Damn him. Ruby looked around the room. All these people, living in this reek of shit and piss and rotting food. Teeth decaying in their mouths, the rank smell wafting off them as she spoke with one or another.

The vids made the Golden Age of Piracy look like a grand adventure, and here, it just looked like every other ghetto in every other port town. Minus modern indoor plumbing. “You,” she said, waking another customer up out of stillness. “Where do I find Anne Bonny?”

A blank look of terror. “Come on, jizz-wits, I don’t have all day. Anne. Freaking. Bonny. Woman who wears pants, tamed dragons. Where is she?” Who knew that people in the past were all idiots?

A quaking hand pointed at a door at the rear of the tavern. Score! Okay, At least I get to meet Anne. “Don’t worry,” she told the man as she stilled him again. “It’ll all go back the way it’s supposed to be. You won’t even remember this. It’s better if you get the future you’re meant to have.” With indoor plumbing and global warming and even ChronoInnovation. Time travel is a blast, if we can get it away from the assholes.

And then into the room, and a click on the stiller, set to wide-dispersion. Ruby grinned and pulled up her camera feed, which went right through her retinas for all purposes except for selfies. “Score,” she muttered, looking around the room at the various men, caught mid-argument, and the single woman seated at the table with them. Then a rush of disappointment swept through her. Wow. She looks like she’s had one hell of a rough life. Are all those lines are her face just from sun-damage? Everyone here looks so freaking old. Maybe that’s all the disease and bad food? “Okay, Anne,” she said out loud. “Wakey-wakey time.”

Click.

Quiang sat back in his chair, satisfied. He watched the ghostly play of past events dance in the air as holograms. He’d seen this play out before, in archival footage that his superiors had shown him. He knew what was going to happen in that room.

Somehow, it was different, watching it play out in ‘real time.’ It was different, knowing that this time, it was the result of actions he’d already taken, not just actions that he’d been told he was eventually going to take. 

“I’m sorry, Ruby,” Quiang muttered, closing his eyes. 

There was a chance that the unthinking arrogance of the future, the tendency to assume that everyone in the past must think and feel as we do, because we’re so much better, smarter, more advanced, and of course right about everything, would falter. That she wouldn’t die for it. Fate wasn’t fixed; change was possible in a universe in which chaos existed, and realities could calve off from each other like icebergs.

But the chance of it happening here? Quiang knew it was vanishingly small.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated softly, like a mantra. “It has to happen. It’s already happened.”

Anne had shifted on the bench towards the white-clad intruder, only to have the world fade out. When she regained consciousness, her vision returned slowly as her limbs came back to prickling, cramping life. She realized that she still sat by Jack’s side, but that the men remained still, almost frozen—Vane’s fist still in the air, about to thump the trestle table. 

The figure that had assailed them stood beside Anne, close enough that she could smell the acrid reek of its shining white clothing—trousers below, but without division between trews and shirt. 

It didn’t take a genius to understand that this figure, whoever it was, was a threat. It had paralyzed everyone in the room, as if by magic, and that, again, didn’t take a genius to connect to the presence of the flying beasts. Magic. And not Mackandal’s houngan business, half Islam, half-African spellery. 

She, Jack, and the others had spent many long nights over grog, debating from whence the creatures had come. The local preachers would have it that they were demons straight from hell, a manifest sign of God’s wrath. Mackandal had called them spirits, either the loa of African tales, or the efreet of Arabian lore. “Either way, takes a person of great power, of great courage, to bind them, bargain with them,” he’d said, lifting his cup of water to her as if in respect. But his eyes had been wary. He’s afraid. Wants the secret, to take me and mine out of the business. Hold the power for himself. I can’t blame him. But I also can’t tell him or anyone else how the magic works. Else then they’d have no need for me and Jack, and our heads would be next on the wall. Can never let them know it’s just the magic of being a mother. Of being the first face the hatchlings see, of being the first hand to feed them. Nothing more. 

She and Jack had found identifying bands on all the adults that they killed. All with the same information, and the same, uncanny date. She didn’t understand what it meant. But she didn’t need to. All she needed was to understand them, her loveys. And how to use them in the world that they were making for themselves.

The figure reached up and lifted off its too-smooth helmet, and Anne tensed, then relaxed as a human female face appeared. Dark-toned skin suggested mixed descent, but the woman’s curly hair was vibrantly and unnaturally blue, and her features soft and unmarked as a child’s. “That’s better,” the intruder declared in an accent Anne could barely decipher. “So, you’re Anne Bonny? I’ve read all about you—”

“Anne Rackham,” she corrected, her tongue feeling thick in her mouth.

