroids, while others were alpha-numeric only, so it was impossible to know what they were offhand.  

Juliet clicked Luna.

More subfolders. Maps, structural diagrams, documents, flow charts, personnel rosters, inventory, and supply information.

Looked similar to some of the national and international company reporting data she'd seen earlier. But seriously? The moon? "What the…" It was some mistake or some kind of joke. Something to throw off anyone who found the drive, surely?

Emily poked at the screen - a subfolder under 'Luna' titled Photographs. 

Juliet went in.  

As she selected each photo file, a window to the right displayed the photograph and standard metadata information. The list showed pictures of the earth from the moon's surface, much more clearly than the old NASA photos she'd seen. She had to pinch to zoom in several times before it stopped. Other photos were of facilities, seemingly in caves or below the surface, reddish grey rocks carved out in spheres and circular connecting tubes, along with infrastructure, candid photos of workers in a kitchen, sleeping, playing video games. Normal everyday things. But in each, the backgrounds showed what appeared to be the same kinds of smooth-cut rock surfaces, or a bubbled spray foam, perhaps. 

"This is just visual effects. Could have been taken anywhere. Maybe it's promotional materials they never published? Promo renderings of ideas, space travel, like Max talked about, I guess?"

Jason nodded along.  

Ian asked only, "What do you think of the date information?"

Juliet glanced at the metadata for the current photo, an out-of-focus candid picture of an older woman pulling cookies from an oven. Instead of the typical month, day, and date format, the year had three times too many numbers and started with a negative sign. "Corrupted data," she mused. "All of the files are showing sizes way too big for what they are. Might be drive errors or some artifact of the encryption? I don't know. Hope not; it could be unfortunate if this stops working again."

She popped out of Luna, backward through the folder hierarchies. Opened one titled Jupiter, then went down into a couple of subordinate satellite folders. Similar architecture to the files listed, showing similar information, manifests, and photographs.

"This doesn't make any sense."  

In frustration, Juliet clicked back to the parent directory, then down into one labeled Max-X 1.0.  In it, they found PDFs, text files, presentation files, report documents, and spreadsheets. Speaker lists. "…a company event." The dates were more than two and a half years old. She spied a video file titled 'Max Intro.' Opened it.  

Watched as Max Caulfield mounted a makeshift stage. A few jump-cuts, like it had been edited wrong. Buffer-stutter?

"…So first, hi, everyone. Um. Most of you know I'm Max Caulfield. I'm the MC in MCCP…"

Juliet let the video play. "This had to be right after they started."  

Introductions. Outline of a day's worth of internal events. Very much about world-saving and not so much about the business side. What looked like timelines and detailed predictions of catastrophic events that might unfold over the next few hundred years. An overview of early successes and promise of more. It was only a few minutes long.  

"This was right at their beginning. Jesus." Juliet recalled the dissonance she'd felt on seeing Max in person on interview day. This video, by contrast, would have been mere months after the disaster that struck Arcadia Bay. At the time of Max's video, Juliet would have been at home. In shock. Inconsolable. Devastated at learning for the first time the permanence of impermanence. Suffering through a loss too heavy for her youth. She recalled, during the interview with Max, fighting her inner voice, which was shouting that a few years was too little time for the kind of personal development and maturing Juliet saw in her. Angry at the unfairness of outcomes, at how unaffected she seemed by it all… But to think that Juliet's on-site assessment of Max at the interview had been so wrong - it hadn't taken years if the event video was real - it was only a few months after...and she was already like that.

She broke out in a cold sweat, felt vaguely sick.

Jason, Mira, and Emily were the exact opposite - they were excited, gleeful even. Like they'd discovered promises of a long-forgotten holiday in the cracks of an old calendar.  

Ian interrupted. "There's more. Much more."

"This is so freakin' cool." Emily reached and clicked to open the Video folder.

Juliet sat back, didn't interfere. Still processing. Stuck in a moment.

The filenames this far down were scrambled alpha-numeric. Like the contents might have been pulled from a database directly. It was the same as when Juliet downloaded safety copies of pictures from social media to her computer. Original filenames were gone, replaced by numbers. A lot of naming context missing.  

