Invictus

by Ryan Graudin

  He stared at her, more dazed than not. How could he forget his entrance onto the Titanic? Far recalled his exit well enough—the polished staircase, the angry steward, chasing Eliot to kingdom come.

  “It’s happening too fast,” she told him. “I forgot Charles.”

  Charles? Who was Charles? Everything she said was nonsense…. And yet it wasn’t. The ground felt all tilty beneath him. Eliot’s fingers turned tight as talons; she started tugging him through the dancers.

  “We have to go back to Central. Right now.” She said the same thing to Priya, to Imogen, to Gram as she led the group to the cabana. “Gather your things and let’s go.”

  “Now, wait a second!” Imogen stood far closer to Gram than she would have four drinks ago. Her face was flushed from dancing, strands of glowing hair stuck to her neck. “No. We’re on vacation. Farway, tell her!”

  “We’re on vacation,” he said. “Like it or not, I’m still the captain of this—”

  “If we don’t leave right now,” Eliot told them, “I will destroy the Rubaiyat.”

  The group went dead silent. Their expressions matched the savage beat of DJ Rory’s song. Imogen looked as if someone had just shaved Saffron’s tail clean down.

  “You’re bluffing.” The stakes were too high for Far’s poker face to hold. Dreams, freedom, life… “You—you can’t do that to us.”

  Eliot’s eyebrows rose. One of them was smudged, but instead of looking comical, it gave her an edge. “I can and I will. We deliver the book to Lux, right now. If we don’t… it’s gone.”

  Gone. The ground was tilting again, and Far had to fight to stand straight. Why couldn’t he remember walking through first class? That was a massive chunk of memory… minutes and minutes of his life. Now that Eliot had pointed it out, all he could focus on was the gap. The space in his mind where someone had come along and cut the film.

  Had she erased things somehow? Disturbance. Result. Linked. Could she have doped him up with Nepenthe when he wasn’t paying attention? Eliot was capable of anything. He saw all this and more in her eyes—the fire ready to light the pyre, send his entire world up in flames. Fear, anger, fear, fear, fear widening gyre all of it spiraling to places Far couldn’t reach. Priya’s hand on his shoulder was the calm during the storm. He would’ve keeled over without it.

  Far puffed up his chest instead, tried to sound like the sober, in-control captain he wasn’t. “It’s decided, then. We go.”

  20

  NIGHT ARMOR

  READINGS ARE 30% COMPLETE. REMEMBER CHARLES.

  Vera’s second sentence cut Eliot to the quick with every update. Each new percentage brought a fresh degree of panic: Were the measurements being processed fast enough? Charles was gone, reduced to a collection of pixels that Eliot played and replayed. His face blinked on her interface—a bit round, mostly innocent. There was something of a dreamer about him, as he talked about his recent European tour, his plans for school once he returned to Canada.

  I hope I’m not boring you, Ms.—Forgive me, my memory has been wretched today. What did you say your name was?

  Eliot, she whispered inside her head. My name is Eliot.

  At least she remembered that.

  The feed continued, into territory Eliot recalled with perfect clarity—producing the Rubaiyat and its oak case, appearing in the cargo bay, watching Subject Seven’s face implode with recognition, the cat-and-mouse chase that followed. She even remembered passing Charles again before rushing up the Grand Staircase. He hadn’t called out, just watched her yellow dress swish and vanish.

  Had he ever made it to Canada? Eliot hoped so. Someone in this haze of a mess deserved a happy ending.

  She switched off the feed and stared at her bunk’s white walls. The DJ’s spins rang through her ears, hours old, strong enough to dance to. It had been a fun evening—raking in cash from blackjack and blowing it on whatever she pleased. Gram and Imogen had made for excellent conversation—fashion and physics, history and the merits of twentieth-century gaming consoles. (Buttons, the Engineer had explained. It felt like more of an achievement if your hands were put to work.) She’d taught them both a Gaelic hex, as whimsical as it was wicked: May the devil make a ladder of your backbones while picking apples in the garden of hell. There was a beat, between the translation and the laughter, when everything around Eliot solidified, from her skin all the way to the flinted stars. She became a solid girl in a steady world, partying her arse off.

