Chapter 3; Into Me

And you made your mark on me
Like lovers carve their name on a tree
And here I hand you my bare heart
Where you carved your piece of art
Into me

-Anna/Kate, Head on Vacation

October 24, 2013

"Is that the lady from the Two Whales?" asked Steph. She had driven Max home in search of the perfect photo to enact their plan to save Rachel & Chloe, and when they arrived they found an older homeless woman waiting for them on the steps. Seeing Jane again was somehow startling for Max. She had spoken with her just the day before, at length. She had taken Jane's words to heart. Well, selectively, maybe, but she had listened. She had spent most of the night and all the following day thinking about Jane, and yet somehow being reminded that her time-lost half-sister doppelganger actually existed in the flesh was a bit of a shock to the senses.

"Better let me talk to her," Max said, and climbed out of Steph's little Fiat. She approached Jane with a sense of trepidation, but rather than bringing warnings of doom, this time her older counterpart seemed to be enthusiastic; downright eager, almost.

"Max I have an answer for you! Ever since I fell outside of time, I can't go back further than the start of my loops, but maybe you can! Your friend, with the blue hair? She was alive in my world! I wasn't close with her like you were, but there was no shooting, and that teacher of yours, the killer? He wasn't there. If you can restore that timeline..."

"With no Jefferson around, none of this would happen," said Max, putting her fingertips thoughtfully to her lips, "And Rachel was okay too?"

Jane nodded, "No killer teacher, no overdose!" She clasped Max's hands in her own. Jane's hands felt worn and hard; Metal wrapped in leather. "We can do this, Max! Do you know if you can access a dead reality?"

Max didn't reply. She was struggling to work out the tangled webs of causality in her head. Jane's promise of a Blackwell without Jefferson was very tempting. It certainly seemed cleaner than her own plan. Looking back, she saw Steph watching her intently from behind the steering wheel. She thought of Steph's description of Rachel and Chloe as a happy couple over the years she was away. She couldn't help picturing them in her head having finally escaped Arcadia Bay. She could almost see the two of them on the Santa Monica pier, gorging on food truck food, smoking up, looking at the moon shining on the waves. She remembered Chloe dancing on her bed, blue hair and waving arms amid a swirl of smoke and snark. That was the Chloe she wanted to save. Her Chloe. And Steph's Rachel.

"Jane, I'm sorry, I'm honored you thought about me, but..." Max said, as Jane's expression clouded over, "Steph and I already have a plan."

Jane froze. She jerked her hands back and walked past Max to stare daggers at Steph in the car. "Steph? Who the hell is Steph?"

"She's from Blackwell and..."

"Oh yes, the gamer," said Jane, peering at the smaller girl in the car before whirling on Max, "Tell me, how many centuries of time travel experience does she have? I'm gonna go ahead and guess... zero?"

"I know, I know! This is exactly what you warned me about! But we've got a good plan this time. We'll be careful."

Jane didn't seem to like this idea. She looked back and forth between Steph and Max with narrowed eyes. "You'll be careful? You'll be careful? Okay, Max, let's get in the car. There's something you and your little sidekick need to see."

Jane navigated as Steph drove; Max stuck in the back by herself. For about an hour, their route took them southeast on US 90 into the mountains, until Jane had them turn off onto a narrow, winding mountain road. They followed that for a while before Jane directed them off on a smaller, unmarked track, and then another, and another. Max hoped Steph knew how to get back, as she felt herself grow lost in the maze of low ferns and mossy pines. Cloying cloud cover brought a premature darkness to the afternoon, but Max expected that; the clouds always hung low over these hills.

"Okay, I'm going to ask one more time. Where the heck are we going?" asked Steph, turning sharply around yet another switchback in the endless sea of green.

"And I'm going to answer one more time, you'll just have to see it for yourselves. If I try to explain it won't have the same impact," retorted Jane.

"You're not just luring us out into the woods to kill us both, right?" grinned Steph.

"Don't be stupid," replied Jane, flatly, "I barely even know who you are, and if I wanted Max dead I had the perfect opportunity yesterday. Didn't I, Max?"

Max nodded in grim agreement, then realized she was in the back seat and they couldn't see her. "Um, yes. I guess," she admitted, "Still, Jane, like, maybe a hint what we're doing out here would be nice, especially since we'll probably lose signal soon and I want to let my folks know when to expect me." Max glanced down at her phone, flickering between one and two bars.

Jane made eye contact with Max in the rear view mirror, "I thought you wanted to change the world. Now you're worried about curfew?"

