“What do you mean, make use of?” I asked, feeling a bit wary after the horse riding incident.
I’d never been to Petra, the water planet in Genesis. Sanchi had a small lake that we’d stocked with fish, but it wasn’t large enough for boating, and swimming wasn’t permitted.
“This is a quiet cove. We could row out a little, drop a small anchor, and enjoy the privacy.” He gave me a small smile. “I do not mean to suggest anything untoward. Only that I want to spend these final hours with you uninterrupted, Kaia.”
“Okay. Yes.” His straightforward words took my breath away, leaving me lightheaded and drowning in a million emotions.
How could it be that I’d only met him days ago? It felt as though some part of me had been tangled with him since the beginning of time.
Together we dragged a small, wooden craft with a few pictures carved into the bow down to the shoreline and pushed until it let go of the sand. The warm water of the Red Sea splashed around our ankles before we climbed aboard. I took a deep breath, wondering if a boy who had spent his entire life being taken care of knew how to row a boat, but Caesarion surprised me with his competence.
He took hold of the twin black oars, and while he paddled, I stared at the muscles straining across his arms and chest. We didn’t go far before he hefted a stone anchor tied to a simple, thick line of rope, and dropped it into the depths. The cove must have been shallow; the water was a light blue, almost green in the moonlight, and the rope tugged tight within the space of a few breaths. The little craft had two wooden benches, both too narrow to share comfortably, but a meter-wide section of the bow was covered with reeds. Caesarion slid backward onto it, then beckoned to me, and the two of us lay on our sides, facing each other.
His body warmed mine, bicep pillowing my head as we stared into each other’s eyes. Those midnight-blue irises did funny things to my stomach—and lower parts—but he didn’t move to kiss me. Finally, he brushed a thumb over my cheek, then over my lips, and gave me a sad smile.
“Tell me about the future, my Kaia. About this world I will never see.”
“Which one?” I whispered. “Do you want to know what will happen in your world after your death? Or two thousand years from now? Or three?”
“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.”