“Shall we watch the last day?” Far gestured to the common area.
They gathered in the usual clusters—Far and Priya on one couch, Gram and Imogen taking the other. There was hand-holding on his cousin’s side, pheromones finally focused into smiles. Though Far had seen Imogen with this hair color before, he couldn’t remember it being so incandescent. She was all lit, all yellow. Happy as it was, the sight stung.
A first and a last, they never even had a chance….
Eliot settled on the floor, cross-legged, freezing when Saffron hopped into her lap. Fear braced her shoulders, but all the red panda did was curl into a ball.
“Ooooh!” Imogen’s expression went up in wattage. “Saffron doesn’t nap with just anyone, you know. He likes you.”
Eliot patted the beastie’s head, her palm flat and awkward. “I guess it’s not that bad.”
The sting settled deeper in Far’s chest. He hadn’t thought he’d miss the Ailurus fulgens, but it seemed the creature had sunk its claws into more than just his shins….
“Before we get started, I think I’ll make us some tea.” There were no arguments to Priya’s proposal. How could there be when one final time hung unsaid at the end of her sentence?
Eliot pulled the chip from her pocket universe, drew up the file. Imogen rested her head on Gram’s shoulder while the Engineer stared at their hands, marveling at the pattern of interlocking fingers. Far watched Priya in the kitchenette with the same wonder. He’d seen her make tea on countless occasions, but every detail felt new. The way she smelled each spice before adding it into the boiling water. How she counted each stir beneath her breath. Her care in lining up the mugs’ handles before divvying out the chai. So many lasts adding up, not even a scalding swallow could wash this grief away.
Losing her might just kill Far before the Fade did.
They sat with mugs of steaming chai, outside of time, watching Far’s beginning. He didn’t know what to expect when the Ab Aeterno’s final 95 AD footage flickered to life. What the hologram showed was both familiar and surprising.
Far’s mother had walked the Colosseum’s crumbling circumference with him many times. She was full of facts during those visits, pointing out the thumbprint masonry of the hypogeum, describing how lions used to be stored beneath the arena floor. Not once had she mentioned that she’d seen men bleed there.
Far had watched datastreams of gladiators before; they were impossible to avoid in Central, where the clash of their blades still echoed round and round the ancient ruins. But this one felt different. It was unedited—raw footage that didn’t skip over ugly things. The violence of the first fight was enough to make Imogen—a seasoned Historian—squint through her fingers.
How strange to think that his mother had taken this in without blinking. Stranger still to realize that Far had been there in fetus form. He’d heard this crowd with his own ears, racing alongside his mother’s heart: Blood! Blood! Blood! A noise urgent enough to call him out into this ruthless world… Burg’s voice—which Far associated with bedtime stories—sounded surreal as he urged Empra off her bench, down the stairs.
“Why would Aunt Empra ever want to watch this?” Imogen wondered aloud. “Why does she keep looking back?”
“Pause.” At Eliot’s command, the hologram froze on the pair of gladiators. “Look at who she’s looking to.”
“Ugh.” Imogen peeked between her hands. “All I see is blood.”
“Far…” Priya, her own steel stomach unfazed by the insides of men turned out, leaned toward the projection. “That gladiator looks just like you.”
Now that the footage was paused, Far had time to study the fighters. Priya was right. The gladiator with his back to the wall wore no helmet. Though what helmet could contain such dead-ringer curls? And the nose… Far had always wondered where his most dramatic feature had come from.
Now he knew. He knew so many things: why his mother insisted on teaching him Latin, why she’d called him by his middle name in the Library of Alexandria, why she’d stayed to watch this brutal match, why his skin was always tan while every other McCarthy’s burned at the first glimpse of sun, why he forever needed to move-move-strive-fight. It wasn’t just timelessness in his blood, but battle, too.
Eliot was the first to state the obvious. “That’s our father.”
“Oooooh, Aunt Empra!” Imogen gasped. “Courting a gladiator! No wonder Burg classified this datastream! She would’ve been in such deep shazm had anyone found out.”
“That’s why your DNA is fudged in Central’s systems,” Priya said. “It wasn’t just a common discretion clause. It was so no one could prove your father wasn’t one of the Ab Aeterno’s crew members.”
Far should have felt surprised, but facing his father’s image—back to wall, blade to throat—struck a much deeper chord. The sadness that was always beneath his mother’s eyes, dictating her smile, made sense now. This wasn’t just a one-night sperm donation.
This was love.
“Why does anyone look back?” It wasn’t hard to imagine the emotions behind the datastream when Far’s own chest was a pulpy mess. When he turned to see Priya—still here, still next to him, but for how long? “She didn’t want to leave him.”
Her lips went tight. He wanted to cry again.
Instead, Far braced himself for the worst as the datastream played on, but that view of his father was the last. Empra ran from the stadium’s roar, pausing every few minutes to lean on columns, huffing through her pain while Burg recited encouragements: “C’mon, McCarthy! Keep going. You’re almost here!” The datastream’s visual had gone misty when Empra finally did reach the Ab Aeterno, her tears turning Burg into a giant blob. The time stamp, at least, was clear: 9:10 AM when she boarded the Ab Aeterno, 9:14 when the clock froze and froze and froze and Far’s very first breath of ageless air expelled with a scream.
The boy who should not have been was born, and something disastrous with him.
The datastream ended. Far stared through the vistaport, wondering if that very birth was happening out there in the black.
“Poor Aunt Empra,” Imogen whispered. “Poor gladiator. This is so hashing sad.”
“It doesn’t have to be.” Priya’s eyes went from smoky to steel: a hard shine. “Far’s father doesn’t have to die.”
“I’m pretty sure his name is Gaius,” Far offered.
Priya went on, “We want to get Empra back to the Ab Aeterno well before nine ten. If she was lingering to watch Gaius’s fight, then it makes sense to free him. Yes?”
“You can’t just free a gladiator,” Imogen told them. “There’s a whole system in place. Most of them are slaves or prisoners of war, and even the men who volunteered are bound to their lanista overseers to the point of death. If Gaius goes missing, his lanista will rip apart the city searching for him. And it’s not as if he can hitch a ride to Central….”