Prologue: Runaways

October 16th 2013—on the road

The blue light from the police car struck Max's eye, shot through the rear window. She blinked and slumped back into her seat. The muted sirens rummaged through her brain like crawling insects. She sighed, sinking further down.

"Don't worry, Max. I've got this," Chloe said. Chloe's feet were firmly planted on top of the dashboard. Kicking back while wearing a pair of black aviators—framed by her striking blue hair, it didn't give Max the impression of someone handling the authorities.

The noise stopped. Max heard a car door slamming, and the faint footsteps of the policeman approaching.

"Morning, officer." Chloe waved halfheartedly.

The officer positioned himself at the window—taking in the car, then looked inside of it. "License and registration, please."

Max tensed up. Please don't do anything stupid … she looked away.

"License and registration–what? That's not even a question," Chloe said dryly, pausing for effect. Max already cringed. "But maybe you meant to ask 'may I please see your license and registration, miss?' "

The officer stood quiet, then leaned down to hang on the car door, matching Chloe's height. "Very funny, girl. Can I see your license and registration, please?"

"I definitely think you can," Chloe said, blinking. "Don't be so hard on yourself."

The officer sighed. "I see young people like you out here all the time, looking for trouble for no damn reason. I'm not gonna make it that easy for you. May I have your license, please?"

Chloe grimaced, yanking the license out of a bag on the floor. "Fine. Have it—pig," she said, waving it around. She threw it into the cop's vest, and it dropped into the dirt on the ground.

Max stared in disbelief. "Chloe!"

The officer looked subtly incensed, masking it with a stoic smile. He reached and picked it up, then doubled down on leaning into the window, uncomfortably close to Chloe as far as Max was concerned.

He took some time looking over the license. Max chewed on her tongue. Does she always have to start some shit?

Chloe dropped her feet from the dashboard, leaning forward. She pushed her shades up on her head. "Is there a problem, dude?" Max swallowed. Then the radio clocked on for the regular news broadcast.

"This is the twelve o'clock news, and we finally have some new information for you worried souls out there. Of course everybody's talking about the tornado that hit the coast last Friday, but until now the officials have refused to release any kind of body count,"a man explained. Max froze. She saw Chloe's eyes widen. "Luckily we now know that the damage was isolated, but it's still very much a tragedy for Arcadia Bay—or should I say, what's left of it. It made a clean cut through most of—"

"Max, turn that shit off!" Chloe leaped, slamming the radio button with her fist. The voice cut off, leaving them with a deafening silence.

"Chloe! We have to know—" Despite Max's gut reaction, a nagging self-doubt gripped her immediately. Maybe there was a reason she didn't want to turn the radio back on.

The officer looked thoughtful. He opened his mouth, struggling with something. "Did the two of you just come out of the Bay?"

They both avoided answering. Chloe stared at the earthy road ahead of them, trailing into the distant horizon.

"I…" The officer started, looking ahead at the road, then back at them and the car, reassessing the situation. He chewed on it for a moment, then shook his head. The officer threw the license back into the car. "Have a good day, miss Price." He stepped back from the vehicle, eyeing them over one last time, meeting Max's eyes with a knowing look. He spoke solemnly. "Take care out there. I know how it sounds—but people lose their damn minds out on the open road—it happens all the time." The officer turned and walked back to his car.

Max held the Polaroid photo she had kept from the week before, her eyes lingering on the wing of a blue butterfly, broken by the jarring paper-white where its completing fragment used to connect. She had thrown it to the long arms of the storm—to be eaten—sacrificing their hometown in the process, all to save her best friend's life.

The police car took off ahead, driving toward future things—unlike Max, it seemed. Moving forward only took her further back in time, wondering about what could've been. It seemed to haunt her everywhere they went, and if that was a taste of what life on the road was, she wasn't sure if it was worth it.

Chloe gripped the keys to start the ignition, but lingered absentmindedly. Max watched the photo piece reflecting in the daylight. The blue butterfly's broken state was, she realized, obvious without her actually looking at it or even touching the broken side. It was a lack of presence. When Max had looked at one of her photos, its artistic impression had taken her to a unique nostalgia of the moment it had captured, and that feeling sometimes invoked in her a vivid presence of the past. That was when something already strange got even stranger.

The mysterious blue butterfly sat captured on a bucket in the dark bathroom corner. At first her power to time travel into photos had hit her like a drug—sending her senses spinning into some kind of vortex, and the sensation at the end of that could only be described as something like a black hole. It pulled and crushed her head at an accelerated speed—but also condensing itself into an eternal second—and when it was finally over, it was just that—over as if it had never happened, like waking up from a dream.

Max leaned to gaze out of the passenger window. Lately though, some of the finer points of the travel had dawned on her, and she knew that there was more to come. Her power seemed to grow together with her. But for better or worse, the butterfly photo was nothing but a dull weight in her hands.

Chloe took her hand. "Max. It wasn't fair to put all of that on you. Not for me, or for anyone else. Whoever gave you your power is an asshole."

Later on, Max stared at the trees passing by along the roadside as they drove, vanishing into their past like the bodies they had left behind. Like the countless faces, children and pets left in their wake, increasingly becoming just numbers—a vague sketch in Max's selectively photographic mind.

Chloe's eyes roamed the woods surrounding them. Max would never apologize for saving her life, she thought. She had leaped at the opportunity to sacrifice herself when it truly mattered, just like the selfless superhero she had pretended to be when they were kids. It's like she knew that the games were over, and that it was time to become that hero. Max didn't have the heart to let her die in that moment, and maybe some would say that was her super-weakness.

Still, Chloe was one of the few people, Max realized—that she deep in her heart knew deserved better. Max tried to believe in people, but they were usually complicated and uncertain—and like a child, Chloe was not. She wore her heart on her sleeve for better or for worse. To Max she had become a symbol of the human condition, and if she could save her, then maybe there was hope to save everyone else as well.

Max would've had to let Chloe die in pain on the cold bathroom floor, believing she was abandoned and unloved in her final moments as she bled out. Whatever the right choice was, she hadn't found it yet. Fuck that.

Chloe gazed at the horizon line as they drove, expressionless. Everything had changed since they were kids, and now they were actually heroes in some sense—except Max hadn't learned how to do any of it right yet. Her big heroic moment had involved either making things worse, or to do nothing in the face of injustice.

Having powers really sucked.

"Alright, fuck this place." Chloe finally said. "Let's go, super Max." Chloe turned on the ignition and burned tire.