Return Once More

“Good gravy boats, more touching?”

“You didn’t seem to mind so much with Caesarion.”

The comment seemed to surprise Oz as much as it startled me, and red splotches grew on his cheeks. My heart throbbed at the memories. No smart reply choked out, no matter how badly I wanted to let Oz have it.

After a moment, he found his voice, but only barely. “I’m sorry, Kaia. He’s your True, and I’m … I shouldn’t have said that.”

Tears filled my eyes at his unexpected kindness. I looked away, determined not to let him see, and cleared my throat. “Let’s get this over with.”

Oz opened his arms, and I stepped against his chest. His hands found the small of my back, pressing me tight against him until the top of my head wedged under his chin. His breath moved my hair, wrenching loose more memories of Caesarion. For a moment, I wanted to cling to Oz, to break down and let him hold me simply because I needed to be held. To steal comfort.

My breakdown had to be worse than I’d thought to even consider taking comfort from Oz, no matter how easily he could cradle me against his chest.

“Step up so you’re standing on my feet.”

I did as he asked, my body shaking with the effort of not relaxing into his embrace, until our cheeks pressed together. Without another word, Oz maneuvered us both over the threshold, walking with me standing on him without any extra effort at all. Once we were clear of the doorway and close to the center of the room, he dropped his arms, leaving me both cold and relieved.

A waist-high, glass pedestal sat at the center of the room. The top held a table comp, but the base and stem were riddled with tiny pinholes. None of the other pedestal or table comps in the Academy looked like this; they were solid glass and gears. The rest of the room was empty. The holo screens that made up the walls were blank and transparent, and no dots to track apprentices, Historians, or Elders skittered across the floor.

Before I could ask Oz what we were doing here, what this place was, or why the Elders kept it a secret, he moved from my side and to the pedestal. His fingers flew over the table comp’s screen, punching in mysterious information.

His smoky eyes held mine as he finished, a quagmire of guilt, sorrow, trepidation, and maybe even concern. “I shouldn’t be showing you this, Kaia. But I know you won’t believe me if I just tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“That your actions in thirty BCE have had disastrous consequences. We have to set them right.”

My heart thudded to a stop. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve been wondering why you’ve seen me traveling alone, and to places we haven’t been authorized to go for apprentice observations. You’ve figured out, likely from your brother,”—he made a face that clenched my hands into fists—“that there are secrets at the Academy. This is it.”

Oz hit one last button on the table comp, then swiped his wrist tattoo over some control along the side of the pedestal. The room lit up. Glowing strands of virtual string spurted from the countless holes all over the pedestal, crisscrossing the room like an elaborate game of cat’s cradle. They seemed to sense objects in their path and left a hole around me, but I moved quickly to Oz’s side when he asked. With both of us in the center of the room, the glowing strands multiplied until the room resembled an elaborate, multicolored spiderweb.

When it finally stopped expanding, there were far too many threads to count or keep track of with the naked eye. If they had been physical, we could have used them like a hammock.

I reached out an experimental finger, intent on touching one of them, but Oz covered my hand and shook his head. “Not yet.”

My eyes stretched wide. “What is it?”

“It traces the trajectory of decisions. Deaths and births, mostly, but it can also track events forward or backward to their point of inception.”

No appropriate answer to this information existed. We’d never been able to do such a thing —not officially. That was the whole reason we needed so many Historians. So that we could do our best to trace the events that led to our evacuation, but also the events and the people who had lifted us up.

If this comp could do it for us, why would Genesis need Historians at all?

“How?” I breathed.

“It’s not perfected. That’s why I’ve been going to suspected points of origin, tracing development of certain things—”

“Like weapons,” I interrupted dully.

His gray eyes narrowed. “Exactly. Like weapons. To see if the comp is right.”

“And is it?”

Oz shook his head, his dark hair falling over one eye until he impatiently brushed it aside. “There are still too many variables.” He motioned at the tangle of virtual threads spread out around us. “And the further back we start, the harder it is to predict an outcome.”

“Explain it to me.”

“I’m showing you the trajectory stemming from Caesarion.” He watched me closely, but I didn’t respond, even though my insides jerked at his name. “Something happened when he didn’t leave Berenice when he was supposed to.”

“What?” My knees went weak at the thought, the same instinctive panic I’d felt when Caesarion told me he’d delayed his departure.

If this room could predict the consequences of his living, maybe it was possible that he would now. Even though it was wrong, even though it couldn’t happen, my heart still hoped. This had to be how Jonah knew he could save Rosie and not affect anything but a baseball season, and the reason behind Oz’s decision to knock that girl into James Puckle’s path. But Jonah had claimed this knowledge was dangerous.

It would be cool to easily trace the development of technology, the trajectory of the people who changed Earth Before for the better and for the worse. But why would we need to know the alternate consequences? The one thing that remained constant about the past was that changing it created unknown outcomes. This mass of twine proved that to me again—there were simply too many possibilities.

Oz studied the table comp for a moment, then touched a button. One of the strands in front of us glowed orange and zigzagged across the room, turning haphazardly this way and that until it dead-ended over by the door.

“What’s that?” In spite of how slow my mind felt after enduring hours of grief, this room warmed it up again. It felt good to flex my mental muscles.

“When Caesarion doesn’t arrive in Alexandria when he’s supposed to—supposed to by our documents, not by any specific day Octavian is expecting him—the delay causes a shift in history. The man who is supposed to execute Caesarion is killed in a robbing. The executioner Octavian chooses as a replacement is sympathetic to the Egyptian ruling family and brings the burned body of a commoner in Caesarion’s place. Your True lives, and it is many years before Octavian—by then Augustus—learns of the treachery.”

“I saved him,” I whispered. My heart swelled at the knowledge Caesarion lived, but my gut churned with horror.

Oz grabbed my arm and squeezed, shaking me out of the trance. “Kaia. He has to die. Caesarion ends up challenging Augustus for Rome, and the years the two of them spend fighting sets the development of the ancient world back hundreds of years. Art, military advancements, a

“How could one boy affect that many things?” I scoffed.

No matter my dismissive response, years of training promised it was possible. Not only possible, but likely. One person’s life affected countless others, even when he wasn’t the son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar.

“This orange line represents the direct changes to his life in particular. He’s killed at the age of forty in a second battle at Actium, one that puts the first to shame.” Oz touched the table comp again, and more lines lit up. Some were green, others purple, blue, and red. “These are the other major time lines that are affected by the alteration. Major. This doesn’t take into consideration the countless other, minor lives affected.”