Invictus

by Ryan Graudin

  “He’s awake!” one of the guards announced.

  This was August’s first good look at his assailants. His eyes focused on their sleeves’ loopy hourglass symbol. Corps. August came from a long line of career Bureau men and consequently had a patent dislike for anything to do with the Corps. They were forever stealing things—funding, recruits, public interest—and leaving messes in their wake. Pivot point had become akin to a curse word in Ackerman families across the HTP8 string. Unauthorized worlds popping up like fungi, all because this lot was so obsessed with looking backward. August couldn’t understand why. What sort of person would want to make a career wallowing around in history’s diseases and odious smells?

  These sorts. Amateurs who thought a few links of metal could tie him down….

  …

  …

  When August did not vanish, he sat straighter in his chair. His interface—and the teleportation equipment linked to it—had been scrambled by the surge of electricity. Much like August’s body, it needed a reboot. He wouldn’t be going anywhere for some time, unless these guards decided otherwise.

  The flame-haired one leaned in, elbows locked as if he was bracing for something. “What were you doing in the Corps’ restricted archives?”

  That explained the servers, as well as the alarm. Both had been unexpected. This entire assignment was, really. He’d spent most of his twenty years with the Bureau mopping up time- traveling messes—observing oopsy-daisy universes, numbering them in the ever-changing system—but the Fade was a first for his career. Whatever Farway McCarthy had done to cause it was a muck-up of catastrophic proportions. Despite the many Dr. Ramírezes’ valiant efforts, it could not be cleaned up, only contained. The quarantine should’ve been simple: Follow the beacon, X out this final catalyst, confiscate Cadet McCarthy’s jump equipment before she could create more spin-off worlds. Of course, history hoppers never made anything simple.

  Lightning bolts streaked down the side of August Ackerman’s throat as he swallowed a second time.

  “Who was that girl?” the guard tried again. “How is it she vanished into thin air? Why was the motto on her badge different? Why was she tapping into the Ab Aeterno’s 95 AD archives?”

  Because Cadet McCarthy was foolish enough to think time might change things, and she would keep creating pivot points, spreading the Fade into world after twisted world, until she gave up and jumped to an innocent string, dragging the countersignature’s infection with her.

  That couldn’t happen. Metal bit into August’s skin as he tried to lift his wrists. Chained to this chair, stranded in this rotting universe… He wasn’t going anywhere if he kept silent.

  “Some very unfortunate events are about to occur,” he informed his questioner. “I was in the process of preventing them when you intervened.”

  Eyes widened. The guards glanced at one another.

  “You’re from the future, aren’t you?” the red-haired guard offered. “Explains why we didn’t recognize your credentials.”

  The thought of the respected emblem of the Multiverse Bureau—the infinity symbol linked over and over again into a circular chain-mail pattern—being mistaken for a time traveler’s badge ticked August’s blood pressure up a few notches. Somewhere in universe MB+251418881HTP8, the Ackerman forefathers were rolling in their cryonic suspension chambers.

  “Sharp young man you are.” Agent Ackerman’s gaze flicked past the guards, to the mirror. Whoever was calling the shots of this interrogation stood behind the glass, listening. August stared past his reflection as austerely as he could. “Your present is in peril. Cadet McCarthy is traveling back into the past to alter events, but she is playing with forces vastly beyond her qualifications—”

  CRACK! The door to the interrogation room opened so hard August expected the sound to spread to the mirror and spill into a thousand silver shards. The glass held. Agent Ackerman recognized the newcomer from the datastream of his trip to MB+178587977FLT6. Headmaster Marin’s alternate was identical in this world—right down to the mustache. It was an admirable lip wig, waxed into knifepoint ends that quivered when their owner spoke.

  “Did you say McCarthy?”

  “Yes,” Agent Ackerman answered with care. The name was obviously an explosive one.

  “First day of a new promotion and that hashing family shows up. Never could stand Farway, always preening about being born outside of time. As if having a mother irresponsible enough to watch gladiator matches during labor is a bragging point!”

