17

STILL POINT

SO MUCH DEPENDED ON a plastic spoon.

All throughout the celebratory dessert-before-dinner, Priya kept tabs on Eliot’s utensil, noting how the girl ran her thumb over the stem when she wasn’t using it. Between that and the dozen or so bites of blood orange gelato she took, there’d be plenty of DNA to analyze. It was just a matter of snatching the spoon and getting it back to the Invictus without Eliot noticing.

The task wasn’t that risky, or even very thrilling, but Priya’s heart thrummed inside her chest—a wild thing—as she watched Eliot toss her waste into the rubbish bin. Priya lingered in the back of the line, waiting until Eliot’s stare drifted elsewhere to retrieve the evidence and wrap it inside a clean napkin before stowing it in her purse. Far sometimes teased her for lugging such a large tote everywhere, and even Priya had to admit it could get cumbersome, but she needed its pockets for gauze, Heal-All spray, med-patches, and everything Imogen wanted to bring off ship but didn’t have room for in her clutch. Priya slipped the used spoon under Far’s swim trunks, pulse thumping all the while.

The group gathered in the hall, looking more tight-knit for the Bellagio’s grandeur: sweeping marble and columns. Priya joined them with a smile—one she hoped conveyed there’s nothing at all in my purse, certainly not Eliot’s DNA. It wasn’t easy to hold. She didn’t have Far’s poker face or Gram’s ability to drift out of a chaotic room even when he sat in the middle of it. Best to do the analysis as soon as possible.

Imogen’s eyes were glazed over in a way that meant she was reading her interface screen. “There’s not too much more here in the Bellagio…. We could go down the Strip and try the pool at Caesars Palace, or eat at one of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants. Most of the shows and dance parties don’t kick off until later.”

“I’m going to have to steal Far away for an hour or two.” Priya slipped her elbow neatly through Far’s, bag wedged between them. Her smile was starting to feel too tight. “Girlfriend’s prerogative.”

“You do?” Far asked. Her arm tensed in his—not Morse code, but signal enough. “Oh. Yes. She does. We’re off to do, er, couple-y things.”

Eliot’s eyes narrowed, shifting from Far to Priya. Was that jealousy she sensed, playing tug-of-war between them? Or something else? Priya couldn’t get a good read on the girl. She also had trouble gauging Far’s reaction—yes, there was anger, yes, there was fear, but a different charge crackled amidst the pair. An absolute sort of energy, felt even on the periphery. Its pang crept into Priya’s chest, tendriled around her heart, pried open cracks she hadn’t even known were there.

Jealousy… maybe.

“How long will you be?” Gram asked.

“Three hours.” This was Priya’s best guess, between the journey back to the ship and running the tests. “Or so.”

“Hand over the swimsuits and we’ll find something to distract ourselves.” Imogen’s voice had a wink-wink, nudge-nudge quality. Not subtle at all, if one knew her well. “You two go have some fun.”

Fun wasn’t the word Priya would’ve used for the hike back to the Invictus. The heels Imogen advised her to wear had a six- kilometer-walk span. Maximum. She shucked them off before her toes became totally raw, but walking barefoot on the roadside wasn’t much better. Far offered to carry her the rest of the way, but Priya refused. The Invictus was within hobbling distance. She could see the parking spot but not the ship—its holo-shield was doing its job too well, mimicking the surrounding landscape. Blue sky, bland dirt. Out here, away from the Strip’s fountains and well-groomed palms, you could actually remember that Las Vegas sat in the middle of a desert. The air was so thin it felt lonely. There was no humidity, no sweat to smother the skin, just a solitude that stretched for kilometers—up to the hawk wheeling overhead, out to the highway’s cracked edge. There were no cars passing and no one to see them, though Priya was sure she and Far looked odd. Two teenagers clad in party-wear wandering through an empty field, vanishing from sight.

The ship’s internal air system blasted Priya’s bangs across her face as she tossed her purse onto the couch, narrowly missing Saffron. The red panda was curled among the pillows, clutching his newfound treasure. Eliot’s wig was markedly more frayed after hours of gnawing.

“Alone. At last.” Far latched the door shut and removed his aviators. The sun remained behind his eyes—desert bright and glaring. “I need a vacation from this vacation. It’s bad enough that she’s holding the Rubaiyat over our heads, but does she have to be so, so…”

“Smug? Smirky?” She tossed out adjectives to fill his pause. “Sinister?”

“Unsettling. You know she hasn’t said one word about this detour to Vegas? Nil. All that fuss to get on our TM and Eliot doesn’t even care where we take her, which raises the question, what does she care about?”

“You.” The word felt thorny, the way it sprouted. Green, too. Wraparound tendrils climbed all the way up Priya’s throat. “Or was that not obvious after two intersecting missions? Her eyes are on you, Far.”

“She does stare an awful lot, doesn’t she?”

“You stare back.”

Far chewed his lip. His cheeks were flushed from their walk, but Priya suspected some of the color had stayed for emotion’s sake. She felt hot, too: near a sweat, a shout, a kiss. It was as if someone had come along and twisted off every safety mechanism to her emotions. Someone had, she reminded herself. Eliot. Unsettling everything.

