Invictus

by Ryan Graudin

  No…delete that. It was too lighthearted.

  None of this was funny: The look in Farway’s eyes as he stomped into the console room sans the Rubaiyat. All of those faces of all of those passengers Imogen saw through the datastream. The tooth-raking sound of ice on steel as the collision took place just meters below. It was an awful noise. Imogen covered her ears, and she wasn’t the only one. Both Gram and Priya paused from their tasks—booting up the nav systems, latching the Invictus’s door shut—to block it out.

  Farway alone listened. He stood in the console room—eyes scalped, hands bare. She’d seen this look on her cousin only once before: the evening she force-fed him honeycomb gelato and found that exquisite real-paper message.

  It meant the loss of everything.

  When the iceberg and the Titanic parted, all was quiet. None of the Invictus’s crew wanted to be the first to test the wounded-animal look on their captain’s face. Even Priya, who always gave Farway a once-over for injuries, hovered to the side, scanning him with eyes alone.

  This was uncharted territory. They’d never not pulled off a heist.

  They’d never returned to Lux empty-handed.

  The thought turned Imogen’s stomach. She’d only met Lux once, but that one time was more than enough. There was something off about the man they called boss. She got the distinct impression that he was a devil without the d. Not the sort of person who’d forgive the loss of eighty-five mil. Imogen wasn’t sure what the black market mogul would do in mercy’s stead, and she really, really didn’t want to find out.

  Similar thoughts layered Farway’s face—denial, anger, desperation—sketching his emotions into new dimensions as he strode to Gram’s station. “We have to go back. I have to try again.”

  The Engineer was staring at the numbers in front of him and whispering to himself, traces of gibberish syllables. He held one of his prized Rubik’s Cubes in his hands, twisting without thought. Imogen had never seen Gram so imprecise, in word or motion. Muttering into unhearing screens was usually her forte….

  “Gram! I need you to focus! I need you to skip us to earlier in the timeline, so I can get that hashing book before the girl does! Go back to the time we were supposed to land in before this whole mission went to shazm!” Farway’s voice was sharp enough to make Imogen look at his eyebrows.

  No trembling. This time he was truly pissed.

  Gram looked up. There was sweat on his face; it caught the display’s glow, shimmering from his cheekbones and brow. “Can’t.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t?”

  “I don’t know why or how, but we can’t jump to that time. I tried plugging the numbers in—”

  “So fix it!” Smack. Farway hit the frozen Tetris screen. Its glass held, but the rest of the Invictus flinched. “Isn’t that what I pay you to do?”

  “I tried,” Gram said again. “I tried, and I’m telling you, I can’t. It’s impossible.”

  His sweat had collected into beads, rolling down his face so profusely that Imogen knew the Engineer—though he made no sense—was telling the truth. Farway must have come to the same conclusion, because he started back for the hatch.

  “Imogen, get the feed back online!” he barked.

  “No!” Imogen swiveled her chair too hard in her franticness. “You can’t go back down there! The ship is sinking. There are too many variables now—”

  “Do I look like I give a hashing bluebox about variables?” Her cousin halted. “That’s two hundred mil I just lost down there! Lux isn’t going to let that go easy, and I sure as Hades won’t, either! Bring back the feed!”

  Lux’s wrath loomed, true, but Farway’s descent into the gathering deep wouldn’t change that. “The girl’s gone,” Imogen reasoned. “She’s not gonna stick around with loot like that when the ocean’s knocking!”

  Yet stubborn is as stubborn does, especially where McCarthys were concerned. Farway made for the console room door, only to find Priya blocking its threshold. She stood there with her arms crossed, eyes relentless. “Imogen’s right. You can’t go.”

  “Move,” Farway said. “Please.”

  “Sometimes,” Priya spoke in a whisper, “it’s okay to fail.”

  Imogen watched her cousin’s face turn a shade darker and found herself wondering if there was any gelato left in her freezer stash. She could use some right about now, but she had a feeling the last carton of raspberry had fallen victim to nighttime cravings over a week ago.

  NOTE TO SELF: SAVE AT LEAST ONE PINT OF GELATO FOR EMERGENCIES.

