Invictus

by Ryan Graudin

  Datastreams held more answers. There were none from their target landing year, but a Recorder had taken a long wander through the library in 52 BC. Imogen watched the footage in 8 to get a sense of the layout. The place was large, with three stories of rooms for every activity: reading, greeting, lecturing, even eating. There were windows galore, wide open to views of gardens and the harbor, complete with its iconic lighthouse. For the library’s scholars, this meant ample daylight to read by. For Farway and Eliot, this meant escape routes. Imogen took note of each one, just in case. With its walls and walls of diamond-shaped shelves stuffed with papyrus scrolls, the place looked awfully combustible.

  It was fire they were facing; she was certain. Though there were no expeditions present at the event, later Recorders had managed to glean enough oral history to fill in the gaps. December 16, 48 BC. Alexandria, Egypt: a city under siege. Caesar. A battle with boats. Lots o’ flames. The Roman ruler hadn’t destroyed all of the library, just made an ash pile out of hundreds of thousands of its irreplaceable books.

  Oops.

  If she were Caesar, she’d probably omit that not-so-tiny detail, too.

  It never ceased to amaze Imogen how much she could get done alongside a ticking clock. In the span of hours she had a date. She had a (very loose) time frame. She’d set the translation tech to a combination of Greek, Coptic, and Latin.

  Now all she needed were clothes.

  This particular errand was tight. Imogen had gotten so caught up in datastreams and note-taking that she’d almost forgotten the wardrobe component. Most of the boutiques, including her not-really-former place of employment, locked their doors at sunset, and Imogen had no desire to break into the store, so she found herself jogging along Zone 2’s ground level, racing the Flaming Hour. Walkways buzzed with the onset of dusk. Even on Sunday it was a time for rushing, when government officials broke from their work stupor to put sustenance in their bodies. Vendor tents popped up at the base of each skyscraper, numerous as spring weeds, selling everything from meal blocks to stimulant patches to obscenely priced pizza with garlic and greenhouse tomatoes—and CHEESE. Imogen’s stomach growled at her to stop, but her watch vetoed the motion.

  “Make way!” She mucked through the masses. Elbows, bags of roasted nuts, shoulders, holo-paper zines, toes she could not avoid stomping on. “Apologies. Condolences. Make way! Make way!”

  Gram moved in a silent path behind her. He was much better at navigating a crowd—those with Recorder training always were—probably imagining it as one big Tetris game. Imogen would’ve let him lead, but she had a better idea of where they were going. It was a path she’d walked most mornings through periwinkle haze, past the Department of Agriculture, with its fifty-story-high wall gardens, through the financial district—Imogen had often bought her morning stimulant patches from the vendors here, since they were twice as strong to keep the bankers goinggoinggoing—along a man-made canal and into the Palisades, a residential district where new houses put on their best old-money faces. Many of the senators had “city-houses” here, and Imogen often wondered how many of the globe’s laws were decided behind their lion-knocker doors.

  The boutique—Before & Beyond—sat at the edge of this neighborhood. Its ground-level walls were made of holo-glass: programmable to a variety of vistas. Right now they mimicked a jazz club from the 1930s, which meant it was Bel’s shift. The shopkeeper’s expression flickered when the door opened—veiled annoyance, Imogen knew. She felt it, too, when customers sauntered in five till close. Once he spotted the hair, his face went just as bright. He set down the poodle skirt he was clipping to a hanger.

  “Imogen! Dearest! Come to check your schedule? You could’ve just comm-ed.”

  Schedule? Oh right. Technically she still worked here, though it’d been ages since her last shift: a few days in Central time, weeks for Imogen. As much as she wanted to hand in her notice, having access to the store’s closet was worth staying on its payroll.

  “Hi, Bel! I—we were hoping to get into the closet before you left.”

  “We?” The man’s face lit even more as he looked over Imogen’s shoulder, where Gram stood, studying an early-twenty- third-century mirror gown. “Oh! Who is this?”

  “My…” Oh Crux—she couldn’t say coworker. Bel was her coworker.

  “Your…?” Bel prodded.

  Bluebox blunders on a blathering whale’s tail! She couldn’t even say his name now because then the pairing would be My Gram and her pause had gone on a beat too long. Welcome to the pinkest skin that had ever graced her cheeks.