Emily clicked at random.

A video window opened with the frame frozen on a desert scene. A small hooded figure stood in the distance.  

Em hit play.  

The scene was still. Clouds moved in the background to mark time. Suddenly, Max appeared full-frame, stumbling forward, as what could have been an explosion or shockwave roared at her from behind, blowing her hood on over her head; the camera fell backward in a chaos of dust and debris. Blue skies. Dirt falling. Max entered the frame again, laughing, picking up the camera on its tripod, all smiles. 

"That was a good one! I felt like I almost had it!" She grinned happily.  

Chloe's distinct voice answered off-screen as Max tried to set the tripod back up. "Reset. Go Again."

The video ended.

"What on earth?" Mira asked. "That was weird."

Jason took over, scrolled and scrolled and scrolled before selecting another video file - there appeared to be hundreds of them, with no named titles or differentiating information.

Again, the open frame showed a still of Max, this time in an open green field of tall grass. She appeared frozen, even once the video rolled. Without warning, she started what looked like a martial arts display in very slow motion but with occasional explosive transitions from one stance to the next. The camera tracked as it made a circle, keeping Max in the middle. Her slow movements got slower while the fast transitions became faster.  

Juliet would have thought it was a function of editing, speeding up and slowing down the camera, except for the startled bird that flew across the background during one such transition from slow to fast. And then there was the grass blowing down ten feet in front of Max as though hit by a shock wave at the end of a palm strike.  More visual effects.

"Woah." Jason seemed proud of his selection.  

Out of nowhere, a soap bubble appeared in the air a few feet from Max. Or at least reminiscent of a floating soap bubble. There was something inside it. Max vanished. The camera cut to a new viewpoint on a hilltop but ended on that final frame of a blur, what looked like a rifle barrel, and some weird visual glitch effects.  

Juliet wasn't sure what the point was. None of it seemed coherent, and none related to anything else.

Ian remained silent.

Juliet reclaimed control of the touchpad. Scrolled to the bottom of the video folder they were in. Opened the lowest file. Date-stamp in the metadata said it was recent. A day before their interview, if she remembered correctly. She wasn't sure what she was looking at. Or searching for. But Tie-Dude passed her the drive for a reason, right? She'd been carrying it for a reason. Worrying over it for a reason. Was she supposed to go through all of this?

She clicked play. The video opened to what looked like the interior of an urban mall. The camera followed behind a young girl, who was reaching up, smiling, holding her mother's hand on one side while dragging a floating red balloon tied by ribbon to her other wrist. The view panned up as the pair entered a large, enclosed, food-court-style area, bright, festive, with tall ceilings and perhaps a dozen patrons, mostly families. Storefronts with enticing displays ringed the perimeter on two sides, while restaurants jammed side by side ringed the remainder. The signs, scripts, weren't in English. Arabic, maybe? Kiosks for specialty dessert shops or confectionaries mixed in with the open seating areas, largely empty. Off hours?

The camera suddenly took off, zooming like a drone, flying to the opposite entrance.  

The movement reminded Juliet of the camera movements and point of view of her interview video with Max. She wondered if it was the same here? No physical camera, but perhaps multiple static cameras lent enough for a high-fidelity reconstruction of some sort? Or was the whole thing a render? Based on what she'd seen and heard inside MCCP that day, anything was technically possible.

Which wasn't an answer. Her attention returned to the screen.

The video re-centered behind a trio of men walking into the food-court area together. It zoomed low - to the ugly tip of a rifle barrel hanging an inch below the edge of a long fabric coat, swinging with each step.

Juliet barely suppressed a reflexive shudder.

The camera left the three men behind and flew over tabletops, coming to rest alongside a lone, seated figure.  

Bench seating. A slight frame, hoodie pulled forward. Colorful rainbow headphone wires spilled out from under, connected to a phone resting on a closed book. The camera circled behind the other side of the hidden person. No face visible.

Beyond the hood, slightly out of focus, three men wielding rifles fired a bright burst into the air, appearing like arcs of blurry fireworks in the camera.  

Juliet jumped unconsciously.

