8

A ROYAL GREETING

“THERE’S SOMEONE ELSE ON BOARD WHO isn’t supposed to be.”

Eliot fiddled with her bracelet as she eavesdropped on the Invictus’s comms. A few subjects ago this statement would’ve summoned a smile. As things stood, her pulse pushed between the tendons on her wrist, a scattershot tempo it had kept up since the afternoon, when she strolled up to the first-class promenade and saw everything she feared beyond the ocean.

“I hope I’m not boring you, Ms.—” the gentleman across the settee from Eliot faltered, blushing. “Forgive me, my memory has been wretched today. What did you say your name was?”

She stared at the sandy-haired man. Man? No, even at nineteen Charles was more of a boy. Baby fat clung stubbornly to his cheeks, and there was such a hope in his eyes. The kind that looked like fresh-smelt copper, before the world ate it away in cruel patina chunks. Eliot couldn’t remember the last time she felt so bright….

Unfortunately, the shine was about to end for Charles as well. She’d made the mistake of running his profile as soon as he’d sat down to chat. He wasn’t one of the 710 souls who survived the night. Throughout their entire conversation together, this knowledge boiled inside her: He’s going to die.

Eliot wanted to stay and give him a piece of happiness to hold on to when he plunged into the frigid water and his fingers, toes, arms, legs, thoughts, heart withered under the cold. That was the way destruction always crept: outside in. From the edges to the core.

He’s going to die.

Aren’t we all?

In a perfect world Eliot would linger on this settee and teach Charles some foreign curse words. It was a hobby of hers, learning obscenities in other languages: The French always sounded like poets when they swore, while Latin often felt dusty off the tongue. Her favorite insult was in Japanese: Hit your head on the corner of tofu and die! Charles would laugh when she translated it for him. Eliot would smile back. The Titanic would push on into the dawn, all the way to New York City.

The entire scenario was a paradox, though. ’Twere this world perfect, Eliot wouldn’t be here at all. She couldn’t spend the evening with Charles any more than she could warn the boy of his fate. If she didn’t go do her job, there were going to be even more deaths. A whole haze of a lot more than a shipful.

“I’m sorry,” she told Charles. And she really was. “I’ve got to go.”

With that, Eliot left the boy, beet-faced and stuttering. She walked fast so she didn’t have to hear him. It helped to have other voices buzzing through her comm.

“Once you get to B deck, you’ll round back to where the elevators are and go through the baize-covered doors. Walk to the end of the hall and take the door out to the deck.” The Historian was getting ahead of herself, Eliot noted, rushing despite her own instructions not to do so.

They could hurry all they wanted. It wouldn’t help. Subject Seven—aka Farway Gaius McCarthy—had failed before he’d even stepped foot on this boat, because Eliot had boarded first. She’d already combed through the cargo bay’s FRAGILE THIS SIDE UP crates, collecting splinters in her fingertips during her search for the Rubaiyat. To some, the book was a fount of wisdom: poetry that dissected birth and death and the life between. To others, the Great Omar was art bound in fortune, a collector’s dream.

Yes, it was beautiful. Yes, it was wise. But to Eliot, it was so much more.

She paused by the Grand Staircase, watching Subject Seven as he descended to B deck. Her heart rattled over the steps. What a wonder it kept beating so fiercely when her weariness went so deep: down to the level of atoms and quarks, to fraying threads of fear and an always dreamless black sleep.

Disaster was exhausting. She’d lived so much of it.

And now, through Subject Seven, she was about to live it again.

Far was only too glad to ditch the first-class getup. He didn’t even wait around to watch them hit the water as he tossed the clothes overboard: Good-bye, bird-tail jacket! Peace out, top hat! Vale, gentlemanly cane!

The second outfit, with its trousers and rough shirt, was much more flexible. No one looked twice at a scuffed-up workman windmilling down five flights of stairs to the orlop deck. He was deep in the ship now, beneath the waterline, where engines hummed like warring whales and the dim lights served only to silhouette the mountains of crates and luggage. There were ranges of wooden boxes, leather wardrobes, even cars.

“Now what?” Far asked his cousin.

“You’re looking for a small oak case. Probably near the top of one of these piles.”

“Probably?” Far walked toward the nearest pile. Boxes on boxes on boxes, all netted together like a bunch of king mackerel to keep from tumbling with the ship. No small oak case here. Unless it was buried deep.

T minus one hour and ten minutes.

“It’s the best I can do, Farway.” Imogen sounded as stretched as Far felt. “You’ll find it.”

He moved to the second pile, using a Louis Vuitton trunk as a launch point for his climb to the top. Once there, Far pulled aside some crates, peering into the maze of leather and wood. Nothing of note. It was on to the next stack. And the next. He scaled mound after mound of expensive luggage, his stomach shrinking a size with every overturned crate, every passing minute.

T minus one hour and five minutes. T minus fifty-five minutes. T minus forty minutes…

Though Far kept searching, his mind was starting to wander—picturing his own empty hands outstretched, and Lux before them. Even in imagination the man was cold—no sneer on his face, no rageful tone: I gave you a 1.2-billion-credit TM and three million credits’ worth of fuel and you’ve brought me nothing. What am I supposed to do about that, Mr. McCarthy? What forfeit is equivalent to this loss?

The answer that was sure to follow made Far search harder, but this mission had turned into a handful of dust and the tighter he gripped, the faster everything slipped. The Rubaiyat wasn’t in this stack or the next or the last, and what else could he do except swear?

“We are so hashed.”

“There’s another cargo room with a lot of first-class luggage one deck up,” Imogen told him. “The Rubaiyat’s probably in there.”

True or not, this didn’t make up for the thirty-minute countdown. Twenty if you counted the time it’d take for him to return to the Invictus—

Far halted, trying to understand what he was seeing.

An entire ship away, Imogen processed the same image. “What’s a first-class lass doing in the cargo bay?”

The girl in the door was decked out in first-class frippery—floor-length daffodil-colored gown; chestnut hair coiled and pinned—but just from her stance Far could tell she was out of her era. She stood with her shoulder to the doorframe, elegantly slumped, an oak case propped on her hip. Far was a universe and a half certain this box contained the Rubaiyat, but it was what he saw on the girl’s face that rendered him speechless. Or rather, who he recognized there.

Marie Antoinette.

The queen of France was on the hashing Titanic.

It was her, and yet… it wasn’t. There was no beauty mark. No beehive wig. Her eyebrows still appeared scripted, the product of a pen nib. The gaze beneath was unmistakable: dark as glistening.

“You,” he croaked.

Marie Antoinette—Far was certain that wasn’t actually her name, but what else could he call her?—smiled and opened the case. Peacock jewels gleamed under the cargo bay’s flimsy light. “Looking for this?”

“Um.” Imogen’s bewilderment was palpable. “Who is that? And why does she have the Great Omar?”

Far wanted these answers, too, but with T minus twenty-seven minutes to disaster and the Rubaiyat in the hands of another, there was only one question that mattered: “What do you want?”

The girl shut the box and tucked it under her arm. “To get your attention.”

“Consider it obtained.” Far took a step forward. “Now can I have the book?”

Marie Antoinette didn’t move. Her smile was as unnerving as it had been in Versailles, just a twitch away from becoming a snarl. “You didn’t say the magic word.”

“Now can I please have the book?” he tried.

“You’re going to have to work a little harder than that.”

“Pretty please?” Far raised both eyebrows. “With a cherry on top?”

She winked.

And then she ran.