Empire of Lies

45 FONTAINEBLEAU

The instant of travel was just that—instantaneous. But despite its extreme brevity, it hit Kamal like a cosmic slap and tore through him with the most intense and fearsome sensations he’d ever experienced.

He felt as if his body had been hollowed and turned inside out, his eyes crushed into grains of sand, and his brain sucked inward and compressed to nothingness before suddenly exploding outward and expanding as if to fill the entire universe. He wanted to scream, needed to yell out his agony, and yet weirdly there was no pain and no time to scream, just a cold, silent nothingness. Every cell in his body had been ripped apart and reassembled in the blink of an eye. The journey was over the very second it began.

He was alive. On the ground, somewhere—sometime—but alive.

He felt heavy-headed and sweaty, his senses dulled by a high-pitched thrum in his ears, his eyes swimming as they struggled for focus. But he knew he was definitely alive.

Once, just over a year earlier, he’d got caught up in an unexpected explosion in a Paris apartment building. He and Taymoor had gone there to arrest a suspected extremist, and the man had blown himself up inside his apartment just as they entered it. They’d managed to leap back into the hallway a split second before the detonation and had both escaped serious injury. It had been the most debilitating, shattering sensation he’d ever felt, in mind and in body, and yet it paled in comparison to what he’d just experienced. But what he felt right now—confused, numbed, reduced to only the most basic levels of sentience—reminded him of the explosion’s aftereffects.

This time, though, the fog cleared much faster—and she was there. Crouched on the ground, facing him, just as she had been in what his mind was now reminding him was only a moment ago.

Alive, shaking, glistening with sweat—and naked. Just as, he now realized, he was.

Her face fell further into focus, her expression wild with shock and uncertainty—and the same realization evidently hit her, spurred by the sight of him. She flung her arms around herself to cover her breasts and pulled her thighs together, but her mouth was still ajar, just as Kamal dropped his hands to cover his genitals.

She looked around, her face now alive with wonderment. “Are we…?” She took in the emptiness surrounding them. “It worked,” she added, half stating, half questioning, in a breathless, amazed whisper.

They were in the exact same spot, by the edge of the lake, with the same dense forest breaking off and giving way to the secluded clearing that led to the green, still water. The sun was still out, a bit lower and less potent perhaps but unchallenged in a crisp blue sky.

But the cars were all gone. As were their pursuers.

Only they weren’t alone.

Alarmed voices and shrieks testified to that.

Kamal and Nisreen turned to where the voices were coming from, farther down the lakeshore, to see a gaggle of people—adults and children, two or three families maybe, with a few servants attending to them—picnickers enjoying a day out until it had been disrupted by the sudden appearance of a naked couple.

“Bok,” Kamal muttered.

The men in the picnic party were already on their feet, gesturing and yelling angrily at Kamal and Nisreen, while the women were moving to shield the children’s eyes while turning away themselves.

“Let’s get out of here,” Kamal said as he did a quick scan of their surroundings. It was pretty much as he remembered it, except for four cars parked by the edge of the tree line in the shade, closer to his and Nisreen’s position than to the picnickers.

Old—really old—cars.

Chrome bumpers, spoked wheels, whitewall tires, fender-mounted spare, flip-out windshield, black soft-top roof old.

How old, he wasn’t sure. He’d never seen any on the road—only in pictures and movies and at the Imperial Science Museum.

“There,” he said as he pointed at them.

He bolted toward them, Nisreen on his tail, the men taking a few seconds before realizing what they were going to do and setting off after them.

Kamal reached the nearest car and yanked its door open.

“Get in the other side,” he blurted to Nisreen as he climbed in himself—only to be greeted by an alien sight. The car’s interior looked completely different from anything he was used to. It was literally a museum piece and had a thin, resin steering wheel; a long, spindly gear stick rising from the floor; a thin hand brake stalk rising next to it; two pedals and an unusual, smaller third one where the accelerator normally was; and a small trio of dials in the middle of the bare-bones dashboard, next to a single, basic key—a key that he now turned urgently.

It clicked into position a quarter turn to the right, but wouldn’t go further. It also didn’t start the engine. In fact, it didn’t generate any reaction under the hood.

He clicked it back, then turned it again.

Still nothing.

“What are you doing?” Nisreen asked.

“I don’t know how to start this thing,” Kamal shot back, his eyes urgently scanning the plain dash area in front of him, searching for clues.

He spotted a small round knob sticking out from under the edge of the dashboard. It was connected to a long cable that disappeared into the engine compartment, and he realized it might be some kind of choke. He pulled and turned it. And still got nothing.

“There’s got to be a starter button somewhere,” he said as he searched for one.

