Invictus
“Good thinking!” Far slid from the couch. Destination? The honeycomb bunks.
Priya risked no contamination, donning latex gloves before retrieving the spoon from her purse, unwrapping the napkin with an archaeologist’s care. She cupped it in both hands— artifact and offering—all the way into the infirmary. It would only take one swab to get what she needed, but Priya did two for good measure, pausing to fold her hands and whisper a prayer to Ganesh—remover of obstacles, miniature statue at her workstation. The god’s elephant head watched, serene, as she placed the sample in the reader. It was an older diagnostics machine, nothing like the fancy scanners in some of the newer CTMs. This had never posed a problem before, but the crew’s injuries were often minor: scrapes and burns, food poisoning, a common cold every once in a while. Running DNA aboard the Invictus was a first.
When Priya inserted the sample, the diagnostics machine wheezed so loud that Saffron perked his tented ears and trundled into the infirmary. He sat on the floor, eyes latched to the screen, entranced by the hourglass cursor that never seemed to run out of sand.
“Keep an eye on that for me,” she instructed the red panda and went to check Eliot’s bunk. The place was wrecked: sheets everywhere, the mattress upended. Far was on his hands and knees, prying up floor panels that had no business being bothered, elbow deep in wires he knew nothing about. Priya, who did know about the wires and how they connected to the ship’s power grid, was quick to warn him. “Careful. One wrong move and we’ll have a fritzed Invictus with fried Far on the side.”
“The Rubaiyat isn’t here! Nothing’s here!” Far scowled. “Eliot was wearing a yellow dress when she showed up, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then where is it?”
“Not in the floor.” It wasn’t in the hanging wardrobe, either, though Priya spent several seconds scanning for the frill. “That’s odd.”
Unsettling, actually.
Far dropped the floor panel back into place, frowning. “She must have a hidey-hole somewhere. Will you help me check the console room?”
She did, if only to keep him from tugging at even bigger, badder wires. Both of them made a thorough search of it. More floor panels were lifted, drawers were opened, overhead pipes were checked. They even tipped Bartleby over to see if something had been hidden in his hollow torso.
Nothing, except for several tumbleweeds of Saffron’s fur.
There was a chime from the infirmary just as Priya set the mannequin back on its stand. Answers. Finally! She made her way to the workstation. Gone was the hourglass, a full DNA profile in its place. The report was a mess of Gs and Ts and As and Cs, mapped with graph lines. Data too raw for Priya to read—geneticist she was not. The machine had managed the hardest part, turning markers into more familiar language: female, age range fifteen to twenty, Alopecia universalis.
Two eyes and a Medic degree had already told her as much. There had to be more juicy secrets hiding in this saliva…. She scrolled down the sequence. Reports automatically cited census data—linking chromosomes to ID numbers. Every single person in Central time was stored in the system. Even Far, whose genetic profile was as censored as an ancient war letter, was matched with one of his old Academy pictures: skull-cropped hair, grin thrice as cocky.
Priya kept scrolling.
No picture. No name. No ID number.
NO MATCH FOUND.
She read the results—again and again—until the words disintegrated into letters, the letters into meaningless light. Eliot wasn’t just a hologram, but a ghost. She did not exist. Well, obviously she existed; her spit was on a spoon. The phantom status was digital and, according to previous suspicions, logical. Eliot was either black ops or a citizen of the future. Erased or unwritten.
“What’s the verdict?” Far had rooted through couch cushions, finding nothing but a Beats on Blast holo-paper zine Priya hadn’t realized was lost. Its battery was almost drained, review of a 1969 Woodstock datastream in the throes of death. A clip of Jimi Hendrix’s legendary “Star-Spangled Banner” performance flickered between his fingers. In and out, in and… gone. Far’s expression was the same when he read the screen. “Dead end?”
“Detour,” she said, determined. “Just because Eliot is MIA in the system doesn’t mean we can’t dig up some leads. Ever heard of the Ancestral Archives?”
“The program where you shell out credits to get a pedigree?”
