Invictus

  This was fine. This was normal. This was working.

  Everything was where it needed to be.

  Best to let sleeping feelings lie.

  “To the right.” Imogen looked up from the screen during her instructions, eyes drifting toward Gram’s chair. The glance didn’t feel intentional—it had the automatic slowness of a habit. This time, when their gazes locked, hers didn’t skitter away. She didn’t seem to realize she was looking. He hadn’t, either.

  See? Gravity.

  “Hold on….” The moment caught up with them. Imogen tore her stare from his, back to the screen. A chasm opened up between their chairs. “No! Sorry, I misplaced my notes….”

  1.2191 meters. Exactly what it was before.

  Completely different now.

  Gram’s palms tightened around the mug. He looked back at his frozen Tetris game, his color-coded cubes. Not too long ago everything had fit. If Eliot hadn’t brought up how pretty Imogen was by the blackjack tables, he might not even be dwelling on this… this… imbalance. Then again, maybe he would. Gram still wasn’t sure if the newcomer was the cause or the effect. The problem or the solution.

  “HOLY SHAZM!” Imogen shrieked.

  Chaos ensued. Gram dropped the mug—chai went projectile when the ceramic shattered, hitting the chalk wall. 1922: Hunted down Hen With Sapphire Pendant washed down to 1946: Recovered Yamashita’s Gold from the Philippines until all thirty missions became a polychromatic soup. Saffron scattered from his owner’s lap, leaping to the closest high point he could find: Gram’s console. Paws mashed the Tetris score back to zero before landing in an explosion of Rubik’s Cubes. Green side became orange flipping over to white, which was sure to become brown after landing in the pool of tea. Gram’s stare fixed back on Imogen, and hers to her screen. Both hands were on her face, framing trembling lips.

  “Oh Crux, oh Crux, oh…”

  “What’s wrong?” Priya appeared in the doorway. Fear enough for all of them circled her eyes: three times pale. “What’s happening?”

  Imogen seemed incapable of answering. Gram looked at the screen that swallowed her so, view via Far. He picked out shapes through the haze: shelves, the face of a woman who was not Eliot. She was staring at Far and Far stared back, meeting her eyes in a way no Recorder should.

  “Who is that?” he asked.

  “It’s Aunt Empra,” she gasped. “Aunt Empra is in the library.”

  Empra McCarthy. Gram had never met Far’s mother but he’d heard plenty about her. She was one of the most respected Recorders of her time—fluent in Latin without translation tech, Recorder of several staple datastreams. Her career was matched by few, but most of Empra’s fame sprang from a different source: her disappearance.

  If Empra McCarthy was here, the Ab Aeterno was, too. But… that didn’t make sense. No official Corps expeditions had ever been sent to this date. Gram and Imogen had checked and double-checked the Corps’ logs. They would have noticed any crossover, especially if the CTM was the Ab Aeterno.

  Unless…

  Unless this was the Ab Aeterno’s final mission. The one Empra and her crew had never returned from.

  Click, click, click. These thoughts snapped into place, building up to a terrible realization. No one had been able to deduce where or when the Ab Aeterno had vanished—several rescue expeditions to the CTM’s last logged destination (the Giza Plateau, before it possessed such a name, some two centuries earlier than this date) had come up empty, including several ventures by the Invictus itself. Nor had anyone been able to determine what prevented Empra and her crew from jumping back to Central time eleven years ago. Something unprecedented, something catastrophic enough to keep a mother from her son… Gram had no idea how the Ab Aeterno came to be here now, but if his theory was right, something drastic was about to happen.

  His gaze swung back to the Invictus’s nav systems: Vigilance! What he saw struck him to the core.

  The numbers weren’t just changing this time.

  They were disappearing.

  28

  CONFLAGRATION SITUATION

  FAR WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD AGAIN. Chocolate gelato danced over his tongue, sweet with a seep of bitter. He’d taken too many bites too fast, and the cold of it climbed through his molars into his brain. Morning sunlight stole into their flat, transforming the most ordinary objects into gold: the rim of his bowl, a vase full of forget-me-nots, the boxes Burg had turned into a make-believe CTM. His mother—beneath these rays—was royalty. Her hair was bound in several braids, but the flyaways caught the light, betraying amber beneath the brown. When she frowned, these Celtic roots became a crown of fire.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You just went on an expedition!” Far tapped his frozen temple, wincing. “Why do you have to go again so soon?”

