Invictus

by Ryan Graudin

  “When the alarms sounded, I wiped the security footage,” Gram explained when he caught Far’s expression. “The Corps will have no idea what went down.”

  “That’s something, at least.” Far turned to Eliot. “Did you download the file?”

  She pulled off her wig, nodding. “One hundred percent.”

  “Shall we watch the last day?” Far gestured to the common area.

  They gathered in the usual clusters—Far and Priya on one couch, Gram and Imogen taking the other. There was hand-holding on his cousin’s side, pheromones finally focused into smiles. Though Far had seen Imogen with this hair color before, he couldn’t remember it being so incandescent. She was all lit, all yellow. Happy as it was, the sight stung.

  A first and a last, they never even had a chance….

  Eliot settled on the floor, cross-legged, freezing when Saffron hopped into her lap. Fear braced her shoulders, but all the red panda did was curl into a ball.

  “Ooooh!” Imogen’s expression went up in wattage. “Saffron doesn’t nap with just anyone, you know. He likes you.”

  Eliot patted the beastie’s head, her palm flat and awkward. “I guess it’s not that bad.”

  The sting settled deeper in Far’s chest. He hadn’t thought he’d miss the Ailurus fulgens, but it seemed the creature had sunk its claws into more than just his shins….

  “Before we get started, I think I’ll make us some tea.” There were no arguments to Priya’s proposal. How could there be when one final time hung unsaid at the end of her sentence?

  Eliot pulled the chip from her pocket universe, drew up the file. Imogen rested her head on Gram’s shoulder while the Engineer stared at their hands, marveling at the pattern of interlocking fingers. Far watched Priya in the kitchenette with the same wonder. He’d seen her make tea on countless occasions, but every detail felt new. The way she smelled each spice before adding it into the boiling water. How she counted each stir beneath her breath. Her care in lining up the mugs’ handles before divvying out the chai. So many lasts adding up, not even a scalding swallow could wash this grief away.

  Losing her might just kill Far before the Fade did.

  They sat with mugs of steaming chai, outside of time, watching Far’s beginning. He didn’t know what to expect when the Ab Aeterno’s final 95 AD footage flickered to life. What the hologram showed was both familiar and surprising.

  Far’s mother had walked the Colosseum’s crumbling circumference with him many times. She was full of facts during those visits, pointing out the thumbprint masonry of the hypogeum, describing how lions used to be stored beneath the arena floor. Not once had she mentioned that she’d seen men bleed there.

  Far had watched datastreams of gladiators before; they were impossible to avoid in Central, where the clash of their blades still echoed round and round the ancient ruins. But this one felt different. It was unedited—raw footage that didn’t skip over ugly things. The violence of the first fight was enough to make Imogen—a seasoned Historian—squint through her fingers.

  How strange to think that his mother had taken this in without blinking. Stranger still to realize that Far had been there in fetus form. He’d heard this crowd with his own ears, racing alongside his mother’s heart: Blood! Blood! Blood! A noise urgent enough to call him out into this ruthless world… Burg’s voice—which Far associated with bedtime stories—sounded surreal as he urged Empra off her bench, down the stairs.

  “Why would Aunt Empra ever want to watch this?” Imogen wondered aloud. “Why does she keep looking back?”

  “Pause.” At Eliot’s command, the hologram froze on the pair of gladiators. “Look at who she’s looking to.”

  “Ugh.” Imogen peeked between her hands. “All I see is blood.”

  “Far…” Priya, her own steel stomach unfazed by the insides of men turned out, leaned toward the projection. “That gladiator looks just like you.”

  Now that the footage was paused, Far had time to study the fighters. Priya was right. The gladiator with his back to the wall wore no helmet. Though what helmet could contain such dead-ringer curls? And the nose… Far had always wondered where his most dramatic feature had come from.

  Now he knew. He knew so many things: why his mother insisted on teaching him Latin, why she’d called him by his middle name in the Library of Alexandria, why she’d stayed to watch this brutal match, why his skin was always tan while every other McCarthy’s burned at the first glimpse of sun, why he forever needed to move-move-strive-fight. It wasn’t just timelessness in his blood, but battle, too.

  Eliot was the first to state the obvious. “That’s our father.”

  “Oooooh, Aunt Empra!” Imogen gasped. “Courting a gladiator! No wonder Burg classified this datastream! She would’ve been in such deep shazm had anyone found out.”