  Life was for the living, and this one should have belonged to her. For an evening, for just a few hours, it did.

  READINGS ARE 30.1% COMPLETE. REMEMBER CHARLES.

  “Thanks, Vera,” Eliot said, though thankfulness was the last thing she felt, this close to evanescing. “Keep updates to every one percent.”

  Racing against the unknown was enough to make anyone restless, and the bunk was no place for itchy legs. Eliot stepped into the common area. All was quiet, haloed in April 19’s daylight. Through the vistaport she caught glimpses of a cloud- cluttered sky. If she leaned over far enough, she might even see the glittering carpet that was the Atlantic. The Invictus was flying itself over the ocean, on autopilot while the rest of the crew slept off their wild night. A few had been wilder than others…. They’d been forced to take a cab from Caesars Palace to the desert lot because Imogen and Seven were in no condition to walk that far without tangling themselves in their own legs, and there was no time to stumble.

  Eliot walked a few laps around the couches, keeping time to the ringing in her ears. Notes that would’ve helped her dance the dawn into existence, had the past not fallen out from under her. The tear was growing, had grown while she partied, and who was she to take a break? Agent Ackerman would go full-on feral if he found out….

  A flash of red and white, the beastie called Saffron, dropping from the pipes onto the couch. Its tail reminded Eliot of an old-fashioned duster—fur straight as static. A dozen curiosities dashed through the creature’s gaze as it watched her. Who? What? Yum?

  “You don’t look like a panda,” she muttered, walking to the other side of the couch. The more cushions between them, the better. “Stop staring! Return to the void from whence you came!”

  “He doesn’t bite. Usually.” The voice over her shoulder sounded as if it’d been zapped by lightning. Its owner didn’t look too different: Himmeldonnerwetter in human form. Imogen emerged from her bunk—palazzo pants crumpled, hair frazzled and glowing.

  “A question…” she croaked. “Do I look as shazmy as I feel?”

  “You look as one might expect after a night on the Strip and a more-than-healthy dose of Belvedere.”

  “Ngh.” Imogen held a hand up to block the vistaport’s light, then frowned. “We’re flying?”

  “You don’t remember?” Eliot wasn’t worried. This was normal forgetting—alcohol-induced. “We’re on our way back to Rome.”

  “Already? The one time we get started on a decent vacation! Why the Hades would Far yank us back to Central so soon?” Imogen stomped toward the washroom, pausing before she reached it. “Oh no.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Bits are coming back.” Fingers fluttered around her electric- storm hair—frantic. “I made Gram dance with me last night, didn’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did I talk to him? Like, talk talk?”

  “Dunno.” Eliot shrugged.

  “Of all the bluebox blunders…” The Historian massaged her temple with a groan. “Remind me never to drink vodka again.”

  “I don’t think it’s the vodka that’s the problem.”

  “Right. Pining. Star eyes. I know. It’s what I don’t know that’s killing me. What if I said something stupid? Like only he could make math sexy? Or that I already named our imaginary pet chinchilla?”

  “You want more animals?”

  “Its name is Dusty,” Imogen offered. “This is some code-red stuff right here. I’m going to need you to do some reconnaissance. Toss Gram a few feeler quest
ions. ‘Hey, I heard you talked to Imogen last night. How was it?’ That sort of thing. It’d help my pining immensely!”

  Why are you so afraid of being vulnerable? Eliot should have asked the question aloud. She didn’t. It was an answer she knew well enough. She knew other answers, too: Gram was a man of numbers, but he had heart, and some of it leaned in Imogen’s favor. And Imogen? The girl was all tilt, all over, but with some direction she’d find her way. Both parties needed a shove….

  Over the past year Eliot had become quite proficient at moving people around the chessboard. Arranging, rearranging, in order to reach checkmate. But Gramogen wasn’t in her mission directives. Subject Seven was the one she was here for, and there was no time

  no time

  no time to stumble, dance, play matchmaker.

  “Think on it. Oh, you’ve got—or rather, you don’t have—” Imogen gave up on words, pointing to her own eyebrows instead.

  “Ah. Happens sometimes. They need freshening up; it’s been a while since I drew them.”

