The king and the Monarch were two separate entities, though I get how confusing that is. The king is the Alligator snapping turtle, the thing that’s now where Florida should be, and the Monarch isn’t known about by anyone except me and the other five returners right now.

  I glanced in the direction outside of the ruined building where Elenor was. If I did this on my own, it’d be very hard to break away from her and get where I needed to. If I asked her for help, I’d have to tell her everything.

  I ran a hand through my hair, thinking.

  Elenor was someone who was with me from the beginning to the end. I’ve known her for more of my life than I haven’t. We were friends in the academy, assigned to be in a single unit, where we worked together until the world ended. She knew me better than anyone else in the world.

  But how well did I know her?

  The thought filled me with a feeling of unease and disgust towards myself. She didn’t talk about herself much, and in the world we lived in, are living in, to ask about someone else is mostly to touch old wounds. There are very few people alive who didn’t lose most of what they had before. Those that are mostly are kids, children only just born into this world, not knowing any other.

  Still, I’ve worked with her for so long, and done so much with her. I’ve trusted her to have my back, to keep my life in her hands a hundred times. Why shouldn’t I trust her now?

  And hell, even if she was putting on the best performance of her life to convince me she didn’t remember the past when she did, explaining myself to her was the better choice.

  With another deep breath, I stood up from the ruins of a world long gone and made my way out.

  She was sat up on a curb that outlined what was once the pavement around a parking lot, but had mostly been consumed by the natural world, save a few bits of concrete that stuck out.

  I sat down next to her, and she nodded at me. I nodded back. I wrapped my hands together, looking down at the plants and natural life below my boots. “Hey, so, I have a bit of a, uh, big thing to discuss with you.”

  She looked at me, expression neutral. Giving me space to talk.

  I felt air push out of my mouth, decompressing my body. “Don’t…Tell me yours, but my power has to do with-”

  She slapped a hand over my mouth, her eyes wide and panicked. I stuck my tongue out and she yanked her hand back with disgust, causing me to snort. “I know what I’m doing. I trust you.” I nodded and said it again to myself this time. “I trust you.” I looked back at her. “Time. I control and manipulate time. On a very small scale…normally.”

  A sharp, piercing pain caught me in my chest, and I grit my teeth, letting a sharp exhale out from between them.

  Information about your power being spread makes you weaker. It hurts too. But, letting her know was the least I could do for her. I owed her a lot, both for what I had to do to get here and for what she had done to help me before that. This much was deserved, even if it felt like a heart attack.

  I rolled my shoulders to distract my mind from the sharp pain like a ballpoint pen was jammed through my back and stuck in my body. “The world…So we uh.” I paused, thinking about how to say this. “Alright, I’m going to sound crazy, so let's just get it over with, and you can ask any questions you’d like. The world ended, and you and I were one of the last five people. I um, kinda killed you, sorry about that, but I was hoping that having, right shit, um, so the powers we have are spread out across everyone, and the more people that die the stronger the surviving people's powers get. So, when it was just you, me, and three others, I made myself the last person alive.” I winced at my own phrasing, making it sound so insignificant. “Through killing them. B-But I was right! I managed to use what I had gained to reverse things, to pull the world back to about, 8 hours ago.”

  She was staring at me with wide eyes, glancing from side to side as if trying to look for a hidden camera. She raised a shaky hand to get me to stop speaking, and I shut up instantly, failing to meet her eyes. I sorta had to look at her to understand what she was signing, but I kept my gaze averted. Her hands wavered in the air as she tried to figure out what to ask. Finally, after a moment, she made a flurry of movement I was only able to keep up with thanks to working with her for so long. “Why tell me?”

  “Well, for one I thought you probably deserved to know. I also figured you’d figure out I’m a little different eventually. I mean, I did a lot of bad things to survive, I’m…probably not quite the same person I was back…well, now. The second thing, is that I need your help. I can only change so much by myself, and there isn’t anyone else I trust as much as I trust you.” I closed my eyes for a moment, before gathering my courage and looking right at her, meeting her green eyes dead on. “I’d love to do this alone, but I’m not stupid enough to think I can handle things without you.”