People in the video screamed. The men fanned out, corralling the workers and families, driving them toward the same corner as the seated figure, who, facing the other direction, appeared unaware of the chaos. The men shoved the laggards, some panicking, some running, one tripping in terror while trying to comply with the shouted orders.  

Juliet couldn't be sure of the language. Sounded like Arabic again, but she didn't know enough to exclude other possibilities.

Other men must have come in from the entryway behind the camera because, out of nowhere, the end of a barrel poked the seated figure in the back of the hood.  

Another man leaned in from the front, trying to get the attention of the only person ignoring the cacophony of their surroundings. He roughly yanked the headphone wires, pulling the earbuds onto the table.

The camera's position whip-snapped backward. 

In the following split-second - far faster than the video could clearly show, the hooded figure rose up, hands lifting the edge of the table, throwing the whole thing up and forward in a powerful paddlewheel spin, slamming the man in front out of frame. In the same instant, the person twisted, catching the gun barrel behind with the back of a slender arm, nudging it up and away.  

The camera pulled back yet again.  

They completed their original turn, slamming their other palm into the gunman's chest behind them, sending him flying backward out of frame as a few rounds popped off sideways, uncontrolled.  

Only a fraction of a second had gone by.  

Juliet had edited plenty of videos - even at 120fps in school - and what transpired was captured in 10 to 15 frames. It was an explosive fraction of a second. Inhuman movement speed.

The bench seat, unbalanced by the now still figure's prior movements, slowly tipped and fell back with a clatter.

The camera followed behind as the hooded figure turned, crouched, and pushed off like a track star, running at the other three gunmen at an impossible pace. Launched up and sideways off the front of a kiosk, slammed into one of the men in a spinning barrel roll, bodily taking him down and out, closing with an elbow to his head.  

Pushing up and out of the roll, she — Juliet was confident now — grabbed a chair by its back, threw it overhand at another man halfway across the room. It connected with his head and chest, dropping him instantly.

The camera pulled away and to the side.

The hooded hero interposed herself between the frightened would-be hostages and the remaining gunman.  

Juliet, startled as her eye caught the balloon, realized the gunman had crouched behind the young girl, rifle hanging behind him now, a pistol digging into her quivering chin. She whimpered in fear, tears streaming, arms out toward her mother, restrained by others behind the hooded figure.  

The person, woman, who had just dropped four out of the five armed men in half as many seconds, dropped to one knee and pushed her hood back.  

Max…

Juliet was surprised by her lack of surprise at the reveal.

On-screen, Max reached toward the girl, some 20 feet away.

To the left of the frame, 15 feet behind the man, the storefronts distorted, pulled inward, like a cheesy Photoshop pinch effect.  

More vfx?  What are we watching?  Was all this some cheap action movie ego-cosplay or something? Confused.

The distortion behind the man increased.  

A second pinch effect similarly distorted the background shops in front, between Max and the girl. The girl's balloon drifted toward the pinch, its ribbon at a hard diagonal angle and dropping toward the horizontal.

Both distortions increased in effect. 

The girl cried out.

The pinch behind the man grew extreme and drifted closer to him. As did several chairs and benches in the background.

The distortion between the girl and Max grew.

At once, a bulge appeared in the small space between the man and the girl, exploded, and expanded rapidly, pushing them apart - the pinch in front simultaneously grew, racing toward the girl.  

Behind, the first pinch raced to the flying gunman, accelerating him backward.

It was like Hollywood wire-work - the two were yoinked apart in a blink of an eye.  

The man flew, bouncing away from the girl and Max.

Max raced forward.

The pinches and bulge effects smoothed and vanished entirely.  

The man landed back two dozen feet, tangled up in the undermix of chair and table legs collapsing around him.  

Max caught the girl in her arms. Dropped to one knee, held. Waited a moment, visually checking each of the fallen men for movement before pulling her hood back up and returning the girl to her mother.

The video framed out on a black screen.

"I don't get it." Juliet shook her head. During her pre-interview research, she'd seen similar scenes allegedly showing Max doing strange things, if only in over-pixelated phone videos claiming to be this or that. She'd dismissed all of it as nonsense, conspiracy nuts doing what they did best. Trolls, memes, whatever.

