McKenzie Brink's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

McKenzie Brink woke up on wet blue sand with her skateboard still under her arm. The last thing she remembered was rolling down Dundas Street in Toronto and the sidewalk vanishing under her front wheel. Now the sky was the wrong color, two suns hung low, and a purple alien with six arms sat cross-legged three feet away, watching her breathe. She sat up and checked her trucks first, her ribs second. The trucks were fine. The purple one pointed at her board and made a sound like a kettle. McKenzie stood, brushed sand off her jeans, and dropped the deck. She pushed once, ollied over a piece of driftwood, and landed clean. A small crowd of aliens on the beach stopped what they were doing. Most of them tilted their heads at her the way her dad had tilted his head when he found his pallets nailed into a quarterpipe in the driveway. She knew that look. It meant crazy. She didn't care. There was flat blue stone stretching up the shore, smooth as a parking lot, and her brain was already drawing lines on it. A man walked out of the tide toward her. He wore a fur coat and a raccoon-skin cap, and he was soaking wet. He said his name was Fredrick Grant, and he asked if she knew the year. She said 1994. He said 1847, and looked at his hands like he wasn't sure they were his. Behind him, a squat building of blue rock and pale wood sat tucked against the dunes, and through its open door McKenzie could see wax, wheels, and a tall blue surfboard carved from some tree that had never grown in Ontario. A shop. A skate shop, almost. Close enough. Fredrick started to say something about a signal under the water, about voices, about being pulled here. McKenzie was already walking toward the door. She stopped in the doorway and turned back to him. "I'm not going home yet," she said. "There's a whole flat rock out there and nobody's ever dropped in on it." Fredrick blinked at her. The purple alien padded up behind her on all six hands and made the kettle sound again, softer this time. McKenzie looked at the wax on the shelf and the blue board leaning in the corner and the empty coast beyond the window. Whatever had dropped her here had dropped other people too, and one day she'd want to know why. Today she wanted lumber. She stepped inside the shop and started counting what she could use.