Return Once More by Trisha Leigh Page A

lover. I assumed whoever had been in the room had been dismissed at that point, and the final image was of the Roman and the Greek, their arms wrapped around each other as what looked like early-evening sun streaked through the windows and bathed them in golden light.
    I stood and stretched, giving the recording a flick with my fingertip that sent it back to its place in the Archives. Impatience tickled my limbs, an itching desire to do something—to move, to run—but there was nothing to do. No one could save a single member of that family from their collective fate. The hardest stories for me were always the ones that ended in tragedy. To stand in their presence, hear their breaths and their heartbeats and know they’d be silenced too soon.
    But
everyone
I observed had already died. Some of them made me more melancholy than others, and Caesarion perhaps more so than any other, now that I was aware of our connection through time. It seemed natural to hope that someone who would have loved me would have lived a rich, full life.
    But maybe he had. It would make me feel better to know what his life had been like as a teenager—that he’d been happy before his adopted brother stole his future. The image of Jonah’s cuff danced in my mind, a temptation that quickened my breath.
    I could find out. Just
observe
Caesarion. Not talk to him, of course, but to know what he was like, how his life felt while he’d lived it, might be worth a sanction.
    The rules about contact had the stiffest penalties, and altering the past in even the smallest capacity could mean repeating a year, being assigned a specialty no one else wanted, or maybe even exile. But an apprentice traveling alone wasn’t even
listed
as an infraction in the Guide, since we didn’t own our own cuffs. So it wouldn’t break any rules.
    Technically.
    I stared at the floor in the main room, at the colored dots that marked the Historians currently in the field, absently touching them with the toe of my slipper, one after the other. The seven Historian Elders were spread out, all observing different times and places. My brother’s dot hovered in the present, inside the Academy. Jonah had dug the bio tattoos out of his neck, throat, and wrists before running away. Since they were linked with skin and arteries, veins and blood, he must have had help. Someone from the Medical Academy, or at least someone with training. One of the other pirates was the prevailing opinion, which means they’d been planning his disappearance.
    Maybe rebellion ran in my blood.
    The ache in my center gnawed harder at the reminder of Jonah. No one knew where he was now, or where he’d be spotted next. No one talked about the outliers, and the Elders tried—mostly unsuccessfully—to keep news of their attacks and whereabouts off our radar. It made people uncomfortable, the idea that they lived outside. Apart.
    I touched Oz’s dot idly, remembering he was scheduled to be at Pearl Harbor, in 1941, today.
    Except he wasn’t.
    The embedded bio stats read
Bukhara
, 1221
. Eastern History gave me trouble—I’d banished many of the details to the back of my mind when I’d decided Renaissance Europe would be my specialty—but focused concentration knocked loose a few facts.
    Bukhara. A city in Asia, part of the Persian Empire in the ancient world, and I thought part of the USSR at some point, but in 1221 … it would have been under attack or recently felled by the Mongolians. Their invasion of the Rus territories lasted for another several years before it spread into Europe.
    What was Oz doing observing the Mongol invasions instead of watching the Japanese drop bombs on Pearl Harbor? Not to mention visiting the
way
wrong century? It crossed my mind briefly that he’d lied on purpose, but I dismissed it. He had to be with an overseer, even though he
appeared
to be alone.
    System glitches weren’t unheard of, so maybe