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I feel Wyatt surge forward down the stairs and I put my non-rewinding hand out to stop him. The guy down below isn’t the Darren I knew. This guy looks strong and sure of himself -- capable of anything. There’s no way in hell I’m letting him touch Wyatt.

Darren primes an old school syringe and flicks it with his index finger. He smiles wickedly. “Hey baby,” he says, his voice clear and dripping with malice.

I’m not your baby, asshole.
I can’t speak with the mask on, so I settle for getting my point across by flipping him off. Then I will my power to spring forth and grab him, to rewind him out of my sight. Nothing happens. Darren bends forward, laughing at me.

“Haven’t quite figured out how to rewind normally yet, huh?” He shakes his head and jams the syringe into Christopher’s arm. “I was counting on your being a total failure, Pen, and it looks like you came through as always.”

I check Wyatt’s color, and between holding his breath and visibly wanting to kill Darren, he’s red segueing into purple. I take off the mask and hand it to him. He puts it on and we take a tentative couple of steps forward. Darren carries on, priming the syringe again.

He injects adult Zellie. “Man, does that feel
bueno!” Darren looks up at me. “Has your little boyfriend told you what his bitch sister and her gays did to my dad?”

Of course the
nutball leader of the Crusaders is Darren’s dad. I nod and flip him off with both hands for extra emphasis. This no talking thing is bullshit.

“Oh, fuck you right back, you stupid whore. Let’s see how brave your
kind are without their powers.”

Wyatt grabs my arm and shakes his head violently. He stamps his foot, pointing at Darren, and takes off down the stairs, charging.

I run after him, watching as Wyatt springs off the bottom step and slams feet first into Darren’s chest. The syringe goes flying. My hands are out, begging my ability to come forward and help. Wyatt may have got the first blow in, but Darren is stronger and out of his mind. Wyatt lands on his side, Darren flat on his back, but just for a moment before they’re both up. Darren lands a powerful punch to Wyatt’s jaw, causing his head to snap to the side, the gas mask sliding up, uncovering his mouth.

“Wyatt!” I scream, realizing too late that I’ve sucked in a mouthful of gas.

Chapter Nineteen

Wyatt

I manage to rake my fingers across the edge of the mask and pull it down before Darren lands another punishing blow to my stomach. He draws his hand back, preparing to throttle me dead, I’m sure of it. I curl up in the fetal position and twist my head around to get a look at Penny, glad that at least she won’t have to witness me failing her and everyone else so completely.

But she’s standing, arms out and up, her eyes blank, her lips pursed in concentration. Instead of the expected hit, the pain in my gut recedes as Darren unpunches me. The mask goes askew and I’m standing, then back down on my side, up, my feet jumping off of Darren’s chest. I charge backward up the steps, stopping at Penny’s side. She pauses Darren with her right hand and grabs onto mine with her left.

“Put your hands on me,” she says, her voice calm, emotionless. I get behind her, out of the way and place my palms on her shoulders. Her left hand rises and begins rewinding the Seers and
Retros and Lookouts in their seats. They wake as the gas is sucked back into the air vents. I take off my mask and drop it to the floor.

Penny’s left hand stops moving, holding steady as she suspends the others in time, confused, but awake. She walks forward and I’m right there with her.

Darren backs up two steps and then slides in triple time over to the right before going back on pause. Penny’s left hand, working again, rouses my family and Parker. Zellie’s body shakes as Penny pulls at the air like she’s pulling on a rope. A flicker of a man bolts from Zel’s chest, transparent, freezing in front of her. Zellie’s body bends and takes baby Michael into her arms. Penny pulls more spirits from Claire and Avery, Christopher and Connor’s bodies.

Next, she moves Ben and Parker over beside Darren and
unpauses them, pushing them backward within their motions, skipping over moments in time until they’re reversing through the lower auditorium entrance. A severely beaten Parker stumbles out into the hall. Darren holds a gun to Parker’s head with one hand and uses the other to keep an unconscious Ben steadily slung over his shoulder. We follow them.

Penny

I push them faster through the hall, over to the stairwell, down to the Yellow floor. Darren backs through the open door to the secret tunnel and holds Ben and Melody’s pass keys above the lock with his gun hand. Pause. I slip though the door after them, Wyatt holding tight. We speed on, moving toward the space in the hall where the way to that storage room is. Darren reverses past it, though, going further to where this hall dead ends. A metal door in the wall is open, with a squat white tank of compressed gas sitting on the floor in front of it. A hose from the tank is screwed onto a valve going into a twist of tubes and wires in the wall. The Society School’s ventilation system.

