No sound came from the bedrooms. My brother hadn’t lied about the chip hurting like a bitch, but the throbbing discomfort passed as I wiped up the drops of blood on the sink and cleaned off my wrist, marveling at the tiny gash left by the sliver of tech. The two hair-like strands for easy extraction trailed outside the wound, tickling the sensitive skin inside my wrist.
The question of who could have helped him create it remained unanswered. None of the other pirates were Historians, which meant someone else at this Academy knew the chip existed. Jonah’s class had been five years ahead of mine—his classmates were all certified Historians now, but none of them had been here long enough to be overseers. We didn’t interact, and I didn’t know any of them well enough to gauge their tech skills. It added to my curiosity over what exactly drove my brother onto that ship and out of civilization, but one obsession at a time.
Outside the air lock, I swiped my wrist tat and waited to see the effect of having the chip inserted. Instead of my name popping up, it registered one of the certified Historians. Clever, and less suspicious, for anyone other than an apprentice to be down here alone. They traveled alone all the time without being questioned.
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.