Invictus

by Ryan Graudin

  TARGET ACQUIRED. SCAN OF SUBJECT SEVEN FOR COUNTERSIGNATURE EMISSIONS WILL NOW COMMENCE. READINGS ARE 0% COMPLETE. WHAT ELSE CAN I DO FOR YOU, ELIOT?

  That was all. The scan’s climb to 100 percent could take days, and there wasn’t much Eliot could do before the results accumulated. Positive or negative. Catalyst or casualty. Here was a chance to keep her eyes shut, to lure sleep to her like some wild beast for the trapping. It did not come gently. How could it, when the cold night cried out below, awash with violins no pillow could mute?

  Eliot piled blankets over her gown. Her bones sagged into the mattress; her heart would not stop shivering.

  12

  CHORUS OF THE DAMNED

  WHEN IN DOUBT, MAKE TEA. It was a rule Priya Parekh lived by, upheld by her mother and her mother’s mother before that. How many all-nighters spent studying for her Medic examinations had been made bearable by the constant supply of masala chai her mother brewed?

  They were in for a long night. Or day. Or whatever time it was. Time traveling never failed to screw up the internal body clock, one of the reasons Priya kept her infirmary cabinets stocked with melatonin med-patches. She doubted even those would help Far now. He was wound up tighter than Saffron on a sugar high. Priya’s own movements were methodical as she put a pot of black tea leaves on to boil and gathered the spices—ginger, cardamom, star anise, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg—all stronger than the ones from her childhood, and fresher, too. The manufactured ingredients her mother was forced to use couldn’t hold a candle to past-procured karha mix.

  The water came to a boil as Far paced. Priya added the spices, poured in fresh milk, and fought the urge to embrace her boyfriend every time he passed the kitchenette. After almost a year together, she’d learned that what calmed her only made Far antsier.

  “What. Just. Happened?” Imogen flopped onto one of the common area couches. Only her bluish hair was visible over the armrest. Saffron was batting at it. “Who is that girl, Farway? What’s she doing here?”

  All apt questions, though the mystery that piqued Priya’s interest the most was: “Marie Antoinette?”

  “Freelancer, my tail! Liar’s trying to gaslight me,” Far said. “She showed up in my final exam Sim in the Hall of Mirrors dressed as Marie Antoinette. She was the one who made me fail. I knew I’d been framed!”

  Imogen sat up, frowning. “Marie Antoinette had blue eyes, Farway. Not brown. Everyone knows that.”

  “Your assessment of global knowledge is generous,” he told his cousin. “The computer said she was the queen of France and I had no reason to doubt it. Neither did the licensing board, apparently.”

  Priya poured tea into four mugs and passed them along. Gram first—he looked like he needed a caffeine jolt the most, face lost inside his console screens. She set his drink by the green Rubik’s Cube, where it’d be least likely to spill. “That’s one Hades of a hacking job, though, fooling the Corps like that.”

  Imogen’s eyes wavered behind steam as she accepted her mug. “Was she fooling the Corps? Maybe this Eliot character is with the Corps. Think about it. She’s got access to TM tech. She not only knew we were going to be here, but she also knew what Farway was looking for.”

  Far stopped under a heinously bright three-piece flash-leather suit—the one he’d donned to snatch the Cat’s Eye Emerald from the Caponian Collective minutes before their headquarters were destroyed in the millennium’s biggest organized crime raid—and shook his head. “The Corps would’ve arrested us as soon as we landed. They wouldn’t remove the Rubaiyat out of its original time.”

  “Speaking of,” Imogen interrupted, “where is the book bling? How do we know Eliot is going to produce it when we arrive on Lux’s doorstep?”

  “We don’t. Thanks, P.” Far nodded when Priya handed him the chai, polishing it off in a single swig. He claimed he hated hot drinks losing their heat, but Priya had no idea how his throat could stand the scalding. Even he grimaced a little at the end of the swallow. “What about the second Rubaiyat? The remade one? Imogen, you said it burned in World War II…. Any way we could get to it before the bombs do?”