Parker backs up, removing the tank, a horrified expression on his face as he hands it to Darren. Then we’re back to the spot with the laser in the ceiling, going toward the outside,
skipping ahead, out on the asphalt in the alley standing across from the Dumpster. Darren’s SUV is parked a few yards away.

Here’s as good a place as any, we have some cover.
Bringing the tops of my hands together and then slowly pulling them apart, the five of us dive into time. I separate our moment from all of the others that came before it in this chain of events. Bypassing Darren’s car ride from the club in Hollywood. An instant. We come to a halt inside the club, on the stage, Darren again holding the gun to Parker’s head, forcing him to stab Melody. I reverse, his hand unstabbing her, the wounds closing and the blood disappearing.

“You.
Are. Amazing,” Wyatt says into my ear.

I
pause Ben, Parker, and Melody. We’ll return for them. I need to follow through with Darren. But…

“Do you want me to leave you here to tend to them…to go back for the others?”I ask Wyatt, knowing I don’t sound like myself, trusting he doesn’t care.

“No. There’s no way I’m leaving you.”

I peel back the layers of Darren’s path through time: at the airplane hanger, dosing Ben with a syringe of Parker’s serum, beating Parker and Melody, driving to Brentwood, hurrying up the stairs of a Spanish style apartment building…there. Time plays out and we follow him inside his apartment, a sparely decorated studio with a bamboo floor and white paint on the walls. I
pause him and Wyatt kicks the door closed behind us.

A futon mattress is one of two pieces of furniture.
Darren had told me that he hated sleeping high off of the ground – the one truth between us.
The other is a desk, piled with file folders. Behind it, on the wall, a web of photographs and articles. A printout of a journal article by Dr. Parker Henry with a red string stuck to it by pushpin, leading to a glossy photo of Kent Hahn and then to blueprints of the Society School – with a large red question mark on half of the Yellow Floor, the other half showing only the ventilation system. Next to it, written directly on the white painted wall, “Penny’s favorite singer – put his decoy in harm, she’ll show other way into Soc. School?”

Apparently, yes. Damn.

Wyatt, still holding onto me with one hand, slips his Ret-tech from my pocket with the other and puts it on his head. “Take photo,” he commands. The Ret-tech emits a short pulse of light.

“Why?”I ask, readying to move onto the next relevant prior moment in time.

Wyatt points to the wall. “Up in the corner.”

There is a photo of Maud Lavoie – different from the others we’ve seen. She’s in a lab, wearing a white coat. It’s just one more piece in the puzzle that is my past, here in Darren’s singular present.

“We have farther to go,” I say.

“Bring it,” Wyatt replies.

I hurry us through the moments, speeding back through Darren’s days until we’re in that room filled with crates of tanks. I quickly stop to erase Parker’s torture, reversing the electricity out of his body like he’d unstabbed Melody’s chest.

A rush of relief comes over me. This was my purpose.

I rewind them from the hours spent in the room, tedious hours of beating – Darren’s addled father trying desperately to extract information from Parker. Information that Darren already knew, only meant to bait me in my dreams and make me show Darren the way into the Society School.

We go back, another day, little happening because Darren didn’t expect me to be looking for Parker yet – not during the daytime.

“Fuck. I apologize again for stopping you at the beach, Penny,” Wyatt says, obviously coming to the same conclusion as me.

I push us all back to the parking garage, to the moment that was taking place when Wyatt kept me from drowning.

Darren and the old man dump Parker in the back of the SUV and get into the front. Darren turns to his partner-in-crime. “Don’t worry Dad, I’ve got this handled. The Three and all of those like them, that sadistic doctor, they will suffer for what they did to you.”

I
pause them again. Reaching behind me, I take Wyatt’s left hand in my right and turn to face him. “Tech the cops.”

“Dial 9-1-1,” Wyatt says.
“Yes, hello. I’d like to report a kidnapping. Kent Hahn, lead singer of Squirr- yeah.”

I tilt my head, questioning.

“It’ll make them get here faster if it’s a celebrity,” he whispers. “You got my location? We’re underground. Excellent. My name? Rob Van Winkle.”

Chapter Twenty

Wyatt

We wait behind a box truck until we hear the sound of sirens and police vehicles racing through the upper floors of the parking garage, before Penny
unpauses a totally screwed Darren and Clemmon Wayne Dansbury. The law is hard on criminals who threaten the lives of the rich and famous – even if Parker isn’t exactly the real deal. I say a quick goodbye to him, hoping he will remember nothing of his ordeal.

Then we’re moving sideways through time, stopping at the beach. I watch Penny checking me out when I’m not looking and then watch myself checking her out when she isn’t looking. We’re about equal with the ogling, which makes me feel better and also like the present can’t get here fast enough.

“I need to pick up one of our timelines,” she explains.

