They were almost out of orange juice. Max finished off what was left in the carton and tossed it in the sink to wash out later. It was Danny's week to shop, and Danny always went on Tuesdays. There would be more orange juice by tomorrow morning.

Investigating the contents of the refrigerator, he found several more things that were almost but not quite gone. Danny was a great roommate in almost every way, but he was a little too... focused, when it came to grocery shopping. He didn't check anything before he left. He assumed that whatever was on the list was what they needed, and that was what he got.

Max pulled the marker off the white board stuck to the freezer door and added "orange juice" to the list. Then he put "apples," "eggs," and "WHITE bread" on the list as well. He felt it necessary to distinguish between "white" and "wheat" bread, since Danny didn't seem to notice the difference. Some weeks they ended up with one, some weeks with another.

As an afterthought, he yanked open the freezer door too. Cracking the lid on the ice cream, he considered the half-full carton. Yup, definitely needed ice cream too. He put "blueberry ice cream" on the list.

Finally satisfied, he extracted a piece of cold pizza from the box at the bottom of the fridge and wandered into the bedroom. Danny's week to shop meant his week to do laundry. Munching on the pizza, he gathered up as many clothes as he could with one hand and dumped them in the laundry basket by the door. He threw in his towel too, and figured he might as well clean out the rest of the apartment's towels while he was at it.

One slice of pizza and an overloaded laundry basket later, he was heading down the stairs to the laundry room in the basement. He made it all the way down before he realized he'd forgotten quarters, and he sighed loudly. Dropping the basket on the floor inside the laundry room, he turned back to the door.

"Good morning, Max," Kayla greeted him, peering at him from underneath the heaping basket balanced on top of her head. She waited patiently for him to get out of the way, then glided forward to place her basket carefully on top of one of the washers.

"Kayla!" He bounced up on the washer next to her and gave her his most endearing smile. "How's it going? Having a good morning?"

The elderly woman regarded him with a small smile. "Yes, Max. Thank you for asking." Turning back to her laundry, she added, "And yourself?"

"Well, here's the thing," he said, letting a sheepish note creep into his tone. "It was going great, until I got all the way down here and figured out I'd forgotten my quarters..."

He trailed off, giving her a hopeful look, and she just shook her head. "Help yourself," she said, gesturing toward the dish she'd set up on the edge of the coin deposit.

"Thanks, Kayla!" he exclaimed. He scooped out a handful and slid off the washer immediately. "You're the best!"

She didn't answer, but he knew she was still smiling. Kayla had been fond of him ever since he rescued her cat from the roof in the middle of a rainstorm. After that she had insisted he stop calling her "Mrs. Inpalei" and just use her given name, which according to her he pronounced better anyway. He and Danny had never been without desert on a holiday since.

Max fed the first washer with quarters and dug the detergent out from the bottom of the laundry basket, sorting clothes as he went. It was better to do laundry early in the morning, when there weren't many people in the basement. He could spread things out all over the place, leave them in long after the machine had stopped, and hang damp stuff up to dry without getting in anyone's way.

He had sorted their clothes in the time it took Kayla to fill a single washer. She had taken up a place underneath the high set windows, a knitting bag beside her chair and a felt jingly toy at her feet. Her cat must have come in with her, but he hadn't seen it. She had left the quarter dish on top of her washer.

Max filled two washers, shoved the laundry basket on top of one of them, and waved to her before he headed back upstairs. The first thing he did when he reached their apartment was to pick up the quarters from the change drawer and put them in his pocket. He would pay Kayla back when he went down to move the laundry.

He checked the time, the voice mail, and his alarm clock, which was still set for nine. He turned it off, as he always did, but he left it set just in case. Danny tried to be quiet when he got up in the morning, and Max wasn't going to tell him that he'd gotten used to waking up early. As far as Danny knew, Max rolled over and went back to sleep the moment he left.

The phone rang, startling him, especially when he had just checked it seconds before. Only people he knew would call so early in the morning, right? He picked it up more out of curiosity than anything else. "Three-oh-four," he told the person on the other end.

"It's Danny," his best friend's voice answered. Danny didn't expect anyone to recognize his voice--even people he'd lived with for years. "Did I wake you up?"

Max glanced at the clock again: seven-thirty. "Yeah," he decided, feigning a yawn for effect. "What's up?"

"The time hole's gone," Danny said, his voice noticeably quieter even though he was probably in the back office where no one could overhear their conversation. "It disappeared during Taylor's shift last night.

"She and Eric are missing," Danny added, almost as an afterthought. "Wes thinks they went through the time hole before it closed."

"They what?!" Max dropped all pretense of sleepiness. "I knew he was up to something! He had that stupid smug look on his face and he was way too nice to me when he offered to take my shift! He didn't even say anything about teddy bears!"

