Giovanni shivered. “Okay, a yellow disk.”
Jess finished winding the roof back and walked to the telescope, inspected it. Not damaged at all. She wheeled the gimbals and it swung back and forth. Perfect.
Looking up and south, she found the Libra constellation, hanging just over the top of the dim black cloud bank. Libra. She squinted. At this time of year, Jupiter should be just in the middle of the four stars forming the base of Libra. She didn’t see anything, but she wheeled the telescope around.
Nothing.
Jupiter was gone.
Not gone, it had to be somewhere else. But where?
She looked further south. Venus should be just there, but it wasn’t. She scanned her head back and forth, looking for the shimmering red dot of Mars, the yellow disk of Venus. Nothing.
Giovanni tapped her shoulder. “I’m no astronomer, but…” He pointed behind her.
Jess turned. In the northeast, the sliver crescent of a waning moon rose over the black clouds. She smiled.
Old friend, you’re still with us.
She looked harder. It seemed bright, but was it as bright as it usually was? Were they further from the sun? Did Nomad drag the sun away behind it? The moon reflected light from the sun, the Earth occluding the light falling on the moon. It was still about the same phase as she remembered it from three nights ago. That was something, right? The pieces fell together, a small part of her world still intact.
When she was a child, she remembered her father teaching her all about the constellations, the moon, the tides, the sun. A gift whose value he could have never imagined.
Giovanni tapped her shoulder again. “And is that your Venus?”
Jess turned. A yellow dot near the horizon. “That’s Venus.”
She’s in Leo. The hair on Jess’s arm prickled. What the hell are you doing there?
The excitement of seeing the moon faded into dread. If Venus was all the way over there, where was the Earth? She swung the telescope around and looked through the viewfinder, pulling out the pad of paper from her jacket pocket and scribbling notes and star positions.
Half an hour later, they found Mars just as the clouds rolled back in, the crescent moon skimming the tops like a silver surfer riding black fog. In the beam of Jess’s headlamp, plump gray snowflakes drifted in a suspension of twinkling ice crystals.
Far to the east, the black sky lightened into blue, then pink. For an instant, the sun burst over the horizon. In the jumbled, broken courtyard, Leone and his workers stopped what they were doing and stared up. In the ray of sunlight, a single green leaf fluttered on top of L’Olio, the ancient olive tree.
The clouds closed up. Darkness descended.
Jess stood and stared at where the sun had been, an impenetrable haze enveloping them. It was the sun, but was it as bright as she remembered?
It seemed weaker.
Colder.
She blew on her hands, and returned to the stairs to winch the roof cover back.
OCTOBER 26th
43
CHIANTI, ITALY
SHHHH…SHHHHHHH…RADIO static hissed.
Giovanni picked up the microphone and clicked it. “Say again, Jolly Roger?”
Jess sat across from Giovanni, her back to the rock wall of the cave, her leg stretched out for her foot to soak some warmth from the wood burning stove Leone had managed to kludge together in the main room, with a metal duct-work chimney snaking out the tunnel to the sheer cliff face. She fought the sensation of being buried alive. Even going topside, it felt oppressive, the darkness and ash and snow drowning out the world. Nothing lived out there. Nothing.
They hadn't found Roger. His body must have been swept away, or buried under the crush of rubble somewhere. The northerly wind continued to blow, mercifully bringing clearer air. A thick fog of particle and vapor still clogged the air, but it wasn’t as thick or oppressive now the wind blew away from Monterufoli. Clearer air, but colder. Much colder.
Jess had her father’s laptop on her knees, plugged into an extension cord connected to a generator running outside. The laptop’s screen was filled with a 3D model of solar system simulations he’d been running on software called Universe Sandbox. It was a detailed physics simulation of the entire solar system—all the planets, their moons, their rings, even thousands of asteroids and smaller objects. She hit reset, and the dot representing Nomad streaked through the middle of the solar system, scattering the planets and dragging the sun behind it.
“Jolly Roger, are you there?” Giovanni tried again.
The radio crackled. “…yes, mate…my name’s Leaming, engineer onboard the RNLB Jolly Roger out of Gravesend station, just south of London…”