  “That’s why your DNA is fudged in Central’s systems,” Priya said. “It wasn’t just a common discretion clause. It was so no one could prove your father wasn’t one of the Ab Aeterno’s crew members.”

  Far should have felt surprised, but facing his father’s image—back to wall, blade to throat—struck a much deeper chord. The sadness that was always beneath his mother’s eyes, dictating her smile, made sense now. This wasn’t just a one-night sperm donation.

  This was love.

  “Why does anyone look back?” It wasn’t hard to imagine the emotions behind the datastream when Far’s own chest was a pulpy mess. When he turned to see Priya—still here, still next to him, but for how long? “She didn’t want to leave him.”

  Her lips went tight. He wanted to cry again.

  Instead, Far braced himself for the worst as the datastream played on, but that view of his father was the last. Empra ran from the stadium’s roar, pausing every few minutes to lean on columns, huffing through her pain while Burg recited encouragements: “C’mon, McCarthy! Keep going. You’re almost here!” The datastream’s visual had gone misty when Empra finally did reach the Ab Aeterno, her tears turning Burg into a giant blob. The time stamp, at least, was clear: 9:10 AM when she boarded the Ab Aeterno, 9:14 when the clock froze and froze and froze and Far’s very first breath of ageless air expelled with a scream.

  The boy who should not have been was born, and something disastrous with him.

  The datastream ended. Far stared through the vistaport, wondering if that very birth was happening out there in the black.

  “Poor Aunt Empra,” Imogen whispered. “Poor gladiator. This is so hashing sad.”

  “It doesn’t have to be.” Priya’s eyes went from smoky to steel: a hard shine. “Far’s father doesn’t have to die.”

  “I’m pretty sure his name is Gaius,” Far offered.

  Priya went on, “We want to get Empra back to the Ab Aeterno well before nine ten. If she was lingering to watch Gaius’s fight, then it makes sense to free him. Yes?”

  “You can’t just free a gladiator,” Imogen told them. “There’s a whole system in place. Most of them are slaves or prisoners of war, and even the men who volunteered are bound to their lanista overseers to the point of death. If Gaius goes missing, his lanista will rip apart the city searching for him. And it’s not as if he can hitch a ride to Central….”

  “So what do you propose?” Priya asked. “Letting Gaius die while one of us drags Empra back to the ship by force?”

  “Maybe not that.” Far’s cousin made a face. “Farway and his father look so much alike that Aunt Empra called him Gaius in the Library of Alexandria. Perhaps there’s a way to fool her back onto the Ab Aeterno.”

  The footage of his father was gone, but Far kept seeing him: curls splayed against the stones, ready to fight until the end. The image reframed his entire childhood. Seven years with his mother and her mourning, she didn’t want to leave Gaius, she’d always regretted it….

  The Code of Conduct lay open before him, title down. Far could see where ink from Gram’s illustration had bled through—arrows and cracks, a picture in pieces. The stick man didn�
��t appear on this side of the page.

  He knew what he had to do.

  “I’ll take my father’s place. If I claim Gaius’s spot in the arena, the lanista won’t think my father escaped when one of you takes him to meet my mom. Empra can say good-bye to Gaius, and she’ll leave in time to create a pivot point.”

  “You? A gladiator? Are you out of your hashing mind?” Imogen’s shout supernovaed through the common area. “Farway, these guys live and breathe slaughter. A few fencing lessons at the Academy won’t mean squat when you step into that ring.”

  Yeah, he’d figured. Far had never been that great at swordplay anyway, as the scar on his biceps reminded him. “I don’t have to win the match. I can’t. The Fade’s present is linked with mine, right? My death won’t stop my past from being erased, but it’s the best chance this new universe has at living. It’s the only thing that might prevent the countersignature from passing through the pivot point. Cut the string, end the signal before the Ab Aeterno takes off, stop the echoes of my wrong birth before I’m born right again.”

  Priya became a statue, leg rigid against his. Far wasn’t sure he could bear her expression, so he stared at the ceiling instead. The ship’s skeleton pipes were too easy to see through the thinning wardrobe. Why the Hades would he wear such an eye-gougingly bright flash-leather suit?

  His next question was a footnote: “What’s a little extra blood in the scheme of things?”

