The last thing Alexi saw before the portal closed was the chamber ceiling, the quite intricate details of it. And also, her own face reflected by the mirrors overhead that she only paid attention to as she was being sucked deeper into the portal.
This was unusual for Alexi. Alexi thought everything through. Alexi had a five-year academic plan, a colour-coded filing system, and an emergency contact list that she updated every six months. She had once spent forty-five minutes researching the optimal brand of field notebook before purchasing one. She was not, by any measure, a person who jumped into glowing purple holes in the ground.
And yet.
Tina, she thought, which explained everything and nothing simultaneously, and then the hole closed behind her and she landed.
She landed in a garden.
To be more precise, she landed in a large ornamental planter containing a very expensive-looking shrub-- which, by the way, did not survive the impact.
She lay there for a moment, staring up at a sky that had a particular shade of blue that seemed untouched by any grey. The particular 'grey' of pollution, which, in her opinion is the normal.
She was only starting to feel a little meditative when--
A small child appeared above her, peering over the edge of the planter with enormous dark eyes.
Alexi stared at the child.
The child stared at Alexi.
"Hello," Alexi said in English, in her most careful tone, careful enough to not startle the child and actually secure some 'information' about where the hell she landed.
But maybe, destiny had other plans, or so she thought to herself after the child screamed and ran away inside.
Alexi closed her eyes briefly. Then she climbed out of the planter.
The house was massive.
She figured this out within about ninety seconds of being escorted inside by two servants. They’d appeared the second the child started screaming, and both were currently looking at her the way people look at a problem they’ve decided to outsource to someone else.
The entry hall alone was twice the size of her apartment. The floors were marble, and the walls were covered in geometric tiles--patterns she recognized with that bittersweet feeling of a historian looking at something that wouldn’t exist in five hundred years.
She was shown into a reception room and left there with the very firm implication that she should stay put.
Naturally, she moved immediately. She was a historian, and the room had stuff in it.
There was a ceramic bowl on a low table that was, she was fairly certain, at least three centuries old even by the standards of this era. There were actual books--properly bound luxuries--stacked on a shelf with the casual energy of a family that had always been rich enough to own them.
Through the window, she could see a servant outside in the garden, trying to re-stake the shrub she’d just assassinated. He had the expression of a man who had decided not to ask any questions.
Where is Tina? she thought, for the fourteenth time. What year is it? she thought, for the first.
She scanned the books. The script on the spines was, she recognized, was Byzantine Greek. The style of the binding told her something else. Even the dust--thick on the top, disturbed on the bottom-- told her this family bought books for the aesthetic and only actually read a few.
She was doing this to avoid thinking about the portal. She was very aware she was doing this.
The door opened.
The woman who entered was maybe fifty, wearing clothes that confirmed Alexi's theory about the century while making her feel like she’d shown up to a black-tie event in trekking boots. Which was, she realized with a fresh hit of horror, basically exactly what had happened. The woman looked at Alexi with the expression of someone who hadn't been surprised since the Crusades and wasn't about to start now.
Behind her: a guy, maybe twenty, who was definitely surprised and doing a terrible job of hiding it. He had the look of someone who actually read those lower-shelf books.
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Behind him: the kid from the planter, peering around the door with a look of fascinated hostility.
The woman spoke.
Alexi’s Byzantine Greek was solid, but she quickly discovered that "academic" Greek and "native speaker in a specific regional dialect" Greek were two very different things. She caught about seventy percent of it. The rest she filled in with vibes and... context clues.
The gist: Who are you, where did you come from, and why were you assassinating our shrubbery?
Alexi straightened up. She’d prepared for nothing, but in the forty seconds she’d been alone, she’d somehow prepared for everything. Years of academic training, field work, and a lifetime of being Tina’s friend--which usually meant solving "unexpected situations" on the fly--had led to this.
"My name is-" she started, then caught herself.
Alexi Papadimitriou was a great name in the 2020s. Here, it would probably sound like she was having a stroke. She needed something plausible. Something Byzantine.
