One
“In the beginning, Chaos ruled alone in the heavens,” read the inscription over the door.
People in the Sixth Epoch had never minded long names, but this was stretching it, Lucca mused as she entered the dirty coffee shop. It was a dark little place, one that would be swept under history’s rug like every insignificant soul who had ever walked through this verbose archway. Lucca’s arrival, and that of the sorcerer she had agreed to meet here, would be the only meaningful things to ever occur in this dismal room.
She absently ordered a drink in the local dialect and found herself listening in on the conversations around her. She still had trouble with this Epoch’s languages; she had never found reason to spend much time here, with so few years left to rewrite before the sun went supernova. The people here knew that, of course. Maybe that was why nobody had bothered to sweep the crumbs off her table. She should have agreed to meet somewhere she was more familiar with.
In fact, Lucca understood just enough Late Sixth Epoch Malian to realize that a couple near the doorway was talking about her.
“So say you could make a single leap. Where would you go?”
“Just one? I can’t come back after?”
“…Nah, we’ll say you get two crystals. One there and one back.”
“Hmm. Go back and kill the Architect, probably.”
They didn’t mention her by name, of course. They didn’t need to. They weren’t the first of the unwashed rabble who’d come up with that idea, though they must have thought themselves so creative. It was like the idle drivel of poor men wondering what they would spend their money on if they won the lottery, or where they would go if they found immortality. All were fools’ wishes.
Of course, there had been numerous, inexplicable attempts on Lucca’s life as a child. In hindsight, that should have raised plenty of red flags—not that Lucca could be blamed. All these Sixth Epochers, born in an age when the near-infinite sum of human knowledge could be packed into a datachip smaller than a neon lightbulb, had spent their whole lives used to the idea of time leaping. How could she have known that she would become the very definition of whom to kill if you only had one shot? She drummed her fingers on the table. Her impatience was no longer an emotion, but an instinct. Three minutes after the hour, read her bronze watch. She was almost to the bottom of her drink.
Finally, the man entered, carrying something large and rectangular. Four minutes and twelve seconds late. He pulled up a second chair to her table and laid the package against one of its rickety legs. It was a massive book. Lucca got a glimpse of the title, written in a language even she didn’t understand, and the two perpendicular lines engraved above it.
“Thanks for responding,” the sorcerer said, settling into the wooden chair across from her. He wore a casual, plain shirt under his robe, as if he’d just been playing street polo and had remembered the appointment at the last minute. “Despite it being…what, the fifty-second request?” A smile crept onto his young face. “What made you accept this time?”
“Boredom,” Lucca said.
“I reckon that’s the closest we’ll ever get to a virtue from you,” he said. “It’s been a while.”
She grunted. “It’s easy to lose track.”
“It doesn’t help when every one of us is on our own clock, does it.”
Visiting the Sixth Epoch for the first time, it had shocked Lucca at how cavalier the people were with their knowledge of time leaping. If you’d gone up to someone from Lucca’s home epoch and mentioned it over a coffee, you’d have been asked who your mushroom dealer was. Here, it was written in their history textbooks—everything from the sixfold division of time to the chemical composition of the Comet’s priceless crystals that inexplicably allowed their users to defy all reason and see history’s greatest hits for themselves. (The logic behind it, the books claimed, was that with a finite number of crystals, time would reach a stable equilibrium, just as if there were no leaping at all.)
Still, this man had more experience with leaping than most, if barely. He wasn’t dangerous—not that anyone posed a danger to Lucca. But he knew just enough to be annoying.
“Why are you here?” Lucca said.
“Well, for one thing, I’ve been curious about you,” he said. “And more importantly, I’d like to tell you what I did with the chance you gave me.”
“I don’t have time for sentiment.”
One of his eyebrows went up. “I’d have thought you, of all people, would have all the time in the world. But I can make it quick.”
This was going to be a long meeting.
The man seemed to consider for a moment, then reached down for the tome leaning against his chair leg and heaved it onto the table. He opened to the first page and looked over the title with a curious reverence, as if he’d never read it before. The paper was printed in that same unfamiliar language as the title on the aging cover, unknown to every history Lucca had ever experienced.
“I think you’ll find this interesting.”
It was then, as he gently turned the ancient book’s pages, that Lucca first realized something was different about the sorcerer. Not something new, but something missing. The burning intensity with which he’d forced his way into Lucca’s life was gone. The man in front of her skimmed the strange volume with quiet confidence. Yet the pain was still there. Lucca knew pain better than anyone.
Lucca found herself thinking of the first time she’d met him, although she tried to avoid thinking about that day as a matter of principle. It was hardly a consequential thing in her own life. But when you reached Lucca’s age, memories were practically history. And history was something that had always followed Lucca very, very closely.