Second Skin - Chapter 0001

Chapter 1 — The Delivery Man of Harlem

The bell at Douglass Avenue High School rang at 3:00 PM sharp, and the sound—an electronic hum that attempted to imitate the old brass bell but sounded more like a tired microwave alarm—wounded through the hallways of the old brick building in the heart of Harlem.

It was Thursday, January 16, 2030.

Douglass Avenue wasn’t a prestigious school. It didn’t appear on lists, it didn’t have Stark Solutions-sponsored labs, it didn’t receive visits from heroes on holidays. It was a four-story building squeezed between a housing complex and an automated laundry, with heaters that worked intermittently and windows that let in the January wind through cracks that no one had fixed since before the alien war. But it was a school. It had teachers who cared when they could and too many students for the teachers who cared. It was the kind of place that futuristic New York passed over without looking down.

The classroom doors opened almost simultaneously, and the second-floor hallway filled up in the blink of an eye. Teenagers of all sizes spilled down the corridors like water breaking a dam—backpacks banging against shoulders, sneakers squeaking on the worn linoleum floor, voices overlapping each other in a cacophony of laughter, shouts, teasing, and plans for the rest of the afternoon.

In the middle of that river of people, a boy was swimming against the current.

He was easy to miss, which was exactly what he preferred. Short, thin in a way that made his coat look two sizes too big—because it was two sizes too big, bought at a thrift store on 125th Street precisely for that reason, “it’ll last another two winters like this,” his mother had said—a gray wool hat pulled down to his eyebrows and, underneath it, a pair of glasses with lenses so thick they slightly distorted the gray eyes behind them. Bottle-bottoms, as the kinder ones said. The less kind ones had worse names.

He walked quickly, head down, shoulders hunched, dodging larger figures with the automatic precision of someone who had spent years practicing the art of not being bumped into. A senior football player walked by laughing with his friends and almost hit him with his backpack; the boy spun on his heels, let the backpack pass inches from his face, and continued walking without breaking his rhythm, without raising his eyes, without anyone in the group even registering his existence.

Invisibility was a skill. He had perfected it in six different schools.

The cell phone vibrated in his coat pocket. He pulled it out without stopping walking—a device from three generations ago, with a cracked screen in the upper corner and the back held together with black electrical tape, but which worked perfectly because he himself had already replaced the battery twice and resoldered the charging connector once. On the screen, a message:

Mom: Remember to pick up your sister today. I received a message that the school buses won’t be running. There’s a problem with the system, I don’t know. Sorry, my love. With love, Mom. ❤️

Sebastian Cross frowned, causing his glasses to slip slightly down his nose.

He did the math in his head in two seconds, because doing mental math was one of the few things that came free to him. Camila’s school was a twenty-minute bike ride away, plus another ten minutes of waiting and talking, plus twenty-five minutes back home with the extra weight on the back, plus the time to get food ready, plus the commute to work… He was going to be almost an hour late to the delivery company. Again. Mr. Williams was going to give him that look. And fewer deliveries meant fewer tips, and fewer tips meant that the money he was saving for the new bicycle battery controller would remain a dream for another three weeks.

He typed back with his thumb, still walking:

It can leave.

Complaining was pointless. His mother wasn’t to blame for the buses, and she already carried enough guilt for everything else—he saw it in her face every time she came home from her shift and found him awake, finishing his homework at midnight. Complaining would only add more weight to the pile. And Sofia Delacroix’s pile was already high enough.

Locker number 14 was at the end of the first-floor hallway, near the side exit—another strategic choice. Sebastian turned the combination lock with quick, mechanical movements, 32-7-19, and the small metal door opened with its usual creak. Inside, taped shut, was a single decoration: an old, yellowed newspaper clipping, a rare sight these days, showing Spider-Man suspended upside down between two skyscrapers, with the headline “HE’S STILL ONE OF US.” The clipping was older than Sebastian. It had belonged to his father.

