Return Once More (35 page)

He whispered words that meant nothing, nonsensical comfort, into my hair. “Kaia, my love, what's wrong?”

Over his shoulders, all of the guards had sprung from the water and studied me warily, hands on their weapons. They would kill me if they got the chance, and it hurt that my actions would shorten their lives unfairly. Nothing about this was fair.

I shook my head and held on tighter, never wanting to let him go. Staying long would be too great a risk with Analeigh digging through the Archives at home, but maybe a few minutes. Thirty at the most. Caesarion had to die at the end of them, but surely I had time before it had to be done. Before the rest of my life without his touch and his voice and the warm presence of his solid, lithe form.

“I just wanted to see you.”

“I wanted to see you, too. From the moment you left.” He pulled back and studied my face. “There is something else. What has happened?”

Our relationship had begun with a misunderstanding born of the vast gap between our worlds, and there were still so many things he could never understand. I wished that he could return with me to Sanchi, but it was impossible. We had not perfected time travel from the past into the future—the few attempts had not been successful in circumventing the aging process. Caesarion would be nothing but dust by the time we arrived in 2560.

Staying here wasn't an option. One second past twenty-four hours and my own organs would liquefy. A voice in the back of my mind whispered that perhaps that was the poetic choice—to die with him in a big pile of romantic goo. But Analeigh was counting on me, and the rest of Genesis was, too. They just didn't know it yet.

“Nothing happened.”

“You are a terrible liar,” he said with a small smile, before bending to kiss me.

I kissed him back, nothing romantic or sexy about the tears and snot and desperation racing through me and pouring onto him. My legs shook when I pulled away and tried another smile, with a bit more success this time. “I'm actually a pretty good liar. You just see through me.”

“I'm not sure whether that makes me feel better or worse,” he mused.

He grabbed me around the waist and hoisted me onto his chestnut mare, then leaped up into the saddle. His lips moved against my ear, sending tingles and excitement through my abdomen that quickly spilled lower, landing in my knees. It was a far cry from the way Oz's whispered questions had affected me earlier that day in the Maldives.

Caesarion kicked the horse into motion, his guards following a little too close for comfort. I almost hadn't bothered with period-appropriate clothing but was now glad I had—we would be riding past other contemporaries, most likely, and the fewer people I had to take out with my waver, the better. We rode in silence for a while, the clomping of the horses' hooves and the far-off patter of human voices a low hum in the late afternoon heat.

“How long are you staying?”

“Not long.” I pressed my back harder into his chest.

“Perhaps until tomorrow?” he nudged.

I didn't respond. He pointed out animals and constellations as they appeared, but mostly we breathed together in the soft evening. I put my hand over his and pulled the horse to a stop, turning so that I faced him, my thighs draped over his and our fingers clutched together.

My eyes burned and my throat felt raw from holding back the truth. “Your time, Caesarion. It's now. Not tomorrow. We've already changed too many things, and …” I trailed off as my fingers found Oz's sonic waver in my bag and pulled it loose.

Fear flashed in Caesarion's gaze. My heart shattered into so many pieces it would take poor Isis a hundred lifetimes to find them and put me back together.

Steely acceptance banished the other emotions racing across his face. When his eyes raised to mine, they held love and sorrow in equal measure. “If I must die, I want it to be in the arms of the woman I love, not at the hands of a cruel executioner.”

The words squeezed the air from my lungs. The request should have made this easier, but somehow it made it worse that he trusted me enough to give me his final moments. To share them with a girl who had made everything in his life harder from the moment she'd walked into it.

I nodded, and tried to gather some courage, because that's what I had come here to do—kill him. Make sure that the time line was righted before the repercussions were too many and too far- reaching to be recalled. I slid from the horse onto the marshy ground, then pulled my Historian cloak from my bag and secured it around me. One of the biggest barriers to sonic weaponry during its early development was that the person holding the device became as susceptible as their unsuspecting victim, but the cloaks were built with an adequate barrier. I tied it at my throat, ensuring all of my vital organs were covered, except my face. I would do that last.

