38

THE LAST DAY

FAR WATCHED THE OUTCROP GOATS FROM his captain’s chair, taking in their shadows against the growing pulse of Central time’s dawn. The animals were a poor distraction: The few that weren’t asleep grazed on dew-coated grass, boring and bored. He wanted to move, but with clothes strewn across the floor there was no room for pacing. Instead Far began picking a hole in his armrest’s leather—worrying the orange wider and wider, while the rest of the crew troubleshot behind him. Having never been on this side of a mission, Far had nothing to offer.

He sat it out in the chair, picking it to pieces, watching goats take shape against the sunrise. Eliot’s landing—and consequent scrambling—made enough noise for the animals to perk up their ears and stare at the empty patch of field. Had their eyes and minds been sharper, they might’ve noticed the seam where the TM’s holo-shield met true air. Being livestock, they just went back to eating.

The Invictus tore out of Central time, goats giving way to the Grid. Absolute dark stared into Far, and the truth hit him: They weren’t going back. Whether they succeeded or failed, he would never see Central as himself again. It was a smaller good-bye, but even the tiny lasts felt huge stacked up like this.

“You were right.” He swung his chair toward Eliot. Her comm was still connected to the Invictus’s systems, every breath magnified. It sounded as if she’d just run a marathon. “Agent Ackerman is a total arse.”

“I forgot”—gulp, gasp—“about Vera’s beacon. It wasn’t in my self-briefing. The zapping was brilliant, though. Even if Ackerman gets his teleportation system back online he won’t find us. Multiverse Bureau agents aren’t equipped to travel through time.”

“Great clicking, Gram!”

“Good swirling, Imogen!”

The two grinned at each other, bridging the space between their consoles with a high five. Far couldn’t shake the feeling that these celebrations were preemptive. They’d only escaped the Multiverse Bureau by poking the dragon that was the Corps, who did possess time-traveling capabilities.

“When the alarms sounded, I wiped the security footage,” Gram explained when he caught Far’s expression. “The Corps will have no idea what went down.”

“That’s something, at least.” Far turned to Eliot. “Did you download the file?”

She pulled off her wig, nodding. “One hundred percent.”

“Shall we watch the last day?” Far gestured to the common area.

They gathered in the usual clusters—Far and Priya on one couch, Gram and Imogen taking the other. There was hand-holding on his cousin’s side, pheromones finally focused into smiles. Though Far had seen Imogen with this hair color before, he couldn’t remember it being so incandescent. She was all lit, all yellow. Happy as it was, the sight stung.

A first and a last, they never even had a chance….

Eliot settled on the floor, cross-legged, freezing when Saffron hopped into her lap. Fear braced her shoulders, but all the red panda did was curl into a ball.

“Ooooh!” Imogen’s expression went up in wattage. “Saffron doesn’t nap with just anyone, you know. He likes you.”

Eliot patted the beastie’s head, her palm flat and awkward. “I guess it’s not that bad.”

The sting settled deeper in Far’s chest. He hadn’t thought he’d miss the Ailurus fulgens, but it seemed the creature had sunk its claws into more than just his shins….

“Before we get started, I think I’ll make us some tea.” There were no arguments to Priya’s proposal. How could there be when one final time hung unsaid at the end of her sentence?

Eliot pulled the chip from her pocket universe, drew up the file. Imogen rested her head on Gram’s shoulder while the Engineer stared at their hands, marveling at the pattern of interlocking fingers. Far watched Priya in the kitchenette with the same wonder. He’d seen her make tea on countless occasions, but every detail felt new. The way she smelled each spice before adding it into the boiling water. How she counted each stir beneath her breath. Her care in lining up the mugs’ handles before divvying out the chai. So many lasts adding up, not even a scalding swallow could wash this grief away.

Losing her might just kill Far before the Fade did.

They sat with mugs of steaming chai, outside of time, watching Far’s beginning. He didn’t know what to expect when the Ab Aeterno’s final 95 AD footage flickered to life. What the hologram showed was both familiar and surprising.

Far’s mother had walked the Colosseum’s crumbling circumference with him many times. She was full of facts during those visits, pointing out the thumbprint masonry of the hypogeum, describing how lions used to be stored beneath the arena floor. Not once had she mentioned that she’d seen men bleed there.