Max started to respond when Jane cut her off, "Max, there's a big flaw in your plan. If you get your two friends out of harm's way, that just means what happened to them will happen to someone else. Instead of Rachel Amber missing posters everywhere, you'll have them for, I don't know ... the cheerleader, or the church mouse, or the photo snob."

"Shit! Fuck! I didn't think of that!" said Max, recalling the image of Victoria, bound and helpless on the dark room floor after Max had tried to warn her; about the wrong person, as it turned out. That timeline had been changed, but Max still felt guilty about it anyway. Drugged out Victoria's weak little voice begging her for help would stay with her for quite some time.

"Did you think of that?" Jane asked Steph, pointedly.

"I did," Steph admitted.

"What?" asked Max in surprise.

"I figured that might happen. I mean, I'd hope it wouldn't, but..."

Max tilted her head so she could see Steph's eyes in the rear view. Victoria was... Victoria, but nobody deserved that. The goal here was to save everybody. Having to choose who lives and who dies was exactly what Max had been trying to avoid. She snapped at Steph, "But you were willing to trade someone for Rachel and Chloe?"

"Yes, of course I was!" said Steph, returning Max's gaze in the mirror.

"What? Steph, I thought... I thought you were better than that," Max said. "Better than me.", she thought, slumping into her seat, arms crossed.

"You look me in the eyes and tell me you wouldn't trade Victoria for Chloe, Max," said Steph, in a hurt tone.

Max bit her tongue. She had come within inches of trading an entire town for Chloe. Since Chloe's funeral there had been many late nights clutching a certain blue butterfly photo, imagining the possibilities if she had made the other choice on the lighthouse cliffs; holding the photo to her chest, unable to look at it for fear she wouldn't be able to resist focusing into it. She recalled telling herself long ago she would miss Chloe more than all the rest of Arcadia Bay put together and that was doubly true now that Chloe was dead. So, yeah, inches.

The guilt played over Max's face as Steph continued, "If you're not willing to do that, I don't know what else to suggest. The only other way I can see to completely fix this would be to go back and kill Mark Jefferson."

"Kill him? Steph, I couldn't do that! I don't want to hurt anyone, let alone kill them!" in exasperation, Max leaned forward, her head between the two front seats, "You can't treat this like a game!"

"I'm treating this like I want my friends to be alive!" snapped Steph, defensively. Turning her head to see the scowl spread over Steph's face, Max knew she had gone too far. She lifted her right hand up to rewind when suddenly Jane reached over and swatted her hand.

"Not in a moving car, you idiot!" she scolded.

"Did... did you just try to rewind me yelling at you?" asked Steph, incensed.

Max sank into the backseat and looked back and forth between Jane and Steph. "I'm sorry, Steph. I said something stupid and... I'm sorry. You're right, I shouldn't take the coward's way out when I'm an asshole."

Max looked down at her hands. There were times she felt her power helped her in social situations; never her natural strong suit, but maybe using them to cover up her mistakes was just making her a terrible person. "I just meant... I don't think I have it in me to be an executioner, even for an evil prick like Mark Jefferson. Even knowing all the suffering his death would prevent. It's one thing to say it, but it would have to be so so different to have to do it for real."

"It's never going to be real for me, Max!" responded Steph, still angry, "Even if I believe every word you say about time travel and tornadoes, this is all just theory as far as I'm concerned. I mean, if you changed something, would I even know it? What would happen to me?"

Jane spoke quietly, without turning to look at the younger girls, "This would become a dead reality. You would cease to exist."

Steph replied, "What?"

Jane looked at her sideways, "You. Cease."

"I mean what's a dead reality?"

Jane grunted in frustration, "It's a reality, a timeline, that a time traveler has left to go back and make a change. Whenever we do that, one reality comes to an end and another is spawned. Everybody in the old reality would cease to be the moment the time traveler left. There'd be a new version of them in the new reality and they would never know what happened."

"She asked if I could go there. To a dead reality," Max explained to Steph.

"It's possible in theory," continued Jane, "To a time traveler, is a past that's part of one timeline any more gone than a past that's part of another? That little strip of time, it still exists! We can get back there."

"Even though it didn't happen?" asked Steph.

Jane countered, "It happened. It may not be part of the timeline we're on, but it happened. Like the reality with Max's tornado. She was there. I was there. She warned me about it and I got in my van and left, but I could see it from up in Forest Hills. It happened. We were there. Weren't we, Max? Why couldn't we go back?"