But this was clear, almost hyperreal. Elaborately staged if it wasn't authentic. But of course, it wasn't real-real.

Juliet, thinking aloud, "Did they do these kinds of things for fun because they can? Rich people cosplay games? It's just money to make little movies like this, right? Did some of these, like maybe, low-res versions, leak, and that's where this weird stuff on the internet about them started? Or did they leak them themselves on purpose…why? What do they get out of it? Amusement? Trolling, or…"  

The kids looked at each other as though realizing some fundamental new truth. Jules couldn't puzzle out what…

Ian interrupted her thoughts with a suggestion. "Why don't we take an organized step back. Would you do me a favor and open the 'Orientation' folder?"

She obliged. In it, they spied a single file titled, Drink me.

Juliet hesitated.  

Rolled her eyes.

Clicked.

Juliet poked at her bacon. She was too mentally exhausted to be angry. Over it.

It was all fucking crazy. If they took the narrative of the drive at face value, then the story the Journal ran was at least partly true - they were a confirmed cult, 100%, albeit an anti-death cult. The distinction felt like a critical clarification to hold onto. But that made Max their…what, leader after all? Time wizard, apparently? God? It wasn't far from the alien space wizard rumors among the fringes. And based on other documents and files, Chloe was supposed to be some sort of post-human, then? Max's introduction in the MCCP event video, everything she talked about, wasn't phrased as doom speculation; it was presented as genuine - the story was, they'd come back in time, and they were all on a merry mission to save the world, and hopefully, civilization. Complete batshit. So dumb if that's what this was all about. And yet…

As crazy as it sounded, it was an exquisite solution to the questions she and Elliot discussed before and after the interview. Every 'how.' Every 'why.' If she could suspend her disbelief long enough to compare the facts, gaps, and implications of what she'd just witnessed, it all worked. Every piece fit. Without exception.  

If she believed, it all clicked into place. 

If she believed, everything made sense.  

Including everything about Max and Chloe.  

But to do that, to honestly believe, she'd have to embrace the craziest ideas she'd ever heard. It was the only way to make the rest not crazy.

She wasn't there. There were too many other possible explanations. And she lived in the real world.

She and the kids had been online with Ian for over an hour, reviewing the contents of the orientation folder. That turned out to be a high-level guided tour, sequential and seemingly pulled together from confidential MCCP onboarding presentations, training videos, and speeches, all of which sold the same gospel and pulled no punches on their counter-apocalyptic mission.  

When speaking candidly to other insiders, the leadership there sounded utterly unhinged. But there were also one-on-one interviews with employees, edited videos highlighting case studies and a few live missions of note, and framing discussions with section administrators in a few different divisions, all chained together in a hastily assembled story, just for her, from start to finish.  

Juliet made mental notes throughout, reporter-brain assembling facts, and events, comparing things. Looking for holes and inconsistencies. So far, coming up short. But Jesus fucking Christ. What a giant waste of time.  Why had she even cared about the stupid drive?

Half an hour ago, Ian had to go. Said he had to talk to some of his people and he'd get back in touch that afternoon.  

After disconnecting, Juliet finally did the autopilot thing with breakfast for everyone. Some tummies rumbled more than others. The kids devoured it and were excitedly talking over each other. She'd tuned them out. They were entirely on board Team SuperMax.  Kids.  

It was a joke. A farce.  

A comic book.

Max and Chloe. Fucking superheroes.  Right.  Battling some unseen darkness. Science fiction and space magic. It was so entirely necessary to dismiss outright. Obviously, it wasn't meant to be believed. Disinformation in the open. Had to be. They worked on classified projects too. That made way more sense.

Otherwise, it would mean that the shitposters and internet conspiracy nuts were correct. It would mean that the shaky phone videos, the second-hand rumors, stories, held at least a grain of truth. The whole premise was so outlandish that if there was even a single grain - if any of it were true - it could all be true. All that meant the rules of common sense were out the window. There was no way to distinguish the truth from fiction at that point. No way to understand the world around them.

And if she believed that, she'd also have to accept her houseguests' claimed talents. Including the picture Emily drew. And Ian's proposed explanation for it.  

Ian had all kinds of theories.  

