Dak closed his eyes for a second and shook his head. What in the world was going on here?
Alexander spoke next from his chair in the corner. “Would someone please explain this nonsense? My teacher says that someone plans to kill me, and then my mother says her new market friend told her this would happen. Explain.”
Dak looked at him in awe. The heir to the hegemon sat with his ankles casually crossed, leaning back, and yet he radiated a sense of command. It even seemed to affect his mom. She stammered a bit and then did her best to answer.
“Tilda is a wonderful, sweet, compassionate person, my son. She told me the entire story of how these . . . children” — she gave a very nasty glare to each one of them — “had escaped their homes and fled to our land, bent on causing trouble. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that they have a vendetta against my beautiful friend, and she told me they’d come here, saying wicked things about her. Her wisdom and foresight is evident.”
Dak couldn’t take another second of this ridiculousness. “She’s brainwashed you! That’s what she does. All nice and sweet until she stabs you in the back. Ever think there’s an actual reason we’d come here to say bad things about her? If she’s so perfect, why would she have to warn you that we’d . . . warn you about her?” Dak groaned. He was sounding like an idiot.
Sera seemed to agree, shooting him her special look. “What my friend’s trying to say is that this woman, Tilda, is really good at convincing people to do what she says. She’s the leader of a . . . group that’s very . . . evil.” It was her turn to groan.
Dak hid his smile. At least he wasn’t alone on the idiot train.
Olympias stood, folded her arms, and took a few steps forward. “I think I’ve lived long enough, seen enough, met enough people to be able to take care of myself. I know when a soul is good, and when a soul is . . . what was the word you used?” She looked at Sera. “Evil, I believe. Yes, I know. Trust me, I know very well. . . .” She trailed off with that last part, her gaze going distant, and Dak knew she was thinking of King Philip. The man who’d broken her heart and stood in the way of her son’s ascendance.
“Olympias, please.” Aristotle used a soft voice. “Please listen to us. Please trust us. I spent a good part of my life teaching your son — preparing him for a great future. I couldn’t bear it if he were to lose his life. Alex is in danger, and I firmly believe that it’s all because of this woman. This . . . Tilda.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” she responded. “I’m well protected anyway. When she comes here, if I sense any —”
“Mother!” Alexander shouted. He jolted from his chair and practically charged to where she stood — Dak thought for a split second he might tackle her like a rogue linebacker. But he stopped in front of her and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Did you tell this woman where we live? Where our home is? Did you?”
Olympias appeared shocked by the outburst, eyes wide, leaning back from her son. She finally nodded timidly, and Dak wondered if maybe she was snapping out of her brainwashed delusion of Tilda.
Alexander pulled her into a hug, then kissed her on the cheek. “I love you, Mama, but I would fall backward off the tallest ship into a sea of sharks if my teacher told me to. I trust him with my life, heart, and soul. You should not have done this thing. You shouldn’t have told her where we live.”
“You trust him more than me?” she replied, her expression showing pure heartbreak.
“It’s not the Olympiad. It’s not a race. I trust you both.”
Besides the sweet glorious glee of hearing Alexander actually mention the Olympics — which originated in his country long before they renewed it in the modern day — Dak felt unsettled. Things just didn’t seem to be going well, or the way he expected. Tilda was too smart.
He noticed Aristotle was looking at him.
“Any suggestions?” the man asked him.
Dak wished he had that moment on video. Aristotle asking him for advice.
“I say we lock Alexander in a closet and have his guards and dogs right outside the door for a week.” It’d never happen, but Dak didn’t know how else to make sure — absolutely sure — that Tilda couldn’t get to him.
Alex pulled out his sword and pointed it at Dak. “Remember the lesson you were supposed to learn on that statue? Do I look like the kind of person who’d allow someone to lock me in a closet?”
Dak shook his head, liking this guy more by the minute.
“That’s a good student.” He sheathed his sword. “Now, come. We’re going to the market to hunt down this woman that everyone seems to think wants me dead. She has her own lesson to learn.”
