7

WHOOPS

GRAM WRIGHT’S STATION WAS MORE OF a shrine than a console. An homage to blocks and order. There were the usual buttons and screens, the navigation systems vital to any TM worth its stock. And the numbers… there were always the numbers, streaming through his brain at a rate that’d break a lesser genius. Gram’s own gray matter had bandwidth to spare. School was so easy he’d done it twice, cycling through the Academy first as an Engineer, then doubling back for Recorder training. Why contain knowledge to a single degree? Why trap yourself in a tiny box?

Maybe that was what made Gram so fond of Rubik’s Cubes. Yes, they were boxes—squares within squares within squares—but they held over forty-three quintillion color combinations. He was the proud owner of six of these toys, all vintage 1980, fresh off the assembly line. They lined his console in solid colors—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, white—the promise of a solution always within reach. A few twists + abstract thoughts = disorder reversed.

There was nothing Gram loved more than wrapping his mind around chaos, solving it. This was why he’d joined the Invictus. Piloting ships through time was a demanding job, but it was also short-lived. Engineers on a normal CTM often kicked back their feet and watched datastreams during the meat of the mission. Life aboard an illegal time machine was much more free-flowing. Dull moments need not apply. Gram could fire at all cylinders here: helping Priya tweak the engines, running heat scans for Imogen, and, every once in a while, getting off the ship to rescue Far’s tail.

But the numbers were Gram’s task and Gram’s alone. These tangled equations kept the Invictus on course through the Grid, providing specific landing points down to the year, month, day, hour, minute, second, millisecond. It was a bit like doing a Rubik’s Cube backward—twisting out of the present into a specific pattern of time. The astrophysics was so complicated Gram had to put his Tetris game on pause.

His score was frozen at 360,000. The Invictus spun through the nothingness that was the Grid. Gram ran through the numbers. Wrenching, twisting, solving, trying to land them on April 14, 1912 AD, 6:00 PM.

Wrenching, twisting, not-quite-solving, not-quite-solving…

Though timelessness was all around them, a tangible lack of passage that felt akin to an astronaut’s lack of gravity, Gram had the cutthroat sensation this was taking too long. He stared at the screen, reviewing the equations until their white pixel forms burned into his vision.

Not-quite-solving…

An eternity passed, crammed inside a nanosecond, until Gram knew for certain that something was wrong. He couldn’t make the numbers click and fit. Not the way he normally did.

It didn’t fit. It didn’t fit.

Why didn’t it fit?

The equation was unsolvable. Impossibly impossible.

They couldn’t land.

Gram tore his eyes from the screen and looked around the Invictus’s console room. It was oddly peaceful. Priya was helping Far smooth out the lapels of his new costume. Imogen was engrossed in her Historian screen. Saffron was draped over her shoulders, his striped tail twitching like an old clock pendulum: tick-tock, tick-tock.

Except there was nothing to keep time to. Nothing. Nothing. It didn’t fit. They couldn’t land. Couldn’t—

It was only when Imogen looked up—a burst of green eyes, and then blush—and frowned that Gram tried to silence these thoughts. If he wasn’t careful, the panic would stack on top of itself, block after misplaced block, until it choked him.

He looked back at the screen’s pale numbers, took a deep breath, and ran through them again. Wrenching, twisting, not-quite-solving…

One of the numbers changed.

If Gram hadn’t seen it happen with his own two eyes, he’d never have believed such a thing could occur. Though the physics of time travel was a twisty, turny business, there were rules to it. Sixes didn’t just turn into eights. Numbers in equations couldn’t change, according to the laws of the universe.

They couldn’t, but they had.

“Everything okay, Gram?” Imogen asked.

“Everything’s fine.” It was only when Gram ran through the equations again that he realized he wasn’t lying. The numbers worked! He could thread them through the Invictus’s landing gear, out of the Grid, and straight into April 14, 1912 AD, 6:00 PM. First he had to check that the TM’s holo-shield was on, autoset to mimic the surrounding environment. If it did, anyone looking up at the sky would see exactly that: stars, blue, perhaps a cloud. If not—well, there goes history.

The shield was in tip-top shape. Gram typed his solution to the equation into the navigation system and pressed Enter. The landing was so seamless that he started wondering if the panic he’d felt in the Grid was somehow a side effect from traveling through an eternal void. Integers didn’t change. They just didn’t.

Live footage from the Invictus’s hull began streaming through Imogen’s screen. Her frown changed every angle of her face. “Um…”

“What is it?” Far gripped his cane.

Imogen looked at Gram instead. “What’s the clock say?”

“April fourteenth, 1912…” If he were a real Tetris game, he’d be stacked up too high: GAME OVER. As he was, he just sat there, staring at the last few numbers on the clock. The numbers…

“Why’s it dark out?” Far’s stare bounced from the vistaport to his cousin’s screen. “Where is the hashing Titanic?”

“Gram,” Imogen said softly, “what’s the rest of the time stamp?”

The numbers had changed and they’d landed wrong. Off not just by a few seconds or minutes, which would’ve been bad enough, but by hours. Four whole hours.

“Ten o’clock in the evening,” Gram heard himself say.

Priya made a small in-the-throat sound. Far straightened, fists choking his gentleman’s cane. Gram couldn’t tell if the O of his friend’s lips meant shock or anger. Probably both. In nearly a year of flights and heists, Gram hadn’t screwed up once. He was convinced he still hadn’t.

“I—I’ll go check the engines,” Priya volunteered. “Something must have fritzed.”

