Invictus

by Ryan Graudin

  “It won’t.” Gram’s grave words buried every one of them. “Dr. Ramírez said the Fade has been active for over a decade, though I suspect it’s been closer to eighteen years. Far’s carried this countersignature his entire life; shooting him now might cut the signal and stop the Fade’s reach into the future, but it won’t keep the decay from chasing down his past self.”

  Eliot squeezed her eyes shut. Far stared at the illustration: boy radiating brokenness. His future, their fate prophesied in one small scribble. He wasn’t the blood threading through history’s veins, but a poison, polluting every time he’d ever touched. All the seconds he’d lived—the sights he’d seen, the pasts he’d walked—were damned, and his friends’ lifetimes with them.

  There was a rattling of pots in the kitchenette and Imogen emerged with a half-eaten pan of tiramisu. The scene was heartbreaking for its normalcy. His cousin set the leftovers on the table like she always did. She’d brought enough forks for everyone.

  “The world’s ending,” she explained as she sat down and started digging into ladyfingers and cocoa-flecked cream. “Might as well have dessert.”

  “You’re going to give up on Far that easily?” Priya bristled, too distraught to hide the fact that she was. It was so unlike her to fall apart in the open, for all to see. “Stuff yourself with sweets while everything goes to shazm?”

  “What else can I do?” Imogen’s voice hit a pitch that made Saffron scramble into her lap, ears perked. “Dress him up in his finest flash-leather suit? Teach him the proper etiquette for meeting a universe-gobbling evanescence? ‘Smile, Farway, take a bow as you go to your doom. Always remember that gentlemen never run. Oh wait, we can’t remember anything, because the Fade has an insatiable appetite for our past.’ Eating some fexing tiramisu is currently the only thing between me and drowning in a puddle of my own tears. I’d be happy for anyone to join me!”

  Priya grabbed the Code of Conduct and waved the book about. “We’ve broken these rules for trinkets and thrills so many times… but when things get hard, when lives are on the line, we tuck tail. We make ourselves feel better by saying they’ve already died and we don’t have a choice and we can’t change history and I swallow it every time, because what else is there to do?”

  “P…” Far couldn’t feel his fingertips, couldn’t let go of her. “There’s nothing to fight here. Imagined heroics—”

  “You’re not already dead!” Priya broke in. “And I refuse to act like you are.”

  “Far shouldn’t be alive in the first place,” Eliot said. “Gram’s right. I don’t know why Dr. Ramírez didn’t see it. The Fade won’t stop until every trace of Far’s existence is erased. Our lives were doomed from the start.”

  “That’s it!” Gram leaped to his feet, snapping both sets of fingers, embodiment of an exclamation point. “The start!”

  “What?” Imogen paused between bites.

  “Dr. Ramírez ordered Eliot to neutralize the catalyst. Far isn’t the catalyst.” All the Engineer got were blank stares. He kept snapping, as if the sound might jog their IQs up to speed with his own. “I mean, yes, he’s carrying the countersignature, but he himself isn’t the aberration. His birth is.”

  “What difference does that make?” Eliot asked.

  “There might be nothing to fight, but there is something to save,” Gram told them. “If we go back and alter the circumstances that led to Far being born on the Ab Aeterno, we could pivot point into a future where the catalyst has been neutralized. We can give our universe, our own lives, a second chance.”

  The common area was quiet as their minds ran the track. It felt a bit like an infinity loop—internal histories and external forces and what about all the other universes? What about themselves? What was the cost of this hope?

  “That’s dash…” Eliot blinked. “It just might work. I mean, it’s making a lot of assumptions. That Far’s birth is the aberration. That the time we have to travel back to doesn’t fall to the Fade. Plus, how do we know the countersignature won’t echo into this new world?”

  “We don’t.” Gram crossed his arms. Excitement was writ beneath his skin, pulsing with the veins there. “But if we fail, everything goes to shazm anyway. Succeed and we get a new lease on life.”

  “My vote goes for saving stuff,” Imogen offered. “What’s there to lose?”