  “It’s my job, Farway. I’ll be back before you know it,” she promised. “Besides, what’s a week for me will only be a day for you. Time travel is funny like that….”

  It was. Motherhood had shortened Empra’s expeditions—no more yearlong surveys—but even the shorter missions added up after a month or two. Every time the Ab Aeterno returned, Far’s mother was changed. New freckles pollocked her arms. Her eyes had seen more and were heavier for it. The sadness that swamped their brown never left, even with sunlight’s Midas touch.

  Far stared across the table. She’d be back this evening, but she wouldn’t be the same mother sitting across from him now. So fiery, so ready to leave… He decided to take a picture with his interface. Click! Sun and gold and flowers blue. When his mother came back, he’d show her the image. Maybe then she’d realize how much she changed.

  Empra McCarthy was the unchanged one now. Eleven years and she hadn’t aged a day, torn straight from Far’s childhood. Her hair was even bound up in the same braids, as if someone had crafted a hologram from the footage of that last-sight photograph.

  No hologram could stare like this, though, eyes brighter than any memory could burnish. Smoke clung to Empra McCarthy’s silhouette, proving her to be flesh and blood and here. “Gaius?”

  Strange. She’d never called Far by his middle name before.

  He scrambled to his feet, plane of existence tilting. His mother had gotten shorter—no, he was the one who’d grown. The years had slid sixty centimeters into Far’s bones, and now he could see the fine white part of his mother’s hair.

  “Mom?” he croaked.

  “Farway?” His mother had the look of a dreamer waking, settling slowly into the realization that she stood in Alexandria’s ill-fated library, face-to-face with her grown son. “But—what? What are you doing here? Crux, how old are you?”

  Imogen was yelling something in Far’s ear, and the surrounding smoke had gone from filmy to fuzz—fires closing in. Neither of these things moved Far, for he was a waker falling back into dreams. Eleven years he’d fought for this moment. Academy Sims and orphan nights, jewel heists and laughing his lungs sore with the crew. Everything had been done with this at the back of his mind: son to mother reunited in the heart of history. The scene had been imagined a thousand different ways—in just as many ages and locations. Now that it was manifesting, Far found it difficult to believe that this was the version. All true.

  It was too good to be….

  But then Empra clasped Far’s face in her hands. It was a mother’s touch—instantly familiar, twisting his emotions upright.

  “I’m eighteen now,” he managed.

  “Eighteen,” she whispered. “Burg, are you seeing this?”

  Burg was here? Of course. He was the Ab Aeterno’s Historian, missing alongside the rest of the crew. Technically, Far had only lost one parent to the disaster, but in his heart, the number doubled. Burg’s bedtime stories, his cardboard time machine missions, his crush-your-shoulders hugs—Far missed those comforts something fierce. Then and still.

  “Burg?” His mother was frowning. “Do you read me?”

  “You never came back.” The words hurt more than F
ar expected, as if eleven years of sobbing into pillows and surrounding adults’ conversations wilting into a shame, such a shame, we’ll never truly know could be crammed into a sentence. “None of you came back. Eleven years I waited, Mom….”

  “Eleven years?” Empra McCarthy stiffened; her heart-shaped face broke a little. Far knew he might be ruining things—telling his past her future—but what was lost was lost, etched in stone on the granite memorial walls at the Corps’ headquarters. “But it was just yesterday. Oh, Farway… Farway, I’m so sorry. I thought we could make it right….”

  There was a tremble in her fingers, against his cheek.

  “Make what right?” Far asked.

  “Our nav system fritzed, and we landed hundreds of years off course, and as luck would have it, our fuel rods were never restocked. We don’t have enough juice for a second jump. The Ab Aeterno’s been running on fumes, and we used a lot of those getting here from the Giza Plateau. Burg knew the library burned today, and we thought if I came on-site I might find a Recorder to pass along our SOS. Here you are….”

  “You’ve been stranded?” No wonder the Corps’ rescue unit never found the Ab Aeterno, stuck in a date two hundred and some years from when they were supposed to be. “But—”

  “FARWAYFarwayFarwayFarwayFarwayareyoulistening?” Imogen’s words melted into an indistinguishable shout. “GetbacktotheInvictusnow!”

