Return Once More (15 page)

“I'm not telling you who he is.”

The teasing grin slipped from his face as he studied the determined set of my jaw. “There are things that go on in this System that you're not privy to, little sister. If you're lucky, you'll never know they exist.”

“Did the Elders find out what you did with Rosie? Is that the reason you left?”

Our eyes locked. The accusatory tone in my voice banged off the walls of the cargo bay, barely tempered by the tinge of hurt I tried to hide. We didn't have time for this now, my pain. It wouldn't lie quiet, though, after building up all of these years.

“It's one of them.” He raked a hand through his too-long hair, leaving it unkempt in its wake. I used to give him haircuts; Jonah said he preferred my steady hands to the grooming booths at the Academy. “I know I hurt you when I left, Special K, and that's the last thing I wanted. But I'm still your big brother, and it's my job to protect you. Three years ago that meant leaving the Academy, and the System. Right now, that means telling you to keep your head down and stop asking questions about whether it's possible to change the past. And be careful who you trust.”

“You're not going to tell me why?”

“People who know
why
tend to disappear, one way or another. You deserve better.”

“Then why should I trust
you
?”

He tried to hide the pain in his golden eyes, but it spun me around like a good slap anyway. Guilt welled up in my chest, bubbling like lava, but I didn't back down. I wanted answers. I wanted to know how he'd known the Cubs' pennant would be the biggest fallout of Rosie's existence. More than anything, I wanted the truth about why he left me behind.

The staring contest that followed ended in a draw, which didn't surprise me since I'd never won with Jonah my entire life.

“Wait here for a second,” he said, leaving the cargo bay through a door at the back without waiting for my response. He returned a minute later and passed me a tiny metal chip the size and shape of the fingernail on my pinkie. Two long wire antennae, as thin and soft as strands of hair, sprouted from the top.

“What is it?”

“Technology a friend at the Academy developed for me when I went after Rosie. It hurts like a bitch, but if you jam it in the edge of your wrist tat, right there—” he touched a spot in the center of the outer, straight edge—“it holds your location until you take it out. You insert it in your dorm room, you'll appear to be in your dorm room until you take it out. Remove it when you get back, though, because they'll notice if you're static too long on the locator floor.”

“I'm scared, Jonah. To use the cuff. If I get caught, if the sanction is bad … After losing you, it will break Mom's and Dad's hearts.”

“You
shouldn't
use that cuff to travel, not to see your True or me or anyone else. You should forget him, and me, and any thought of messing with the past. But I know you. It's dumb and it's dangerous, and you don't have all of the facts, but you won't be able to resist. That chip works. They never guessed what I did.”

“Then that can't be the reason you left.” He clamped his teeth together, staring back at me blandly. My hands curled into fists, frustration mounting so high I almost growled. “But how did you
know
you could save Rosie?”

“I can't tell you that. I can say this, though: not everything you've learned at the Academy has been true, but one thing is. We can't change the past without consequence. Every person, every event, affects at least one other. Be careful.”

We sat in the kind of silence that only exists between two people who don't have to speak to understand each other. Jonah's warnings rang loud and clear. The pain inside him translated as clearly as his fear and I knew one thing: he believed he had done the right thing in leaving.

My heart squeezed until my chest hurt, and against my best efforts, tears pricked my eyes. I reached out and grabbed his hand, and Jonah held on tight. “I miss you.”

“I miss you, too, Special K.” His voice shook and the sight of tears gathering in his eyes shook me to the core. “I miss you all so much.”

Analeigh's light footsteps on the stairs ended the companionable grief a moment later, and she cleared her throat softly. “Kaia, we've got to go.”

I nodded and stood, throwing my arms around Jonah's neck and giving him a tight hug. He had been more evasive than anything, but he was my brother and I loved him. In his own way, he had tried to help.

