Two
There was nothing Lucca hated more than her birthday.
She noticed it every year. The harder she tried to forget the date, the deeper it dug into her mind. From what she’d read about neuroscience, she suspected there was an entire sector of her brain dedicated to reminding her.
At first, she’d tried giving up calendars. But rewriting world history, unfortunately, required a good grasp on dates and times. Then she’d tried changing the whole system. It had required a couple of carefully-placed assassinations and the violent toppling of a handful of empires—but she’d saved more people in total by making those changes anyway. She was used to performing those kinds of calculations. So good, in fact, that she’d stopped performing them centuries ago.
Besides, she reasoned, having a system where every month has the same number of days is better for everyone. Imagine the computing logic that would be simplified, the language learning overhead that would be reduced…
And the first thing her mind had done after establishing the new system was calculate her birthday. All because she’d tried so hard to forget.
These were some of the thoughts that Lucca fought to push away as she gathered as many grammar books as she could carry from the ornate shelves of a Fifth Epoch library. Any other leaper would be in awe at the stained light that poured through colored windows, casting kaleidoscopic shadows over the gold-leaved shelves and mahogany benches. But today was Lucca’s birthday.
She left with the books, ignoring the alarm that rung out as she walked down the marble steps, and slid into the waiting taxi. She’d already told the driver where to take her, so now she could be alone with her unpleasant thoughts until she got home.
Lucca called it home out of spite. She’d never had a real home. She’d built a house with her bare hands once, back when she was young, just to learn how. Then there was some violent conflict to stop in a previous Epoch—she worried about things like that back when she was young—and when she got back to her house, she’d found that time had rewritten it back to oak trees with birds’ nests in them. It had been a few months or centuries before she’d learned how to build something truly permanent.
The taxi dropped her off where she knew the place would be. The familiar runes over the entryway, crudely cut here, greeted her with their jagged lines. This time it was a bathhouse.
She walked along the perimeter of the pool, past dozens of staring bathers, to her private study in the back. It was always here, no matter the Epoch, whether her home was a bathhouse or a restaurant or a casino. The instructions she’d given in the First Epoch had been clear. Sometimes the people worshipped her. In other ages, they hated her. Either way, they left her alone.
Lucca had already opened her book and started to read about nouns when she noticed that she wasn’t alone in the study. She jumped—then realized that it was just herself. The other Lucca was well-kept, her purple hair (the older Lucca couldn’t remember whether it was illegal or just weird in this country) braided tightly and neatly. Lucca hadn’t looked like that in…well…she could hardly remember when this had happened to her from the other side, so long ago it was.
Well, it was bound to happen sometime.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Lucca muttered, and forced herself to sit and memorize the noun inflection patterns of Late Fifth Epoch Kallish.
But today her mind couldn’t stay on noun inflection patterns. Maybe it was just her birthday. Or maybe it was the shock of seeing herself, probably millennia closer to when she’d believed in justice, when her hair was braided nicely like that, when she smiled like that sometimes as she read. When she’d dreamed of being a savior.
It wasn’t fair that the pain was stronger now. It wasn’t fair that the world didn’t reward the ruler who had sacrificed years of her immortal existence building the perfect history. It wasn’t fair that the only human she’d ever loved, her father, had died on the one date she was incapable of forgetting. It wasn’t fair that no change to history could bring them together, when he talked in his sleep all night about the faces of his beloved daughter that followed him everywhere pleading for a final goodbye, until the day that all the townsfolk said had been an unfortunate accident of a healthy thirty-year old falling to his death down a well. It wasn’t fair that blood had never dripped from her pores and that she was the one to endure enough birthdays for both herself and history itself to lose track. It wasn’t fair that this endless chain of time had given her the mind it had and then left her in freefall. It wasn’t fair that the only one who could save the world from itself was buried under a wall of pain no riches and power could quench, and every hope down to her aging itself had slowed to a stop. It wasn’t fair that even now, memory burned and ate her alive. Of all emotions, anger passes, sadness passes, passion passes. But regret only grows stronger.
She couldn’t think with this other Lucca in the room. Studying out in the heat would be uncomfortable, but it sure beat the pain of jealousy.
She was halfway across the bathhouse when she heard her name.
“Lucca.”