He made the switch with assembly-line efficiency: chemistry and history books into the locker, the battered school tablet and the physics notebook—the real notebook, the one where he drew circuits and scribbled ideas in the margins during class—into his backpack, along with the homework booklet. Finally, he grabbed the bunch of keys hanging on an improvised hook that he himself had glued to the inside wall of the locker: house key, bicycle lock key, and a smaller key for a toolbox that was kept under his bed.

She closed the cupboard. She took a deep breath.

Around him, the hallway emptied in different directions. Most of the students dragged themselves along without haste—groups arranging to go to the corner convenience store, girls laughing at something on a holographic wrist screen, a bunch of people from the robotics club (whichSebastian desperately wanted to join but never could, because robotics happened exactly during work hours) carrying a box of parts to the lab. Nobody was in a hurry to face the winter outside. Nobody, except the few who, like Sebastian, had somewhere to run to.

He pushed the exit door open with his shoulder, and the New York winter hit him squarely in the face.

The January chill in the city wasn’t a polite chill. It was a wind that channeled through the hallways of buildings, laden with moisture from the river, finding every crevice in clothing as if trained for it. Sebastian felt his eyes water behind his glasses and the icy air burn inside his nose. The temperature on the digital panel of the laundromat next door read 28°F, and the wind chill must have made it feel much colder. He pulled his coat zipper up to his chin and pulled his hat down further.

And then, as he did every day, he looked up.

From the school’s staircase, Harlem stretched out before her in layers. First, the neighborhood’s low, old buildings—red brick, rusty fire escapes, old antennas coexisting with new signal repeaters, clothes hanging on lines even in the cold. Then, further on, the mid-rise buildings of the previous era, twenty, thirty stories. And finally, to the south, rising above it all like a mountain range of glass and steel, Manhattan.

The skyscrapers of the new century looked like real mountains. The tallest of them, the super-school—the Institute, as everyone called it, that colossus where the children of geniuses, the young mutants, the hand-picked prodigies studied—disappeared within the low winter clouds, and its mirrored sides reflected the gray of the sky in patterns that changed as the smart panels adjusted to the wind. Between the towers, points of light moved: delivery drones on routes organized like shoals of fish, flying vehicles in the air lanes marked by faint holograms, and occasionally—if you were lucky, if you looked at the right time—something faster than all of that, a red or gold or silver blur cutting across the sky.

Sebastian stared for three full seconds, searching for a specific blur. Red and blue. An almost invisible thread of webbing connecting one building to another.

Nothing. Just drones and clouds.

“One day,” he murmured to no one, his breath turning to white smoke. It was less a promise and more a habit, a short prayer he recited without even realizing it anymore.

He checked the time on his cell phone: 3:07 PM . He put the device away and ran down the stairs.

The bike rack was located on the side of the school, a metal structure covered by a leaky awning. Most of the spaces were empty—few people still used regular bicycles, and those who had factory-installed e-bikes could leave them anywhere, because the trackers and magnetic locks took care of the rest. Sebastian bike was secured with a thick chain and an iron padlock, technology from the last century, but efficient nonetheless.

And there she was. Frankenstein , as he affectionately called her in his own thoughts.

At first glance, it was a monstrosity: an old mountain bike frame, sanded and spray-painted lead gray, a secondhand battery salvaged from a disused scooter, attached to the frame with industrial cable ties and protected by a plastic case that Sebastian had printed in parts on the public library’s 3D printer over two months of free forty-minute sessions. The motor in the rear wheel hub came from a junkyard in Queens, with a bent axle—Sebastian had spent three nights straightening and rewinding it by hand. From the handlebars, carefully arranged wires with plastic spirals led to a panel he had assembled himself: a repurposed old cell phone screen, displaying speed, battery charge, motor temperature, and navigation route, all running on a program he had written himself, piecing together open-source code he downloaded from the library.