  “Ourselves.” Priya looked to each of them in turn, her stare ending with Far. The whole room wavered. “We might be alive in this new world, but we won’t be who we are now. This life on the Invictus, everything we’ve been through together…”

  More silence, another track. This one more finite: May 7, 2371, dawn—hazy, like all others—when the four of them stood at the helm of an unnamed ship, admiring the flawless holo-shield invisibility plates and their reflection in them—a fine, shiny crew. Their very first mission to eighteenth-century Portugal that same day to retrieve a bottle of port for Lux’s stores. From there it was a life of historical snatch-and-grabs: the Cat’s Eye Emerald, Klimt paintings, Fabergé eggs…. For each treasure, an adventure; for each adventure, a mess of tears and laughter, kisses and scrapes. For all of this?

  A family.

  “Who we are now can’t stay.” It was Imogen who pointed to the chalk wall, where Far’s cursive cried into itself, running ruins of color. “How many of those mission descriptions could you rewrite? How many would we never know we lost? How soon until we don’t even know each other? I’d take a total system reboot over rotting through the brain stem any day. No offense, Eliot.”

  “I’d take that, too,” Eliot told them. “If it’s any consolation, there was no Invictus before I arrived on the scene.”

  This was a strange thing to consider. Far walked over to the creator of his world, still a head shorter. She had no parted hair for him to ponder, just the cuffs, which made her wrists look far thinner than they were. “Tell me, why haven’t you teleported out of those yet?”

  “A rather pissed-off boy once told me trust is something that’s built.” Ah! There was her smirk, making a comeback. “I figure I’m a few bricks down after trying to murder you.”

  “Yeah, well… if I were you, I would’ve shot me, too.”

  “If you were me? Ha. Good one.” Eliot’s laugh was made of brass, as hard as it was deflective. “At least our humor is equally morbid.”

  Far didn’t echo the sound, because he meant every word. So much fury, so much fear spent on this girl’s behalf and for what? Hers was the ruined life, his was the fault. “I’m sorry, Eliot. About your mom, your cousin, your childhood… I’m sorry it’s gone.”

  Dimples mussed Eliot’s chin.

  He went on. “There’s a place for you on this crew, if you want it. I know it won’t last long. We’re all about to take a fall, and I’ll need every hand on deck to create this pivot point—”

  The air before him flickered, and again Far was reminded of Central’s street magicians. Top to bottom, stola and all, Eliot had vanished. Her cuffs dangled from the pipe, chaining nothing. Displaced air wove through the wardrobe’s garments—the yellow dress among them.

  “Did—” Gram blinked. “Did she just haul tail on us?”

  Far stared at the daffodil gown, swaying its phantom waltz.

  Everything was disappearing on him. Everyone…

  He looked back to the couch, where Priya was staring at the crumpled guidebook, tracing the cat ears over each C. Her haircut looked extra drastic from this angle: short, long, two versions of herself pasted together.

  “Look!” Imogen pointed toward the console room, where Eliot was stepping from behind Bartleby’s cloth-and-wire frame.

  “Let’s start over, fresh.” The girl reentered the common room, rubbing her wrists back to white. “New mission, new world. We’re going to have to be quick about this if we want to beat the Fade.”

  “How quick?” Far felt better shifting back into mission mode. Fighting for a future, albeit an alternate one, was preferable to waiting for oblivion. �
��What kind of timeline are we talking? Days? Weeks?”

  “My best guess is the former.” Eliot grabbed a fork, gouged a V-shaped hole into the top half of the dessert. “Imagine the multiverse as a piece of tiramisu. Each layer’s a world. My universe is the top layer, the one below that is Subject One’s world, and so on. This universe is at the bottom, with Far’s moments mostly intact. But the Fade’s growth”—she scooped out a fuller bite, scraping the pan—“is exponential. The longer we take, the faster it spreads.”

  “Vera isn’t equipped with any sort of mapping system?” Gram asked.

  Eliot shook her head.

  “We can use the wardrobe to make our own.” Imogen planted her own utensil in the tiramisu and started pulling down clothes. Yellow dress, workman’s shirt, tricorne hat, a camouflage field jacket… “Put anything we don’t remember into a pile, figure out the dates that are being erased. That’d at least give us a sense of scale….”

  “Ingenious, Imogen!” Gram turned to Far. “What mission was the Ab Aeterno on before you popped out?”