Without waiting for a response — as if he expected any human who ever crossed his path in life to obey his commands without question — Alexander walked out of the room. Dak followed happily at his heels.
RIQ FELL in line with everyone else as they marched through the grand halls of the palace and out the front door, finally walking down huge marble steps onto a wide lawn. It spread out like a green sea before them, and Alexander didn’t hesitate a second as he stomped onto it and kept moving, his muscles clenched as if he wanted to run instead.
The two guards who’d accompanied him earlier had appeared, hurrying to get right behind him. Then came Aristotle, walking with confident strides. Next was Olympias, having lost every ounce of the stately, towering demeanor she’d shown earlier.
After them, Riq, Sera, and Dak tried to keep up, side by side, Sera in the middle.
Riq leaned in toward her. “You think she’ll be there?”
“I don’t know,” Sera said with a shrug. “But since we’ve probably already altered what she originally intended to do, we need to stay close to Alexander.”
Dak made a scoffing sound. “Like we can do anything to protect him. Look at that dude. He could take down three bears with his pinkie.”
“Did you lose your brain somewhere?” Sera responded. “We just found out that Tilda killed him.”
“Yeah, but she probably sneaked up on him or something. Now that we warned him, I bet he’ll be fine. Man, for all we know, we’ve already fixed the Prime Break. Holy cow. What if that’s true?”
Riq had only been half listening, seeing movement up ahead, beyond where the huge lawn met a road. A group of people, maybe. But what Dak said really struck him. The kid could be right. Totally right. His heart lifted a little.
Then he got a better glimpse of what lay ahead. “Who are those guys up there?” he asked. There seemed to be twenty or thirty people, and they’d just left the road and walked onto the vast lawn surrounding Olympias’s palace.
“I don’t know,” Sera responded, “but they don’t . . .” Her voice trailed off and she stopped walking.
So did Riq. “What?” he asked. But the word had barely left his mouth when he saw exactly what. Behind the others coming toward them — at a brisk pace, body language screaming that they weren’t on a nice, casual stroll — a woman strode along, mostly hidden from view because she was shorter than the others. But every once in a while Riq caught a glimpse of flaming red hair.
“Wait!” Dak called out to Alexander and the guards. Aristotle and Olympias had already stopped. “Tilda’s up there!”
Alex turned around, not a trace of sweat or deep breathing to show that he’d practically been running down the lawn. He looked at his teacher. “That’s the woman you came to warn me about?” Then his eyes moved to his mom. “That’s your new friend from the market?”
Both of them simply nodded.
Alexander pulled the sword from its sheath and his two guards followed his lead; the scrape of metal sliding against hard leather rang through the air like birdsong.
“And your friend needed an escort of twenty soldiers to come say hello?” Alex asked.
Riq was watching the oncoming crowd, and the heir to the hegemon was right. Those marching toward them, protecting Tilda in a semicircle as they walked, were dressed and armed just
like Alex and his guards. The glint of breastplates and helms and drawn daggers, swords, and spears sparkled in the sunlight, some of the flashes almost blinding.
Olympias had gone totally pale, every bit of her seeming like she’d aged ten years in a minute, her eyes hard with worry. “I don’t understand. I . . . things have gotten so complicated.”
It doesn’t matter, Riq thought. They were here, and Riq and his friends were ridiculously outnumbered. The front line of soldiers stopped about thirty feet from where Alexander stood, but Tilda kept walking until she slipped past the armed men and finally stood where Riq could see her head to toe.
Below that fiery hair, her black lips made the rest of her skin look ghostly white. She wore tight-fitting clothes, bloodred and charcoal gray, that looked totally out of place compared to everyone else. Her face bore no expression whatsoever. In her right hand, she gripped an infinity-shaped device made out of gleaming metal.
The Eternity Ring.