  The smoke beyond the shelves parted, giving way to a wild Eliot—arms thrashing, wig as skewed as her eyes. Her sandals skidded through scrolls as she grabbed Empra and Far and started dragging them through Berossus’s spilled words. She screamed while she did: “Tell Gram to fly the Invictus over the courtyard! We’ve got to get out of here!”

  Far dug his heels against her pull. “The scrolls—”

  “Leave them!” Eliot snapped. “They’ll only weigh us down.”

  Her fingernails formed five fierce moons—close to blood—in Far’s biceps. Still he fought to stay. “I’m not getting my tail skinned alive by Lux—”

  “Lux doesn’t matter!” Eliot kept yanking; papyrus shred beneath her feet. “Lux never mattered!”

  “Quickexitisagowe’recomingrightawaygotit?” What the Hades was Imogen saying? It was too much, pouring into Far’s senses alongside the smoke, twisting everything dizzy.

  “Farwaywe’rethirtysecondsoutlistensomething’shappeningsomethingbigGramsaysweneedtojumpnow!”

  His mother seemed overwhelmed as well, staring at Eliot with a misty-strange expression. “Have we met before?”

  Eliot’s grip tightened. Far hissed. If she hadn’t drawn blood before, she certainly had now. “We have to get out of here before it reaches us!”

  “We’re well away from the flames still,” said his mother.

  “Not the fire!” Eliot pulled and tugged and tore. Her wig slipped off, black hair tangling with ink just as dark. “The Fade!”

  “The what now?” Far asked.

  “This moment is—it’s decaying. It’s unbecoming. So will we, if we stick around much longer. We have to get back to the Invictus and haul arse into the Grid before the Fade erases us!” Fear yawned beneath Eliot’s explanation: the death-facing, life-flashing kind. “Time is collapsing.”

  Collapsing? Decaying? Unbecoming? What?

  “She’snotlyingFarwayGramsaysthenavsystemnumbersarevanishingwhatevertheHadesthatmeans!”

  “Hashing blueboxes!” Far hissed and started running. “Let’s get to the Invictus!”

  “I’m not leaving my crew!” It was Empra who stood her ground this time. Eliot clung to her wrist, but the connection was taut, arms stretching. “Burg… Burg? Do you read me? Doc? Nicholas?”

  “Mom! Come on! We have to—” Far’s voice shriveled in his throat when he stared back at his mother. Shorter than him, so much the same; eleven years clashing with a day. These shocks paled in comparison to what poured through the window behind her.

  The smoke billowing at the end of the row was not really smoke. It wasn’t made of dark cinders or white ash. It was…nothingness. The world had become a Sim and was shutting down panel by panel, only there was no mother-of-pearl hologram tech shining beneath. Alexandria’s lighthouse: gone. The harbor’s warships: vanished. Lush palms, glimmering water: erased, unmade.

  Every disaster Far had ever witnessed had one thing in common—noise. Do not go gentle events were punctuated with shrill bullets, screams, fire hissier than dragon’s breath, war drums, orchestras—take your pick. Destruction was a loud, roaring thing.

  Unmaking wasn’t.

  The Fade’s silence was absolute, made for hearing your heartbeat in your ears. As the absence reached for them, dissolving the library’s windows, devouring stones and shelves and scrolls, Far’s blood became sludge inside his body. He was a dreamer back in the dream-turned-nightmare; everything around him tinged a red, colorless shade. His mother yelled into her comm, oblivious to the void over her shoulder, even though it was beginning to swallow her voice’s sound waves—“Burg! Burg! Burg! Burg!”

  Eliot’s reaction to the vacuum was instantaneous. She dropped their arms and ran.

  “FOLLOWHERYOUHASHINGFOOL!” Imogen’s yell crashed through the comm, loud enough to move him.

  Far lunged for his mother. The Fade was so close that the words coming from her mouth took no shape at all—they fell out of existence with the floor just a step away. His hand to her wrist, Far ran and Empra followed. Together they crashed through the stacks, clipping the shoulders of librarians rescuing manuscripts, trying to keep up with Eliot. The girl was several lunges ahead, her stola winging past Anubis.

  What are we running from?