  “I didn’t fail.” Farway’s words seared. “I never fail. I was robbed.”

  “Can you really be robbed of something you never had in the first place?”

  The whisper had come from Imogen’s corner, just over her shoulder. Gram, Priya, and Farway all turned to look. When Imogen followed suit, all she saw was Bartleby, but once her sight started to adjust, she realized there was another human shape cookie-cuttered into the darkness behind the mannequin.

  The shadow stepped forward.

  It was the girl in the yellow dress.

  11

  SCANNING WILL NOW COMMENCE

  ELIOT HAD SEEN HER FAIR SHARE of time machines and TM crews. They all had their quirks—you couldn’t expect to survey the whole of time without a few personalities—but this took the cake. Clothes hanging from the ceiling. A girl with hair the color of a nebula. The Medic in grease-stained scrubs. And—oh haze—was that a raccoon?

  The Invictus’s crew stared at her with the same scrutiny, trying to process her out-of-thin-air appearance. It wasn’t as sudden as they thought. Eliot had been lurking behind the mannequin for several minutes, observing. She’d already gathered quite a lot about how this particular engine of teenagers ran. The Engineer, he was the steady click, click of gears. The dark-haired girl in the doorway was something of a radiator, monitoring temperatures, keeping things cool. The Historian—colorful like motor oil, running everything through the chaos.

  But Eliot wasn’t here to pick apart the interpersonal web of the ship. That was extra credit. The real assignment was Subject Seven, whose gaze was fuel-rod hot, aimed straight at Eliot. Had she been anyone else, she might have melted.

  “You!”

  Eliot was beginning to wonder if that exclamation was all he was capable of saying when the others chimed in.

  “How’d she get in here?”

  “Where’s the book?”

  “Who the hash is she?”

  The ginger raccoon hissed at her, darting under Nebula Girl’s chair.

  “The Rubaiyat is in a safe place.” Eliot gathered her skirts and stepped into the center of the console room. Nebula Girl scooted her chair back, accidentally rolling over the whatever- kind-of-animal-that-was’s tail. The creature bounced away, yowling.

  Subject Seven didn’t seem to notice the mayhem. “What do you want?”

  That question again… It was almost as if Seven were reading from a script, just like all the others. Same scene, different setting. Eliot brushed this thought aside. The other subjects, those other scenes, were done. Closing acts and curtains drawn. Her focus needed to be here and now. Subject Seven had to be the center of her universe… in case that was what he was.

  “I want a job.” Eliot moved to the empty captain’s chair, sank into its tangerine-colored leather—haze, it felt good to be off her feet—and twisted to face her audience. “I want to join the Invictus as part of your crew.”

  The Medic’s eyebrows tilted: one up, one down. Gingerbread Rodent kept hissing from the safety of the mannequin’s shoulders. The rest of the crew continued to be dumbfounded, staring at Eliot as if they couldn’t quite grasp her dimensions. Real? Hologram? Bad med-patch trip?

  If only they knew the half of it.

  Nebula Girl was the first to respond. “But… why?”

  This was the hard part—knowing how much to say. The truth was off the table, but Eliot knew her time with the Invictus’s crew would be smoothe
r if the conversation felt two-sided. “The black market is more crowded than Lux has led you to believe. I’ve been working the scene as a freelancer for a while, but that gets lonesome. Not to mention exhausting.”

  “Yes.” Seven’s voice brought new meaning to the word scathing. “Hashing up other people’s lives must be very tiring.”

  “Freelancer?” The Engineer frowned. “But—how do you jump through the Grid without a TM crew?”

  A rabbit-hole question, best skipped. “With great difficulty. As I said, I’m looking to ease things up, so I thought I’d give the whole teamwork thing a try.”

  “Teamwork?” Subject Seven spat. “You just sabotaged our mission!”

  “No,” she corrected. “I gave you incentive to hire me. Consider this past hour my test run, a demonstration of my top-notch thieving skills.”

  “I’m all the thief this ship needs!” Nothing had caught fire yet—a miracle considering how Seven’s stare burned. “I can handle heists just fine, when you’re not there tossing everything to shazm! What the Hades were you doing in my final exam Sim anyway?”

  “Your—what?”

