Invictus

by Ryan Graudin

  With one long sigh, the Invictus’s nerves unspooled. Its holo-shield dropped.

  “Glad we’re not dead.” Imogen held two thumbs up, both nails ragged. “Good job, Gram.”

  “Er. Thanks.” The Engineer’s expression went soft. Crinkled brow, undecided smile. “Though I don’t know if my skill had anything to do with it.”

  Is every jump going to be like this from now on? Far wondered as they pulled into their slip. The Armstrong’s crew was in the process of unloading. Their captain, Paolo, wheeled a dolly of crates down the dockside. The boxes were brimming with all sorts of goods: fresh oranges, specialty soaps, cages of extinct songbirds. Every one of these things would fetch a fat price from Central’s elite, but they paled to the value of Far’s one-of-a-kind cargo. The one he hoped they were actually carrying.

  “The Rubaiyat?” He turned to Eliot. The way she stared at Far’s outstretched hand made him feel like a beggar. “Look, as soon as I leave this ship I’m going to have to meet with Lux—”

  “We’re going to meet with Lux,” Eliot interrupted. “Together. I want to cement my position on your team.”

  What was she playing at, hanging on to the freelancer story when there was obviously so much more going on? Far’s molars locked tight as the Invictus landed, settling into its own weight with a groan. He spied Wagner at the end of the dock, checking and double-checking the Armstrong’s crates. Lux’s right-hand man was nothing if not thorough, which meant that the black market mogul already knew of Far’s arrival. Commence catastrophe in three, two, one…

  “Lux doesn’t like unexpected guests,” he said.

  “I’m guessing he’d like your empty hands even less,” Eliot challenged.

  “Just give me the Rubaiyat. Please. You have my word that you can stay on as a part of this crew.” Far tried not to think of everything that could go wrong if he took Eliot with him to Lux’s villa. “What about mutual trust? Hmm?”

  “What about it?” The girl cocked her head, most Antoinette-like. “Take me to Lux and the Rubaiyat will be delivered safely. I’m not here to haze you over, Far.”

  THEN WHY ARE YOU HERE? It was all he could do not to yell. Anger and alcohol banged against his skull, magnifying everything. Wagner glared alongside the lights, into the vistaport; his look let Far know he was already behind schedule. Lux hated to be kept waiting.

  Imogen cleared her throat. “I think she’s telling the truth, Farway.”

  He stared back at his cousin, sitting cross-legged in her twirly chair. Her hair reminded him of the cotton candy Burg once smuggled back from a mission—sweeter than anything Far had ever tasted. Only later had he realized how much was risked to bring it to him.

  “You sure? Are you willing to bet your entire future on Eliot? Because if she doesn’t deliver, it’s not just my tail Lux will skin. Every one of us signed our names to his contract. Every one of us just used five jumps’ worth of fuel to bring him nil. That kind of loss won’t blow over.”

  Wagner was walking dockside, only twelve paces away. Terror was a physical thing in Far’s chest—clawing him short of breath. Could he do it? Could he face Lux with his life in Eliot’s palm? His crew’s lives? Could he trust this blackmailing, timeline-meddling thief not to turn all turncoat on them?

  Thud thud. “Captain McCarthy? Everything all right in there?”

  “Everything’s peachy keen, Wagner!” he shouted at the hatch.

  The hatch shouted back. “Peachy what?”

  “It’s all hashing brilliant! I’ll be out in a moment.”

  There was no choice—only knives at his back and a cliff at his feet. Far looked around at his crew. They’d picked up his fear once more, and the emotion carved grim lines in their faces: scaffolding light eyes and dark. Gram Wright, Imogen McCarthy, Priya Parekh… all of these names were on Lux’s contract. Every one of them signed at Far’s request, letters spreading red as open veins.

  The fall should be his to take, and his alone.

  “Get a new fuel rod in and keep your comms on, just in case.” Far looked to Priya. Her headphones were only half off, the notes bursting through them as rampant as his heart. “If stuff goes south, I’ll send a distress signal and you guys get the hash out of here. Got it?”

  “We’re not ditching you,” she said.

  “Knowing Lux, there might not be anything to ditch.” Far nodded at Gram and Imogen. “Fly at my say-so. That’s an order.”