Far had watched datastreams of gladiators before; they were impossible to avoid in Central, where the clash of their blades still echoed round and round the ancient ruins. But this one felt different. It was unedited—raw footage that didn’t skip over ugly things. The violence of the first fight was enough to make Imogen—a seasoned Historian—squint through her fingers.

How strange to think that his mother had taken this in without blinking. Stranger still to realize that Far had been there in fetus form. He’d heard this crowd with his own ears, racing alongside his mother’s heart: Blood! Blood! Blood! A noise urgent enough to call him out into this ruthless world… Burg’s voice—which Far associated with bedtime stories—sounded surreal as he urged Empra off her bench, down the stairs.

“Why would Aunt Empra ever want to watch this?” Imogen wondered aloud. “Why does she keep looking back?”

“Pause.” At Eliot’s command, the hologram froze on the pair of gladiators. “Look at who she’s looking to.”

“Ugh.” Imogen peeked between her hands. “All I see is blood.”

“Far…” Priya, her own steel stomach unfazed by the insides of men turned out, leaned toward the projection. “That gladiator looks just like you.”

Now that the footage was paused, Far had time to study the fighters. Priya was right. The gladiator with his back to the wall wore no helmet. Though what helmet could contain such dead-ringer curls? And the nose… Far had always wondered where his most dramatic feature had come from.

Now he knew. He knew so many things: why his mother insisted on teaching him Latin, why she’d called him by his middle name in the Library of Alexandria, why she’d stayed to watch this brutal match, why his skin was always tan while every other McCarthy’s burned at the first glimpse of sun, why he forever needed to move-move-strive-fight. It wasn’t just timelessness in his blood, but battle, too.

Eliot was the first to state the obvious. “That’s our father.”

“Oooooh, Aunt Empra!” Imogen gasped. “Courting a gladiator! No wonder Burg classified this datastream! She would’ve been in such deep shazm had anyone found out.”

“That’s why your DNA is fudged in Central’s systems,” Priya said. “It wasn’t just a common discretion clause. It was so no one could prove your father wasn’t one of the Ab Aeterno’s crew members.”

Far should have felt surprised, but facing his father’s image—back to wall, blade to throat—struck a much deeper chord. The sadness that was always beneath his mother’s eyes, dictating her smile, made sense now. This wasn’t just a one-night sperm donation.

This was love.

“Why does anyone look back?” It wasn’t hard to imagine the emotions behind the datastream when Far’s own chest was a pulpy mess. When he turned to see Priya—still here, still next to him, but for how long? “She didn’t want to leave him.”

Her lips went tight. He wanted to cry again.

Instead, Far braced himself for the worst as the datastream played on, but that view of his father was the last. Empra ran from the stadium’s roar, pausing every few minutes to lean on columns, huffing through her pain while Burg recited encouragements: “C’mon, McCarthy! Keep going. You’re almost here!” The datastream’s visual had gone misty when Empra finally did reach the Ab Aeterno, her tears turning Burg into a giant blob. The time stamp, at least, was clear: 9:10 AM when she boarded the Ab Aeterno, 9:14 when the clock froze and froze and froze and Far’s very first breath of ageless air expelled with a scream.

The boy who should not have been was born, and something disastrous with him.

The datastream ended. Far stared through the vistaport, wondering if that very birth was happening out there in the black.

“Poor Aunt Empra,” Imogen whispered. “Poor gladiator. This is so hashing sad.”

“It doesn’t have to be.” Priya’s eyes went from smoky to steel: a hard shine. “Far’s father doesn’t have to die.”

“I’m pretty sure his name is Gaius,” Far offered.

Priya went on, “We want to get Empra back to the Ab Aeterno well before nine ten. If she was lingering to watch Gaius’s fight, then it makes sense to free him. Yes?”

“You can’t just free a gladiator,” Imogen told them. “There’s a whole system in place. Most of them are slaves or prisoners of war, and even the men who volunteered are bound to their lanista overseers to the point of death. If Gaius goes missing, his lanista will rip apart the city searching for him. And it’s not as if he can hitch a ride to Central….”

“So what do you propose?” Priya asked. “Letting Gaius die while one of us drags Empra back to the ship by force?”

“Maybe not that.” Far’s cousin made a face. “Farway and his father look so much alike that Aunt Empra called him Gaius in the Library of Alexandria. Perhaps there’s a way to fool her back onto the Ab Aeterno.”

