Chapter 6

"What time is it?" Chloe asked as the two of them walked aimlessly through the town. They didn't know how long everyone had been gone for, but they'd gone around and turned off all the grills on the stands to prevent a fire. The last thing they needed was to burn the town down. And the flames wouldn't last forever. They would last long enough to destroy the festival lights, though. And once they burned out, Max and Chloe would be defenceless against the shadows that had attacked them before. Better to avoid an accident before it happened. But when Max pulled out her phone to check the time, her phone wouldn't switch on. No matter how many times she clicked the button, the screen remained black as the ace of spades.

"What the fuck?" Max muttered as she kept pointlessly trying to turn her phone on. "I had like eighty-four percent when we left for the festival!"

"Well the lights are on so there's still power in this ghost town." Chloe shrugged as Max turned to glare at her.

"I don't know if that was a joke, but after we got attacked by those things before I'd ask you not to say it again."

"Sorry." Chloe's expression told Max that she meant it. Then again she probably realised she was on incredibly thin ice over the whole power thing. What Max found amazing was that she fact that she hadn't yet mentioned going back in time and trying to resurrect Rachel. She'd whole-heartedly expected to have to be talking her down from such an idea, trying to convince her about the cascade of potential paradoxes she might cause with no clue of how to control the power or fix timelines once she broke them. But no. There had been none of that. She didn't know if it was because she hadn't entertained the idea or just felt too guilty to bring it up. Whatever the reason, Max was quickly learning that when you didn't see something in this town then that was when you should be most afraid of it.

"Seriously though, how can it be out of power?"

"Well like I was saying, we have electricity here!" Chloe pointed out again, gesturing around them. "All we have to do is plug it in. Where's your charger?"

"In my suitcase." Max said casually. She could see the gears turning in Chloe's head. Their suitcases were in the truck. The truck was now a burned-out hulk of metal just outside of town. No chargers.

"Ah." Chloe muttered sheepishly. "Well there are quite a few places pulling night shifts here with this festival going on. Maybe there's a phone shop and you can raid a charger." Max instantly started having flashbacks to when she and Chloe broke into Wells' office at Blackwell. She'd let Chloe take the handicapped fund for the pure and simple reason that while Wells might have called it that the only handicap it actually funded was his own alcoholism. If she'd thought for a second that he might actually spend a cent of it on disabled students, she would have made Chloe leave it alone. And that in itself brought flashbacks to their wedding night. When they bedded down together as a married couple for the first time, Chloe had flagged up the week they found each other again. And she'd been right. It was a week neither of them would ever forget. Mainly because PTSD is something that never really leaves you. But that was then and this was now. And the situation was both completely different and exponentially more dangerous.

"I really don't want to go stealing from a town full of people I don't know if we can help it." Max protested, but it sounded weak even to her own ears.

"Which is why we're not stealing it." Chloe persisted. "We'll put it back once your phone's charged up. I'll even tape the box back up and everything. We're literally just borrowing it."

"So how much is your phone on, then?" Max asked her. It was an important question, too. She'd given it a partial charge the previous day at Max's insistence because she was notorious for forgetting to charge it up. There was no way she'd be completely out by this point but at the same time she might not have much either. That was all they'd have between them until Max's phone was done. But when Chloe clicked her own phone on, she was met with nothing but a blank screen herself. It was refusing to power up.

"Oh come on!" she hissed under her breath as she slapped it a couple of times to try and coax some life out of it. But Max already knew that she could have smacked it with a hammer and nothing would have changed. This wasn't a power issue. This was an issue with whatever was going on around them.

"Well there goes that plan." Max sighed as she tucked her phone back in her messenger bag. "Okay, let's think about this for a second: you said yourself that some places are still open for the festival. Now there are bound to be people who find the festivities too overwhelming. They would need some place quiet to go. What about the library?" As soon as the words passed her lips, Chloe let out an involuntary snort before bursting into flat-out laughter.

"You are going to die a nerd!"

"That's okay." Max shrugged with fake nonchalance before turning a vicious glare on her. "You can always rewind back to when I was younger." At that, Chloe evidently decided it was a good idea to shut up. She held up her hands in a 'I don't want trouble' gesture but Max kept glaring for a couple of seconds before backing off.

"Okay, but seriously. Why the library." Chloe asked, putting on a casual front. Max could tell she was torn up on the inside. She hated it just as much as Chloe apparently did but at the same time she couldn't shake the anger over the fact that her own wife had not only developed an inferiority complex- the one thing she'd been fighting to keep from happening- and had done something so selfish because of it. To say she felt stabbed in the back was an understatement. Still, it was a valid question and Max took a breath to calm down before even trying to answer.

"Libraries contain books on their town or city's local history. That includes things like folklore. Maybe we can find something on the festival in there and what to do when a wish goes wrong. I'm hoping there's a way to reverse it."

"There must be." Chloe reasoned. "If we're thinking that the whole reason we're trapped here is because the wish went wrong then there has to be a way to fix it. Otherwise we're stuck in here forever and I don't even want to think about that." That was it. As far as either of them were concerned, it was decided. They had literally nothing to lose and they weren't prepared to wait around in this town for something else to happen.

"Carried. Unanimously." Max nodded. "Library it is." They went to set off only for Max to abruptly pause and look around. Chloe noticed and stopped too, looking at her with concern.

"What's wrong? What do you see?"

"Actually, it's what I don't see." Max told her. "Where's the library?" At that, Chloe just burst out laughing again.

"Oh god, it's like that British movie we watched! What was it called again? Hot Fuzz? The one where he almost gets run over and tells the guy that he's taking him to the station but he's only just moved there himself and so he then has to ask the guy he's just arrested where it is. This is just like that! Only we could say we need to find a place while we're in a town we've never been to before and don't know where we're going!" It took a few seconds, but eventually Max was laughing too. As much as she hated it, it was true. Only they could do that. It was something that was so uniquely them that it always brought a smile to her face.

"You're right." She turned to look at Chloe with renewed determination. "Blackwell, the Darkroom, Rachel, the Vortex Club, moving to Seattle with no real funds to our names, getting married... We threw ourselves into these sorts of things with no real plan to speak of time after time. Some might say it was courageous. Some might say it was stupid. But we made it through each time. Not because of my rewind power, but because we were together. We were Max and Chloe, just like old times. And do you know what's changed in the last three years?"

"What?" Chloe asked with an amused grin on her face.

"Nothing." Max said resolutely. "Now come on. We're going to find the library, we're going to find answers and we're going to do it together."

"Fuck yeah, Super Max!" Chloe cheered, wrapping her wife in a bone-crushing hug that almost forced the air from her lungs. Max could tell it was a desperate move to make up for what she'd done, but the gesture, at very least, was appreciated.

"By no means does this get you off the hook." Max told her as she returned the hug. With that, she took Chloe by the hand and walked with her as their search for the library began.

Author's Note: This chapter is a bit shorter than I usually aim for, but I didn't have another good cutoff point without it getting stupidly long and unbalancing the chapter lengths. Thanks to everyone who's reviewed so far. As a quick teaser, I have started on my next story. It's called One Life-Changing Night (title may be edited) and it's about Brooke and Warren going to the drive-in. Don't worry, it's going to have heavy Pricefield just like this story since no story would be complete without it. But it also gave me the chance to explore a different angle I haven't tried before. I'll be posting chapters once this story is fully uploaded.