18

IN THE GARDEN OF THE GODS

SO MUCH WASTE.

It was impossible not to think this, sitting in the Garden of the Gods. There were seven different swimming pools in Caesars Palace, most named after the expected gods: Bacchus, Apollo, Venus. It wasn’t the imitation of grandeur that bothered Eliot, though it was underwhelming after standing in the shadows of real Roman columns. It was the assuredness of excess: fountains gushing in the desert, middle finger to Mother Nature, partygoers reveling while a few miles away Lake Mead shrank to critical levels.

It was ironic. No, that wasn’t the right word. Tragic? Smacking of poetic justice? Maybe she was being too critical. Eliot’s mother had always teased her for being a glass-half-empty kind of person.

It’s the one thing I can count on, she used to say in her lilt of a voice.

The memory was faint—an echo, really—but it caught Eliot like a blade between the ribs. She sat up in her lounge chair, breath sharp, borrowed sunglasses sliding down her nose.

“Everything okay?” Imogen propped herself up in the next chair.

No. It wasn’t. And it wouldn’t be. Water wasn’t the only thing being wasted. Eliot was on the clock. Subject Seven had been out of scanning range for hours now, and her readings were stuck at 23 percent. Too slow, too slow; her lungs shuddered the warning.

“Ooooh.” Imogen’s nose wrinkled. “You’re burning.”

When Eliot pressed her fingers to her arm, they left white prints. Unsurprising. It was her mother’s skin—pale like the north, ready to take on a thousand freckles at the first kiss of sun. She winced. It helped as much as it hurt, remembering these little things….

“Pink’s a great shade for hair, not so much for skin….” Imogen pulled out a bottle of the highest SPF money could buy. “Here. Apply liberally to avoid turning into a lobster princess.”

There wasn’t enough sunscreen in this world that could keep Eliot from getting fried, but Imogen was one of those people you just couldn’t say no to. A glass-overflowing kind of soul. In fact, the Historian was so eager to pass along the bottle that she knocked over her own empty piña colada glass. When she set the barware upright, she salvaged the tiny umbrella to wedge into the base of her bun. On anyone else the decor would’ve looked ridiculous, but Imogen made it fit. In a way, she made Eliot fit, too. The others seemed wary around her—even that hissy panda thing—but Imogen was a fount of conversation, not to mention knowledge. The offhand comment about Subject Seven’s birthday meant more than the Historian would probably ever realize. Eliot had assumed the blank spot by the birth date in Seven’s files was an oversight. SYSTEM ERROR. It felt too easy, too much to hope for, that he was, indeed, the one she’d been searching for.

Was he? This boy born outside of time?

Eliot still feared to hope. She feared a lot of things: being wrong, what must follow if she was right. There was no room for mistakes, and she couldn’t afford to act on impulse. Her certainty had to be at 100 percent, and right now the countersignature scanners were stuck at less than a quarter of that.

“Do you know when—” Eliot caught herself. It wouldn’t do to call him Subject Seven out loud. “Far and Priya will get back?”

“That’s like asking where a hurricane will make landfall.” Imogen laughed. “Farway is a force all his own.”

“I’ve gathered as much.” Eliot squirted sunscreen into her palm. “Do you enjoy working for your cousin?”

“I’d say with as much as for. Farway… he’s always been strongheaded, but sometimes he gets that strong head up his own tail. That’s when he gets into the most trouble. He needs people. We all do, really.” Imogen cast a glance at the Fortuna Pool, where Gram hovered in waist-deep waters, watching the blackjack tables. “I can’t imagine freelancing.”

“Don’t. It’s not a life to envy.” Eliot had forgotten how nice it was—sitting by a pool, applying sunscreen, chatting with someone who wasn’t a computer. “Did you know there’s a German curse that literally translates as ‘heaven thunder weather’? Himmeldonnerwetter!”

“Germans have the best words.” It said a lot about Imogen, that she followed this segue. It revealed even more that she appreciated cultured profanity.