The footage of his father was gone, but Far kept seeing him: curls splayed against the stones, ready to fight until the end. The image reframed his entire childhood. Seven years with his mother and her mourning, she didn’t want to leave Gaius, she’d always regretted it….

The Code of Conduct lay open before him, title down. Far could see where ink from Gram’s illustration had bled through—arrows and cracks, a picture in pieces. The stick man didn’t appear on this side of the page.

He knew what he had to do.

“I’ll take my father’s place. If I claim Gaius’s spot in the arena, the lanista won’t think my father escaped when one of you takes him to meet my mom. Empra can say good-bye to Gaius, and she’ll leave in time to create a pivot point.”

“You? A gladiator? Are you out of your hashing mind?” Imogen’s shout supernovaed through the common area. “Farway, these guys live and breathe slaughter. A few fencing lessons at the Academy won’t mean squat when you step into that ring.”

Yeah, he’d figured. Far had never been that great at swordplay anyway, as the scar on his biceps reminded him. “I don’t have to win the match. I can’t. The Fade’s present is linked with mine, right? My death won’t stop my past from being erased, but it’s the best chance this new universe has at living. It’s the only thing that might prevent the countersignature from passing through the pivot point. Cut the string, end the signal before the Ab Aeterno takes off, stop the echoes of my wrong birth before I’m born right again.”

Priya became a statue, leg rigid against his. Far wasn’t sure he could bear her expression, so he stared at the ceiling instead. The ship’s skeleton pipes were too easy to see through the thinning wardrobe. Why the Hades would he wear such an eye-gougingly bright flash-leather suit?

His next question was a footnote: “What’s a little extra blood in the scheme of things?”

“It’s awful!” Imogen cried. “It’s awful and you’re being too hashing heroic to see straight! If you die before the Fade finds our present, where does that leave us? With a pile of clothes and no minds to call our own? Playing pincushion will only make a mess! Tell him, Gram!”

“I can’t.” The Engineer cleared his throat, and again, harder, as if to dislodge some hidden feeling there. “I mean, I don’t like it, but Far’s theory about the countersignature has merit. For all of Ackerman’s horribleness, the man was right. The Fade must be contained, and this is the cost.”

“It doesn’t have to be sad.” There wasn’t much left to Far—his memories shedding like autumn leaves, time sliding in the wrong direction—but his fate was yet in his hands. More fates, still. He looked around at his crew: Imogen, Eliot, Saffron, Gram, Priya. Priya… “If we succeed, the pain won’t even be a distant dream.”

Stone, all stone, stayed her lips. No words left them, nor did they tremble.

“I’m with Far,” Eliot said. “We’ll find a way to free Gaius—”

“How?” asked Imogen. “He’ll be locked up in his cell at the ludus.”

Eliot held up her wrist; a seam between dimensions shimmered against hairless skin. “This pocket universe doesn’t just hold clothing and sundries. I can carry Far into the cell and take Gaius out. If I intercept Empra on her way to the Colosseum and redirect her to the Ab Aeterno, they’ll have a chance to say good-bye.”

“I can be on the ground,” Gram volunteered. “Something as important as this requires a second set of hands.”

Far’s cousin walked over to the clothing pile and dug the toga from the bottom. “If this is really what we’re doing, we’ll need another toga. As for three live datastreams… Gram might be able to keep up with that many screens, but I’ll be overloaded.”

“It’s okay, Imogen. I can get to the arena without comm support. You shouldn’t have to watch…” My death, the silence said, and Far faltered. How could he give himself over to the sword when he couldn’t even form the words? Talking talk, thinking thoughts was easy. But to stand where his father had stood, to feel the years wasting behind, the ones ahead sliced short…

“I’ll manage your comm.” Priya reached for his hand. “Through lights and time and whatever else comes our way. Even this.”

Her palm filled his with warmth, the kind that seeped through pores and lit a path to the heart. Fortitude? No. Bravery? No. Hope? In any other circumstance, Far might have said so. But as the saying went: Dum spiro spero. Hope could not outlast the breather. Love, however… Love was something not even death could conquer, because at the end of everything, even life, he was hers. If Far could wield his father’s trident, wear his father’s wounds, claim his father’s quietus, this last might give way to next.

Maybe not for him—blade and Fade, dead and done.

Maybe not for her—past lost forever at best.

But for them.

Blood or none, it was a chance worth seizing.