Fritzed, yes. Engines? No. The numbers had failed somehow, but Gram knew how crazy that sounded: Yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and blame the laws of the universe for this glitch. Not machines or human error.

“We don’t have to waste fuel on another jump,” Imogen informed them. “There’s still time. The Titanic has an hour and forty minutes before it hits the iceberg. We just have to fly a few knots west. Should only take ten minutes.”

Far shut his mouth.

“You didn’t need all that time anyway,” Imogen told her cousin. “You always work better under pressure. We can get the mechanics of this sorted later, after you snatch up the pretty-pretty.”

“Later.” Far nodded. “Let’s get hauling.”

A Rubik’s Cube got caught in Gram’s haste to turn back to the nav systems. Fingers to squares to floor. He let it lie between his feet, channeling every ounce of concentration into guiding the Invictus where it needed to be.

The Invictus hovered just meters above the Titanic: engines silent, elegant V shape melting into the night. If one looked closely enough, one might see the distortion—patterns of stars where stars had no business being—but the few people smattered on the decks below weren’t watching the sky. Their gazes were turned out to sea, or to the windows inside, or to each other. Even the lookouts in the crow’s nest were too busy wishing they had a pair of binoculars to notice the dark figure appear out of nowhere onto the second smokestack’s top rung, balancing a top hat on his head and a cane in his mouth.

Far wasted no time descending the smokestack’s ladder, because there was no time to waste. It had taken fifteen minutes, not Imogen’s predicted ten, to catch up to the ocean liner, and now there was only T minus one hour and twenty-five minutes until iceberg, panic, doomsday. He wanted to be far away when that shazm hit the fan.

The rungs were cold enough to burn. Wind from the Titanic’s forward motion lashed Far’s back as he hurried down. By the time he planted two feet on the deck his teeth were chattering, beaver-fast. It was too hashing cold for just a fancy dinner jacket and a workman’s shirt. Imogen should’ve known better, added in a sweater or something.

She didn’t usually make mistakes. Neither did Gram.

“I’m on d-d-deck,” he shivered into his comm.

“I see that,” Imogen replied. “Kind of. The visual’s shaking a lot.”

Far sucked in a breath. No point in pointing out her wardrobe oversight now. It’d only distract her from the more important task of giving him directions. “Which way?”

“All the cargo rooms are on the orlop deck, which is the second level from the bottom. You have to go through first class. Find the Grand Staircase…. It should be close.”

Far looked around. The night was clear and moonless, with stars, stars, stars overhead and glassy water in every direction. The Titanic’s boat deck stretched out, its pitch pine planks littered with chaise lounge chairs, edged with too few lifeboats. Imogen was right. The door to the Grand Staircase was close, literally a hop, a skip, and two short ladders away from the smokestack’s base.

“Got it.” Far ducked under the railing and down the first ladder.

“Good, good. Now, when you reach the Grand Staircase, you’re going to go down two floors, to B deck. While looking snazzy and dapper and all that. Don’t rush too much. Gentlemen don’t rush.”

“Why would I rush when I have so much free time?” he muttered.

Imogen’s don’t be a jerk, Farway sigh fuzzed through the comms. Far ignored it, pushing through the door into the Grand Staircase.

It was a nice place, for a ship. White tile floors bloomed with black geometric patterns. A vast dome of iron and frosted glass stretched over the stairs, netting the night’s shadows and pouring them into the halls. There were passengers here, chatting despite the late hour; faint conversations weaving beneath the notes of a pianist in the corner.

Far didn’t look directly at any of these people. Avoiding eye contact was the best way to go unnoticed. He kept a healthy pace to the first landing, where the stairs spilled into a grandiose show of oak carvings. At the center of these sat a very fancy clock, which caused Imogen to ooooooh through the comms and offer one of her Historian tidbits. “The clock’s famous, you know, called Honor and Glory Crowning Time.”

Far didn’t really care about the angels’ names so much as the time they crowned.

10:20.

T minus one hour and twenty minutes. Gotta keep moving.

Past the bronze cherub candelabra, down to A deck and another collection of chatty passengers. He was just curling around to the second flight of stairs, past a young couple seated on a settee, when Imogen spoke again.

“Um, Farway.”

That tone—stretched, a little sticky, the one that only meant trouble. If Far never heard it again it would be too soon. There were too many people around to reply to his cousin without drawing attention, but Imogen knew this and kept talking. “Gram just did a heat scan of the ship. There are 2,225 people on board. The manifest in the databases has 2,223 names. You’re 2,224, so… there’s someone else on board who isn’t supposed to be.”

Who? Who was the 2,225th? A Recorder? Or worse, security from the future who’d figured out what they were up to, come to prevent it? If that was the case, they were already hashed. Unless they dumped the mission and returned to Lux empty-handed. That would go over well: lots of screaming, guns pointed at them, the Invictus seized and given to another crew. And Far, back to square one…

No no no no. An old fear stirred inside him, whispering that he was on the wrong side of a dream, that this life could get torn away, that everything would crumble to nothing again and Far would never be what he’d hoped: heroic son, unstoppable wanderer.

NO. Fire threaded through his veins, fight hot. Running wasn’t an option. Far belonged here, sneaking through a soon-to-be-sunk steam liner like the spectacular thief he was. Besides, if it was Corps Security coming to intervene with this mission, there’d be more than one extra body. It was probably a CTM Recorder. All Far had to do was keep his head down, blend in like he always did, and keep walking.