The Emperor's Omen

Oscar Carter was failing Roman History, which was why he was standing in front of two thousand years of it, texting.

Maya: Thorn keeps staring at u

Oscar: bc i’m his favorite

Maya: bc u haven’t taken a single note

Around him the museum’s new exhibit hummed with climate control and boredom. ROME: EMPIRE OF HOURS, the banner said. Twenty-three students drifted past coins and busts and cracked pottery while Dr. Thorn’s voice carried down the gallery like he was narrating a funeral no one had agreed to attend.

“And this,” Thorn said, stopping, “is why I requested this trip.”

Oscar looked up. The professor stood beside a case in the center of the room, and for the first time all semester the old man looked properly awake. Inside the case sat half of a bronze medallion. Just half. Cracked down the middle, edges ragged, green with age. Two faces had been worked into the metal, back to back, staring opposite ways. One of them had gone missing with the missing half. The other stared straight at Oscar.

“Janus," Thorn said. “God of doorways. Beginnings. Endings.” He smiled at the class, but his eyes stayed on Oscar. “The Romans believed he saw both ways down the corridor of time. Mr. Carter. Since you’ve been so quiet today, come closer.”

A few people laughed. Oscar pushed his phone into his pocket and shuffled forward.

“Tell me what you see.”

“Uh.” Oscar leaned toward the glass. “Old bronze guy. Half an old bronze guy.”

“Look closer.”

He did. And this is the part he could never explain afterward, no matter who asked: the case was open. Not all the way. Not so you’d notice. Just a hairline seam where sealed glass should have met sealed glass, and a maintenance latch sitting unclipped in the shadow at the side. He never decided to reach in. His hand just moved, like it had gotten permission from somebody who wasn’t him.

“Mr. Carter—” Maybe Maya. Maybe nobody.

His fingertip touched the bronze. The face turned. Two thousand years of corroded metal shifted under his finger like something with a pulse, the single face of Janus rotating toward him, and somewhere a sound started up underneath the alarm, underneath the floor, underneath his own heartbeat. Low and enormous. A door the size of the world dragging open on its hinge.

“Wait,” Dr. Thorn said. He didn’t sound nearly scared enough, and he said it too late anyway.

The museum tore in half. The floor came up. The ceiling came down. His phone hit his hip hard enough to bruise, or his hip hit the phone, he couldn’t tell which. Light snapped sideways. His stomach dropped through his shoes and the floor and every century that had ever pretended to stay where you left it.

For one impossible second he was falling down a corridor with two ends. At the far end stood a man in white with a gold band on his wrist, asleep. No. Dreaming. And then the man’s eyes came open, found him mid-fall, and held. Not surprised. Just certain, the way you’d look at someone you’d been expecting for a long time. For one sick second it felt less like falling than like being reeled in.

Then Oscar hit the ground.

Dirt. That came first: dirt, packed and hot and stinking. Then the iron weight clamped around his ankle. Then the flies, crawling along a wooden ceiling above his face.

He was lying in straw that had stopped being straw a long time ago. The smell was animals and sweat and waste, and something older underneath all of it that he didn’t have a name for. His hoodie stuck to him. And the phone, still in his pocket, digging into his hip. His hand went to it before he’d even finished thinking, flattening over the denim, pressing it down out of sight. Eighty-four percent. No signal at all. The only piece of home he had left, and every instinct in him said don’t let them see it.

“It wakes,” said a voice. Latin.

Oscar had failed Latin two semesters running, and here was the horrible thing: the words weren’t nothing. It wakes. He caught the shape of it, the roots, the way you half-recognize a song through a wall. But that was all he got. The man kept talking and the rest came too fast, run together, bent by an accent his textbook had never once made a sound like, and the meaning slid off and was gone. Enough to know the sentence was about him. Nowhere near enough to understand it. He turned his head. Faces stared back through the gloom, a dozen men chained along the wall of a pen, watching him the way you watch weather you know you can’t outrun. Past a barred gate there was torchlight. Voices. A city grinding awake.

“Okay,” Oscar said. It came out smaller than he wanted. “Okay. Either this is a lawsuit, or I’m dead.”

The pen went silent like he’d fired a gun. A man near the gate made a sign against evil. Another one whispered something with the word daemon in it, and Oscar knew that word. Everybody knows that word.

“No,” he said fast. “No, no, no. Not a demon. Student. Broke student. Very non-demonic.”

It came out in English, quick and alien, and the whole pen flinched back from the sound of it. Then the gate crashed open and two men filled the doorway. Leather. Iron. Faces that cruelty had bored a long time ago, right up until they landed on the hoodie, the jeans, the white sneakers glowing ghost-pale in all that filth.

The bigger one crouched, took Oscar’s jaw in one hand, and turned his face into the torchlight the way you’d check a horse’s teeth. He said something fast and hard, and Oscar caught a word in it, maybe two, and lost the rest in the speed of it. Then the man waited, like Oscar owed him an answer.

“I don’t—” His chest pulled tight until the words snapped off. “I don’t understand. Please. I don’t understand.”

And that was the truth and a lie at the same time, and the gap between them was the most frightening thing yet: he understood just enough to know how much he didn’t.

The grip tightened. Behind the guards, out in the brightening street, he could see it now. Columns. Real ones. Laundry strung between brick walls, a slice of forum, a temple roof catching the first of the sun. And past all of it, huge and impossible, a city that an hour ago had been rubble under glass, alive now, loud enough to swallow him whole.

Rome.

The guard hauled him up. The chain came off his ankle and a rope went around his wrists, and Oscar twisted his bound hands toward his hip as they pulled him, trying to keep the lump of the phone covered, willing them not to look down. They didn’t. They dragged him out of the pen and into the street, toward a wooden platform at the center of a square where a crowd had already started to gather.

A block. An auction block. There were people being sold up there.

“No,” Oscar said, and dug his heels in. It did nothing. “No, wait. Listen to me—”

Then the light changed. Thinned. Went yellow. The shadows down the street sharpened to knife edges, and the crowd’s roar stumbled and came apart, a thousand faces tipping up at once as the sun, the huge ordinary climbing morning sun, began to go out.

The guards stopped walking. Even they looked up.

Oscar stood there with his wrists bound, alone in the wrong thousand years, and ran the only arithmetic nobody else in that square could run. Moon. Sun. Alignment. A total eclipse, right on schedule, except he was the only one here who’d ever been told it was coming.

The last sound left in the world was the rope creaking around his wrists, as every single person in the square turned away from the dying sun to look at the boy who’d fallen out of nowhere.