Excerpt

Flirting with death was the perfect way to spend an afternoon.

My slim shadow stretched behind me as I paced along the brink of the cliff, squinting into the setting sun.

Next to me, Adrianne prepared to leap. She grinned from her perch at the edge.

"Just jump already," I urged while securing my pink hair into a braid past my shoulders.

"Relax, Elle. I'm getting in the zone." She stretched her arms wide and leaned forward, surrendering to the wind.

I peeked over the lip as she plummeted toward the depths of the sandstone canyon.

Adrianne's gleeful cheer echoed through the chasm as she fell. She kicked off an outcropping, launching herself into a cartwheel through the air, which she transitioned into a somersault. Every movement was fluid, reaching and twisting in ways I'd never be able to achieve myself.

While I watched her aerial acrobatics, I gripped my left shoulder in my right hand with subconscious envy—my reminder that showing off sometimes came with a price.

"Reset!" I called out to our friend Jiro when Adrianne was almost to the canyon floor.

"Loading," he confirmed behind me.

The air electrified, tingling my skin and pulsing in my ears. White light crept into the corners of my vision, accompanied by an intensifying hum. With a flash, my vision went black.

For a moment, I floated in nothingness. Then, the physical world resolved around me once more. The blackness receded into sunlight and my feet were again solidly on the rocky ground.

I was now standing in the same position I'd been minutes before when I made the reset point at the access terminal. Suspended inside the monument was a two-meter-tall crystal that glowed with a swirling blue inner light.

It was one of four monuments in the vicinity of our community, each connected to a larger crystalline network woven throughout the planet and surrounding worlds. The remarkable properties of the crystals made our play possible.

Every time someone touched one of the crystals, it would record the precise physical state within its zone at that moment—including the kinesthetic abilities, clothing, and hair style of each person, along with the general environmental configuration. The access panel on the monument could then be used to reset the surrounding landscape and our physical forms into one of the previously recorded states with our cognition intact. Out in the remote canyon where it was just us, we could reset as many times as we wanted since the action was restricted to each crystal monument's specific zone.

Adrianne beamed, exhilarated by her recent fall that now only existed in memory. "I needed that."

I let my good arm drop to my side and stepped back from the terminal. "Showoff."

"Let's see your moves." She smirked.

Despite being an unfair competition, I took the bait. "Watch and learn."

"Be quick," Jiro instructed, sweeping aside a lock of dark hair that had fallen in front of his almond eyes. "We need to get back."

He was right; it was almost dinnertime. As much as I dreamed about ways to prolong our last summer of freedom, even resetting the physical world didn't alter the underlying flow of time, only the physical state within the crystal's zone.

"Last one for the night." I jogged to the edge of the cliff and peered into the familiar canyon. It was at least one hundred meters to the bottom, but the shadows made the depth difficult to gauge. I beckoned Adrianne over. "Spot me."

We had learned the hard way to reset before hitting the bottom. Since we retained all of our memories after each physical reset, the splat at the end kind of put a damper on the thrill of freefall.

"I'm watching," she assured me.

I took a deep breath and raised my arms—my left only making it forty-five degrees from my side due to the permanent effects of a childhood injury. Even though I couldn't put on an aerial show as well as Adrianne, I could still fly.

A gust of wind crested the canyon and I leaned forward.

"Wait!" Jiro shouted.

Adrianne yanked me back by my braid.

"What's wrong?" I asked, regaining my balance. No sooner had I spoken than I saw the reason for his concern.

The crystal that normally exuded pleasant blue light now contained a dark cloud.

Jiro took a step away from the monument. "What's wrong with it?"

Adrianne and I cautiously approached. As I neared, the cloud took on more definition, as though individual black particulates were floating inside the prism.

"I have no idea," I murmured.

Nothing had ever disrupted the crystal before. Its existence was a given—as much as the sun rising and having chores.

"We should go," Adrianne stated as she backed toward the path leading to our town.

"Maybe it needs to recharge or something," Jiro suggested, following her.

"Yeah," I agreed, though I didn't believe it, and followed my longtime friends away from the canyon.

"Should we tell someone?" Adrianne asked. "I've never seen anything like that in one of the crystals."

"That would require explaining why we were out here," Jiro pointed out.

"That's definitely not going to happen." There was no way my mother would approve of me repeatedly jumping off a cliff in the adjacent zone while she prepared dinner back home. Especially after what had happened six years ago, this was the last place I wanted her to know I hung out. What she didn't know wouldn't worry her.