  “Friend,” Imogen finished, flustered. “Gram’s my friend.”

  At least she couldn’t see Gram’s fallout face, mercifully behind her. She’d already spent most of the day analyzing his expressions, trying to scrape whole memories from Vegas. They’d danced together. His smile had made Imogen feel floaty. After that the night went splintery. Lights. Blur. Bodies. Booze.

  Curse Belvedere and its ability to make her talk!

  Something important had happened during those lost moments… Imogen was sure of it. A raw, fundamental thing had shifted; there’d been such a tension between them all day. Stumbly words, caught glances, cleared throats, all while her heart pitter-patter wilted. It was every awkwardness she’d feared, plus some.

  Gram was far from awkward now. His levitating grin returned as he introduced himself to the shopkeeper. “Gram Wright.”

  “A pleasure. Bel Fisher.” Bel shook the Engineer’s outstretched hand; his eyebrows waggled at Imogen in a terribly unsubtle fashion.

  “Can we get in the closet?” she croaked. “Please?”

  “Sure, sure. As long as you make it snappy. I’m meeting Jansen for dinner. Well, dinner for me, breakfast for him, seeing as he works nights and all. I’ve told you about Jansen, right? Redhead. Dreamy. Does security for the Corps. It was Mrs. Chun who introduced us—”

  “We’re on a bit of a time crunch as well,” Gram prodded.

  “Indeed?” Bel’s gaze bounced between the pair. “What’s the occasion? Dinner? Dancing? Dalliances?”

  Imogen wanted to crawl under the mink coats and hibernate for the rest of her life, but the shopkeeper was already heading off to the back room to unlock the closet entrance. “We’re going to a toga party,” she said.

  “How retro! There are plenty to choose from down there. Virilis, candida, trabea, praetexta. We might even have a few picta, too.” Bel waved at the wrought-iron stairs. “You know your way around. Just bring up what you need and I’ll run it through the system.”

  Imogen muttered her thanks before rushing down the staircase. Gram’s steps echoed behind her, accented by the fact that they were alone.

  What had she said in Vegas?

  What should she say now? Talk, talk, tell him was the only thing on her mind, thanks to Eliot, who hadn’t been as helpful at salvaging the dark hours as Imogen hoped. Instead of doing reconnaissance, the girl had suggested that Gram make the wardrobe run in Farway’s place.

  Now they were here and Imogen had no words.

  Gram didn’t, either, but his speechlessness was caused by the view. What the employees of Before & Beyond called a closet was more along the lines of a warehouse—millennia’s worth of styles on hundreds of racks. Some eras were better represented than others. The 1920s had an entire row dedicated to beaded gowns, while the 1120s consisted of a few flared-sleeved tunics, probably on order for a Recorder expedition.

  “Some closet.” Gram whistled. “Got any string we could tie to the bottom of the stairs to find our way back?”

  He was making jokes. That had to be good, right? Should she joke back? Should she smile? Would that scare him off? Why was her brain rushing along at a thousand kilometers an hour while she stood there paralyzed?

  Pull it together, McCarthy.

  “No need.” Imogen knew this place backward and forward. “The BC section is this way.”

  “So this is where you come to get outfits. I always wond
ered.”

  “The Corps uses it, too. All of this stuff is accurate, sometimes painfully so.” Imogen paused to take a whalebone corset from the eighteenth-century rack. “These reshaped women’s rib cages, you know.”

  “That’s”—Gram’s eyes went wide, and Imogen realized exactly just what she was holding—“awful.”

  “Right?” NOTE TO SELF: AVOID SHOWING OFF LADIES’ UNDERWEAR TO CRUSH. INCITES DEER-IN-HEADLIGHTS LOOK. She returned the corset to its rack and kept walking toward the BC section. It was smaller than the closet’s AD portion, if only because the citizens of the ancient world had less to work with. Plant dyes, flax fiber, and sheep’s wool. Hades, some of the Greeks preferred no clothes at all!

