The boy waiting beside Priya’s tea stand was not a regular. A grin as bold as his would be memorable any morning of the week, pre-caffeine or post-. So why, oh why, did it feel so familiar? Why did her heart do a tiny cartwheel inside her chest when their gazes locked? She’d never been one to swoon, especially when it came to Corps cadets. The uniform alone should have been grounds for dismissal: Strike one, he’s out.
Strike two. He was… waiting for her? It seemed this way, when he held out the hotmug. Priya regarded it, skeptical. His grin didn’t waver. It held more than just straight teeth and confidence—something she couldn’t name, but echoed inside her anyway, a song apart from the one she was listening to. She removed her rip-off BeatBix and met his eyes, dark enough to see constellations in.
“Do I know you?”
“In a manner of speaking? No. I’m Farway McCarthy. Far for short.”
Priya had seen the name around—inscribed on a 24-karat plaque, popping up on med-droid reports, referenced in Edwin Marin’s faculty memos. By nature of the Academy’s size and the lack of Medic-to-cadet contact, this was the first time she’d met the boy himself.
Wasn’t it?
She gestured at the tea in Far’s hand. “What’s this?”
“Chai. For you.”
“I don’t date cadets.” There wasn’t much heart in the rejection, since her own kept flip-flopping. “Even ones who wait at my favorite tea stand with my favorite drink. Whoever tipped you off was ill-informed.”
“Is that so?”
“It is so so.”
Far’s smile grew past his lips, until it charged the air about him. Priya could think of at least a dozen songs with a similar feel, half of them about L-O-V-E. This made her grip her headphones by their backward BB logos, intent on placing them back over her ears. Her Medic shift was starting soon, and she didn’t have time for a time traveler—
“It was you, Priya.”
Pause. One headphone on: half song, half stun. She hadn’t told Far her name, yet she must have, because it sounded so right when he said it, earnest enough to believe.
“You told me to find you,” Far went on. “I know it sounds like some time traveler’s pickup line, but it’s the honest-to-Crux truth. I’ve got the datastream footage to prove it. You said to bring you a mug of chai from the tea stand on Via Novus. You told me to give us a chance, so that’s what I’m doing. If the cadet part’s a deal breaker, it shouldn’t be. I’m about to quit the Academy.”
“When?”
“I was just about to go over there—”
“No.” Priya’s headphones slid down. She did nothing to stop them. “When did I say these things?”
“Short answer? December 31, 95 AD.” Star-stories aligned behind the boy’s stare. “Complicated answer? In a different life.”
A different life. It sounded crazy, but so many things did these days. Time travel had made a mess of nature’s order. Pasts might not fall before futures on the calendar, people lived side by side with themselves, and the promise of parallel worlds lingered behind every Central News Tonight headline. The impossible was all possible.
Priya might have turned her back anyway, had this first sight not felt so much like a second. Or a tenth, times infinity. “What about the long answer? The one with the corroborating datastreams.”
“I was hoping to fill you in over tea.” Far nodded at the hotmug.
“I’m already running late for work.” Twelve hours of reading through charts, tuning up med-droids, and trying not to spill blood samples on her scrubs. Followed by a long hoverbus ride home, reheated leftovers from Sunday dinner, an Acidic Sisters behind-the-scenes datastream, creating tomorrow’s get-through-the-day playlist, and falling asleep to it. She’d gone through these motions before, but only now did they truly feel like motions. Priya wasn’t sure what a different life looked like, or if she even wanted what this boy was offering. All she knew was that she couldn’t stay where she was, without knowing.
She reached for the chai. Her fingers brushed Far’s—warmth, all warmth, and a shiver, too. “But it seems we’re headed in the same direction. Why don’t you walk with me?”