by Jana Miller
My family had been okay all these years. It had been hard—and it still was sometimes—but we were okay. And maybe we were stronger for it. Maybe I was stronger because of the Ring of Time and all it had given me—and even what it had taken from me.
I allowed myself to soak in his angelic little face one more time, to tell him I was so sorry, and to tell myself that maybe it hadn’t been my fault—and even if it had been, that it was time to let it go.
Love you, buddy.
I said goodbye to Max in my heart, and I pulled the strand of time the other way.
* * *
As I traveled back through those seven years, I let myself see both the good and the bad. I watched my choices and my mistakes, my relationships and my many rewinds.
It had been an amazing journey, but I didn’t need this ability.
And what I knew in that moment, with absolute certainty, was that nobody should have this ability.
When I returned to the present, still in the Ring of Time with the others, I felt only two presences: Rob and Leah. What had happened to Janie? Was she off on her own rewinding journey? Would I feel it if she pulled one strand to the past like I had?
Either way, I should still feel her presence. I focused on Leah and Rob, wishing I could communicate with them in some way. I realized that Rob’s presence was fading; while I’d been off fantasizing about saving the day, the other three had been expending energy in the present. But what were they doing?
And then I felt it: a small surge of energy, coming from the amulet. What were they trying to do?
I mentally reached out to the amulet, sensing the familiar humming coming from it, and then a surge of energy from it blasted me. I reeled for a moment—but then I realized that I felt stronger because of it. The energy of the amulet seemed to be clearing up my head. I couldn’t feel anything physically, since time was stopped, but I wondered if this was the way to heal all the side effects from rewinding. I pulled a little more and felt Rob pulling as well. As I tried to suck in a little more of the amulet’s energy, I felt the golden hum filling me up. Hungrily, I pulled more. But then I felt Rob flicker even more, and I realized that after another surge went to Leah, her presence was less noticeable, as if she was losing strength. And then I had the startling realization that I was fading a little bit as well. The energy was filling me up, but it wasn’t healing me; it was pulling me in. And I didn’t know if it would let me go when I was all the way full.
Horrified, I pushed the energy out of me. At first it wouldn’t go, but I kept pushing, and eventually it reversed. The more I pushed, the more I felt like myself. Once I’d pushed everything from me back into the amulet, I realized that all the energy in the Ring seemed to be...yearning toward the amulet. Like it belonged there.
Had the Ring of Time actually come out of the amulet? No, that didn’t make sense. The Ring of Time was eternal, right? It hadn’t been created by Apollonius, and it couldn’t have been stored in an amulet that somebody had made. But still—the Ring’s energy wanted to go into the amulet.
Was this how the Ring of Time could be closed? If the amulet had opened it, the amulet could close it, right? Maybe it was a portal that had pulled the Ring of Time into our world, rather than taking us into the realm where the Ring of Time was.
I wasn’t even sure if that made sense, but somehow it felt true. And if I’d learned anything from my ridiculous healing crystals, it was to trust my intuition. I could almost hear Jake’s voice cheering as I finally decided to just go for it. I nudged the energy from the Ring toward the amulet.
It accepted it gladly.
The energy belongs in the amulet, I told myself. Knowing how willingly the amulet had sucked its energy from me—leaving me feeling strangely uninfected—I mentally nodded to myself. I would help the amulet take back what it had set loose; I would close the Ring of Time.
I nudged the strands toward the amulet, willing the energy of the Ring of Time to return to the Káti Square—the One Thing that had somehow opened it up and allowed humans to access it.
Armed with the conviction that manipulating time was something that nobody should be able to do, I nudged again, and then the amulet took over. It pulled them in steadily, and I felt the Ring shrinking.
And then I could feel the energy of the amulet being pulled from Leah and Rob, and I wondered if they would help close the Ring when they realized what I was doing.
I watched it and felt it for a satisfied moment—but then I remembered Jake.
