13

THE HILLS REMAIN

GRAM STARED AT THE NUMBERS.

They were changing, but it was a slow, expected shift. Seconds ticking along. Time’s natural passage as morning caught up with them—April 15, 1912 AD, 5:32 AM. In just a few minutes, Las Vegas would appear on the horizon, looking like little more than an old Western movie set, with signs advertising BILLIARDS and horse shazm scattered along the dirt roads. Nothing to see, and even less to do. The great state of Nevada had outlawed gambling in 1909, never mind that it would be at least twenty years before the first official casino opened. The flashier stuff came much later.

Could they make the jump? Gram hoped so. He more than hoped. The 1900s wasn’t an era he wanted to be stranded in. Skin color wasn’t a barrier in Central time, but when it came to the past, prejudice was inescapable. Every time Gram stepped into a new era, he had to brace himself for the hatred of the age. Sometimes it was just under the surface, lurking in shopkeepers’ gazes as they watched him walk down every store aisle. Other times men called Gram words unfit for a dictionary, insulting his intelligence to his face. This stretch of history was downright dangerous. He’d seen photos of lynchings. Even in black-and-white they were graphic enough to make him retch.

They had to make the jump.

Gram ran their next landing date over and over again in his head. April 18, 2020, was no golden age, either: slavery’s chains exchanged for jumpsuits, keep your hands where I can see them a guarantee for nothing. But a successful jump to the twenty-first century meant a future jump home. There was no reason these landing numbers shouldn’t work. The Invictus’s nav systems were running as smoothly as they had before the hashed landing, but this only made the Engineer more anxious. It’d be better to know what was wrong than to just keep floundering like this….

“Is your tail glued to that chair? You haven’t moved for hours.” Imogen walked in and took a seat at her console. It was a new day, and sure as the sun, her hair was a fresh color. The blue and pink chalks had been washed out, replaced with even brighter shades.

“Green.” Gram realized, as soon as he said it, that the word didn’t make sense on its own. His brain needed a few extra beats to shift from numbers to language after staring at equations all night. “Your hair, I mean.”

But it wasn’t just green. Imogen’s head was phosphorescent. It looked as if she’d snapped a glow stick in half and used the insides as conditioner. The predawn shadows through the Invictus’s vistaport made her shine all the brighter.

“‘Nuclear Green’ is the colloquial term,” she told him. “It’s a 2020 throwback color. Do you like it?”

“It’s…” Of all the times for Gram’s vocabulary to abandon him! “Shiny.”

“It’d be rubbish for a stealth mission,” the Historian admitted. “But Las Vegas isn’t really known for its subtlety. When in Las Vegas, glow as the Las Vegans do. Vegans… that can’t be right.”

“It is,” Gram said.

“History’s ironies abound much.” She swiveled her chair back to the screen, radiant hair aflutter.

Radiant. Resplendent. Pulchritudinous. These were the words Gram should have used, queuing up ten seconds too late. He couldn’t voice them now, not when Far appeared in the doorway, scanning the console room with bleary eyes.

It wasn’t hard to guess who he was looking for. Gram glanced at the bunk door, still sealed. Eliot: a piece that didn’t fit. The girl’s sudden appearance was as much of an outlier as the hashed landing, both of which had happened in the span of an hour. Correlation didn’t imply causation, but he was willing to bet that the events were linked. Was Eliot the cause of the disturbance?

Or was she here because of it?

Twisty, turny, not-quite-solving puzzles. Gram wasn’t used to problems that lasted so long. He looked up at his Rubik’s Cubes—each solved and back in place, their rainbow row complete. There was an answer out there. There had to be.

Far sidled up to the console. “Think we can land when we want to this time? Ship’s guts look good according to Priya.”

“Priya checked the engines?”

“Well, yeah.” There was a seedling frown on Far’s face, threatening to grow. “You asked her to, didn’t you?”

