“What’s your next move?” Gram asked.
Priya materialized from the revelers—a welcome relief. When Far looked to her, the rest of the crowd seemed to crystallize, unmoved in their motion. Her grin called him over before her wave did.
“Dancing, apparently.” He set the barware back on the tray, next to the Engineer’s unfinished drink. “Have you had enough booze to join the grind yet? Imogen is accusing you of being a wallflower.”
“Is she?” The look on Gram’s face was pained and determined. He donned his fedora like a helmet as he stood. “Right, then. Let’s get this over with.”
Three drinks, four drinks, five. The night melted into itself—moments without seams, becoming one syncopated blur. Like Gram, Far never went out of his way to seek a dance floor, but he found that once he started moving he didn’t give a shazm anymore.
Imogen came by with shots of something that tasted like a candy-shop display. Priya shouted the name and artist of every single song DJ Rory played. Gram tried to make a graceful exit at the five-song mark, but Imogen caught him by the vest and whispered something that made his eyes go wide. The Engineer stayed on the edge of the dance floor, feet shuffling in a way that was too tight to really be called dancing. Eliot flitted in and out of the crowd, always on the edge of Far’s consciousness. She was a moving marionette. Weightless limbs, delicate with hints of broken. The metaphor fell apart with her expression—unpainted. Yes, the eyebrows were sketched, but Far now saw how staged everything else had been, such curated smirks. Collected winks. This face was a good deal younger. It actually dared to smile.
Seven drinks. Eight. Far didn’t normally imbibe this much, but they were in Vegas and it was his unbirthday. If there was ever a time to let loose…
Party all night, dance into the dawning light.
Tick-tock, wind the clock, we can’t stop.
We can’t stop.
We can’t stop.
Priya brought a round of water, which the group guzzled down. Eliot did everything right: grin, laugh, thank you, drink, and was she actually aiming to become part of the crew? Far spent a good five seconds staring at his cup, marveling at the way the plastic crumpled against his palms. No no no. The Rubaiyat should be on the Invictus, in his hands. How could she make a whole book go poof? Maybe Eliot was a magician? Or an honest-to-goodness wizizard…
Hades, I’m drunk. The realization washed over him, accompanied by dizziness. Everything turned blue—the glow stick, in his eyes. The plastic link snapped off when Far tugged it, the circle becoming a line. He dropped the cup and the shine, watching both get stomped to bits by dancers’ frantic feet.
Once the beat fades, we fall apart.
We can’t stop.
Tick-tock.
Far stood still, watching everyone else spin around him. Imogen. Gram. Priya. Stranger after stranger. Everyone was covered in sweat, despite the dry air. How long could the night go on? It felt like forever already.
A hand on his arm. Far wasn’t surprised to find that the firm grip belonged to Eliot. Her countenance had gone stark… something to match the clench of her fingers on his sleeve.
“What’s the first thing you remember about the Titanic?” Her question was loud enough to pick out over the music, but Far struggled to keep up.
Remember? Everything was a blur, thanks to that bottle of Belvedere. He could barely recall the past few minutes, much less the finer points of his last mission. “Um. Crates?”
“How did you get to those crates?” Eliot was cutting off his circulation. Far’s fingertips buzzed; pins and needles pulse. BOOM sting BOOM. “Do you remember the exact route?”
Far frowned, thoughts spinning too fast to track. He remembered the plans: ship’s schematics flashing across Imogen’s screens and Bartleby standing by, looking dapper in a swallowtail coat. He remembered tossing said coat overboard before he descended into the cargo bay. But when it came to his actual jaunt through first class?
Nothing. The space was blank.
Shaking his head only made him dizzier. “Too much vodka…”
“Fex!” Far had never heard the word before, but he was pretty sure it was a curse for how hard Eliot spat it. “Fex! Fex! Fex!”
He stared at her, more dazed than not. How could he forget his entrance onto the Titanic? Far recalled his exit well enough—the polished staircase, the angry steward, chasing Eliot to kingdom come.
“It’s happening too fast,” she told him. “I forgot Charles.”
Charles? Who was Charles? Everything she said was nonsense…. And yet it wasn’t. The ground felt all tilty beneath him. Eliot’s fingers turned tight as talons; she started tugging him through the dancers.
“We have to go back to Central. Right now.” She said the same thing to Priya, to Imogen, to Gram as she led the group to the cabana. “Gather your things and let’s go.”
“Now, wait a second!” Imogen stood far closer to Gram than she would have four drinks ago. Her face was flushed from dancing, strands of glowing hair stuck to her neck. “No. We’re on vacation. Farway, tell her!”
“We’re on vacation,” he said. “Like it or not, I’m still the captain of this—”
“If we don’t leave right now,” Eliot told them, “I will destroy the Rubaiyat.”
The group went dead silent. Their expressions matched the savage beat of DJ Rory’s song. Imogen looked as if someone had just shaved Saffron’s tail clean down.
“You’re bluffing.” The stakes were too high for Far’s poker face to hold. Dreams, freedom, life… “You—you can’t do that to us.”
Eliot’s eyebrows rose. One of them was smudged, but instead of looking comical, it gave her an edge. “I can and I will. We deliver the book to Lux, right now. If we don’t… it’s gone.”
Gone. The ground was tilting again, and Far had to fight to stand straight. Why couldn’t he remember walking through first class? That was a massive chunk of memory… minutes and minutes of his life. Now that Eliot had pointed it out, all he could focus on was the gap. The space in his mind where someone had come along and cut the film.
Had she erased things somehow? Disturbance. Result. Linked. Could she have doped him up with Nepenthe when he wasn’t paying attention? Eliot was capable of anything. He saw all this and more in her eyes—the fire ready to light the pyre, send his entire world up in flames. Fear, anger, fear, fear, fear widening gyre all of it spiraling to places Far couldn’t reach. Priya’s hand on his shoulder was the calm during the storm. He would’ve keeled over without it.
Far puffed up his chest instead, tried to sound like the sober, in-control captain he wasn’t. “It’s decided, then. We go.”
20
NIGHT ARMOR