Tears spilled down my cheeks. “It will be fast. It won't hurt.”

Caesarion dismounted and beckoned his guards to do the same, then walked to my side. “I will send them away. If they see you kill me, they will take your life.” He moved a sweaty piece of hair off my forehead. “We can't have that. You're going to live a long life, and be happy.”

Happiness seemed impossible in this moment, sacrificed at the altar of my disobedience.

As my True spoke with his guards, who eyed me with distrust but led the horses away until they dropped from sight, I palmed the waver and secured my hood over my hair. My thumb flicked the safety off, the device slipping against my sweaty skin.

Caesarion closed his eyes, pushed his shoulders back, and waited. Tears burned in my throat and I squeezed the waver harder, trying to remember the thousands at home instead of the one in front of me. It wasn't working. I wasn't ready.

Everything Caesarion had taught me about duty felt like faraway concepts when faced with putting them into action. I had been kidding myself. I was still the same silly Kaia—a girl who broke the rules but couldn't grow up enough to handle the consequences.

He's already dead,
I told myself, trying to use the truth as reassurance.

I couldn't do it. Failure crashed through my system, the hot despair and self-loathing like slime in my veins, but none of it spurred me into action. I dropped my arm to my side. Caesarion opened his eyes when a sob tore from my throat, but didn't move to touch me. My weakness was making this harder for him, and that killed me more than anything else.

“I'm sorry.” His face blurred through my tears and I gripped the waver tighter. “I can't.”

Before he could move, Oz popped onto the scene behind him. He held a second waver in his outstretched hand, his body cloaked from head to toe. His gray eyes flicked wildly about the scene, probably searching for Caesarion's guards. “Kaia, close your hood,” he shouted.

My grief cleared immediately, making way for a panic that jammed my racing heart into my throat. It couldn't be this way. “Oz, no!”

Caesarion paused, looking between us with fear returning to his posture. The scene moved in slow motion as I ran to his side, but as Oz pushed buttons on his waver and tugged the strings to shield his own face, I instinctively did the same.

The telltale, invisible thrums, like the heartbeat of a small animal in your palm or a million lead balls dropped onto a silent gong at the same moment, shook my blood. I stumbled the final steps, blind with the shield in place, and crashed into Caesarion's body as it crumpled. We landed on the ground in a heap as my arms found my True Companion's and held on tight.

“Kaia. Kaia, you have to get up. We have to go.”

The words sounded far away, as though Oz spoke underwater, and for a moment I thought he'd liquefied my organs, too. Then raw sobs replaced his voice, proving I was alive. And the one making a racket. My fingers tore at the strings of my cloak, freeing my face to see Caesarion.

He lay with his eyes closed, looking at peace but for the fluid leaking from his ears and nose, his hand slack in mine. I clutched his tunic, begging my mind to take hold of the rest of me.

“I'll be seeing you,” I whispered.

My emotions settled sooner than expected. My anger toward Oz for taking this responsibility from me, for robbing Caesarion of final moments filled with love and replacing them with confusion and fear, ripped through me with shocking ferocity. I stood and threw myself at Oz, pummeling his chest with my fists. My hair stuck to the sweat and tears on my face, but as big a mess as I must have looked, it was my insides that would never return to normal.

He'd stolen my job. Ignored Caesarion's last request. Made me feel as though everything I'd been through with my True had ended in failure, and in that moment, I hated Oz almost as much as I hated myself. “What the hell do you think you're doing? This was my job. I was doing it!” I shrieked, too mired in loss to think about being overheard.

“Not fast enough. Kaia, I—” He held me at arm's length and took my beating, his eyes darkened by sorrow.

