Thieves

by Lyn South

  “The French have a saying: A court without women is like a garden without flowers. Francois will be eager to display the most beautiful women in France in front of Henry, including his mistress. There will be more courtiers attending him at Calais than we can count. Make friends with his favorite mistress, and we’ll be in the King’s line of sight. A little flirtation here, a little flattery there, et voilà, we’ll get an invitation to Calais.”

  “That’s clever,” Fagin says, grudgingly. “But we have to play this carefully. Making friends with the king’s mistress could be disastrous.”

  “Not true. Francois rarely speaks to his wife. Anne wields more power in the French court than just about anyone. Trust me. This will work.”

  “Trust you? You’ve been more of a pain in the ass since we got this assignment than when I first found you, and that’s saying something.”

  “Are you seriously throwing that in my face?” I groan and slip into my rendition of Fagin’s throaty voice and, for added emphasis, throw up my hands in a frenzied motion to mirror her usual exasperation with the memory of those early days. “I was a little monster for the first six months. Mouthy. Disrespectful. Constantly trying to run away even though there was nowhere for me to go.”

  “You were a beast,” she interrupts, slamming a book into the middle of the table, causing a slight flicker in the hologram image as the book lands with a thud. “The only reason I didn’t take you straight back to picking pockets on the wharves of New Orleans was your pure, raw talent. You were the most gifted thief I’d ever met before you’d had a single day of training.”

  Fagin had considered throwing me back into that cesspool.

  This confession strikes a surreal dissonant chord, tinny and out of tune with the rhythm of our relationship since she saved me. She taught me how to get what I want from people and make it think it was their idea to give it to me. She has been my protector, and the only family I have left.

  The more her words sink in, the more they feel like a knife being drawn torturously down my chest until my nerves and muscles, my very heart, lay exposed and raw.

  How could she have thought of abandoning me?

  “I think I’m handling this entire shit show extremely well.” I swallow the lie along with the lump of emotion stuck in my craw; it leaves a trail of bile that burns down my throat, all the way to my belly. “What you’re asking me to do is—”

  “Save our lives. That’s what I’m asking you to do, Dodger.” Fagin says.

  “You know the Benefactors sent goons to threaten me into submission, right?”

  “I know.” She looks like she hasn’t slept in years. Her face is drawn and dark circles mottle the skin below her eyes. “If we play our parts, we’ll come out of this in one piece.”

  “Reporting my every move to the Benefactors is playing your part?”

  “Yes.” She looks me square in the eyes. Her tone is matter-of-fact, like her choice to be an informant is what any sane person would do in her position instead of what it is: a solid blow to the foundation of our relationship. She doesn’t explain her answer further; instead, she pivots back to the argument at hand. “Convince me why King Francois’s mistress is the better in-road to Calais than his wife.”

  Prying a rationale out of Fagin for her choices when she gives definitive one-word answers is akin to prying a coin from a miser’s grip. She knows better than to think I’ll let this go forever. For now, this battle will have to wait. “Neither of these men will risk being seen as having less fortune, fewer servants and courtiers, than the other,” I say. “Henry, alone, brings a contingent of two thousand people to Calais. We can expect Francois to do no less.”

  The skin between her eyes crinkles. “Go on.”

  “Our cover stories place us as wealthy, influential women, so the most important courtiers—including the king’s mistress—should be keen to meet us.”

  “My cover story includes wealth and influence. You, my dear, are my ward.”

  “Semantics,” I say, waving a dismissive hand. “You won’t dress me in rags and refuse to let me attend the king’s festival, right?”

  She chuckles under her breath, a small concession. I’ll take it. Even in our toughest times, if I can get her to laugh a little, I can get her agreement to a plan, too.

  “Francis won’t spend more than a single night away from the mistress; where he goes, she goes. As long as we make ourselves indispensable to her, we’ll get an invitation to the ball. This meeting is as much about one-upmanship as Henry’s goals of gaining acceptance of Anne.”

  “And once we’re in Calais?” she asks.