I couldn’t let the strands disappear without saving Jake. We could rewind to get the amulet sooner, enter the Ring before Lillian knew anything about it. We could prevent the springback that had caused Leah to spin off the road. It wasn’t just the infection of the Ring plaguing Jake; it was the injuries of the crash. And how did I know he wouldn’t still be infected—and Gene too, and anybody else who wasn’t here in the Ring as it shrank?
And even worse—what if Jake had already died? The doctor had called his condition “critical.” His brain was shutting down. He hadn’t wanted Rob to leave for even a few minutes; he’d all but told him to stay so he could say goodbye to his son.
Desperately, I tried to pull the strands back toward me, tried to convince them to reverse so the Ring would grow and be accessible to me again. Why hadn’t I tried to rewind first, when it was still an option? It would have been so incredibly easy. Had my thoughts of Max really dominated me so much that I’d forgotten to think about my current situation—my friends who needed me now? I could have gone back to before any of this had started.
No, wait—I was still in the Ring. I could just pull one of the strands. I grasped one, but nothing happened. It just continued toward the amulet, going back to where it belonged.
No, I inwardly pled. Please, just one more rewind. I can’t leave Jake to die. I have to fix one more thing.
But no matter how I pulled, the Ring just shrank, heedless of my attempts. I couldn’t stop it any more than I could have stopped and reversed a raging river.
* * *
The ring disappeared in a brilliant flash of light, and I blinked at the sudden…lack.
Lack of glowing, lack of humming, lack of something in the back of my mind. The emptiness pressed in on me with a suffocating finality as my heart beat fiercely in my ears.
No. No, it couldn’t be closed all the way. I knelt down and desperately felt around in the dark for the amulet—not even registering that I was still holding my phone with the flashlight on—but I couldn’t feel it.
“No,” I breathed.
I had closed it. It had just sucked in. I hadn’t been able to stop it.
I looked up to see Janie blinking down at me.
We were still in the forest clearing. Of course we were; we had stopped time. All of that had happened in an instant.
To my left, Leah was starting to smile, and to my right, Rob’s face was pale as he pressed his hand into his side.
“It’s—it’s gone,” Leah said simply, shining her light at the spot on the ground where the amulet had been. It was gone. It was closed, and we couldn’t get it back. My breathing sped up.
“But I didn’t—” I continued to feel around in the dirt in vain. There was nothing left behind to indicate it had ever been there. “It went too fast. I couldn’t stop it. Jake—I don’t know if Jake—I’m so sorry,” I said, turning my pleading eyes to Rob. “We won’t be able to rewind if he—”
But Rob was shaking his head. “Chloe. You—you saved us.”
He didn’t understand. “But I closed it,” I insisted. “I forgot to rewind first. I could have rewound. We could have stopped the accident.” My vision was starting to blur. “What if we didn’t do it soon enough?”
Janie knelt down in front of me, pushed my hair out of my face, and put her hands to my cheeks. “Chloe. Breathe.”
I shook my head. “It felt like it needed to close, and I let it.” I looked up at Leah. “It seemed like it was—taking over you two, and I—I pu
t the energy back inside it. But I don’t know if Jake—”
Now she was shaking her head. “He’ll be fine, Chloe! We’re all fine now! Don’t you feel it?” Leah’s eyes were shining as she smiled at me and I just blinked at her.
“Fine?”
Janie stood, trying to pull me up with her. “You fixed it,” she said simply.
“But Jake—”
“Chloe, you did great!” Leah insisted, crouching down to pull me up to stand. “You closed the Ring of Time! You stopped my mom, and you fixed us!”
“All better,” Janie agreed with a grin, holding up her hands and shaking her legs out a little to prove it.
And then I realized it was true. For the first time in almost seven years, I had no headache.
Absolutely no headache, no vertigo. I closed my eyes to check the strands, and they were—
Gone.
The Ring of Time really was closed.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Please, please, please, please, please. . .”
