34

PAST THE END

IT WAS A BAD MED-PATCH NIGHTMARE, Far told himself. Reality couldn’t possibly morph like this, until it had more in common with a Salvador Dalí painting than the world he’d wandered for eighteen years. Everything was swimming, as if he’d fallen back-first into a river and was seeing the rest of the Invictus through its flow. Bright hair, bloodstained scrubs, rainbow cubes on the floor. The ship full of colors seemed to be moving and swirling, yet nothing was.

“I’m the catalyst? Why? How?” Far knew the answer. It was something he’d carried his entire life—a badge of honor. Being born outside of time had always felt like a mark of something greater, culling him out for an extraordinary existence.

But this existence was becoming a bit too extraordinary.

“It’s your unbirthday,” Gram said. “Think about it. Every one of your alternates is your genetic match, which means you all share the same father. Nothing aberrant there. It’s the birthday, or in your case, a lack of one, where you diverge. The rest of them were born on April eighteenth, 2354.”

And Far was born in the Ab Aeterno. Eternity. Surely there was a scientific reason for the collapse of the multiverse, but all Far could think about were the Linear protesters who sometimes gathered on the Academy steps—their digital ONE LIFE, ONE TIME banners blazing. Their leader’s magnified words rapped at the school windows: When humanity steps into the shoes of gods, things will go awry.

You don’t belong here. Eliot wasn’t just a premonition. She was course correction, God’s will, karma, fate—call it what you will. This was the universe’s way of righting itself, handing Far an eviction notice….

The dreaming feeling ebbed enough for Far to recognize Priya’s breath beside his—thick with emotion, too thin to hold back her sob. Their hands turned into a tangle of each other’s fingers. Hold on for life, dear.

He didn’t want to go.

“But if it really was my birth that set all this off, why’d it take the Bureau so long to find me?” Far asked. “Everyone in Central knows about my unbirthday. Surely that would’ve set off some red flags.”

“The Multiverse Bureau isn’t omniscient or omnipresent. Your universe is just a number to them—MB-178587984FLT6—though I suppose that number’s changed since I broke the immutability threshold twice….” Eliot trailed off. “Regardless, I think Gram’s correct. You’re the only alternate who was born outside of time. It’s not a stretch to believe that your birth broke something.”

“So why’s the Fade attacking the other universes first?” Far knew it wasn’t important in the end, but maybe, if he could wrap his head around his doom, it’d be easier to accept. “Shouldn’t it go the other way, if I’m the epicenter? Inward out?”

“The Fade isn’t springing from you,” Gram said. “If I understood Dr. Ramírez correctly, it’s hunting you down. Does anyone have a pen? Imogen?”

“What? Pen.” The Historian started at the sound of her name. “Yes, pen. I have. Somewhere. Definitely.”

“Could I borrow it?” Gram prodded.

Imogen brushed her hair from her face, set to scouring the table. She found the felt-tipped pen and handed it to the Engineer over her shoulder. “Yeppers.”

“Thanks, Im.”

She nodded, still not looking at him, and sank back into her hair.

Gram grabbed the sole paper they had on board—the Corps of Central Time Travelers’ Code of Conduct—and traced a circle on one of the cover’s un-doodled spaces. “Inside this circle are all of the FLT6 universes where your genetic alternates exist. Here you are”—stick figure jotted in the middle—“the epicenter. Now here’s your birth, causing the countersignature.” Tiny lightning lines, splintering out of the toothpick man. Were they signals, or cracks? To Far, they looked like both. “Crux knows where the Fade actually comes from, but for this illustration we’ll just say outside the circle. It’s honing in on you, following the trail through the other universes, and obliterating them in the process.”

His friend etched arrows, until Far’s entire likeness was ringed with points, every one of them aimed inward. A dozen sharpnesses. You don’t belong, you’re wrong, wrong, wrong!

Far looked to Eliot. The gleam of her handcuffs was mirrored in her eyes. “You said the Grid keeps us safe from the Fade. If I was born here, maybe I should stay. That way the decay wouldn’t have anything to follow.”

“No can do, Far.” Gram placed the pen back on the table. “All time or no time, our resources are finite. We’d run out of fuel and food if we didn’t land.”

“Food.” Imogen perked up again, rising off the floor, drifting toward the kitchenette. “Good idea.”