“Hello, Olympias,” Tilda said, her voice so soft and smooth that it almost convinced Riq she was genuine. For a split second, he felt the outrageous urge to hear her out. There was something magnetic about her, like the woman had evil spells to hypnotize and manipulate whomever she wanted. “It’s good to see you again so soon. Thanks again for the invitation to visit your beautiful home. I can tell it’s quite the keeper.”
“You always bring along a bunch of hired thugs for friendly get-togethers?” Riq asked, his heart rate ticking up. He was surprised that Tilda appeared to have a translation device as advanced as that of the Hystorians. The SQ probably stole that technology from them, too.
Tilda was shaking her head, taking looks back at the soldiers she’d brought with her. “I’m done taking chances, as you can see. This isn’t the first time I’ve come back in time to do the job that the SQ needs to be done.” She faltered a bit on the last couple of words — almost slurring them — and took a step to the left as if she’d suddenly lost her balance. “I hired every sword I could find in the city, and came to meet you here, exactly where I knew you would be.”
She pointed somewhere over Riq’s shoulder, and he turned to look. About fifty feet away, a woman was standing beside a tree, staring at them. Impossibly, it was Tilda — another version of Tilda, holding the Eternity Ring. A couple of seconds later, she activated the device and warped away in a blur of light and sound. Everyone gasped in surprise.
Riq spun around and shouted at the Tilda who was still there. “Are you crazy?”
“You can’t mess with time like that!” Sera added. “No wonder you can barely stand. Jumping around with the Ring like that is going to fry your brain — not to mention do who-knows-what to reality itself!”
Dak was still staring back at the spot where the other Tilda had disappeared. Aristotle, Olympias, Alexander — even Tilda’s own allies — just stood there, wondering what in the heck was going on.
Tilda stumbled again, but then moved a few steps forward as if she’d meant to do it. “Say what you want. Pretend to have all the high and mighty ideals you want. But I’m telling you, the Hystorians do not understand what’s at stake. We can all fight here, and lose a lot of lives in the process. But if you would just listen to me . . .” Her face scrunched up in genuine frustration, and Riq found a small part of himself wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt again.
“I don’t know you,” Aristotle said, his voice deeper and holding more resonance than Riq had heard in him yet. “And I don’t know the smallest part of what lies in the future or the extent of this battle between your . . . SQ and the Hystorians. But I do know that talking things through — trying to come to an understanding, might be our wisest course of action for right now.”
Maybe because we’re outnumbered three to one, Riq thought darkly.
Tilda took a few steps forward, and her focus was on Dak, Sera, and Riq, not the others in the group. “I know you think we’ve done bad things. Horrible things. But I’m telling you, we’re not idiots. We’re not evil. In fact, I know something that you don’t — that none of the Hystorians know.”
“And what’s that?” Riq asked.
Tilda answered quietly, her face a mask of stone. “How to stop the Cataclysm.”
SERA FELT a tingle in her temples, as if there were static electricity prickling her skin. She had encountered Tilda before, and it was never a pleasant experience. But this time felt different. Tilda herself seemed different. Desperate. Sera couldn’t shake the feeling that the woman was more dangerous than ever.
“You have no idea how to stop the Cataclysm,” Dak said. “The SQ boneheads are the ones who’ve been trying to make sure it happens!” The volume of his voice had risen with every word.
Tilda laughed as if she’d heard something horrible, not funny. When she did, she also winced like something hurt. Sera understood. Too much warping through time and your body started to feel like it had been stretched on a medieval torture device.
“Make sure it happens?” the woman said after she recovered. “You kids are supposed to be smart. You have to be, or the Hystorians would never have let you go back in time to fix their so-called Great Breaks.” She paused, taking a second to look all three of them in the eyes. Alexander and everyone else seemed content to observe for the moment. “You are intelligent, right? Or am I wrong?”
“Of course we’re smart,” Sera snapped. “What’s your point?”
