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!”