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?”
Metal screeched across metal. The observatory roof looked undamaged from the ground, but it was battered, dented. Slowly the dome awning squealed open as Jess frantically cranked the mechanical winch by the stairs. She had no idea how long the opening in the clouds would last. Could the Earth have been knocked over? No, it spun like a top, a giant gyroscope. Even if it was sucked away from the sun, the northern hemisphere would still point the same way.
“Where are you, my friends?” she whispered, barely hoping to hope.
Staring up, the dots of stars appearing as the roof’s mouth shuddered open. The tail of Ursa Minor rewarded her. And then Ursa Major. The simple pleasure of something so familiar tingled the back of her scalp. Something of her old world remained in this dark, alien place she’d been transported into.
“What are we looking for?” Giovanni asked, stamping his feet. On each breath, a white plume of vapor circled his head in the glow of his headlamp.
“Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,” explained Jess, “they’re all visible to the naked eye, but I really want to find Venus. It’s the third brightest thing in the sky, after the sun and moon. It’s what you see at sunset, at twilight before sunrise, the yellow disk that people think is a star. But it’s not. It’s Venus.” Even if they didn’t use the telescope, the observatory tower was the best place to get a view.