First day, she cried.

  Not immedietely. Immedietely she had been too busy -- too busy smiling at the monk, too busy drinking tea she didn't taste, too busy nodding at things she half understood and trying to look like a person who had meant to be here. Her scientist brain had been running so loud, so fast, cataloguing everything that there had been no room for anything else.

  But then the monk -- Brother Ioannis, she had gathered, though she wasn't entirely sure if Ioannis was his name, or his title, or something completely else -- had shown her to a small room off the archive corridor, plainly furnished, clearly a guest room for visiting scholars, and said something that included the word 'rest ' and gently closed the door behind him.

  The silence that came after hit her like a wave she hadnt seen coming.

  She sat on the edge of the narrow bed.

  She buried her face in her palms, in an attempt of letting the warmth of her palm ground her.

  She looked at her hands. A small ink stain from her own pen, from her own life, from a morning that had existed this morning and was now -- how far away? how many centuries away? She couldn't even --

  She didn't even know what year it was. Not yet. She had spent the entire day in hopes of waking up in her bed the next moment, like it was all, just a weird dream. Strange is how the moment never came.

  She knew the Byzantine empire. She knew it the way she knew most history, which was to say: impressionistically, enthusiastically, and with a complete inability to attach specific events to specific dates. She knew the broad shape of it. She knew it the way you know a song you've never learned the words to -- the melody, not the meaning.

  Alexi would know what year it was.

  The thought arrived like a bruise being pressed.

  Alexi, who was not here. Alexi, who had been in the chamber, who had shouted her name, who was -- where? Still in the present? Ofcourse. Where else would she be? Was she still standing in the underground chamber right now, alone, calling Tina's name into the stone?

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  Was she--

  Tine pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes this time.

  Do not spiral, she told herself.

  She breathed.

  She breathed again.

  Recalling the mindfullness sessions she learnt about in her second year psychology elective.

  She opened her bag, ran a quick assessment of things she had with her. Then she noticed something else.

  The compass.

  The same compass that pulled her here.

  She took it out.

  It sat in her palm, warm as always, the needle steady. She turned slowly -- north, it found immediately, the needle swinging to orient.

  You are somewhere, she told herself. You are in a specific place at a specific time and both of those things can be determined with sufficient data. You are a researcher. Start researching.

  She put the compass back in her bag.

  She lay down in her clothes because she didn't have anything else to change into and she was very tired and the ceiling had painted beams and they were honestly quite beautiful.

  She cried for a while. Quietly, because the walls were stone but still.

  Then she stopped, because there was no point continuing past a certain threshold and she had reached it.

  Then she slept.

  On the second day, she started learning.

  Brother Ioannis was, it turned out, almost supernaturally patient. He was the kind of elderly scholar who had encountered enough unusual things over a long career that he had developed a broad working definition of unusual and Tina, apparently, fit within it. He fed her. He answered her careful, oblique questions about the city and the empire and the current year -- she asked this last one as casually as she could, as if confirming something she'd half-forgotten, and he answered it without apparent suspicion and she did the mental arithmetic twice to be sure.

  She was in the mid-1600s. Constantinople.

  The empire was in a particular political moment that she could feel without being able to name -- a tension in how people spoke about the palace, a careful quality to certain words, the way Brother Ioannis would occasionally pause before answering a question about current governance, the way you pause before stepping on ice you're not sure will hold.

  She noted all of this.

  She borrowed a piece of parchment from the archive -- Brother Ioannis allowed this with the air of a man who had long since made peace with scholars treating his resources as communal property -- and she wrote down everything she knew, in the smallest handwriting she could manage, on both sides.

  What she knew about current court structure. What she knew about this period specifically -- which was less than she wanted and more than nothing. The name she'd chosen. The cover story she was assembling: foreign scholar, came overland, separated from her travelling companions. The linguistic gap she was managing with a combination of careful modern Greek, miming, and the expression that conveyed I understood more than I'm letting on which was, in this context, not even untrue.

  She did not write down anything about the compass.

  She was not ready to think about the compass yet.