“HOLY SHAZM!” Imogen shrieked.
Chaos ensued. Gram dropped the mug—chai went projectile when the ceramic shattered, hitting the chalk wall. 1922: Hunted down Hen With Sapphire Pendant washed down to 1946: Recovered Yamashita’s Gold from the Philippines until all thirty missions became a polychromatic soup. Saffron scattered from his owner’s lap, leaping to the closest high point he could find: Gram’s console. Paws mashed the Tetris score back to zero before landing in an explosion of Rubik’s Cubes. Green side became orange flipping over to white, which was sure to become brown after landing in the pool of tea. Gram’s stare fixed back on Imogen, and hers to her screen. Both hands were on her face, framing trembling lips.
“Oh Crux, oh Crux, oh…”
“What’s wrong?” Priya appeared in the doorway. Fear enough for all of them circled her eyes: three times pale. “What’s happening?”
Imogen seemed incapable of answering. Gram looked at the screen that swallowed her so, view via Far. He picked out shapes through the haze: shelves, the face of a woman who was not Eliot. She was staring at Far and Far stared back, meeting her eyes in a way no Recorder should.
“Who is that?” he asked.
“It’s Aunt Empra,” she gasped. “Aunt Empra is in the library.”
Empra McCarthy. Gram had never met Far’s mother but he’d heard plenty about her. She was one of the most respected Recorders of her time—fluent in Latin without translation tech, Recorder of several staple datastreams. Her career was matched by few, but most of Empra’s fame sprang from a different source: her disappearance.
If Empra McCarthy was here, the Ab Aeterno was, too. But… that didn’t make sense. No official Corps expeditions had ever been sent to this date. Gram and Imogen had checked and double-checked the Corps’ logs. They would have noticed any crossover, especially if the CTM was the Ab Aeterno.
Unless…
Unless this was the Ab Aeterno’s final mission. The one Empra and her crew had never returned from.
Click, click, click. These thoughts snapped into place, building up to a terrible realization. No one had been able to deduce where or when the Ab Aeterno had vanished—several rescue expeditions to the CTM’s last logged destination (the Giza Plateau, before it possessed such a name, some two centuries earlier than this date) had come up empty, including several ventures by the Invictus itself. Nor had anyone been able to determine what prevented Empra and her crew from jumping back to Central time eleven years ago. Something unprecedented, something catastrophic enough to keep a mother from her son… Gram had no idea how the Ab Aeterno came to be here now, but if his theory was right, something drastic was about to happen.
His gaze swung back to the Invictus’s nav systems: Vigilance! What he saw struck him to the core.
The numbers weren’t just changing this time.
They were disappearing.
28
CONFLAGRATION SITUATION
FAR WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD AGAIN. Chocolate gelato danced over his tongue, sweet with a seep of bitter. He’d taken too many bites too fast, and the cold of it climbed through his molars into his brain. Morning sunlight stole into their flat, transforming the most ordinary objects into gold: the rim of his bowl, a vase full of forget-me-nots, the boxes Burg had turned into a make-believe CTM. His mother—beneath these rays—was royalty. Her hair was bound in several braids, but the flyaways caught the light, betraying amber beneath the brown. When she frowned, these Celtic roots became a crown of fire.
“What’s wrong?”
“You just went on an expedition!” Far tapped his frozen temple, wincing. “Why do you have to go again so soon?”
“It’s my job, Farway. I’ll be back before you know it,” she promised. “Besides, what’s a week for me will only be a day for you. Time travel is funny like that….”
It was. Motherhood had shortened Empra’s expeditions—no more yearlong surveys—but even the shorter missions added up after a month or two. Every time the Ab Aeterno returned, Far’s mother was changed. New freckles pollocked her arms. Her eyes had seen more and were heavier for it. The sadness that swamped their brown never left, even with sunlight’s Midas touch.
Far stared across the table. She’d be back this evening, but she wouldn’t be the same mother sitting across from him now. So fiery, so ready to leave… He decided to take a picture with his interface. Click! Sun and gold and flowers blue. When his mother came back, he’d show her the image. Maybe then she’d realize how much she changed.
Empra McCarthy was the unchanged one now. Eleven years and she hadn’t aged a day, torn straight from Far’s childhood. Her hair was even bound up in the same braids, as if someone had crafted a hologram from the footage of that last-sight photograph.
No hologram could stare like this, though, eyes brighter than any memory could burnish. Smoke clung to Empra McCarthy’s silhouette, proving her to be flesh and blood and here. “Gaius?”
Strange. She’d never called Far by his middle name before.
He scrambled to his feet, plane of existence tilting. His mother had gotten shorter—no, he was the one who’d grown. The years had slid sixty centimeters into Far’s bones, and now he could see the fine white part of his mother’s hair.
“Mom?” he croaked.
“Farway?” His mother had the look of a dreamer waking, settling slowly into the realization that she stood in Alexandria’s ill-fated library, face-to-face with her grown son. “But—what? What are you doing here? Crux, how old are you?”
Imogen was yelling something in Far’s ear, and the surrounding smoke had gone from filmy to fuzz—fires closing in. Neither of these things moved Far, for he was a waker falling back into dreams. Eleven years he’d fought for this moment. Academy Sims and orphan nights, jewel heists and laughing his lungs sore with the crew. Everything had been done with this at the back of his mind: son to mother reunited in the heart of history. The scene had been imagined a thousand different ways—in just as many ages and locations. Now that it was manifesting, Far found it difficult to believe that this was the version. All true.
It was too good to be….
But then Empra clasped Far’s face in her hands. It was a mother’s touch—instantly familiar, twisting his emotions upright.
“I’m eighteen now,” he managed.
“Eighteen,” she whispered. “Burg, are you seeing this?”
Burg was here? Of course. He was the Ab Aeterno’s Historian, missing alongside the rest of the crew. Technically, Far had only lost one parent to the disaster, but in his heart, the number doubled. Burg’s bedtime stories, his cardboard time machine missions, his crush-your-shoulders hugs—Far missed those comforts something fierce. Then and still.