“Imagine those ballads! What creature of flaming fur is this, which hath scratched back the apocalypse—” Far’s laugh was slain where he stood. He kept staring upward, his expression fogged. “Then again I suppose we’ll all be unsung after this.”
“What is it?” Priya stepped in close, following his gaze. “What’s wrong?”
Far pointed to one of the hangers, where a jacket hung. Its black leather was roughed up at the elbows, as if it’d had a run-in with some road. “What mission did I wear that jacket for?”
The Invictus’s long-term crew stared at the item of clothing. Had it always been hanging there? Gram couldn’t recall a time when it wasn’t. Then again he’d never paid much attention to clothes.
“I picked it up from Before and Beyond. We were planning for a trip to 1950s America,” Imogen recalled. “You said it made Bartleby look like a gang member from a musical when I was briefing you. We flew to Kansas City and then…”
Then what? Based on the state of the jacket they must have jumped, and Gram did have some memory of the equation. Numbers, numbers all blending together, now bled from this world’s gaping wound.
“Another time bites the dust!” Imogen plucked the garment from its hanger, tossed it into the growing pile. “Let’s see… that’s one mission in the twenty-third century, two in the twenty-first, three in the twentieth, one in the nineteenth, two in the eighteenth, two in the seventeenth, a BC blip.”
There’d be more, Gram knew, and soon. To have this many lost hours in their log, this many clothes crumpled on the floor… Eliot was right. The Fade’s decay was accelerating, which meant their window for a reboot was closing. Imaginary chinchilla children and second kisses would have to wait.
“I’m going to need that networking cable,” he said.
“Yeah, yeah.” Imogen nodded, breathless. “It’s up here somewhere. Maybe you can reach it.”
After fumbling through fur tufts and something…sticky?… Gram found the hardware, a cord connected to a wireless transmitter. It would work for Eliot’s on-site hack, assuming the Corps hadn’t rehauled their servers in the past few months.
“Once you plug this into archive 12-A11B you should be able to access the server’s data through your interface,” he explained, handing it off to her. “I’m expecting there will be other security protocols, but those should be a cakewalk after what you showed me.”
Eliot tucked the cable inside her pocket universe. Though Gram knew a rational explanation lay in interdimensional mechanics, the sight of hardware sliding straight into the girl’s pale wrist twisted his insides. So much was weird and wondrous and bent.
“Good job on the profile planting.” She nodded back at the hack on his screen. “I’ll be a wraith as far as Corps alarms are concerned. I think it’s best we find a parking spot, so I have solid coordinates to teleport back to.”
“All of time at our feet and we’re running out of it.” Far marched toward his orange chair, back to mission mode: “Let’s get a move on! Gram, find us a place to land. Priya, get ready to switch out the fuel rods for our next jump when we do. Imogen, give that wardrobe another comb-through. Eliot—”
The cut in Far’s silence was clean. In it Gram heard how much this bothered his friend, handing this heist to another. He’d never not been on the ground, and the stress of it winched his neck tendons tight—muscled mountains, valley skin.
“Yes, Far?”
“What else do you need?”
“I’m all set.”
Gram returned to his console and guided the Invictus to a safe landing spot, one of the many islands dotting the flight path from ancient Alexandria to Central. At this hour, both nearby towns would be asleep. Their outcrop was occupied solely by spotted goats, which didn’t even twitch a tail at the invisible TM’s arrival. Once the ship hit earth, the crew rushed against the clock—fuel rods were switched, teleportation coordinates pinned, comm connections confirmed for the third time—until no more details could be finessed and all five of them gathered in the console room.
Priya was in the doorway, peeling the gloves from her hazard suit. Imogen and Gram sat at their stations, and Far on the edge of his chair. Eliot stood in the center, making adjustments to her wig. The Invictus’s mood was somber and spectacular, everyone a laugh away from tears.
“Hey, Eliot?” Imogen’s fingers were crossed, as Gram knew they would be. He hoped he’d get a chance to kiss her again.
“Yes?”
“What do your eyebrows say? For the record.”
There were new letters on Eliot’s face, Gram realized. Fresh ink, fully scrawled, a mystery until she said them: “Carpe the hazing mundi!”
The air swallowed her.
37
A HAT AS FINE AS THAT
JUMPING THROUGH SPACE WAS MUCH WORSE than leaping through time, in Eliot’s opinion. The latter took the world and rearranged it beneath her feet, but teleportation rearranged Eliot. The breakdown of her cells into travel-sized pieces was a painless process, but every time she disappeared from one place and materialized in another she felt the dissonance. A quiver in her bones, intestines knotted, blood thick as mud.
It was no different when she appeared in the Corps Headquarters restricted server room. The coordinates Gram had given her, the same numbers she’d fed to Vera, placed Eliot in one of the room’s blind spots, so the cameras wouldn’t catch her stepping out of nowhere. Her boots found purchase against the concrete, but it took a moment to settle into herself—elbows and knees rehinging, stomach sloshing with smaller and smaller waves.
“This teleportation thing is so hashing cool!” I’ve just been kissed GLEE oozed from Imogen’s every word.
“Sure.” From Eliot: a grunt. She was as thrilled with the pair’s carpe kiss as everyone else, but it was hard to maintain a cheery demeanor with liquefied insides. “Where to?”
“Start heading south,” Imogen instructed. “You’ll have to walk a ways to get to the twelfth row. Keep an eye out for foot patrols.”
To call the server room a room was a disservice to its size. The place stretched for blocks, disappearing into its own largeness. Servers glowed through glass-faced racks, a crimson light that cramped the air around it. Everything felt ominous, one slip away from sirens and stunrods. But Eliot’s digital mask held when she began walking down the aisle. No alarms were triggered. She was alone with her footsteps, gliding past rows of hive-hum data. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. So many Recorders’ memories—her teeth rattled with them. It was strange to think of how many datastreams were inside these machines. They cannot be counted, and yet we keep counting. Dr. Ramírez had acknowledged the impossibility of the Multiverse Bureau’s task of numbering infinite universes, but the Corps’ mission fell under the same schlep your boulder up a hill only to watch it tumble down again category. Thousands of Recorders and years of footage could be spent trying to capture a single day and still something would be lost.
History could not be collected, and yet they kept collecting.
Worlds could not be saved, and yet…