Zach. Dana. Alive at Columbia on a sunny day. It was a nice dream that they could be alive out there somewhere. Some other universe. But that would mean multiverses existed, some with identical copies of people, with slight changes, and…whatever else. Not just the math but the physical reality. Too abstract. No way to prove anything. Mathematically, sure, under some theories she'd heard of, she'd been taking introductory physics. But still. No way to get to the other places, even if they existed. No way to ever interact or know.

So it was all bullshit.  

Right?

Bullshit.

Amazingly self-consistent bullshit.  

Bullshit that made perfect sense if you ignored the fact that it was bullshit.  

Bullshit that explained every 'this isn't right' spider-sense Juliet had experienced since Arcadia.

But she wasn't a believer. Obviously. The table under her elbows was tangible. The chill off the windows was cold. Ember, the orange kitty with a single brain cell, rubbing against her leg under the table, was there in the fur.

Max, Chloe, and their people were doing some good in the world, whatever they believed, or said they believed. That much seemed accurate. They were motivated and trying to help. She already knew that and saw examples more directly in the insider stuff she'd read and watched so far. So did it matter what they told themselves, or if they were also crazy? Maybe. Maybe not.

But really? Time travel? No, what had they called it instead?  Time manipulation?  They didn't have to go so far with it. That was just dumb.

Max and Chloe.  

They were amazing.  

Truly unbelievable.

Un-believable.

And just…surrounded by completely unnecessary rumors, lies.

Was it all a con after all?

Or a cover?

Maybe, but that didn't feel right either. Juliet had known them as they were. And while they were different now, whatever the cause, they weren't evil. They weren't criminals. Chloe maybe was flirting in that direction at one point, but that was entirely different. Low-key.

Whatever the setup, whatever mind-fuck they played to get thousands of brilliant people to believe in them, give them money, and work for them, the result of all of their chaos was still a net positive, wasn't it? Bringing extinct species back from the dead? Curing diseases? Trying to solve housing, poverty, and education? Solving energy like forever? And by extension, climate change, every environmental concern? Third parties had verified some of it.

Even if the space travel and off-world bases were fluff, even if the Max and Chloe superhero cosplay videos were entirely fabricated (of course they were), their motives seemed genuine. The results of MCCP's other efforts seemed wildly globally beneficial.

Eccentric, but…ignoring all of her own logic holes. How, then, had Max changed so much in so little time? (Bullshit). How had Chloe matured at the same rate? (Bullshit). Where did their seed money come from? (Bullshit). Who would ever loan them that much cash? (Bullshit). Why was there so much consistent speculation about them online? (Entertaining bullshit). So many more questions with answers that only made sense if…

And there was still that Journal article that she didn't write, discrediting them, published in her name.

There was still her attempted kidnapping, the gunfire in the streets, and the terrified, all too horrific deaths of real people before her eyes.

That wasn't bullshit. Something big, something else was going on.

Basic facts, there was this group of (probably crazy) people trying to do something positive for the world.

And there was some other group trying to stop them. Shut them down.

That was the setup at the most basic, all other bullshit aside. Someone was trying to stop them and shut down the positive outcomes they were trying to engineer. That meant the good they tried to do had potential, and the other side could only be criminal. If not a conspiracy of epic proportions, it was one of economic interest. Back to the basics Juliet could recognize. Money. Power.

Juliet didn't work for MCCP or for the Journal anymore. She was skeptical either by nature or a lifetime of practice. But then, she didn't have to believe all of that outlandish mythology to see the basic outline above or to want to try to help them. If she could do so safely.

It was the best middle ground she could reach on short notice.

Ian said that with the full-resolution video and audio recordings of the initial interview, there might still be a way to do that. Help them. That was part of what he wanted to talk about with the others in his group. Their dinky cellular uplink wasn't sufficient for moving the enormous interview files. That part of the data seemed consistent and not the result of drive corruption. Despite its nondescript exterior, the drive's storage capacity appeared to be massive, which made sense, given the source. The individual images she saw were all multi-gig in size. Text files were in the hundreds of MB each. The video files were ridiculous - all uncompressed, up to 8k, at least 16-bit color depth. The smallest, shortest video clips were in the single-digit terabytes. Longer ones were, well, much, much bigger. The small notebook was excellent for surfing the web and light video but far too underpowered - and didn't have the software or memory needed for transcoding such huge files into something more internet-portable. Even if they'd been able to, Ian said there was a chance they'd be detected at the backbone and deleted long before anyone could see or copy them. Maybe they could get Juliet something more powerful or a better uplink. Ian thought there might be a better way to move the interview video file online, but he didn't say anything specific yet.  

