There was a movement of some kind, just outside the walls. Leathery wings. Bats returning home after their hunting, hiding themselves in cracks in the stones. It must be near dawn. How many days had passed? How long had she slept? Why had she slept here at all?

She recalled only snatches of what had passed in the hours before she’d arrived here. A hunger. A feeding. The feeling of her body swelling with pleasure, warming. What had she eaten?

She remembered the touch of the emperor’s lips on hers. She’d felt the pressure of him against her thigh, his hand on her breast, yet she’d been unable to move. He’d spoken to her. She struggled to remember what he said.

A confession. He had told her how he had sinned against her, but she could remember only the taste of his words, not the sound of them.

Something had terrified him. He’d lost his pride and confidence and turned back into a boy scared of the dark. He knew she lived, and he had buried her because of it.

She quivered and then cried out as her skin shifted against the chain. Each link burned and cut her flesh. She tried to still herself, hoping that her body would cease screaming if she were immobile.

It was airless, or nearly so, in this crypt. They’d bricked up most of the air holes near the roof. The window upstairs was gone, too, she could sense that much, and when she stilled herself and stretched her senses —what strangeness, to be able to feel the edges of things far beyond her sight— she knew more. They’d placed a layer of stone outside the mausoleum’s walls and then a layer of alabaster, sparing no expense, finishing the structure as she herself had meant to do. She could feel the chisels, the inscriptions carved into its surface. She could feel the march of the guards, several of them, encircling the building, armored as if for battle.

Why would they have done such a thing, after they’d placed her here, still living? Tricking her people, she guessed.

Octavian Caesar had stood on the steps of the mausoleum, looking over the crowd. Cleopatra could smell his fear still lingering there.

The queen is dead, Octavian told her people. She killed herself in grief for Mark Antony. It was an honorable death, though it went against the wishes of Rome.

Her people would have suspected her murdered but not dared challenge him. Cities that resisted the Romans ended in ashes. The people of Alexandria would have mourned instead, torn out their hair and knelt, processed about the mausoleum, singing and drinking. She could still hear the echoes of it.

The queen is dead. Long live the emperor. Hail Caesar!

This was a Roman city now.

She heard a man breaking into drunken song out on the street, the guards hushing him. She was suddenly filled with wrath. Would she be doomed to listen to the world forever, trapped away from it?