Hit Rewind

ELEVEN: HIVEMIND

She didn't like to be controlled. She didn't like to have her free will be questioned or be taken away from her, and no amount of good intentions coming from Iris would ever change that. Lyra could kick and stomp her feet and argue with her all she wanted, but Iris was arrogant enough to know when she was right, and she was adamant on being the one person in the world who knew her better than she knew herself.

At least she had, up to a certain point in their lives—before it all went wrong. At least she thought she had been that person, once upon a time. She hoped so—wishful thinking, and all.

All the time Iris had spent oscillating between stages of grief somehow felt meaningless then. Even the unbearable numbness that had found its way into the cavities between her ribs hadn't amounted to anything, and all that anger and sadness and everything in-between had all been for nothing.

Trying to make sense of what had happened to Lyra was pointless because she had successfully undone it—not just once, but twice—yet the doubts and the bargaining attempts were still bubbling underneath her skin like lava. She'd cried for Lyra Sinclair, begged the skies and the sea to bring her back, broken several of her belongings, shattered her parents' hearts, and Lyra was sitting right next to her as though nothing had happened. As though Iris had gone through all that mourning over a death that hadn't ever occurred in the literal sense, at least in that version of reality; to her, however, it had.

What was she supposed to do with that?

She'd heaved and broken down in the kitchen floor for an undead girl, and, now that she'd finally gotten everything she wanted—a second, a third, a fourth chance to finally making it right—she'd been rudely reminded of how fickle life truly was. Everything could be over in a fraction of a second—a current too strong to withstand, a speeding car, anything could whisk Lyra away from her again—and she felt so goddamn ungrateful and selfish for daring to be furious about it.

She was furious over Lyra's own anger for having been saved, for being known and seen by someone after years of complaining about being the daughter of two people who found her to be invisible (which was objectively not true). Lyra had questions, but so did Iris, and only one of them got to have theirs be answered. Only one of them got to be coddled and supported and saved.

Why wasn't Iris allowed to feel her own emotions? Why was she, after all this time, still invalidating herself for the sake of protecting Lyra? Lyra Therese Sinclair, who didn't love her in this universe, who barely even knew her, whereas Iris had gotten to keep all the memories?

Why?

"Prove it, then," Lyra said, voice surprisingly steady for someone who had been hunched over, arms circling her bony knees, for so long Iris could hear her joints creak like a ghost house. Iris looked at her, but Lyra didn't return the gesture. Instead, she stared right ahead, focused on a blank spot on one of Iris' dorm room walls—one of the few devoid of any decorations. "Can you prove you can rewind time in a way that doesn't involve my death or a near-death experience involving either of us?"

Iris chewed down on her bottom lip. "I don't know. Most of the time, I don't really know how to trigger it; it just does. It's usually in response to an external event."

"The external event here is me asking you to do it. It shouldn't take an imminent tragedy for it to happen, right?"

Iris cowered with the animosity and defiance in Lyra's voice, even though she should have expected it from the start.

She'd had a hard time believing her powers herself, but had attributed most of it to her crippling self-doubt, a constant in her life that had been present for as long as she could remember being aware of it, and to the sheer ridiculousness of time traveling being real outside of the fictional worlds she didn't even review or edit for a living. Those were her personal feelings, and she knew she had a plausible explanation to feel that way, one that no one but her got to invalidate.