Jess forced a smile, squeezed his hand. “We have to hurry.” She pointed out the window. “We need to get away from the coast. This place will be destroyed tomorrow.”
Enzo shrugged. “Perhaps, perhaps not. Today is a beautiful day, the most beautiful of my life.” He kissed Jess’s hand. “We will talk tomorrow morning.” He dropped her hand, took three paces to the door and rapped on it. Metal scraped against metal and the door opened.
Jess pulled the cot into the middle of the room so she could stare out the window. Steely pinpoints of stars pierced the inky sky, a silver moon rising over the fishing village nestled in the hills by the shore. Lights twinkled in the houses, almost a mile away across the water. Jess checked the dock every half an hour, as best as she could estimate, and watched the water sink lower. It was at least four feet below the high tide line on the wooden dock supports.
Far below any tide this place had ever seen. Looking out the window, a ghostly green flickered across the sky, like God shining a flashlight over the roof of the world.
It had begun.
How was this possible? How could her and her mother have been dragged into Italy, into the middle of this ancient blood feud, just at the same moment as the Nomad disaster was announced? And her father being tied up in the middle of discovering it? It defied all explanation, seemed to exceed all possibilities of odds or coincidence. Was it chance? If not chance, then what?
But it didn’t matter anymore. Not how she got here. That was the past. Jess wrung her hands together and paced around the room. She didn’t bang on the door. She didn’t beg for release anymore. She had to think.
All her life, she’d never really committed. Not really. She’d always run away. Like to the Marines. Just another half-baked escape. She always thought she was running away, but alone in this room, she realized she was only running from herself. She’d never even allowed herself to love anyone. It wasn’t that she didn’t want love. She did. If she was honest, she wanted it desperately. But she didn’t deserve it.
And in a few hours, she would die here, alone.
She always scorned the idea of a family, yet now, at the end, all she wanted was to be near hers. All the pain she put her mother and father through, all the things she did to them, she regretted now. The great secret she’d been carrying all these years.
The pain and guilt gnawed at Jess’s soul.
She was the nomad. She was the terrible thing hurtling through peoples’ lives, tearing them apart.
A half-finished degree; a half-finished tour of duty; the endless road kill of half-finished relationships in a half-finished life. Was this how it was going to end? She even only got halfway out on the ice that day…
Right now, she could run.
If there was ever a time to run, it was now. Save herself. Get back to the castle, find her mother and father. Burrow into their embrace.
But she’d be running again.
Or would she stay?
And save the boy from the black hole.
OCTOBER 24th
33
ISOLA GIGLI, ITALY
BOATS IN THE fishing village harbor tilted left and right as their keels came to rest on the sands, the water at least fifteen feet below high tide now. Jess estimated it was 2 a.m. The ocean wasn’t disappearing, though; it was being sucked away to the other side of the planet by Nomad. Jess imagined the Indian Ocean swelling upward, pulled by tidal forces already ten times the moon’s—and this was just the beginning, the gentlest of caresses from Nomad before it pummeled the planet.
Jess closed her eyes, tried to visualize the Earth in her mind, spinning like a top.
A growing wall of water, now fifty or even a hundred feet high at the coasts, was being pulled around the surface of the Earth at more than a thousand miles an hour. And that wall would grow exponentially higher in the next few hours. Now Nomad drained the Mediterranean, but soon, as the Earth turned and Italy spun from darkness toward the sun—toward the onrushing black holes—a wall of water, hundreds or even thousands of feet high, would crash through the Red Sea, roll across Greece and into Italy.
Time had run out.
Opening her eyes, Jess walked to the door of her room and banged on it. “I need to talk to Enzo, please. It’s very urgent.”
“Che cosa?” came an answering reply.
“Enzo!” Jess yelled. “I need to speak to him.”
“Uno minuti.”
Walking back to the window, she checked the dock one last time. No guards, and the dirt bike was still there. Sticking her head out the window, she looked down. The guard down there seemed asleep. She paced back and forth, and was about to bang on the door again when the heavy bolt squealed and the door swung open.
“What is—” Enzo started to ask.