“I want to know everything.” His gaze betrayed his seriousness, even though we both knew a couple of hours wasn’t adequate for the history of the world.
“For what it’s worth, Octavian does well with Rome. Under his rule, it becomes the largest and most influential empire in the Western world. The citizens are well cared for, art and religion and science all flourish. For a time.” I paused, gauging his reaction to see if perhaps my honesty was too much, but Caesarion watched me with interest.
“And then?”
“Nothing stays the same, Caesarion. Empires fall, new ones rise. Good people struggle against those who are corrupt, until eventually good loses more often than it wins and this planet begins to suffer.”
“Rome is no more?”
“This entire planet is no more.” He looked startled, so I reached out, covering his hand on the reeds between us. “I mean, it still exists, but it is no longer inhabitable. We live out there, now.”
I motioned to the stars, bright and too numerous to count, and stared as wonder crawled across his face, lighting up one feature at a time.
“We live in the stars?” he murmured, sounding reverent and as though my story was as unbelievable as any he’d been told at his mother’s knee.
“Among the stars, yes.”
“You’re from the stars. I knew that a girl who could steal my heart, my every thought, in the space of a day could not be of this Earth.”
He shifted the short distance to press his soft lips against mine. The kiss was sweet and filled with longing, with the desperate desire to hold on to something that had been slipping away the moment we’d grasped it.
“Tell me more,” he whispered. “What of Egypt?”
“Your Egypt is remembered as one of the most advanced cultures of this time. Children and scholars studied it for centuries. We still do. Much of Alexandria was lost to the sea—your beautiful library, your mother’s palace. People still know your story, Caesarion. Yours and your mother’s. Your father’s. You’re memorialized in theater and books, and live in everyone’s memories even now.”
“People in the stars remember me?”
His mother and father more so, but he didn’t need to know that. Right now, he did not appear to be a grown man, the way he would have been considered by his contemporaries. He looked like a scared teenager facing certain death just days after losing his mother.
A boy who wanted to believe he would not be forgotten.
“They do. I do. And that’s never going to change. I promise.” Strange how the desire to be remembered had never faded in our psyches, never eased. We all wanted that. A lump of sorrow burned in my throat.
Octavian has stolen his future, and with it, the chance for him to leave a legacy of his own. Perhaps he would have been an awful tyrant. Another Ptolemy who married his sister and ruled Egypt, fought against Rome’s growing choke hold over the Mediterranean, become a father.
Or perhaps he would have just lived his life. Left the world better than he’d found it.
“It seems impossible, these feelings for you. As though my heart has melted and spilled happiness into my blood.” The words emerged hesitant, as though they embarrassed him, but the determination in his eyes filled my body with a responding emotion. “I love you, Kaia, and I’m glad you came to visit me.”
“I love you, too. I always will.”
Tears wet my cheeks as we kissed hard, my teeth pressing against the inside of my lip. Caesarion gentled it after a moment, easing me onto my back and kissing me until I’d forgotten my name, and that we rocked gently on a boat in the middle of a cove on the ancient Red Sea. His free hand roamed through my hair, trailed wakes of fire down my neck, grabbed firmly at my waist so he could pull my hips against his.
I felt dazed, as though we were both underwater and my perceptions were off, but the gutted expression on his face pulled me quickly to the surface. The salty tear tracks on his cheeks when he pulled away shoved a blazing dagger through my chest.
“I don’t want to die,” he managed.
My heart squeezed flat, like a pancake trying to pump blood, and nothing had ever hurt so much in my entire life. I barely got words past the lump in my throat, and tears burned like acid in my eyes, against my cheeks. “I wish I could save you. I wanted to, maybe convince you to hide away in a faraway land, but we both know I can’t.”
He wiped my face, shaking his head. “You said Octavian will be important to the world, and I could never leave my people and pretend I am not Pharaoh, son of the great Caesar of Rome. If I lived, it could only be as ruler of Egypt, and then Octavian might not walk the same path.”
“I know.”
Caesarion rested his forehead against mine, both of us sweaty and out of sorts. After a moment he shifted onto his back, tugging me over until my body curled into his, my head resting on his chest. The boat rocked us as though we were babes being lulled by an indulgent mother. I loved the smell of the sea, the way the stars sparkled on the water, the constant, gentle motion that reminded me nothing stood still. Not even the past.
The edges of the horizon lightened almost imperceptibly, and the shift shot dread into my limbs. Caesarion tightened his arm to press me against him.
“You come here and we talk about life, about the stars and what might have been, but I can sense the fear in you, Kaia. I want to help. Tell me about what is happening at your home.” He paused. “With the boy.”
I struggled in vain to brush off his question, to pretend everything outside of this last night with him didn’t exist. Except it did. Strange, how he had become a friend as instantly as he’d become so much more. “Things are worse than the last time we talked. The Elders—the people in charge of my training—are hiding things. They have ways to track us that they’ve never told us about, and they know the boy is traveling to the past alone. I don’t know if they know he’s changing things.”
“You haven’t told them. You do not trust these Elders?”
A few weeks ago, that answer would have been an unequivocal yes.
Not anymore.
“I don’t know who I can trust. I want to trust them.”
“Continue.”
The command in his voice sent a shiver of desire down my spine, and I wondered what had gotten into me. Power could be as dangerous as it was attractive, but I knew in my heart, had he been given the chance, that Caesarion would have wielded it with honor. “And the boy knows what’s going on, but he doesn’t trust me, either.”
“Why do you think?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s scared.”
“People who have no one to trust are dangerous. Fear is even more so. You must find a way to get through to him.” He paused, running a gentle hand up my arm before settling it at the back of my neck, his fingers toying with strands of my hair. “People with power—and your ability to travel through time is power, no matter how it is viewed—are susceptible to corruption. If your heart says you cannot trust what you have been told, then you must follow it.”
I wanted to go back to when things were simple, to trust blindly in those who were supposed to be incorruptible—shit, our entire society was built to resist the narcissistic and power hungry. But Caesarion and his instinct for understanding hierarchy and political strife made me sure that at least some of the Elders were working to change the past.
Oz must know why, and what they hoped to accomplish. I had to convince him that his loyalty lay with the many, not the few.
“What intrigues future people about those who are no longer relevant to your world? Would you not rather study the sciences or become a priestess? Or a mother?”
His question brought me back to the moment, reminded me that though problems waited for me back in Genesis, time with Caesarion slipped quickly through my fingers. “You are still relevant. The past harbors an endless supply of lessons, all waiting to be unearthed so that we can help the people of the future live more stable lives. But that’s not what intrigues me.” I considered how to put my interest into words he would understand. “It’s the moments. The way each one matters, even if the person experiencing it doesn’t realize. In a small way, I get to possess many lifetimes. Those moments make me feel alive.”