Nisreen was looking out the back of the car. “Hurry. They’re almost here.”

He looked back, saw how close the men were, and decided it wasn’t going to work.

“Let’s get out of here,” he told her as he pushed his door open. She did the same as he sprinted around the car, took her by the hand, and led her into the woods.

The men chased after them until they reached the edge of the tree line; then they gave up.

Kamal heard their incensed rants and insults fade away as he and Nisreen advanced farther into the forest.

When he was finally sure they weren’t being followed, he slowed down his pace, then stopped to catch his breath. It was colder than before, especially now in the shade. The sun was paler. They’d gone back thirty thousand days, which probably didn’t equate to an exact number of years—he’d need to do the math later. It certainly didn’t feel like the height of summer, but it didn’t feel like winter either. Spring or fall, perhaps. But cooler. The air had a biting chill.

He looked back. There was no sign of their pursuers.

He turned to Nisreen. She had one arm across her breasts, the other hand down where her thighs met. He noticed her skin was covered in goose bumps, though he didn’t know if that was from the cold or from unease. The sight of her fully naked was a shock to him. He’d never seen her anywhere near that exposed, not given the strict norms of Ottoman society, not given that she was his brother’s wife. Over the years, he’d sometimes imagined her in that light, of course, imagined what she might look like if she were his, if they’d been together, but that’s just what it had been—his imagination. But here, now, despite everything, despite all that had happened and the dire circumstances they were in, seeing her like that was still unexpected enough to make it hard for him to tear his gaze from her.

A gaze that Nisreen noticed.

“Could you stop looking at me like that?”

He snapped back to full consciousness and turned away, feeling embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…” His words stumbled over themselves and he went mute.

Hesitantly, he turned back, wanting to catch her eye.

She was half turned away from him but was also looking over her shoulder at him. “What?”

“We made it,” he told her. “We’re here. Wherever—or whenever here is, anyway.”

She nodded and breathed out with delayed relief, and looked around, taking stock of the quiet forest around them.

“When is here, anyway?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. I had to think fast. We had to jump back to a time before we were alive or it wouldn’t work. So I thought, a hundred years, and that’s roughly 36,500 days, right? But it would have taken too long to translate. Too complicated. So I picked a round number close to it. Thirty thousand.”

“About twenty percent less,” Kamal said. “So we’ve traveled back around eighty years?”

“I guess so.”

He ran a quick mental calculation. “So… around 1354?[6] The time of…”

“Sultan Bayezid VI,” she told him.

Kamal thought about it. He knew it had been a glorious era for the empire. Oil was pumping out of the Arabian desert and feeding new, hungry technologies. The empire was flush with money and enjoying a prosperous, stable period. Bayezid, Murad V’s father, was a dignified, benevolent ruler—just as Murad had turned out to be. He had promoted cultural exchanges between the empire’s diverse communities and hosted an annual interfaith symposium at his palace in Istanbul.

“Could be worse,” Kamal said.

“It’s cold, though. It’s not summer.”

“Doesn’t feel like it, does it?”

He looked around. From his vantage point, out in the middle of the Fontainebleau Forest, nothing seemed different. Elsewhere, of course, he knew things would be very, very different. For better or for worse.

But at least they were alive, and they were free. That was what mattered most.

That, and they were together.

He caught himself staring at her again and averted his eyes once more. But he caught a hint of a smile on her face just as he did. “And this,” he said as he gestured up and down his body, “this was inevitable, I guess?”

“That’s how it works,” she replied. “I told you.” Then, suddenly, a look of panic swept over her and she flicked her gaze onto her forearm. Just as quickly, she breathed out a big sigh of relief.

“What?”

She held it up for him to see. “It’s still there.” She stared at it again. “We have to write it down somewhere. Safeguard it. We can’t afford to lose it.”

“We’re here now,” he said. “But yes, you’re right. We need to memorize it. Or have it tattooed.”

She looked behind her, her expression darkening with worry. “We might need it again. They might come after us. They know the incantation.”

“They’d have to know how far back we traveled to follow us.”

Her face lit up with alarm. “The browser. On your phone. They could find your search history.”

“I busted it up pretty badly. And threw it in the lake. We should be fine.”

“It didn’t look that deep,” she countered.

“I doubt they saw me do it.”

“Are you willing to bet our lives on that?”

He frowned, angry with himself. “I should have saved a bullet for it.” He looked around. It felt too quiet. “We’d better get moving then.”

“Where shall we go?” She hugged herself more tightly, rubbing her arms with her hands to warm them up. “We don’t have clothes or money or anything.”

“One step at a time.” He looked up at the tree cover. There were several more hours of daylight to come. Then he gathered his bearings, came to a decision, and said, “Follow me.”