The Elders and their mysterious secret business didn't strike me as interesting as the suggestion that I could at least try to save Caesarion. If Jonah wouldn't tell me how I could verify the trajectories the way he must have before he saved Rosie, and then maybe I could figure it out on my own by spending more time with my True. If I could gauge the potential course of his unlived future, know his mind and his essence, maybe the answers would follow.

The chip my brother had given me burned hot in my palm as the blue, shimmering field surrounded Analeigh and me. Even if, in the end, I couldn't be sure enough to save Caesarion, the chip meant that our story didn't have to be over.

Not yet.

Sanchi, Amalgam of Genesis–50 NE (New Era)

Three days passed before I found time to go see Caesarion again. We had the trip to observe the Louis XIV's coronation, then a couple of days of mandatory reflection, and I didn't want just an hour with my True this time. I wanted as much time as I could pilfer.

For every ten days of apprentice work we were granted one free day—not always a pass out of the Academy but time to spend as we chose—and that was today. Twenty-four wonderful, empty hours where no one expected me to be anywhere. Not showing up at meals didn't raise any eyebrows, even, since we often chewed protein tabs or ate the snacks stowed in our rooms. We took advantage of the alone time if we didn't score a pass to leave the grounds.

I told Analeigh and Sarah that I planned to spend the day in the Archives working on my Sun King—an affectionate term for Louis XIV, even if he did drive the monarchy into bankruptcy—reflection because the upcoming certification reviews worried me. I'd gotten enough things wrong in the last several weeks that it sounded plausible to me, but neither of my friends bought it. Analeigh didn't push, though. She'd been tiptoeing around me since we'd seen Jonah and his pirate friends, maybe assuming time alone would shine old wounds. It sucked to leave her in the dark. I'd turned into one of those idiot girls who chose a boy over her best friend, but at least this was temporary. A twinge of regret in my chest at the thought of him dying very soon only strengthened my resolve to try to find a way to save him. Just him.

If Analeigh guessed my plan to use Jonah's cuff to travel alone again, she didn't say anything. Probably because visiting her True Companion with the idea of saving his life would never enter her mind.

But she didn't know what it felt like to stare into the eyes of a person who felt like part of her. To know the grim details of his impending, senseless death but be helpless to intervene. Analeigh hadn't lived with the empty hole Jonah had left in my house, or borne the weight of lost love, of bitter strength, soldered in the necklace hanging against my chest.

If Jonah could improve his True's outcome, why couldn't I?

Since secret travels and illicit contact seemed to be my life now, flying under the radar at the Academy seemed the best plan, so I had done better with my last recording. No one in the crowd at the coronation of Louis XIV distracted me—even Maude Gatling approved during our initial reflection. The less attention the Elders and overseers paid me, the better.

Of course, behaving didn't stop me from checking on Oz in the Archives a couple more times, out of plain and simple curiosity. He, Levi, and Jess were assigned to observe part of the first Crusade yesterday and his bio information confirmed he'd joined them. It made me second-guess my instincts about him traveling on his own, but I dismissed the thought quickly. Rosie's second life hadn't been a comp error, and neither had Oz's travel.

He was up to something, but I couldn't worry about my problems and his, too. Not today.

This morning, all that mattered was that I could leave for most of the day and night without anyone thinking twice. According to Jonah, if anyone did go looking, my dot on the Archive floor would show me in my bathroom, where I currently stood—once I got up the nerve to use the device he gave me.

I took a shaky breath over the sink, grasping my brother's tiny, metallic disk with a pair of tweezers, poised to jam it into the base of the golden barcode on the inside of my left wrist. This was the price. A little moment of pain, and I could be with Caesarion again. Figure out if saving him was an option.

I gritted my teeth, held my breath, and jammed the sharp metal under my skin in one rough shove. The faint glow of the golden threads under layers of skin flickered and dimmed, then went dark for the first time in seven years. A quiet groan escaped and I held still, both to wait out the wave of sweating and nausea and to make sure Analeigh hadn't heard me.

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—re
doing
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.