Tilda held up a finger. “This. This is my point. Why on earth would we spend our entire effort — sacrificing lives and time and immense amounts of money — to run an organization that wants the world to end? What would be the point? If we want to rule humanity, don’t you think we’d want there to be a place for them to live? It’s insane to think we want the Cataclysm to happen. It’s outrageous and most definitely not intelligent.”
Sera wanted to say something, rebuke her somehow. But any potential words froze on her tongue. As much as she hated to admit it, the woman had made a good point.
Tilda seemed to sense a victory in their silence. “Our ways have been tough, I’ll be the first to admit it. We’ve been harsh because we have to be. Yes, we’ve ruled with an iron fist, and we’ve done everything in our power to make sure this man” — she tipped her head toward Aristotle — “didn’t fulfill his plan to mess up the world. To drive it toward the very Cataclysm that you think you’re preventing.”
She paused, and pinched the bridge of her nose as she took a deep breath. “Time and space are fine. The fabric of reality is fine. What you’re doing — messing with the past, trying to change major events — that’s the thing that will drive us to destruction. This young man . . .” Tilda paused and turned a sad gaze on Alexander. “He dies. He must die, for the good of the world. Whether by Pausanius’s hand or my own. I’m here to convince you to let that happen. With words, if possible. If not . . .”
She didn’t need to say the rest. Sera swallowed, feeling uncertain about their mission for the first time. Aristotle was the founder of the whole order of Hystorians — but was it possible that he’d created the organization for selfish reasons? That he simply couldn’t bear to see his favorite student killed? That it wasn’t about the fabric of time, but about a softhearted man who wanted to save a boy who could have been great? Sera hated it, hated this wave of doubt. “But why all the natural disasters?” she asked Tilda. “You’ve seen the state of the world. Plus, I went to the future and I saw the Cataclysm for myself. In a world that the SQ has been running, by the way.”
“Exactly,” the woman replied. “You saw it. You went to the future after correcting some of the Hystorians’ so-called Breaks. You saw a catastrophic future that you created. Again, you’re smart. Think about these things, and you’ll see that I’m right.”
Aristotle turned away from Tilda and walked to stand with Sera and her friends. Alexander, his guards, and Olympias did as well. They stood in a circle, their job now to decide the fate of the entire world. Maybe the universe. No biggie, Sera
thought.
“I don’t trust this woman,” Alexander said. He still held his sword as if he wanted to strike the first person to disagree with him.
“Amen,” Dak added. “I don’t trust that lady any farther than Riq can throw Sera.”
Riq’s face wrinkled up in confusion for a second, but then he just shrugged. “She’s a trickster. Whatever she says we should do, I’m doing the opposite.”
Sera looked at Olympias, but the woman was silent, deep in thought.
Aristotle scratched his long beard and sighed heavily. Then he spoke.
“This woman believes what she’s saying. Of that, I have no doubt. But there’s also a . . . darkness about her. Not to mention the simple fact that she marched twenty armed men down here to kill the boy I spent years training to be a great king someday. And I feel the goodness in each of you.” He stepped forward and took a second to touch Dak, Sera, then Riq on the shoulder.
“I don’t even see a question, to be honest,” the philosopher said. “There’s no way in Hades or the halls of Zeus that I’ll let that woman take the life of Alexander.”
“He is the son of Zeus,” Olympias whispered distantly.
“I don’t need your help,” the young heir said, his eyes slightly moist. “But I appreciate the offer.”
Fear crawled like a caterpillar up Sera’s spine. They only had three soldiers, and Tilda had twenty.
“What are you thinking?” Dak whispered to her.
She shrugged. “I just don’t know what we’re going to do.”
Dak turned to Alexander. “Can you call more of your friends? It looks like we have pretty bad odds.”
Alex spun the sword in his hand. “Today you will learn the greatness of Alexander” was all he said, but it came out sounding like something that should be engraved on a plaque. The young man turned toward Tilda and stepped away from the circle of friends they’d formed, heading straight toward the woman.
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