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When he did, he saw the empty plaza below. All those people. Gone.
There was no one in the nearby streets either, the tracks and canals vacant, no airships in the sky, no smoke from steamers in the harbor.
It was so quiet. Diego’s breathing echoed in his head. The only other sound was the humming of the clock hands.
Diego’s board began to vibrate. The buildings started to tremble. The clock hands suddenly froze, and the world seemed to halt. Even Diego, his breath caught in his throat, his board stuck in the air—
Then the world began to roar.
Diego raced away as fast as he could. Water and ash swirled behind him, coming closer. Boats and trolleys rocketed up in the air, thrown by the force of the blast. The sky went dark, clouds and dust all around, swallowing Diego. He lost sight of the sky, the buildings, and . . .
A voice drifted across an infinite wind, speaking a single word as if from a hundred miles away.
“Forward.”
CHAPTER TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
The Riberas of New Chicago (#litres_trial_promo)
Diego’s eyes flashed open, the vision of the crumbling city still fresh in his mind.
He blinked and saw a curve of metal overhead, dotted by rivets. The inside of his bed.
Diego breathed deep. It had only been a dream . . . a nightmare. He sat up on his elbows, careful not to bump his head inside the old propane tank that his dad had converted to look like a Mid-Time–era submarine. The bed had been a present for Diego’s eighth birthday. These days, his feet reached to the far end when he slept.
He looked around his room and saw that everything was as it always was.
Diego shivered. He’d pushed his blankets off during the dream. He reached for them but then noticed daylight through the windows. He glanced at the clock—would the hands be spinning backward? No, they were normal; of course they were. And it was time to get up.
Still, he lay back for a moment, crossing his arms. The image of everything exploding played across his mind. He knew it was a dream, but still. There had been that gravity board. Something he wanted more than anything else.
Diego swung his legs out of bed and stood, stretching. He threw on cargo work pants and his favorite T-shirt: orange with bright white letters that spelled ATARI.
His eyes paused on the poster above his bed. It showed the skyline of Chicago the way it used to be. A long row of elegant buildings neatly arranged along the shore of a lake. The city that his father was from. Before the Time Collision. Diego was part of the first generation of children to be born in this new world. Everyone older had arrived here from some other time. Many people still identified themselves as being from those other eras, but not his parents. Though Santiago was a Mid Timer and his mother, Siobhan, was a Steam Timer, they thought of themselves simply as citizens of this new world.
“You are lucky,” Santiago had said once. “You are a child of the future. You will never be held back by the past.”
Santiago never talked about the Time Collision, or the Dark Years that followed. Some groups were still bitter about the war, but his focus was always on making this world better. Still, he had saved a few clippings from the newspapers right after the event. When Diego started learning about the Time Collision in school, Dad had given them to him. They were on the wall above his desk.
The biggest one was titled TIME COLLISION! The article below was interesting to read now: people had known so little in the years right after, when the Chronos War had erupted. The Steam Timers had fought the other-time cultures for control of the world, and for a while, people had become more dangerous than the dinosaurs.
A different article detailed a group of hunters standing over a spinosaurus; another, the vast woolly mammoth herds that lived north of the wild lands. And below there was one about the first explorations across the fantastically changed American landscape by the great explorer Bartholomew Roosevelt. Diego stepped onto the balcony outside his room. A cool, salty breeze greeted his face. It smelled like seaweed and diesel fuel. He gripped the railing and gazed out over the city. He wanted to make sure it still looked like it always had. One last assurance that his dream had been just that.
And sure enough, there was New Chicago, shimmering in the morning sun, looking as fixed and permanent as a city made of three different time periods could.
A ship’s horn blared. In the distance beyond the building tops, Diego spied the great heads and shoulders of massive, clanking robots toiling in the morning mist of the harbor. Once the cargo ships were tended to, these robots would make their way into the canals, their engineers patrolling the city for any signs of deterioration or disrepair from the salt water. The canals were once city streets, but they all lay beneath the waters of the Vastlantic, an ancient ocean that now covered a third of North America.
A bright blue robotic crane passed by Diego’s building, picking its way through the crowded canal like a spider on its eight spindly legs. Another smaller robot followed not far behind. It was yellow and sturdy, more like a bulldozer on legs but with two piston-powered arms instead of a giant shovel. It towed a barge loaded with steel beams.
The streets were clogged with people and vehicles from many eras. New Chicago was unique like that. In most parts of the world, the eras of time were uniform over vast geographic regions, and they lined up neatly against each other like slices of a pie. Here, the time regions were more like splinters in a cracked mirror. Some narrow and long, some short and trapezoidal, and they wove and crossed among one another. It made life more colorful and chaotic than in other places, and in some ways more dangerous, but compared to that skyline in the poster on his wall, Diego thought this version of Chicago seemed way more interesting.
