Nomad (41 page)

“What happened?” he asked.

“He fell through the ice at our cottage, when we were kids.”

“Doesn’t sound like you
killed
him.”

“I told him to go out on the ice.” Jess pulled her legs inward. She wasn’t used to her secret being out. Her entire adult life was a lie, a cover up, but no more. “I was mad at my mother.”

“I’m sure you didn’t mean to hurt him.”

He was right. She meant to hurt her mother. Show her that she couldn’t tell her what to do.

“And that was a long time ago, Jess,” continued Giovanni, “you need to let go. You’ve paid for whatever mistake you might have made, and you were just a child. I’m sure if Billy was here, he wouldn’t want you to suffer like this.”

Even now, more than twenty years past, she could still see little Billy’s eyes. Giovanni was right. She sighed. Billy wouldn’t want her to suffer. She felt a weight lifting. “Maybe.”

“And let me tell you something,” Giovanni added.

Jess felt the oppressive weight of the mountain holding her down. She was happy to move on to something else. “What?”

“I abandoned my father.” Giovanni let out a long sigh. “I told everyone I wanted to explore, be an adventurer, but the truth was I just wanted to be away from him. This whole blood feud with the Tosetti, it consumed him. I think he might have even had people killed. I wanted nothing to do with it. So I ran away, just like you.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.” In Nico’s final words to Jess, he said to ask Giovanni why he was in Antarctica. Now she knew. She didn’t need to ask.

“I might have been able to stop it. I didn’t even try.” Giovanni’s chest shuddered. “I even…I even wished for him to be dead, sometimes, so I could return and be free here.”

Jess didn’t say anything.

“I wished my father dead, and Nico killed him. Maybe I could have stopped that, could have stopped all of this. This is all
my
fault.”

Looking up, Jess saw tears in Giovanni’s eyes. “No more secrets, then.”

“No more secrets.”

Jess settled her head into Giovanni’s stomach, pulling Hector into her.

So tired.

She closed her eyes.

OCTOBER 25
^th

42

C
HIANTI,
I
TALY

IN THE CONICAL beam of light from her headlamp, Jess watched fat purple snowflakes fall in the grainy black soup enveloping her. Looking down, the beam glistened off rocks frozen together in a slurry of mottled black ice and ash. She brought her hands together, blowing on them. A plume of vapor dissipated into the chilled air with each labored breath. “Are you ready yet?” she called out, her voice muffled.

The air was putrid and thick, breathing and speaking difficult from behind the N-95 particulate masks Giovanni had scrounged from his supplies. He brought his scuba tanks up to top, to give everyone a blast of fresh air from time to time. A headache throbbed between Jess’s temples, her senses scrambled, shapes shifting in the darkness. She was lightheaded from whatever they breathed in—hydrogen sulphide, carbon monoxide and dioxide. Slow poisoning, but they had no choice. They had to find her parents.

“One minute, just one second,” Giovanni croaked, his voice disembodied in the darkness.

Jess pulled her mitts back on and sat on top of the generator. She inspected the yellow cords snaking out of it, umbilicals feeding some unseen monster. The purplish snow accumulated in hoary clumps on the rocks.

Eerily quiet.

They finally broke through the tunnel to topside about two hours ago. Jess slept the whole night before, if night was really a thing anymore in this suffocating underworld. For fourteen hours Giovanni let her sleep, said she needed it. She was furious when she awoke, her head splitting in pain, but she went straight back to tearing away the rocks in a panic. Lucca, Raffael, Leone and Giovanni did their best to help, wheezing and coughing. By six p.m., the five of them had opened a gap big enough for her to squeeze through.

And she scrambled out.

Up top.

Into this blackness.

Nothing seemed to be where she remembered. She stumbled around for ten minutes in the freezing darkness, gagging and gasping for air in a black tomb that used to be the world.

“Ben! Celeste!” she’d screamed, her voice hoarse. “Roger, are you out here?”

Giovanni found her, brought her a coat and mitts, brought the oxygen tanks up. For another hour she circled, trying to make sense of the piles of rock looming in the small pool of light from her headlamp. But nothing.

No answering calls.

Just silence. No crickets. No rustling of leaves. No sound at all.

It seemed nothing was left alive. Had the world fallen into the black hole? Her father always said that the rules of physics disappeared at the event horizon. While she slept, had they passed over, in the rumbling thunder, into a netherworld? The world above seemed to have collapsed into a dark shell, floating disconnected. Her mind barely felt connected to her body in the blackness.

“Okay, now.” Giovanni’s voice echoed.

Jess pulled one mitt off and stood. The cold bit into the stump of her left leg. It rubbed painfully against the ill-fitting prosthetic. She’d never get a new one now. One more in a long list of things that were no more. How long could they even survive in this?