  “I introduce myself to Mary Boleyn. The critical path to England goes straight through Lady Anne’s sister. She slept with both Francois and Henry, so she knows the inner workings of both courts.”

  “I’ll admit it’s not the worst plan I’ve heard. I need to watch the research holograms again to see if there’s anything we missed. Some angle we haven’t spotted.”

  “You don’t trust me?” It stings to even have to ask the question. Whatever else happens, their damage to my partnership with Fagin can’t be a casualty of war.

  “I trust your skills,” she says in a resolute tone. I can hear the “but” coming from a mile away. “It’s the attitude I don’t trust. Your anger controls you. That’s dangerous.”

  “You’ve never had an issue with how I work before. You love that I’m unconventional, that I take risks no one else does and always come out on top.”

  “Your unconventional ass attracted the wrong attention from the wrong people, and here we are.” Fagin flings both arms out to the side and lets them fall with an exasperated slap against her chair. “Every mistake you make in training, every tantrum or mood swing is weighed against you, and your talent may not be enough to balance the scales.”

  “Why can’t they send us somewhere else? To some other time?” I hate the pleading tone in my voice. It makes me sound like a five-year-old whining about bedtime. “This can’t be the only way to prove my worth to them.”

  “Not happening, kid. This is your only chance to right this ship.”

  A faint buzzing grows steadily louder in the background. Fagin crosses over to her desk and taps the display screen on her tablet computer several times. I can’t see what she’s reading, but her brow furrows and she closes her eyes. She exhales a short, sharp breath. “You ready for this?”

  Shaking my head and suddenly, feeling quite small and vulnerable, I answer. “Does it matter?”

  There’s a shaky laugh—the polar opposite of the chuckles I finessed from her today. “I guess it doesn’t. Nico says that the Timeship is ready and we have our departure window. We leave at dawn tomorrow.”

  Chapter 9

  Morning people annoy the hell out of me. Chipper, bright-eyed people who spring from bed fully loaded and excited to tackle a new day are freaks of nature who get a buzz out of beating the rest of us to the productivity punch. Early birds don’t really get the worm; they just wake everyone else up. Overachievers, every damn one of them.

  I need coffee.

  It’s a little before four o’clock in the morning. Dawn is an hour away and, for some perverted reason, the Benefactors scheduled our time jump nearly four hours before any reasonable person should be expected to work. The ground crew swarms around the outside of the shuttle like worker bees, running diagnostic tests and prepping for launch.

  Stepping into the ship, I hear someone whistling a happy tune deep in the bowels of the cargo hold. The trilling notes echo up through the opening in the floor, as Nico ascends the ladder into the main cabin.

  He looks me over head-to-toe and I’m suddenly self-conscious about my untucked shirt, untied boots, and disheveled hair bound up in a loose elastic band, which allows half of its volume to hang past my shoulders on the right side of my head.

  “You look like hammered shit.” He walks past me to the galley and gives a command to the replicator. “Sixteen ounces of Garc
ia’s French Roast and chicory root coffee blend. Mix with fifty percent organic whole milk. Brew at precisely one hundred-forty degrees Fahrenheit.”

  A muted orange glow radiates from the replicator as it produces a glass mug filled with steaming, aromatic coffee. He offers the cup to me, and it’s the most perfect Café au Lait I’ve ever tasted. My personal replicator comes close to reproducing the brew I remember from childhood, but Nico’s blend beats every other twenty-sixth-century knockoff in existence. He orders the same brew for himself.

  “Mm. Coffee and chicory,” I say. The heat from the mug warms my hands as the drink warms my insides, making the ship’s cabin a little less frigid. The cold isn’t quite at the stage where you can see your breath hanging in a frothy cloud in front of your face, but with the hangar bay air drifting through the open door, it’s close.

  “After our last mission to New Orleans,” he says. “I’ll never drink it any other way if I can help it.” His morning-person eyes are clear and alert, and he looks annoyingly put-together: his dark curls are tamed with hair product, and a pressed khaki shirt is tucked into his blue jeans. He takes a swig from his own mug and beams a big smile.