  Thud thud thud. Time to go. His kiss with Priya held every promise he wanted to keep, including the one she herself had planted in him: We’ll figure this out. The BeatBix slid down her neck, its song beating between their throats—golden and ferocious—and he wanted to keep listening through to the end, wanted his fate to be this. Eyes on her, lips too, closest joy this side of eternity.

  But Eliot was waiting at the hatch, the devil he’d dealt with waiting beyond. The longer he lingered, the more apt Lux would be to increase the forfeit. No doubt there would be a forfeit. The white jumpsuit Eliot wore was flowy in places, but nowhere near baggy enough to hide a book the size of the Rubaiyat.

  He was so, so hashed. “This is the first time I want you to have something up your sleeve, and you’ve got no sleeves.”

  Eliot laughed—she would be the type of person who reveled in gallows humor—and waved her very bare arm at the door. “Shall we?”

  22

  THROUGH LIGHTS AND TIME

  REPLACING THE FUEL ROD WAS A task for hazard suits with steady hands. Priya managed it well enough, even though her insides matched the cyber-metal songs she was listening to. Clanging chaos CRASH. The playlist—dubbed “Unintelligible Screaming” by Imogen—was usually reserved for workouts, so it was fitting that she felt both the adrenaline and the drain of two dozen crunches.

  This stress was beyond the power of tea, and music only agitated it. Loss breathed down her neck. Was this why Far was moving, always moving? Priya knew his mother’s disappearance haunted him, but only now did she connect his forward motion with grief. Stay a step ahead, always, lest it catch up. Waiting for a distress signal to punch across her interface was the last thing Priya wanted to do. (As if she’d ditch anyway: Love was all and home was here.) She paced from one end of the infirmary to the other, trying to outrace the tightness in her throat.

  “Hiya!” A wave—Imogen trying to steal Priya’s attention through her headphones. “Need some company?”

  Priya pulled back her BeatBix and put on a smile that made her lips feel wobbly. “Sure.”

  The other girl flopped onto the workstation stool: fresh flower hair, a sigh that reckoned with savannah rains. “He’s going to be okay, you know. Sure, Lux is scary enough to make a shark shazm itself, but Farway’s wiggled out of worse scrapes. I mean, just take a look at the wall o’ chalky wonders out there. As much as I tease him, he’s got plenty to brag about.”

  “This is different.” Far’s talent was never in question. “This is… Eliot.”

  “Eliot’s not all bad,” Imogen offered. “In fact, I’m not sure she’s any bad. She’s just really lonely. Can’t you hear it, beneath her words? Every time we talk, it aches… how sad she is.”

  There was something, now that Imogen mentioned it, now that Priya thought to listen. Some fragile desperation she couldn’t quite cling to, lengthening, thin, thin as the echoes of the Titanic’s phantom orchestra, threatening to make wraiths of them all. Who was this census-ghost of a girl? Why was she trying to take everything from them?

  If anyone had pulled answers out of Eliot, it was Imogen. The Historian could talk a fish into walking. “What kinds of things did you two chat about?”

  “Normal people stuff. Eyebrows. Clothes. Cursing. Boys. She thinks I should talk to you-know-who, too. I’m afraid I might have taken the advice to heart.”

  “Wait, what? I’ve only been telling you to do that for…” Priya counted up their time as a crew in her head. “Eleven and a half months. What happened?”

  “I’m not exact
ly sure.” Here Imogen launched into a familiar monologue. One Priya had heard dozens, if not scores, of times: all the feels. This was a bonus edition, complete with angst, amnesia, and alcohol. I drank, we danced, what then??? Told at a whisper so “you-know-who” wouldn’t hear. Not that he would—Gram was entirely in his Tetris game, tongue edging his lips as he mashed buttons. Why was it so easy for guys to get lost in screens?

  “I take it that’s why you’re in here and not the console room?” Priya asked, once the story reached its inconclusive conclusion.

  “No comment.”

  “Oh, Im. You have nothing to be scared of—”

  “Easy for you to say. You and Far just happened.”

  “Not exactly.”

