The majority of my plain clothes were hand-me-downs from my mother, which meant cute little mid-twentieth-century dresses. Analeigh was obsessed with early nineteenth-century fashion, and her closet contained a disturbing number of frilly undergarments.
Boys had it easy. Pants and a shirt. Done. Maybe Oz would recycle his dashing 1714 look. Sarah would probably think she’d died and gone to old-fashioned heaven.
“I think I’m going to fool around with an ancient Greek drapey thing,” Pey replied.
“What about you two?” Jess shot a glance in Oz and Sarah’s direction. “Doing something stupid and cute, like color-coordinated taffeta and cummerbund?”
“Seriously, Jess, have you met Oz? I’ll be lucky to get him into a tie and a shirt that doesn’t have some kind of food stain on it,” Sarah quipped, choosing to ignore Jess’s snotty undertone.
Jess was not-so-subtly jealous of their pairing. Most of us felt the same way, but we tried hard to be happy for the two of them instead of making them feel as though they were some kind of freaks under a microscope.
“Have you got your pirate wench outfit all picked out, Kaia?”
“That joke was funny the first time.” I rolled my eyes at Jess, then slurped a spoonful of soup. “You need some new material.”
“I’m not a writer, I’m a Historian.”
“Good thing,” I spat back.
Tangling with Jess got old fast, especially when there were too many important things vying for my attention. Like when I’d be able to see Caesarion again, or whether Oz or I was going to blow up the future first.
My mind wandered, dismissing the rest of the lunch conversation, until a prickly feeling lifted the hairs on my arms. I looked up to find Oz watching me while Sarah and Pey discussed which branch of the Historians they preferred once we were certified. His gray irises were clear and as enigmatic as ever behind his thick black lenses, though less haughty than normal. I stared back, willing a challenge into my gaze. Oz knew I was up to something, but so was he—and I hadn’t altered anything. Not yet.
An answering challenge lit Oz’s eyes on fire. He and I were locked in some kind of battle of wills, but I didn’t know the rules or the reason for the declaration. A month ago we had been Kaia and Oz, two apprentices a little more than a year away from being certified as full Historians and taking up the mantle of observing, recording, and reflecting. Two people who had known each other since we were kids—not friends, exactly, but not enemies. Now we were both traveling on our own, with our own agendas.
Maybe we both needed to be stopped.
“I mean, of course it would be fun to focus on reflecting, so Oz and I would have the same schedule, but maybe he doesn’t want to spend every day in the lab with me.” Sarah nudged Oz’s side, turning to smile at him.
The playful grin dropped when he didn’t reply to her question, because he was still staring at me with a little too much intensity. My cheeks flushed from the attention, from the guilt and worry. Not because anything about Oz turned me on, but because sometimes it seemed as though those eyes could see right through a person’s skin.
Could he tell I was nothing more than a girl about to tumble headlong down the wrong path, who couldn’t resist the pull of even a long-dead true love? A girl sitting here judging him instead of herself?
“Oz?” Sarah asked, frowning now. Her blue eyes flicked between us, confused, maybe a little worried.
My roommate’s expression made me look away, and under different circumstances, I might have laughed. Whatever was happening to my relationship with Oz these past couple of weeks, it wasn’t romantic. Simply the dance of two people with secrets they were determined to keep.
He finally realized the entire table was staring at him—at us—and glanced down at his True Companion. “What?”
Oz’s admittedly handsome—if tired—face softened as he registered the worry in Sarah’s expression, and he lifted a hand to brush a piece of short blond hair off her forehead. The tenderness in his touch twisted loose a piece of my heart. I felt the ghost of Caesarion’s lips on mine, a perfect fit I would never know again, and in that moment, realized that I never should have experienced it in the first place.
I never should have met him, because now, nothing in my life could ever live up to the sense of balance and completion offered by his presence.
“Of course I want you to choose reflection, Sarah. I don’t want you off gallivanting at all hours when you could be home with me.” He slid an arm around her waist.
It impressed me that he’d heard her question. While our eyes had been locked, I had barely heard anything over the roar of my own panic, but Oz’s response made me frown. Sarah would hate being relegated to reflection; she loved the observations and recordings. It would be terrible to see her chained to not only surly, superior Oz, but the table comps, too.
The future had always seemed far away, a little murky. For me, it surely held a Chosen Companion, children, and a job at the Academy in some capacity. Now it appeared obscured by the kind of fog that concealed the ground on Angkor. Most people preferred to steer clear of the swampy mist, yet the planet seemed like a dream to me, as though each step meant an adventure—maybe you’d crash into a hole, or maybe the path would lead you into a beautiful re-created bayou filled with cypress trees and Spanish moss.
Sarah glanced between Oz and me one last time, concern tightening her features. But when a loud alert signaled the end of lunch, she shrugged and let it go. Her laid-back demeanor made her one of the easiest girls at the Academy to get along with, but also one of the easiest targets. She was altogether too nice for her own good. Whatever was going on with Oz, and whatever had shifted between him and me, it could hurt her. I needed to make sure that it didn’t.
We all left the mess hall for the Archives, scheduled to spend the afternoon on our final supervised Triangle reflection. Everyone moved slowly after eating, or perhaps because spending the rest of the day watching teenage girls burn to death didn’t appeal to a single one of us.
Oz and Sarah sat next to each other on one side of the largest, square metal table. Analeigh and I took the two seats next to them, across from Jess, Levi, and Peyton. Two Elders stood at either end of the table, and today we were blessed with a double dose of Gatling sisters. Jess and Peyton chattered about something that had happened at Stars last night, but as the clock ticked to the hour we fell silent without having to be asked.
The sisters were both heavyset with unruly, gray old-lady curls, a permanent ruddiness smeared over their cheeks, nose, and chin. Their icy eyes could wrap chills around your spine faster than you could pretend to be paying attention, and standard Historian garb didn’t flatter either one of them, accentuating every pucker, roll, and dimple they’d earned with fifty-plus years of life. Neither of them were mean, but they were strict. They expected our best.
There actually weren’t any Elders that didn’t command our respect, but the Gatlings froze the frame every ten seconds from the beginning to the end of the recorded memory and asked you to analyze the choices you made. It was brutal.
Today, Maude pulled up her own recording of the Triangle Fire on one end of the tabletop screen and Jess’s on the other. Everyone looked as green about the gills at having to relive the situation as I felt.
We watched the recording in ten-second spurts, comparing what Maude recorded to what Jess had seen, and of course my least favorite classmate’s work was nearly perfect. There was a brief mistake, maybe five or ten seconds when she looked away from the girls jumping out the windows. I didn’t blame her.
Analeigh and Oz’s observations were also both hard to fault—Maude had plenty to say about mine, of course, and my distraction by Rosie Shapiro. Levi and Pey both got a lecture on how to make sure the camera cut through smoke so it didn’t obscure anything.