  “Cooks in French Louisiana’s great houses made coffee this way for a century before the American Civil War. When I was a child—”

  Nico’s eyebrows raise, and he leans forward onto the balls of his feet, like he’s anticipating a revelatory tidbit from my past.

  Fagin’s words ring in my ears. Giving people your past gives them power over you. I wave away his interest with a dismissive hand. “Doesn’t matter. I could do with a beignet or three.”

  Nico smiles and commands the replicator again. “Six beignets. Extra powdered sugar.”

  Memories are weird, imperfect things; the oldest recollections—the fossils buried deep in the sub-conscious—are the weirdest and most imperfect of all. Colored by the passing of years, all it takes to unearth unexpected relics, sometimes at the most inopportune moment, is a trigger. Like the sight of something familiar, or a word or situation that conjures powerful feelings, frozen in time. A song that throws you backward and slams you heart-first into a long-forgotten moment.

  Smell is a powerful trigger. The smell of sweet fried dough takes me back to a Louisiana plantation and Marie-Thérèse, the Acadian cook who found my starved, half-clothed body cowering behind the hydrangeas in the garden.

  She hid me, fed and clothed me for a month. She tucked me into bed with her own children. I was ten years old and had been an orphan since I was eight. It was the first time in two years I had felt any sense of safety or security. The aroma and taste of the light-as-air pastry reminds me of her; it feels like she’s standing beside me.

  Nico is talking, but I only know this because his lips are moving. His voice is muffled by the thoughts racing through my head. I catch his last few words. “Well, are you?”

  “Huh?” I ask, forcing myself fully back to the present.

  “I asked if you’re happy. You were smiling, but I couldn’t tell if it was a happy smile or something else.”

  Pushing the last wisps of Marie-Thérèse away, I put on a sarcastic mask to hide behind. “Even with coffee, it’s too damn early to be chipper. Whoever scheduled departure for this ungodly hour should be drawn and quartered, then boiled in his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”

  “Bitching already? Not a very auspicious beginning to the journey, Clémence.” Fagin stands on the threshold, a small leather backpack slung across her shoulder. A frown crinkles the skin between her eyes. She drops the backpack onto the floor next to one of the leather crew seats. Then she says to Nico, her voice sharp as a blade, “Get moving on pre-flight. And turn the heat up in here. It’s freezing.”

  “On it,” he says.

  Nico and I exchange looks. He orders a Cafe au Lait for Fagin, too, which she accepts without comment. Maybe the caffeine will help dislodge the stick up her ass.

  Nico and the ground crew work through pre-departure checklists with surgical precision. Given the consequences of miscalculating time jump coordinates—no one wants to wind up in the wrong place or time or inside a stone wall—attention to detail is required. Nico sits at the pilot’s console working through his checklist; a symphony of colors light up the cockpit in oranges, yellows, greens, and blues. They pulse and glow with each rhythmic move of his hands across the Betty’s virtual reality screens.

  On Nico’s left, laminated printouts of the pre-flight checklists and pilot’s manual—holdovers from Nico’s Spanish Air Force pilot days that he insists on keeping in paper form—are attached to the bottom of the command console by a metal ring. “Belt and suspenders,” he had said to me, when I questioned him about it on our first mission together. “Never know when you might need to bypass computer gadgetry and fly by the seat of your pants.”

  I’m not sure these Timeships can be manually flown. The printouts are likely a security blanket for him. Most time transplants—those of us plucked from other times to live and work in the twenty-sixth century—have a touchstone of some sort. Something that grounds us and helps with homesickness because integration as a time traveler is a one-way deal. Once you join the team, you can’t go home unless your memories are wiped.

  A female voice comes over the intercom, the Time Jump Ground Control Director—T-Jump, for short—runs down the steps of her checklist with Nico. “Commence final pre-flight check,” she says, her tone all business. “Flight crew affirm mission with go or no-go confirmation.”

  “Roger, T-Jump. Commencing final pre-flight check,” Nico says. “Begin navigation systems checks.”