Max was definitely not ready to be called on. She felt like she was only grasping about half of this, and she most definitely didn't want to have to face that tornado again. "I'm not following," she admitted.

"Let's say you have a reality where you don't like something. Maybe a friend got seriously hurt in an accident. Maybe it was your fault. Something like that," Jane's eyes flicked accusingly at Max in the rear-view mirror. Max shrank away. "So you leave that reality to prevent the accident; change it back. That piece of time you just left, it ends, but it doesn't go away. In theory you could still travel back there if you wanted."

"So when you create an alternate future, you leave behind an alternate past. But it would only exist up to the point you left," mused Steph.

Jane nodded, "I can see why you like this one, Max. Smart. Pays attention. Doesn't get lost in her own damn head all the time. Yes, unless you stop the time traveler from leaving, that dead reality would still end right when they leave. And anybody there would cease to be." Max ignored the implied rebuke. If what Jane was saying was true, that meant the reality where Chloe had been paralyzed had ended the moment Max left it to revert her change, so there would be no version of William and Joyce who would find their euthanized daughter's body in the morning. For some reason, Max found this profoundly comforting.

Steph asked Jane, "Have you done it? Been to a dead reality?"

"No. Maybe I could have, before I broke my power, but I didn't try."

"Have you?" Steph asked Max, who was relieved to find Steph's anger with her seemed to have passed. Give a gamer a new rule to chew on and they're happy, she supposed. Although it had been a bumpy ride (before, figuratively, and now, literally, as the paved roads gave way to dirt and gravel tracks) Max was glad she had opened up to Steph. If anybody could wrap their brain around the intricacies of time travel, it would be her!

"I don't know," Max answered, "I don't think so. Maybe. I did a lot of changing things and then changing them back."

Steph stopped the car abruptly. The winding mountain road Jane had them following suddenly came to a dead end. There was enough room to turn around, and otherwise just a concrete wall in the side of the mountain, broken by a plain door and a rolling garage door. Both were rusted from disuse and neither bore any kind of sign or writing. It all looked aggressively, deliberately nondescript. Very utilitarian, like it might lead to a sewer or a maintenance tunnel of some kind.

Getting out of the car, Jane explained, "In some of my loops, early on, I went looking for answers about my power. Where it comes from. Who else might have it. That kind of thing. In the 90's, I found a group. One scientist and a small collection of amateur researchers. They were convinced supernatural abilities were real, and they were developing ways to find people who had them."

She walked to the door and leaned against it, laying both hands flat and closing her eyes. Even knowing what Jane could do, Max was skeptical that rusted door would ever open again. It looked more like Jane was trying to physically move the mountain, and it seemed to Max like she might at least have even odds. There was an immovability to Jane; an ancient will, steadfast and weighty. The mountain seemed a good match for her.

Jane continued, "In this reality, as in most, it all ended up going nowhere. They ran out of funding almost immediately and disbanded. Except in a couple loops where I volunteered as a test case. Then! Then we learned a thing or two!"

Max could feel Jane sifting the door through time. It gave her the impression of someone flipping through a photo album; different times flickering by. When Jane found a time the door was unlocked, she pulled the handle and the door creaked open. There was a sucking sound, a rush of air like Jane had ripped open a membrane into a vacuum chamber. The air inside smelled thick and close, choked of mildew and dust. Jane started down the bare concrete stairs, seemingly unconcerned about the darkness. Max hung in the doorway, shining her phone's light down the stair.

Steph stared nervously at the door into the mountain. "Well, Gingrich, you always wanted to go dungeoneering for real. Now's your chance!" After another moment's hesitation she dug the tire iron out of the back of her car. Feeling its reassuring heft in her hand, she approached the door.

Max stood in front of her, "Steph, I'm sorry I snapped at you, and I'm sorry I tried to rewind to fix it. All this craziness... it can't be easy for you."

"Max, if all this craziness turns out to be real and we can save our friends, then it's all worth it. And ... if it isn't, and all I'm doing here is helping you work through what you gotta work through... then that's worth it too," Steph blushed as suddenly Max was hugging her. She buried her face in Max's shoulder and inhaled. "This shirt still smells like Rachel," she said softly to herself. Max held her with one hand on the back of her head and was surprised by the softness of Steph's downy buzz cut. She rubbed it absentmindedly as Steph breathed in the familiar scent. "I miss her, Max. More than I thought I would."

Max held the smaller girl and looked out over the pine-covered hills. The clouds were sinking down into the valleys. Rain was coming.

"Come on, Steph, let's get down there and see what we can find."