  Just happening had happened over months. It was song recommendations and history lessons and late-night interface messages that felt around feelings: HOW’D YOUR EXAM SIM GO? WHAT WAS THE NAME OF THAT TROPICAL HOUSE BAND? TOP TEN FAVORITE DATASTREAMS, AND GO! It was Priya’s heart sparking each time she saw that tell-the-world-I’m-here smile across the examination room. It was that very same grin glowing a thousand watts brighter when she crossed the threshold. It was Far on the night of his failure, tugging the edges of his flowered waistcoat, hope on his face where there should have been heartbreak, saying, I think we both know that we… Well, what I’m trying to say is, I’ve been offered a job, one I can’t do alone, and I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather have with me.

  Of course, Imogen had met Priya in this very docking bay on the eve of the Invictus’s debut heist, so she hadn’t seen any of that. Her perspective began when Far took the entire crew to twenty-first-century India on Priya’s behalf—a first vacation that turned into a not-so-thinly-veiled first date.

  They’d landed in the city of Varanasi amid Dev Deepawali, a festival of lights of the gods, when the night dripped with thousands of candles and the lush, golden promise of things to come. Fireworks splashed across the sky, birthed again in the reflection of the Ganges River, where the gods were believed to bathe. A brush of the hand led to interlocked fingers as Priya and Far walked through the festivities—marveling at the ghats lined with tiny earthen lamps, steps of flames descending to the water’s edge. She knew then she could keep wandering with him: through lights and time and whatever else came their way.

  “Everything looks easier from the outside in. I liked Far for a long time, but when he asked me to join the Invictus, I almost told him no.” It was hard to imagine now: a single-time existence, soundtrack provided by fake BeatBix. “Doing what we do, it puts a lot in peril.”

  Imogen nodded. She had her own parents, her own cover job at the boutique. She, too, faced jail time if they were caught by the Corps. “So why’d you say yes?”

  Cyber-metal shook Priya’s headphones. She gripped each earpiece; the voice through them was more scream than song, licking her fingertips. “The no would’ve haunted me. Far and I had talked so much about wanderlust, places I wanted to go, times he wanted to see, and there he was, offering all of it. Remaining in Central suddenly felt like half of a life.

  “Risk nothing and you’ll stay where you are,” she told Imogen and reminded herself. Her eyes landed on the dead-screen diagnostics machine, Ganesh’s likeness beside it: There were answers out there. Priya just had to trust it wasn’t too late to find them.

  She exchanged her real BeatBix for the poseur pair and grabbed her purse.

  “What, what are you doing?” Imogen blinked. “Far said—”

  “Let’s both make a deal to be brave. Far’s coming back.” And Eliot with him, presumably. If Priya was going to purchase the equipment they needed to scan the Ancestral Archives without raising suspicion, she had to do it now. “He’s coming back, and I have an errand to run before he does.”

  The bazaar of Zone 4 was an organizer’s nightmare, a bargain hunter’s dream. It was the size of a small town, made up of corridors so winding they required interface GPS to navigate, though many window-shoppers chose to get lost in the market’s charm. There was more than a whiff of the Old World about it. Estate salvagers sold whatever they could: pages torn from magazines (back when magazines had pages to tear), keys to doors long rotted, thumbdrives no modern machine could read. Priya’s mother came here every week to sift through these offerings. Her eye for value and relentless bargaining kept her own Zone 2 store well stocked. Priya had spent many afternoons listening to her haggle over stained glass windows and teak furniture. Whether through DNA or osmosis, she, too, had acquired the skill; it would serve her well today.

  She walked with throngs of shoppers into the digital district. There were several shops with the tech she needed, touting their wares with loud lights and louder hawkers. Priya perused ten of them before she ventured to make her first bid.

  “Five thousand,” she told the shopkeeper. Even the low number was high; operating systems with enough bulk to run something as comprehensive as the Ancestral Archives were stupid expensive. Add the price of software on top of that and it could easily cost every credit on Priya’s palmdrive.

  The vendor wrinkled his nose, replied with a line he’d probably recited twenty times that day: “Bah! Are you trying to rob me? This is a top-of-the-line diagnostics machine. Twenty thousand. No budging.”