It was ugly. It was clumsy. None of the kids with factory-built e-bikes would look at it twice, except to laugh.

And she climbed the hills of Harlem carrying forty kilos of packages without getting cold, she had more autonomy than most store models and never, not once, had she let Sebastian down. Every screw on her had been tightened by him. Every weld had a story.

Sebastian released the chain, wound it around the support under the saddle, put on the fingerless gloves he kept in his coat pocket—he needed his fingers free for the screen—and mounted. A touch on the panel: the system woke up with a discreet beep, the charge showing 84%. Enough for the whole day, if he didn’t abuse the throttle on the climbs.

He abused the accelerator on the first uphill climb.

The Frankenstein started with a deep hum, and Sebastian leaned forward, the winter-studded tires—another modification, made with short bolts threaded through an old tire—biting into the thin layer of dirty snow accumulated along the curb. He knew every street on that route as well as he knew the circuits themselves: he knew where the asphalt had potholes hidden under the snow, he knew which corner the wind hit from the side, he knew that in front of the church on 132nd Street there was always black ice at three-thirty in the afternoon because the shadow of the neighboring building prevented the sun from reaching it.

Harlem passed by him in fragments of sound and smell. The icy air carried smoke of roasted chestnuts from Mr. Okafor’s stall, who waved to Sebastian with his ladle—Sebastian waved back with two fingers, without letting go of the handlebars. An autonomous delivery van waited patiently at a traffic light, its front LED flashing blue, while a human delivery driver from another company, huddled inside a thermal poncho, cursed the traffic stopped beside it. Music escaped from a barbershop with its door open despite the cold, the bass making the window vibrate. On a screen attached to the side of a market, a news anchor spoke without sound, and the automatic caption ran below: …AVENGERS CONFIRM PRESENCE AT GLOBAL SECURITY SUMMIT NEXT WEEK…

And then, on 128th Street, Sebastian did what he did every day at that point in his route: he slowed down.

The wall covered the entire side of a six-story building, some thirty meters of brick transformed into a canvas. The graffiti was about five years old, but someone from the neighborhood always touched it up—you could see the layers of newer paint over the older, vibrant colors patching up the faded, like a wound that the community refused to let heal ugly.

The scene depicted was the Battle. The battle, with a definite article and a capital letter in the voice of anyone who spoke of it. Five years ago, when the sky over New York opened and the ships descended, and for three days the whole world held its breath thinking it was the end.

In the graffiti, the sky was purple and torn, and angular alien shapes—half insect, half machine, just as everyone remembered them from nightmares—descended in swarms over the city skyline. And against them, rising, the entire coalition: Iron Man in armor that looked like liquid gold, the Hulk in mid-leap that spanned two stories, Storm with white eyes and lightning bolts erupting from her open hands, Wolverine in the foreground with his claws embedded in something best left unexamined, Cyclops, Captain Marvel, Thor’s hammer leaving a trail of light…

And at the center of it all, bigger than everyone, at the exact point where the eye was first drawn: him.

Spider-Man. Red and blue against a purple sky, crouching atop an antenna at the highest point of the wall, one hand shooting webs, his head turned toward the horde as if to say, ” Come on .” The original artist had painted the lenses of the mask in such a way that, depending on the angle, it looked like he was looking directly at you.

Thirty years of career. The man had started before Sebastian was born, before Sebastian mother was an adult, and five years ago, in his fifties, he had led the defense of the planet and won. The aliens from the graffiti had remained only there: in the graffiti, in the recordings, in memory. The city around the wall remained standing, full of people buying chestnuts and complaining about traffic, and each brick of it was proof that the heroes had succeeded. That he had succeeded.

Sebastian walked slowly, his neck turned, his eyes traveling from Wolverine to the white lenses high on the wall, just like he did every single day.

One day.