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  She put a hand on my shoulder, before nodding. She withdrew her hand to speak. “That’s insane. But I trust you too. Let me know what you need, and I’ll be right there with you.”

  A relieved breath poked through my lips before I could even think about it. “Thanks. Alright, we need to make a pit stop after we deal with whatever Yoaki are at the shell.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “If I’m right about timing, we’re going to destroy one of humanity's greatest threats before it has a chance to mature.”

  “If you’re wrong?”

  “We’ll die probably.”

  She huffed. “Sounds about right.” She stood up, stretching out her back, before gesturing for me to follow her with a finger.

  I stood up, and she placed a hand on my shoulder, starting the journey once more.

  But, when the contact with her was made, the relief from her listening to me and not instantly hating me caused me to relax somewhat. The grip on that knot in my head slipped once more as well.

  I slipped again, my consciousness leaving and heading somewhere else for the second time.

  I was in an audience. The spotlights of a small auditorium pointed down on a very young Elenor. The girl couldn’t have been more than 13 or 15. About the same age as me when the world ended.

  Her hair wasn’t dyed, leaving it a long black which draped down like a backdrop behind her, making each feature of her face stand out even more. She looked out across the audience, taking a deep breath.

  She spoke.

  The first time I had ever heard it, her voice. This was before the end of times, before whatever had stolen that away from her. Her green eyes shone, and her ever-closed mouth opened, words like a bird's first flight leaving her lips in a loud, heard voice. It was stressed out across the stage, commanding in a way that had people sitting up in their seats next to me. It was immediately apparent that she was greater than the other children on the stage with her, from the first syllable of her voice, the way that those children as well looked up to her, looked with ambition or desire, to match what she was.

  “All the world is a stage.

  All the men and women are merely players;

  They have their exits and their entrances,”

  I wanted to look around, to understand where I was and what was happening, but I was inextricably locked onto her, to her words, to the way she was commanding the entirety of the small stage she was on. She moved in slow motions, her voice carrying her actions.

  “And one man in his time plays many parts,”

  She was interrupted, as a fire alarm triggered, and people all looked around in confusion. The intercom came on, a voice speaking out. “All members of the performance, an unforeseen event is currently occurring, please evacuate. The school used to be a nuclear shelter when it was made, so we request those of you who can follow the teachers to the safety rooms. I repeat an emergency is occurring, please evacuate.”

  The lights flooded on, a piercing ringing noise coming in and out through the intercom as the alarm kept ringing. People moved in herds, flooding out of the building panicked, checking their phones and desperately trying to figure out what was going on, and why such a thing had happened.

  The stage was cleared out, except for one person.

  Alone, and getting more alone as more people flooded out, her opened eyes looked across the throngs of people as she continued her speech. I’m not sure she ever stopped, as she had moved in her speech at some point.

  I could still hear her loud and commanding voice pressed out into the air, above the shrieking alarm. A seagull coasting high above the winds of a hurricane.

  “Last scene of all,

  That ends this strange eventful history,

  Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

  Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”

  She stopped, opening her eyes as she saw that the auditorium had been completely cleared out, herself forgotten in the chaos. She looked around calmly, seemingly debating what to do, before vanishing in an instant, her power taking her somewhere unknown. Her calm never pierced, her mask never shattered, and herself the character she had been playing until she had no more actors to continue alongside.

  I tightened that knot in my mind and was pulled out of the auditorium only moments after her, hand on the ground as I was taking deep breaths. My eyes adjusted to the dirt as a hand was still on my shoulder.

  My eyes shot up to look at Elenor, taking in all the differences in her from that youth I had seen. She tilted her head, making an ‘ok’ gesture with a curious look.

  I nodded, standing back up fully. “Yeah, lost focus. That’s…probably going to happen again.” Slipping through time was a bad habit. I had to constantly keep that knot tied, and keep pulling the ends together to make it tighter. Any looseness would cause that to happen again.