I muttered unfinished prayers under my breath the whole way to the hospital, terrified of finding that we hadn’t done enough or been fast enough—terrified of finding him dead, even though the others were convinced that we would find him awake and just fine.
“We were pulling too much energy, thinking it would heal us,” Leah said, dragging my mind back to the present. “At least, that’s what I was thinking.”
“I think I passed out as soon as we got in,“ Janie said. “It was way too much for me.”
“I thought you pulled at least a little energy first,” Rob said to her, then he groaned again. “It felt right at first, pulling it in, but then...it was like it was taking over.”
I nodded. “That’s why I started putting it back, and then the strands—I felt like it needed to . . .”
I trailed off again, my brain insisting on reliving those moments when the Ring disappeared. Leah was certain Jake would be fine just like the rest of us, but I couldn’t convince myself. What if we’d only been healed because we were actually inside the Ring?
My mouth was dry, my stomach and chest tight as we took the elevator up to the ICU.
“You’re just in time!” a nurse exclaimed when she saw us. “We just called the doctor in to see our miracle patient!”
Tears I hadn’t noticed forming in my eyes spilled over as I covered my mouth with my hand.
“He’s okay?” Leah exclaimed.
The nurse nodded, her eyes bright. “He woke up about ten minutes ago, acting like nothing happened at all.”
Leah pulled me into a side hug as my mind tried to process the sudden switch from dread to exultant.
And it was at that moment that Rob passed out.
I blinked in shock as nurses rushed over, asking him questions, asking us questions.
“Sir, are you okay?”
“Does he have any medical conditions?”
“He looks injured.”
I looked at Leah. “He—he crashed his motorcycle,” I finally said. “He was holding on to his side like it was hurt . . .” I glanced down the hall toward Jake’s room, the need to see if he was really okay overpowering my concern for Rob.
Leah took over after that. “He didn’t tell us he was injured.”
As the nurses assessed him and called others to help, Leah caught my eye and motioned toward Jake’s room with her head. “Go,” she mouthed.
I glanced over to his room and then back at her. “Just me? But—” I looked down at Rob.
She shook her head. “We’ll stay with him,” she said quietly, pulling Janie close to her. Then she smiled wryly. “If someone doesn’t go tell Jake the whole story, he’ll probably try to escape just to come find us.”
I felt like I should protest again, but instead I pressed my lips together and nodded before rushing away down the hall to Jake’s room.
I knocked quickly and then pushed his door open, poking my head in.
It took me a split second to process what I was seeing.
“You’re okay,” I choked out when I saw him sitting up in his bed, looking right at me with a huge grin.
“Better than ever,” he assured me. “And probably even better looking,” he added with as cocky a look as he could manage through his obvious joy.
I tried to roll my eyes, but tears were forming and I couldn’t say anything as I rushed to his bed and smothered him with a hug.
“I must be even better looking than I thought,” he said as he squeezed me back.
“Shut up,” I laugh-cried, shoving him as I stood back up.
He shook his head a little, wonder filling his face. “What happened?” he asked.
I swallowed and took a breath, everything that had happened coming back in an overwhelming cascade of memory and emotion. But one thing fought its way to the surface—the thing I hadn’t even begun to fully process.
“I said goodbye.” I said it with a wistful sort of peace and a tiny shrug of one shoulder, somehow knowing that he would know what I meant.
His eyes slowly widened and his eyebrows lifted as he looked at me with a mixture of sympathy and pride. “You said goodbye?” he repeated reverently. “To Max?”
I smiled a little and nodded, my tears coming back, as I sat in the chair next to his bed.
“Chloe, that’s”—he smiled a little as he searched for words—“that’s amazing.”
I took a deep breath. It was. It really was amazing.
“So did you—I mean, how did that happen?”
“Well, once we entered the Ring, it was actually really easy,” I told him. “I pulled on a strand, and I went back—and I saw him.” I swallowed. “I saw the moment, and I almost did it. I almost stayed and fixed it. But then…I don’t know, I just knew. I knew he wouldn’t want me to do it. And I knew it wouldn’t be fair to any of you.”