“That’s one application.” Certainly the most popular. The program was established for learning more about hereditary diseases, but like everything else in the world, it evolved at the eve of time travel. With history forever blasting through people’s ears and eyes and hearts, it was natural they’d want to know their place in it. Discovering your many-times-great-grandfather was Albert Einstein did wonders for the ego—never mind that thousands of others could make the same claim. “It cross-references DNA databases for all sorts of things. Estate settlements, medical research, lineage mapping. This program could help us. People don’t appear out of nowhere—even future ones. Depending on the types of genetic matches we get, we might be able to figure out what year Eliot’s from.”
“Great! Let’s run it!”
“We don’t have the software or the hardware. This two-bit piece of shazm is at its limit.” Priya gave the diagnostics machine a healthy thwack with her fist. It snarled back. “We have to jump back to Central for answers.”
Central, where Lux was waiting for a book they didn’t have. A prospect Far summed up with a single syllable: “Ugh.”
“Ugh is right.” Priya moved to the common area, surveying the mess they’d made. Uneven floor panels, dislodged cushions, Eliot’s bunk in shambles—so much to clean up and nothing to show for it. She flopped onto the couch. “Seems this trip was a waste. I’m sorry, Far.”
“Sorry?” He settled beside her, curl-to-cheek close. “What’ve you got to be sorry for? I mean, except for getting a banana split when you clearly should’ve ordered gelato. That’s tantamount to a criminal act in Imogen’s eyes.”
It wasn’t quite a laugh-aloud joke, but it did make Priya smile. She rested her hand on Far’s, taking a moment to marvel at their physicality. Knuckles, knicks, calluses. Veins, tendons, pores. All touching, not a shadow to be found.
“I know what I want.” This, the resonance, a connection past flesh. “How about you—what did you wish for?”
“Wishes have the same weight as luck in my palmdrive. You want something, you make it happen. No need to go spitting on a perfectly nice dessert.”
“Play the cynic all you want with the rest of the crew, but I know you made that wish.” She’d seen it in his eyes, the way they caught the sparkler, drinking its brilliance spark by spark. It was the look Far got when he honed in on something—intense, fixed, as if nothing in all of time or space could stop him. But what did a boy like Farway McCarthy wish for? There were so many possibilities: amassing a fortune, trumping Eliot, making his mark, finding the Ab Aeterno…
Priya could only guess, and that was why she wanted to know. For as many touches and glances and whispers as they’d exchanged, there was still a part of her boyfriend that felt distant. A side of himself he either didn’t share… or couldn’t. Sometimes it seemed to her like an emptiness. Other times, a hunger.
Love should be all, but all was always growing.
“You’re right.” He smiled at her—there was no sparkler glow in his face now but sunlight. A slant of it reached through the Invictus’s vistaport, wrapping around their shoulders. “But if I tell you, it won’t come true. Isn’t that how the old legends go?”
Priya had no idea, though it did sound like the ragged remnant of a fairy tale, something twenty-first-century people might cling to. That or Far was making the whole thing up. She’d have to quiz Imogen on birthday lore when they reunited.
Which should be soon…. Three hours had sounded like an age when she’d cited it, but time passed faster when Priya and Far were alone together. There wa
s never enough—every second, every breath felt stolen.
“The others will be waiting for us.” Priya hated to say it. How many moments like this had she wanted to press Pause? To rest her head against his shoulder as long as she possibly could? Instead, their lives felt stuck on Fast-Forward. Flying here and there, caught up in capers, rushing, rushing, rushing…
… to what, exactly?
“Someone’s always waiting for something. Imogen and Gram are at the biggest grown-up playground in the world. I think they can manage to keep Eliot distracted for a few more hours.” Far smiled. “If you wanted to pick up where we left off.”
Oh did she.
Plastic spoons, the missing Rubaiyat, the unsettled rush—all this faded when Far’s fingers trailed up her arm, along the garment’s green gauze, over the bare skin of her shoulder. This was the pause, the beat, the shiver…. Something worthy of a snapshot. Priya could command her interface to take an actual photograph, but she preferred collecting the details of Far through memory alone. His eyelashes, thick as ink. The sun spiraling off his curls. The many degrees of emotion caught in the angle of his lips. Herself—far away in the center of his eyes—another world of details and memories made.
