21

WOBBLES

FAR’S FEAR HAD GONE VIRAL. It was the worst thing that could happen from a captain’s perspective, watching your insecurities leak into the crew, nerves crawling all over the console room. Every one of the Invictus’s five passengers stared out the vistaport as Gram guided the time machine down the Tiber. Its water crept brown beneath the evening light. They drifted along with it, past the Castel Sant’Angelo, over bridge after bridge, to a section of river that the men of Central would choose to forget. What was now water would become earth, and what was earth would be hollowed out by Lux and used as a warehouse for his illegal TMs. During Central time, the place was buried in secrecy. Ships like the Invictus could only dock there by jumping through specific years, namely ones where drought had reduced the Tiber to a volume that wouldn’t drown them on impact.

They’d made it to 2155—a year skies refused to cry and the earth thirsted—without incident, but the stakes were much higher with the docking jump. Lux’s fleet left and landed on an airtight schedule to avoid collisions. One slipped landing became two TMs with volatile fuel rods in the same space became nuclear apocalypse.

So yeah, nerves.

Gram brought the Invictus to the exact landing coordinates, settling the ship into muddy shallows. He grabbed one of his Rubik’s Cubes and began twisting.

Priya slipped on headphones, insulating herself in music.

Imogen chewed her thumbnail to a saw-toothed quick.

Eliot didn’t have a tell, but this didn’t stop her anxiety from being palpable. Far tasted it as well as his own. The only one without a care was Saffron, who’d planted himself in the captain’s chair and would’ve melted into its abhorrent orange if not for his facial markings. Far was too hungover to tsk the animal off. It’d been a long sleep and a few waking hours since Caesars Palace, but the wooze of vodka clung to him. Nausea was inevitable for this jump.

“You sure we can land right this time?” Far asked.

“Nothing’s sure now, Far,” Gram reminded him.

Right. All conjecture at this point. Far turned to Eliot. “If you want all of us to get back to Central in one piece, you’d do well to dish anything you might know about wobbly landings. They only started happening when you showed up, and Gram here tells me you were asking about it. It’s not much of a leap to assume that you can help us avoid blowing up.”

“Which is preferable,” Imogen added.

Eliot’s eyebrows scrunched together. They looked different today, more substantive. She’d put on another wig—a jet-black bob that added five years to her appearance. “These… wobbles, as you call them, are relatively random. As far as I know, this landing shouldn’t be affected.”

So she was connected to the wobble, which meant the wobble was linked to his memory loss. Again, Far felt his forgetting, the shock of it like a limb just amputated. Where had his entrance onto the Titanic gone, and why?

The question felt too big to ask. He couldn’t imagine the size of the answer.

“How far do you know?” It was Gram who pressed for truth, because he couldn’t not. “What caused the wobble? What made the numbers change? They did change, right?”

“Tick-tock, my friends.” Eliot tapped her watchless wrist. “The Rubaiyat’s at stake.”

Far turned to the nav system. Its center screen was crammed with digits, spattered with symbols, things the Engineer once swore by. Now as Gram sat by his instruments, he had the posturing of a gladiator: ready to attack, bracing for the wounding. His nostrils quivered. He set his cube down, unsolved. Ready or not?

“We jump,” Far ordered.

Five breaths held. Five sets of eyes locked onto the vistaport as gloaming surrendered to absolute black. One red panda tucked his nose into his tail, for sounder sleep. Far looked back to the screen, where Gram was wrestling with equations. None of the numbers changed, though there were too many for Far to actually keep track. How the Engineer managed it was a few IQ points beyond him.

There was no length to how long this solving took, such was the nature of the Grid. Gram punched buttons, and light poured through the vistaport—the manufactured kind that belonged to the lamps of Lux’s warehouse. Harsh under normal circumstances, stabby to the alcohol-soaked senses. Far fumbled his aviators back on, cursing the ingenious soul who had invented vodka.

“We’re back to anchor time.” He didn’t need Gram’s confirmation, not when he could see two of Lux’s other TMs—the Ad Infinitum and the Armstrong—flanked by their latest shipments. The Engineer offered the time stamp anyway. “August twenty-second, 2371, 1:31 PM.”

With one long sigh, the Invictus’s nerves unspooled. Its holo-shield dropped.

“Glad we’re not dead.” Imogen held two thumbs up, both nails ragged. “Good job, Gram.”

“Er. Thanks.” The Engineer’s expression went soft. Crinkled brow, undecided smile. “Though I don’t know if my skill had anything to do with it.”