Danny waited for him to take a breath, then pointed out reasonably, "He always has that look on his face, Max. He was probably being nice to you because he wanted to talk to Taylor. Even Eric wouldn't go through a time hole for no reason... would he?"

"No," Max grumbled, kicking the edge of the counter with his toe. "He wouldn't have had to wait till midnight if he wanted to, anyway. Maybe he tried to make Taylor go through and they double-dared each other."

"Or maybe something came through from the other side and they had to chase it back," Danny said worriedly. "They wouldn't have expected the time hole to close behind them."

There was a pause and then he added, "At least, I don't think they would have."

"Eric probably knows all sorts of stuff about time holes," Max muttered. "I'm surprised Mr. High and Mighty hasn't already shown up with the crystal and a new zord on top of it."

"Jen's tracked them to 2001," Danny offered, ignoring his bitterness. "She says they're right at the end of some big battle that Time Force fought that year, but that Eric should know enough to keep them out of it."

"Because Eric's first reaction to danger is to run away," Max said sarcastically.

"Maybe Taylor will hold him back," Danny suggested. The idea was, at first glance, overly optimistic, but on the other hand Taylor would probably oppose anything Eric wanted just because he wanted it. Max brightened a little as he thought about it.

"Maybe," he agreed with some satisfaction. "I'd like to see that!"

"I have to go." Danny sounded distracted already, as though someone was talking to him from out in the shop. "Wes said he'd pass the word when they know more."

"Sure." Max glanced at the clock automatically, but the flower shop wouldn't open for almost an hour. They must be getting ready for some big event today--he wasn't driving for it, so he hadn't paid much attention. "See you at ten."

"Right," Danny agreed. "Bye!"

"Later," Max replied absently. As he hung up the phone, he thought of Princess Shayla. He and Danny had always been at the bottom of the phone tree, being both the least likely to know anything and the hardest to reach at any given time.

Cole always knew things, just because he was Cole. Alyssa knew things because she lived with Cole, and Taylor was the first person both Alyssa and Eric called when anything happened. Danny and Max usually got messages left on their voice mail, or sometimes with Kendall at the shop...

But who would have told the princess? Max thought about this, then remembered that Merrick was staying with Alyssa and Cole. So he probably knew what was going on--but would he have told Princess Shayla? As far as Max knew, Merrick was going out of his way to avoid the princess, not seek her out.

Her shift at the time hole. That was it: she had been scheduled to be there this morning after Cole. If she hadn't known what was happening beforehand, she had to know by now.

He put it out of his mind, counting on someone to let him know if anything changed. He didn't waste much time worrying about Taylor, just as a general rule, and he wasn't about to start now. She didn't worry about them, for one thing, and for another she was easily the most capable person on the team. He had never known her to get into something she couldn't get out of.

Max turned the radio on and got work on the dishes left over from last night. He had learned very quickly that the longer dishes sat in the sink, the harder they were to wash later. That didn't stop either of them from ignoring dishes in the evening, when there were better things to do, but one of them usually did them voluntarily the next morning. It saved hot water and aggravation.

The orange juice carton was easy to rinse, of course, and he flattened it and tossed it in the recycling bin when he was done with the dishes. Only when he debated emptying the drainer did he realized he had no dish towel. As far as he was concerned, that gave him the perfect excuse to avoid drying the dishes, so he left them where they were. Danny could put them away when he got home.

He headed downstairs to check out the paper--someone had usually left one in the lobby by now--and visit the garden. The apartment garden had been Danny's idea, but he had the whole-hearted support of several of their neighbors. They had set up a watering and weeding rotation that Max could never keep track of, so he figured he'd better check and make sure he hadn't forgotten his turn already this week.

By the time he had wandered around the lobby and the building several times, the rest of the residents were waking up and milling too. Or maybe "milling" was unfair, since many of them were on their way to work or class, but he had long ago noticed that the more relaxed he was, the more relaxed the rest of the world looked to him. Thus, milling. It was an art form.

He milled his way into the laundry room, not surprised to find Kayla still there with what looked like half a sweater on her lap. She knitted fast. Her cat was curled up at her feet now, the felt toy nowhere in sight.

Max fished the quarters out of his pocket and dropped six of them into her dish. Then he started transferring the laundry from washer to dryer, separating the towels out throwing them in to the first dryer. Danny insisted that towels had to be dried separately--Max had no idea why, but he did know that towels definitely did not dry soft enough if they weren't put in a dryer. So he made sure they went in first.

He put two quarters in the towel dryer and one in each of the others, waved at Kayla, and headed back upstairs. He had just enough time before he had to be at the flower shop to Accomplish something, which he usually tried to avoid. Mornings were not about accomplishing things. On the other hand, if the evening was going to be taken up with whatever mess Taylor had gotten herself into...