It was a still point. A perfect moment.
She let it stretch on as long as she could.
18
IN THE GARDEN OF THE GODS
SO MUCH WASTE.
It was impossible not to think this, sitting in the Garden of the Gods. There were seven different swimming pools in Caesars Palace, most named after the expected gods: Bacchus, Apollo, Venus. It wasn’t the imitation of grandeur that bothered Eliot, though it was underwhelming after standing in the shadows of real Roman columns. It was the assuredness of excess: fountains gushing in the desert, middle finger to Mother Nature, partygoers reveling while a few miles away Lake Mead shrank to critical levels.
It was ironic. No, that wasn’t the right word. Tragic? Smacking of poetic justice? Maybe she was being too critical. Eliot’s mother had always teased her for being a glass-half-empty kind of person.
It’s the one thing I can count on, she used to say in her lilt of a voice.
The memory was faint—an echo, really—but it caught Eliot like a blade between the ribs. She sat up in her lounge chair, breath sharp, borrowed sunglasses sliding down her nose.
“Everything okay?” Imogen propped herself up in the next chair.
No. It wasn’t. And it wouldn’t be. Water wasn’t the only thing being wasted. Eliot was on the clock. Subject Seven had been out of scanning range for hours now, and her readings were stuck at 23 percent. Too slow, too slow; her lungs shuddered the warning.
“Ooooh.” Imogen’s nose wrinkled. “You’re burning.”
When Eliot pressed her fingers to her arm, they left white prints. Unsurprising. It was her mother’s skin—pale like the north, ready to take on a thousand freckles at the first kiss of sun. She winced. It helped as much as it hurt, remembering these little things….
“Pink’s a great shade for hair, not so much for skin….” Imogen pulled out a bottle of the highest SPF money could buy. “Here. Apply liberally to avoid turning into a lobster princess.”
There wasn’t enough sunscreen in this world that could keep Eliot from getting fried, but Imogen was one of those people you just couldn’t say no to. A glass-overflowing kind of soul. In fact, the Historian was so eager to pass along the bottle that she knocked over her own empty piña colada glass. When she set the barware upright, she salvaged the tiny umbrella to wedge into the base of her bun. On anyone else the decor would’ve looked ridiculous, but Imogen made it fit. In a way, she made Eliot fit, too. The others seemed wary around her—even that hissy panda thing—but Imogen was a fount of conversation, not to mention knowledge. The offhand comment about Subject Seven’s birthday meant more than the Historian would probably ever realize. Eliot had assumed the blank spot by the birth date in Seven’s files was an oversight. SYSTEM ERROR. It felt too easy, too much to hope for, that he was, indeed, the one she’d been searching for.
Was he? This boy born outside of time?
Eliot still feared to hope. She feared a lot of things: being wrong, what must follow if she was right. There was no room for mistakes, and she couldn’t afford to act on impulse. Her certainty had to be at 100 percent, and right now the countersignature scanners were stuck at less than a quarter of that.
“Do you know when—” Eliot caught herself. It wouldn’t do to call him Subject Seven out loud. “Far and Priya will get back?”
“That’s like asking where a hurricane will make landfall.” Imogen laughed. “Farway is a force all his own.”
“I’ve gathered as much.” Eliot squirted sunscreen into her palm. “Do you enjoy working for your cousin?”
“I’d say with as much as for. Farway… he’s always been strongheaded, but sometimes he gets that strong head up his own tail. That’s when he gets into the most trouble. He needs people. We all do, really.” Imogen cast a glance at the Fortuna Pool, where Gram hovered in waist-deep waters, watching the blackjack tables. “I can’t imagine freelancing.”
“Don’t. It’s not a life to envy.” Eliot had forgotten how nice it was—sitting by a pool, applying sunscreen, chatting with someone who wasn’t a computer. “Did you know there’s a German curse that literally translates as ‘heaven thunder weather’? Himmeldonnerwetter!”
“Germans have the best words.” It said a lot about Imogen, that she followed this segue. It revealed even more that she appreciated cultured profanity.