“P…”

“I know it’s not romantic. But—it’s almost as if she’s draining you, as if you’re letting her. I don’t want to be dating a shadow-person.”

“This is new ground for us,” he said softly. “Like you said, Eliot’s running a long game, and I’m still figuring out how to play. Staring, swearing, wig-snatching… The only thing it takes from me is pride, which, according to Imogen, I can spare.”

Far stepped closer so the warmth of his sunbaked skin rolled onto hers, fingertips to arms, nose to cheek. Such a different static from before; instead of finding cracks, it filled them, until Priya felt that her skin was no longer an apt container for everything inside. She was breathless and breathed: a song before the first note, after the last.

“Have no doubt, P,” he whispered. “I’m yours, at the end of everything.”

Their kiss was all tension at first—tight lips, teeth on edge—but it didn’t take long to soften. It never did. Far was this at his core: feathery breath, heat of a wandering heart. Priya roamed with him, letting their kiss fall deeper out of their now. Out of time and space, out of the Invictus’s common area and the Nevada desert, into a perfect suspension of them. Just them, just them, floating and falling all at once, hands in hair tumbling toward the couch, just them—

And Saffron. The red panda’s YOU’RE IN MY SPACE!!! squawk yanked their surroundings into focus, and Priya realized she was in danger of crushing her purse, along with its cargo. “Wait, wait! The spoon! I need to take a sample before something ruins it.”

Far fell gently to the side, curls amok. “Work first, play later, huh?”

“Isn’t that always the case?” Her insides blazed still, would for a while. But, “The answers in this DNA are our next move. The sooner we have them, the better. It’ll just take a few minutes to run the test. Why don’t you search the ship? There are only so many places Eliot could’ve stashed the Rubaiyat.”

“Good thinking!” Far slid from the couch. Destination? The honeycomb bunks.

Priya risked no contamination, donning latex gloves before retrieving the spoon from her purse, unwrapping the napkin with an archaeologist’s care. She cupped it in both hands— artifact and offering—all the way into the infirmary. It would only take one swab to get what she needed, but Priya did two for good measure, pausing to fold her hands and whisper a prayer to Ganesh—remover of obstacles, miniature statue at her workstation. The god’s elephant head watched, serene, as she placed the sample in the reader. It was an older diagnostics machine, nothing like the fancy scanners in some of the newer CTMs. This had never posed a problem before, but the crew’s injuries were often minor: scrapes and burns, food poisoning, a common cold every once in a while. Running DNA aboard the Invictus was a first.

When Priya inserted the sample, the diagnostics machine wheezed so loud that Saffron perked his tented ears and trundled into the infirmary. He sat on the floor, eyes latched to the screen, entranced by the hourglass cursor that never seemed to run out of sand.

“Keep an eye on that for me,” she instructed the red panda and went to check Eliot’s bunk. The place was wrecked: sheets everywhere, the mattress upended. Far was on his hands and knees, prying up floor panels that had no business being bothered, elbow deep in wires he knew nothing about. Priya, who did know about the wires and how they connected to the ship’s power grid, was quick to warn him. “Careful. One wrong move and we’ll have a fritzed Invictus with fried Far on the side.”

“The Rubaiyat isn’t here! Nothing’s here!” Far scowled. “Eliot was wearing a yellow dress when she showed up, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then where is it?”

“Not in the floor.” It wasn’t in the hanging wardrobe, either, though Priya spent several seconds scanning for the frill. “That’s odd.”

Unsettling, actually.

Far dropped the floor panel back into place, frowning. “She must have a hidey-hole somewhere. Will you help me check the console room?”

She did, if only to keep him from tugging at even bigger, badder wires. Both of them made a thorough search of it. More floor panels were lifted, drawers were opened, overhead pipes were checked. They even tipped Bartleby over to see if something had been hidden in his hollow torso.

Nothing, except for several tumbleweeds of Saffron’s fur.

There was a chime from the infirmary just as Priya set the mannequin back on its stand. Answers. Finally! She made her way to the workstation. Gone was the hourglass, a full DNA profile in its place. The report was a mess of Gs and Ts and As and Cs, mapped with graph lines. Data too raw for Priya to read—geneticist she was not. The machine had managed the hardest part, turning markers into more familiar language: female, age range fifteen to twenty, Alopecia universalis.

Two eyes and a Medic degree had already told her as much. There had to be more juicy secrets hiding in this saliva…. She scrolled down the sequence. Reports automatically cited census data—linking chromosomes to ID numbers. Every single person in Central time was stored in the system. Even Far, whose genetic profile was as censored as an ancient war letter, was matched with one of his old Academy pictures: skull-cropped hair, grin thrice as cocky.

Priya kept scrolling.

No picture. No name. No ID number.

NO MATCH FOUND.

She read the results—again and again—until the words disintegrated into letters, the letters into meaningless light. Eliot wasn’t just a hologram, but a ghost. She did not exist. Well, obviously she existed; her spit was on a spoon. The phantom status was digital and, according to previous suspicions, logical. Eliot was either black ops or a citizen of the future. Erased or unwritten.