  Even still, there was plenty to choose from. Alexandria was a port city founded by the Greeks in Egypt, which meant that Farway and Eliot could get away with numerous styles. Imogen’s magpie nature gravitated toward traditional Egyptian garb—jewels, kohl, gold—but such shininess would draw too much attention. Best to go with something simple.

  “A toga virilis or a chiton?” She took one of each from the racks. “That’s the question.”

  Gram squinted at both linen garments. “Is there a difference?”

  “Roman or Greek. There’ll be some Romans about, especially since they’ll be in Caesar’s section of the city. Farway is fluent in Latin, so it’d be safer to go Roman if anything happened to his translation tech.”

  “You did tell Bel we were getting togas,” Gram pointed out.

  Imogen chose a toga virilis for Farway and an unadorned stola for Eliot. Below the rack was a row of leather shoes. They weren’t as finely crafted as hers—straight from the source—but one would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the reproduction and the original.

  CLOTHES: CHECK

  SHOES: CHECK

  DIGNITY: MOSTLY INTACT, NO THANKS TO BEL. AS LONG AS YOU GET OUT OF HERE WITHOUT SAYING SOMETHING IRRETRIEVABLY STUPID.

  Gram, however, seemed in no rush to leave. He’d taken a bright purple toga picta off the rack. “These must have been comfortable.”

  “Hashing comfortable. Like walking around in a cloud all day.” Imogen nodded to the golden embroidery on the outfit’s edges. “Showy, too. It’s what generals used for their victory parades.”

  “You know so much.” Gram looked out over the warehouse: Regency gowns and neon jumpsuits, armor and tuxedos. “There’s so much to know.”

  “Says the boy with two Academy tracks to his name.”

  “Never did make it to Historian.” His smile went past wry into crescent-moon territory. “It’s amazing, everything you do.”

  Imogen’s insides were starting to go zero G again. She grabbed the rack next to her to keep from floating off, an impossibility that seemed very likely, because dimples! “Well, I mean, guiding a ship full of miscreants through time is pretty snazzy, too.”

  “That’s just numbers.” Gram shrugged.

  “Just numbers! Ha! There’s a reason I make you sort out multicentury exchange rates. ’Twere I an Engineer, we’d probably get stuck halfway between the Grid and the late Cretaceous Period, watching T. rexes tromp about through the vistaport.”

  The Engineer’s grin grew, lifting Imogen another few centimeters. “Getting stuck like that isn’t possible.”

  “Exactly.” She smiled back. “I’m that bad at math. Being a Historian is just teaching yourself to learn. It’s about knowing the landscape to a T, but also being flexible for whatever curveballs the past tosses your way.”

  “I wish I could live in the tangled places so confidently.”

  Really? One of the things she loved about Gram was his neatness. There was always an order to the way he did things, a predictability that was more comfortable than boring. He was steady, stoic, smart. He was always there, in the chair across from hers—taking them beyond, bringing them home. He was perfectly him.

  “Your brain works in clicks and mine in swirls,” Imogen said. “The Invictus needs both.”

  “Clicks and swirls.” The words had felt like mist from her lips; they solidified against Gram’s when he repeated them. “I like that.”

  This exchange was going well. She hadn’t said anything stupid. The awkwardness she’d feared between them all day was nowhere to be felt. There was a tension, but it was a good kind—less like scraping teeth, more of a whisper down her skin, shivering to the end of every capillary.

  Priya and Eliot popped up on her shoulders, cartoon consciences. Instead of the normal angel-devil routine, both said the same thing: Tell him.

  Imogen squeezed the Roman garments to her chest and wondered if she could. Was there enough courage clinging to her? Enough to say I like you, maybe, but could she survive the break if he didn’t feel the same way? Could she walk back to the Invictus with him in one piece? Could she sit in the chair across from him every day after, feeling the jaggedness between them, a fresh wound every time?

  She had to say something. This silence was getting ridiculous.

  Her breath hitched. Her mouth opened.

  Gram’s did, too. “Look, Imogen. Last night—”

  The darkness cut him short. Above them the warehouse lights died, then hummed slowly back to life. Bel’s way of saying Closing time! There are places to be and people to see!

