Between Beats

The first time time listened to me, it happened under a sky that was showing off.

It was late summer, the kind of night where the heat still clung to your shoulders, but the air had that one cool breath that promised fall was waiting somewhere around the corner. The city had been humming all day and by the time I loaded into the rooftop venue, it felt like every streetlight was leaning in, curious.

They called the party Aurora Hour, which was funny because we were nowhere near the Arctic and nobody on the flyer could have explained solar winds if you offered them the book that explained it all.

But the promoter had sworn there would be northern lights right here. Why? Because some rare geomagnetic storm was supposed to make the sky do something it never did over our skyline. I didn’t care what they called it. I cared about the sould system and the power draw. The way the bass would roll over the edge of the building and drop into the city like a blessing.

I’m a DJ. Not the kind that hides behind the booth like it’s a confession. I’m the kind that watches a crowd like a living waveform. I read heads, shoulders, knees and toes. And also eyelids. I can tell you who just got dumped. Who’s here to forget they have a nine to five. Who’s two drinks away from starting a problem. Lastly, who is one song away from remembering they’re still alive.

My name is Beck Raines, but on flyers I’m DJ Raines. Promoters seem to love a last name that sounds like the weather. I thought that was the only kind of influence I’d ever have.

Then the sky opened like someone had pulled back a curtain.

At first it looked like a smear of green light, faint enough that half the people on the roof missed it. The other half screamed like the universe had shown up personally to tak attendance. Phones rose like a field of mechanical flowers. People pointed, laughed, hugged strangers. The city’s unusual orange glow was still there, but above it. The sky rippled in bands of green and violet, like a silk scarf being shaken out by invisible hands.

I stood behind my decks and watched all of it through the reflection on my laptop screen.

I had just transitioned into the next track, a deep house cut with a kick so clean it felt like a heartbeat you could trust. The crowd was moving, not wildly, just steady. Synchronized and beautiful.

Then the lights on my controller flickered. Just once. A quick stutter, like the equipment had blinked.

I frowned, tapped the power cable with my finger and glanced toward the generator station at the far end of the roof. Everything looked normal.

Then the music hiccupped. Not the track or the system. The whole moment.

One second, a woman in a yellow dress was laughing with her head thrown back, hair caught by the rooftop breeze. The next second, her head was still thrown back, her laugh still mid flight, the breeze still holding her hair, but something was wrong. It was like the world had been paused on a frame and nobody knew it except me.

The sound was still coming through the speakers, but the crowd had frozen. The bartender’s hand hovered over a cup. A man’s foot hung in the air halfway through a stop. Even the smoke from someone’s vape was suspended, a cloudy ribbon that refused to move.

I stared at them and my stomach tightened so hard I thought I might be sick.

My hands were still on the decks. My fingers were resting on the jog wheel. And under my fingertips, I felt it. A subtle resistance, like the wheel had teeth and was gripping something deeper than the audio I was playing.

I did the first thing any DJ does when something feels off. I checked the power. Because if your set dies, your whole reputation can die with it.

I looked down. The LEDs were glowing. The laptop was humming. The mixer was alive.

A thought slid into my mind so calmly it felt like it had always been there.

What if this is because of me?

I swallowed and my mouth tasted like metal.

My fingers twitched on the jog wheel and the world moved again.

The woman’s laugh finished itself. The breeze let go of her hair. The bartender poured. The man’s foot landed. The vape smoke drifted.

Nobody screamed or gasped for air. Nobody even looked around like something weird had happened.

Except me.

I stood there, pulse in my throat and tried to convince myself it was a panic spike. Just a lightheaded moment. Some weird strobe induced illusion.

Then, because I am apparently the type of person who sees the laws of reality crack and thinks, “Hmm, let’s poke it,” I did it again.

This time, I pressed the pause button on the controller.

The track paused, the way it always did, clean and obedient. And the world paused with it. Like it was part of the song. Like time itself was on my playlist.

The sky above them still ripple, but even the aurora looked stuck. A painted wave held in place without a frame.

The only things moving were the LEDs on my board and the small spinning icon on my laptop that showed the software was loaded..

I slapped the play button. The track resumed. The world resumed.

I didn’t have time to process that fully because a shout rose from the far end of the roof, not from the crowd, but from the security team. Something about the generator, a cable and an overload.

I refocused and pretended I hadn’t just held the entire party in my hand like a paused video.

But it was in me now, that knowledge and that secret hunger.

Time, like a track. Rewind, pause and fast forward. While I’m doing my music.

