29

DEVOURER OF ALL THINGS

FAR HAD ALWAYS THOUGHT OF THE Grid as the definition of nothing. Central’s scientists often used words like void and vacuum when trying to describe such an indescribable place. Now he knew that couldn’t be further from the truth. There was some allowance for matter, some level of existence here. Theirs was proof of that.

The Invictus was an island in the endless dark. Priya and Far sat on the edge of eternity: her gasping, him screaming. The noise was back to full volume, no echo, no fade, just agony rolling on and on and on and on. The Grid gaped in front of Far, inside him. The sight of his mother—falling down and apart—was easy to conjure against the lightless space, a horror just starting to hit.

Priya’s arms were the one thing keeping him from the black. She dragged Far farther into the ship, while Imogen shut the hatch. His cousin had his mother’s nose—narrow down to a delicate, pointed end. Almost whittled. Far had never noticed the similarity before, never would’ve noticed if Empra had stayed lost.

He never would’ve known what happened to her….

What had happened?

Far had no idea. His scream was gone and he was trembling. Priya draped the couch throw over his shoulders and told him to sit, but how could he? The blanket clung to him, lopsided, dragging over sticky Rubik’s Cubes and mug fragments as he entered the console room. Gram sat in his chair, hands up, as if to say I didn’t touch anything; the jump was all her.

Eliot braced herself by the nav system with thunder-white knuckles, eyes closed. The glow of the Invictus’s lights would not stick to her skin; instead it beat back, harsher than the numbers on the nearby screen.

“Turn this hashing ship around!” Were those his words? Leaving his mouth? “We have to go back!”

“There’s nothing to return to.” Eliot’s knuckles bulged at the seams, but she didn’t yell. “When the Fade destroys a moment, it’s lost. Forever.”

“One more second and my mother would have made it on the ship!” he screamed, if only to get his insides’ ragged edges out, where the hurt could stretch its legs. “If you hadn’t jumped this ship, she’d still be alive!”

“We didn’t have one more second. Don’t you understand?” Eliot opened her eyes; their darkness went deep. “The Fade is the devourer of all things: matter, moments, memories, even time itself. Your mother was unraveling. She was already gone.”

“WHY DID YOU BRING ME HERE? WHY DID YOU MAKE ME SEE THAT?” He’d always thought that knowing what happened to the Ab Aeterno would make things hurt less. Closure, his childhood counselor once said, was the emotional equivalent of a scab. Instead, Far’s grief felt more open than ever, gaping with the knowledge that his mother was gone now, really gone, and he hadn’t been able to save her. “Why do you care about my mother? Why do you care about any of this? All you’ve done is destroy my life!”

“All I’ve done?” Eliot barked. “I gave you a chance to fexing rescue her! That’s what I did! That’s what I always do!”

She was speaking in riddles again. Holding something—everything—back. Far was sick of secrets. “Cut the shazm, Eliot! You knew this Fade thing was coming!”

“I didn’t know.” Eliot let go of the console. “I feared… and that fear came to pass. I’ve told you before, the Fade is relatively random. It can happen at any moment in our timeline. It is happening in lots of moments—”

“LIAR!” Yelling just to yell, just to have something loud outside of him. “You never told us about the Fade. I would’ve remembered being told about a void bigger than the hashing SKY!”

“Do you remember landing four hours late on the Titanic mission?” The girl cocked her head. “Of course you don’t, because the Fade doesn’t just cause wobbly jumps but amnesia, too.”

There was no Nepenthe. They should all be dead. Far’s mother was dead, uncreated before his very eyes, and how had they gone from a breathless reunion in the shelves to this… another hole. Had he had this conversation before? There was no telling with his temporal lobes going Swiss cheese on him. Far couldn’t trust himself, couldn’t stop fighting. “There has to be something we can do! Go back to Alexandria earlier in the timeline, find Mom before the Fade!”

“We can’t! It’s too dangerous! Your mother’s gone and you have to move on! You have to keep going!” Eliot slammed her fist into the console, knuckles catching the corner. Real tears ribboned her cheeks. “Fex, that hurt!”

“Why does everyone keep punching my stuff?” Gram muttered. “Bartleby’s a lot softer.”

Eliot’s hand bloomed with blood and nerve endings—skin sliced off. Far knew exactly what it felt like: the punch, the hit, the raw. Shock was catching up with him, overriding every other emotion. Keep going? He couldn’t even move. He stood there staring as red wreathed down Eliot’s fingers.

“Playing punching bag with Gram’s instruments won’t help anything. We don’t want to get stranded here.” Priya was on the scene, hand full of gauze, lips pressed as she took in the damage. “This laceration is deep. You’re going to need stitches.”

When the bandage pressed to Eliot’s wound, she flinched. White grew heavy with scarlet and her tears fell thicker. Why is she crying? She had no right to sadness or pain when she’d brought all this on herself. On them.

Far was about to say as much when Priya cut in with a steady, take-no-shazm tone. The deck was hers now. “Imogen, try to make Far sit down. Gram, find us a time to land when we won’t crash into the library—”

“No!” Eliot gasped. “Stay in the Grid. We’re safe from the Fade here.”

“Fine.” Priya’s jaw locked. “We stay in the Grid. But after I sew you up, you’re going to tell us everything. Who you are, where and when you came from, why you’re here, what the Fade is. Understood?”

To everyone’s surprise, Eliot nodded. Something inside the girl had wilted: Her shoulders slouched, and her steps dragged as she followed Priya into the infirmary. The door slid shut.

Suspension gripped the console room. The Grid’s timelessness mixed with held breaths. For a second, for an eon, no one spoke. It would’ve felt silent, but now that Far knew what true silence sounded like, all he could hear was noise. The thud, thud of a heart begging for oxygen. Red panda claws tapping the common area floor. The Invictus’s stealth engines made more commotion than he’d realized—their background hum more feeling than decibel.

“The universe is falling apart.” Gram glared at his equipment; his voice boomed.

“Farway.” Even Imogen’s presence was muted—neon gone gray. Far hadn’t noticed her in the doorway until she said his name. “Come sit. I—I can try to make tea. Maybe.”

Far didn’t want tea. He didn’t want to sit. He didn’t want the universe to fall apart. But every ounce of fight-or-flight had abandoned his body, so he let his cousin guide him to the couch. It wasn’t just Imogen’s nose that matched his mother’s. It was the clean part through aqua hair. It was the great sorrow molding her face as she sat on the cushion beside Far’s. He kept expecting her to say something sunshine-y, but each of Imogen’s exhales was as empty as the next. There was no buoying grin. No honeycomb gelato. She’d seen everything that had happened through his eyes. He’d lost a mother and she’d lost an aunt, and this time words wouldn’t help either of them.