  Far looked over his shoulder and found, to his terror, that the library’s southeast corner no longer existed. Nothingness pushed toward them, claiming shelves and statues, refusing to be processed by logical senses. No mind could link vocabulary to what Far was seeing.

  “GETTHEHASHOUTOFTHERE!” Imogen screamed. “GRAM’SBOOTINGUPTHESYSTEMWE’REGOINGTOTRYTOJUMPEVENTHOUGHTHENAVNUMBERSAREDISAPPEARINGANDIWANTYOUTOBEINHEREWHENWEDO!”

  There was little air left in his lungs, and everything burned for it. Calves, thighs, eyeballs, veins. Empra’s strides had equaled out with Far’s, so he let his mother go as they dashed toward the library entrance and the courtyard beyond. The Invictus was already there, hovering a few centimeters off the ground with the holo-shield dropped. A massive iridescence, impossible not to see. Several scholars were pointing from the steps—by far the worst breach of the Corps of Central Time Travelers’ Code of Conduct that Far and his crew had ever managed.

  It didn’t matter now. The Corps wasn’t coming here. No one was coming here. If the nav numbers were disappearing, no time machine could land in this moment.

  Far only hoped they could leave.

  Priya stood in the Invictus’s open hatch, waving them forward. Eliot was already on board.

  “HURRYHURRYHURRYKEEPRUNNINGTHEFADE’SCOMING!”

  His cousin’s screams were all the louder for the dead quiet rolling in behind them. The Fade? It must be. The sky was disappearing, the vast expanse above them peeling back into something vaster. Blue and smoke and ashes gave way, their dimensions draining as destruction without a shadow curled over the Invictus, one beat from crashing down.

  Far ran from his own fading footsteps, toward Priya’s outstretched hand. His blood, his veins, his everything had gone kinetic. He was existence in motion. He wanted to stay that way. As soon as his sandals hit the hatch, his heart exploded, bits smearing the time-machine floor. He gasped past them, into Priya’s arms, unable to gather anything as he turned to see what was—and wasn’t—behind him.

  Empra was only a few strides from the hatch, braids flaring as she lunged. Everything else was nothing. The vacuum licked for his mother’s heels, snatching courtyard stones out from under her. Her face was afire once more, ready to leave with him this time. Far could see his name on her lips—

  “Mom!” he screamed, reaching for her. P
riya clutched his toga tighter than life. “Hurry!”

  “ELIOTWHATAREYOUDOINGTHEHATCHISN’T—”

  His mother was staring straight at him when the nothingness latched on. Foot gone, calf gone, thigh now, she was falling… tumbling to a ground that was not there. The sadness in her eyes turned infinite.

  Far kept screaming. Silence honed in on the sound, hungry for it. “Noooooooooooooooooo!”

  Everything vanished.

  29

  DEVOURER OF ALL THINGS

  FAR HAD ALWAYS THOUGHT OF THE Grid as the definition of nothing. Central’s scientists often used words like void and vacuum when trying to describe such an indescribable place. Now he knew that couldn’t be further from the truth. There was some allowance for matter, some level of existence here. Theirs was proof of that.

  The Invictus was an island in the endless dark. Priya and Far sat on the edge of eternity: her gasping, him screaming. The noise was back to full volume, no echo, no fade, just agony rolling on and on and on and on. The Grid gaped in front of Far, inside him. The sight of his mother—falling down and apart—was easy to conjure against the lightless space, a horror just starting to hit.

  Priya’s arms were the one thing keeping him from the black. She dragged Far farther into the ship, while Imogen shut the hatch. His cousin had his mother’s nose—narrow down to a delicate, pointed end. Almost whittled. Far had never noticed the similarity before, never would’ve noticed if Empra had stayed lost.

  He never would’ve known what happened to her….

  What had happened?

  Far had no idea. His scream was gone and he was trembling. Priya draped the couch throw over his shoulders and told him to sit, but how could he? The blanket clung to him, lopsided, dragging over sticky Rubik’s Cubes and mug fragments as he entered the console room. Gram sat in his chair, hands up, as if to say I didn’t touch anything; the jump was all her.

  Eliot braced herself by the nav system with thunder-white knuckles, eyes closed. The glow of the Invictus’s lights would not stick to her skin; instead it beat back, harsher than the numbers on the nearby screen.