“Burg?” His mother was frowning. “Do you read me?”
“You never came back.” The words hurt more than Far expected, as if eleven years of sobbing into pillows and surrounding adults’ conversations wilting into a shame, such a shame, we’ll never truly know could be crammed into a sentence. “None of you came back. Eleven years I waited, Mom….”
“Eleven years?” Empra McCarthy stiffened; her heart-shaped face broke a little. Far knew he might be ruining things—telling his past her future—but what was lost was lost, etched in stone on the granite memorial walls at the Corps’ headquarters. “But it was just yesterday. Oh, Farway… Farway, I’m so sorry. I thought we could make it right….”
There was a tremble in her fingers, against his cheek.
“Make what right?” Far asked.
“Our nav system fritzed, and we landed hundreds of years off course, and as luck would have it, our fuel rods were never restocked. We don’t have enough juice for a second jump. The Ab Aeterno’s been running on fumes, and we used a lot of those getting here from the Giza Plateau. Burg knew the library burned today, and we thought if I came on-site I might find a Recorder to pass along our SOS. Here you are….”
“You’ve been stranded?” No wonder the Corps’ rescue unit never found the Ab Aeterno, stuck in a date two hundred and some years from when they were supposed to be. “But—”
“FARWAYFarwayFarwayFarwayFarwayareyoulistening?” Imogen’s words melted into an indistinguishable shout. “GetbacktotheInvictusnow!”
The smoke beyond the shelves parted, giving way to a wild Eliot—arms thrashing, wig as skewed as her eyes. Her sandals skidded through scrolls as she grabbed Empra and Far and started dragging them through Berossus’s spilled words. She screamed while she did: “Tell Gram to fly the Invictus over the courtyard! We’ve got to get out of here!”
Far dug his heels against her pull. “The scrolls—”
“Leave them!” Eliot snapped. “They’ll only weigh us down.”
Her fingernails formed five fierce moons—close to blood—in Far’s biceps. Still he fought to stay. “I’m not getting my tail skinned alive by Lux—”
“Lux doesn’t matter!” Eliot kept yanking; papyrus shred beneath her feet. “Lux never mattered!”
“Quickexitisagowe’recomingrightawaygotit?” What the Hades was Imogen saying? It was too much, pouring into Far’s senses alongside the smoke, twisting everything dizzy.
“Farwaywe’rethirtysecondsoutlistensomething’shappeningsomethingbigGramsaysweneedtojumpnow!”
His mother seemed overwhelmed as well, staring at Eliot with a misty-strange expression. “Have we met before?”
Eliot’s grip tightened. Far hissed. If she hadn’t drawn blood before, she certainly had now. “We have to get out of here before it reaches us!”
“We’re well away from the flames still,” said his mother.
“Not the fire!” Eliot pulled and tugged and tore. Her wig slipped off, black hair tangling with ink just as dark. “The Fade!”
“The what now?” Far asked.
“This moment is—it’s decaying. It’s unbecoming. So will we, if we stick around much longer. We have to get back to the Invictus and haul arse into the Grid before the Fade erases us!” Fear yawned beneath Eliot’s explanation: the death-facing, life-flashing kind. “Time is collapsing.”
Collapsing? Decaying? Unbecoming? What?
“She’snotlyingFarwayGramsaysthenavsystemnumbersarevanishingwhatevertheHadesthatmeans!”
“Hashing blueboxes!” Far hissed and started running. “Let’s get to the Invictus!”
“I’m not leaving my crew!” It was Empra who stood her ground this time. Eliot clung to her wrist, but the connection was taut, arms stretching. “Burg… Burg? Do you read me? Doc? Nicholas?”
“Mom! Come on! We have to—” Far’s voice shriveled in his throat when he stared back at his mother. Shorter than him, so much the same; eleven years clashing with a day. These shocks paled in comparison to what poured through the window behind her.
The smoke billowing at the end of the row was not really smoke. It wasn’t made of dark cinders or white ash. It was…nothingness. The world had become a Sim and was shutting down panel by panel, only there was no mother-of-pearl hologram tech shining beneath. Alexandria’s lighthouse: gone. The harbor’s warships: vanished. Lush palms, glimmering water: erased, unmade.
Every disaster Far had ever witnessed had one thing in common—noise. Do not go gentle events were punctuated with shrill bullets, screams, fire hissier than dragon’s breath, war drums, orchestras—take your pick. Destruction was a loud, roaring thing.
Unmaking wasn’t.
The Fade’s silence was absolute, made for hearing your heartbeat in your ears. As the absence reached for them, dissolving the library’s windows, devouring stones and shelves and scrolls, Far’s blood became sludge inside his body. He was a dreamer back in the dream-turned-nightmare; everything around him tinged a red, colorless shade. His mother yelled into her comm, oblivious to the void over her shoulder, even though it was beginning to swallow her voice’s sound waves—“Burg! Burg! Burg! Burg!”
Eliot’s reaction to the vacuum was instantaneous. She dropped their arms and ran.
“FOLLOWHERYOUHASHINGFOOL!” Imogen’s yell crashed through the comm, loud enough to move him.
Far lunged for his mother. The Fade was so close that the words coming from her mouth took no shape at all—they fell out of existence with the floor just a step away. His hand to her wrist, Far ran and Empra followed. Together they crashed through the stacks, clipping the shoulders of librarians rescuing manuscripts, trying to keep up with Eliot. The girl was several lunges ahead, her stola winging past Anubis.
What are we running from?
Far looked over his shoulder and found, to his terror, that the library’s southeast corner no longer existed. Nothingness pushed toward them, claiming shelves and statues, refusing to be processed by logical senses. No mind could link vocabulary to what Far was seeing.
“GETTHEHASHOUTOFTHERE!” Imogen screamed. “GRAM’SBOOTINGUPTHESYSTEMWE’REGOINGTOTRYTOJUMPEVENTHOUGHTHENAVNUMBERSAREDISAPPEARINGANDIWANTYOUTOBEINHEREWHENWEDO!”
There was little air left in his lungs, and everything burned for it. Calves, thighs, eyeballs, veins. Empra’s strides had equaled out with Far’s, so he let his mother go as they dashed toward the library entrance and the courtyard beyond. The Invictus was already there, hovering a few centimeters off the ground with the holo-shield dropped. A massive iridescence, impossible not to see. Several scholars were pointing from the steps—by far the worst breach of the Corps of Central Time Travelers’ Code of Conduct that Far and his crew had ever managed.
It didn’t matter now. The Corps wasn’t coming here. No one was coming here. If the nav numbers were disappearing, no time machine could land in this moment.
Far only hoped they could leave.
Priya stood in the Invictus’s open hatch, waving them forward. Eliot was already on board.