The pounding of sandals, of guttural cries filled with rage and hatred, interrupted him. Caesarion's guards spotted their Pharaoh lying on the ground, obviously killed by these two strangers they had never trusted, and the murder in their eyes said Oz and I were about to pay their price. This time I moved first, yanking my hood back into place and jerking the strings to cover my face. Oz followed suit without having to be asked, responding to my motions as though we'd been working in tandem, sonic waving memories to death as a team our entire lives.

I flicked off the safety and aimed the waver, hoping no one else had been summoned by the guards' shouts and wandered into range. The waver pulsed in my fingers for five seconds, and when it buzzed again once, letting me know the area was clear of danger, I undid my hood and surveyed my damage.

The three guards had collapsed in mid-run, their mouths open, eyes turned to goo and melting from their sockets. Oz grabbed my hand, but I jerked it away.

“Be pissed at me if you want, but we've got to go. Now.”

My anger had crowded everything else for the past several minutes, but now the panic encroaching on the edges of his voice registered and my heart dropped into my knees.

“What happened?”

“It's Analeigh. The Elders caught her in the Archives. They've got her sanctioned already and they've recommended exposure, Kaia. Death. They're looking for you now, and if they find you here they'll activate your remote auto-destruct.”

None of it made sense; the information was too much all at once. I didn't care about me, and the one thing that stuck in my mind, repeated on a loop, was that Analeigh was in trouble.

Because of me. She was going to die because of me.

“No. Oz, why? She's never been in trouble before, and that's not a capital offense!”

His own eyes shone with tears. “I don't know. I swear, I don't. They're panicked about something … whatever she found out or stumbled across.”

“They want to shut her up.”

“Yes. And they've … they've got Sarah, too. Something about private files and schematics.”

“Shit. Shit.” My knees wobbled and threatened to dump me back onto the ground. I reached out and grabbed his arm, using him to steady my legs as my mind struggled with the transition between losing Caesarion and saving my friends.

Caesarion's manservant peered into the clearing, his face ashen at the scene. He seemed to want to flee but his feet refused to move, instead he stared at the two of us, so obviously out of place in our cloaks, electronic devices in our hands. I realized we'd both been speaking aloud in English the past several minutes, too.

“Don't run,” I called to him in Greek. “We're not going to hurt you as long as you never speak of this day. Take Pharaoh's body to Alexandria and ensure Octavian learns of his death.”

He nodded and kept bobbing his head as though it was on a spring. It would have to do.

“Let's go.”

Oz nodded and set his cuff, beckoning me closer so that the blue field could encompass us both, and we returned to Sanchi.

*

Sanchi, Amalgam of Genesis–50 NE (New Era)

Our time in the decontamination chamber seemed to last an eternity. My heart and body and brain were a mess of emotions, part trying to mourn Caesarion for the second time, part furious with Oz for his interference, and all of me terrified we would be too late to save my best friend.

Analeigh needed us. So, I shoved my emotions into a compartment and locked it tight, intent on dealing with it later. If I wasn't dead.

I dumped my dress, tunic, and sash into the decontamination pod and stepped into the shower at the behest of the electronic voice that discovered too many particles on my skin and hair. The air lock was still closed when we were clean and dressed in clean uniforms.

“Tell me.”

“I did. The Elders dragged Analeigh to a public sanction, and you know she can't lie very well.”

“What did she say? When they asked her why she was in those Archives?”

“Nothing. She said nothing, just sat there and stared at them.”

I wanted to cry, but nothing came out. My tear ducts felt hollow. Maybe the anger crashing through me made it impossible, or the fear tightening my muscles had dried them up. “And then?”

“I left to come get you.”

The air lock clicked open and I shot out the door. Oz pounded at my heels as we climbed from the travel decks of the Academy up to the dorm levels, then raced toward the judgment rooms. I would turn myself in, tell them everything and that I'd made Analeigh do it.

The sight of Teach and Jean outside the chamber stopped me in my tracks so fast Oz slammed into my back, sending both of us toppling toward the pirates. Which, given that they both held sonic wavers at the ready, jammed my heart into my mouth.

Oz and I managed to right ourselves, and I shoved him away.