Ksenia struggled weakly in her arms.

  They broke the surface for a moment. A gasp of air. Spray of salt.

  An inflatable appeared next to them followed by an old life buoy. Nieve looped her free arm through it. Gazed up. A few dark, frantic figures called at them from the walkway. A man dove in after them and helped drag them both to the ladder on the edge of the bobbing complex.

  Ksenia lay on the platform, coughing. Nieve took her by the shoulders and shook her. “What were you thinking?” Nieve said.

  Ksenia coughed and spat, “It should have been me. I should have been with them.”

  “The bravest thing to do is live,” Nieve said. “You understand? We live because they can’t.” And they clung to one another as if they had been sisters long separated.

  “It’s been three weeks,” Indira said. “How did you sleep?”

  “No dreams,” Nieve said, though that was only partially the truth. She dreamed often of swimming languidly through the water, pacing dolphins. “I’m still on the anti-anxiety meds, though. You think I’ll be able to come off those?”

  “Perhaps. Are you doing the yoga?”

  Nieve rolled her eyes. “Yeah.”

  Indira said, “We don’t know why it helps, but it does. It’s the same with the swimming. We’re bringing the emotional and rational minds together, repairing all these complex systems. It requires many different approaches, but your moods do seem to have stabilized.”

  “My mother voted for what happened to us all, you know that? A lot of other people did, too. I hated her for it. Hated the world for it.”

  “I’m sure she was thinking of the future,” Indira said, “in her own way. Do you think your mother was afraid of the future?”

  “All the time,” Nieve said. “She didn’t like what she couldn’t control.”

  “And you?”

  Nieve snorted. “She couldn’t control me either.”

  “I mean, are you afraid of the future? Afraid of what you can’t control?”

  “Isn’t everyone? When you live in one moment for so long, it’s hard to leave it.”

  “Like leaving a friend?”

  “Like leaving … somewhere known. Not safe, maybe, but known. That’s what Ksenia was afraid of, that she’d lose that moment, and if she did, she’d lose her whole platoon again. It felt like abandoning them. Maybe … Maybe I feel like letting Amyl go would be a betrayal.”

  “Planting a garden, forming a relationship, having a child … these are intrinsically hopeful behaviors. They assume a future. I assumed there would be a future when I began this project.”

  “You still believe in the future?”

  “I do,” Indira said.

  “What’s that future like?”

  “It’s a future built on choices informed by hopes, not fears.”

  “I still don’t know what that looks like.”

  “You have time to imagine it,” Indira said. She held out her hand. “We all have time.”

  Nieve could not bear to take her hand, not yet.

  But that night, when she closed her eyes, she found herself swimming in a bright turquoise ocean among a pod of dolphins. No mangled bodies. No purling blood. No cries for help. They were swimming toward something just over the horizon.

  She didn’t know what it was, but knowing it existed gave her hope.

  Moontide

  Achiya was a precipitous port city nestled several kilometers inland within the spokes of a jagged natural rock formation, out of reach of the tremendous tides that washed the shore clean twice a day when the moons were in progression. Most people in Achiya made their living scouring the beaches after the tides receded. What they pulled out of the sea was often monstrous, and rarely palatable. But there were real treasures sometimes, too—bits of semi-organic heat shielding from some derelict, or the tuberous helmets that survived the long plunge taken by a spacefarer shot out of the sky.

  But Zoe’s mother turned her back on the life of a scavenger and instead took to the sea itself. When she announced to Zoe’s grandmother that she would fish the sea, the story went, her grandmother had told her she was an arrogant ghost and God would punish her for her arrogance and turn the whole village to salt.

  Zoe’s mother had fished that sea for forty years before it finally consumed her. Six days after she disappeared, the tide had surged further inland than its usual kilometer and set the colorful debris of her mother’s boat to rest just a few thousand paces from their stoop. Zoe remembered climbing down from the loft high up in the branches of the living abordna tree that supported their home and finding her aunt wailing over the wreckage.