  Ah. The history hoppers had a history, something painfully personal, gathering from the mustachioed man’s tone. It was the born-outside-of-time bit that piqued August’s interest. Could the circumstances of Farway McCarthy’s birth be the event to which Cadet McCarthy had been referring? Was 95 AD the time she was so determined to alter?

  “Who is this girl? Farway’s daughter?”

  “What she is, is a danger to you and your timeline.” Cadet McCarthy was probably in 95 AD already, catalyst alive at her side, attempting to spread this decay even farther…. Even if August could get his teleportation capabilities back online, they wouldn’t do him much good. “It was a disaster I was in the process of preventing, but your stunrods have interfered with my equipment. Headmaster Marin—”

  “Headmaster?” It wasn’t until Marin frowned that Agent Ackerman realized his slip. Different world, different title. “No, no. It’s Commander Marin.”

  “Commander Marin.” Frozen Ackerman corpses kept rolling round and round, but family honor could wait. The Fade had to be contained. If Agent Ackerman had to time travel to kill the final catalyst, so be it. “I’m going to need a ride.”

  41

  THAT TIME GODS POPPED OUT OF THE FLOOR

  THE DREADED DAWN HAD COME. Gaius fought it off, clinging to dreams as long as he could, for Empra was in most of them. Empra—woman who’d come from the clouds, or so she’d always claimed. It was the glib answer to his serious question: Where are you from? He’d wondered this ever since his first sight of her in the stands in the ludus’s training arena, bright spot in the bleakest winter of Gaius’s life. His debts had hounded him to the foot of a lanista, forcing him to make an oath—to train, to fight, to slay, to die in the man’s name. Sunrises became numbered, nothing more than a reason to wake and begin the litany of blood and blade anew.

  Whenever Empra watched Gaius’s practice spars, he felt life’s gray slip away. Food stuck to his stomach, jokes became laugh-worthy. On the evenings she visited him, to break bread and ask Gaius about the gladiator’s lot, he remembered that spring smelled of warmth and star-edged flowers, and love felt much the same.

  During the day, Gaius fought. During the night, he lived.

  Their conversations wound through many things. Questions, answers, fears, the dreams of youth. Nothing about Empra added up to a single city or province, nor did she ever commit to one when he asked.

  Where are you from? The stars.

  Where are you from? Heaven.

  Where are you from? Not here. Elsewhere.

  The thing was, it was believable. Empra was sky—vivid and vast with possibilities. But Gaius? Gaius, as his name so literally claimed, was a man of earth. He felt this gap between them even after their love became a spoken thing, even when she lay in his arms: shoulder blades sprouting like wings into his chest, a beat or two away from taking flight. Not even a child, his child, growing inside her womb, could keep Empra from leaving, going back to wherever it was that she’d come from.

  Why? There was no fanciful answer this time.

  Nor was there sky above Gaius when he opened his eyes, just the dull stone of ceiling, made for tamping down dreams. A rooster’s cry announced that morning was nigh. Soon he’d be fighting his first official match.

  “Gaius? Is that you?”

  The accent was Empra’s, and the woman standing on the other side of his cell door had a complexion just as alabaster. But the torchlight called up several differences: Her eyes were d
arker, her hair, too. Empra was gone and this woman was here when she was not supposed to be—even wealthy matrons didn’t frequent the gladiator school at this hour.

  “How do you know my name?” There was crust in Gaius’s eyes. He made to wipe it out, yet the motion was in vain. He was still dreaming. He must be, for the woman was now inside his cell, while the bars themselves had not moved.

  Gaius blinked. The sight only grew stranger. The woman—girl? She looked to be that in-between age where both words applied—removed the thinnest bracelet he’d ever seen, stretched it out in front of her, and pulled the air apart. She stared into this hole, speaking tooth-jarring words that belonged to no tongue Gaius had ever heard.

  Hair appeared, black curls spilling out of nothingness. A head followed.

  It was his own.

  Gaius forgot to breathe.

  The head frowned and spoke in the tumbling language. The woman—Girl? Goddess?—knelt down, placing the torn air before her. Two arms sprouted from the floor; an entire second Gaius pulled himself into the cell.