  “Eh.” Priya shrugged, trying to keep her heart off her grease-spotted sleeve. This part—feigning disinterest—was always hardest for her. “Six thousand, maybe. I’m sure I can get a better price next door.”

  Again the shopkeeper balked. “Eighteen.”

  So the numbers went—high, low, to and fro—accompanied by stubborn grunts and shaking heads. Priya walked off at one point, only to have the vendor wave her down and cut his quote another twenty percent. From there she wiggled him down to eight thousand, Ancestral Archives software included. A decent enough price, though she still winced when the credits were transferred.

  The package fit in her purse, but only if her knockoff BeatBix took their rightful place over her ears. Priya wore them through the crowd as she wove back toward the hoverbus stop. Tight hips, bags jostling, adverts splashing her interface, dash, dash, hundreds of strange faces, and then—

  A familiar one.

  Roshani Parekh stood with her back to the street, examining a vase. Priya stopped, her thoughts spinning through the calendar—of course, it was Sunday. Shopping day. Her mother had been discussing it at dinner last night, several days ago, before the Titanic and Vegas and Eliot. She’d even invited Priya along….

  Priya stood, watching her mother watch the vase, hating this distance. She wanted to tap her mom on the shoulder. She wanted to brew her a batch of chai with sunshine-fed spices and sit at the kitchen table, chatting the way they once did. She wanted to describe the treasures she’d seen, the places she’d walked, the boy she loved. Far, especially. She’d wanted to bring him to Saturday dinners too many times to count, but it was unwise. Though he also had a cover job—same as Gram’s, employed by one of Lux’s many non-illegal companies as independent contractors—how could they cover a one-year relationship?

  She wanted, she wanted, yet she had to keep moving. Priya’s mother thought she was working a Medic shift today, and if she turned to find her daughter with an eight-thousand-credit diagnostics machine in her bag, there would be questions.

  Priya rallied her tangled-garden heart and kept walking.

  23

  MAGIC E VINO

  AS THE CROW FLEW, Lux’s villa was a good ten kilometers away from the TM warehouse. This distance was best conquered by underground magcart, which could make the journey in under two minutes and often did, zipping past the catacombs of Old Rome and the skyscraper pilings of Zone 2. Safety lights flickered every half kilometer, the sole sign of speed. Far counted them through his sunglasses to keep insanity at bay. The tactic only half worked.

  The magcart exited into Lux’s wine cellar, where bottles of the mogul’s favorite port were stacked by the score. Far ran a finger along their necks as he passed,
the way he did every visit, carving a line through velvet dust. The walks he’d made before were still there, in varying states of waning. Dustfall come again.

  He left his mark—bold and unbroken—all the way to the stairs, wiped off the grime on his shirt, and headed up. Eliot followed, a specter he couldn’t shake.

  Lux’s villa was the kind of place only reckless money could afford. It had the skeleton of a grand house, though many of its original amenities had been altered to accommodate state-of-the-art everything: auto-dimming windows, hologram platforms, a hovercraft landing pad. Even though there were pollution filters around the windows, the smell of city emissions was unmistakable: home, hazy home. Today Far’s lungs refused it, as if his organs knew the end was nigh and decided to get a head start. Respiratory shutdown. His heart threatened to do the same when they entered the mansion’s main room. Lux sat where he always did—in a high-backed leather chair facing the vista wall. His was an opportunistic view of the skyline, the New Forum’s gold gleaming through his eyes like some strange pupil.

  “Run into trouble, Captain McCarthy?”

  That’s one name for her. “Not trouble, exactly…”

  “Lux.” Nothing about the figure in the chair seemed to intimidate Eliot. Far wasn’t sure if it was sheer bravery or a not-so-blissful ignorance. “Can I call you Lux?”

  Hades’s clangers in a hashing bluebox. Far’s too-short life flashed before his eyes, best-of reel bouncing off his sunglasses. Piggyback rides with Burg. A sweltering summer day visit to the Colosseum with his mother. His first kiss with Priya, after their second heist, his back to the old Forum stones; testosterone swam through his veins, and her lips tasted like moon rays made human: silver light secrets.

  “Take those things off.” Lux waved the aviators away. “I like to see eye-to-eye.”