This was his life.
How would Far fill it?
He wished he knew.
Gifts came next. Uncle Bert, Aunt Isolde, Burg, and his mother had all pitched in to buy him a hoverbike—no more public transportation to school! Imogen bought him a pair of goggles to reduce windburn while he drove. Gram gave him credits toward a new datastream. Aunt E’s gift was a family heirloom, judging by his mother’s reaction. She reached for the tweed jacket as soon as he opened it.
“This belonged to your great-great-grandfather, Farway,” she said. “He was a history professor at Oxford, back when Historians had to rely on books. Crux, it’s been ages since I’ve seen this.”
Years, Far knew. Seventeen plus one, to be exact. Crashing into one’s own life was exactly that—a crash. As much as his mother and Aunt E had adjusted to themselves, casualties such as this jacket sprang up every once in a while. Identical childhoods, not enough inheritance to go around. He let his mother hold on to her memory, returning to the final gift. It had been wrapped with haste—no bow, no tag, small enough to fit into his palm twice-over.
“Who’s this from?”
“Open it.” More strange behavior from his mother… The only time she ever skirted subjects like that was when Far tried to bring up his father.
He tore the paper, fast. Silver hinges, plush blue—the box looked like something from a jeweler. The kind of thing that would hold cuff links or a ring or a corneal implant upgrade. It was tech, Far discovered, but none he’d ever seen before. Clear and nearly invisible, the chip had the feel of a futuristic prototype.
“What is th—”
Far spoke. Light bloomed. Everyone at the table gasped.
Gram moved to get a better look at the item. “This is a hologram platform? How?”
Far didn’t know the answer to the second question, but the first was obvious. It was a hologram in front of him, displaying some kind of menu. Eight boxes sat in a neat gradient of colors, tagged 0 through VII. Above them sat a box with an altogether different label: TU FUI, EGO ERIS.
What you are, I was. What I am, you will be.
“Strange.” Imogen leaned forward in her seat. “That’s a gravestone phrase. The Romans used it to warn the living about death.”
Death. Far didn’t think that was what it was referencing this time. He had no proof, nothing beyond a gut feeling—the very same longing he got every time he flew over the Colosseum, magnified. It was a twinge turned roar: WILL BE WILL BE WILL BE.
“Tu fui, ego eris,” he repeated the words to let some of their feeling out.
WILL BE WILL BE WILL BE
The box opened. Out spilled ship’s logs for a vessel called the Invictus. Far read his name in the documents, along with Imogen’s and Gram’s and two others that felt on the brink of familiarity, as if his tongue had recited them many times before. Priya, Eliot, Priya, Eliot, Priya, Priya, Priya. He used to be the captain of a time machine, four months from now, and there were over thirty datastreams to prove it, time-stamped all over history: AD, BC, take your pick.
Far cleared his throat. There seemed to be only one thing to do. “Start from the beginning.”
EPILOGUE
MAY 5, 2371 AD
THE GROUND LEVEL OF Zone 2’s financial district proved a perilous place to walk. Its walkways swarmed with brokers, all of them edgy with stimulants and distracted by the stock numbers on their interfaces. Toes beware! Coffee cups, too! Eliot’s reflexes were being put to good use as she tracked Far through the fray. The cadet’s Recorder training brought out the chameleon in him, causing him to step at the same tempo as the surrounding suits. He was too easy to lose: no curls to draw in the eye, uniform melding into the gray of the walkway.
Eliot—with her flash-leather moto jacket, her ice-blond wig—was the one who stood out in this swarm of corporate monochromes. Her eyebrows felt a few font sizes too large, though she had written them with a freer hand today. The color? Darkest Before Dawn. The message? Forget me not. She’d scripted the phrase rightside forward, for Far’s sake.
All he had to do was pause, see her, read it. But Far kept forging along Via Novus. It was a roundabout route to the Academy. Especially strange, considering his final exam Sim was scheduled to start in a few hours. Eliot hadn’t planned on hacking this test, at least in the digital sense. Her scheduled interruption was of the manual variety. Or would be, if the boy would just stop moving. She could run to catch up, but so many lattes sloshing about made her nervous, especially with the invitation tucked in her non-universe pocket. Real ink bled, and though flash leather was expensive as Hades, a stain wouldn’t be the worst of it. Lux Julio wasn’t the sort of man who deigned to write things twice.
Eliot slid her hands into her jacket pockets, thumb pressed against the envelope’s corner. It was quite sharp, for paper. Heavy, too: worth its weight in steals. She’d had to produce more than a bottle of port to gain the black market mogul’s trust this go-round.
It seemed unlikely that Far had business in the Central World Bank, where gold letters swirled around a globe just as bright, assuring customers that their credits belonged nowhere else. Rotating glass doors swept in person after person, the odd droid. Far broke away from this flow before the grandiose steps, to the plaza lined with pollution scrub bushes and vendors.
Curiosity, more than caution, was the reason Eliot hung back, pausing beside a crouched marble lion. She leaned against the statue and pondered this break in pattern. Of all the times she’d followed Far during the fortnight since his seventeenth birthday, he’d never stopped at a tea stand. The boy was energetic enough as it was; caffeine was apt to make his heart explode.
“I’ll have a chai,” he told the vendor. “Extra hot, if you could.”
Twenty-five credits. Far flinched when the price came up. Eliot knew this was because he couldn’t cover it, not even by half. She, on the other hand, had plenty of money to spend. After two snatch-and-grabs for Lux, she was sitting pretty, but what use were so many credits without friends to enjoy them with?
Eliot stepped in, swiped her own palm over the scanner as payment. “It’s on me, this time.”
The vendor began preparing the order—using spices that smelled of heaven and home, and made Eliot long for something she couldn’t quite remember. Story of her life—lives. But that forgetting was over, thanks to the boy beside her. Far was already reading Eliot’s eyebrows when she turned, his own high enough to get lost in would-be curls. It was the strangest thing: meeting someone for the first time once more. Even though there were a thousand places to begin, Eliot had no idea what to say.
Hello. Again?