He sighed, deciding he'd have to catch up on his bank account eventually. He settled down at the counter, idly tapping his pen in time to the radio while he tried to remember where the calculator had gone. Was he supposed to pick Jordan up this morning? And were the violets meant to droop like that under their special grow-light? It was amazing how many things needed his attention when he was trying to think about money.

There was a knock on the door, and he grinned to himself. First the phone, now the door. He was on a roll this morning. With a little luck, he would get absolutely nothing done, which was after all his secret goal every day.

"Cole?" He stared at the Red Ranger in surprise, then leaned past him to look up and down the empty hallway. "How did you get in here?"

Cole gave him a nonchalant look that had probably been perfected long before the Animarium. "There was an open window in the laundry room."

Max frowned, trying to remember if that was true. Then he shook his head, disgusted that Cole had made the ridiculous sound plausible without even trying. "You can't just climb in through windows! This is private property!"

Cole smiled, but his look of polite confusion was just a look. He knew perfectly well that people didn't go around climbing through windows. "The woman in the laundry room didn't seem to mind. She was very nice."

Max couldn't decide whether to be outraged that Cole was still giving him this attitude, or to laugh outright at the idea of Kayla watching Cole break into the laundry room. "You probably talked to her cat," he decided at last, shaking his head again. "She likes anyone who likes Enis."

With that, he realized what was missing. Looking up and down the hall again just to make sure, he gave Cole a horrified look. "Did you leave Ness outside? What if someone sees her wandering around loose?"

"She's at day care for the morning," Cole answered, as though that were a perfectly reasonable thing to say about a dog. Before knowing Cole, Max would have laughed at the thought, but now he just accepted it and waved for Cole to come in.

"Danny called you?" Cole asked, as Max closed the door behind him.

"Yeah." Max went over to push one of the windows open, glancing at the garden outside as he did so. Two of their neighbors were already down there, either weeding or picking--it was hard to tell from here. "Taylor's missing?"

"Taylor and Eric," Cole corrected. "They disappeared just after midnight last night, and Jen's tracked Eric's morpher to 2001. Someone back then must have one of the crystals that was lost in the battle with Doomtron."

"So they can use it to get back?" Max suggested hopefully.

"Maybe." Cole didn't sound enthusiastic about the possibility. "It depends on how whoever's controlling the crystal has it set up. They must be able to direct its effects, or the time hole wouldn't have closed so quickly this morning. But if they know what they're doing, they're probably protecting it pretty carefully."

"Taylor and Eric won't be able to get to it," Max guessed.

"If they got away from it to begin with," Cole agreed. "Whoever has control of that crystal must have known the second they came through the time hole, and it's possible they're being held captive."

"When did you get so smart?" Max demanded, giving Cole a suspicious look. He knew Cole wasn't the naive jungle boy he pretended to be most of the time, but he had never been very interested in technology either. And time travel... definitely down at the bottom of a very long list of Things Cole Cared About.

"I've been at Silver Guardian headquarters all morning," Cole said with a smile. "Taylor called me just before she disappeared last night, and when I got there I offered to search the base while Jen tried to track her and Eric. We've been helping Wes secure the area ever since."

"We?" Max repeated, not sure he wanted to know. Bottom of the phone tree, as usual.

"Alyssa and Merrick came in around one," Cole explained. "Princess Shayla arrived a couple of hours ago, Merrick left, and Alyssa called in so she could get some sleep. The princess is working with Jen right now."

Max frowned, but decided against asking what, exactly, Princess Shayla could do to help a thirty-first century time cop. "Is there anything we can do?" he asked at last. He couldn't help being privately glad he had the evening to himself again, but if it got him out of work he'd volunteer to help at SGH.

Cole shrugged. "Probably not," he admitted. "I just wanted to make sure you knew what was going on."

"Aren't you supposed to be working today?" Max demanded. Cole's schedule was stranger than his, but he'd thought he had it figured out--for the next week, at least.

"I worked Sunday," Cole said calmly. "I have today off."

"Right..." Max eyed him, but there was no way to read the Red Ranger once he'd decided something wasn't important. "Well, thanks. You're better than Danny is over the phone, even if I don't know what you're talking about."

Cole grinned at that, nodded once. "Stop by later if you have time," he suggested. "Jen and the princess are working on some kind of... something, and it's fun to see them hunched over Wes' computer together."

Max laughed aloud, relieved that Cole was talking normally again. "I will," he promised. "And I'll bring my camera!"

Cole nodded again, tossing a wave over his shoulder as he headed for the door. He looked more tired than Max had noticed at first... or maybe it was just more noticeable from the back. Cole didn't always stand up straight, but he didn't obviously slump either. Now he was.

Long night, Max guessed. There were advantages to being at the bottom of the phone tree, after all.