She had exactly one second.
"Alexandra," she said. "Of... Trebizond."
Trebizond was a real place. It was far enough away to explain her weird accent, and she’d written a paper on it once. This was either a high IQ move or the exact kind of lie that gets you killed in chapter three in the historical fiction she read before.
The woman’s face didn't move. "Alexandra of Trebizond," she repeated, filing the name under Suspicious but Unverifiable.
"I’m a scholar," Alexi added, because it was true and "scholar" was the ultimate 'get out of jail free' card in a house full of books. "I was traveling to the city for research when I got separated from my companion." She paused. (This part was actually true in a painful way.) "I apologize for the planter. I..I tripped."
The young man made a muffled noise. His mother shot him a look, and he immediately fixed his face.
"You tripped," the woman said. "Into the planter."
"It was a very... sudden trip."
Silence. The child whispered something to the doorframe.
The woman watched Alexi with eyes that had clearly been catching people in lies as a hobby for decades. Finally, she muttered something to the young man--the dialect thickening too much to follow--and he nodded and left.
"You will stay," she told Alexi. It wasn't a suggestion. "Until we understand your situation."
"That's very kind."
"It’s practical," the woman countered. "A woman alone in this city is a problem I’d rather contain."
Alexi didn't love the word contain, but she decided to ignore it for now.
The woman nodded once and walked out, leaving the child in the doorway.
The child looked at Alexi. Alexi looked at the child.
"Did you really come from Trebizond?" the kid asked in slow, extremely loud Greek, clearly convinced the foreigner was a bit slow.
"...Yes," Alexi said.
"Trebizond is very far."
"Very."
"You don't have any bags."
Alexi opened her mouth, then closed it. "I travel light."
The child pointed at Alexi’s hand--the field notebook, the two pens behind her ear, and the very modern university lanyard she’d totally forgotten to hide.
"What’s that?" the child asked, pointing at the ID card.
Alexi tucked it under her collar in one smooth motion.
"A talisman," she said. "From Trebizond."
The child tilted her head. "Is it magic?"
"...Probably," Alexi said. It was honestly the most truthful thing she’d said all day.
She was given a room.
It was a good room--a guest room, clearly, maintained with the slightly impersonal tidiness of a space kept ready for people who weren't actually expected. There was a window. There was a bed. There was a small table with a lamp and a ceramic pitcher of water, which Alexi drank from immediately because her mouth tasted like dust. As it turned out, time travel tasted like dust, copper, and the specific anxiety of a person who had just made an irreversible decision.
She sat on the bed.
She opened her field notebook to a clean page. At the top, she wrote in the small, precise handwriting she used for lab notes: Working Hypotheses.
She sat for a moment, the pen hovering. Then she wrote:
-
This is real.
She stared at the words until they felt true.
-
Tina is somewhere in this city.
-
I am in Byzantine Constantinople (est. date unknown). Current status: Residing in a noble household under a false name. Resources: No money, no identification, no change of clothes. Assets: Field notebook, three pens, university lanyard (concealed), modern trainers (nightmare), working knowledge of Byzantine history/culture/language (approximate), and the ability to look more confident than I feel.
She noted that last one as a skill she’d developed specifically from being Tina’s friend--and one that was apparently now her primary survival strategy.
-
I need to find Tina before Tina finds trouble.
-
I need to find Tina, who has already found trouble.
She looked at the ceiling. From somewhere else in the house, she could hear the child explaining to someone--a sibling, probably, or a very patient servant--that the lady from Trebizond had a magic talisman and had spawned directly out of the garden.
Alexi closed her notebook.
"Tina," she said quietly to the empty room, in the tone she usually reserved for moments of deepest frustration, "I am going to be so incredibly insufferable about this."
The lamp flickered. Outside the window, Constantinople hummed and glittered--six hundred years before either of them were born, and entirely indifferent to the fact that Alexi was currently panicking in its guest room.
Alexi picked up her pen.
She had work to do.