2103:12:21:15:19:01

  I placed my left foot in the middle and the toes of my right on the tail end. My stance was firm, muscles locked tightly in place and focus narrow. Everything was in place. Amber approved of my positioning.

  “Good. Now, squat down, then jump and at the same time press your right foot down hard on the tail,” she said. “And remember: time your slide and shoulders straight.”

  I nodded, crouched down, and jumped.

  Left foot left the ground first while my right pressed down on the tail. It hit the ground with a click, the front leaping up. I raised my right foot up and into the air, and slid it forward along the curve. My left moved further up as well, if less far. When I found the right spots, I locked their position and pressed down hard, mentally whispering that this time, this time…

  Then, with a soft yet reverberating clack, I landed. It was a wobbly one and I instinctively flailed my arms, but after taking a second to concentrate I successfully stabilized. Time froze as I stared at my feet in disbelief.

  I just did an ollie.

  “Hell yeah, you go Sam!” Tommy, one of Amber’s friends, cheered. “First try!” It wasn’t even close to my first. It’d taken me four weeks – or four ‘lessons’, rather – and dozens upon dozens of tries until I managed it.

  But manage it I did. I grinned at him and did a little theater bow to my audience – not that there was much of one. Besides Amber and Tommy, there were Jewel, Casper, Alisha and Franklin; all skaters, and all friends of Amber.

  They were an eclectic bunch, I found, and it had taken a bit of detective work to figure out how the group had formed. None but Jewel and Alisha went to the same school, and only Franklin and Casper lived anywhere close to one another. Amber had gotten to know Alisha through a ‘dance thing’ they’d been forced to go to by their parents when they were young(er), while Jewel had gotten to know Franklin through a birthday party of their parent’s mutual acquaintance. Then, one friend introduced the other, and these loose threads connected, then solidified through a shared love of skating – or so was my understanding of it anyway.

  All except for Tommy. He’d moved to the city later than any of the others, and was simply hanging around in Hufflebee Park at the right place and the right time. He’d spotted the others one day and then just… decided to join them through sheer force of personality. It made sense then that, out of everyone that’s not Amber, Tommy had been the one most active in making me feel welcome.

  Not that the others were mean or anything like that, but aside from Tommy, they weren’t exactly a group of ‘open’ people. Franklin was mostly serious mixed with scowls and sarcasm whenever the mood swung which way. With his near all-black clothing, a tendency to cross his deceptively toned arms, and seemingly little cheer, I could almost imagine him like a boy version of Amber, although with a much plainer style of black clothing and leaning more into stoicism than sarcasm. He was the most… not suspicious, but most skeptical when it came to me, having adopted a wait-and-see approach. Which I believed I was whittling down slowly with every interaction.

  Jewel was the epitome of the teenaged skater that parents dreaded would turn into a stoner once they entered college. Baggy pants, graphics sweater, sneakers and a grey beanie; she certainly looked the part, and had the lackadaisical, casually dismissive attitude to match. Still, despite said attitude, she’d been welcoming enough when it came to my ‘integration’ into the group, and even though she preferred to laze about for the most part, it was never to the point she was annoyed – or annoying – when it was time to do something. Merely reluctant.

  Alisha was a mostly happy teen, if a shy and soft-spoken one, which contrasted heavily to the way she looked. Her style was all but a copy of Amber’s, except with gold instead of steel or silver to accent the black. Or perhaps Amber had copied hers; I didn’t know which caused which. I’d have guessed Amber if Alisha had been the one to wear the less-noticeable silver-steel instead of the more eye-grabbing gold embellishments. As she was Amber’s oldest friend out of the bunch, she’d been the one I talked with most, and despite her shyness she was direct and to-the-point in a way that was very much a mirror to Amber, except less sarcastic and more kind.

  Casper was a quiet kid, a head-in-the-clouds style of aloof, and a bit of a daydreamer. Along with the peculiar set of his eyes and his neutral-to-dark colored clothing, it made him strangely look like he was locked in perennial melancholy, with a smile that would’ve otherwise looked normal on anyone else looking wistful on him. When he joked, laughed and talked that impression was dispelled, but since if left to his own Casper remained quiet and on the fringes – and it was Franklin’s job to get him out of that – that didn’t happen that often. Out of the group, he was the one I’d talked to the least.

