Return Once More (30 page)

We had one night left. Taking things further would make things more painful or just plain awkward. He smiled at me, happiness nudging away some of his fatigue. It filled me with pride that a few minutes kissing me could erase the years that had found his face over the past several days.

“I can't stay very long, and you need to get on your way first thing in the morning. Let's go do something.”

He sat up on his elbows, kissing me again, then eased away with a perfect, roguish grin that would have been at home on the fashion magazines that would become popular two thousand years in the future. “What would you like to do?”

“This is your world, Caesarion. Pretend I'm a lady you'd like to impress. What would you show me?”

“I am not at home in Berenice. However, as you are the only lady I have ever wanted to impress, aside from my mother, I will make an attempt.”

“That's what I like to hear,” I teased, rolling off the bed and handing him his clothes.

I turned my back as he dressed over the next several minutes, then called the manservant, who brought fresh water and soap. After Caesarion finished washing up, we eased into the hallway, where he spoke softly to his servant. I caught enough of the whispered conversation to know that he'd promised we would return by daybreak, and they should be ready to depart for the capital city.

We paused outside the inn's front door while Caesarion shook the kinks from his back and neck. He resembled a tiger waking in the jungle, a masterpiece of long limbs and lithe, capable movements. No matter how hard I wanted to enjoy tonight, every time I looked at him tears clogged my throat.

I tried to smile when he reached for my hand. “Where are we going?”

“Just follow me, my love.”

I started to make a joke about the Pied Piper, then realized it wouldn't mean anything to him. Gauging by the trek of the moon across the heavens, a couple of hours remained ours before sunrise. The night was silent but for the crunch of our footsteps until the sand muted those, as well, and we walked until a wooden dock appeared, set back in an inlet where the water barely moved with a current. Farther away, toward the center of the bustling seaport, bright evidence of civilization gleamed in the darkness.

Caesarion and his guards had surely chosen to reside on its outskirts to avoid the entourage and notoriety that came with parading Pharaoh around town, especially one whose power had been called into question by Rome. The bio-tat spat facts at me about the volatile relationship between Egypt and Rome, about the port city of Berenice—population, mineral wealth, coral reefs, the booming shipping industry—but it all felt less than the scene in front of me. I didn't want facts about this place. It was enough to experience it.

“Would you like to make use of a boat?”

“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.”

Tears wet my cheeks as we kissed hard, my teeth pressing against the inside of my lip. Caesarion gentled it after a moment, easing me onto my back and kissing me until I'd forgotten my name, and that we rocked gently on a boat in the middle of a cove on the ancient Red Sea. His free hand roamed through my hair, trailed wakes of fire down my neck, grabbed firmly at my waist so he could pull my hips against his.

I felt dazed, as though we were both underwater and my perceptions were off, but the gutted expression on his face pulled me quickly to the surface. The salty tear tracks on his cheeks when he pulled away shoved a blazing dagger through my chest.

“I don't want to die,” he managed.

My heart squeezed flat, like a pancake trying to pump blood, and nothing had ever hurt so much in my entire life. I barely got words past the lump in my throat, and tears burned like acid in my eyes, against my cheeks. “I wish I could save you. I wanted to, maybe convince you to hide away in a faraway land, but we both know I can't.”

He wiped my face, shaking his head. “You said Octavian will be important to the world, and I could never leave my people and pretend I am not Pharaoh, son of the great Caesar of Rome. If I lived, it could only be as ruler of Egypt, and then Octavian might not walk the same path.”

“I know.”

Caesarion rested his forehead against mine, both of us sweaty and out of sorts. After a moment he shifted onto his back, tugging me over until my body curled into his, my head resting on his chest. The boat rocked us as though we were babes being lulled by an indulgent mother. I loved the smell of the sea, the way the stars sparkled on the water, the constant, gentle motion that reminded me nothing stood still. Not even the past.

The edges of the horizon lightened almost imperceptibly, and the shift shot dread into my limbs. Caesarion tightened his arm to press me against him.

“You come here and we talk about life, about the stars and what might have been, but I can sense the fear in you, Kaia. I want to help. Tell me about what is happening at your home.” He paused. “With the boy.”

I struggled in vain to brush off his question, to pretend everything outside of this last night with him didn't exist. Except it did. Strange, how he had become a friend as instantly as he'd become so much more. “Things are worse than the last time we talked. The Elders—the people in charge of my training—are hiding things. They have ways to track us that they've never told us about, and they know the boy is traveling to the past alone. I don't know if they know he's changing things.”

“You haven't told them. You do not trust these Elders?”

A few weeks ago, that answer would have been an unequivocal
yes
.

Not anymore.

“I don't know who I can trust. I
want
to trust them.”

“Continue.”

The command in his voice sent a shiver of desire down my spine, and I wondered what had gotten into me. Power could be as dangerous as it was attractive, but I knew in my heart, had he been given the chance, that Caesarion would have wielded it with honor. “And the boy knows what's going on, but he doesn't trust me, either.”

“Why do you think?”

“I don't know. Maybe he's scared.”

“People who have no one to trust are dangerous. Fear is even more so. You must find a way to get through to him.” He paused, running a gentle hand up my arm before settling it at the back of my neck, his fingers toying with strands of my hair. “People with power—and your ability to travel through time is power, no matter how it is viewed—are susceptible to corruption. If your heart says you cannot trust what you have been told, then you must follow it.”

I wanted to go back to when things were simple, to trust blindly in those who were supposed to be incorruptible—shit, our entire
society
was built to resist the narcissistic and power hungry. But Caesarion and his instinct for understanding hierarchy and political strife made me sure that at least some of the Elders were working to change the past.

Oz must know why, and what they hoped to accomplish. I had to convince him that his loyalty lay with the many, not the few.

“What intrigues future people about those who are no longer relevant to your world? Would you not rather study the sciences or become a priestess? Or a mother?”

His question brought me back to the moment, reminded me that though problems waited for me back in Genesis, time with Caesarion slipped quickly through my fingers. “You are still relevant. The past harbors an endless supply of lessons, all waiting to be unearthed so that we can help the people of the future live more stable lives. But that's not what intrigues me.” I considered how to put my interest into words he would understand. “It's the moments. The way each one matters, even if the person experiencing it doesn't realize. In a small way, I get to possess many lifetimes. Those moments make me feel alive.”

“I think you are beautiful, Kaia. Your words. Your face and your body. Your heart. I feel unworthy to be yours, even for as short a time as this.”

I'd never felt beautiful. I wasn't a girl who looked in the mirror and hated what she saw, but while my face was pretty enough, my on-the-big-side nose kept it short of anything to write home about. But now, in Caesarion's arms, there could be no mistaking the truth in his voice. To him, I was beautiful. And not because I had a pretty face or a perfect nose. Because he loved me.

Emotions tumbled like acrobats through my bloodstream, pounded in time with my throbbing headache until my heart begged to explode and get this over with once and for all. Instead, I snuggled closer. “Thank you.”