Ian suggested Juliet go through the drive's contents independently to see what she'd find. 

He'd also suggested that if Juliet could take an hour over the following days, do a little pre-amble, written or video, that set up the facts as she understood them, journalistically, and that set the record straight about her interview with Max, and about the attempts on her life. Then, if they found a way, they could push that and the full interview video out, which would probably go some way toward cleaning up at least the initial spark of MCCP's troubles. Might help. He and his people could help ensure the story bubbled up from the grassroots. It was something they might be able to do. She might be able to do.

She felt at least partially responsible for everything they were going through. Her access to Max and Chloe allowed other vested interests to cause harm. But the stakes were far beyond the survival of any one company at this point. And, she reluctantly agreed, any one person.

But once she'd spilled all of that to the web, there probably wasn't a logical reason for MCCP's adversaries to continue to pursue her life anymore. Cat out of the bag and all. Ian logic. Juliet wasn't sure she wanted to bet her life assuming rationality on the part of darkly motivated power players, but…yeah. It made some sense. Unless they were the revenge types. They seemed like the revenge types.

What was it Jason said? "If there's a chance to help someone, we should. Even if we won't benefit."

That part also felt right. Not that she'd ever put the kids in harm's way.

Some things still bugged her, though.  

Going backward.  

Bullshit aside, the threading was off. Even the drive itself - if their interview had been on it this whole time, why didn't MCCP publish it on day one? Why did some suspicious insider stick it on a thumb drive for her? How did he know to do that?… why did he do it, and why did he make it inaccessible for so long? And why bother to include any of the other stuff on the drive? The things about Max and Chloe and The Power of Myth? It just muddied the waters. Confused facts for no good reason. What was it he'd intended by giving it to her in the first place? What was she supposed to do with any of it? It just made them look nuts.

Just then, Jason interrupted her thoughts and asked if she was going to finish the bacon she'd been pushing around her plate. She nodded absently that he could take it.

John walked with his hat low, shoulders in, head bent forward, and a far less confident shuffle than his ordinary stride. Nothing over the top, nothing anyone could notice as an affectation, but enough to blend away his athletic frame. The cumulative effect of these small changes synchronized him with his charge as they navigated their way across the terminal. Nothing to tip off a live observer that John was an escort rather than a cohort. Just two touristy peas in a pod, with their ill-matched, slightly-out-of-style western garb.

The Atacama Desert had recently become one of the world's fast-fashion dumping grounds. Brought in through various smuggler's routes from the US, Europe, and Asia, much of the globe's unsold clothing inventory found its way to the Santiago fashion merchants, where it was exported throughout Latin America. But a portion sat unclaimed in vast, open piles, dropped off in the open desert by smugglers who couldn't sell off all their imported goods but who weren't able to properly dispose of them either. Municipal dumps had long since turned the refuse away because of their synthetic or non-biodegradable materials and the sheer overwhelming volume. If not literal mountains of clothing, there were long chains of hills migrating endlessly across the arid region.

And so, nearby families had taken to wandering into the desert to sort through the massive drifts for free clothing that had hung from fashionable racks in fashionable stores in fashionable global metropoli only years before. The ultimate open-air outlet mall. Clothes pollution was another sign of the wasteful carelessness that defined the modern era.

But as a result, the local fashion around Almagro, Chile, was decidedly global, if mixed and matched well beyond designers' intentions.  

John availed himself of the loot at a second-hand stall on his initial landfall, topping himself off with a well-worn hat purchased from a local fisherman. Always blending. It served him during his mission but was the worse for wear after so many days on the move.