“Wow.” I could see Jake’s mind racing, probably full of so many more questions, but for now he just let it be quiet, waiting until he could tell I was ready to move on. “So…you actually went back that far? How?”
I bit my lip a little. This was the part that would kill him. “Well,” I began, “once we got inside the Ring, it was totally different. The strands were so easy to see, and to use—”
“Wait, they were easy to use? Wasn’t the Ring broken?”
I shook my head. “They were perfect,” I said. “I think the amulet fixed them.” Jake looked like he wanted to interrupt, but I wanted to tell him the whole story first. “It was almost an accident at first; I just pulled a little, but then…I may have become—for just a second”—I winced a little, knowing how he would react—“a Master of Time.”
“WHAT!?” he exploded. “Master of Time? And I missed it!?” He scoffed then looked at me sternly. “Chloe—” He cut himself off then suddenly asked, “What’s your middle name?”
I pulled my chin back, confused. “Uh—Alice?”
He again pinned me with a stern look. “Chloe Alice Brown, how dare you become a Master of Time without me.”
I let out a scoff. “Okay, pal, where’s your nurse button? I think you need a sedative.”
He glared. “I’m serious.”
I laughed and rolled my eyes. “Oh my gosh, Jake, seriously? I’m in trouble for that? You know, I wasn’t planning on rubbing this in, but we did sort of save your life in the process.” I gave him a stern look of my own, though I was sure my amusement cancelled it out.
He sighed. “Yeah, okay, fine, I guess we’re even.”
But he still muttered, “Master of Time” under his breath, and continued to do so every once in a while over the next hour.
* * *
“So there was nothing wrong with the Ring?” Jake was having a hard time processing everything we’d told him about entering—and then closing—the Ring of Time.
Leah shook her head. “It was perfect,” she reported. “More beautiful than I ever saw it in my head.”
“I can’t believe that’s the only time I’ll ever
see it,” Janie murmured.
“And I still can’t believe I missed all that,” Jake moaned. He’d been pouting for fifteen minutes.
I rolled my eyes. “Suck it up, you baby. Have another drink from your juice box.”
He looked at me defiantly and took a long but dainty sip of apple juice, once again making Janie giggle. “So if the Ring wasn’t broken, what was wrong with us?” he asked.
“It probably had to do with the fake amulet,” Leah said.
“And that’s why the real one fixed it,” I said.
“I guess that makes sense,” Jake said. “There can only be one Magical Square of Káti,” he said grandly.
“Wow, you embellished the name?” I asked.
“Sounds better, doesn’t it?”
I shrugged. “Sounds fake.”
A nurse came in to tell us that Rob had been stitched up and given a couple bags of fluids and was now sleeping, thanks to some morphine. I wasn’t totally sure what had cut him when he’d crashed his bike, but the nurse said he was lucky that it was the only injury he’d had, and that if he’d crashed on pavement rather than on the pine-needle-covered forest floor, they’d be having a different conversation entirely.
The three of us had wolfed down dinner in the hospital cafeteria, and I’d texted my parents saying that Janie and I were going to a movie—that way it wouldn’t be suspicious when I didn’t answer their calls or texts, since I was two and a half hours from home and it was already after eight on a school night. I had no idea what I was going to tell them. I knew I’d be dealing with angry parents when I got home, but I couldn’t get past my sheer relief at everything to be too concerned about it.
“So are you going to call?” I asked Leah, and she wrinkled her nose at me. “What?” I said with a laugh. “Is Jake’s attitude rubbing off on you?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said with a faint smile. “I think I’m feeling kind of—free.”
“Free to act like him?” I asked with a laugh, even though I knew what she meant. I’d always thought that losing my ability would be scary, make me even more cautious and nervous about messing up. But somehow it had done the opposite.
