“You had eleven more years with her than I did—”
“And I can’t remember any of them. You want to toss around blame, Far? Those years are gone because you exist. I stranded your mother because I was trying to save her. I tried to save all of them….” Eliot sagged, marionette past motion. Wardrobe clothes shuddered from the extra weight on the pipe. “If I’d known the Fade was going to appear in Alexandria, I never would’ve taken you there and let your present align with Empra’s.”
“So why bother with target practice?” Far looked past the brown-white weave of his and Priya’s fingers, at the burnt satin below. “You should’ve just left me in Alexandria, let the Fade do what it set out to.”
“The countersignature scan wasn’t complete. The Multiverse Bureau wants hard evidence that you’re the catalyst, proof that the Fade might halt with your death.”
“It won’t.” Gram’s grave words buried every one of them. “Dr. Ramírez said the Fade has been active for over a decade, though I suspect it’s been closer to eighteen years. Far’s carried this countersignature his entire life; shooting him now might cut the signal and stop the Fade’s reach into the future, but it won’t keep the decay from chasing down his past self.”
Eliot squeezed her eyes shut. Far stared at the illustration: boy radiating brokenness. His future, their fate prophesied in one small scribble. He wasn’t the blood threading through history’s veins, but a poison, polluting every time he’d ever touched. All the seconds he’d lived—the sights he’d seen, the pasts he’d walked—were damned, and his friends’ lifetimes with them.
There was a rattling of pots in the kitchenette and Imogen emerged with a half-eaten pan of tiramisu. The scene was heartbreaking for its normalcy. His cousin set the leftovers on the table like she always did. She’d brought enough forks for everyone.
“The world’s ending,” she explained as she sat down and started digging into ladyfingers and cocoa-flecked cream. “Might as well have dessert.”
“You’re going to give up on Far that easily?” Priya bristled, too distraught to hide the fact that she was. It was so unlike her to fall apart in the open, for all to see. “Stuff yourself with sweets while everything goes to shazm?”
“What else can I do?” Imogen’s voice hit a pitch that made Saffron scramble into her lap, ears perked. “Dress him up in his finest flash-leather suit? Teach him the proper etiquette for meeting a universe-gobbling evanescence? ‘Smile, Farway, take a bow as you go to your doom. Always remember that gentlemen never run. Oh wait, we can’t remember anything, because the Fade has an insatiable appetite for our past.’ Eating some fexing tiramisu is currently the only thing between me and drowning in a puddle of my own tears. I’d be happy for anyone to join me!”
Priya grabbed the Code of Conduct and waved the book about. “We’ve broken these rules for trinkets and thrills so many times… but when things get hard, when lives are on the line, we tuck tail. We make ourselves feel better by saying they’ve already died and we don’t have a choice and we can’t change history and I swallow it every time, because what else is there to do?”
“P…” Far couldn’t feel his fingertips, couldn’t let go of her. “There’s nothing to fight here. Imagined heroics—”
“You’re not already dead!” Priya broke in. “And I refuse to act like you are.”
“Far shouldn’t be alive in the first place,” Eliot said. “Gram’s right. I don’t know why Dr. Ramírez didn’t see it. The Fade won’t stop until every trace of Far’s existence is erased. Our lives were doomed from the start.”
“That’s it!” Gram leaped to his feet, snapping both sets of fingers, embodiment of an exclamation point. “The start!”
“What?” Imogen paused between bites.
“Dr. Ramírez ordered Eliot to neutralize the catalyst. Far isn’t the catalyst.” All the Engineer got were blank stares. He kept snapping, as if the sound might jog their IQs up to speed with his own. “I mean, yes, he’s carrying the countersignature, but he himself isn’t the aberration. His birth is.”
“What difference does that make?” Eliot asked.
“There might be nothing to fight, but there is something to save,” Gram told them. “If we go back and alter the circumstances that led to Far being born on the Ab Aeterno, we could pivot point into a future where the catalyst has been neutralized. We can give our universe, our own lives, a second chance.”
The common area was quiet as their minds ran the track. It felt a bit like an infinity loop—internal histories and external forces and what about all the other universes? What about themselves? What was the cost of this hope?
“That’s dash…” Eliot blinked. “It just might work. I mean, it’s making a lot of assumptions. That Far’s birth is the aberration. That the time we have to travel back to doesn’t fall to the Fade. Plus, how do we know the countersignature won’t echo into this new world?”
“We don’t.” Gram crossed his arms. Excitement was writ beneath his skin, pulsing with the veins there. “But if we fail, everything goes to shazm anyway. Succeed and we get a new lease on life.”
“My vote goes for saving stuff,” Imogen offered. “What’s there to lose?”
“Ourselves.” Priya looked to each of them in turn, her stare ending with Far. The whole room wavered. “We might be alive in this new world, but we won’t be who we are now. This life on the Invictus, everything we’ve been through together…”
More silence, another track. This one more finite: May 7, 2371, dawn—hazy, like all others—when the four of them stood at the helm of an unnamed ship, admiring the flawless holo-shield invisibility plates and their reflection in them—a fine, shiny crew. Their very first mission to eighteenth-century Portugal that same day to retrieve a bottle of port for Lux’s stores. From there it was a life of historical snatch-and-grabs: the Cat’s Eye Emerald, Klimt paintings, Fabergé eggs…. For each treasure, an adventure; for each adventure, a mess of tears and laughter, kisses and scrapes. For all of this?
A family.
“Who we are now can’t stay.” It was Imogen who pointed to the chalk wall, where Far’s cursive cried into itself, running ruins of color. “How many of those mission descriptions could you rewrite? How many would we never know we lost? How soon until we don’t even know each other? I’d take a total system reboot over rotting through the brain stem any day. No offense, Eliot.”
“I’d take that, too,” Eliot told them. “If it’s any consolation, there was no Invictus before I arrived on the scene.”
This was a strange thing to consider. Far walked over to the creator of his world, still a head shorter. She had no parted hair for him to ponder, just the cuffs, which made her wrists look far thinner than they were. “Tell me, why haven’t you teleported out of those yet?”