  “It’s not salvageable.” The Historian shook her head. “That copy wasn’t incinerated—its jewels were reused in a third iteration. And before you ask, no, we can’t steal that Great Omar, either, because it still exists in Central time. Eliot’s our only hope, which means if she is Corps, we’re royally hashed.”

  “None of this fits the Corps’ MO.” Far set his mug on the common area table. Priya’s eyes drifted to the real-paper copy of the Corps of Central Time Travelers’ Code of Conduct beside it. After every mission, she and Imogen went through the guidebook, marking every rule they managed to break. Over half of its three hundred pages were covered in checkmarks and Xs and swirly hearts. Cat ears bedecked every C on the front cover. When had those been added? Imogen must’ve broken tradition by doodling solo.

  “Not the current Corps, no,” Priya said. “But MOs change over time.”

  Far frowned.

  “You think Eliot’s from the future?” Imogen asked.

  The future. It was one of the few Code of Conduct rules they hadn’t broken: No CTMs are authorized to travel more than one day in the future from their anchor date. The crew of the Invictus never had a reason to travel ahead of their native time. Lux’s missions were bound to historical events studied well enough to sidestep. The future wasn’t just unknown but also full of potential complications: learning their own fates, crossing timelines, getting caught by future authorities. It was a sticky business—best avoided.

  But that didn’t mean the future couldn’t come to them.

  “It’s the most likely explanation,” Priya said. “That or some sort of Corps black-ops program.”

  “Black-ops, future, whatever.” Far started pacing again. “What are we going to do with her?”

  Imogen looked pointedly at the door to Eliot’s bunk—not 100 percent soundproof—then back at Priya. “You should turn that music up.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t.” There was a song playing in the background, but Priya hadn’t started any of her playlists during the mission. This music—strings-based, classical—was far more poignant than the beats she usually listened to.

  They fell silent as the notes crept on. Imogen’s face drained whiter with each bar. “Crux, it’s—it’s the Titanic’s orchestra. Farway, why are we still here?”

  Here: hovering above the song of the dying. Most time travelers Priya knew preferred to say already dead, as if the inevitability of the tragedies they encountered made them less tragic. Her Medic training couldn’t write off a life so easily. How many people were about to freeze to death down there? How many children? It hurt even more to think of these numbers, these lives, when the Invictus hovered a mere thirty meters away.

  Bitter, bitter symphony; every new note haunted Priya more than the last, until she couldn’t bear listening any longer. It was possible to switch on a playlist remotely, but she took the chance to duck into the infirmary. Sometimes she hated how secluded it was from the console room, but then there were moments like these, when the wall was a relief. She didn’t like to cry where others could see.

  Tears clogged Priya’s lashes as she scrolled through the playlist. Pick a song, any song—it didn’t matter, as long as it drowned out the dirge below. Thrash & Hash: Live from the Pantheon [uncensored] began beating through the speakers. Priya slumped down to the infirmary floor, staring at cabinets full of med-patches and scanners. Tools of the trade she’d wanted to practice ever since she was a gap-toothed girl welcoming her father home from hospital shifts. Long work’s grit often lurked beneath his eyes, but Dev Parekh never failed to play scan-the-patient with his only daughter. He crafted splints for dolls’ arms out of tongue depressors and taught Priya various suture techniques as he helped her sew stuffing back into Madam Wink.

  “All better now,” he’d say when the thread was cut. No hero in the world could be bigger, and Priya knew that whe
n she grew up she’d save not just polyester unicorns but people, too. Who wouldn’t?

  It wasn’t until later that she registered something else in the crescent shadows of her father’s face: the grief that came with truth.

  Some people were past saving.

  It didn’t help that Priya couldn’t hear the lifeboats being lowered, the deckhands crying out, the chorus of the damned playing on and on. She knew these things were happening, had happened. The already dead were dying and nothing was better now….

  “Hey, P. Can I come in?” Priya recognized the shape of Far’s shadow against the med-cabinets, as familiar as her own.

  She nodded. Her face was a mess—trying to blot out the tears with her sleeve only succeeded in smearing snot everywhere. She’d only ever seen Far weep twice: teardrops small enough to blot with a single finger. Priya didn’t understand how you could keep such a strong emotion so clean. Every crying session of hers ended up with her resembling a drowning walrus….