“What’s the verdict?” Far had rooted through couch cushions, finding nothing but a Beats on Blast holo-paper zine Priya hadn’t realized was lost. Its battery was almost drained, review of a 1969 Woodstock datastream in the throes of death. A clip of Jimi Hendrix’s legendary “Star-Spangled Banner” performance flickered between his fingers. In and out, in and… gone. Far’s expression was the same when he read the screen. “Dead end?”

“Detour,” she said, determined. “Just because Eliot is MIA in the system doesn’t mean we can’t dig up some leads. Ever heard of the Ancestral Archives?”

“The program where you shell out credits to get a pedigree?”

“That’s one application.” Certainly the most popular. The program was established for learning more about hereditary diseases, but like everything else in the world, it evolved at the eve of time travel. With history forever blasting through people’s ears and eyes and hearts, it was natural they’d want to know their place in it. Discovering your many-times-great-grandfather was Albert Einstein did wonders for the ego—never mind that thousands of others could make the same claim. “It cross-references DNA databases for all sorts of things. Estate settlements, medical research, lineage mapping. This program could help us. People don’t appear out of nowhere—even future ones. Depending on the types of genetic matches we get, we might be able to figure out what year Eliot’s from.”

“Great! Let’s run it!”

“We don’t have the software or the hardware. This two-bit piece of shazm is at its limit.” Priya gave the diagnostics machine a healthy thwack with her fist. It snarled back. “We have to jump back to Central for answers.”

Central, where Lux was waiting for a book they didn’t have. A prospect Far summed up with a single syllable: “Ugh.”

“Ugh is right.” Priya moved to the common area, surveying the mess they’d made. Uneven floor panels, dislodged cushions, Eliot’s bunk in shambles—so much to clean up and nothing to show for it. She flopped onto the couch. “Seems this trip was a waste. I’m sorry, Far.”

“Sorry?” He settled beside her, curl-to-cheek close. “What’ve you got to be sorry for? I mean, except for getting a banana split when you clearly should’ve ordered gelato. That’s tantamount to a criminal act in Imogen’s eyes.”

It wasn’t quite a laugh-aloud joke, but it did make Priya smile. She rested her hand on Far’s, taking a moment to marvel at their physicality. Knuckles, knicks, calluses. Veins, tendons, pores. All touching, not a shadow to be found.

“I know what I want.” This, the resonance, a connection past flesh. “How about you—what did you wish for?”

“Wishes have the same weight as luck in my palmdrive. You want something, you make it happen. No need to go spitting on a perfectly nice dessert.”

“Play the cynic all you want with the rest of the crew, but I know you made that wish.” She’d seen it in his eyes, the way they caught the sparkler, drinking its brilliance spark by spark. It was the look Far got when he honed in on something—intense, fixed, as if nothing in all of time or space could stop him. But what did a boy like Farway McCarthy wish for? There were so many possibilities: amassing a fortune, trumping Eliot, making his mark, finding the Ab Aeterno…

Priya could only guess, and that was why she wanted to know. For as many touches and glances and whispers as they’d exchanged, there was still a part of her boyfriend that felt distant. A side of himself he either didn’t share… or couldn’t. Sometimes it seemed to her like an emptiness. Other times, a hunger.

Love should be all, but all was always growing.

“You’re right.” He smiled at her—there was no sparkler glow in his face now but sunlight. A slant of it reached through the Invictus’s vistaport, wrapping around their shoulders. “But if I tell you, it won’t come true. Isn’t that how the old legends go?”

Priya had no idea, though it did sound like the ragged remnant of a fairy tale, something twenty-first-century people might cling to. That or Far was making the whole thing up. She’d have to quiz Imogen on birthday lore when they reunited.

Which should be soon…. Three hours had sounded like an age when she’d cited it, but time passed faster when Priya and Far were alone together. There was never enough—every second, every breath felt stolen.

“The others will be waiting for us.” Priya hated to say it. How many moments like this had she wanted to press Pause? To rest her head against his shoulder as long as she possibly could? Instead, their lives felt stuck on Fast-Forward. Flying here and there, caught up in capers, rushing, rushing, rushing…

… to what, exactly?

“Someone’s always waiting for something. Imogen and Gram are at the biggest grown-up playground in the world. I think they can manage to keep Eliot distracted for a few more hours.” Far smiled. “If you wanted to pick up where we left off.”

Oh did she.

Plastic spoons, the missing Rubaiyat, the unsettled rush—all this faded when Far’s fingers trailed up her arm, along the garment’s green gauze, over the bare skin of her shoulder. This was the pause, the beat, the shiver…. Something worthy of a snapshot. Priya could command her interface to take an actual photograph, but she preferred collecting the details of Far through memory alone. His eyelashes, thick as ink. The sun spiraling off his curls. The many degrees of emotion caught in the angle of his lips. Herself—far away in the center of his eyes—another world of details and memories made.

It was a still point. A perfect moment.

She let it stretch on as long as she could.