In the expanse of time, Aileen was able to pinpoint Hypatia's death closely. By closely, I mean a few days. When this occurred I will admit that I wondered whether or not she had done this on purpose. Usually, she could find historic events if I described them well enough to her, and drop us right into the thick of it - or close by. In this case, however, she lacked her usual accuracy. She also had a motivation for waiting to interact with the woman. Aileen adored Hypatia. She accompanied the woman to classes, asked questions and gave answers. She was tactful though, far more than she usually was with people. At this point, Aileen had come to understand people a bit better, and so she didn't make her interactions too awkward by seeming too smart or knowing too much.

Soon, over the course of the few days that we stayed with the graceful philosopher woman, I realized that Aileen was teaching Hypatia. She was giving the woman little tidbits of knowledge here and there through their little discussions over dinner and at the end of classes. Aileen even gained the teacher's respect, and was allowed to introduce a topic to the class one day. It was something clearly surprising to the crowd of students, but not unwelcome by them. Her appearance of youth didn't matter to them, what mattered was her knowledge.

I worried that Aileen's interactions, and mine, would throw off the path of history too much, and we would not be able to accomplish what we had come to do - that is, witness Hypatia's death. Aileen assuaged these concerns by assuring me that her interactions were not sufficient to do this, and added some comment about not being able to change the particle interactions enough - I didn't understand that part though.

None of that helped the knot in my stomach that we were befriending someone we planned to see die. Aileen demanded it to see this event though, and that was why we had yet again jumped to this time.

One odd thing that I noted was that Hypatia had remembered us. This surprised me because we had never met a historical figure twice, and I'd always wondered if our actions actually left an impression on history through Aileen's time travel. I ahd never expected our actions to actually change history, but apparently, they did. This concerned me, mildly, because I wondered if we jumped through the past enough whether or not I would have no future to go home too. But yet again Aileen assured me that nothing would change in my time in the future, and that once this was all over I'd go right back there as she had promised at the start of our journey together.

Yet, even that wasn't my primary worry. Our goal being messed up or even the future being destroyed wasn't at the forefront of my mind. It was Aileen. Her mind.

"Have you ever had a friend die before?" I asked her, as we walked down the street from where we would watch Hypatia commute. We had done this for the past couple of days, since Aileen indicated that we were close to the day. Today, she had said it was very likely.

It felt eerie, going to the same place every day to wait and see if we would watch a good woman die for the sake of Aileen's curiosity and research, but it was hardly the worst thing Aileen and I had done so far in our travels.

Aileen shrugged in response to my question. "No. Have you?"

"No." I replied, having to admit that I hadn't. However, I felt like I understood the concept of death better than Aileen did. "I did have my mother die though. This is going to hurt you. You won't like this, no matter what you learn from it."

"I have seen your kind die before. All your kind must die eventually," she replied, with a tiny shrug. "She is already dead in my time."

My stomach churned and I felt a weight in my chest. My mind flashed to images I wished that I had never gained. I'd seen some terrible things while on this adventure with Aileen. The Holocaust, nuclear bombings, slavery the world over, torture, executions, and all manner of sorrowful human states. Hearing Aileen brush it off flippantly was almost horrendous, and it would have been had I not reminded myself that her species clearly had very different thought processes and priorities than mine.

"Then why do you want to badly to see this, if it will not be different?" I asked.

Aileen seemed to think for a moment, and then nodded. "Because it may be."

She did feel empathy. She had stated as such. She did make bonds, and very human bonds at that. I remembered that while Aileen was a different species from my self by her own admission, she also claimed to be a type of human still. This girl from the future had feelings, and perhaps ones that she wasn't aware of through the life she had lived in the future.

We reached the street corner, and time passed. I tried to strike up a conversation with Aileen, to convince her this was a bad idea or to ease her into the subject of loved ones dying, so she would understand what was about to happen. However, she did not seem interested in conversation and gave curt answers. She would play with dust on the ground instead, blowing it into the air and running her hand through it. She even put some in her eye and one point and made a fuss about it till she was able to remove it using her Manus Dei.

It wasn't long after this that Hypatia's chariot appeared at the street end. We watched, and sure enough, a small mob of the cities Christian population had begun to filter into the street ahead of her. She stopped as she approached them, and only tried to run too late as the Christians surrounded her and one grabbed her, dragging her down from the chariot into their midst.

"Why are they doing that?" Aileen asked, and tilted her head along with the question, as the crowd began dragging Hypatia away screaming. The woman was kicked and battered as they went, her clothes stripped off as well. Aileen didn't seem fazed by it, and even maintained the use of human body language as we walked - observing from a distance.

"She disagrees with them," I explained. "She doesn't believe in their god, and believes in something different, and that difference puts them at odds, I suppose. Though to be honest, I'm not really sure why. Someone in power ordered that she died, so people listened and decided to kill her. "

As I watched, while we approached an ancient church, I felt the same things that I had when seeing any other human suffering. I couldn't figure out why they would do it. What it was that necessitated this in their minds. It just seemed foolish. Why not speak with words if your ideas were so great?