“There are fantastic obscenities all over the globe. History, too. I’ve made it my mission to collect as many as possible. Reminds me that everyone’s got something to swear about—no matter where or when they live.”
“In Latin you can slander someone by calling them a pumpkin,” the other girl offered. “Cucurbita! Farway and I used to shout it at each other all the time, until Aunt Empra made us stop.”
Eliot emptied more sunscreen into her hand—the bottle was down to the dregs, and the stuff splattered everywhere. “I imagine that was quite an insult, back in the day.”
“Most people don’t like being compared to gourds,” Imogen said sagely. “So what about haze? When’s that curse from?”
Oh fex… She’d noticed. It wasn’t like Eliot to slip from the script: careful vocabulary, galvanized backstory. But the wig-snatching had rattled her more than she cared to admit. She didn’t mind going without a hairpiece; in fact, she preferred it (less heat and itch), but the suddenness of the loss—hair and gone—summoned a memory that was all knife. Six years old, stares from every side, cafeteria tears—where did she belong now?
So much had changed, and yet so much hadn’t.
“Haze… It’s an Australian word, I think. Twenty-third century?” Eliot hoped the Historian knew nothing about Down Under slang. These rabbit holes were getting harder to dodge. “I lose track after a while.”
The sunscreen bottle was tapped, but Eliot’s skin was too saturated to accept more regardless. She was sure that if she looked in the mirror she’d appear more wraithlike than usual. Blanched to the bone, half past disappearing. It would happen one day, she was certain. The Fade would catch her unawares, in a moment she could not escape.
Eliot pressed her arm again. White prints against white. Still solid. Still here. Even with the new layer of SPF she felt her skin slow-roasting. “I’m going to join Gram in the shade. Want to come?”
“Um, no.” Imogen’s body language was at war with her words. Calves taut, shoulders turned. “Not this time.”
“Most things look good on you,” Eliot told her. “Pining isn’t one of them.”
At this, Imogen removed her sunglasses. “Who told you? Farway? Priya?”
“It’s not that hard to see. Your eyes go all galactic when you look at him. Stars and stuff.”
The Historian made a mouselike sound and slipped the shades back on as if that could retroactively keep Eliot from no
ticing the lovey-dovey glow. “Do you—do you think he knows?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“Because… then we’d have to talk about it.”
“And?”
The other girl swiped up her piña colada glass and began scraping leftover fluff off its edges. “Why does everyone think it’s so easy to bare one’s heart for possible laceration? Hmm?”
“Not easy, no,” Eliot admitted as she stood. “But it just might be worth it.”
The Historian stabbed at dried coconut bits with her straw, grumbling.
“Carpe diem.” She shouldn’t have pushed, shouldn’t have cared at all. Getting attached to subjects and their affiliates only meant there’d be detaching later. Still, this rainbow of a girl reintroduced pumpkin profanity into Eliot’s mindscape, and that was no small thing. “You should try.”
Before it’s too late…
“Noted.” Imogen waved her off. “Now let me pine in peace!”
For all of Eliot’s judgment, the water felt blessedly cool when she waded into the Fortuna Pool, heading straight for the covered part, where people could swim up to the blackjack tables. Staff in shimmery blue shirts dealt the cards from a dry inlet. Gram watched one of the games from a nearby column. His stance was made of intense corners: keen jaw, shoulders straight enough to level a portrait. Eliot could almost see the numbers running through his eyes—+1, 0, +1, −1, and on, and on.
“What’s the count?” she asked.
“Crux!” The Engineer started, his calculations scattering. “How do you keep sneaking up like that?”
“Was I sneaking?” It wasn’t intentional. Force of habit, maybe, the side effect of a year spent in and out of shadows.
“You don’t even slosh. It’s not natural.” Gram’s stare drifted back to the table. “Negative three. Odds are in the house’s favor.”
So they were, much to the chagrin of the man who watched his chips get swept away after the next hit me. Gram let out a sigh—part satisfaction, part… relief? The people at the blackjack tables kept playing, tapping for more more more as the cards were laid down.