Diego and the Rangers of the Vastlantic

by Armand Baltazar

  Copyright

  Published in the United States of America by Katherine Tegen Books, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  Published simultaneously in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  TIMELESS: DIEGO AND THE RANGERS OF THE VASTLANTIC. Copyright © 2017 by Armand Baltazar. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  www.harpercollinschildrens.com

  FIRST EDITION

  Source ISBN: 9780008258955

  Ebook Edition © September 2017 ISBN 9780008258962

  Version: 2017-09-27

  Dedication

  For Dylan & Sharon Baltazar

  and my friend

  Kevyn Lee Wallace

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One: A World Remade Chapter One: A Dream of Flight

  Chapter Two: The Riberas of New Chicago

  Chapter Three: A Workshop of Wonders

  Chapter Four: Where Giants and Monsters Be

  Chapter Five: Serpents and Soldiers

  Chapter Six: Streets of Fire

  Part Two: The Rangers of the Vastlantic Chapter Seven: Pirates and Stowaways

  Chapter Eight: Trials at Sea

  Chapter Nine: Those Who Help Themselves

  Chapter Ten: Maker’s Sight

  Chapter Eleven: There Be Dragons

  Chapter Twelve: The Magellan

  Chapter Thirteen: The Captain

  Chapter Fourteen: Diego and Lucy

  Chapter Fifteen: Monsters of Sea and Air

  Chapter Sixteen: Volcambria

  Chapter Seventeen: Turtles and Tactics

  Chapter Eighteen: An Oath Before the Storm

  Chapter Nineteen: What the World Can Be

  Chapter Twenty: Games of War and Jubilation

  Part Three: Until It Turns No More Chapter Twenty-One: Where All Paths Lead

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Battle at Yorktown

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Fury and Love

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Path and the Promise

  Chapter Twenty-Five: One Destiny Divided

  Chapter Twenty-Six: A Dream Changed

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Our world did not end the way you might expect. It wasn’t caused by any of the things you hear so much about today: the wars, the unrest, the changing climate. It wasn’t our arrogance, our pride, our selfishness. No, in the end, it was our creativity and brilliance. We thought we were making history by changing the future.

  Turns out, we did both.

  It came from beyond the stars, a cosmic event we could never have predicted, a rupturing of the space-time continuum that tore apart our entire existence. Not just our present, but our past, our future—everything that humans had been or would be. Gone. And what remained was a void, echoing with the faint whispers of a world that no longer existed.

  But that was not the end.

  Humankind was granted a second chance.

  Out of the great silence, the earth was reborn, but like nothing we had ever fathomed. Dinosaurs roamed the great plains beside woolly mammoths and buffalo herds a million strong. Great steamships and ancient sailboats crossed the harbors among the legs of towering robots. The past, the present, the future—all thrown together. The continents reshaped, oceans re-formed, and mountains sculpted anew. This was the world after the Time Collision.

  The hundred million or so humans who survived the cataclysm came from all points in time and found themselves scattered across the planet. The people of the civilized past were called Steam Timers, the people from the in-between times were called Mid Timers, and the people from the future came to be called the Elders. As these refugees from different eras struggled to survive in a dangerous world without order, conflict was inevitable. It was not long before this savage yet beautiful new landscape became a backdrop for war.

  After years of fighting, the desperate people finally saw the pointlessness of hurting one another and realized they needed to work together. They declared an end to what came to be known as the Chronos War and grudgingly united to form governments, laws, and communities.

  Their fragile peace allowed the surviving cities to rebuild and countries to be remade. Children were born, and the mysteries and wonders of this new world were explored.

  But the darkness had not been vanquished. Despite all of humanity’s efforts, there were still those roaming the undiscovered wilds who would never submit to peace and order, and who would strike down anyone who stood between them and the power . . .

  . . . to make the world their own.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Dream of Flight

  On the morning of his thirteenth birthday, Diego Ribera glimpsed his future in a dream. It was a dream he’d had before, one that he feared, and it always began with his father calling to him through darkness.

  “Diego. We need more light.”

  Santiago’s voice echoed through the vast workshop. He stood high on faded blue scaffolding among the enormous robots that ringed the room. He wielded a wrench the size of his arm, and was leaning dangerously far into the oily gears of a massive shoulder socket. The head, arms, and legs of the robot were spread around the floor in various stages of completion.

  Diego sat on a stool, gazing at one of the robot’s enormous eyes perched on the center workbench. He’d been studying the geometric kinks of its iris. It functioned like a Mid-Time camera aperture. Diego imagined the steel plates sliding open in sequence like flower petals. He pictured the tiny pistons firing one by one, how they connected to the steam processors. He seemed to know how these mechanics would work, sensed their purpose. He wondered if this was how it felt to be his father.

  Everyone in New Chicago called Santiago a genius: the greatest mind of the new age. He was a builder, an inventor, a visionary. Some had even called him a charlatan, claiming that his creations were so ingenious that there must be some kind of trickery or fraud at work, but those people had never seen Santiago when he was engrossed in his work.

  “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.

  F
ive 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.

  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

  The Riberas of New Chicago

  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 ha
d 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.

 
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