Diego and the Rangers of the Vastlantic

“Diego, did you hear me?”

“Yeah, sorry, Dad.” Diego slid off the stool.

All at once he was standing at one of the workshop’s towering windows.

Moved without moving.

I’m dreaming, Diego thought, though the awareness was fleeting. The edges of his vision swam in watery darkness.

He yanked the heavy curtains aside. Brilliant morning light spilled into the room.

“Is that enough?” Diego asked over his shoulder.

No answer.

“Dad?”

Diego turned. He found himself back in the middle of the room again. . . .

But Dad was gone. So was the robot he’d been working on. And all the others. No scaffolding, the workshop floor empty in all directions.

Except for the table where Diego had been sitting. The robot eye had also vanished, but now something far more interesting had appeared in its place, gleaming in the golden sunlight.

A gravity board.

Five feet long, made of alder wood, Kevlar, and chrome, and decorated in red and white stripes. The portable steam backpack and navigating gloves lay beside it. Of all his father’s wondrous inventions, the gravity boards were Diego’s favorite. He and his friend Petey had flown them around the workshop on many occasions.

And yet the sight of the board filled him with worry: he’d had this dream before.

The board always appeared right after Dad vanished.

There was danger here, something he couldn’t quite grasp.

“Diego.”

“Dad?” Diego peered into the shadows. But that hadn’t sounded like his father. “Who’s there?”

The disquiet grew in his belly. This may have been a dream, but his fear felt all too real.

He spied a silhouette in the dark space between two windows. The figure stepped into the morning light. Not his father. Shorter. A girl? It was hard to tell. She was wearing thick goggles and an aviator’s cap. She looked about his age.

“Who are you?” Diego asked.

The girl stood motionless. When she spoke again, her mouth didn’t move, her voice instead echoing in Diego’s mind:

Fly.

Then she vanished.

A gust of air.

Diego spun to see the girl leaping out the window.

“No, don’t!” Diego rushed over. He gazed down at the bustling street ten stories below, but the girl wasn’t lying broken on the train tracks, nor floating faceup in the canal. Instead, she was speeding away through the air, on a gravity board of her own.

Fly!

The voice burned between Diego’s temples. He had to move. Had to act.

Diego grabbed the gravity board from the bench. He slung the steam pack over his shoulders. The heaviness of the miniature brass boiler and pressure converter threw him off balance, but he got his feet under him and ran for the window. He slipped on the thick leather gloves—covered in dials and fastened to the pack by slim hoses. He attached the power gauge regulator, flicked switches, and heard the familiar hiss as the boiler cycled up—

And then he was leaping into the sky.

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.