  Weeks later, a salty group of her mother’s peers hauled a vicious monster from the sea—ten meters long, four meters wide, covered in massive stinging tentacles that dangled with a thousand glittering optic nerves. It did not have a proper mouth or jaw, but a sucking maw that made up the core of its underside. They slit the thing open and found Zoe’s mother’s corpse there, perfectly preserved in one of the eight interior sacs the beast used to store its captured prey for later digestion.

  Zoe remembered standing on the rocky beach. Thousands of tiny beetles migrated across the pebbles between the tides. When the moons were in recession, they hibernated. Her people were like those beetles, their livelihoods dependent on the long, ten-year cycle of the moons.

  She became a data harvester, steeling in and out of great monsters like the one that had taken her mother, ransacking their guts for bits of flotsam they had ingested. A beetle casing here. An old semi-organic brain mesh there. Zoe did her best work during moontide, that long spill of dark when the nearest moon pulled hardest at the planet, peeling the ocean back like a flayed blanket of skin.

  The goods she pulled out all went up into the city proper, for sale; she hiked through the winding streets, kept the sun off by moving from one tattered awning to another, offering salvage for a fraction of the cost of new, exchanging what the monsters ate for a bag of rice, a keg of beer, and once, a long length of muslin that put her in mind of her mother’s shroud.

  She lived with her aunt up in the old abordna tree until her aunt’s vision went, and then her knees, and finally her heart, and Zoe sent her, too, back to the sea. For years, after, she expected that every behemoth she dug up would contain some scrap of her aunt; a toe, a bit of torso. But as Zoe, too, scuttled about on the beach like those beetles, year after year, ten-year moontide after moontide, she found no sign of her aunt while digging and skinning and squeezing.

  As she, too, began to fall more often while descending to the beach, she considered the comfort that such an existence had offered her, and her people, the beetles on the beach, each of them making up a small piece of something far greater, cyclical as the seasons. Death and rebirth; the sea at once a murky incubator of life and a seething dumping ground of death and waste. This was life; its most potent metaphor. Birth and shit.

  Moontide.

  The moons so close she felt she could reach up to touch them. Her vision, not so great as the day they pulled her mother from the sea. Her balance, ever-worsening. Her mind, wandering. Her body, tired.

  Achiya rose behind her, a tremulous beacon lit by swarms of fireflies. The city neither grew nor contracted, it hummed along, like the sea, like her own heart.

  Stretched across the sand before her, here at moontide, a great bloody gob of slime-crusted organic matter lay inert, waiting. Zoe put her hands on it. Marveled at the ache in her fingers as she took up her knife and slit it open, filled with the same anticipation as the day they revealed her mother’s body. She hoped for a treasure, something from the sky.

  Inside, she found a boat, a proper craft. Sturdy and gleaming like a new tooth. Zoe drug it away from the creature and pulled it down to the water, compelled there though she could not say why. The craft took the water as if born there, and perhaps it was. Zoe climbed inside, her hands still sticky with blood and viscera. She lay on the bottom of the craft and gazed at the moons. Is this how her mother felt, at sea?

  She lay in the belly of the sea, the belly of the planet; she was the guts of the universe. Like her mother. Her aunt. All of Achiya, like the beetles and the tides and the moons. A great gory living thing. She was a bit of sinew, a length of bone, a knobby knee.

  The craft began to drift. Zoe drifted with it.

  They shared the same heartbeat. She felt it under her hands. The same rhythm as the lapping water. The same pulse as the stars.

  She was the moontide.

  Citizens of Elsewhen

  Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land, drawing no dividend from time’s tomorrows.

  Dreamers, Siegfried Sassoon

  We drop through the seams between things and onto the next front.

  The comedown is hard. It’s meant to be. The universe doesn’t want you to mess with the fabric of time. Our minds are constantly putting down bits of narrative into our brains, a searing record of “now” that gives us the illusion of passing time. In truth, there is only “now,” the singular moment. We are all of us grubs hunting mindlessly for food, insects calling incessantly for mates. Nothing came before or after.