Then the bicycle’s panel beeped with the route reminder he himself had programmed, and the day became scheduled again. Sebastian straightened his body, twisted the throttle, and left the wall behind.

Hamilton Heights Elementary School was located on a street lined with bare trees, and when Sebastian turned the corner nineteen minutes later, the sidewalk in front of the gate was already teeming. Cars were parked in double rows with their hazard lights flashing, two autonomous private school transport vehicles were waiting with their doors open, parents were crouched down zipping up colorful coats, and a swarm of toddlers poured out of the gate as if the school were sneezing them out, all talking at once in a whistle-like frequency.

Sebastian leaned Frankenstein against the railing, stood upright against the painting, and craned his neck, sweeping through the crowd of hats and hoods. Seven years old was an age when all the children were about five feet tall and shouted in unison, which made it difficult—

“SEBASTIAN! HERE!”

He didn’t even need to look. The voice came from the left, sharp and imperious like a miniature siren, and two seconds later a girl in a shocking pink coat and a pom-pom hat broke through the crowd and shot toward him, backpack bouncing on her back, red braids escaping from under her hat, a crumpled drawing in one hand.

Camila Delacroix braked just inches from her bicycle, in the dramatic way she braked everything in life, lifted her freckled face to her brother and announced, breathless and without greeting:

“You took too long.”

“Two minutes,” said Sebastian. “I counted.”

“It took two minutes,” she confirmed, like a judge upholding the sentence. Then her face broke into that toothless grin—her front tooth had fallen out at Christmas and the new one was growing crooked, which only made the smile more devastating—and she held up the crumpled paper. “Look.”

Sebastian picked up the drawing. It was, unmistakably, Spider-Man—unmistakably because Camila had written “SPIDER-MAN” on top with an arrow and everything, prepared for any doubt. The crayon hero swung on a web that looked more like a lightning bolt, and hanging from his back was a second, smaller figure, in a pink dress and orange braids.

“Is this you?” Sebastian asked, pointing.

“Obviously,” said Camila. “The teacher asked us to draw ‘who you want to spend the day with.’ Zoe drew her mother.” The tone made it clear what Camila thought of Zoe’s level of ambition.

“And how was the rest of the day?”

“It was AMAZING.” She grabbed the railing and started hanging on as she spoke, because Camila was physically incapable of recounting anything while standing still. “We had science class and the teacher brought in a REAL robot, a tiny one, that walks on its own and avoids things, and it bumped into Marcus’s foot because Marcus wouldn’t get out of the way, and EVERYONE laughed, and then at recess Zoe said that—”

“Tell me on the way,” Sebastian said, suppressing a laugh and gently flicking the pom-pom on her hat. “We’re late. Get in.”

He carefully tucked the drawing into the outer pocket of his backpack—a detail Camila meticulously inspected until the zipper closed—and mounted the bicycle. The rear rack was another of his creations: a padded seat bolted onto the reinforced luggage rack, with footrests welded to the frame and a handle. Camila climbed on with the ease of someone who had been doing this forever, fitted her boots into the footrests, and wrapped her arms around her brother’s waist, securing her gloved hands in front.

“Safe,” he said, as always.

“I’m holding on,” she said, as always, squeezing harder.

Frankenstein buzzed and left.

The commute home was Sebastian favorite part of the day, though he’d never put it into words. The small, warm weight clinging to his back, the high-pitched voice narrating without pausing for breath—the saga of the robot that ran over Marcus covered six blocks; the complex politics of the lunch table, another four—and the little hands pointing over his shoulder at everything worth recording: a dog in a coat (“SEBASTIAN, LOOK AT THE DOG!”), a drone flying too low, a gray, melted, half-finished snowman someone had made in a flowerbed.

“…and then Priya said I can go to her birthday party, which will be in her building’s party room, and her mom is making a two-tiered cake,” Camila concluded, as they turned onto her street. “Can I go?”

“When is it?”

“Next Saturday.”