The night ended with people chanting my name and begging for one more song. I gave it to them because that’s what you do. You don’t leave people wanting. You leave them satisfied and a little stunned.

When the last beat faded and the lights came up. The aurora was already gone, as if it had never existed.

But my hands still felt like they were buzzing.

The next day, I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even tell myself. I tried to act normal. I ate cereal. I scrolled my phone. I answered a text from my mom. I went down to the corner store for a drink and nodded at the guy behind the register like I hadn’t just learned I could grab time by the collar.

But it followed me.

Every sound became suspicious. The click of my light switch. The hum of my fridge. The buzz of streetlights outside my apartment. All of it felt like proof that the world was plugged in and that I was standing too close to the outlet.

That night, I set up in my living room. Just me, my decks, laptop and headphones.

No crowds, no promoters and no aurora.

Just the steady, reliable electricity of my apartment building.

I loaded a track, something simple. A beat with room to breathe. Then I hit play.

The music started. The room felt normal. The air moved. The clock on my wall ticked. I reached out and tapped pause.

The track stopped. The clock stopped. Even the little dust motes I could see in the lamp light froze like stars.

I let out a laugh that came out sharp and too loud. Like I was trying to convince the universe this was hilarious and not terrifying.

I hit play. Everything resumed.

Okay, I thought, okay. This is real.

My throat was dry. I ran my tongue over my teeth.

Rewind.

I grabbed the jog wheel and spun it backward.

Then I watched the room. The clock hands reversed. The condensation on my glass crept upward.

I stopped turning the wheel and everything stopped reversing. I hit play and time continued forward from that earlier point, like I’d simply moved the needle back on a record.

My knees went weak. I sat down hard on my couch.

“You’re kidding,” I whispered because it’s easier to talk to an empty room than to accept you are now a glitch in God’s software.

Fast forward.

That’s the one I didn’t want to touch. Not yet.

Still, curiosity is a greedy little thing. It doesn’t care about your fear. It eats it and smiles at you while chewing.

I took a deep breath, loaded a longer track with almost ten minutes on it. I imagined time like a tape, like the timeline of my life stretched out in front of me.

Then I grabbed the jog wheel and pushed forward. The track jumped ahead.

And the room.

The clock lurched forward, hands skipping like a nervous dancer. The shadows shifted on the wall. Outside my window, the streetlight glow changed.

My phone buzzed three times in one second and then stopped, screen lighting up with notifications I couldn’t read fast enough.

I panicked and let go.

The room settled.

Time continued from wherever I had landed.

I stared at the clock. It was several minutes later that it had been. My phone showed missed notifications that hadn’t existed a moment ago.

I had just skipped over my own life like it was boring content.

I didn’t sleep that night. I sat at my kitchen table watching my lamp like it was a guard. Like if the bulb went out something might happen.

Over the next week, I experimented, carefully. I learned the boundaries.

The ability only worked when music was playing through my system. When I was actively DJing. Not humming, tapping rhythm, listening, performing or controlling the mix.

If I tried to pause time while music played from my phone speaker, nothing happened. If I tried while I had earbuds in and the deck was off, nothing happened. It had to be the full setup, the circuitry, the flow, the intent to play.

I also learned that the electricity rule wasn’t a metaphor.

The first time I took my setup to a park, using a portable battery pack, it worked. Pause, rewind, small fast forward.

Then the battery dipped into low power mode and the music stuttered.

Time stuttered with it.

For a terrifying half second, everything did a weird double step, like reality tried to keep dancing but forgot the count.

I shut it down immediately.

Electricity is the oxygen. No power, no time tricks.

Which would have been fine, if my mind wasn’t already drawing lines into the past and future like a child with a crayon and too much freedom.

Because once you can rewind time, you start thinking about all the things you wish you could fix.

And once you can fast forward, you start wondering what’s waiting.

I told myself I would never use it for anything serious. I told myself I was a DJ, not a god, not a superhero and not a walking disaster.

Then my little sister called.

River is twenty three and stubborn in a way that makes you proud and exhausted at the same time. She called me one afternoon crying so hard I could barely understand her. She had been driving home from work. A truck had blown through a red light. She had slammed on her brakes. Someone behind her hadn’t.

She was okay, shaken but okay. Her car was not okay. And the guy who hit her was yelling and threatening her.

I could hear him in the background, that sharp male voice that thinks volume is authority.

Something in me snapped.

I told her I was coming, get back in her car and lock herself in.

Then I did something I promised I wouldn’t.

I set up my decks in my apartment, hands moving with speed that felt borrowed. I loaded a track, hit play and the moment the beat started. I spun forward.