  On the other hand, Tommy was active to the point of hyperactivity. He was bouncy, quick to encourage and cheer others up, and even quicker to interact with others. He was very Millie-like in that respect, if Millie had zero focus and bottomless energy. He liked to dress brightly despite the dreariness of winter in colors which, according to what both Jolie and Millie’d told me, were not appropriate for the season.

  When I rose from my bow to my adoring audience, only Tommy and Alisha clapped – the former loud and vigorously, the latter with a kind smile. Franklin was rolling his eyes at the spectacle from where he, Jewel and Casper were at, with the latter two shooting me a thumbs up and a small, close-mouthed smile respectively.

  “Yes, yes, very impressive,” Amber said, voice dry as the desert. “Now do that a couple more times and I’ll let you try and jump the table.” My mentor, always so controlling.

  But as always, I obeyed. It wasn’t like I had anywhere else to be anyhow. School was officially on winter break until January 7th, and as an early Christmas present – or so I chose to believe – Miss Sims had waived what was supposed to be today’s remedial lesson, the one that would’ve been my last. On that same day, due to all the positive feedback from last week’s parent-teacher meetings, I’d managed to persuade Mom to end my grounding early as well. Early parole for good behavior, she’d joked.

  The only other obligation I could’ve had, namely masking, had similarly entered a sort-of winter break. With the Jannacht Wars ending the way it did, calm had returned to Charm quickly. Order was restored, and the citizens’ hearts and minds were… well, mourning and dour right now, but that feeling wouldn’t last. People would move on sooner or later – likely sooner – and then their hearts and minds would be fully at peace.

  Charm’s masked scene as a whole had entered into somewhat of an informal Christmas truce, albeit a tense, tenuous and temporary one. The gangs were busy regrouping, or consolidating, or restructuring. Something along those lines anyway; it wasn’t like Amber and I knew exactly what they were doing. The only thing made public was that the former Dead Hive masked were renamed from Hexeminar, Hellear and Death Rite to Hexkey, Helltearer, and Deathride; yes, very creative of them. As for the rest, we had no idea.

  As the minutes passed and Amber guided me through the ever-growing number of successful ollies, Tommy and Alisha resumed their own skateboarding. Tommy mostly stuck to grinds, quarter pipes and ramps, racing and jumping from here to everywhere. Alisha disappeared into the pool-like kidney bean-shaped bowl, reappearing every so often to perform one-eighties, three-sixties and even handstands. Franklin and Casper conversed on the meter-high blocks of decorative two-tiered concrete steps while Jewel lay a bit further away on top of it, basking in the cold winter sun with a bag for a cushion and my coat for a blanket.

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  “Learning fast as always, huh,” Amber muttered, voice low enough to not be overheard. I stuck the landing, making it the third successful ollie in a row, then shrugged in response to Amber. “Come on, step off and take a break.”

  I frowned. “I can keep going.”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly the problem. You’ve been skating for near an hour without breaks, and without so much as a sweat to show for it,” she said. “Besides, I want to have a go as well, you know?”

  “Oh,” I said. I stepped on the tail of the skateboard to flip it and then returned it to Amber with two hands, handing it to her like a blade. “Have fun.” Amber snorted, rolled her eyes and took off, joining Alisha in the bowl.

  I walked towards the others of the peanut gallery, hesitating for a split second over who to join. Casper and Franklin were busy talking amongst themselves. They were still a bit too socially intimidating to me to approach, so I made my way to Jewel. I sat myself down a tier below, my back against the step around where Jewel’s head lay.

  “Aren’t you cold with your back on the ground like that?” I asked her. While yesterday’s rain didn’t linger thanks to the combination of special porous asphalt – if the ground even was asphalt – and hydrophobic street coating, the cold certainly stuck.

  “Nah,” she said. “‘Sides, being cold is easy to ignore. Easier than the heat, at least.”

  Was it? That seemed doubtful, but all I said was, “Fair enough.” It wasn’t like I was particularly vulnerable to either cold or heat, though my reasons were obviously very different.

  When the silence grew long and I felt social pressure mount, I asked, “Got plans for Christmas?”

  “Hmmm,” she hmmm-ed in thought. “I don’t know. My parents probably planned something as they usually do, so I’ll be forced to tag along.” She audibly yawned. “You?”

