Night-Owl Trucking

Wednesday, 4:55pm

Amity and Luz walked through the automatic sliding doors of the Petro Station Shopping Center for the third time that day. The third for Amity, at least. Luz had been asleep on her feet the first time around, depending on the taller girl to hold her upright and keep her from stumbling face-first into the slow-opening glass doors. If Luz didn't remember it, did it really count?

There were only a few customers milling about the shop or standing in line waiting to be cashed out. Luz nodded at the man behind the register, tipping her hat with a slow, southern-style drawl, "Hullo, Jerry the Evening Clerk."

"Ah, shit," Jerry the Evening Clerk remarked, pausing with a customer's change in hand to point at Luz long enough to say, "Be good."

Luz looked back at Amity's confused blink and made a noncommittal shrug, "Ignore that guy."

They wandered past the snack section, over to the aisles full of odds & ends. Amity smiled as the shorter girl hunted up and down the shelves with excitement brightening her face and quickening her step. Luz turned the corner and gasped, hopping up in the air to see the taller girl over the shelf, waving, "Ooh, Amity! I found some!"

She rounded the aisle endcap and chuckled as she watched Luz dance from one foot to the other. The truck stop's meager collection of outdoor toys sat on a shelf at their knees: a pair of footballs and a lone boxed basketball sat underneath a hanging stack of individually packaged frisbees and a handful of jump ropes. The lowest shelf had a set of lawn darts—an eye-catching Illegal since 1988! handwritten across the front in five-inch-tall black marker letters—sitting beside an extremely dated badminton set. Amity scoffed and waved a hand toward the battered cardboard box decorated with sun-faded photographs of rackets and a birdie, and what might have once been smiling children. "Fifteen dollars?"

Luz glanced her way, then blinked and asked, "Huh?"

Amity tapped on the badminton set, "This has two rackets, three birdies, and a net, for only fifteen dollars?"

Luz set the paper bag with their breakfast on the floor by her feet. "I know that doesn't sound like much, but," the shorter girl tipped the box back to see the fine print on the bottom, "this was packaged in... Wow, nineteen ninety-eight?" Luz turned and looked the taller girl up and down, "This is older than you are."

"It is not," Amity huffed, snatching their breakfast from the ground before Luz could stop her. She stuck her tongue out at the brown-haired girl, earning herself a laugh.

"Gosh, the nineties. I bet fifteen dollars back then was more like a hundred 'n' fifty bucks today," Luz quipped as she gingerly set the box back in place, then brushed the crumbling cardboard residue from her fingertips. "I knew there were places where it felt like you stepped into the past," she made a face like she was grudgingly impressed, "But I never thought we'd find evidence of a time pool." She grinned and pulled her phone out of her pocket to snap a quick picture of the old boxes, "I can't wait to tell Lilith."

Amity eyed the other items while the smaller girl bashed out a quick text with one hand, pausing just long enough to take a sip of her coffee. "I suppose you were thinking of one of the footballs?" Her eyes flicked to the lawn darts and she added, "I hope."

Luz laughed and lifted one of the brown pleather pigskins, "Yeah, I bet they'd have fun playing with this. Not to mention—" she paused to kick a foot toward the basketball, tapping it with the toe of her sneaker, "—I didn't wanna make Min feel bad about the last one."

The taller girl opened her mouth to protest but paused to reconsider why she was disagreeing. The urge had been more instinctual than rational. She was making an assumption, again. She had been about to disregard the fact that Min might be hesitant to play with another basketball, wasn't she? Amity knew her robots learned from their mistakes; she had tested that behavior with cheap furniture and porcelain dishware while calibrating their kinematic systems. They were careful around things they knew could break, and Min had accidentally damaged a building with the last basketball. Cold logic painted them as mere machines, but clearly, they had quirks and behaviors that appeared to be emotive in origin. "You... might be right," Amity admitted.