“If Mom lets me and it’s not far, I’ll take you.”

“Yay!” The shout went straight to his ear, and arms tightened around his waist in a celebratory, almost choking hug that nearly made him veer off course.

Sebastian grinned into the icy wind. This was what he could never quite explain, not even to himself: he had no group of friends, no best friend, not enough people in his life to fill a birthday table. Six schools in eight years did that to a person; he’d learned not to unpack his bags from the inside. But Camila made friends the way she breathed, anywhere, in two weeks, and there was something in her toothless smile recounting these achievements that warmed his chest as if the victories were his too. Maybe they were. He had kind of helped create that little person, after all.

Their building appeared on the corner: 419 Hadley Street, eight stories of brick darkened by time, a zigzagging fire escape on the facade, and a stubborn, leafless plant growing in a cracked pot beside the entrance. Decades ago, eight stories was a respectable building. Today, with the towers of Manhattan streaking the clouds in the background, 419 looked like a baby tooth in the mouth of giants. But the central heating worked—most of the time—the elevator worked—most of the time—and the rent was the cheapest Sofia Delacroix had found in two years of moving. They had been living there for fourteen months already. A recent record.

Sebastian disassembled his bike, opened the lobby door with the key (the building’s electronic lock had burned out in November; the superintendent had been promising to fix it ever since, and Sebastian had already offered to do it for free twice, receiving in return two “let me handle it, kid” and no repairs) and pushed the bicycle inside. The lobby smelled of cleaning products and, vaguely, of someone’s stew from the first floor. The Frankenstein, despite the battery and the clutter, was light enough for him to maneuver it sideways into the old elevator, a cubicle with Formica walls imitating wood, a cracked mirror in the corner, and buttons yellowed from use.

He pressed the 6 button . The elevator went up grumbling.

“…and the cake will have strawberry frosting,” said Camila, who hadn’t stopped talking for a moment.

Apartment 6B announced itself even before the door opened: a faded doormat with the word WELCOME almost invisible and, stuck to the door at a child’s eye level, a laminated drawing of a smiling sun, Camila’s work at age five, which Sofia refused to remove.

Inside, the warmth welcomed them like a hug—the old radiator under the living room window working with its usual metallic tick-tick-tick, a sound so constant that the family could no longer hear it. Sebastian leaned his bicycle against its usual spot in the small hallway by the entrance, on a piece of cardboard that caught the melted snow from the tires.

The house was small. Three cramped bedrooms, a living room that also served as a dining area, a kitchen where two people could only fit if they really liked each other, and a bathroom with green tiles from another era. The living room sofa had a sunken seat on the left side and a crocheted blanket strategically covering a tear on the right; the blanket had belonged to Sebastian grandmother, whom he barely remembered. The Formica dining table had one leg propped up with two popsicle sticks glued on—a repair Sebastian himself had done, categorized as “temporary since 2028.” Nothing there was new, nothing matched anything else.

And yet, it was impossible to enter that apartment and not feel that a family lived there.

The walls told the story. Near the window, a crooked shelf (Sebastian had leveled it three times; it was the wall that was crooked) displayed mismatched picture frames: Sofia in her white uniform on the day of her nursing graduation, very young, very similar to Camila; the four of them together on a Coney Island beach one long ago, Sebastian small and still without glasses, perched on the shoulders of a tall man with gray eyes and a wide smile; baby Camila, sleeping with her mouth open on the chest of a six-year-old Sebastian terrified by the responsibility. In the beach photo, the glass in the frame was new—Sebastian knew, because he was the one who had replaced it after the last move, when the box fell. His mother had sat on the floor of the new living room for ten minutes holding that photo, and Sebastian had gone to the hardware store that same day to buy the glass with his lunch money.

