Beside them, the shortwave radio hissed. It was attached to an outside antenna, a cable snaking through the wreckage into the outside. Two days ago, her mother had shown her how to use it. They’d been able to raise dozens of channels, but now, everything had fallen silent. Giovanni cycled through the frequencies, but found nothing. Nobody else out there.
For the past ten hours, she’d been digging through the rubble, trying to move the rocks blocking the tunnel to the staircase. Her fingers bled, her shoulders and back burned, but she ripped and tore into the pile. Lucca and Raffael and Leone tried the other tunnel, the one leading to the ledge under the cable car, but that side of the cliff had sheared away. She’d stared into the roaring blackness; thought of trying to scale the sheer wall, but it was madness. So she returned to the tunnel, tore her fingers to shreds until they forced her away.
Forced her to sit down.
The crunching bombardment died down in the first hour as she pulled the stones away, and in the hours since, the world above had gone eerily silent. Hours ago, the hot wind pressing through the rock had turned cool, but the sulfurous stench of rotten eggs remained. The only sound now was the steady thump and groan of Lucca and Raffael, working steadily on the rocks, slowly working their way through the debris blocking the tunnel.
Jess wrapped her arm around Hector tighter, not for him, but for her. Her body and mind were utterly exhausted. She couldn’t remember the last time she slept.
For ten hours she’d been digging.
Ten hours.
By now, Nomad was three hundred million kilometers away after its closest approach to Earth. A staggering number. Three hundred million kilometers in ten hours. Jess turned the number over and over in her head. Three hundred million kilometers was halfway to Jupiter, but Jupiter wasn’t where it used to be. She had a sense of vertigo, like a roller coaster out of control. Nomad was gone, but where was the Earth? Was the sun already receding, disappearing? When they got topside, would they see the sun as just another star in a black sky?
After surviving all this, were they doomed to a frozen death in a matter of days?
The oceans were already slipping back across the land, settling into their basins; the crust relaxing, the surface of the Earth, cracked and damaged, now sinking back. But the damage was done. The tidal effects of Nomad, at this distance, were almost back to what the Earth felt from the moon.
Jess laughed. The moon. If that was even still there.
“What are you laughing about?” Giovanni asked softly.
“Nothing very funny. Did I tell you that I killed my brother Billy?” She said it matter-of-factly, like she just knocked over a glass of water.
She thought Giovanni would stiffen. She half-expected some outcry, something…but he continued to stroke her hair.
“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 25th
42
CHIANTI, ITALY