Seventeen-year-old Alan can bend time for a few dangerous seconds. One night in an abandoned skatepark, he meets a girl who already knows his secret.
Trump never really slept. Neon still burned above Silver Street long after midnight, and somewhere beyond the crossroads, skateboards rattled over kerbs and metal rails with the restless noise of kids refusing to go home. But the skatepark behind the old factory felt cut loose from the city, like a pocket of silence hidden inside all that light and movement.
Alan rolled into the empty bowl and stopped at the deepest curve. He liked the pause before a run, that thin breath of quiet before everything started racing again. Most people thought he was just another boy who kept to himself, the kind nobody bothered to understand. That was fine. It was easier that way, especially after he found out he could do something no one else could.
At first it had happened by accident. A dropped cup had hung in the air, spinning without falling, while Alan stared at it like it had just broken the laws of the universe in front of him. After that came the stumbles, the mistakes, the moments where the world slipped into slow motion and then froze completely, as if someone had pressed a hidden button on reality itself.
The strange part was the feeling that followed. Every time he pushed the power too far, that prickling sense crept over his skin, as if he were not alone. Tonight it returned in a cold line between his shoulder blades. Alan looked over his shoulder. Only graffiti stared back from the concrete wall, and his own shadow stretched thin under the moon.
He exhaled, pulled out his phone, and checked the score on the skating game he had been obsessed with all week. Then he stepped onto the board and pushed off. Wheels whispered against concrete. His pulse rose. The edge of the bowl rushed toward him.
And then the world slipped.
Sound thinned. Movement stretched. The distant city held its breath. Alan blinked, suddenly aware of every detail at once, and saw a girl standing against the far wall where no one had been a second earlier. Her dreadlocks were tied back with a red scarf, and she was smiling like she had been waiting for him to notice her.
Alan nearly lost his balance. There was something unsettling in the way she looked at him, not surprised, not afraid. Certain.
"I can do that too," she said, her voice low, almost swallowed by the empty ramps.
Alan stared. His mouth went dry. Another one? Before he could ask anything, she tipped her chin toward the rusty gate that led through the factory yard.
"If you want to know what you really are," she said, "come with me."
Then she climbed the railing in one easy movement and vanished into the dark beyond the gate.
Alan hesitated just long enough to hear the city grind and hum around him again. Questions crowded his head, sharp and bright as sparks. But one burned hotter than the rest.
What if she knew more about his power than he did?
He kicked off after her, the board trembling under his feet as he headed for the gate, and the darkness beyond it seemed to be waiting.