2103:08:27:07:16:22

  Kati had almost finished her bowl of breakfast cereal at the kitchen table when she heard her daughter come down the stairs and join her. Her daughter’s hair was as immaculately groomed as ever, pulled back in a high and tight ponytail with not a strand of hair out of place. It was a character trait completely unfamiliar to Kati, a thing her daughter had never done in the before times.

  But no matter how different she now was, Kati couldn’t help but smile brightly at seeing her daughter again.

  “Morning honey,” Kati said. “Sleep well?”

  Her Sam shrugged. “Well enough,” she said. It was the exact same response Kati got every time she asked it, and she still had to work on how to interpret it. Had she really slept well? Or did she just not want to tell this stranger she was housing with?

  “Well, that’s good,” Kati returned. She watched Sam open the fridge and get a tub of yoghurt, then opened the cupboard to get a bowl and cereal. She filled the bowl with both, grabbed a spoon from the utensil drawer and sat down beside Kati on the long end of the kitchen table.

  It didn’t escape Kati that Sam ate the exact same thing she did, despite there being other kinds of cereal in the cupboard. Kati had bought a bunch of them for taste testing, secretly hoping Sam would pick her former favorite from the collection. Sam hadn’t liked it, and picked the same cereal Kati liked instead.

  Once again, Kati didn’t know how to feel about it, but knew she’d had to deal with it nevertheless.

  Taking the last spoonful from her bowl, Kati moved toward the sink and did a quick rinse before putting them in the dishwasher.

  “Alright, I need to get going,” Kati said to her daughter. “You know how to get to school right?” They’d travelled the route there five times total, but there was this itching in the back of her head that she couldn’t ignore. A worry that might never fully disappear.

  “Yes Mom,” her little girl said with an overexaggerated, put-upon sigh. That part was comfortingly familiar at least.

  She approached her daughter from behind and patted her daughter on the head, messing up her tightly-packed hair just the tiniest bit. “Just making sure. It’s a mother’s duty, you know?” Sammy groaned and shot her a glare, then quickly set about fixing her hair.

  Kati couldn’t help but smile. It had always been fun to tease her daughter even in the past, but now she did so as much as many times as she could get away with. It was rare for the ‘new Sam’ to wear her emotions plainly on her face, and so Kati fought hard for every scrap of it. Even if that emotion was more often than not annoyance.

  Kati walked out of the kitchen, grabbed her bag and went to the door. “Bye! Have a nice day at school! And try to make some friends!” After hearing a ‘bye’ back, Kati left her home and walked to the subway station.

  The doctors and psychologists Kati had talked to, the videos she’d watched online, the articles she’d read; all told her that such severe cases of achronal displacement had trouble showing their emotions, communicating their thoughts, understanding themselves, etcetera. The advice on how to help varied from source to source, but Kati tried them all. So far, it hadn’t backfired and even seemed to help, so she would keep doing it.

  She remembered their conversation back in the municipal office. It had been horrifying, a barrage of shifting emotions. From disbelief to overwhelming happiness, to the extreme awkwardness of trying to connect with her own daughter for the first time! She’d had to revert to her training in interacting with and calming down trauma victims – child victims, aged ten-and-below victims. Then there was the way Sam, her little Sammy, had all but treated her like a complete stranger during it. It was heartbreaking to see such her daughter’s face so distant, so cold towards her in the beginning.

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  The two weeks after had been a struggle, to say the least. Trying to reconcile the memories of the daughter she’d had and the daughter that had returned was difficult, and doing so while also respecting her kid’s autonomy and personhood, and trying to reforge their bond… it was never going to be easy.

  But regardless of the difficulty, she believed she’d made great headway. Sam was emoting more, talking more, speaking more about her preferences and opinions. It was like watching her daughter grow up all over again at blazing speeds, followed by all the emotional whiplash that came with it. It was pure stress in a way Kati had never felt before.

  And yet, it was the happiest she’d felt in a long time.

  Her subway stopped at her destination and Kati left the station. She went from subway to bus, continuing her travels from her home in the Northside to her workplace in the Bayside district of Charm. Her next stop was near the mouth of the Hoquiam River, in the southeast corner of Bayside. The area was surrounded by towering buildings of steel and glass, which made sense for the city’s premier office district.