Leaning over, she grabbed the red handle of the generator and pulled back as hard as she could. It sputtered, then roared to life.

She looked up. “My God…”

Six floodlights glowed to life. Through swirling ash and snow, they illuminated the castle and walls, or what was left of them. Most of it was gone, nothing more than a pile of rubble. The southern and western walls were flattened; the two-story museum crushed under a boulder the size of a semi-truck. Only the north-eastern tower remained, the observatory dome unscathed. In the middle of the devastation, L’Olio, the ancient olive tree, stood proud. Its leaves stripped and branches scorched, but still it stood.

“
Sparsi
!” Giovanni waved his hands at Leone and Lucca and Raffael. “See if you can find anything.” He hobbled forward, intent on helping, even bandaged and battered.

Jess put her mitt back on. Over-sized, they were from Giovanni’s arctic expedition boxes. He had crates of gear stored in the caves, none of it her size.

The air temperature dropped to near freezing already, down from almost sixty Fahrenheit less than forty hours before. But it fluctuated. On the side of the castle closest to Monterufoli, it was ten degrees warmer. The temperature depended on the direction of the wind.

Jess didn’t let her mind dwell on any of it. Only one thing circled in her mind: she had to find her mother and father. They were out here somewhere. If they didn’t find them soon, they’d freeze to death soon.

Shots like cannon echoed from the darkness.

It had to be Monterufoli volcano, invisible in the choking murk. The snow thickened, flakes sticking to her eyelashes.

“Over here!” Giovanni yelled. “Jessica, over here!”

Jess bolted upright and almost slipped off the frozen rock pile she was trying to get across. “Did you find them?” Her heart raced.

“We found something, not sure what.” His voice a muffled echo in the darkness.

Doing her best to quick step through the boulders and rocks, Jess tried to triangulate Giovanni’s voice. “Where are you?” she yelled, stopping still and closing her eyes.

“This way!”

His voice was louder to her right. Climbing over a boulder, she reversed course. She’d gone around the back wall, the floodlights a dim glow from where she was. Slipping and sliding across the ashen snow, Giovanni’s outline finally emerged from the gloom. He was gathered with the workers and Leone by a pile of rubble next to the twisted remains of the iron portico gate. A strong northerly wind began blowing an hour ago, finally clearing away some of the putrid stench.

She arrived just as Leone heaved away a chunk of flat concrete. Lucca and Raffael stood back. Giovanni’s lips pressed together. He grimaced and looked at Jess.

“What?” She skidded to a stop.

There, sticking from the pile of rock, a hand. Not just any hand. Jess recognized the gold wedding band. Her father’s.

“Get him out,” Jess shrieked, diving at the rocks.

Leone and Giovanni jumped in beside her, grunting to pull away a huge slab.

Ben’s face appeared in the glare of their headlamps. Even in the dim, unnatural light, Jess saw the purple bruises, his skull crushed, his lips blue. She brought one hand to her mouth and sobbed. Giovanni wrapped his left arm around her, his right hanging in a sling under his winter coat.

Gently, Leone reached in and pulled away another wall fragment.

The blood drained from Jess’s face, her knees buckling. Giovanni strained to hold her up. A keening, animal wail echoed off the rocks. Jess realized the sound was coming from her own lips.

Celeste’s body was below Ben’s, his arms around her, cradling her. Her face as blue and bruised as his.

Her mother and father.

Dead.

“Come on, let’s go in,” Giovanni wheezed. Jess knew he was in pain. “Nothing we can do for them now.” He squeezed Jess.

She slipped free, dropped to her knees. Kneeling, she stroked her father’s hair, kissed his cold cheek. She leaned deeper and kissed her mother’s forehead, the skin freezing cold, hard.

“Have the Lucca and Raffa search around here, see if we can find Roger,” Giovanni said to Leone.

“Should we bring them in?” Leone asked.

“No.” Jess pushed herself up. They almost looked asleep, their arms around each other. “Leave them here, as they are.”

What could have been so important that they came up here?

Jess squinted.

What was that under her father?

Leaning in, she grabbed a strap. Pulled. A backpack slithered out from between Ben and Celeste. She sat in the snow and looked inside to find his super-ruggedized laptop along with some notepads. A metal box was in there too, filled with old tape spool and CDs. Taking a deep breath, she rocked her head back. Is this what he came out for? His work? The north wind blew hard. Jess shivered and stared into the blackness above.

Blackness.

But not blackness. Tiny dots of light danced across it.

“Stars,” Jess whispered, pointing up. “Stars!” she yelled.

Giovanni and Leone looked up, their mouths dropping open.

“What time is it?” Jess got to her feet, closing up and shouldering the backpack.

“Almost midnight,” Giovanni replied.

“Come on, I need your help.” She strode forward two steps, but stopped and turned. “And Leone, could you get us some paper and pens?”