  Far sat down next to her, full mug in his hands. “I brought you your tea.”

  There was still warmth in the ceramic, in the fingers that brushed hers as they passed off the chai. When Priya took a sip, the heat spread through her chest.

  “You okay?” Far asked.

  “Yes. No. I—I know the Titanic sank before we—before I was born,” she corrected herself. “I know it’s in the past.”

  Far rested his head against the wall. His curls had unraveled to frizz during his chase for the Rubaiyat. “The past isn’t as distant as it used to be. When Burg told me bedtime stories about traveling on the Ab Aeterno, it was all about adventures and new sights, never the bodies they had to leave behind.”

  Or the family. Time travel cost more than billions of credits. Corps workers often caught up with their parents in age, while their own children grew at a snail’s pace. Priya had sworn never to date Academy cadets for this reason. Love should be all or it should be nothing. She had no interest in playing a Central anchor-girlfriend, absent for most of her boyfriend’s life until it looked like he’d robbed her from the cradle. If she was going to be with someone, she’d be with them: step for step, year for year, growing old in tandem.

  The rule wasn’t too hard to keep, since the med-droids completed the bulk of face time during the cadets’ routine checkups. Then came the boy who crashed the system. Skewed DNA, blank-space birth date. One glance at Farway McCarthy’s chart and Priya assumed he was a senator’s bastard, the type the Academy halls crawled with: rich with hush money, bored out of his brains. Oh, how wrong she’d been. Far crackled with life, or life crackled with him. (It was difficult to tell which force was stronger.) His ever-movement—legs shifting, fingers drumming—was contagious. Jokes, too. The way he talked about history made Priya miss times she’d never known. On the hoverbus home that evening she found herself scrolling through her music for a song that captured the boy’s longing zest.

  It was the beginning of many playlists.

  Her choice to join the Invictus’s crew was easier than it should’ve been. Far needed a Medic, and though it wasn’t quite love—not yet, not then—Priya didn’t want nothing. The year since had been a juggling act, two lives crammed into one. She kept up her Medic shifts, as well as Saturday dinner with her parents, though every trip home Priya found it harder to pick up where she’d left off. What’s new in your world, beti? took on a different angle when your mother’s week operating an antique shop was your month spent illegally hopping from World War II Europe to Gold Rush America to Queen Anne’s Revenge, all while kissing a boy your parents knew nothing about.

  Imogen and Gram performed the same verbal gymnastics with their parents, though ultimately conversational lag was a small price to pay. Priya was reminded of this every time Far talked about the Ab Aeterno, with a gap in his words no larger-than-legend energy could fill. Though he tried.

  He tried.

  “Would you save those people down there, if you could?” she asked.

  Far frowned. “Imagined heroics make the helplessness worse, don’t you think?”

  “Better than feeling like a vulture.”

  “We are vultures, P.”

  Like it or not, that was the truth of them. “I prefer the term relic relocaters.”

  “It’d be great if we had a relic to relocate.” Far’s lip twitched. “What do you think of our new guest?”

  “I haven’t seen someone get under your skin so badly since Instructor Marin. Not even the pirate who gave you that scar.” Priya touched his right biceps—where, just under the workman’s shirt, she felt a hard welt of skin, one that curved into brachial artery territory. It was the most of Far’s blood she’d ever seen outside of his body, brought forth by a rusty cutlass, closed shut by thirty stitches. A mere flesh wound, he’d joked with blue lips as Gram dragged him back onto the ship. If Imogen hadn’t been there to offer her vein for a transfusion, the story wouldn’t have had such a happy ending.

  “Swords, I can handle—whack and hit! But this?” Far massaged his face. Most of the anger had rubbed off, giving way to starker things. “After I got thrown out of the Academy, I swore I’d do anything I could never to feel so… so defeated again. Here we are nearly a year later—after all these successful heists—and the exact same girl is dangling our futures on a string, and I don’t know what to do. If I don’t deliver the Rubaiyat to Lux… we could lose everything, P.”

  A shudder passed from him to her. It wasn’t like Far to be afraid, and it wasn’t like Priya to squeeze his arm so tight, but here they were. Each other’s only.