Fast forward.

My living room blurred at the edges, the clock leaped, my phone lit up darkened, lit up again.

The floor shifted under my feet, not physically, but in that nauseating way you feel when an elevator drops too fast.

My instinct screamed at me to stop.

But anger is a powerful rhythm.

I tried to picture River safe. I tried to picture the street, the intersection. I tried to picture myself there.

And that’s when I realized the worst part.

I wasn’t traveling in space. Only in time.

Fast forward didn’t teleport me to her. It just moved my life forward, sitting in my apartment. While the world outside continued doing whatever it was going to do.

If I fast forwarded an hour, I would still be in my living room. River would still be wherever she was, only now it would be an hour later and I would have missed the chance to help at all.

I yanked my hand off the wheel, slammed pause.

I stared at my decks. My hands trembling.

“You idiot,” I whispered.

Time control didn’t make me omnipresent. It made me dangerous in a small, more personal way.

I hit play. Time resumed. I grabbed my keys and ran.

When I got there, the police had already arrived and the man who hit her was suddenly polite, quiet and aware there were witnesses. River hugged me so hard my ribs complained.

On the drive home, my mind was chewing on new questions.

If I can’t change where I am, only when I am. Then what happens if I rewind too far?

I had been so focused on the electricity rule as a tether. I hadn’t really pictured the implications.

No electricity in the dinosaur age. No electricity in the deep future if humanity decides wires are obsolete. And no electricity means no way to play music. No way to control time.

No way back. I would be stuck.

A few nights later, I got booked for a warehouse party on the edge of the city. One of those events where the walls sweat and the bass makes your organs vibrate like tuning forks.

I told myself I wouldn’t use it. I told myself this was just a set.

But the crowd was electric in that way that makes you feel like you’re riding a living animal. Every transition hit. Every drop landed. People moved like they were connected to the same pulse.

And in the middle of it. A drunk guy climbed onto a stack of speakers. Security started pushing through the crowd.

The guy laughed, swayed, arms out like he was about to dive into the sea of bodies below.

I saw the fall before it happened.

The angle of his ankle, his wobble. Then inevitability.

My fingers moved before my conscience caught up.

Pause.

The track froze mid beat. Time froze with it.

The warehouse became a sculpture. Sweat droplets hung in the air. A girl’s eyelash blink stopped mid flutter. The drunk guy’s foot hovered over empty space, heel lifted, gravity waited patiently.

I stared at him, my heart pounding, and the temptation hit.

Rewind just a little. Let him step back.

I grabbed the jog wheel and pulled back.

The frozen world began to reverse, not smoothly like rewinding a video, but with a strange elasticity, like reality was stretching backwards through thick syrup.

The drunk guy’s foot slid back onto the speaker stack. His arms lowered. His grin unformed. He teetered, steadied, teetered again.

I stopped rewinding the moment before he climbed up. I hit play.

Time flowed forward again, but now, because I had altered the moment. The bump didn’t land the same way. The guy stumbled, laughed, then got pulled into the crowd by someone.

He never climbed.

Relief washed through me so hard my eyes stung.

And then I felt it. A tug.

Not physical and not emotional.

The lights in the warehouse flickered.

Just once.

The power system groaned under the load of the sound and the bodies and whatever else the building was doing to stay alive.

A technician near the back shouted something. I saw him run toward the breaker panel.

A blackout threatened.

And my blood turned to ice.

Because I was in the middle of an altered time.

If the power cut out while I had shifted the timeline, what would happen? Would time snap back? Would it freeze? Would it drop me into some broken version of the moment with no music.

I forced myself to breathe. I made the most boring, safest transition of my life, lowering the energy and easing the system. Giving the power a chance to catch up.

The lights steadied. The technician slowed. Whatever was about to fail decided not to.

I kept DJing, hands steady, and a smile in place. Like my entire soul hadn’t just tried to crawl out of my body.

I went home and sat in front of my setup without turning it on.

I thought about the night on the rooftop. The aurora like a cosmic wink. The moment the universe had leaned close and said, “Here. Try this.”

I don’t know why. But I do know I had access to a power that could ruin me.

So I made myself rules.

First, I don’t fast forward unless my life depends on it, because the future is a room I’m not allowed to enter.

Second, I don’t rewind for regret. Only for immediate danger or to prevent harm.

Third, I never pause time for longer than a breath because stillness is addictive.

Then I did something that felt both ridiculous and holy.

I loaded a track and hit play.

The music filled my apartment.

Please don’t stop the music by Rihanna.