Or the family. Time travel cost more than billions of credits. Corps workers often caught up with their parents in age, while their own children grew at a snail’s pace. Priya had sworn never to date Academy cadets for this reason. Love should be all or it should be nothing. She had no interest in playing a Central anchor-girlfriend, absent for most of her boyfriend’s life until it looked like he’d robbed her from the cradle. If she was going to be with someone, she’d be with them: step for step, year for year, growing old in tandem.
The rule wasn’t too hard to keep, since the med-droids completed the bulk of face time during the cadets’ routine checkups. Then came the boy who crashed the system. Skewed DNA, blank-space birth date. One glance at Farway McCarthy’s chart and Priya assumed he was a senator’s bastard, the type the Academy halls crawled with: rich with hush money, bored out of his brains. Oh, how wrong she’d been. Far crackled with life, or life crackled with him. (It was difficult to tell which force was stronger.) His ever-movement—legs shifting, fingers drumming—was contagious. Jokes, too. The way he talked about history made Priya miss times she’d never known. On the hoverbus home that evening she found herself scrolling through her music for a song that captured the boy’s longing zest.
It was the beginning of many playlists.
Her choice to join the Invictus’s crew was easier than it should’ve been. Far needed a Medic, and though it wasn’t quite love—not yet, not then—Priya didn’t want nothing. The year since had been a juggling act, two lives crammed into one. She kept up her Medic shifts, as well as Saturday dinner with her parents, though every trip home Priya found it harder to pick up where she’d left off. What’s new in your world, beti? took on a different angle when your mother’s week operating an antique shop was your month spent illegally hopping from World War II Europe to Gold Rush America to Queen Anne’s Revenge, all while kissing a boy your parents knew nothing about.
Imogen and Gram performed the same verbal gymnastics with their parents, though ultimately conversational lag was a small price to pay. Priya was reminded of this every time Far talked about the Ab Aeterno, with a gap in his words no larger-than-legend energy could fill. Though he tried.
He tried.
“Would you save those people down there, if you could?” she asked.
Far frowned. “Imagined heroics make the helplessness worse, don’t you think?”
“Better than feeling like a vulture.”
“We are vultures, P.”
Like it or not, that was the truth of them. “I prefer the term relic relocaters.”
“It’d be great if we had a relic to relocate.” Far’s lip twitched. “What do you think of our new guest?”
“I haven’t seen someone get under your skin so badly since Instructor Marin. Not even the pirate who gave you that scar.” Priya touched his right biceps—where, just under the workman’s shirt, she felt a hard welt of skin, one that curved into brachial artery territory. It was the most of Far’s blood she’d ever seen outside of his body, brought forth by a rusty cutlass, closed shut by thirty stitches. A mere flesh wound, he’d joked with blue lips as Gram dragged him back onto the ship. If Imogen hadn’t been there to offer her vein for a transfusion, the story wouldn’t have had such a happy ending.
“Swords, I can handle—whack and hit! But this?” Far massaged his face. Most of the anger had rubbed off, giving way to starker things. “After I got thrown out of the Academy, I swore I’d do anything I could never to feel so… so defeated again. Here we are nearly a year later—after all these successful heists—and the exact same girl is dangling our futures on a string, and I don’t know what to do. If I don’t deliver the Rubaiyat to Lux… we could lose everything, P.”
A shudder passed from him to her. It wasn’t like Far to be afraid, and it wasn’t like Priya to squeeze his arm so tight, but here they were. Each other’s only.
She drew strength from her next sip of chai. “Let’s not lose our heads, though. The fact that Eliot diverted your timeline makes me think there’s some sort of long game at play here…. We need to learn more about her. If we can get our hands on a DNA sample, I can run it through the diagnostics machine. Could give us something to go on.”
“The washroom floor looks like it’s covered in spaghetti confetti from Imogen’s shedding,” Far said, nose wrinkling. “Scrounging up an Eliot hair shouldn’t be hard. We have the time—I’ve asked Gram to take us to Las Vegas.”
“Vegas? As in an actual proper-vacation destination?”
“The only other option is limping back to Lux, and I’d prefer to delay that demise for as long as possible. We’ll use the trip to get a handle on things. Figure out who Eliot is, find the Rubaiyat. All of this assuming we can make the jump to the next century—”
“We should. I checked the engines and the fuel rods.” As evidenced by the spots on her scrubs. Grease this time, not blood. Fixing things tended to get messy. “Everything’s smooth on the mechanical end.”
“You sure?” The question stayed in Far’s stare even after she nodded. “It’s not like Gram to hash things up.”
“Gram spoils us with that brain of his, but he’s not a droid. Mistakes are what make us human. I hope you’ve apologized for assaulting his Tetris screen.”
“Gram knows I was frustrated.”
“But he won’t know you’re sorry until you tell him.” The tea’s extra dash of ginger burned gold on Priya’s tongue, adding fire to her grandmother’s favorite saying: “‘The world misses bees for their honey, not their sting.’”
It would’ve been easy for Far to bring up the fact that the proverb was outdated—bees were back thanks to time travelers. He rubbed his knuckles instead, as if wiping away the memory of the punch. Determination settled in the darker edges of his profile.
“I’ll make it right.” He leaned forward to plant a kiss on her forehead. Priya shut her eyes and soaked in every warmth: the mug of tea in her hand, the press of his lips to her skin, the radiance from the Invictus’s engines as it tore west, through the night.
13
THE HILLS REMAIN
GRAM STARED AT THE NUMBERS.
They were changing, but it was a slow, expected shift. Seconds ticking along. Time’s natural passage as morning caught up with them—April 15, 1912 AD, 5:32 AM. In just a few minutes, Las Vegas would appear on the horizon, looking like little more than an old Western movie set, with signs advertising BILLIARDS and horse shazm scattered along the dirt roads. Nothing to see, and even less to do. The great state of Nevada had outlawed gambling in 1909, never mind that it would be at least twenty years before the first official casino opened. The flashier stuff came much later.
Could they make the jump? Gram hoped so. He more than hoped. The 1900s wasn’t an era he wanted to be stranded in. Skin color wasn’t a barrier in Central time, but when it came to the past, prejudice was inescapable. Every time Gram stepped into a new era, he had to brace himself for the hatred of the age. Sometimes it was just under the surface, lurking in shopkeepers’ gazes as they watched him walk down every store aisle. Other times men called Gram words unfit for a dictionary, insulting his intelligence to his face. This stretch of history was downright dangerous. He’d seen photos of lynchings. Even in black-and-white they were graphic enough to make him retch.