  She drew strength from her next sip of chai. “Let’s not lose our heads, though. The fact that Eliot diverted your timeline makes me think there’s some sort of long game at play here…. We need to learn more about her. If we can get our hands on a DNA sample, I can run it through the diagnostics machine. Could give us something to go on.”

  “The washroom floor looks like it’s covered in spaghetti confetti from Imogen’s shedding,” Far said, nose wrinkling. “Scrounging up an Eliot hair shouldn’t be hard. We have the time—I’ve asked Gram to take us to Las Vegas.”

  “Vegas? As in an actual proper-vacation destination?”

  “The only other option is limping back to Lux, and I’d prefer to delay that demise for as long as possible. We’ll use the trip to get a handle on things. Figure out who Eliot is, find the Rubaiyat. All of this assuming we can make the jump to the next century—”

  “We should. I checked the engines and the fuel rods.” As evidenced by the spots on her scrubs. Grease this time, not blood. Fixing things tended to get messy. “Everything’s smooth on the mechanical end.”

  “You sure?” The question stayed in Far’s stare even after she nodded. “It’s not like Gram to hash things up.”

  “Gram spoils us with that brain of his, but he’s not a droid. Mistakes are what make us human. I hope you’ve apologized for assaulting his Tetris screen.”

  “Gram knows I was frustrated.”

  “But he won’t know you’re sorry until you tell him.” The tea’s extra dash of ginger burned gold on Priya’s tongue, adding fire to her grandmother’s favorite saying: “‘The world misses bees for their honey, not their sting.’”

  It would’ve been easy for Far to bring up the fact that the proverb was outdated—bees were back thanks to time travelers. He rubbed his knuckles instead, as if wiping away the memory of the punch. Determination settled in the darker edges of his profile.

  “I’ll make it right.” He leaned forward to plant a kiss on her forehead. Priya shut her eyes and soaked in every warmth: the mug of tea in her hand, the press of his lips to her skin, the radiance from the Invictus’s engines as it tore west, through the night.

  13

  THE HILLS REMAIN

  GRAM STARED AT THE NUMBERS.

  They were changing, but it was a slow, expected shift. Seconds ticking along. Time’s natural passage as morning caught up with them—April 15, 1912 AD, 5:32 A
M. In just a few minutes, Las Vegas would appear on the horizon, looking like little more than an old Western movie set, with signs advertising BILLIARDS and horse shazm scattered along the dirt roads. Nothing to see, and even less to do. The great state of Nevada had outlawed gambling in 1909, never mind that it would be at least twenty years before the first official casino opened. The flashier stuff came much later.

  Could they make the jump? Gram hoped so. He more than hoped. The 1900s wasn’t an era he wanted to be stranded in. Skin color wasn’t a barrier in Central time, but when it came to the past, prejudice was inescapable. Every time Gram stepped into a new era, he had to brace himself for the hatred of the age. Sometimes it was just under the surface, lurking in shopkeepers’ gazes as they watched him walk down every store aisle. Other times men called Gram words unfit for a dictionary, insulting his intelligence to his face. This stretch of history was downright dangerous. He’d seen photos of lynchings. Even in black-and-white they were graphic enough to make him retch.

  They had to make the jump.

  Gram ran their next landing date over and over again in his head. April 18, 2020, was no golden age, either: slavery’s chains exchanged for jumpsuits, keep your hands where I can see them a guarantee for nothing. But a successful jump to the twenty-first century meant a future jump home. There was no reason these landing numbers shouldn’t work. The Invictus’s nav systems were running as smoothly as they had before the hashed landing, but this only made the Engineer more anxious. It’d be better to know what was wrong than to just keep floundering like this….

  “Is your tail glued to that chair? You haven’t moved for hours.” Imogen walked in and took a seat at her console. It was a new day, and sure as the sun, her hair was a fresh color. The blue and pink chalks had been washed out, replaced with even brighter shades.

  “Green.” Gram realized, as soon as he said it, that the word didn’t make sense on its own. His brain needed a few extra beats to shift from numbers to language after staring at equations all night. “Your hair, I mean.”