The intruder sighed, removing another square device from some pocket to take notes on it as if it were a piece of paper. “Another thing wrong with the time-line,” she muttered. “You actually married Calico Jack?”

“The day after my doltish husband died, aye.” Sensation had returned to Anne’s hands, but her feet remained numb. She didn’t think it best to announce this fact, but remained seated, discreetly worked her fingers by her sides, loosening them. People tended to underestimate her. She was small. Whip-slender. And a woman in a man’s world. “Seemed the thing to do, given that I was six months gone with child,” she added, still slurring her words, this time deliberately. She wanted time to figure out who this woman was. What she wanted. How she’d frozen them all in place like noddy dolls. Magic of another sort.

The woman’s eyes widened. “What? Anne Bonny, marrying because she was pregnant? But...you’re a feminist icon! You and Mary Read—you aren’t lovers in this timeline?” 

Timeline. Anne noted the word distantly, among the others she didn’t recognize, tucking it to the back of her mind for later, and then grimaced, moving her toes inside her boots. She remembered the news clippings and raucous ballads that had circulated even here, brought from England. “Lovers with Mary Read?” She laughed. “No. You do know that the English will print anything in their papers to make us sound more scurrilous than we really are, to keep people from helping us, aye? That printers make money by selling papers, and that nothing sells papers better than scandal?” She snorted. “Mary’s a good woman. Helps look after little Jack when I’m training the beasts to fly with us on their backs. Flies with us—has a good sense for moving with the beasts, not against them. Past that? Jack’s mine and I’m his.”

 The woman’s mouth fell open again, looking as piteous as a kicked pup. Anne wanted to slap her for her pleading eyes and face. What are you? You’ve taken us hostage, as surely as if you’d boarded our ship and held us under your guns. But you put on this show of weakness, and… think it strength? 

“None of this is right,” the woman said, sounding piteous. 

“You want to believe me, or what people who never met me have written about me?” Anne slurred carefully. “You’re a fool if you take rumor’s word for anything.”

“You...you were supposed to have a child in Cuba, that no one could ever find traces of, then plead your belly in 1720, when Jack was hanged, avoiding your own execution. None of this is right! I’ll bet that Vane and Blackbeard are still alive, too.” She sighed, oblivious to the turmoil now churning through Anne’s mind.

The woman continued to mumble to herself, ignoring Anne. “I didn’t jump back far enough to find the initial incursion point. Tell me, when did the pterosaurs all start appearing? And where? I’ll get this fixed. You won’t even remember I was here.” She nodded briskly, her blue hair flying around her face. “I’ll hop forward to about 1725 to make sure that the timeline’s healed invisibly before heading for home.”

“I don’t understand.” Stalling. Playing for time. Trying to sound piteous and half-witted. Come on, witch. Buy the lie. It’s a good one.

The woman sighed. “I suppose there’s no harm in telling you. I mean, you won’t remember any of this.” She ran a hand through her knotted hair. “There’s a corporation in my time that’s colonizing the past. Breaking off alternate timelines for their resources, bringing them back to our timeline.” Her eyes blazed with enthusiasm, and she looked away, as if talking to an audience that Anne couldn’t see. “They’re gutting the multiverse! Getting fat on the blood of a hundred timelines, like a great, greedy tick! And it’s up to us to stop them. What do you say, Anne Bonny?” Her head swiveled back towards her, eyes wide, and something in them…glowing? Shining? “We’re going to put it all back the way it’s supposed to be,” she declared after an awkward pause in which Anne didn’t speak. “It’ll all be all right. I know exactly what to do. It’s what’s best, right?”

Anne shuddered at the sight, even as her mind worked feverishly behind her dull, glassy eyes. She could only grasp parts of the woman’s rapid speech, in which so many words were unfamiliar. So she’s…from the future. Why would people in the future breed dragons? Nevermind. Doesn’t matter. Her mind changed course, circled around the woman’s words. Supposed. Jack’s supposed to be dead. And if this witch from the future has anything to say about, I’ll open my eyes when she’s gone, and he will be. Supposed. Damned if I’ll bow to her yoke any more than to the Crown’s.

The next thought slammed through her like a cannonball. “So…when you’re gone…This entire last year won’t have happened?”