Back to civilization, such as it was. He tried to gawk at the McCarran terminal interior with the same trepeditious enthusiasm as the man walking beside him, keeping up their outward ruse while surreptitiously studying the news updates on the monitors. Charts, graphs, talking heads. Drone views of crowds at the entrance to the MCCP campus. Many protestors outside the DC building where Chloe and Hector were arrested held "Free Chloe!" signs. His first impression was that MCCP had lost momentum in their counter-push in the press, but maybe that was going both ways? Hard to keep up, but it seemed like a bare-knuckle bar fight. He'd caught snippets wherever he could. The whole convoluted affair was global news, after all.  

While it was among his concerns, it wasn't his fight anymore. He shrugged unconvincingly.  They'll sort it out.

John continuously read his surroundings through the eyes of his companion. Tactically, for mirroring reasons, and from a more human perspective. The poor guy had a rough couple of days, with his entire life upended.

John could relate.

The man he'd been contracted by his anonymous employer to fetch, a newly identified talent candidate, turned out to be a 30-something rural laborer, poorly educated but intelligent, alternating his working time between the local mines and occasional day-work as part of a large crew helping to prep the grounds of a planned solar field to the east of his town. He lived his entire life in an adobe house with a tin roof and satellite dish, never venturing more than 100km from home. Unmarried, he had an on-and-off girlfriend, a source of contention and resistance from the outset.

Again, John could relate.

The man was understandably skeptical of John and the stranger's insistence that he leave his entire life behind and make a new one in another country.  Who wouldn't be?  It had taken a thwarted abduction attempt by a Chilean ops team to convince him.  

Shortly thereafter, the pair fled west by car to the coastal town of Chañaral, where they boarded a small prop aircraft to Santiago. They picked up new papers and caught a commercial flight to Mexico City. Another in-terminal identity swap, then onward to McCarran. Passing through customs was uneventful. Their employer-provided documents at the dead drops, and the data behind them, were well forged and maintained.

The handoff of his man was supposed to take place in the parking garage across the road from Terminal 3, a few minutes ahead. 

John wasn't sure who he was handing off to, exactly. The texts said he'd know it when he needed to know. Wasn't any of theirs…well… MCCP's. Vegas was a sanctuary city for Talents, so his companion - John barely knew his real name before they switched to temporary fakes, so he hadn't internalized more than that - anyway, he was safe on landing given Max's proclamations. It probably wouldn't be stealth agents of chaos on the receiving end, either. Not MCCP. Not their adversaries. It was a big world. Still, John was curious to learn that a third party might be involved. On the other hand, there could as easily be hundreds. Nature of the game.

He'd dropped Ty a courtesy note before leaving, giving him a heads-up. John didn't need to rely on training to be sure there were friendly eyes on him. But it wasn't anyone he recognized.  

Bottom line, if there was any issue with the handoff or with the intentions of the people picking the man up, John was sure his old comrades would step in and make everything okay.

While maintaining his temporary shuffle, he managed to relax his body; felt relief at his responsibility nearing its end. Back to food, a beer, a hot shower and shave, and a change of clothes that fit. The outlandish advance payment wasn't terrible either. He'd almost forgotten what it was like to rely on money.

Past the shops and waiting areas, far from their arrival terminal, they took the final set of escalators down to the baggage area. The last stop before the end. They'd picked up a couple of suitcases on the way to the Santiago departure terminal. International travel without luggage could be a flag, so they'd improvised. It wasn't essential to pick them up, but they were loose ends and might stand out if left behind. He wasn't sure if that mattered. Better safe.

Halfway down the escalator, John saw their contact. Or at least, a mustachioed man holding a sign with John's alias.  Older feller.  'Feller' seemed a wholly appropriate description. Grey-blonde, overgrown mustache, long and scraggly. Long hair in a tangle of escape from a windblown, braided ponytail. Gold-mirrored vintage sunglasses. Beat up cowboy hat, boots. A riot of plaid and buckle and denim.  

Blending. Aren't we all?

John guided his friend to their new pickup point. He was not where he was supposed to be in the terminal, but plans change. Took John a second to work through a feeling. Thought the dude looked familiar beneath the outfit. Slowly, pieces snapped together.

S6. Lombard. Old picture in the boss's office. What was his name?

"You're Wash." Instincts.

