The knot of tension between my shoulders eased. Being able to go without my movements being tracked made my decision easier, calmed the anxiety doing flips in my stomach at committing such a serious infraction for a second time. It might be too good to be true but for the moment, it seemed the chip allowed me to see Caesarion without consequences.
Now I could turn my attention to trying to find him.
Caesarion’s movements following Alexandria’s occupation by the Roman army were unconfirmed. We knew he left the capital city hoping to escape, eventually ending up in a city called Berenice, on the Red Sea. I set the cuff smack in the middle, hoping to catch the ousted Pharaoh after he’d moved south along the Nile.
He would soon be lured back to Alexandria by false promises of reconciliation and peace from Octavian. Then he would die.
The details of his death were unknown, with speculation by historians from Earth Before that he may have been strangled and then entombed with his mother and the rest of the Ptolemy ancestral line.
It had been a week since we’d met in the palace gardens. If he hoped to hide, he would have left quietly, without fanfare. Caesarion didn’t strike me as a man too proud to understand that, so I expected to find him keeping a low profile. They would be traveling on horseback or with a small envoy, perhaps on foot for part of the journey, and couldn’t have made it all the way to Berenice in fewer than seven days. Even on horseback that trip would have taken at least three fortnights.
I wanted to find him sooner than that, anyway. If it were possible to change his outcome, I would need as much time as I could get to figure it out, and I wanted our relationship to be linear for us both. Visiting him any number of times during this, the seventeenth year of his life, might be possible, but it felt wrong. If these were my only moments, reliving them—redoing them—felt like cheating.
Standing in the icy-cold air lock, dressed again in draped linen and scarves, but without jewelry or makeup, a thought came to me. I whispered Caesarion’s name into the cuff instead of a place, like the overseers typically did, hoping it would take me right to him. It had better work because twelve or so hours didn’t give me enough time to track down a guy on the move in an unfamiliar ancient world, never mind one surrounded by a devoted royal guard.
The blue bubble surrounded me. I crossed my fingers as the lights turned from red to green, and Sanchi disappeared.
*
Cairo , Egypt , Earth Before–30 BCE (Before Common Era)
The muggy air choking the Tropic of Cancer bathed my skin in sweat, offering a ton more heat and humidity than Sanchi, or even the coastal city of Alexandria. My mistake became instantly clear when the memory swam into focus.
The overseers never specified a person rather than a place because explaining how we bled into existence out of thin air might be a bit of a challenge.
Luckily for me the day had barely broken, and the room where I’d appeared filled with the blessed sounds of heavy breathing and light snores. Three guards slept on the open sides of the ratty, almost flat straw mattress. Their thick, strong fingers clasped the hilts of various weapons, ready to wake and defend their charge at the drop of a hat.
Caesarion slept, his narrow, handsome face relaxed. He appeared younger without the weight of grief and free of doubt about the future. My fingers twitched with the desire to touch his cheek, to wake him so those deep blue eyes could look into mine. I wanted to be alone in the room and find out what it felt like to be held willingly in his arms, to live in one of the moments people talked about, wrote about, sang about, when immersed in that elusive thing called true love.
But those guards wouldn’t hesitate to kill me if I tried to get anywhere near Caesarion, and we’d probably have to rehash his previous assumptions if he woke and found me in his bed. Instead of taking unnecessary chances, I snagged a money pouch off the stand by the door, backed out into the hallway, and tramped down the stairs, remembering at the last moment that only whores or servants would be conducting themselves with so little propriety.
The dining area would work as a place to safely pass the time until Caesarion woke and prepared to move on for the day. The inn was small and a little smelly—the floors were packed with dirt and straw and the wooden tables wobbled under my elbows. Early morning sunlight warmed the room until sweat coated my skin under the light tunic and skirt, but the smell of food coming from the kitchen kicked my stomach into a grumble. I’d skipped breakfast again.
No one spared me more than one curious glance. The innkeeper’s wife took my order and returned to plop down the food, mumbling something about milking the cows before leaving through the open door. My happiness at being out on an adventure in the fresh air of Earth Before, with no need to return to the Academy anytime soon, warred with my bubbling fear that the chip wouldn’t work. That I’d get caught. That I’d accidentally change something important. I shoved the worries down into my center and locked them away before panic could overtake my excitement. There would be plenty of time for regret later. I wouldn’t waste today.
Another patron joined me, an elderly man who slurped his broth and avoided eye contact, then left a coin on the table and shuffled out before the innkeeper’s wife returned from her morning chores. The denarius I’d swiped off the dresser bought me a bowl of broth and a hunk of bread, which I gnawed for the next hour, every bite ramping up the impressive headache my bio-tat imparted in exchange for my interaction with the past. The pain retreated with a poof when Caesarion appeared at the bottom of the wooden stairs.
The sight of his sleepy midnight eyes squeezed my lungs into oblivion, and even though staring was impolite, I couldn’t stop. When his gaze found mine, the delighted surprise that sprang onto his face pulled my heart into my throat. I could almost hear his thoughts from across the room, could feel the rush of relief that gushed through me at being in the same space as him pour through Caesarion’s blood as well.
Perhaps I’d imagined it and he felt nothing. Perhaps the True Companion calculations were nothing but parlor tricks and games invented to entertain us, to prove that true love wasn’t a necessary factor in human happiness. But right now, staring into his eyes while we both grinned like fools and my knees turned to jelly, my heart believed.
He waved his royal guard out of the room with instructions to saddle the horses. One older man, likely his personal servant, limped toward the kitchen. Caesarion crossed to my side, taking a seat across the table from me. His smile turned a bit shy, very unlike the first time we met, and infected my heart with a strange flutter.
“I dreamed I would see you again, mysterious Kaia. But I did not believe it would be in a ratty inn on the road to nowhere.”
My smile felt wobbly. Words jammed between my head and my mouth refused to be spit out. After a moment of silence he leaned forward, elbows on the table. My body responded almost of its own accord, and I copied his posture until our faces were close enough that we shared breath.
“All roads lead somewhere,” I managed, finally.
He gave me a sad smile. “That is true. Since the Hathors long ago foretold my untimely death, perhaps Tuat or Aaru has always been my destination.”
My bio-tat explained that ancient Egyptians believed the entirety of their lives were laid bare at birth to the Hathors—sort of like witches, or seven ladies akin to the Greek Fates—who predicted the high and low points of every child’s life until death.
“Is death not everyone’s destination?”