  A feeling I didn’t exactly understand welled up, urging me to share something which I’d otherwise say would be too personal. I hesitated for a second before saying, “My brother’s coming back from New York for Christmas.”

  “Not a fan?” Jewel asked. She’d turned her head to and was now staring straight at me through half-opened eyes.

  I hadn’t told her about my relationship with my brother, nor anyone else in Amber’s group for one obvious reason: we weren’t that close. But I had told them the lie of my return from achronal displacement, so they understood some of the context at least.

  “It’s not that…” I said, and it wasn’t a lie. For all that I disliked some parts of him, I didn’t dislike the whole. “It’s just- he and Mom don’t get along sometimes.”

  “Ah. Basic family stuff, then,” Jewel said, coming to some understanding I knew nothing about. “Know what I do when I feel like that?”

  “What?”

  “Lie down, look at the clouds and just… let it go, and not think about anything.” And then she turned her head to do precisely that. “Try it,” she urged. “Not like you can fix the problem between them right away, so why not take things as they come.” I frowned and opened my mouth to argue, but seeing her so calm and at ease made me hesitate.

  Maybe she had a point. What even was there to get upset at it over? It wasn’t like Michael leaving had improved the mood, both my personal one and at home. While the last week-and-a-half might’ve been a calm one now that the Jannacht Wars and all that had ended, I had enjoyed very little of it. Not because I was busy with anything – Amber and I’s masking had been limited to a couple of lackluster, no-action patrols and scouting out locations for our new base – but because…

  Well, because I felt off. Lethargic and gloomy, like I was wading through a mental swamp. I had been feeling this way ever since I killed Nth-Sight, who, while definitely deserving it, I hadn’t killed for the right reasons. In only half thought-through desperation, I’d even confessed to my therapist to try and see if she could help me understand and close that chapter of my life for good, but it hadn’t worked for the same reason I’d killed Nth-Sight in the first place: I couldn’t tell her what was really going on, couldn’t tell her I was an android that killed a man – a Treaty-breaking scumbag of one, but a man nevertheless – to cover it up.

  And add to that the overall strangeness of how it all went down, with my body acting mechanically and decisively despite my reservations, my mind overwhelmed by an uncharacteristically cold, foreign-feeling rationale, and I felt more unsure of myself than ever. It felt like my mind was stuck, split in halves I barely felt the edges of, with threads threatening to pull it further apart.

  “Sam?” Jewel asked, her face suddenly appearing right above me.

  The movement startled me from the stupor I hadn’t realized I was in. At some point, my body had acted on its own accord and decided to follow Jewel’s advice, lying down one step below and staring at the clouds, albeit without really watching.

  Jewel narrowed her eyes at me before sitting up. “Yo Casper!” she shouted. Both him and Franklin, but a few meters away – there was really no need to shout – stopped mid-conversation and turned to look. “Grab your skateboard; it’s your turn to teach Sam.”

  Casper opened his mouth, but Franklin beat him to it. “Do it yourself, Jay; we’re busy,” Franklin said.

  Jewel rolled her eyes. “Oh come off it Frank. Think a little,” she said. “Do I look like the kinda girl that needs exercise to calm the mind?”

  The self-deprecation aside, I grimaced at the remark. And from the corner of my eye, I saw Casper do much the same at Franklin’s side.

  Franklin opened his mouth to argue back, but Casper stood up before he could. “It’s fine, Frank,” he said, grabbing his skateboard. He turned to me. “Take Jay’s skateboard and let’s go.” He stepped down the concrete blocks and went toward the skatepark proper.

  Jewel blinked and said, “Wait, what?” but I’d already stolen her skateboard and left. I quietly heard Jewel mutter ‘ah whatever’ before I joined Casper’s side.

  “Sooooo…” he said. “You got the ollie down more or less, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Alright…” he said, turning silent with a thoughtful expression. “Never had to teach someone skateboarding before,” he mused idly.

  “Amber said something about ‘jumping the table’?” I suggested.

  “Table?” he asked, blinking. I gestured toward the double ramp thingy with a flat surface connecting the two. He ‘ah’-ed in realization. “Ah, the box jump. She calls a deck a table?”

  I shrugged. I had no idea what the correct terminology was, and Amber hadn’t explained too much of it yet.