  With a wave, the other girl continued into the washroom. “There’s a scathingly strong mirror in here, if you need it.”

  The area was roomier than expected, tucked along the ship’s starboard side. It had all of the standard long-term time-travel fare—shower, toilet, vanity, closed-loop recycling water system. The mirror lived up to Imogen’s descriptions: overachieving to a fault. Who knew skin had so many pores? Eliot’s sunburn wasn’t as bad as she’d feared, already pastel in shade. Most of her left eyebrow was nonexistent. She set to work washing her face clean, and—while Imogen’s back was turned—pulled out her brow pen. It was a relic, label rubbed off from so many uses. Eliot sometimes composed new names as she drew: Black as the Souls of Mine Enemies, Widow Maker, A Humor So Dark, Night Armor.

  Muscle memory took over her fingers. Swipe, swipe, fill in the blank. Eliot traced curves along her supraorbital ridges while Imogen watched. Fascinated. “Do you always draw the same arch?”

  “More or less.”

  “Do you ever doodle secret messages into them? Something tiny and subliminal?”

  “I’ve—never thought to do that,” Eliot admitted. “What would you write?”

  “‘Hello, there.’ Or ‘Cookies please.’ It’d depend on the day, to be honest. Speaking of.” Imogen hefted up a giant case of hair chalks stacked in rainbow rows—primaries, neons, metallics, white. Some had been used more than others: almost down to the nub. “What color do you think I should go with? Taylor Pink? Marigold? Silver Dream?”

  Eliot couldn’t help renaming the shades: Fairy-Tale Fury, Earwax?, New Robot Overlords. “You change your hair color every day? Isn’t that time-consuming?”

  “I like colors and colors like me,” the other girl said. “Anything’s better than boring old blond.”

  “My hair was blond, before it fell out.” One of the few memories Eliot actually wanted to dissolve. Standing barefoot in the tub, fingers around a fistful of golden strands. They’d looked so short apart from her head, so straggly when she dropped them and shrieked for her mother.

  Her pen hand quivered, turning her left brow cartoonish.

  “Shazm.” There was gravel in Imogen’s whisper. “I’m sorry, Eliot. I wasn’t thinking. It didn’t even occur to me—”

  “Don’t get me wrong. I like your colors, too.” Eliot set down her pen, using a towel to scrub the deviant brow away. “The world gets gloomy. It helps having something bright around.”

  Imogen ran a finger down its color-blocked columns. Rainbow dust clung to her skin—as if she were a fairy gathering a spell. “It’s all about perspective, isn’t it? That’s why Aunt Empra loved time travel so much. She always said the past helped her make sense of the present… sometimes even the future, too. I didn’t understand what she meant until I started traveling. When you witness the breadth of history, you understand how small you are. And yet at the same time you realize how much your life matters… how much you shape the people around you. And vice versa.”

  There was still a tremor in Eliot’s fingers. She stared at the pen nib, waiting for the shake to pass. Usually it wasn’t this hard to put her face on.

  “Anyway, I’m babbling,” Imogen sighed. She plucked two chalks from the case. “If we’re going back to our anchor date, I should default to aquamarine with a hint of bubble-gum pink, for continuity’s sake.”

  “Nebula hair,” Eliot offered.

  “It does sort of look like a nebula, doesn’t it? Celestial ’do, here I come.” The Historian set the aquamarine and pink chalks on the vanity. “I’ll let you finish your eyebrows before I monopolize the washroom. Take your time. I’m off to concoct something strong and caffeinated.”

  The washroom became ten times quieter with her exit, silence that felt more hollow than full. Eliot’s hand had steadied, ready to trace what she’d show the world. She liked the secret message idea, wearing a war cry only she could see at a mirror’s glance. She stared at her reflection—past the burn and the blackheads—and wondered what today’s mantra should be. Fex this? Brace yourself? Zut alors? Carpe diem?

  READINGS ARE 31% COMPLETE, Vera told her. REMEMBER CHARLES.

  Eliot picked up her pen and started to write—spider-leg letters, backward to the casual observer. Once she was finished, she shaded over them, until even the most discerning eye couldn’t pick out what was scripted beneath.

  She fully intended to.

