With a wave, the other girl continued into the washroom. “There’s a scathingly strong mirror in here, if you need it.”
The area was roomier than expected, tucked along the ship’s starboard side. It had all of the standard long-term time-travel fare—shower, toilet, vanity, closed-loop recycling water system. The mirror lived up to Imogen’s descriptions: overachieving to a fault. Who knew skin had so many pores? Eliot’s sunburn wasn’t as bad as she’d feared, already pastel in shade. Most of her left eyebrow was nonexistent. She set to work washing her face clean, and—while Imogen’s back was turned—pulled out her brow pen. It was a relic, label rubbed off from so many uses. Eliot sometimes composed new names as she drew: Black as the Souls of Mine Enemies, Widow Maker, A Humor So Dark, Night Armor.
Muscle memory took over her fingers. Swipe, swipe, fill in the blank. Eliot traced curves along her supraorbital ridges while Imogen watched. Fascinated. “Do you always draw the same arch?”
“More or less.”
“Do you ever doodle secret messages into them? Something tiny and subliminal?”
“I’ve—never thought to do that,” Eliot admitted. “What would you write?”
“‘Hello, there.’ Or ‘Cookies please.’ It’d depend on the day, to be honest. Speaking of.” Imogen hefted up a giant case of hair chalks stacked in rainbow rows—primaries, neons, metallics, white. Some had been used more than others: almost down to the nub. “What color do you think I should go with? Taylor Pink? Marigold? Silver Dream?”
Eliot couldn’t help renaming the shades: Fairy-Tale Fury, Earwax?, New Robot Overlords. “You change your hair color every day? Isn’t that time-consuming?”
“I like colors and colors like me,” the other girl said. “Anything’s better than boring old blond.”
“My hair was blond, before it fell out.” One of the few memories Eliot actually wanted to dissolve. Standing barefoot in the tub, fingers around a fistful of golden strands. They’d looked so short apart from her head, so straggly when she dropped them and shrieked for her mother.
Her pen hand quivered, turning her left brow cartoonish.
“Shazm.” There was gravel in Imogen’s whisper. “I’m sorry, Eliot. I wasn’t thinking. It didn’t even occur to me—”
“Don’t get me wrong. I like your colors, too.” Eliot set down her pen, using a towel to scrub the deviant brow away. “The world gets gloomy. It helps having something bright around.”
Imogen ran a finger down its color-blocked columns. Rainbow dust clung to her skin—as if she were a fairy gathering a spell. “It’s all about perspective, isn’t it? That’s why Aunt Empra loved time travel so much. She always said the past helped her make sense of the present… sometimes even the future, too. I didn’t understand what she meant until I started traveling. When you witness the breadth of history, you understand how small you are. And yet at the same time you realize how much your life matters… how much you shape the people around you. And vice versa.”
There was still a tremor in Eliot’s fingers. She stared at the pen nib, waiting for the shake to pass. Usually it wasn’t this hard to put her face on.
“Anyway, I’m babbling,” Imogen sighed. She plucked two chalks from the case. “If we’re going back to our anchor date, I should default to aquamarine with a hint of bubble-gum pink, for continuity’s sake.”
“Nebula hair,” Eliot offered.
“It does sort of look like a nebula, doesn’t it? Celestial ’do, here I come.” The Historian set the aquamarine and pink chalks on the vanity. “I’ll let you finish your eyebrows before I monopolize the washroom. Take your time. I’m off to concoct something strong and caffeinated.”
The washroom became ten times quieter with her exit, silence that felt more hollow than full. Eliot’s hand had steadied, ready to trace what she’d show the world. She liked the secret message idea, wearing a war cry only she could see at a mirror’s glance. She stared at her reflection—past the burn and the blackheads—and wondered what today’s mantra should be. Fex this? Brace yourself? Zut alors? Carpe diem?
READINGS ARE 31% COMPLETE, Vera told her. REMEMBER CHARLES.
Eliot picked up her pen and started to write—spider-leg letters, backward to the casual observer. Once she was finished, she shaded over them, until even the most discerning eye couldn’t pick out what was scripted beneath.
She fully intended to.
21
WOBBLES
FAR’S FEAR HAD GONE VIRAL. It was the worst thing that could happen from a captain’s perspective, watching your insecurities leak into the crew, nerves crawling all over the console room. Every one of the Invictus’s five passengers stared out the vistaport as Gram guided the time machine down the Tiber. Its water crept brown beneath the evening light. They drifted along with it, past the Castel Sant’Angelo, over bridge after bridge, to a section of river that the men of Central would choose to forget. What was now water would become earth, and what was earth would be hollowed out by Lux and used as a warehouse for his illegal TMs. During Central time, the place was buried in secrecy. Ships like the Invictus could only dock there by jumping through specific years, namely ones where drought had reduced the Tiber to a volume that wouldn’t drown them on impact.
They’d made it to 2155—a year skies refused to cry and the earth thirsted—without incident, but the stakes were much higher with the docking jump. Lux’s fleet left and landed on an airtight schedule to avoid collisions. One slipped landing became two TMs with volatile fuel rods in the same space became nuclear apocalypse.
So yeah, nerves.
Gram brought the Invictus to the exact landing coordinates, settling the ship into muddy shallows. He grabbed one of his Rubik’s Cubes and began twisting.
Priya slipped on headphones, insulating herself in music.
Imogen chewed her thumbnail to a saw-toothed quick.
Eliot didn’t have a tell, but this didn’t stop her anxiety from being palpable. Far tasted it as well as his own. The only one without a care was Saffron, who’d planted himself in the captain’s chair and would’ve melted into its abhorrent orange if not for his facial markings. Far was too hungover to tsk the animal off. It’d been a long sleep and a few waking hours since Caesars Palace, but the wooze of vodka clung to him. Nausea was inevitable for this jump.
“You sure we can land right this time?” Far asked.
“Nothing’s sure now, Far,” Gram reminded him.
Right. All conjecture at this point. Far turned to Eliot. “If you want all of us to get back to Central in one piece, you’d do well to dish anything you might know about wobbly landings. They only started happening when you showed up, and Gram here tells me you were asking about it. It’s not much of a leap to assume that you can help us avoid blowing up.”