  But because time is a trick of the mind, it can be hacked. And we have gotten good at it. We had to. It was the only way to secure our future.

  “Who’s got the football?” Elba says from the darkness beside me. “Lexi?”

  “It’s en route,” Lexi says. “I’m rerouting the coordinates. Coordinates are 17,56-34-12 knot 65,56-22-75. Confirmed placement.”

  “Recording,” Elba says.

  And there is light.

  Our brains start recording moments again, rebooted from our last jump. I half-hope this is some new scenario, a fresh start, but the chances of that are slim. We do these over and over again until we get them right. Because if we don’t get them right ... well, shit, then we don’t exist.

  We only remember our successes, never our failures. This helps with team morale, or so the psychs told us back in the training days, back when everything was burning, the whole world coming apart, and we got tapped to save it.

  When they first started sending us back to secure a better future, the teams could remember every failure. It led to weariness and burnout; only the very stubborn or very stupid can stand living with the memory of compounded failure. Teams engaged in Operation Gray could endure more drops if we only remembered the good times. The successes. It kept us pushing forward.

  For the failures, we had the logs. Our logs told us how many times we’d dropped in and what we’d tried before. The trick, for me, was to pretend the log was from some other team. I pretended I was reading a report about somebody else who failed to complete the mission. I told myself my squad was coming in fresh to solve a problem someone else fucked up. Don’t think too hard about the fact that you were thinking the same thing every time you failed beforehand, or you’ll get stuck thinking about it, round and round, and then you’re not good for anything.

  Trust me.

  The light and shadow transform into our current coordinates in space and time. It’s the last month of autumn in the year we call 4600 BU (before us), known locally as the year 1214 Ab urbe condita, or 461 C.E. by some old alternate calendars. We are in the Western Roman Empire in what is known around here as Hispania, which will become Spain, then the European Alliance, then the Russian-US Federation, the Chinese-Russian Protectorate, then Europe again, and eventually, after several more hand-offs, the province that in my time we call Malorian. I know this area, its future, because I was born sixteen kilometers north in the city of Madira. I know this coast because I will, more than three thousand years from now, walk upon these same beaches with my mothers and raise a little orange flag during a parade celebrating the anniversary of Unification. My first visit here was also the first time I’d ever eaten a lemon, and the sharp, bitter taste is tied so closely with my memory of the coast that I taste lemon as we take in the sight of the sea just to our left.

  A soft, salty wind blows in from over the Mediterranean. My bare toes sink into the sand. I bowl over and spit a mouthful of vomit. Beside me, Lexi has taken the jump worse. He’s lying on his side, frothing and seizing. Elba stumbles over to him and injects him with a stabilizing agent.

  I pat at myself as the gear bags materialize around us.

  “Got the football,” I say.

  We’re nothing without the gear. Without the gear, we have to start the fuck over again. We’ve stumbled naked into camps before, no plasma, no flesh fix-up, no anti-bacterial mesh, nothing, and for all our knowledge, we’re useless without those things. It wasn’t being dumb that killed so many of the people we’re here to save. It was simply not having access to what we did.

  The wind is crisp. I shiver as I tear open the gooey sac protecting our gear. I guess at how all the clothes are supposed to go on; my AI still hasn’t completed the download for this mission. I lace on boots over sandy toes. The clothes part is always haphazard, never quite right. I don’t care what anyone says—it’s clear every time we jet into some other time that we’re aliens, strangers in a strange land. Go back far enough, you can claim godhood, but fewer people fall for that than the old stories would have you think. Better to say you were sent by a mutual acquaintance, a family friend.

