Page 96 of Vesuvius

‘Come here.’

Loren did, crawled closer, and Felix tipped him back into the grass and kissed his neck and shoulders and chest, and stars wheeled overhead in silent cacophony, and insects buzzed and hummed nearby. And the leaves of the olive trees were still. And the world was still.

And Felix could pretend he had it all, for one moonless night.

Dawn broke too soon, lighting the sky in grey and purple, sun hovering below the horizon behind Vesuvius to the east. Felix woke, sticky and sore, and knew Loren would be more so. But he still slept, face softened by the early-morning gloom. Felix dared to kiss his temple.

Their last.

Standing, careful not to jostle Loren, Felix dressed, tunic stiff with salt. Water from the lapping sea cleared his senses when he splashed his face. He ate a heel of bread from Loren’s satchel, slowly, crust firstand then the middle, as if drawing out this moment would somehow preserve it.

He tugged on his sandals, gathered the helmet and disappeared into the mist.

A spell of silence cast a net over the road to Pompeii, as if all that once lived had fled. No birds gathered in the trees. No lizards crossed his path. No idle chatter from a friend to fill the spaces. Only his shadow kept him company, a phantom at his side. Tighter and tighter wound that relentless hum of pressure building, waiting for an excuse to burst.

The quiet offered too much time to plan. To consider the terms of the deal he meant to strike.

Fog crept among the tombs outside the city gate. The guards from yesterday were absent, a sure sign the city had lost faith in catching the helmet thief. Ironic, considering what Felix carried slung over his shoulder.

Alone amidst the mausoleums and markers, Aurelia drifted like a ghost, hem of her white nightdress catching on aloe spines and dragging over dead grass. When she spotted Felix’s approach, her pensive frown didn’t shift. Almost like she knew to expect him out here.

‘Can’t sleep?’ Felix said.

Her face was too empty for a girl her age. ‘You spoiled everything by coming here, do you know that?’

‘So I’ve gathered.’

Felix considered Aurelia, compiling his evidence collected over the past days: her episode in the alley.Take his hand. That scraped chalk drawing of Felix’s face, framed by the same wings on the helmet he held. The collapse she shared with Loren at the festival, and his frenzied warning in the Forum afterwards. Pieces were falling into place, tiles in a misfit mosaic.

Conclusion drawn, he said, ‘His visions. You have them, too. You knew I would meet you here. What else do you know?’

Aurelia glared and kicked listlessly at a grave marker. When she spoke, it wasn’t to Felix at all. ‘Pappa thought I’d gone mad when I begged him not to leave. He and Mamma wrote it off as fussing from a worried little girl. Until the other soldiers brought back his belongings. His blanket. His sword. If he’d listened, he wouldn’t have gone. He promised he’d return, but I knew – Iknew.Now it’s happening all over again.’

‘With Loren.’ When her face only pinched, sourness spread across Felix’s tongue, threatening to bring up the scrap of bread. Confirmation. ‘Aurelia, he thinks he’s stopped it, whatever is about to happen. The destruction. The end.’

‘He’s wrong,’ she whispered.

‘I believe you,’ Felix said.

‘Of course you do.’ Aurelia cast him a scathing look. Then she snarled, yanking her hair. ‘It isn’tfair. I never asked to see these things, I never asked to know. Why can’t – why can’t I be normal? Like Celsi, or the others. I don’t want to live like this anymore.’

Stuffing her fist in her mouth, she muffled a furious sob. Her chest heaved. Her outburst, as most things did, died quietly. She screwed her eyes tight and slumped against a tomb, burying her face in her knees.

Awkwardness settled, thick as the surrounding mist. Felix was no good at this comforting business. He didn’t have the experience, and opportunities to practise were hard to come by when he avoided attachment for exactly this reason. So he did all he could think to do. He sat beside her. She seized when their shoulders bumped, but she didn’t flee. A small victory.

‘Most days, I feel closer to the dead than the living,’ Felix said. Confessing this to her felt both strange and appropriate, like Aurelia alone in the world would understand him. ‘In every town I pass through, no one sees me, but I see everyone. The shops they run, the friends they share meals with, parents and children and families. I can’tfathom how they manage it. How it comes so naturally when it never has for me. That maybe I forgot how to be a person, or maybe I never learned at all. All I know is how to run. Restless.’

She sniffled. After a time, she lifted her head to pick at a hole in her dress. ‘Like you’re missing something, but you can’t find the piece you lack. No matter how hard you look, finding is beyond your control.’

‘It’s shit, isn’t it?’ Felix snorted. ‘If all that separates people from objects, or the dead from those alive, is that we can control ourselves, what does it mean if you can’t? What does that make you?’

‘I don’t want to find out,’ Aurelia admitted.

‘That might not be up to us.’ Felix knocked his knee against hers, then rose, shouldering the laundry bag. ‘I have an errand. If you come with, I’ll give you a ride.’

That was the thing of it. For all that Aurelia existed beyond her time, aged prematurely by visions of futures not yet lived, she was still a child. And although she hesitated when Felix leaned down, she scrambled onto his back, clinging tight around his neck. In an odd way, it wasn’t so bad, having someone holding on to him. Trusting him not to let her fall.

Together, he and Aurelia entered the tomb-still city.

---