Far’s stomach was hollowed past the point of appetite. Saturated fat wouldn’t repair the universe—universes—his existence had broken. Sugar couldn’t resurrect his mother. “The Ab Aeterno didn’t wreck because of the Fade. You—you stranded it.” Eliot wasn’t the villain. Far knew this, but the knowledge didn’t translate into feeling. “You took my mom away.”

“She’s my mother, too,” the girl whispered.

The blaster in his hand had grown heavier. Far wanted to lift it but found that he couldn’t. Who was he going to aim it at anyway? Himself? His different self? No shot would make anything that had happened untrue….

“You had eleven more years with her than I did—”

“And I can’t remember any of them. You want to toss around blame, Far? Those years are gone because you exist. I stranded your mother because I was trying to save her. I tried to save all of them….” Eliot sagged, marionette past motion. Wardrobe clothes shuddered from the extra weight on the pipe. “If I’d known the Fade was going to appear in Alexandria, I never would’ve taken you there and let your present align with Empra’s.”

“So why bother with target practice?” Far looked past the brown-white weave of his and Priya’s fingers, at the burnt satin below. “You should’ve just left me in Alexandria, let the Fade do what it set out to.”

“The countersignature scan wasn’t complete. The Multiverse Bureau wants hard evidence that you’re the catalyst, proof that the Fade might halt with your death.”

“It won’t.” Gram’s grave words buried every one of them. “Dr. Ramírez said the Fade has been active for over a decade, though I suspect it’s been closer to eighteen years. Far’s carried this countersignature his entire life; shooting him now might cut the signal and stop the Fade’s reach into the future, but it won’t keep the decay from chasing down his past self.”

Eliot squeezed her eyes shut. Far stared at the illustration: boy radiating brokenness. His future, their fate prophesied in one small scribble. He wasn’t the blood threading through history’s veins, but a poison, polluting every time he’d ever touched. All the seconds he’d lived—the sights he’d seen, the pasts he’d walked—were damned, and his friends’ lifetimes with them.

There was a rattling of pots in the kitchenette and Imogen emerged with a half-eaten pan of tiramisu. The scene was heartbreaking for its normalcy. His cousin set the leftovers on the table like she always did. She’d brought enough forks for everyone.

“The world’s ending,” she explained as she sat down and started digging into ladyfingers and cocoa-flecked cream. “Might as well have dessert.”

“You’re going to give up on Far that easily?” Priya bristled, too distraught to hide the fact that she was. It was so unlike her to fall apart in the open, for all to see. “Stuff yourself with sweets while everything goes to shazm?”

“What else can I do?” Imogen’s voice hit a pitch that made Saffron scramble into her lap, ears perked. “Dress him up in his finest flash-leather suit? Teach him the proper etiquette for meeting a universe-gobbling evanescence? ‘Smile, Farway, take a bow as you go to your doom. Always remember that gentlemen never run. Oh wait, we can’t remember anything, because the Fade has an insatiable appetite for our past.’ Eating some fexing tiramisu is currently the only thing between me and drowning in a puddle of my own tears. I’d be happy for anyone to join me!”

Priya grabbed the Code of Conduct and waved the book about. “We’ve broken these rules for trinkets and thrills so many times… but when things get hard, when lives are on the line, we tuck tail. We make ourselves feel better by saying they’ve already died and we don’t have a choice and we can’t change history and I swallow it every time, because what else is there to do?”

“P…” Far couldn’t feel his fingertips, couldn’t let go of her. “There’s nothing to fight here. Imagined heroics—”

“You’re not already dead!” Priya broke in. “And I refuse to act like you are.”

“Far shouldn’t be alive in the first place,” Eliot said. “Gram’s right. I don’t know why Dr. Ramírez didn’t see it. The Fade won’t stop until every trace of Far’s existence is erased. Our lives were doomed from the start.”

“That’s it!” Gram leaped to his feet, snapping both sets of fingers, embodiment of an exclamation point. “The start!”

“What?” Imogen paused between bites.

“Dr. Ramírez ordered Eliot to neutralize the catalyst. Far isn’t the catalyst.” All the Engineer got were blank stares. He kept snapping, as if the sound might jog their IQs up to speed with his own. “I mean, yes, he’s carrying the countersignature, but he himself isn’t the aberration. His birth is.”

“What difference does that make?” Eliot asked.