  “Launch sequence trajectory data confirmed loaded to command module,” she says, “Three cycle flight load: mission base launch, navigation to portal entry, and time vortex jump. Navigation aligned with current enviro conditions and portal threshold magnetic energy data signature.”

  “Launch trajectory data locked in, T-Jump,” he says, his fingers dancing across the screens. “Navigation controls are go.”

  Fagin frowns at her data pad while nursing her coffee; she doesn’t look at me as she reads, and after receiving the second grunt as an answer to a question, I abandon all communication attempts until she’s in a better mood which, I hope, will happen sometime before the end of the century.

  Burying myself in my own mission prep—reviewing historical and mission plan briefs using portable holo-programs—doesn’t distract me from the ships’ final systems checks. I’m not interested in hearing the never-ending recitation of technical jargon, but time travel quality control requires checklists to be broadcast over the ship’s intercom system so the crew hears the process.

  All systems are functioning as expected. Replicators and emergency dehydrated meals, enough to sustain a crew of four people for ninety days, are loaded. Medical supplies including computer-guided medical and surgical operation procedure controls are operational. Emergency egress plans, in the event a launch or landing is aborted, are a go.

  One by one, every system gets a thorough check. The pre-flight checklists usually take an hour, about the time required to calm my pre-flight nerves. With Nico at the helm, I find myself more relaxed than usual. I’m beginning to settle in, get my head in the game. Though this is his first official mission as the primary pilot, hearing Nico’s calm, steady tone over the speakers is reassuring.

  “Last two systems on the checklist, T-Jump, let’s finish this up so we can get on our way,” Nico says.

  “Roger,” T-Jump says, “Initiating check of ship’s exterior camouflage program.”

  Watching an intelligent man who is incredibly good at his job strokes every erogenous zone in my body. Nico’s smooth, quiet confidence makes a girl want to strip his clothes off and T-Jump him into bed.

  “Sorry I’m late,” a feminine voice says, scattering my thoughts faster than a fan clearing the fog from a smoky room.

  Fagin and I look up from our work and gape at the new arrival.

/>   “I didn’t get my orders until super late last night, so packing was a nightmare,” she speaks in a rapid-fire cadence that makes it hard to catch everything gushing out of her mouth. The squeaky timbre of her voice reminds me of someone who has sucked helium out of a balloon, and the effects have worn half-way off. “I had to find someone to cat-sit while I’m gone, and Nero is seriously picky about who he lets take care of him. Then I couldn’t find my new hiking boots, and I think it’s because my roomie borrowed them. She has real boundary issues, that one, let me tell you.”

  She actually put air quotes around “borrowed.”

  “Excuse me?” Fagin interrupts in an impatient tone bordering on livid. “Who are you and what are you doing on my ship?”

  The woman, a brunette of average build who doesn’t look much older than me—twenty-two or twenty-three, tops—beams a sweet-as-honey smile, and hands Fagin a manila folder. Fagin hesitates and looks askance at the newcomer as she takes it.

  “Lieutenant Becca Trevor.” Fagin reads the name on the front of the folder aloud, then gives the woman, still beaming her sickening-sweet smile, a blank look and a one-shouldered shrug.

  Trevor flips open the front cover of the folder and points at the top sheet of paper inside. “Read my CV and the copy of my official orders. I’m sure you’ll understand. Everything you need to know is there.” She’s still smiling.

  “I’m not reading anything,” Fagin says. “Tell me who you are and what the hell you’re doing on my ship.”

  Lieutenant Trevor’s smile withers into a quirky twitch at the corner of her mouth. She cocks her head to the side as she considers Fagin with a long, hard glare. “So much for the breezy and friendly approach.” She snatches the papers from Fagin’s hands and shuffles through them. Finding the one she’s looking for, she offers it to Fagin. “Read it.”

  Fagin doesn’t accept the offering, preferring, instead, to return Trevor’s a hard glare. The lieutenant blinks once, then tossed the stack onto the table. Fagin smooths the paper in front of her and silently reads. The color drains from her face; her countenance freezes into stone. An expressionless face can speak volumes about inner turmoil. Right now, Fagin’s face says she’s terrified.