  “We’ll be up in a second!” she yelled at the stairwell, mind tumbling. Look, Imogen was a phrase ripe for disappointment; nothing good could follow it. She could still get out of here with her dignity intact, but she’d have to act fast. “It was great, wasn’t it? Look, we need to jet. If I’m the reason Bel’s late for a date, I’ll never live it down. Do you want to pick up some pizza for the crew on the way back?”

  Swirling, swirly, swirls. The lights hadn’t recovered from the switch, the closet dim around them. Imogen’s vision was broken down to outlines—linen rumpled in her arms, the sharp edges of racks. Though Gram stood close to her, most of his expression was lost. The only thing she could see for sure was that his smile was gone.

  “Yeah, sure. Pizza sounds great.”

  He turned to leave. Imogen followed, wondering if she’d said something irretrievably stupid after all.

  26

  TUMBLING INTO A PAPYRUS TINDERBOX

  THE INVICTUS WAS ALREADY IN FLIGHT, gliding over the Mediterranean with all the grace and shape of a moon-stung cloud. June 11, 2155 was a beautiful night—stars blanketing the black like a chorus—but none of the crew paused to savor it. Far and the others were eating pizza instead, nibbling through two large hot-boxes of Margherita pie, plus a pan of tiramisu. The dinner and adjacent planning session were a shipwide affair—even Bartleby was there, dressed in a toga. The stola meant for Eliot hung by Saffron’s tail with the rest of the wardrobe, linen hem just long enough to graze Far’s head every time he moved.

  He fought the urge to swat at it.

  Imogen stood by the mannequin’s side, walking the crew through the finer points of their heist. It wasn’t like his cousin to get stage fright—but her briefing came across shaky. Throat clearing, hair tucking, sentences riddled with ums.

  “The Library of Alexandria was, um, the most significant collection of knowledge in the ancient world. Poetry, physics, philosophy, astronomy… This place had it all, until Caesar’s conflagration situation. Eliot’s, um, buyers have their credits set aside for two works in particular: the manuscripts of the Greek lyric poet Sappho and the history of the ancient world as recorded by Berossus. The exact locations of these scrolls are unknown, but, um, the librarians had an elaborate cataloging system. Sappho’s writings are thought to be kept somewhere in the, um, northwest corner. The Babylonaica is on the other side of the building. We think.”

  “We think?” Grease leaked down Far’s fingers with his first flashing bite. Ow! The hot-box had done its job too well. He felt mozzarella scald its way down his throat, sticking to the side of his chest. Some of the burn regurgitated with his words. “I’d like more than thinking before I go tumbling into
a papyrus tinderbox.”

  “I’m doing the best I can,” Imogen protested. “Considering.”

  “Of course you are.” Priya nudged Far’s rib cage as she said this.

  It was hard not to be irritable—the relief of not being dead negated by the magcart ride. Eliot’s caginess stung extra hard after his offer to help. He was a hero spurned. No, it felt worse than that. He’d become a bystander in someone else’s story.

  There was one bright spot to cling to: Priya’s new diagnostics machine, currently cross-referencing Eliot’s DNA with a world’s worth of people. The process was—understandably—ponderous. Priya had spent most of her afternoon in the infirmary, installing the Ancestral Archives software out of Eliot’s sight. In a few more hours they’d have a lead on the girl’s identity. An ancestor, an origin year, something seizable.

  “There’s evidence to support the locations,” his cousin went on. “Previous expeditions… and, um, Eliot’s intelligence.”

  Far tried not to choke on the water he was sipping.

  “My intel’s solid,” Eliot assured him. “I’ve been to the library before.”

  Imogen cleared her throat, schoolteacher style. “Things get rather, um, fuzzy when it comes to the timeline….”

  Far chewed the rest of his slice and listened to the long list of everything they didn’t know. The mission felt more slipshod than anything they’d ever tackled. Lux had never before sent them into such a vaguely documented event, nor had they ever had such a short prep time. Twelve scrambling hours. And for what? They were time travelers. Time was one thing they possessed in abundance.

  Eliot remained zip-lipped on the reason for her rush order and, to tell the truth, Far wasn’t sure more time would help. December 16, 48 BC, was one of history’s grayer, unmapped areas. Imogen’s homework would only take them so far. The rest was down to vigilance and improvisation. To get through this heist unscathed, they’d need all hands on deck.