The smell of bacon and eggs broke Diego out of these thoughts. He heard sizzling meat from inside. Then he remembered why they were having a bigger breakfast than normal.
It was Diego’s thirteenth birthday.
He hurried back inside and to the kitchen. Siobhan stood by the stove wearing her pilot’s jumpsuit, her thick red curls pulled back and held up with a blue chopstick. She dropped another strip of bacon into the sizzling pan just as the pressure gauge next to the stove dropped to zero. A shrill whistle burst from the gauge, and the stove went dead.
“Blimey,” Siobhan muttered. “There should be at least thirty minutes of power left on that blasted thing.”
“Try this one, Mom,” Diego said, unclipping the pressure gauge from his belt and handing it to her. “It should have three hours of burn on it.”
“Thank you, my darling birthday boy.” She hugged him tightly, kissing his forehead.
“Mom . . . ,” Diego said.
“What?” She smiled as she unscrewed the depleted gauge and affixed the new one, the stove snapping back to life. “Should I say ‘young man’ now instead of ‘boy’?”
“Just maybe not ‘darling,’” Diego said.
Siobhan sighed. Her face was ivory white and smooth, her eyes a striking gray blue. “Oh, you are getting older, aren’t you? And I think you grew another inch overnight.” She tapped his nose with her index finger. “Sit. You need to eat and get off to school. And don’t forget,” she added as Diego moved to the table, “you’re meeting Dad after school today at the Arlington Geothermal plant.”
“I know,” Diego said.
“You’re supposed to report to the ferry dock right after school. No messing around with Petey. Dad says that installing this new steam converter will take all afternoon.”
“I know,” Diego said. “Man, it would’ve been great if Dad could’ve built the power plant closer. The ferry ride is too long.”
“I think you could forgive him that one oversight,” Siobhan said. “This city has power, security, and prosperity because of your father.”
He knew how much his father had done for New Chicago: in the short years after the Time Collision, Santiago had designed and built the power plant and the perimeter wall protecting the territories, and created most of the robots that maintained and protected the city. “It’s just a long afternoon on my birthday.”
“Yes,” Siobhan said. “We’d been hoping to take you to the Signature Room at the 95th for dinner tonight, but this job is very important. If your father could have scheduled it for any other day, believe me, he would have. So there will be no more complaining in the ranks, boyo. Is that understood?”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” Diego said. He gave his mom a salute. Siobhan flew for the City Search and Rescue now, but she’d once been a decorated fighter pilot. She fought against the Aeternum, a group of marauders who frequently raided New Chicago and other coastal cities in the aftermath of the Chronos War, and her part in the decisive Battle of Dusable Harbor had made her a legend.
Heavy boots echoed down the hall.
“Good morning,” Santiago said. He was dressed for work. Though the title Chief Mechanical and Civil Engineer might sound like it required a suit, Santiago was not one to put on airs, never mind wash the engine grease from beneath his fingernails. He was happiest when he was right there among his crew, up to his elbows in machines.
He hung his heavy, weather-beaten satchel on the back of a chair and then filled a mug with coffee.
“Good morning, Santi.” Siobhan handed him a plate of food, and he leaned over to kiss her.
“You always look fetching and official in your uniform,” he said.
“I thank ya kindly,” Siobhan said, her words seeped in a light Irish lilt that always seemed stronger when she was either embarrassed or furious. “Turns out I got all fancied up for nothing. The whole fleet’s grounded. Colonel McGregor sent word that the batch of fuel they put into the squadron last night was bad.”
“Bad?” Santiago asked as he sat down. “How could that be?”
“Full of impurities,” Siobhan said. “So, instead of flying, we’re going to spend all day draining the tanks and flushing the fuel lines. It’s affected most of the navy ships, too. Nearly every vehicle at the base is out of commission.”
“Sorry to hear it,” Santiago said. “That’s odd, though. The Calumet refinery is usually so reliable. Did they say how it happened?”
“Not in the report I got,” Siobhan said.
Santiago frowned. “I’ll give them a call later this morning. If there’s a problem with one of the pumps, the sooner I can send a team the better.” After a bite of eggs, he glanced at Diego. “I heard you call her ‘Captain.’ You’ll be a captain yourself this afternoon.”
Diego smiled nervously. “And what will I be captain of?” he asked, thinking, Say a gravity board, say a gravity board. . . .