  21

  WOBBLES

  FAR’S FEAR HAD GONE VIRAL. It was the worst thing that could happen from a captain’s perspective, watching your insecurities leak into the crew, nerves crawling all over the console room. Every one of the Invictus’s five passengers stared out the vistaport as Gram guided the time machine down the Tiber. Its water crept brown beneath the evening light. They drifted along with it, past the Castel Sant’Angelo, over bridge after bridge, to a section of river that the men of Central would choose to forget. What was now water would become earth, and what was earth would be hollowed out by Lux and used as a warehouse for his illegal TMs. During Central time, the place was buried in secrecy. Ships like the Invictus could only dock there by jumping through specific years, namely ones where drought had reduced the Tiber to a volume that wouldn’t drown them on impact.

  They’d made it to 2155—a year skies refused to cry and the earth thirsted—without incident, but the stakes were much higher with the docking jump. Lux’s fleet left and landed on an airtight schedule to avoid collisions. One slipped landing became two TMs with volatile fuel rods in the same space became nuclear apocalypse.

  So yeah, nerves.

  Gram brought the Invictus to the exact landing coordinates, settling the ship into muddy shallows. He grabbed one of his Rubik’s Cubes and began twisting.

  Priya slipped on headphones, insulating herself in music.

  Imogen chewed her thumbnail to a saw-toothed quick.

  Eliot didn’t have a tell, but this didn’t stop her anxiety from being palpable. Far tasted it as well as his own. The only one without a care was Saffron, who’d planted himself in the captain’s chair and would’ve melted into its abhorrent orange if not for his facial markings. Far was too hungover to tsk the animal off. It’d been a long sleep and a few waking hours since Caesars Palace, but the wooze of vodka clung to him. Nausea was inevitable for this jump.

  “You sure we can land right this time?” Far asked.

  “Nothing’s sure now, Far,” Gram reminded him.

  Right. All conjecture at this point. Far turned to Eliot. “If you want all of us to get back to Central in one piece, you’d do well to dish anything you might know about wobbly landings. They only started happening when you showed up, and Gram here tells me you were asking about it. It’s not much of a leap to assume that you can help us avoid blowing up.”

  “Which is preferable,” Imogen added.

  Eliot’s eyebrows scrunched together. They looked different today, more substantive. She’d put on another wig—a jet-bl
ack bob that added five years to her appearance. “These… wobbles, as you call them, are relatively random. As far as I know, this landing shouldn’t be affected.”

  So she was connected to the wobble, which meant the wobble was linked to his memory loss. Again, Far felt his forgetting, the shock of it like a limb just amputated. Where had his entrance onto the Titanic gone, and why?

  The question felt too big to ask. He couldn’t imagine the size of the answer.

  “How far do you know?” It was Gram who pressed for truth, because he couldn’t not. “What caused the wobble? What made the numbers change? They did change, right?”

  “Tick-tock, my friends.” Eliot tapped her watchless wrist. “The Rubaiyat’s at stake.”

  Far turned to the nav system. Its center screen was crammed with digits, spattered with symbols, things the Engineer once swore by. Now as Gram sat by his instruments, he had the posturing of a gladiator: ready to attack, bracing for the wounding. His nostrils quivered. He set his cube down, unsolved. Ready or not?

  “We jump,” Far ordered.

  Five breaths held. Five sets of eyes locked onto the vistaport as gloaming surrendered to absolute black. One red panda tucked his nose into his tail, for sounder sleep. Far looked back to the screen, where Gram was wrestling with equations. None of the numbers changed, though there were too many for Far to actually keep track. How the Engineer managed it was a few IQ points beyond him.

  There was no length to how long this solving took, such was the nature of the Grid. Gram punched buttons, and light poured through the vistaport—the manufactured kind that belonged to the lamps of Lux’s warehouse. Harsh under normal circumstances, stabby to the alcohol-soaked senses. Far fumbled his aviators back on, cursing the ingenious soul who had invented vodka.

  “We’re back to anchor time.” He didn’t need Gram’s confirmation, not when he could see two of Lux’s other TMs—the Ad Infinitum and the Armstrong—flanked by their latest shipments. The Engineer offered the time stamp anyway. “August twenty-second, 2371, 1:31 PM.”