  “It’s awful!” Imogen cried. “It’s awful and you’re being too hashing heroic to see straight! If you die before the Fade finds our present, where does that leave us? With a pile of clothes and no minds to call our own? Playing pincushion will only make a mess! Tell him, Gram!”

  “I can’t.” The Engineer cleared his throat, and again, harder, as if to dislodge some hidden feeling there. “I mean, I don’t like it, but Far’s theory about the countersignature has merit. For all of Ackerman’s horribleness, the man was right. The Fade must be contained, and this is the cost.”

  “It doesn’t have to be sad.” There wasn’t much left to Far—his memories shedding like autumn leaves, time sliding in the wrong direction—but his fate was yet in his hands. More fates, still. He looked around at his crew: Imogen, Eliot, Saffron, Gram, Priya. Priya… “If we succeed, the pain won’t even be a distant dream.”

  Stone, all stone, stayed her lips. No words left them, nor did they tremble.

  “I’m with Far,” Eliot said. “We’ll find a way to free Gaius—”

  “How?” asked Imogen. “He’ll be locked up in his cell at the ludus.”

  Eliot held up her wrist; a seam between dimensions shimmered against hairless skin. “This pocket universe doesn’t just hold clothing and sundries. I can carry Far into the cell and take Gaius out. If I intercept Empra on her way to the Colosseum and redirect her to the Ab Aeterno, they’ll have a chance to say good-bye.”

  “I can be on the ground,” Gram volunteered. “Something as important as this requires a second set of hands.”

  Far’s cousin walked over to the clothing pile and dug the toga from the bottom. “If this is really what we’re doing, we’ll need another toga. As for three live datastreams… Gram might be able to keep up with that many screens, but I’ll be overloaded.”

  “It’s okay, Imogen. I can get to the arena without comm support. You shouldn’t have to watch…” My death, the silence said, and Far faltered. How could he give himself over to the sword when he couldn’t even form the words? Talking talk, thinking thoughts was easy. But to stand where his father had stood, to feel the years wasting behind, the ones ahead sliced short…

  “I’ll manage your comm.” Priya reached for his hand. “Through lights and time and whatever else comes our way. Even this.”

  Her palm filled his with warmth, the kind that seeped through pores and lit a path to the heart. Fortitude? No. Bravery? No. Hope? In any other circumstance, Far might have said so. But as the saying went: Dum spiro spero. Hope could not outlast the breather. Love, however… Love was something not even death could conquer, because at the end of everything, even life, he was hers. If Far could wield his father’s trident, wear his father’s wounds, claim his father’s quietus, this last might give way to next.

  Maybe not for him—blade and Fade, dead and done.

  Maybe not for her—past lost forever at best.

  But for them.

  Blood or none, it was a chance worth seizing.

  39

  DENTAL HYGIENE IS THE MAIN CONCERN

  INVICTUS SHIP’S LOG—ENTRY 6

  OUR UNIVERSE IS COLLAPSING. WHAT ELSE IS THERE TO DO BUT MAKE A NEW ONE? RAGE, RAGE, AND ALL THAT. AT LEAST I GOT KISSED BEFORE MY UNTIMELY SPIRAL INTO SENILITY. YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST, FOLKS. IMOGEN MCCARTHY AND GRAM WRIGHT KISSED. A HAPPILY EVER MOMENT, WORTH DECLARING BEFORE THE AFTER PART JOINS THE PARTY.

  HERE ARE SOME BRAIN YOGA EXERCISES: ARE YOU YOU WITHOUT YOUR MEMORIES? IF NOT, WHO DO YOU BECOME? IF SO, ARE YOU ALSO YOU IN A PARALLEL UNIVERSE?

  I HAVE TO STOP WRITING IN THIS LOG AND MAKE A TOGA. STAY TUNED FOR MY TAKE. TO BE HONEST, YOU’LL BE WAITING AWHILE. TO BE HONEST, HONEST, YOU DON’T EXIST, BECAUSE NO ONE IS READING THIS. RIP SPIRIT OF THE INVICTUS.

  THE SHEETS WERE A THOUSAND THREAD count, so soft that kings might weep to sleep on them. Imogen herself had spent many a slumbering hour in the bedding—as evidenced by the neon streaks on her pillowcase. She tossed this aside. Nuclear Green + Taylor Pink + Aquamarine were not shades common to Ancient Roman fashion. Neither was cotton woven with a high-speed automatic air-jet loom, but options for craft-your-own-toga fabric were slim at the moment. Using bedsheets wouldn’t be the end of the world—HA.