  Somewhere the rooster kept crowing, reminding Gaius that he was awake. Awake and sober, unlike his cellmate, Castor, who’d tried to drown his fears in a goblet at last evening’s banquet, and was now a pile of limp limbs in the corner. Gaius drank only a single glass of wine at the festivities, even after Empra had melted off into the darkness and the night caved in on him. Yet if he was neither drunk nor dreaming, what explanation could there be for the scene before him? Had he already died in the arena? Was this Elysium? He’d expected more grass and fewer bars in the afterlife….

  “Wh-who are you?” he managed.

  The two newcomers exchanged a glance and more spear-head syllables.

  “We are…” the woman began in Latin, “… friends of Empra. Though she must return to the realm she came from, it is not her wish that you perish here.”

  This was not Elysium; these were gods come to earth. Clouds. The stars. Heaven. None of Empra’s answers had been false. Like most Romans, Gaius had grown up with the stories—where deities such as Venus and Aurora lit their eyes on mortal men. Tempestuous, whirlwind tales of love that ended in sorrowful partings and children who shook the world.

  He’d never expected to be a part of one.

  “We’ve come to free you,” said the second Gaius. “So that you can say good-bye before she departs.”

  The longer Gaius studied this divine version of himself, the more he realized the imitation was inexact. The god—Man? Boy? He was also of the age where both words applied—had nicer teeth, and a scar on his arm. Something about him, about both of the beings in his cell, reminded Gaius of Empra.

  “But my oath—”

  “I will fight in your stead. Your oath to your lanista will be fulfilled. You’d do best to start your life anew elsewhere.” The god pointed to his toga. The textile’s weave was too small to see, an impossible feat for mortal hands. “We should exchange garments.”

  The rooster’s call was fading, soon to be replaced by armor clatter and lashing whips as the ludus prepared for the day’s bloodshed. Gaius tried to understand what was being said, that he might be spared all this…. Would it be cowardice, to accept another’s offer to fight and possibly perish for him?

  No, Gaius realized. For immortals did not die.

  Who was he to deny the gods?

  He began pulling off his garment.

  For eighteen years, the word father had been a fill-in-the-blank where Far was concerned. What was the fudged half of his DNA hiding? Who had he come from? A CTM captain? A Medic? A senator? Math made the last option impossible, but that hadn’t stopped young Far from adding it to his rotation of imagined father-son reunions. His captain dad taking him for a whirl over pirate-riddled seas. A Medic father letting him wear his lab coat, even though it was years too big. The upstanding senator, guiding Far on a tour of the New Forum, telling everyone he met This is my son! in a voice as proud as it was booming.

  None of the scenarios had come close to this. Far, standing half naked in a prison cell, December air grazing his chest as he swapped Imogen’s floss-strung bedsheets for a ragged tunic. Gaius wrapped his new toga with care, running his fingers over and over the cotton. It must’ve felt otherworldly compared to the fabric Far was yanking over his own head. Scratchy as Hades!

  “Eliot—er, this is Eliot—is going to take you to Empra now. But you will need to step into her…” Shazm, what was he supposed to call it? “Invisible chariot now.”

  “Chariot?” Eliot repeated in Central dialect, her Mundi eyebrow raised. “Does that make me a horse?”

  “Pocket universe was too tricky to translate.”

  “How do I ride this unseen chariot?” Gaius’s question brought them back to Latin.

  “Step in.” Eliot pointed at where the floor gave way to dresses. “Carefully.”

  Quaking brow, disbelieving lips—both children made cameos in their father’s expression as he peered into the dimensional rift. “I can fit in there?”

  “Yes.” Far knew because he’d asked the same question on the same edge, before leaving the Invictus. Once he’d climbed into the space, it felt more universe than pocket. “It’s bigger when you get inside.”

  Gaius took the words of his unknown son on faith. There was a lump in Far’s throat as he watched his father slip into the floor. His entire life had been lived as a McCarthy and only a McCarthy, but there was 50 percent more to him, landing among hemlines and lace. How had Gaius become a gladiator? What were the names of Far’s grandparents? Where did his blood call home?

