*
As much as I needed to clean up the mess I’d made in Caesarion’s world, nothing had changed as far as my having to pick and choose the best time to sneak away. Jonah’s chip might ensure no one knew where I had gone, but it didn’t stop me from being missed. The Projector, which is what Oz called the machine he’d shown me, said I had a week to make sure Caesarion met his proper fate before things started to change that couldn’t be undone.
We had an observation scheduled for today, and there was no way I could skip it. I’d already had to copy Analeigh’s research for wardrobe since I’d spent our allotted independent study time running around Egypt, and it was our first observation where the reflection focus was left up to us—there was no assignment. They never told us when we were being tested, but this felt like a way to gauge whether we were ready for more autonomy going into our final year.
Oz was coming today, and so was Levi. Part of me wondered if Oz would show up or if he’d been diverted to another assignment, but he waited calmly in the air lock when Analeigh and I arrived with two minutes to spare.
He and Levi were bare-chested and wearing patterned swim trunks. Booth, our overseer for the day, had similar bottoms but wore a blue T-shirt with the phrase “Surf’s Up” scrolled across the front. Analeigh and I both had pretty skimpy bikinis on underneath short dresses that served as cover-ups, and all five of us wore cheap plastic flip-flops.
We were all basically naked, a feeling that left my skin crawling with unease. The wardrobe complemented our destination, though—a beach in the Maldives, off the coast of Sri Lanka, 2001. The boys had chosen this particular observation—Analeigh and I had voted to observe the fate of Anastasia, lost daughter of the last Russian tsar, but we’d been overruled.
Instead we got to watch some famous Californian extreme athlete drown. Lovely.
Extreme sports fascinated Levi in particular, and he planned to work on isolating a common strand of human evolution that had sparked a desire to call dancing with death an entertaining pastime. Jay Moriarty had died one day shy of his twenty-third birthday while free diving—diving deep under water without oxygen tanks, a hobby that did not seem advisable. He had been happily married, according to history and our previous observations, and was described as a gregarious guy who loved life. But apparently not enough to want to continue living it. In truth, I wasn’t sure what there was to learn from him or why this even made the list of options for today’s trip.
I found the story depressing, but the worst part was how avoidable his untimely death had been.
If these past seven years had taught me one universal truth, it was that the humans who died the youngest, who had been gifted with the least amount of time, managed to do the most with it. They were often remembered, these tragic children, and their legacies lived on in ways that people who had been given entire lifetimes couldn’t seem to achieve. The reasons behind that observation would make an amazing reflection topic. Maybe I would explore it one day.
Analeigh and I tossed our Historian uniforms into the drawer next to the boys’ and Booth’s. Gooseflesh popped out on my arms and I shivered in the freezing cold air lock, crossing my arms over my chest to avoid giving the boys a show.
Booth checked to make sure we were all ready, then set his cuff and gave it an exact location that would be deserted at the time of day we were arriving, which was just after breakfast, when Jay left his friends to go snorkeling.
The lights on the cuff turned to green, and the five of us shimmered inside a blue bubble for a moment until the decontamination chamber disappeared and we stood several yards away from a deserted beach, under the cover of a grove of coconut trees.
*
Maldives, Indian Ocean, Earth Before–June 15, 2001 CE (Common Era)
My skin immediately warmed in the sticky, tropical air. The view from where we stood stunned me: the beaches were pristine and white, the ocean unbelievable cascading shades of blue. It was almost clear, a crystal aquamarine as it washed onto the shore and deepening to turquoise, then cobalt as it spread farther from the shore.
“Whoa.” Analeigh breathed the word next to me, her eyes round as they took in the perfect paradise.
“It looks a lot like Petra, but the water there isn’t blue like this. More of a greenish brown. This is better,” Levi observed.
If Petra resembled the Maldives even a little bit, I could see why the property there had to be drawn in a lottery.
Over the next hour, the beach filled with sunbathers and surfers, snorkelers and divers, and Analeigh and I stripped off our cover-ups. We all slathered on sunscreen, an unnecessary little product in our System missing natural sunlight. It smelled wonderful. The sand burned the soles of my bare feet, and the sun baked the skin on my shoulders. Waves washed over my toes as I wiggled them, displacing tiny sand crabs that scurried to find new places to hide.
Booth led us to a more secluded section of shoreline, where boats floated just offshore, their red and white diving flags fluttering in the gentle breeze. The lenses on my glasses indentified Jay Moriarty, a rather handsome guy about the same age as Jonah, with a smile that hit me like a punch in the gut from sixty or seventy yards away.
He faced the water alone, his tanned, toned body obeying his commands to stretch and go through some complicated breathing exercises. A blue mask and snorkel sat on his forehead and he fixed it in place, jumping in the water and kicking lazily back and forth for a while. The expression of contentment on his handsome face felt incongruous, but only because I knew what was about to happen. Still, if I had to die, it would be good to know it would be doing something I loved half as much as this boy loved diving in the ocean.