  (Sardonic humor must be genetic, huh? Dominant McCarthy trait.)

  Even Imogen’s seamstress tools were makeshift. From the infirmary: curved needles and surgical thread. There was dental floss, too, in case she ran out. Floss upon unused floss. Some of the Invictus crew members must’ve been lying to their dentist-droids.

  “Need any help?”

  Blushing when she heard Gram’s voice—sonorous song of a sound—was reflex at this point. Imogen’s cheeks fuzzed pink, but she didn’t curse herself this time. Instead, she looked toward the door, where the Engineer stood, elbow propped to frame. The air between them was Grid-dizzy. Her smile swam in it.

  Gram’s dimples grew as he stepped closer. “What?”

  “I like you.”

  “Haven’t those parameters been established?”

  Kiss number two was even better than its predecessor. For as many day—and night—dreams Imogen had spent on the subject, kissing Gram, really kissing him, was something fantasies couldn’t hold a candle to. It was give and receive, find him, show him, warmth exchanged. It was a sparkle in her spine, thrilling to her fingertips.

  “Just making sure the words still worked,” she murmured, forehead resting beneath his chin. “Do you floss?”

  Sealed lips stunted his laugh. “Not a question a guy wants to hear post-kiss. Are you insinuating that I should?”

  “Oh, no. You have very nice breath. The best.” Alas, Imogen’s foot-in-mouth curse had no fairy-tale cure! “I was only wondering because I have too much floss to sew this toga with. After the gelato and tiramisu we’ve been eating, I fear we may have some cavities on board. Naturally, our dental hygiene is my main concern at the moment….”

  “Naturally.” Gram’s embrace tensed, biceps going sharp through his sleeves. “I floss every twenty-four hours. You?”

  “Not enough.” Imogen couldn’t remember her last plaque-be-gone session, probably because the Fade had stolen it, the way it was stealing everything else. STUPID LIFE-GUZZLING FORGETTING. Standing here in Gram’s arms should’ve had the chance to become a memory, recounted to their many fur-babies. Chinchillas and quokkas and sugar gliders and other pint-sized cutenesses. “I’m not sure I did enough of anything….”

  “We’re not over yet,” he whispered above her.

  Chalk dusted
his chin—bumblebee yellow—when Imogen pulled away. She brushed it off with her thumb, thinking of the many colors this could’ve been, had she just told him earlier: every pillowcase shade, a rainbow’s entire reach. Maybe their 2.0 versions could span that spectrum in the next life… whatever next life meant. Limber though Imogen’s thoughts might be, they couldn’t wrap around the pivot point’s existential implications.

  “You’re right.” There was a toga to be sewn. “Were you serious about wanting to help?”

  “There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing.”

  “I need a pen to mark out the panels. Do you still have the one I lent you?”

  “It’s in the common area.” Gram looked through the door, where the others were reviewing Empra’s datastream on repeat for planning purposes. “I’ll go get it.”

  One more kiss left her insides swirling like a glitter snow globe.

  SUCCESSES IN IMOGEN’S LOVE LIFE: **TEN THOUSAND SPARKLE-HEART EMOJIS**

  Saffron skipped in from the common area. Imogen intercepted the animal, scooping him up before he could turn the clean sheet into his personal art project. The garment would be avant-garde enough without a red panda paw-print pattern.

  Her fluffy ward gave a series of chirps. The noises often had a conversational quality—Insert food here! or Why so sad? or You humans are interrupting my daily twelve hours of slumber. Imogen didn’t translate so much as choose the subject matter. This cheep cheep chirrup turned into I always liked Gram. I’m glad you two found each other. Not like this was a game of hide-and-seek or anything. I love hide-and-seek. Especially with your favorite hair chalk colors. No one will ever find Mint Medley now….

  “I know.” She smiled down at the creature. “I got lucky.”

  40

  A NEW LOW FOR ACKERMAN

  AGENT AUGUST ACKERMAN’S VISION WAS BEGINNING to pull itself back together. Instead of three steel tables, twelve men, and an infinity mirror, his surroundings were thirded. He found himself restrained to a chair with handcuffs. There was a coppery residue coating his tongue, but a swallow determined it to be the aftermath of the stunrod’s current. Not blood.