“There might be nothing to fight, but there is something to save,” Gram told them. “If we go back and alter the circumstances that led to Far being born on the Ab Aeterno, we could pivot point into a future where the catalyst has been neutralized. We can give our universe, our own lives, a second chance.”

The common area was quiet as their minds ran the track. It felt a bit like an infinity loop—internal histories and external forces and what about all the other universes? What about themselves? What was the cost of this hope?

“That’s dash…” Eliot blinked. “It just might work. I mean, it’s making a lot of assumptions. That Far’s birth is the aberration. That the time we have to travel back to doesn’t fall to the Fade. Plus, how do we know the countersignature won’t echo into this new world?”

“We don’t.” Gram crossed his arms. Excitement was writ beneath his skin, pulsing with the veins there. “But if we fail, everything goes to shazm anyway. Succeed and we get a new lease on life.”

“My vote goes for saving stuff,” Imogen offered. “What’s there to lose?”

“Ourselves.” Priya looked to each of them in turn, her stare ending with Far. The whole room wavered. “We might be alive in this new world, but we won’t be who we are now. This life on the Invictus, everything we’ve been through together…”

More silence, another track. This one more finite: May 7, 2371, dawn—hazy, like all others—when the four of them stood at the helm of an unnamed ship, admiring the flawless holo-shield invisibility plates and their reflection in them—a fine, shiny crew. Their very first mission to eighteenth-century Portugal that same day to retrieve a bottle of port for Lux’s stores. From there it was a life of historical snatch-and-grabs: the Cat’s Eye Emerald, Klimt paintings, Fabergé eggs…. For each treasure, an adventure; for each adventure, a mess of tears and laughter, kisses and scrapes. For all of this?

A family.

“Who we are now can’t stay.” It was Imogen who pointed to the chalk wall, where Far’s cursive cried into itself, running ruins of color. “How many of those mission descriptions could you rewrite? How many would we never know we lost? How soon until we don’t even know each other? I’d take a total system reboot over rotting through the brain stem any day. No offense, Eliot.”

“I’d take that, too,” Eliot told them. “If it’s any consolation, there was no Invictus before I arrived on the scene.”

This was a strange thing to consider. Far walked over to the creator of his world, still a head shorter. She had no parted hair for him to ponder, just the cuffs, which made her wrists look far thinner than they were. “Tell me, why haven’t you teleported out of those yet?”

“A rather pissed-off boy once told me trust is something that’s built.” Ah! There was her smirk, making a comeback. “I figure I’m a few bricks down after trying to murder you.”

“Yeah, well… if I were you, I would’ve shot me, too.”

“If you were me? Ha. Good one.” Eliot’s laugh was made of brass, as hard as it was deflective. “At least our humor is equally morbid.”

Far didn’t echo the sound, because he meant every word. So much fury, so much fear spent on this girl’s behalf and for what? Hers was the ruined life, his was the fault. “I’m sorry, Eliot. About your mom, your cousin, your childhood… I’m sorry it’s gone.”

Dimples mussed Eliot’s chin.

He went on. “There’s a place for you on this crew, if you want it. I know it won’t last long. We’re all about to take a fall, and I’ll need every hand on deck to create this pivot point—”

The air before him flickered, and again Far was reminded of Central’s street magicians. Top to bottom, stola and all, Eliot had vanished. Her cuffs dangled from the pipe, chaining nothing. Displaced air wove through the wardrobe’s garments—the yellow dress among them.

“Did—” Gram blinked. “Did she just haul tail on us?”

Far stared at the daffodil gown, swaying its phantom waltz.

Everything was disappearing on him. Everyone…

He looked back to the couch, where Priya was staring at the crumpled guidebook, tracing the cat ears over each C. Her haircut looked extra drastic from this angle: short, long, two versions of herself pasted together.

“Look!” Imogen pointed toward the console room, where Eliot was stepping from behind Bartleby’s cloth-and-wire frame.

“Let’s start over, fresh.” The girl reentered the common room, rubbing her wrists back to white. “New mission, new world. We’re going to have to be quick about this if we want to beat the Fade.”

“How quick?” Far felt better shifting back into mission mode. Fighting for a future, albeit an alternate one, was preferable to waiting for oblivion. “What kind of timeline are we talking? Days? Weeks?”