  “December 31, 95 AD,” Priya offered, voice raspy. “It’s what he always tried on the med-droid.”

  “Never worked,” Far muttered.

  Priya smiled at the memory, tucking her longer hairs behind her ear. Far was thunderously struck by the sight—there was only one Priya, his P, who hummed songs long after they ended, who told the most gruesome medical stories with a stone face, who felt on a level most of them couldn’t comprehend. Far had never imagined love could be such a solid thing, yet here it was. He wished he could go back in time and tell himself to drop everything, to go to Woodstock for no reason at all but to be with her….

  “We got the when. What about the where?” Gram prompted.

  There was a good deal Far didn’t know about his origins—i.e., most of it. His father’s identity had always been a question mark, a dead halt in conversations. He only knew the circumstances of his birth because Burg had turned the story mythic with so many retellings. Certain details were cemented in canon: Empra’s indigo stola, Far’s wild curls. Others—such as the ship’s pre-Grid location—had been meticulously cut out.

  “Um, Rome.” It was a guess, one he’d pieced together over the years. Where else would a Latin-speaking time traveler be wearing a stola in 95 AD? “I think. Mom never talked about it.”

  “You think?” Gram frowned. “No offense, Far, but we can’t run this op on hunches. We need a clear picture of what we’re trying to change, a timeline down to the minute.”

  “What about the datastreams?” Imogen kept sorting through clothes. A dinner jacket here, a pair of trousers there. So much forgetting, above them all along… “Every Corps-sanctioned mission has them.”

  “The 95 AD streams were never released to the public.” Every year on Far’s unbirthday, he tried to look up the mission’s footage. Every year he got the same answer: Please refer to archive 12-A11B. A restricted section his cadet badge couldn’t come close to accessing. “Someone locked them up nice and tight at the platinum-black level.”

  The original crew groaned.

  Eliot placed her hands on her hips. “We’ll have to hack it out, then.”

  “You don’t hack a platinum-black-restricted Corps archive.” The mere thought was sacrilegious to their Engineer, schooled in the Academy’s computery ways. “Their restricted servers are isolated, so you have to be on-site at the Corps Headquarters server room to access them. Teleporting might get you in, but the place is bristling with cameras, all running facial-recognition scans. Anyone who doesn’t belong there would be spotted before they could touch the server, much less hack it.”

  “Enter Corps, stage left.” Far shuddered thinking about it.

  “Are you black market thieves or are you black market thieves?” Eliot hissed.

  He shrugged. “We’re realists.”

  “Which is something only pessimists say.” Imogen brushed her hands together. The pile of fabric at her feet was substantial enough for Saffron to nest in. The creature looked downright blissful.

  “I made alterations to Far’s final exam Sim via remote hack. We can do the same with the Corps’ facial-recognition system,” Eliot suggested. “My face isn’t in their files. If we create a profile with platinum-black clearance, that’d prevent the alarms from tripping when I tap the restricted servers.”

  Gram’s brow furrowed, considering. “We could…. It won’t last long, though. Once the Corps realizes their firewalls are breached, they’ll spot the forgery.”

  “What if I told you I had a traceless way of hacking the systems?” Eliot asked.

  “It’s true.” Marin’s nasally sneer stuck to Far’s memories. Diagnostics showed all systems are untampered with. You failed. “Corps had no idea she screwed up my Sim.”

  “Then I’d say our odds just improved incrementally,” the Engineer conceded.

  “All right, then.” Far regarded his crew. Only the chalk puddles knew everything they’d carried him through; not even the future knew what they might face. Nothing was certain except this: They were up to the task. “Let’s make ourselves a world.”

  35

  THROUGH AND THROUGH

  THE PLANNING OF THE CORPS HACK went on for hours or seconds or years, until the crew’s bodies realized that they were, in fact, mortal and very, very sleep-deprived. No one had caught z’s since the flight from Vegas, and the chance to enter REM cycle would be nonexistent once they landed back in Central.