“There are fantastic obscenities all over the globe. History, too. I’ve made it my mission to collect as many as possible. Reminds me that everyone’s got something to swear about—no matter where or when they live.”

“In Latin you can slander someone by calling them a pumpkin,” the other girl offered. “Cucurbita! Farway and I used to shout it at each other all the time, until Aunt Empra made us stop.”

Eliot emptied more sunscreen into her hand—the bottle was down to the dregs, and the stuff splattered everywhere. “I imagine that was quite an insult, back in the day.”

“Most people don’t like being compared to gourds,” Imogen said sagely. “So what about haze? When’s that curse from?”

Oh fex… She’d noticed. It wasn’t like Eliot to slip from the script: careful vocabulary, galvanized backstory. But the wig-snatching had rattled her more than she cared to admit. She didn’t mind going without a hairpiece; in fact, she preferred it (less heat and itch), but the suddenness of the loss—hair and gone—summoned a memory that was all knife. Six years old, stares from every side, cafeteria tears—where did she belong now?

So much had changed, and yet so much hadn’t.

“Haze… It’s an Australian word, I think. Twenty-third century?” Eliot hoped the Historian knew nothing about Down Under slang. These rabbit holes were getting harder to dodge. “I lose track after a while.”

The sunscreen bottle was tapped, but Eliot’s skin was too saturated to accept more regardless. She was sure that if she looked in the mirror she’d appear more wraithlike than usual. Blanched to the bone, half past disappearing. It would happen one day, she was certain. The Fade would catch her unawares, in a moment she could not escape.

Eliot pressed her arm again. White prints against white. Still solid. Still here. Even with the new layer of SPF she felt her skin slow-roasting. “I’m going to join Gram in the shade. Want to come?”

“Um, no.” Imogen’s body language was at war with her words. Calves taut, shoulders turned. “Not this time.”

“Most things look good on you,” Eliot told her. “Pining isn’t one of them.”

At this, Imogen removed her sunglasses. “Who told you? Farway? Priya?”

“It’s not that hard to see. Your eyes go all galactic when you look at him. Stars and stuff.”

The Historian made a mouselike sound and slipped the shades back on as if that could retroactively keep Eliot from noticing the lovey-dovey glow. “Do you—do you think he knows?”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“Because… then we’d have to talk about it.”

“And?”

The other girl swiped up her piña colada glass and began scraping leftover fluff off its edges. “Why does everyone think it’s so easy to bare one’s heart for possible laceration? Hmm?”

“Not easy, no,” Eliot admitted as she stood. “But it just might be worth it.”

The Historian stabbed at dried coconut bits with her straw, grumbling.

“Carpe diem.” She shouldn’t have pushed, shouldn’t have cared at all. Getting attached to subjects and their affiliates only meant there’d be detaching later. Still, this rainbow of a girl reintroduced pumpkin profanity into Eliot’s mindscape, and that was no small thing. “You should try.”

Before it’s too late…

“Noted.” Imogen waved her off. “Now let me pine in peace!”

For all of Eliot’s judgment, the water felt blessedly cool when she waded into the Fortuna Pool, heading straight for the covered part, where people could swim up to the blackjack tables. Staff in shimmery blue shirts dealt the cards from a dry inlet. Gram watched one of the games from a nearby column. His stance was made of intense corners: keen jaw, shoulders straight enough to level a portrait. Eliot could almost see the numbers running through his eyes—+1, 0, +1, −1, and on, and on.

“What’s the count?” she asked.

“Crux!” The Engineer started, his calculations scattering. “How do you keep sneaking up like that?”

“Was I sneaking?” It wasn’t intentional. Force of habit, maybe, the side effect of a year spent in and out of shadows.

“You don’t even slosh. It’s not natural.” Gram’s stare drifted back to the table. “Negative three. Odds are in the house’s favor.”

So they were, much to the chagrin of the man who watched his chips get swept away after the next hit me. Gram let out a sigh—part satisfaction, part… relief? The people at the blackjack tables kept playing, tapping for more more more as the cards were laid down.