“My best guess is the former.” Eliot grabbed a fork, gouged a V-shaped hole into the top half of the dessert. “Imagine the multiverse as a piece of tiramisu. Each layer’s a world. My universe is the top layer, the one below that is Subject One’s world, and so on. This universe is at the bottom, with Far’s moments mostly intact. But the Fade’s growth”—she scooped out a fuller bite, scraping the pan—“is exponential. The longer we take, the faster it spreads.”

“Vera isn’t equipped with any sort of mapping system?” Gram asked.

Eliot shook her head.

“We can use the wardrobe to make our own.” Imogen planted her own utensil in the tiramisu and started pulling down clothes. Yellow dress, workman’s shirt, tricorne hat, a camouflage field jacket… “Put anything we don’t remember into a pile, figure out the dates that are being erased. That’d at least give us a sense of scale….”

“Ingenious, Imogen!” Gram turned to Far. “What mission was the Ab Aeterno on before you popped out?”

“December 31, 95 AD,” Priya offered, voice raspy. “It’s what he always tried on the med-droid.”

“Never worked,” Far muttered.

Priya smiled at the memory, tucking her longer hairs behind her ear. Far was thunderously struck by the sight—there was only one Priya, his P, who hummed songs long after they ended, who told the most gruesome medical stories with a stone face, who felt on a level most of them couldn’t comprehend. Far had never imagined love could be such a solid thing, yet here it was. He wished he could go back in time and tell himself to drop everything, to go to Woodstock for no reason at all but to be with her….

“We got the when. What about the where?” Gram prompted.

There was a good deal Far didn’t know about his origins—i.e., most of it. His father’s identity had always been a question mark, a dead halt in conversations. He only knew the circumstances of his birth because Burg had turned the story mythic with so many retellings. Certain details were cemented in canon: Empra’s indigo stola, Far’s wild curls. Others—such as the ship’s pre-Grid location—had been meticulously cut out.

“Um, Rome.” It was a guess, one he’d pieced together over the years. Where else would a Latin-speaking time traveler be wearing a stola in 95 AD? “I think. Mom never talked about it.”

“You think?” Gram frowned. “No offense, Far, but we can’t run this op on hunches. We need a clear picture of what we’re trying to change, a timeline down to the minute.”

“What about the datastreams?” Imogen kept sorting through clothes. A dinner jacket here, a pair of trousers there. So much forgetting, above them all along… “Every Corps-sanctioned mission has them.”

“The 95 AD streams were never released to the public.” Every year on Far’s unbirthday, he tried to look up the mission’s footage. Every year he got the same answer: Please refer to archive 12-A11B. A restricted section his cadet badge couldn’t come close to accessing. “Someone locked them up nice and tight at the platinum-black level.”

The original crew groaned.

Eliot placed her hands on her hips. “We’ll have to hack it out, then.”

“You don’t hack a platinum-black-restricted Corps archive.” The mere thought was sacrilegious to their Engineer, schooled in the Academy’s computery ways. “Their restricted servers are isolated, so you have to be on-site at the Corps Headquarters server room to access them. Teleporting might get you in, but the place is bristling with cameras, all running facial-recognition scans. Anyone who doesn’t belong there would be spotted before they could touch the server, much less hack it.”

“Enter Corps, stage left.” Far shuddered thinking about it.

“Are you black market thieves or are you black market thieves?” Eliot hissed.

He shrugged. “We’re realists.”

“Which is something only pessimists say.” Imogen brushed her hands together. The pile of fabric at her feet was substantial enough for Saffron to nest in. The creature looked downright blissful.

“I made alterations to Far’s final exam Sim via remote hack. We can do the same with the Corps’ facial-recognition system,” Eliot suggested. “My face isn’t in their files. If we create a profile with platinum-black clearance, that’d prevent the alarms from tripping when I tap the restricted servers.”

Gram’s brow furrowed, considering. “We could…. It won’t last long, though. Once the Corps realizes their firewalls are breached, they’ll spot the forgery.”

“What if I told you I had a traceless way of hacking the systems?” Eliot asked.

“It’s true.” Marin’s nasally sneer stuck to Far’s memories. Diagnostics showed all systems are untampered with. You failed. “Corps had no idea she screwed up my Sim.”

“Then I’d say our odds just improved incrementally,” the Engineer conceded.

“All right, then.” Far regarded his crew. Only the chalk puddles knew everything they’d carried him through; not even the future knew what they might face. Nothing was certain except this: They were up to the task. “Let’s make ourselves a world.”