  I give another heave, spitting more bile, and blink as my AI completes the mission download. The AI’s presence is a warm, comforting one, sitting there in the back of my head, dutifully making connections faster than a non-augmented brain, and storing more information, more quickly, than a civilian. Four hundred years before I was born, AIs were considered separate entities, a different consciousness, like something that lived on its own. They stuck them into people’s heads and gave them names. But that drove far too many people mad. They tore off their faces trying to get the fucker out. It was better if subjects saw the AI as a part of themselves, an enhancement to their own intelligence, instead of a separate entity.

  The AI is how I knew that this was former Visigoth territory, only recently brought to heel by the Western Roman Empire. I knew Majoram, the Western Roman Emperor, had been killed in the summer at the ripe old age of forty, and this being early autumn, there was a heated battle for the Emperor’s title still raging here in the west, led by Ricimer, the head of the army who’d had Majoram killed.

  But the lofty milestones of history don’t prepare you much for the sort of work we do. All it does is provide greater context for what we’re walking into.

  As we suit up, we don’t ask dumb questions like where is she? Where are we headed? The memories are already pouring in. We have other things to talk about.

  “Lemon cake,” I say, continuing the last conversation we can remember; the one we were having after our last successful extraction, killing time before the next jump.

  “Can’t talk about food,” Lexi says; he gags again.

  “I miss cheeseburgers,” Elba says. “You remember those cheeseburgers at that diner back in ... the woman on all the pills? That green vehicle? AI says the colloquial year was 1955.”

  “Should have killed us,” I say. “You know how they processed meat back then?”

  “Still mad they pulled us before I finished,” Elba says.

  Lexi dry heaves.

  “Sorry,” Elba says.

  I heft my pack; I’m the muscle on this trip—every trip—but you don’t want to carry stuff that looks too much like a weapon. We aren’t permitted to kill anyone anyway. You kill someone you aren’t supposed to, and you start over.

  “We’re four to one,” Lexi says, knotting the laces of his sandals. He spits again.

  I figure he’s referring to the fact that the log says our failure last time was because the subject bled out.

  “Your mistake last time,” I say. “That’s four to two.”

  “Bullshit,” he said. “She’d have died of an infection if she hadn’t bled out.”

  “Who dropped the antibiotic mesh?” I say.

  We are dressed in linen tunics, knee breeches, and long coats; the clothes aren’t well-worn enough to pass muster, even if they are the right cut for whatever class we’re supposed to be, and I’m sure they aren’t. When I ping the AI about that, I learn that we tried a more patrician style of clothing on our first drop and were run out of town for it. This one, apparently, worked to get us past the settlement gatekeepers. I wasn’t going to argue with the AI’s memory.

  “Up the dunes,” Elbai says. “You can shit on each other and walk at the same time, right?”

  “Memory serves, we sure can,” I say.

  We walked up off the sandy beach. There’s not much I can recognize here, except the sea. The sea has washed up all sorts of detritus. There’s broken pottery and tiles, rusted bits of metal, tattered riggings, and refuse of all sorts. Far up the beach, I see what must be beach scavengers. They have headed the other direction; I’m not sure if they witnessed our appearance on the beach.

  Here and there are the jutting ruins of more sea trash, old shipwrecks, discarded implements, a reminder that though this place is three thousand years before our time, the world here is already ancient. We’ve been further back in time, much further, but had found the results to be less precise. The further back we go, the more complicated the mathematical models become. Too many variables. Turns out reverse-engineering a future by fiddling with the past can be … complicated. And often, terribly messy. Careening through space-time wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind when I signed up to serve and see Unification through. But here we are.

  “If it’s the bleeding,” Lexi says, “I’ll prep the line first thing this time.”

  On the other side of the dunes are a series of caves. The wind changes, and I catch the smell of the fires. Cave dwellers like these tend to choose these areas because they dislike the oppressive reach of the states. It was a wonder they weren’t slaves under some Roman landlord, but our records of Roman activity and expansion have never been exhaustive. Everything that is the past is fragmented. Our models do better tracking people through genetics—births and deaths—than across cultures and kingships and writs of sale on clay tablets that wash away over time. We can read the histories of our bodies in our blood—but less so the history of our cultures.