“A rather pissed-off boy once told me trust is something that’s built.” Ah! There was her smirk, making a comeback. “I figure I’m a few bricks down after trying to murder you.”
“Yeah, well… if I were you, I would’ve shot me, too.”
“If you were me? Ha. Good one.” Eliot’s laugh was made of brass, as hard as it was deflective. “At least our humor is equally morbid.”
Far didn’t echo the sound, because he meant every word. So much fury, so much fear spent on this girl’s behalf and for what? Hers was the ruined life, his was the fault. “I’m sorry, Eliot. About your mom, your cousin, your childhood… I’m sorry it’s gone.”
Dimples mussed Eliot’s chin.
He went on. “There’s a place for you on this crew, if you want it. I know it won’t last long. We’re all about to take a fall, and I’ll need every hand on deck to create this pivot point—”
The air before him flickered, and again Far was reminded of Central’s street magicians. Top to bottom, stola and all, Eliot had vanished. Her cuffs dangled from the pipe, chaining nothing. Displaced air wove through the wardrobe’s garments—the yellow dress among them.
“Did—” Gram blinked. “Did she just haul tail on us?”
Far stared at the daffodil gown, swaying its phantom waltz.
Everything was disappearing on him. Everyone…
He looked back to the couch, where Priya was staring at the crumpled guidebook, tracing the cat ears over each C. Her haircut looked extra drastic from this angle: short, long, two versions of herself pasted together.
“Look!” Imogen pointed toward the console room, where Eliot was stepping from behind Bartleby’s cloth-and-wire frame.
“Let’s start over, fresh.” The girl reentered the common room, rubbing her wrists back to white. “New mission, new world. We’re going to have to be quick about this if we want to beat the Fade.”
“How quick?” Far felt better shifting back into mission mode. Fighting for a future, albeit an alternate one, was preferable to waiting for oblivion. “What kind of timeline are we talking? Days? Weeks?”
“My best guess is the former.” Eliot grabbed a fork, gouged a V-shaped hole into the top half of the dessert. “Imagine the multiverse as a piece of tiramisu. Each layer’s a world. My universe is the top layer, the one below that is Subject One’s world, and so on. This universe is at the bottom, with Far’s moments mostly intact. But the Fade’s growth”—she scooped out a fuller bite, scraping the pan—“is exponential. The longer we take, the faster it spreads.”
“Vera isn’t equipped with any sort of mapping system?” Gram asked.
Eliot shook her head.
“We can use the wardrobe to make our own.” Imogen planted her own utensil in the tiramisu and started pulling down clothes. Yellow dress, workman’s shirt, tricorne hat, a camouflage field jacket… “Put anything we don’t remember into a pile, figure out the dates that are being erased. That’d at least give us a sense of scale….”
“Ingenious, Imogen!” Gram turned to Far. “What mission was the Ab Aeterno on before you popped out?”
“December 31, 95 AD,” Priya offered, voice raspy. “It’s what he always tried on the med-droid.”
“Never worked,” Far muttered.
Priya smiled at the memory, tucking her longer hairs behind her ear. Far was thunderously struck by the sight—there was only one Priya, his P, who hummed songs long after they ended, who told the most gruesome medical stories with a stone face, who felt on a level most of them couldn’t comprehend. Far had never imagined love could be such a solid thing, yet here it was. He wished he could go back in time and tell himself to drop everything, to go to Woodstock for no reason at all but to be with her….
“We got the when. What about the where?” Gram prompted.
There was a good deal Far didn’t know about his origins—i.e., most of it. His father’s identity had always been a question mark, a dead halt in conversations. He only knew the circumstances of his birth because Burg had turned the story mythic with so many retellings. Certain details were cemented in canon: Empra’s indigo stola, Far’s wild curls. Others—such as the ship’s pre-Grid location—had been meticulously cut out.
“Um, Rome.” It was a guess, one he’d pieced together over the years. Where else would a Latin-speaking time traveler be wearing a stola in 95 AD? “I think. Mom never talked about it.”
“You think?” Gram frowned. “No offense, Far, but we can’t run this op on hunches. We need a clear picture of what we’re trying to change, a timeline down to the minute.”
“What about the datastreams?” Imogen kept sorting through clothes. A dinner jacket here, a pair of trousers there. So much forgetting, above them all along… “Every Corps-sanctioned mission has them.”
“The 95 AD streams were never released to the public.” Every year on Far’s unbirthday, he tried to look up the mission’s footage. Every year he got the same answer: Please refer to archive 12-A11B. A restricted section his cadet badge couldn’t come close to accessing. “Someone locked them up nice and tight at the platinum-black level.”
The original crew groaned.
Eliot placed her hands on her hips. “We’ll have to hack it out, then.”
“You don’t hack a platinum-black-restricted Corps archive.” The mere thought was sacrilegious to their Engineer, schooled in the Academy’s computery ways. “Their restricted servers are isolated, so you have to be on-site at the Corps Headquarters server room to access them. Teleporting might get you in, but the place is bristling with cameras, all running facial-recognition scans. Anyone who doesn’t belong there would be spotted before they could touch the server, much less hack it.”
“Enter Corps, stage left.” Far shuddered thinking about it.
“Are you black market thieves or are you black market thieves?” Eliot hissed.
He shrugged. “We’re realists.”
“Which is something only pessimists say.” Imogen brushed her hands together. The pile of fabric at her feet was substantial enough for Saffron to nest in. The creature looked downright blissful.
“I made alterations to Far’s final exam Sim via remote hack. We can do the same with the Corps’ facial-recognition system,” Eliot suggested. “My face isn’t in their files. If we create a profile with platinum-black clearance, that’d prevent the alarms from tripping when I tap the restricted servers.”
Gram’s brow furrowed, considering. “We could…. It won’t last long, though. Once the Corps realizes their firewalls are breached, they’ll spot the forgery.”
“What if I told you I had a traceless way of hacking the systems?” Eliot asked.
“It’s true.” Marin’s nasally sneer stuck to Far’s memories. Diagnostics showed all systems are untampered with. You failed. “Corps had no idea she screwed up my Sim.”
“Then I’d say our odds just improved incrementally,” the Engineer conceded.
“All right, then.” Far regarded his crew. Only the chalk puddles knew everything they’d carried him through; not even the future knew what they might face. Nothing was certain except this: They were up to the task. “Let’s make ourselves a world.”
35
THROUGH AND THROUGH