  She exited the bus and continued to walk for the next five minutes along the tree-lined boulevard beside the river, enjoying the sunlight, the lightly cooler air and the glistening of sunlight caught in the river’s waves, sparkling like thousands of tiny stars. She could’ve exited at a later stop and arrived at work faster, but those five minutes walking it saved was her favorite part of the journey, and it was always nice to start work in a good mood.

  Still, all good things came to an end and she reached her destination. She entered the lobby of one of many similar looking office towers and went to a panel with dozens of different buttons carrying the labels of various companies beside them, and a covered keypad.

  Kati pressed the one marked ‘Bayside Charmers Consultancy’ and the keypad popped open. She opened an app on her phone and scanned her fingerprint, causing an eight-digit code to pop on the screen with a thirty second timer. She entered the code on the keypad and the security door into the building proper opened up. She made her way to the elevator, where she was once again greeted with a whole list of companies and the floor they resided on.

  But instead of pressing the button for the company she’d previously pressed, she retrieved a security pass from her bag and held it up to the scanner below the panel. It made a chirping noise and a small, green lamp flashed on the scanner. Kati then had to generate another eight-digit code on a second authenticator app, then used the floor buttons to enter that one in before the lift finally moved.

  Downward instead of up.

  The lift travelled down for nearly half a minute, accelerating rapidly the first half of the journey and just as rapidly decelerating on the second half. When it opened, instead of being greeted by an office space or a dingy basement, she instead walked into a small, dark and cramped underground railway tunnel with a one-person shuttle on its tracks.

  It wasn’t her own personal shuttle, but it was close. Only five other people used it and each had their own shifts, meaning they’d almost never had to meet in this place or wait for the shuttle. Only once had she met one of her colleagues here, and only three times did she have to wait five minutes for the shuttle to return.

  Kati entered the shuttle, after which its door slid closed automatically. It shot off into the dark with what she knew was great speed, but felt more like stepping on a particularly slow-moving horizontal escalator.

  In the meantime, she went to one of five lockers located inside. She opened it with, you guessed it, another generated eight-digit code and retrieved her work uniform.

  Like most, the base part of her uniform was skintight. It ended at slightly below her knees and didn’t cover her arms or shoulders. The base of it was a scarlet red with white at her sides, along with a white starburst in the center. It was accompanied by a light brown bomber jacket which ended above her waist, and light brown fake leather boots. An oversized and shaded visor-like pair of sunglasses covered her eyes, and she had two starbursts on a string dangling from her ears.

  Once she’d put those on, she grabbed a can of what looked suspiciously like spray paint and closed her eyes. She pulled the trigger and a hiss like a can of deodorant emerged from it, followed immediately after by the feeling of walking through a fine mist. Five seconds later, she let go of the trigger and, after waiting another five seconds, opened her eyes and looked in her locker mirror. Her short black hair had gone up and was now dyed a light and bright white. The rest of her face and clothes had been unaffected by the spray.

  She checked herself over in the mirror. It was an outfit for a younger person – literally, she’d helped design it over twenty years ago – but she believed that she made it work in spite of her age. It looked less like an old person dressing too young for her age and trying to relive her glory days, and more like a person whose glory days never ended. A mix of a biker who never quit and gymnast who kept going even if she wasn’t in her prime.

  At least that’s what she believed, and her polling was still positive.

  Satisfied with how she looked, Kati faced the door of the shuttle and not even a minute later, it opened. She walked through the mirrored version of the underground tunnel and entered the elevator waiting for her at the end. This time, she didn’t have to enter a code – likely because if someone had gotten this far, another code wouldn’t have mattered.

  The elevator went up automatically to the only floor it could reach. The doors opened and revealed the entrance hall to the massive compound build on Rennie Island, just off the coast of Bayside. It was the home of the West Coast Wardens, the greatest heroic organization on the west coast of North America – no matter what The Guardians claim.

  Kati walked to a desk at the far end of the hall. Unlike anywhere else in the city, the people milling about barely shot her a glance, their eyes leaving rather than lingering when seeing her costume.

  “Peakstar,” the receptionist – Jane –greeted her merrily. “Welcome back. Did you have a nice vacation?” She asked it with what would normally be a suspicious amount of concern, but Jane was one of her oldest friends. She knew exactly why Kati needed the time off.

  Kati thought back on the hardships these past days, but didn’t hesitate for a second. “Yes,” she said, smiling brightly. It had been an emotional rollercoaster, but she wouldn’t trade it for the world. “It was the best.”