Is every jump going to be like this from now on? Far wondered as they pulled into their slip. The Armstrong’s crew was in the process of unloading. Their captain, Paolo, wheeled a dolly of crates down the dockside. The boxes were brimming with all sorts of goods: fresh oranges, specialty soaps, cages of extinct songbirds. Every one of these things would fetch a fat price from Central’s elite, but they paled to the value of Far’s one-of-a-kind cargo. The one he hoped they were actually carrying.

“The Rubaiyat?” He turned to Eliot. The way she stared at Far’s outstretched hand made him feel like a beggar. “Look, as soon as I leave this ship I’m going to have to meet with Lux—”

“We’re going to meet with Lux,” Eliot interrupted. “Together. I want to cement my position on your team.”

What was she playing at, hanging on to the freelancer story when there was obviously so much more going on? Far’s molars locked tight as the Invictus landed, settling into its own weight with a groan. He spied Wagner at the end of the dock, checking and double-checking the Armstrong’s crates. Lux’s right-hand man was nothing if not thorough, which meant that the black market mogul already knew of Far’s arrival. Commence catastrophe in three, two, one…

“Lux doesn’t like unexpected guests,” he said.

“I’m guessing he’d like your empty hands even less,” Eliot challenged.

“Just give me the Rubaiyat. Please. You have my word that you can stay on as a part of this crew.” Far tried not to think of everything that could go wrong if he took Eliot with him to Lux’s villa. “What about mutual trust? Hmm?”

“What about it?” The girl cocked her head, most Antoinette-like. “Take me to Lux and the Rubaiyat will be delivered safely. I’m not here to haze you over, Far.”

THEN WHY ARE YOU HERE? It was all he could do not to yell. Anger and alcohol banged against his skull, magnifying everything. Wagner glared alongside the lights, into the vistaport; his look let Far know he was already behind schedule. Lux hated to be kept waiting.

Imogen cleared her throat. “I think she’s telling the truth, Farway.”

He stared back at his cousin, sitting cross-legged in her twirly chair. Her hair reminded him of the cotton candy Burg once smuggled back from a mission—sweeter than anything Far had ever tasted. Only later had he realized how much was risked to bring it to him.

“You sure? Are you willing to bet your entire future on Eliot? Because if she doesn’t deliver, it’s not just my tail Lux will skin. Every one of us signed our names to his contract. Every one of us just used five jumps’ worth of fuel to bring him nil. That kind of loss won’t blow over.”

Wagner was walking dockside, only twelve paces away. Terror was a physical thing in Far’s chest—clawing him short of breath. Could he do it? Could he face Lux with his life in Eliot’s palm? His crew’s lives? Could he trust this blackmailing, timeline-meddling thief not to turn all turncoat on them?

Thud thud. “Captain McCarthy? Everything all right in there?”

“Everything’s peachy keen, Wagner!” he shouted at the hatch.

The hatch shouted back. “Peachy what?”

“It’s all hashing brilliant! I’ll be out in a moment.”

There was no choice—only knives at his back and a cliff at his feet. Far looked around at his crew. They’d picked up his fear once more, and the emotion carved grim lines in their faces: scaffolding light eyes and dark. Gram Wright, Imogen McCarthy, Priya Parekh… all of these names were on Lux’s contract. Every one of them signed at Far’s request, letters spreading red as open veins.

The fall should be his to take, and his alone.

“Get a new fuel rod in and keep your comms on, just in case.” Far looked to Priya. Her headphones were only half off, the notes bursting through them as rampant as his heart. “If stuff goes south, I’ll send a distress signal and you guys get the hash out of here. Got it?”

“We’re not ditching you,” she said.

“Knowing Lux, there might not be anything to ditch.” Far nodded at Gram and Imogen. “Fly at my say-so. That’s an order.”

Thud thud thud. Time to go. His kiss with Priya held every promise he wanted to keep, including the one she herself had planted in him: We’ll figure this out. The BeatBix slid down her neck, its song beating between their throats—golden and ferocious—and he wanted to keep listening through to the end, wanted his fate to be this. Eyes on her, lips too, closest joy this side of eternity.

But Eliot was waiting at the hatch, the devil he’d dealt with waiting beyond. The longer he lingered, the more apt Lux would be to increase the forfeit. No doubt there would be a forfeit. The white jumpsuit Eliot wore was flowy in places, but nowhere near baggy enough to hide a book the size of the Rubaiyat.

He was so, so hashed. “This is the first time I want you to have something up your sleeve, and you’ve got no sleeves.”

Eliot laughed—she would be the type of person who reveled in gallows humor—and waved her very bare arm at the door. “Shall we?”