  He echoed my shrug. “Let’s do that then,” he said. “Though it’s odd she taught you an ollie before a jump.”

  Was it? “She said I should know how to land on a skateboard before I jump with one.”

  “Hmm,” he hmm-ed. “Makes sense, I suppose. Would explain why I fell so often when I did it myself.” He chuckled at the memory.

  “No one taught you?”

  He smiled, looking wistful – though in this case, it might not be by accident. “Well, Franklin did, but not immediately. Tried it by myself,” he said. “It’s how we became friends. He saw me stumbling around on my skateboard, got annoyed at it and promptly decided to teach me until I was less painful to look at. We were… nine at the time, I think?”

  He shook off the old memory. “But anyway, let’s get to it, shall we?”

  I agreed, and for the rest of the afternoon, I forgot most of my worries.

  X

  It was 17:13 by the time I got home, well before the 17:30 Mom had made me agree upon. Seeing as she wasn’t on the first floor, I shouted, “I’m home!”

  “Welcome back! I’ll be right there, just need to finish something!”

  Just like how Amber and I going masking had stalled since the Jannacht Wars, Mom’s shifts had gotten drastically reduced. So reduced, in fact, that she’d practically gotten an extra week off before her Christmas leave. She’d been at home every time I got back from school the past week, and had joined me at breakfast every morning.

  It would’ve been a nice change of pace had my mood been better, but alas. Mom had noticed something was going on, but had been uncharacteristically reluctant to broach the topic. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

  By the time Mom came downstairs, I was sitting on the sofa with a glass of Mist in one hand and my phone in the other. “Heya Sammy,” Mom said. She walked over and, as per tradition, mussed my hair. I fixed it back in place without complaint. “How was skating? Learn any new tricks?” She moved to the other side of the couch and sat down, leaning against the armrest.

  “Learned the ollie today,” I said, putting away my phone. “And Casper taught me how to jump the box.”

  “Box?”

  “Think two rising ramps with a flat square connecting them.”

  “Ah. And Casper taught you?” she asked, to which I nodded. “And he’s…”

  “One of Amber’s friends,” I said. “Along with Franklin, Jewel, Tommy and Alisha.”

  “Ah, right, right.” She dragged a hand up across her face, combing her hair backwards. “Franklin, Jewel, Tommy, Alisha and Casper. Good to see you expanding your circle of friends. Made any plans with them to get together over the break?”

  I shook my head. “Not really. Alisha and Tommy are both going away – snowboarding, I think?” At least Tommy was, but I thought I heard Alisha say something about it as well during that same conversation. “Jewel… doesn’t really know what she’s doing over the break, but she’s out. Amber’s staying, and so are Casper and Franklin.”

  “You and Amber aren’t planning to meet with them?” she asked. “There’s plenty of time after our visit to the Seattle Crater and Christmas are dealt with. Could be fun to hang out, right? Maybe even together with Millie, Saga and Jolie?”

  I shrugged, feeling a bit awkward. “I’m… not really that close with Casper and Franklin.” Or any of them apart from Amber, really. And besides, getting Amber to agree to meet with my other friends, and getting Saga to agree to meet with Amber was a fool’s errand for now. “And besides, Millie and Jolie are going on vacation themselves, and introducing them so soon…”

  “I get it.” She yawned. “Early days and all.”

  “Yeah,” I said, frowning; Mom looked tired, more so than had become the norm these past few days. “Were you called in today?”

  She looked at me confused for a moment, before understanding. She smiled. “I look that bad?” I opened my mouth to protest, but she waved it off with her hand. “I kid, I kid. No, I didn’t have work today. But I… well, you know how I see my therapist once a month?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, with Christmas and all the stuff that happened these past few weeks I went a bit earlier, and with our little weekend-stay over coming up…” She sucked on her lips and rocked her head from side to side. “Today was a bit of a tough session.”

  I was surprised at that. I’d never heard her say she had a ‘tough session’ before – although considering she’d have roughly gone to four or five sessions total since I came to live with her, that wasn’t that odd. Still, I wondered if that had anything to do with what I suspected she’d share on our weekend away.

  After the silence turned awkward, she asked, “Want to help me cook? It’s creamy salmon pasta, so nothing too difficult."

  I hesitated for a second, before deciding, “Okay,” and rising from my seat.