“Hah.” Santiago chuckled and ate his bacon. “The loader, of course, driving the big blue Centauri bot. This Goliath steam converter is a big deal. I hope you’re still up for it.”
“Oh,” Diego said. “Right. That bot is kinda tricky.”
“I’ve seen you handle it like a pro,” Santiago said.
“I’m not that good at it,” Diego said. “I mean, I guess when we’re installing pressure valves or something, but . . . maybe you should have Stan Angelino do it. He’s the top robot driver at Arlington.”
“Come on,” Santiago said. “You are my son. How could you help but be one of the best, someday maybe even the best?” Santiago rubbed the top of Diego’s head, messing up his hair. “This converter came to us all the way from London. The queen’s top steam propulsion designer and his son are here to help us install it. Stan is very good, but I need my top man on the job.”
Diego felt his cheeks burn.
“And besides,” Santiago said, “you’ve got to see this thing. It’s massive!”
Dad always sounded like a kid when he talked about work. He liked to say that it kept him young, though lately Diego had noticed the gray hair at his father’s temples and the occasional white whisker in his broad mustache.
But instead of smiling back, Diego stared down at his plate.
“What is it, Diego?”
“Well, I just don’t understand why Magistrate Huston thinks that we need some old-fashioned steam technology. First, there was the engineer from France with his revolutionary gas lamp systems, then that awful crude oil expert from Texas. Now we have to put up with some stuffy British guy?” Diego flashed a glance at his father. “I mean, you’re ten times the engineer that he is.”
Santiago sipped his coffee. “Sharing our technology helps strengthen our alliances. It’s my duty to help them, and this converter is the queen’s way of doing the same.” Santiago smiled. “There’s more to being chief engineer than gears and pistons. There’s also the workings of people. And sometimes they’re more complicated. You’ll have to learn that if you are ever going to take my place.”
Diego wished he hadn’t said anything. “I don’t know, Dad. . . .” He didn’t think he could ever take Santiago’s place. He didn’t know if he had that kind of greatness in him, and he didn’t want to see the disappointment in his father’s eyes if he didn’t.
“Listen,” Dad said. “I realize it’s not as exciting as taking your pilot’s test. But I need you.”
“I know,” Diego said.
“And someday when you finally turn thirteen and take that test, you’ll still be the youngest pilot in New Chicago.”
“Dad . . . ,” Diego muttered. He shoved a whole piece of bacon into his mouth.
“What is it?” Santiago asked.
“Today is my birthday.”
“Wait . . . today? But . . .” Santiago started counting on his fingers. “It can’t be. Today is Tuesday, yesterday was Monday. Before that it was Sunday, so today must be . . .”
Santiago’s face cracked, and he started to laugh.
“Dad!” Diego said.
“You’re horrible,” Siobhan said, punching Santiago’s shoulder lightly.
“Sorry,” Santiago said, grinning. “But I had you going.” He pulled a small package from his satchel and held it out. “Don’t worry, I didn’t forget. Here.”
This was not the size of a gravity board, but Diego pulled off the brown paper, revealing a small box wrapped in white paper, with a blue bow. There was a card attached.
To our young adventurer and son, Diego
Through this, may you see
A world of wonders hidden from most.
Love, Mom & Dad
He unwrapped the package.
“What is it?” Diego asked, raising the tube to his eye. Through the lens, he saw tiny broken fragments. They formed a fractured pattern of beautiful colored shapes.
“Now turn the other end,” his father instructed. Diego rotated the cylindrical collar at the front. The image began to move and change, forming new patterns even more beautiful than the last, the colors tumbling and rearranging.
“Wow,” Diego said.
Santiago smiled. “It’s a kaleidoscope. It has mirrors and bits of different-colored glass inside. That’s what creates those patterns when you rotate it.”
“It’s amazing,” Diego replied. He turned the device over in his hand.
“Don’t you like it?” Siobhan asked.
“Yeah, I mean—it’s awesome.” He tried to sound thankful, and he was just . . . Was this it? “Thanks, guys.”
“Never discount the potential in all things, no matter how humble their appearance,” Santiago said.
“Okay,” Diego said, doing his best to smile.
But his parents were still grinning.
“Santi,” Siobhan said, nearly cracking up. “Isn’t there something else?”
“Maybe.” Santiago’s eyes glinted mischievously.
Diego jumped. “Is it—”
“Hold your horses,” Dad said. “It’s still down in the workshop. I have a few last touches to do, but it will be ready by tonight.” He saw Diego’s face fall. “I think you can survive. Besides, we have lots to distract us between now and then. I . . .”
Santiago paused and looked at Diego curiously.