Scuttlebutt was, he'd been an old friend of a future version of Max and Chloe who'd come back to fiddle with things in some crazy punk-rock 80's loop or something. Anyway, he supposedly parted ways after they vanished forever, then went CIA or somesuch. So, if this guy was Wash - the age fit - then he was probably okay. Curiosity piqued, but pressure off, John felt his companion would be safe.  

Their contact looked as though he was about to look surprised at hearing the name, thought better, and moderated his reaction beneath a practiced surface. In a drawn-out twang, he replied, "Observant. I see why they like you."

John replied, "I'm not on the guest list now." He chuckled.  Huh. Nailed it, I guess. 'Wash' it is.

Wash studied from behind his shades. Drawled, "That change of guard…the other guys wanted it, right? And y'all fell for it? On purpose?"  

"Apparently," John replied, more downcast than he'd intended. Still raw.

Wash gave him a sympathetic smile. "Chipper up, li’l buckaroo. At least you're still in orbit. And the other guys, well, let's agree they're in for an awkward time once all this 'age of theater' bullshit's over."

John raised an eyebrow, letting Wash fill in whatever details he would.

Wash continued, almost to himself, "I'm sure the adversaries think the new guy has a more predictable style, and that somehow works in their favor. He's quiet, right? Your former number two? An observer, a thinker - he's sharper than you are, no offense."

This man knew too much for an outsider. John couldn't argue his point, though.

"That's gonna bite 'em." Wash hooked his thumb into his belt loop.

"CIA?" John asked.

"Former."

"Freelance."

Wash offered, "Let's just say you and I; we've had a few employers in common."

Proto-MCCP? Or would that have been technically post-MCCP? This Collectivo group, others?  John considered their interaction, deciding if he should probe for more intel. Zagged, "You didn't know I'd be the one."

After a brief pause, Wash replied, voice low, "Nope - admit, you're an interesting choice for a covert extraction given your rather…unique public profile and situation. But…use the tools you have, eh?"

"Guess so." That was all John was likely to get, but he gave a final direct push. "What do you know about our current employers?"

Wash smiled at the attempt. "Seems they're desperate for tools."

John shrugged and laughed to himself. No reason to delay them any further. Dude was old-school cagey, in a charming, ex-CIA sort of way. Living on the vibe scale somewhere between warm fuzzies and chilled mercury.

Acknowledging the man next to John with a smile for the first time in their brief interaction, Wash gestured him toward the parking exit, hand on his shoulder. To John, "If you ever have the rare privilege of crossin' paths with Chloe the Black or Max the White, tell 'em I said howdy."  

John wasn't sure he understood the nuance buried in the references but nodded anyway. Conversation was out of steam. John motioned for his compadre to go with Wash, nodded encouragement.

Their joint escort objective seemed apprehensive but appreciative in a confused sort of way, without really knowing what was happening or what was next. He hadn't ever manifested any visible talents; he just had the cellular markers. It would be safer here than not.

Handoff complete, Wash turned away with the man. Without another word to John, he exited the baggage area, threw up a hand wave without looking back. For some reason, John head-translated the visual to a drawly 'later.'

Interesting. 

Before he could process, his most recent burner buzzed. Another text, this time thanking him for his work, indicating the second half of the payment had been transferred. There was a delay, and then a long text appeared with a new job, starting right away from that very airport.

He sighed, read the instructions sending him to a new contact in the Lost and Found of Terminal 2, where he'd pick up a change of clothes, a new identity, and a fresh ticket to JFK in New York, with more instructions to follow.

Shit.  There wouldn't be time to find a shower pod in the club lounge or anything.  

Use the tools you have, huh? How shoestring desperate must these guys be?  

Long as the missions were on the right side of things, and as long as they paid up, he didn't see a reason to beg off. His lawyers handled most of the post-Sam allegation legal drama, and the initial interview with the LAPD was behind him. Keeping away from press staked out on his sandy lawn seemed prudent. Nothing else on his immediate radar. And if Sam had taught him anything, movement was better than self-indulgent moping.  

What could go wrong?

Next.

He laughed an exhausted inside laugh, headed for the tram that would take him to Terminal 2.