The Amphitheatrum Flavium was caught up in the death of the moment. The defeated gladiator had faced his end with honor. He was a name struck off a lanista’s roster; a life bleeding out on the sand. Most were too mesmerized to see that they, too, were being scratched out of history’s ledger, the clouds above crippling their firmament. The few who caught the sight were reminded of the tales from Pompeii, after the great eruption. But those stories had been filled with ashes and darkness. This sky wasn’t filled with anything.
The Fade fell on Rome’s past and Far’s present, bringing interruptions and ends. It moved as a fog, creeping through windows, winding down roads, consuming all it could. Four stunrods blinked out, their bearers with them. The Invictus dissolved along with every soul inside. A girl on the edge of a field held her father tight.
There was one CTM the decay did not reach, for though Nicholas wasn’t a knee-jerk kind of guy, he found that—between Empra’s order to Get us the Hades out of here and the glitches on his screen and one year of cabin fever—he was all too happy to jump. The Ab Aeterno vanished from a vanishing sky, just as that vanishing vanished. At last, the Fade had reached what it had ravaged so many worlds for, sliding through stilled lips, seeking that final shudder of a heartbeat.
Lock and key.
Severance.
The boy who should not have been became the boy who never was. No one blinked when the gladiator’s body disappeared. His fight, too, slipped from fifty thousand memories second by second as the unraveling stretched back. Not a soul noticed, for they were already placing their bets for the next battle.
The games rolled on.
Two thousand two hundred fifty-eight years later, a child was born.
49
TAMáM SHUD
THERE WAS AN END.
There is a beginning.
They’re one and the same.
PART IV
In my end is my beginning.
—T. S. ELIOT
“EAST COKER”
50
THE BOY WHO NEVER WAS
APRIL 18, 2371
PASSING OVER ZONE 1 WAS FAR’S favorite part of his Academy– home commute—the hoverbus always took the same preprogrammed path, slicing straight over Old Rome. Every morning and evening he stared through the window, picking out the monuments below. The Pantheon. St. Peter’s Basilica. The Fontana di Trevi. His chest twinged, as always, when they passed the Colosseum. Far never knew why he felt the way he did whenever he saw it—nostalgia and homesickness and wanderlust and none of the above. Something about the stones made it hard to look away.
Gram seemed just as enthralled with the rainbow box he was twisting around in his hands. After arranging the colors into solid sides, he offered the puzzle to Far. “Wanna try?”
“That way lies humiliation,” Far told him. “I don’t like humiliation.”
His friend passed the cube over anyway. “Then hash it up, will you? If I do it myself, I’ll solve it too easily.”
This, Far was happy to do. He twisted the little box at random, until it resembled Imogen on an oil-spill hair day. The hoverbus crossed into Zone 2—skyscraper forest—until Old Rome became a sliver in the rear window. Passengers drifted on and off at each stop, too consumed in their spheres of pop-up adverts and datastreams and Central News Tonight snippets to do anything more than swipe their palmdrives to pay the fare. Far knew almost all of them by sight, none by name. It made him eager to go to an era where strangers actually talked to each other.
Today a true stranger boarded the hoverbus. The girl’s features were striking, not for any particular beauty, but for their starkness. She was as pale as a mist on the moors. Her hair was nearly as light, with the exception of her eyebrows, which had an almost scripted quality. It wasn’t until the newcomer winked that Far realized he’d been staring.
He averted his gaze back to the puzzle—jumbled enough—and tossed the cube to Gram. “Hey, want to make a bet on what color my cousin’s hair will be tonight?”
“That’s an unfair proposition.”
“Not so! I haven’t seen it today.”
“The odds favor you nonetheless, seeing as I’ve never met your cousin and only know of her behavioral patterns through your anecdotes.” Gram wasn’t even looking at the puzzle as he twisted it. Show-off. “It’s basic statistics.”
Far snorted. “There’s nothing statistical about my family.”
This was true. Though Imogen was unpredictable, it was his mother who was the real outlier. She and the rest of the Ab Aeterno’s crew not only made history when their time machine landed on April 18, 2354 AD, at 12:01 PM, but a scientific discovery as well. Empra McCarthy, Burgstrom Hammond, Nicholas Nylle, and Matthew “Doc” Hiott stepped off the Ab Aeterno to find themselves already waiting on the dock. Mirror doubles pulled from the glass, identical but for Empra’s bursting belly. Both crews were stunned. The Corps went into frantic lockdown mode, cross-examining the eight time travelers who should be four. Questions only led to more questions; neither set seemed to be a past or future version of the other. Each Ab Aeterno had just returned from 95 AD, but the nonpregnant crew only spent a few minutes in the year before abandoning the assignment. The reason? They’d been spooked to discover themselves already there. Far’s mother’s crew, ostensibly, who couldn’t seem to remember the final hours of their own mission. The mystery thickened when an investigative team tried traveling to the morning of December 31, 95 AD, only to find that their landing equations wouldn’t add up. Their time machine kept bouncing off the hours, as if that time did not exist….
After countless interviews to rule out timeline crossings, datastream reviews, and blood tests, the Corps could only conclude that Far’s mother’s crew had changed history enough to create a parallel universe, which meant that when they traveled back to the future they arrived in a world where they already existed. Voilà! Two Empras! Two Burgs! Two Docs! Two Nicholases! A whole new branch of science! Bright minds flocked to the theory of a multiverse, both Ab Aeterno crews elevated to celebrity status in intellectual circles. Gram, who’d read every single one of Dr. Marcelo Ramírez’s papers on the subject, knew more about Far’s possible origins than he himself did.
“I look forward to meeting them,” his friend said. “You sure they don’t mind me crashing your birthday dinner?”
“It’s not crashing if you’re invited.”
“A valid point.”
“I make those sometimes.”
The cube’s colors were back to their sides in thirty seconds. Gram returned it to Far: Mess up, solve, repeat. They spent the next few stops laughing over Instructor Marin’s latest assembly rant about not placing the Historians’ wardrobe mannequins in compromising positions. An advert for the Acidic Sisters’ June concert (FEATURING THEIR NEWEST HIT SINGLE “EVERYDAY PAST”! DON’T MISS IT, FARWAY!) popped up on Far’s interface. He X-ed it out before the tune turned into an earworm.