  Far wished he could ask his father these things, but the sun was rising, and any answers would soon be forgotten. He watched Gaius settle into a pile of petticoats instead, marveling at their tulle netting. His windpipe kept clogging, too much to manage a farewell. Then again, he’d hardly even said hello.

  Black curls became earth when Eliot sealed the pocket universe, wrapping it back around her wrist. Far looked around the cell’s flickering lamplight walls, interrupted by the graffiti of past inhabitants—Antiochus was a stallion among women and Today I made bread. These marks made the place less bleak. He wondered if his father had carved any of them.

  “Your link with the Invictus should go live around eight o’clock,” Eliot told him. “Priya will be there to walk you through…”

  “My death?” The words were utterable now, both cathartic and piss-in-your-Roman-underwear terrifying. How could the guy in the corner sleep so hashing soundly when the same fate loomed?

  “Fingers crossed, the Fade won’t show up between now and then.”

  “You sound like Imogen.” Far tried to crack a smirk; the expression was too breakable for his face. “Do we believe in luck now?”

  “I think we have to.” Eliot clasped his shoulder. “Far, I know we’ve had our differences—”

  “Differences?” Far snorted. “That’s a delicate term for a blackmailing, blaster-wielding, mother-snatching Marie Antoinette impostor.”

  “You were the best version of myself.” It was enough to knock the laugh out of him, enough to see glimmer by her lashless lids. “Die well, Farway Gaius McCarthy. I’m going to try my fexing hardest to make sure you live again.”

  Gaius’s cellmate began to stir, mumbling Latin too foul for a mother to teach. Far caught the gist without his translation tech: The gladiator was waking up with a horrible hangover, a mass of muscles and rags assembling into wakefulness.

  “You were the best version of myself,” Eliot repeated. “Of course, that could be the amnesia talking.”

  She winked.

  And then she vanished.

  Far stood on the solid cell floor, comm dead in his ear, his shoulder indented from Eliot’s fingers. His stare went straight to the window, not for the violet sunrise, but for the bars in front of it. He was trapped. The thought itched inside his legs and made him want to pace, back and forth, tiger-in-the-cage style, but he’d seen what his opponent’s blade could do. His en
ergy was best saved for the battle. Far would die, because he had to, but he wasn’t going to leave this life without a Hades of a fight.

  He owed himself that much.

  42

  AN EMPRA IN A HAYSTACK

  GRAM HAD SEEN THE COLOSSEUM’S CARCASS too many times to count. Most of these views had been from an eagle-eye height, through skyscraper vista walls and hoverbus windows. The circle of scarred stones, host to a never-ending stream of tourists, had never particularly captivated him. Even the ground-level sight, amplified by a datastream tour, had ill-prepared Gram for the Amphitheatrum Flavium’s towering prime.

  According to Imogen, this land had been a valley once, complete with a lake. The Romans raised the earth with ruins from Nero’s fire, so necks would have to crane up to take in this marvel of engineering. Every one of the amphitheater’s outer wall stones had been set without mortar—Tetris before its time—coming together into unmatched dimensions: 48 meters tall, 189 meters long, 156 meters high, 80 ground-level entrances to accept the ebb and flow of fifty thousand people. This was Rome’s glory, her heart, throbbing with the footsteps of a blood-callused mob.

  Gram walked among them, searching. At nine months pregnant, Empra should have been easy to spot, but the flood of game-goers drowned out all shapes. Colors blurred his peripheral—yellow togas, rust togas, white togas, every tone of skin—made even more chaotic by the constant crush of body odor. It was tempting to bury his nose in his own dated toga, which smelled of an inferno nearly 150 years dead. The attire, equally out of date, had garnered Gram some sideways glances, but it was best he not blend in. Empra McCarthy was in Recorder mode, which meant she’d try her absolute best to ignore him. An old costume was a way to catch her attention. Or so the plan went. He had to find Far’s mom first.