The father. Rémy Delacroix smiled from that shelf with the same smile in three different photos, forever in his early thirties, forever in that summer. Sebastian had his eyes and nothing more—not his height, not his shoulders, not his entire memory: only fragments, a deep voice humming in French, large hands teaching his how to hold a screwdriver. Camila didn’t even have the fragments. For her, her father was the photos and the stories her mother told, and perhaps that’s why she needed heroes on TV so much.

The rest of the room was divided territory. One corner undeniably belonged to Camila: a plastic box overflowing with toys, mostly secondhand, most notably three Spider-Man action figures in three different sizes—one of them missing its left hand, a war veteran—and a Hulk action figure whose head Sebastian had already reattached twice. Her drawings covered the refrigerator door and much of the low wall of the hallway, in a constantly rotating gallery curated by the artist. The other corner was Sebastian: an improvised steel shelf where shoeboxes labeled with masking tape and pen (“POWER SOURCES,” “CABLES,” “SENSORS,” “ASSORTED SCREWS,” “DO NOT TOUCH—SERIOUSLY, CAMILA”) held the treasure of years collecting discarded electronics on the wealthy sidewalks of Manhattan on collection days.

Camila had already gone through her arrival routine—boots kicked away in two directions, coat hung on the arm of the sofa instead of the hook, an automatic warning from Sebastian (“Camila, the hook”), the coat repositioned with a martyr’s sigh—and now she was settled on the good side of the sofa, remote in hand. The TV screen, an old model that Sebastian stubbornly kept alive, lit up directly on the children’s channel.

” …in New York, nobody gets left behind! ” sang the television, and Camila sang along, without taking her eyes off the screen.

It was the cartoon “The Adventures of United Heroes ,” the licensed children’s program that aired every afternoon: rounded, colorful versions of the Avengers and X-Men delivering twenty-minute moral lessons. In today’s episode, the cartoon Spider-Man—shoulders too broad, chin too heroic, nothing like the middle-aged man who appeared at real press conferences—was teaching a lost baby dragon to ask for help instead of hiding. Camila had already seen that episode at least four times. She knew the lines. She spoke along.

Sebastian left her with the dragon and went to the kitchen.

She opened the refrigerator and did a quick, automatic inventory of whoever had been running that kitchen for years: half a roast chicken from Tuesday’s special, yesterday’s rice in a bowl, eggs, half a broccoli, half a cup of milk, the jar of jam that Camila thought nobody knew she devoured with a spoon. Action plan: rice in the pan to loosen, shredded chicken on top, chopped broccoli hidden in the middle of the rice where Camila couldn’t identify it and exercise her veto.

He worked quickly and efficiently, the way he did everything. The frying pan sizzled as the rice hit the hot oil; the smell of garlic from the sauté filled the small kitchen and drifted into the living room. While he stirred with one hand, the other was already washing the dish in the sink—an old porcelain sink, with a faucet whose seal he had replaced last month. Through the kitchen door, he could hear the cartoon and the commentator: ” NO, little dragon, don’t go in there! Tell Spider-Man WHERE YOU ARE! ”

Five-thirty was technically too early for dinner. But the Delacroix household math didn’t follow magazine schedules: Sofia had been on duty at São Lucas since seven in the morning and had texted earlier to say she might work a double shift into the evening—the emergency room was a mess with winter flu cases, and overtime was overtime, and the January heating bill wasn’t going to pay itself. Sebastian wouldn’t be back from work until around nine or nine-thirty. Which meant Camila would be having dinner alone, and having food ready on the table was the difference between her actually eating or “forgetting” and living on jam until someone arrived.

He plated the dish, covered it with another plate upside down to keep it warm, and left it on the table in front of her chair, with a glass of juice already poured beside it. He thought for a second, grabbed a sticky note pad from the drawer (every kitchen has a drawer for everything) and wrote: There’s broccoli, but you won’t find it. I doubt it. — B. He stuck it on the top plate. She would look for it. She would find half of it.