  “My final exam Sim. You were dressed up as Marie Antoinette. You rigged the whole hashing thing! You winked at me!”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Eliot did, of course. “If we work jobs together, we can maximize our thieving capacity. Twice the loot, twice the payout.”

  “You were inside Versailles’s programming,” Subject Seven pressed. “I’m not crazy and I’m certainly not delusional enough to invite you to join my crew—”

  “No invitation needed.” She shrugged. “I’m already here, and if you try to kick me off, you’ll never see the Rubaiyat again.”

  The four exchanged glances—a web of silent conversations. Seven’s eyes linked most with the Medic. There was such a familiarity in the pair’s body language. Nod, shrug, eyebrow twitch; everything meant something. How long had it been since someone had looked at Eliot that way?

  “This ship,” Seven began, “it’s built on trust. I trust Imogen knows where she’s sending me. I trust Priya to clean my cuts and keep the engines going. I trust Gram to guide us through the Grid….”

  The Engineer fidgeted with the cube he held, brow furrowed. When his gaze landed back on his console screen, it wavered, as if stumbling through a foreign language without translation tech, all meaning lost.

  Eliot took a deep breath, shook the shake from her pulse.

  Seven went on, “I’ve got no idea what I’m going to get when I toss you into the mix.”

  “You’ll just have to sit back and see.” Had there been a table in front of Eliot, she would’ve propped up the ridiculous button-up boots she was wearing, just like the men in old Western movies did when they had the upper hand. But the captain’s console was behind her, and the Invictus’s crew all had a grasp on her superior position without the body language.

  “You’re in my seat,” Seven said.

  “It’s all yours as soon as you show me to my bunk,” Eliot told him. “I’d like one close to the floor. Heights aren’t really my thing.”

  The moment sat and sat. Seven was sizing her up, running through his options, and realizing it was a very short sprint. “So you produce the Rubaiyat when we reach Lux?”

  “That’s right.” Eliot smirked.

  He crossed his arms and stepped close, only a few centimeters short of crushing the hem of her dress. “What’s to stop us from throwing you out on your tail once we deliver the goods?”

  “The same thing that will stop me from giving Lux a matinee datastream of our chase and lobbying for your job. Mutual trust.” Eliot’s smirk-smile remained steady. It was her default expression as of late, because she couldn’t sustain any other emotion. Not after what she’d seen. Not with everything that was at stake.

  Subject Seven’s eyes narrowed. “We don’t even know your name.”

  “Eliot.”

  “That’s it? Just Eliot?”

  “Only Eliot.” What use were surnames when there was no family attached to them? “A girl used to reciprocal introductions. I realize bursting in on you like this was rude, but let’s not make that our standard.”

  The crew wasn’t quite sure what to do. The Medic moved to Subject Seven’s side—a closeness that melded her scrubs with his workman’s shirt. Nebula Girl blinked, while the Engineer looked up from his screen. His stare hadn’t changed, gentle dark mixed with doubt. It reminded Eliot of an overcast dawn. “You want to know our names?”

  “I want—” Here she paused, struck by the word’s danger. The taste of it on her tongue—What? What do you want, Eliot? Can you even recall?—made her swallow. “A fresh start. Look, I’m not asking for friendship tattoos or a forever home, just a chance to try a new life on for size. If it doesn’t fit, no harm done. If it does, your palmdrives will get so loaded you won’t even be able to wave. Knowing your names would be a nice bonus.”

  The Invictus was so quiet, with its stealth engines and haunted crew. Noises from the outside were leaking in, the calls of officers who started to uncover the lifeboats. Theirs were calm, routine voices, unaware that things were about to get much, much worse. Ignorance is bliss, it was said, and maybe it was better that they could stare into the star-strangled sky and breathe deep, before the dark crashed down in fathoms….

  “I’m Imogen McCarthy.” Nebula Girl continued the introductions when no one else offered. “Gram’s our resident genius. Priya keeps busy keeping us alive. Farway—”

  “That’s a family name,” Subject Seven interrupted. “Everyone else knows me as Far.”

  “That’s it?” Eliot prodded. “Just Far?”

