“You saw him? You followed him to the past?”
“Yes.”
She frowned. “But he can’t … we can’t do that. Change things.”
“I think we both know we can. We’ve just been told that we shouldn’t.”
Analeigh’s skin turned green and sweaty. She leaned back against the wall, breathing deep. “We have to turn him in.”
“They know he’s traveling. At least, Truman does. We need to find out if the Elders know he’s altering things before we can decide what to do.”
I didn’t mention we also couldn’t do anything because then I would be caught, too. That I was just as bad as Oz—maybe worse, because I believed he had known the consequences of his interference.
“How did you get out of the interrogation? Why did you tell them you were reading those things and following Oz’s research?”
My face flamed at the memory, then got even hotter remembering that Oz knew what had been said. “Well, since Truman assumed I have some kind of stupid crush on Oz, it seemed like the best idea at the time to let him believe it. I couldn’t think of anything else.”
She snorted, the kind that made the corners of my mouth twitch against my best efforts, and the tension that threatened to strangle us both eased the tiniest fraction.
“Shut up, Analeigh. It’s not funny.”
“It’s hilarious. You and Oz Truman? Can you even imagine such a thing? You’d be bored out of your mind in less than an hour, and he’d go stark raving mad from having to corral you twenty-four seven.”
“Exactly. Hilarious.” The observations hit a little too close to home, given the exchange between us in the decontamination chamber. As though those five minutes had been a microcosm of our imaginary relationship.
It didn’t make a lot of sense, now that I thought about it, that Elder Truman would think for a moment that his son and I could have been a good match. Then again, he assumed I had a wayward crush, not that anything more substantial or two-sided was going on.
And it wasn’t. At least, not in the way he assumed.
I took another deep breath, knowing this second confession would be harder, because it put me under the judgment microscope, not someone else. Analeigh might make fun of Oz for acting like he had a stick up his ass all the time, but she followed the rules, too. Best to dive right in, like jumping in one of the ice-cold pools on Persepolis.
“I’ve been using Jonah’s cuff to observe Caesarion.”
“Kaia,” Analeigh gasped, her face drained of color and her eyes giant round disks. “How many times …”
I waited for more, but she appeared to be at a loss for words. That said more than anything else, really, and since I’d shocked her into silence with that revelation, I chose to keep quiet on the rest of my transgressions, at least for the moment. “There’s more.”
“Oh, stars. I can’t take more.”
“When I got back from Egypt, Oz was waiting for me outside the air lock. He shoved me back inside and said he knew where I’d been and why I’d gone. Told me I had to stop or bad things would happen. It was scary. For Oz.”
That tidbit hung in the air between us, thick and dreadful. I held out my wrist and she took in the red welts ringing the skin below my tat. Her green gaze burned hot with anger behind her glasses. “He hurt you? What a hypocrite! He can’t say anything because you know he’s been traveling alone, too.”
“That’s what I thought, and I told him as much, but he said there are things I don’t understand. And like I said, it was pretty clear from my session with the Elders today that Truman knows he’s traveling. He claims it’s for next year’s certification.”
“All these years, everything about Oz has seemed so straightforward and boring. It’s weird even thinking about him putting us all in danger this way.”
“I know. And I don’t care what Truman says, there’s more to what’s going on than a simple application. You didn’t see his face. Oz is terrified—for me, for him, maybe for everyone, I don’t know. But when he saw Jonah’s cuff he said something in French.”
“What?”
“L’avenir est dans le passé,” I repeated in passable French. I was one of the few who struggled more with Romance languages than German-rooted dialects. It was annoying.
“The future lies in the past?”
“That’s what he said, and when I asked him what the hell he meant, he seemed crushed that I didn’t know. It sounds like some sort of Historian motto, except it isn’t. Right?”
She shook her head, blond waves falling around her shoulders. “No. And I can’t imagine it would be. If anything, the future sprouts from the society they’ve built in the System. Our evacuation from Earth Before is a natural break in the pattern, we move forward from there. The past informs our decisions, how we’re set up and governed, but I don’t see how it could be our future.”
“I know.” I paused, gauging her reaction and whether it had been smart to share, but I needed someone here who understood the Historians and what we stood for. I needed Analeigh, the brains of our friendship. Without her I was lost, not only as to what to do next, but how to get out of this quagmire created by my own rule-flaunting ways.
I was starting to think that my favorite mantra, that you’re only in trouble if you get caught, might not hold water when it came to rearranging the past.
We were silent for a long time, the gears in my mind working so hard I could almost hear them. Analeigh chewed her lip almost raw but said nothing.
“I think that phrase is some kind of secret saying, and when Oz saw I had a cuff he wondered if I was part of whatever it is, too.”
“Part of what, Kaia?”
“That’s what we have to find out.”
Chapter Nineteen