As Then Me rushes up the beach with her limp body in my arms, I kind of wish Now Her was more with it and not all
robo-Penny so she could appreciate how dashing I looked coming to her rescue. Except Then Me trips and sort of dumps her onto the towel and flops on top of her.

Penny does that thing with her hands and starts sifting through the moments of that day, which is basically a Greatest Hits of Two Dorky People Looking at Each Other, until she gets to her nighttime jaunt through the secret tunnel.

Instead of following her timeline, she takes mine: me, getting chewed out by Ben in the conference room. Me, moping around like a little bitch during MMA and Kai taking advantage, kicking my ass. Me, pacing back and forth in the kitchen at home begging Avery and Zellie to let me see Penny, crying and angry and losing my shit. Restless in bed, twisted up in my sheets. Not eating. Combing the stacks in the records room. Finding the box of Crusaders documents. More not eating and sleeping. Christopher kicking me out of the house after Zellie’s labor starts…with a wink. Reed coming to get me. Sneaking into her room. THE KISS. Meeting Michael. Talking to Aunt Hazel – a smug look of validation on my face. What an a-hole. At the hanger. On the way to the club. At the club.

We stop, on the stage, Ben and Melody still paused where we’d left them only an hour or so before, even though I’d travelled back and forth through days. Parker has disappeared from now, just as I’d hoped he would.

“Put your hands on me,” Penny says, only this time it is decidedly less hot, seeing as she’s talking to my sister and out-of-it uncle.

Melody slaps Ben awake and drags him forward. She places a hand on the top of Penny’s arm and then kicks Ben’s foot forward until the tip of his foot touches Penny’s.

His eyes come alive as we resume fast-forwarding. “Absorbing your visions sucks donkey dick, but this is righteous!”

Uncle Ben’s a class act -- one that I never want to see down for the count ever again.

Traveling along my timeline, we head back to school, to the spot where we left Raleigh and Elle and everyone earlier, but they aren’t there.

“I didn’t interfere with them,” Penny states, moving us down the stairs.

The gas has cleared throughout the stairwell and rotunda. Phil and the Seers are sprawled out on the lobby couches. Abbie is passing out bottles of Avery’s special water. We breeze by them at triple speed into the auditorium.

Elle and Reed are trying with all of their might to
unpause the other students and my family, to no avail.

Penny stops and we all let go of her. Hands out, she starts everyone up again and then collapses.

This time, I’m right there to catch her.

Penny

Fake Kent Hahn’s kidnapping makes the news, of course. We all sit around in the lounge chugging Retro water and watching the coverage by twelve different stations on one gigantic TV. In my weird state of totally spent and spazzed out on adrenaline, I take only a tiny bit of pleasure in seeing the replay of a handcuffed Darren being led to a cop car by a short, curvy female officer. She bonks his head against the door frame on his way into the back seat. Clemmon Wayne Dansbury leaves in an ambulance, headed back to the mental hospital he’d disappeared from the month before.

“I have a billion questions for you,” Christopher says, finishing off one bottle of water and cracking open another. “But it can wait for tomorrow, can’t it?” He looks like I feel.

“Yes,” Wyatt answers for me, and I have to admit I don’t mind it. “We have questions too.” He slides his arm around my shoulder and pulls me closer. “But before we all head to bed, there is one thing I’d like you to take a look at. Microscreen down.” It flips down. “TV frequency.” The television goes blank and then shows us what is on his Ret-tech. “Most recent photo.”

Darren’s Crazy Conspiracy Wall comes up. “Arrow,” Wyatt says, and he directs the arrow that appears by sight over to the photo of Maud Lavoie. “Know anything about this, Christopher? Ben? Mel?”

“Where was this taken?” Melody asks from her own body as Raleigh naps beside her.

I snort. “Two days ago…this evening, at Darren’s place.”

“Tech this and the address to Phoebe, we’ll go investigate tonight.”

“You know, you could wait until tomorrow,” Wyatt says, smiling at his sister.

“Please,” Melody and Phoebe say in unison, already getting up and putting their shoes back on.

Melody leans over and gently shakes Raleigh. “You might as well camp out here tonight. Michael is going to be up every hour on the hour.”

Raleigh grins. “The baby is going to wake up, or Avery and Zellie are going to be all in his grill seeing if he’s breathing every hour on the hour?”

“Dude,” Ben says. “The kid was gassed, paused, and rewound on his first day of life. Shit.”

“Welcome to the family!” I joke, and instead of chastising me for being an uncouth loud mouth, everyone laughs and I feel like I belong.

I could get used to this.

Wyatt leans down. “Don’t fall asleep just yet. Wait until I kiss you goodnight,” he whispers in my ear.

I’m awake.

I get to my feet, dragging him up, bee-lining it for the stairs.