She went back into the room, drying her hands on the dish towel. On TV, the little dragon was reunited with his family in pink clouds, and the animated Spider-Man was giving his final speech about asking for help.

“Hey, big ears.” He gave her a light flick on the top of her head as he passed behind the sofa. “Listen. The food’s ready, it’s on the table, covered. Take a shower before you eat, otherwise you’ll eat and dawdle and go to bed dirty, I know you. And if I get home too late today, I want you in bed by nine. Nine ,” he repeated, showing nine fingers over her shoulder, within her field of vision between her and the TV.

“Okay, okay, goood,” Camila replied, in the universal drawling tone of younger sisters obeying bossy brothers, leaning her body to the side to continue seeing the screen behind the barrier of fingers.

“Camila.”

“Shower, food, bed, nine o’clock,” she recited, rolling her eyes, proving that the audio system worked even when her attention was elsewhere. Then, without looking away from the TV, she stretched her closed fist to the side, towards him.

Sebastian smiled, defeated, and pressed his fist against hers. The official seal. That was one she never forgot.

“Door locked. Doesn’t open for anyone. Anything—”

“—I’ll call you, I’ll call Mom, I’ll call 911, I’ll press the button for Mr. Ramirez.” The neighbor from 6A, retired, third line of defense. Camila recited the entire list as if reciting multiplication tables for the thousandth time. “Hurry up, you’re late. You keep making a ‘tic-tic-tic’ sound with your foot when you’re late.”

He looked down. His right foot, the traitor, stopped.

“Nine o’clock,” he said for the last time, picking up his bicycle in the hallway.

“NINE O’CLOCK!” she shouted back, already singing the cartoon’s closing theme a second later.

Sebastian locked the door from the outside, tested the doorknob twice — habit, ritual, superstition, all rolled into one — and called the elevator.

Outside, the day was already dying. At 4:30 in the afternoon in January, the New York sun was an orange memory squeezed between buildings to the west, and the city lights were taking over: streetlights lighting up in sequence along Hadley Street, shop windows, the holographic signs of the larger businesses gaining color against the darkening sky. The temperature, which was already not generous, plummeted along with the light.

Sebastian checked the time, and his stomach sank slightly: 4:31 PM . He sighed, and the sigh turned to a cloud. He usually clocked in at four. Every minute late meant one less delivery on the shift, and one less delivery meant less money, and—he did the math while pedaling, because struggling with math was more productive than struggling without it—at this point today’s shift was going to be about thirty percent below average. The new battery controller thanked him and said goodbye until February.

He lowered his body onto the handlebars and accelerated.

Meridian Express occupied the back of a red commercial building on the border of Harlem and Washington Heights: a small warehouse attached to the building, with a steel door, a once-showy hand-painted sign, and a yard where two of the company’s electric vans spent the night. “Transportation company” was a big name for the operation—Meridian was what was left of the delivery market for small firms: the niche of deliveries that drones couldn’t handle. Packages without standardized codes, addresses in buildings without landing platforms, elderly clients who didn’t trust machines, shipments too fragile, streets too narrow, handwritten signatures required. The logistical waste of the giants was Meridian’s bread and butter. And Sebastian’s.

He placed Frankenstein back in its spot against the inside wall, took his ID badge out of his wallet—a laminated card with a photo of him at thirteen years old making a face like someone taking a photo ID—and tapped the reader next to the door. The device flashed green with a beep.

Inside, the warehouse was noisy and bustling with organized activity: steel shelves reaching the ceiling, the air smelling of cardboard and tape, an old radio playing salsa music at a low volume, and three employees working at the pace of the late afternoon—Rosa labeling boxes with a code gun faster than seemed humanly possible, Denny stacking volumes in a van with a Tetris-like technique that only twenty years of experience could provide, and, in the middle of the warehouse, clipboard in hand, the unmistakable figure of the owner.