  “Call me what you will, but don’t mistake this impasse as an excuse to get chummy.” Each word of his was a pulled tooth. Subject Seven should’ve been bleeding from the mouth. “Bunk on the bottom right corner is all yours, Eliot. I’d like my chair back now, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “It’s never not the same.” With the help of Eliot’s boots, they were equal silhouettes when she stood. “Now if you don’t mind, I’ll be turning in. I’ve had a trying day and these shoes are as painful as they are pretty.”

  Imogen gave an appreciative grunt. The rest of the Invictus’s crew watched, shell-shocked, as Eliot swept past their captain to her new quarters. She stole glances into the others’ bunks as she did. One was strung with twinkle lights, with a holo-paper issue of Style Yesteryear faceup on a brightly woven Kilim rug. Another had a pair of antique wireless BeatBix headphones on top of the pillow. The adjacent pod was cluttered with kettlebell weights and dirty socks, and had the distinct scent of boy. The bunk above was meticulous in comparison—its bed made up with hospital corners. A poster of the periodic table brought blocks of color to its far wall.

  Even after just a few minutes of study, Eliot could pin which crew member each room belonged to. Fitting then, that hers was so bare. The walls had the sterile feel of a science lab—all white in an effort to disguise the bunk’s tininess. Paint could only do so much. Her dress took up half the hexagon, making it nearly impossible to turn.

  Good thing my luggage is so compact, she thought, after the acrobatics of sliding her door shut. When the lock lit, Eliot flopped onto the bed, unbuttoned her boots, and rested her head against the wall.

  Too much running, too much death. Couldn’t she shut her eyes for just a moment?

  When Eliot did, she could hear the crew just past her sliding door, bursting with questions: “Who is that girl, Farway?” “What’s she doing here?” “Where is the book bling?” None of which Subject Seven would be able to answer. Beyond and below, she heard the Titanic’s orchestra launch into the beginning notes of their lives’ final songs. She tried not to think of Charles, with his peach-fuzz face, and failed.

  It was good that she remembered him, though it was exhausting to do so.

  No rest for the weary. Or the dying. Or the dead.

  Eliot’s eyes rema
ined closed when she brought up her interface. A family snapshot was the first thing to appear: Mom, Strom, and Solara on a boat ride through the drowned city of Venice. Towers rose from the water behind them—half elegant, all eerie. Strom wrestled into scuba gear while Solara knotted her hair in a bun. Eliot’s mother was midconversation, words forever suspended. Eliot used to study these pixels for hours, trying to conjure the sights, sounds, scents of that day. Now it was a placeholder as the menu loaded.

  Figures and charts and forecasts and six separate files of datastreams spackled the darkness. Eliot flicked past these to the newest file: SUBJECT SEVEN. It contained a comprehensive profile of Farway Gaius McCarthy… fudged DNA tests, school scores, palmdrive accounts, past residences, current address: Via Ventura Zone 3. It also held a spectacular datastream of the May 5, 2371 AD, Sim hack and the resulting expulsion.

  The rest of the file’s space was waiting to be filled. Eliot transferred her past few hours into it. Her life had become a constant datastream—recorded, stored, labeled, rinse, repeat. This episode went down as Subject Seven Second Encounter. April 14, 1912 AD.

  “Evening, Vera.” Eliot kept her voice soft when she addressed her interface, in case Subject Seven’s crew had taken to pressing ears to her door. “What’s the weather like on your end?”

  I AM A COMPUTER, INCAPABLE OF EXPERIENCING PHYSICAL CLIMATES. Vera replied the way she always did—a dry voice-text combination. Programmers had given her a British accent from the olden years. Often Eliot took comfort in the sound, but this evening it reminded her of all the passengers she’d mingled with.

  History could be such a betch.

  “The climate here is terrible,” she whispered.

  ACCORDING TO MY DATA, THE TEMPERATURES AT THIS DATE AND LOCATION ARE BELOW FREEZING. Vera wasn’t much of a shoulder to cry on. The interface’s range of support was strictly technical. WHAT CAN I DO FOR YOU, ELIOT?

  “Subject Seven should be within range.” The Invictus fit in a one-hundred-meter radius, which was all Eliot needed. “Lock on and start the countersignature scan.”