  Priya had never struggled with insomnia before, but the thought that this was the last sleep she’d ever have as herself kept the ceiling in sight. Ocean noises hushed through her headphones and dreams licked her peripheral vision—come to us sink in deep sleep sleep—but memories kept getting in the way, washing her back into wakefulness. Many of them were firsts: the sight of a cadaver’s waxy lips, the Acidic Sisters concert her father took her to for her thirteenth birthday. That fateful day when, on the angrier edges of a caffeine headache, ERROR: MANUAL MED NEEDED flashed across her interface and she’d marched into the examination room to find a cadet whose grin punched through all defenses.

  These memories… who would she be without them? Identity was never something Priya had taken for granted. You are a Parekh, her mother reminded her every time she stressed over study notes. These were double-sided words. Encouraging: You come from a long line of medical professionals. Daunting: You must live up to their accomplishments. It was something she remembered every single time she put on her ID card at the Academy infirmary: PRIYA PAREKH, MED, mirrored in Hindi.

  The thought of being rewritten kept her turning on the bunk. Reincarnation—sloughing off old bodies for new—had always been such a distant promise, seventy, eighty, ninety years off, and yet here she was, on the eve of it. How much would change in this next life? Would she still be a Parekh? Yes. She was a few months older than Far. If she was a Parekh, she’d probably end up being a Medic.

  The ocean rolled through Priya’s ears, out of her eyes, on, on…

  Tap, tap. The knock was soft, and might’ve been lost to the nautical noises, if Priya wasn’t so familiar with it. Many of the Invictus’s lights had been dimmed, and gloom pressed through the door when she opened it, settling in the corners of her bunk, dripping from the ends of Far’s curls.

  She pulled back her headphones and wiped her eyes. “Did I wake you?”

  Far shook his head.

  The space between them reeked of lasts. Priya wanted to be brave, wanted to say what she meant—I love you. Good-bye.—but the words withered inside her vocal cords, trapped by the deadened tangle of what never was jealousy, but fear. Fear of a loss now realized. “I wanted to let you sleep. We’ve got a big day ahead.”

  “You’ve been crying.”

  Her lips trembled, attempted a smile. “This haircut looks abysmal.”

  I love you. Good-bye.

  Good-bye.

  It was almost as if Far heard. He tilted his head. “You don’t have to hi
de from me, P.”

  Open the floodgates. This was more than ugly crying. It was the grief that came with truth: They were past saving. Their love was all, but soon it would be nothing, and the certainty of it clutched Priya’s spine, shook and shook and shook, until her sobs became wretched, waterless things. Far sat on the bunk, his arm around her shoulder. There were tears on his face, too, aqueducting down his nose. One for his mother, two for the worlds, more for this life.

  “I know it’s not everything we’d hoped, but we’re giving ourselves a chance,” he whispered. “We’ll live.”

  “But the Invictus, Saffron, Gram and Imogen, us…”

  “We’ll find each other.”

  “You’ll have a birthday, so there will be no need for me to come in and reset the med-droids every time you have a medical exam.” Priya’s breath shook. She was a drought inside. “We’ll never meet.”

  “Maybe we’ll bump into each other on a street corner. I’ll flash my impish grin. There’s a vendor a few meters away selling real coffee, but since I’m still a cadet and too broke to pay, I’ll invite you to sit on the curb and share a stimulant patch while we smell the roasting beans instead.”

  “Maybe…” She’d never been one to accept random invitations from boys on the street, and the chances of two souls colliding in a city of millions was slim. Even if both of these things happened, as soon as Priya discovered Far’s future profession, she’d stick to her no-time-travelers policy. But these doubts were nails in a coffin, no point in voicing them. “Make it a tea stand and I’m there.”

  “Of course, tea!” Far laughed—a light, ragged sound. “We’ll smell smoggy chai and I’ll ask you your name and you’ll ask me mine first because you like to know the lay of the land before you commit to anything and I’ll say Farway Gaius McCarthy, just a normal guy with a birthday who likes your smile and your cutting-edge hairstyle.”

  “It really is awful.”

  “It really isn’t.”

  They sat, wordless. Waves crashed through Priya’s headphones, became the pulse in her neck, the beat of her heart, the want want want to not just stay here with Far but to go back to when they had a future. She thought back on all the other times they’d sat like this, where she’d wasted the silences between them wondering about their trajectory: Rings? Vows? A villa in Zone 6? Children?