This thought kept me from noticing that Aileen had stopped walking. The crowd itself had stopped right outside of the church, and I noticed as one of them threw a stone at Hypatia. It split the skin on her head and blood poured out. Another picked up a stone and more followed. Soon, she was beginning to become a battered, naked, bloody heap on the ground. Between the sight of her death and Aileen - I was more frightened and disgusted by Aileen.

Perhaps that was just a result of how jaded I was at this point, how much torture and sorrow I had seen. After all, between the trench warfare of the first world war and the gruesome slaughter of Africans in the congo, this was nothing. The Crusades had been pretty bad too, though surprisingly clean compared to what I had expected.

But I had never seen Aileen cry. Ever

"Why?" Aileen asked. She asked this, as I heard Hypatia's death wails from behind me rise above the crowd. I didn't want to turn to see what they were doing to her. History had said she was cut to pieces. Tears streamed down Aileen's face like a river. She did not sniffle or wail. The tears just fell, like water streaming from a faucet, in single lines down her cheeks. Her mouth hung agape.

"I wish I could tell you," I said as I walked back towards her, simultaneously blocking the scene from her gaze with my body. I tried to reach out and hug her, but she refused this and pushed past me.

"Stop," she said.

"What?" I asked, but she didn't' respond. She wasn't talking to me.

"STOP!" she shouted, as she walked forward towards the mob, who had already killed their victim.

Only one or two noticed her. Then, she shouted it again, and I realized that she had not been asking a question nor making a command to them. She had been speaking to the world.

The men vanished. They vanished in a sudden moment, turned to smoke upon the air without so much as the snap of fingers or the wave of a hand. It took me several seconds to register what had occurred, and by that time Aileen had almost reached Hypatia's body. Her tears formed tiny wet spots on the dusty ground as she walked.

Just before she reached Hypatia's corpse, she stopped, stooped over, and unfastened her sandles. She threw them away from her, and then walked forward. When she had closed the distance she did not lean down to touch Hypatia, or say anything. She just stood in place, staring at the body as her tears formed tiny puddles in the sand.

I ran over to her, but she did not acknowledge my presence.

"This...is what I was talking about, Aileen. I'm sorry, I tried to warn you, I'm sorry." I pleaded, but she continued to stare. She didn't ask any questions, she didn't move. Nothing moved.

The world itself, I realized, was frozen around me.

I do not know how long that moment lasted. When it was over, Aileen had changed. She now wore a pallium, as Hypatia had. She looked older now, like a woman instead of girl, and she was taller. It was eerie, and caused me to panic for a moment, as I hadn't see any of these changes take place.

"Elijah?" she asked, her demeanor not at all unlike the woman who lay dead before us. The world was moving now, and bystanders stood in shocked confusion here and there. Someone shouted something, and a few others ran away from the area. To their perception, I reasoned, an entire mob of people had just vanished, to be replaced by just Aileen and me. To them, a miracle or a tragedy had just occurred, and we were the gods which had presided over it..

"Aileen, are you alright?"

She turned to face me. She did look like an adult now. The odd mix of childishness and maturity that often graced her face was gone, and the cloth she had wrapped around herself billowed with the breeze which made the powerful morning sun of Alexandria tolerable.

"I...I don't know." Aileen replied, and tears started forming in her eyes again. "Elijah, I don't know. I don't like this."

I realized that this was what I should have shown her sooner. Something personal. All the shows of death that she had seen so far were terrible, yes, but to her, these events were probably no different than watching a movie of terrible events. She had never known the people of Nagasaki or been friends with the slaves of America. She hadn't understood the weight of seeing people die in mass under communism or in the holocaust.

I had taken her all over history, to see terrible things, but without the weight of human experience attached to them. At least, that was what I thought, so I went with it.

"Aileen, this is why all of those things were terrible. This is why I showed you all of that death and horror. You asked to see my kind's worst, the most backward and terrible things we had done, to know our extremes. All of those people that died were just like her. Friends, family, they had people that knew them and adored them as you admired her, and -"

"No." Aileen replied, interrupting me. "They were not. Those that killed them, were not."

Her voice was different, I realized. She almost felt like a different person. The Aileen I knew was innocent and childish, this person was an adult.

"I am not what you call naive," Aileen said. ", but you mistake curiosity for the same, and consider it foolishness. I am capable of understanding your empathy, and understanding the feelings you have for the events we have seen. But you mistake familiarity for empathy."

"I don't understand," I replied, not grasping what she was saying. It seemed like nonsense to me. What was clear, was that she was telling me I was wrong. She was presenting herself in the way that she was for that reason too, I realized. She was trying to not appear childish. She had altered her appearance so that I would take her seriously, and so that she would appear strong even though she was feeling extremely weak, I reasoned.

"This was insightful," she said, and in a moment that I couldn't recall, she had returned to her normal, childish-looking self. She approached me and then hugged me around my waist, tears starting to fall again. "It was also sad."

I placed a hand on her head, and then crouched down and returned her hug. It occurred to me that just a few nights ago I thought I had finally figured out how the humans of the future worked, and how they thought. Now I realized that I was still just beginning to understand Aileen and her version of humanity. Likewise, she was just beginning to understand humanity, and perhaps feeling a little to strongly what it was like to be one of us.