There wasn’t much solitude among four souls, one mannequin, and a red attack panda. Something was always happening. A heist, or dinner, or a clandestine snogging session between Farway and Priya, or Gram hitting Tetris’s highest score in record time, or Saffron getting into Imogen’s hair chalks thinking they were treats and staining the floors and pipes with pastel-yellow paw prints for days afterward.
The Invictus was family, life, home, and despite its cramped quarters Imogen wouldn’t trade it for anything. Unless anything happened to be a nice vacation.
“We could go mingle with artists in Belle époque Paris. Or go diving in the Great Barrier Reef.” Imogen realized she was still staring into the Engineer’s eyes. Their darkness had a mesmerizing quality—much like a sustained cello note— flowing into his hair, his skin. Too many beats she’d held his gaze, and now her face was aflame. Such snitches, her cheeks! Blushing at every inopportune moment… “Or Las Vegas before the great drought?”
“Vegas?” Priya’s voice drifted from the infirmary, along with the syncopated beats of her playlist. “I second Vegas! Poolsides, parties…”
“Motion denied. For now,” Farway said, loud enough for the whole crew to hear. “We can start thinking about vacations once this job is out of the way.”
Imogen swiveled her chair 180 degrees in the opposite direction, where Bartleby the mannequin stood, fully clad and faceless. At least she could blush in front of him. Being eyeless and unjudgy and all.
“You’ve got two outfits. The Invictus will drop you off on the smokestack closest to the first-class promenade, so you’ve got to be a bit snazzed up.” Imogen pointed to the swallowtail coat with a top hat, white waistcoat, and cane, before she unbuttoned the dress shirt. “You’ll be wearing worker clothes underneath, so you can strip down once you leave the first-class section of the ship. Trousers, suspenders, and a button-down I greased up in the Invictus’s engine room. It should get you easy access to the cargo bay.”
“That’s where the Rubaiyat is being held?” Farway asked.
“Probably. Problem is there’s no record of where the book was actually stored. All we know is that it’s on the ship.” Imogen brought up the Titanic’s layout on her screen. It reminded her of Gram’s everlasting Tetris game: stacks and stacks of cabins, forced to fit together in block formation. She pointed at the highlighted areas. “The only thing documented in the specie room is opium, so you shouldn’t bother with that. The cargo bay is down here, by the post office. I’ll guide you through the comms. We’ll drop you off at six PM April fourteenth, 1912. Everyone will be preoccupied with dinner and you’ll have hours to look.”
“Before it sinks.”
“Yep.”
Farway sighed. They both knew an earlier landing time wasn’t an option. The entire point of collecting history’s lost treasures was to let history believe they really had been lost. Not stolen.
“You’ve survived worse,” Imogen reminded him. The wardrobe above the common area was testament to that. Sleeves edged with singe marks, a tricorne sporting a musket-ball-sized hole through one corner, pants pocked with blood from Blard’s cutass. War, pirates, burning buildings, disgruntled gangsters… Farway had faced all these and more with minimal damage. He was pretty hashing lucky for a person who swore off the concept of luck altogether.
“Any Recorders?” her cousin asked.
“None that we know of.” Which meant none sent before or during 2371 AD. Future missions might well have landed there. Imogen wouldn’t have been surprised. The sinking of the Titanic was tragic in the most magnetic of ways. A serialized datastream of the event would make billions.
But it was also a landmark moment, prone to all sorts of interference. Lots of deaths. Lots of lives saved. Lots of press. It was the kind of event the Corps tended to shy away from for fear of altering the future. Lux hurled them into such scenarios without hesitation. It always came down to the same two things: money or fear. Which one was stronger?
Farway was fearless in a way Imogen simply could not grasp. If she were the one who had to put on that suit and descend into that soon-to-be watery grave, she—she just couldn’t. She was comfortable being a Historian, guiding Farway through the comm, dealing with danger sans bullets and adrenaline.
Her cousin watched this screen, which would soon be linked to his corneal implant, showing Imogen history through his eye.
“How close are we to the landing coordinates?” he called out to Gram.
“Autopilot’s got us ten minutes out. We’ll be ready to jump in fifteen.” Sonatas and cedarwood. That was what Gram’s voice reminded her of.
Oh hash it all. Her cheeks were going red again. Imogen buried her face into Saffron’s fur to hide it. The red panda chirruped and, instead of being a cooperative muff, hooked around her neck like an old woman’s stole. Gram hadn’t even looked up from the numbers he was running. Imogen didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved. Maybe both?
SUCCESSES IN IMOGEN’S LOVE LIFE: 0. BLARGH.
“Right, then.” Farway grabbed Bartleby by the waist and started dragging the mannequin toward the washroom. “I better get suited up.”
7
WHOOPS
GRAM WRIGHT’S STATION WAS MORE OF a shrine than a console. An homage to blocks and order. There were the usual buttons and screens, the navigation systems vital to any TM worth its stock. And the numbers… there were always the numbers, streaming through his brain at a rate that’d break a lesser genius. Gram’s own gray matter had bandwidth to spare. School was so easy he’d done it twice, cycling through the Academy first as an Engineer, then doubling back for Recorder training. Why contain knowledge to a single degree? Why trap yourself in a tiny box?
Maybe that was what made Gram so fond of Rubik’s Cubes. Yes, they were boxes—squares within squares within squares—but they held over forty-three quintillion color combinations. He was the proud owner of six of these toys, all vintage 1980, fresh off the assembly line. They lined his console in solid colors—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, white—the promise of a solution always within reach. A few twists + abstract thoughts = disorder reversed.
There was nothing Gram loved more than wrapping his mind around chaos, solving it. This was why he’d joined the Invictus. Piloting ships through time was a demanding job, but it was also short-lived. Engineers on a normal CTM often kicked back their feet and watched datastreams during the meat of the mission. Life aboard an illegal time machine was much more free-flowing. Dull moments need not apply. Gram could fire at all cylinders here: helping Priya tweak the engines, running heat scans for Imogen, and, every once in a while, getting off the ship to rescue Far’s tail.