“The landing on the Titanic gave you trouble, didn’t it?” Eliot asked.

“You could say that.” A frown. Slight side-eye. “What would you know of it?”

Everything and nothing. The rabbit hole became an abyss, yet Eliot pressed on. “What time were you aiming for?”

“Six o’clock in the evening. We landed around ten instead.”

Did the tear span all four hours? Eliot couldn’t count on herself to know. There was no plug-in formula for such growth… merely guesswork. What she needed was a point of reference, a coal-mine canary for the Fade’s spread. At 10:20 that evening she’d been talking with the boy on the settee. What was his name? What was his name? Panic spun through Eliot just a moment before the details landed. Charles. Charles with the baby-fat cheeks, nineteen years old. Sandy hair, bright eyes, over a century dead.

“Remember Charles,” she muttered, both as a reminder to herself and for Vera to record as a memo.

Gram glanced down at her. “Who?”

Charles. Charles. Baby-fat Charles.

“It’s nothing.” Which couldn’t be further from the truth. Eliot’s memories weren’t just an arsenal but a barometer. Once she started forgetting Charles…

“I’ve never seen anything like it before. The numbers…” The Engineer’s voice faded, then picked back up along a different line of thought. “I’ve spent my entire life learning about order, knowing how to keep it. What do you do when the world stops making sense?”

READINGS REMAIN 23% COMPLETE, Vera reminded her. REMEMBER CHARLES.

Water crashed all around Eliot, cascading from the ceiling’s edges, enough to drown in. The man at the blackjack table, who’d been counting on luck to toss him a bone, had instead been beaten by the odds. He threw up his hands and wallowed off.

“There’s nothing like the nihilist to bring out the hedonist.” Eliot gestured to the empty seat.

“We can’t. There’s too much reshuffling. The redistribution could—”

But she was already wading over to the table, cash produced seemingly out of nowhere, at the ready. Carpe the hazing diem. Make it count. Either Vegas’s gilded lifestyle was rubbing off on Eliot or she was just too tired to care. What she needed was a distraction, something to do besides worry herself into bits.

Even Nero had fiddled while Rome burned….

The cute blond dealer checked Eliot’s doctored holo-ID before exchanging her dollars for chips—a tidy sum. Eliot didn’t care if she lost it or not. The money of this era looked like play stuff, all green and papery, and the chips even more so. She placed the highest bet she could. The cards were laid.

Gram appeared beside her. “Far won’t like this.”

“Well, your captain isn’t here, is he? What’s the point of coming all the way to Las Vegas if you can’t toss around a bit of cash?”

“It’s irresponsible.”

Eliot shrugged. “We’re young. Isn’t that our job? If you don’t want any part in it, feel free to join Imogen.”

Gram didn’t move. The dealer was waiting for a decision, and so Eliot tapped the table.

“She’s pretty, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. I mean, I guess.”

Typical boys and their monosyllabic answers. “Why don’t you take her out on the town? Maybe to one of those Penn and Teller magic shows?”

“We’re crewmates.”

“That doesn’t seem to stop Priya and Far.”

Gram glanced back through the curtain of falling water—most of Imogen was blurred, but her topknot shone bright. He watched the green glow, something other than numbers flashing through his eyes.

“They’re the exception to the rule. The probability of such a relationship not ending poorly at our age…” The Engineer shook his head. “It’d make things too complicated.”

Everyone kept getting in their own way today. Must be something in the water.

It felt wrong to laugh, but Eliot couldn’t help herself. The sound was unhinged and hysterical and made the dealer do a double take once the cards were placed. Hit or stand? She was at a negative count, but odds mattered less than everyone thought, especially when you pushed back. Life was for the living. She wasn’t going to worry about wasting water or time slipping or Agent Ackerman or frozen readings or pivot points or redistribution or Charles or all the undoings she could not undo.

Time to take a fexing vacation.

“Hit me,” she said.