Wind swirled around him. Windows blurred by. Diego hurtled toward the street, but he held the board firm with both hands and slid it beneath his feet. He hit a switch on his gloves, activating the magnet locks, and his boots fastened into place. The busy sidewalks rushed toward him. He pressed hard with his feet, shifted his weight, the ground speeding closer. . . .
The steam turbine whined at full strength, the board dug into the air, and Diego shot forward into a glide, skimming above the shop awnings and the Steam-Time ladies’ high hats.
Diego finally breathed, his face bathed in the breeze. Yes! He felt a shimmering excitement as he soared through the air, a feeling he’d yearned for all his life, one he knew was in his blood.
He pressed the board against the wind, sweeping this way and that. The movements felt as natural as walking, but so much better.
He sped over New Chicago, its canals and train tracks clogged with the morning traffic of steamships and trolleys, its sidewalks crowded with topcoats, leather tunics, and fine capes, a world collided in color and sound, in the smell of horse droppings and engine grease, corn roasting on food carts, and the sea. Off in the distance, the exhaust clouds from the great steamships and harbor robots colored the sunrise gold.
He spotted the girl up ahead, knifing through the sky. He had to catch her before it was too late. Diego didn’t know why, just knew he had to. Something to do with time, he thought. It was always time, running forward and backward through this world, but in this dream . . .
Running out.
Diego was the wind. He was the sky. He felt light as air and knew this was all he’d ever wanted, just like his mom. To fly free.
He spied the girl again, arcing around the next corner. Diego cut the angle so hard that his shoulder glanced off the brick-building wall, but he also edged closer.
If he could reach her, he could pull the main hose on her steam pack and disable the board. He could guide her down to the canal, and then she would be safe.
Safe from what? Diego didn’t know.
They turned sharply into a wide plaza around City Hall. The building was a grand tower, a mix of Elder and Mid-Time architecture, the plaza a series of floating walkways over water, with fountains burbling in intricate patterns. Diego was surprised to find the plaza packed with people, a huge crowd. More and more were streaming in from all sides, every one of them gazing upward and pointing.
But the timbre of the crowd changed: their gasps shifted from awe to worry. Those who weren’t pointing to the sky were jostling one another, trying to leave.
Diego glanced around for his flying partner, but there was no sign of the girl. She had disappeared.
The shouts below turned to screams of terror. Panic. People knocking one another over to get away. Diego followed the pointing fingers to the great clock at the top of City Hall, gleaming in the morning sun.
At first, he thought that the clock must be broken, because the hands seemed to be missing. There were still earthquakes now and then, due to the new fault lines where the earth’s crust had re-fused, but that wasn’t it. The hands were still there; they were just spinning so fast that they had become a blur.
Spinning backward.
The sight made Diego’s vision swim. He had to bend down and grab the sides of the board to keep his balance.
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.”
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