Mr. Williams was a broad, bald, red-faced man who had worn the same winter jacket for at least three winters and managed his small cardboard empire with a real paper clipboard—Sebastian could count on his fingers the people he saw using paper in 2030, and Mr. Williams alone occupied three of those fingers, by sheer force of conviction. “Paper doesn’t jam, doesn’t run out of power, and doesn’t get hacked,” was his motto, usually delivered with a tap of his pencil on the clipboard, like a judge with his gavel.

The owner’s small eyes met Sebastian the second the door opened.

“Look at him,” Mr. Williams announced to the general shed, pointing with his pencil. “Boy, arriving late again . At this rate, you’ll soon be the one owing me at the end of the month.”

“Sorry, Mr. Williams.” Sebastian was already crossing the warehouse, taking his backpack off to exchange it for his delivery bag. “My sister’s school bus broke down today, the whole system, I had to pick her up in Hamilton Heights and—”

Mr. Williams raised his free hand, dismissing the rest of the sentence. He glanced at the boy over his clipboard—his hat pulled down low, his glasses fogging up from the temperature difference, the face of someone who had cycled for twenty minutes in the cold and was now apologizing—and exhaled through his nose, a snort that twitched his mustache.

“If you didn’t work harder than everyone else here, you would have been fired a long time ago,” he grumbled, in the tone of someone repeating an old saying that they both knew by heart and neither of them took seriously. Rosa, at the counter, laughed without raising her head. “You’re just wasting time and apologizing. Come on, let’s get to work.”

Sebastian approached the central counter. “What do you have for me today?”

The old man consulted the clipboard, running his pencil across the list with the ceremony of a notary. “Good. Your amount is already set aside, it’s right there.” He pointed the pencil to a thermal delivery bag resting on the edge of the counter, visibly full, the seams honestly frayed. “Eight deliveries. Two in Hamilton, one in Sugar Hill, four going down to the center and,” he paused, almost an apology, “one in Midtown . Client paid an express fee, hand delivery, by seven. You have little time for a lot of things, kid. In this cold and this traffic, I don’t know if it all gets done today.”

Sebastian looked at his bag. He drew the map in his head—he didn’t even need the browser anymore for the usual neighborhoods; the city lived inside his head in streets and shortcuts and one-way directions—he fitted the eight stops into a route, measured it against the clock and against the 84%… now 79% battery.

It was going to be tight. It was going to be very tight.

He looked up at Mr. Williams and smiled, that skinny, boyish smile that was eighty percent stubbornness.

“I will succeed, sir.”

The owner’s red face broke into a short laugh, a two-beat laugh, ” ha!” , and he tapped the pencil on the clipboard—the judge’s gavel, the sentence pronounced.

“Ha. That’s why you’re still here, kid. I’m watching you.” He was already turning to yell something at Denny about the order of the boxes in the van. “Come on, go! The clock has no mercy on anyone!”

Sebastian grabbed the bag from the counter—the weight pulled his shoulder down and he adjusted the strap across his chest, distributing the load on his back the way he’d learned through practice—checked the digital address list Rosa synchronized with the boss’s sacred clipboard on his phone, and stepped out the steel door into the icy twilight.

Outside, night was falling quickly, and the whole city was lighting up, floor by floor, tower by tower, until the lights of the skyscrapers mingled with the first remaining stars that the light pollution allowed to escape. It was already 5:02 PM . Eight deliveries, four neighborhoods, one urgency charge, seventy-nine percent battery, and a freezing cold.

Sebastian climbed onto Frankenstein, pulled the zipper up to his chin, touched the screen to load the route, and twisted the throttle.

The bicycle hummed and plunged down the avenue, a small, stubborn light descending toward the mountains of light of Manhattan—unaware, yet, of anything. Unaware that the entire city, that night, was a cog slowly turning toward Times Square.

For now, it was just a boy, a bicycle, and eight deliveries against the clock.

And Sebastian Delacroix had never lost track of time.