“Did I?” It’d slipped Gram’s mind, like much of the moment after the landing. Strange… Adrenaline often heightened his senses, whetting his memories until their edges were razor sharp. Too much cortisol must’ve flooded his system. “Mechanics wouldn’t make a jump go sideways like that. Last time we were in the Grid, I was running the numbers, but I couldn’t solve for the landing time we wanted. That’s when…” Both cousins stared at Gram, expectant. He wasn’t sure if his words would work—they didn’t add up. He said them anyway. “That’s when the equation changed.”

“Huh.” Far took the news far better than expected, though this could be because he didn’t quite grasp what the statement meant. Even Gram wasn’t sure. What happened when the laws of the universe became suggestions?

Far cleared his throat. “Well, I’m sorry for hitting your Tetris screen. And yelling. You were under pressure and I was making a proper tail of myself.”

Imogen’s mouth opened wide enough to catch flies. Gram didn’t need the visual cue to know the behavior was aberrational. Far apologizing was almost as strange as math not being math. Things really were in flux….

“All’s forgiven,” Gram told his friend. “Just aim for something less antiquey next time.”

“Hopefully there won’t be a next time.” Far took a seat in his captain’s chair and stared out the vistaport, where Las Vegas was taking shape in the darkness. One could count the sleepy town’s lights on both hands. The horizon was beginning to lighten—black to blooming indigo—revealing hills. These were the bones of the place. For millions of years the earth had been carving out the sky, as it would keep doing four centuries from now, long after the casinos had crumbled, their swimming pools sucked as dry as Lake Mead, their flash and glitz and neon lights fading to nothing….

Through all this, the hills would remain.

Gram guided the Invictus into this steady distance. The outskirts of the outskirts. It would be the best place to jump—out of range of future flight paths, close to stretches of empty desert that would be perfect for parking an invisible time machine.

“All of us are stressed and yell-y.” Imogen sighed. “That’s why it’s imperative we stay on track with this vacation. We all need some fun. Dining! Drinks! Dallying the days away!”

“This is a mission, too,” Far reminded them. “Eliot’s got the drop on us right now, and I need that to change before we return to Central. Vegas affords us some wiggle room to dig up information. Priya has a plan, and I need you two to keep our guest distracted so she won’t catch on.”

“Consider it done. As long as we can wiggle,” Imogen added. “There’s supposed to be a dance party of epic proportions at Caesars Palace on Saturday night. DJ Rory is hosting.”

Far looked less than enthused. “Eliot doesn’t strike me as the dancing type.”

“Don’t be so quick to judge books by their covers, Far. I contain multitudes.”

All three of them jumped. Eliot. There was no telling how much the girl had heard, for she was but a shadow in the doorway, and just as soundless. It was as if she’d teleported. Twenty-four hours ago Gram would’ve deemed that impossible. But the word meant nothing now….

Their captain scowled. “Sometimes the covers are all that matter. Particularly when they’re loaded up with one hundred mil in jewels.”

With a dancer’s grace and a smuggler’s smugness, Eliot whirled into the console room. “‘One thing is certain, that Life flies; / One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies; / The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.’ Words of wisdom from the very book you deem matterless.”

Again, Far was less than enthused. “My life’s flight will be a hash of a lot shorter if you keep the Rubaiyat stashed away.”

“O ye of little faith…” A smile twisted Eliot’s face as she stared out the vistaport. Not even dawn light could soften her features. In fact, it only brought out the shadows under her eyes, the tendons stringing her neck—things that made Gram weary by proxy. Though both of her feet stood firm on the Invictus’s floor panels, it seemed to him that she was standing on some sort of edge, close to tumbling.

None of this helped the anxiety piling in Gram’s chest. He tried his best to swallow it back as he shifted the Invictus into hover mode.

“We’re ready to attempt a jump,” he told Far. “Cross your fingers.”

Their captain, not one for lucky charms, nodded. Imogen made up for it by crossing both sets of fingers and her arms to boot, as if luck were something you could simply pluck out of thin air, cling to for dear life. Gram knew wishes weren’t quantifiable, but he found himself hoping she’d collected enough fortune for their journey.

“Three, two, one…”