Page 128 of Vesuvius

They shouldn’t have survived. Loren shouldn’t have survived.

His heart thumped slow and methodical, his body convincing itself it still lived.Blood still flows here, it announced.We beat, we breathe, we bleed.He wished he could tune out the reminder.

On the far side of the hills south of Pompeii, where the wake of destruction was reduced to a sprinkling of ash, it all became too much. He shivered, slumped forward against the horse’s neck, and prayed to slip into fever and not resurface at all.

Clumsy stars greeted him when next he woke, and he wondered who had paid his passage to the underworld.

Had Felix pressed a coin into Loren’s mouth, over his eyes? Anointed his body, then let him burn? Or had Felix held his hand, escorted him to Pluto personally? Fitting, given how Felix flitted between this worldand the other, stepped between planes with wings at his ankles, half of himself made ghost.

But Loren recognised these stars, even at night through thin candlelight. He spent a winter painting that ceiling, smearing purple as the backdrop, then attacking with imprecise white points and a cupped moon. If he squinted through the fog crowding his brain, he almost remembered the constellations, and that tipped him over the edge.

He vomited nothing onto his childhood bedsheets.

He needed air. He needed to see sky beyond ceiling, proof that anything still existed past this room. That Vesuvius hadn’t devoured the world, that he wasn’t trapped in a nightmare, condemned deep in Tartarus for the hurt he’d caused.

Loren fell out of bed in a graceless heap. Plastered bandages knocked against tile where his ankle had been set. Wrapped. It hurt like a bastard, and the stitched wound on his thigh burned as he hauled himself upright. His mind tilted precariously until he realised, no, that was his body at a slant, seconds from toppling again. Leaning between his old writing easel and a trunk was the sheathed sword of Aurelia’s father. Livia’s last gift.

He hoped she wouldn’t mind him using it as a walking stick.

His lungs tightened, light sparking at the corners of his vision, as he hobbled from his room. He dragged his useless leg down the empty, low-lit hall, and burst out through a side door that opened onto the Lassius estate.

If this was a nightmare, it was the cruellest yet. But the scents were too vivid – remnants of grapes from the harvest decaying in the vineyard to the back, manure from the stables nearby, autumn pomegranates and pears from the orchard across. In none of his dreams had Loren felt so vibrantlyhere, and he hated it. He hated that his bones had led him right back into the cage he thought he’d flown.

Gasping, Loren made for the trees and the water trough he knew to be within. Distantly, he registered footsteps, a voice, a familiar presence nearing, but he couldn’t focus. He needed proof, to see . . . to see . . .

At the water’s edge, he collapsed. Unsheathed the sword. His faint reflection, distorted by water, snarled at him.

‘What are you doing?’

Loren raised the sword to his neck.

On the downward stoke, Felix caught his wrist and halted the blade’s trajectory. Loren grappled to regain control, but Felix was stronger. The sword clattered into the trough. When Loren lunged for it, water soaking the nightclothes he’d been changed into, Felix kicked the hilt, and it disappeared into a perfectly manicured bush.

‘Fuck, Felix, I was only cutting my hair.’ Cursing was cathartic. Really fucking soothing. If only Lucius Lassius could hear him. ‘Please.’

‘Use this.’ Felix handed him a pocketknife. The wood-and-iron one that he kept losing and that kept coming back. A sore Loren couldn’t be rid of.

Bunching what remained of his braid, Loren sawed. Locks of burnt hair fell away and floated, lifeless. With that, his final shield crumbled. The act stripped him bare, left him with nothing more to hide behind. When he spoke to others now, he would have no choice but to be honest.

‘It looks good.’ Felix sounded hoarse. Too much smoke.

Loren didn’t trust himself to respond. A face he didn’t recognise stared from the water, a boy with hair shorn in an ugly, chin-length bob, and who existed worlds away from where he knelt.

‘Elias,’ he whispered, the name a quiet prayer. ‘Camilia. Nonna.’

‘What?’

‘The Priest. Sera. Shani. Castor and Pollux.’

‘Counting the dead won’t help.’

‘Celsi. Julia.’ Loren’s voice cracked. ‘Julia.’

‘Fuck Julia.’

‘Don’t say that.’

Felix let out a single, incredulous laugh. ‘Are you defending her? Still? She used you. Once you were her heir, the target moved from her back to yours.’

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