Loren opened his mouth to say something, anything, but bit his lip instead. Noxious fumes clouded his mind. His ankles ached, and dirt clung like a second skin. What he wouldn’t give for a bath. A cool bath with orange slices and mint leaves floating.
Vesuvius had no baths. Only an empty crater and unnatural heat and two boys who shouldn’t be there.
‘Don’t tell me you don’t have a plan,’ Felix snapped. ‘Don’t say you dragged me here for nothing.’
‘Not for nothing.’
‘Damn. I can’t think past the ground’s hum. Like voices I can’t parse. Driving me mad.’ Felix flopped on a boulder at the crater’s edge, planting the helmet firmly into the loose gravel beside him. It glared at Loren. ‘Pass the water.’
‘You drank it all.’
‘Damn. I’m leaving.’ He stayed sitting.
What had Loren expected? A vision? Clarity, truth, a grain of salt in a mound of sand? What an ugly place to look for it. Vesuvius was beautiful from a distance, but up close, it writhed like an angry, sick beast.
Maybe he wasn’t close enough.
‘I wonder,’ Loren said.
Hands shielding his eyes, Felix replied, ‘What?’
If Loren didn’t stop biting his lip, he’d gnaw it off.
Felix waited. When Loren offered nothing more, he dropped his palms from his face. ‘The one time I ask you to talk, and you won’t.’
‘I think,’ Loren said, ‘I should go down there.’
‘Go . . .’ Felix jerked around. ‘There? No.’
Too late. Loren swung over the edge of the crater, fixed on the peak of the bowl’s centre, where the land swelled. Carefully, he began picking his way down the slope.
‘Stop!’
Stone scattered, and a hand yanked Loren’s elbow. He jerked free, but it threw his balance. Arms whirling, he teetered. He nearly steadied himself, but Felix made another grab. Loren dodged and hit the ground hard. Momentum carried him forward.
He slid.
Hot gravel snagged his tunic and bit his palms. Silver flashed in his peripheral, a round object knocked free and sent tumbling down. By reflex, he reached.
Fingertips brushed cold, stinging metal.
Loren gasped and, in an instant, everything changed.
Loren’s dreams weren’t dreams.
He had come to terms with that as a child, when he’d wake from a nightmare with paint-covered hands smearing his bedroom walls. Red dripped down his wrists and puddled on the tile. Then he’d scream until his lungs burst and a servant came running. His mother fancied him an artist, indulging him with colours and brushes, instructing himto paint all sorts of lovely things. Fruits in baskets. Flowers. Things to cover the horrors he splattered in his sleep. Nothing helped.
Loren wasn’t mad. He wasn’t.
But against the pounding heart of Vesuvius, hand still brushing metal so cold it burned, he began to second-guess himself.
Time stopped. The helmet, tumbling free, halted its trajectory. Felix, who seconds earlier had been grappling with Loren, disappeared. As though he’d never been there at all.
A shiver racked Loren’s spine. All his hair stood on end. In the stillness of this sweltering world, the breath he released was loud enough to shatter stone.
Movement. White mist wisped into a figure, legs and arms and hair flying loose. A phantom child, running carefree. Loren grasped at the boy’s ankle as he passed, but his hand slipped through.
A ghost. Not real.
