Nomad

by Matthew Mather

  “I didn’t see the point at the time.”

  “And so the data in that backpack,” Roger continued Ben’s thoughts for him, “might contain the only record of the location of Nomad thirty years ago. Which might be the only way to calculate its trajectory accurately.”

  Even with Gaia and Earth-based observatories, they would only be able to get an approximate location of Nomad as it got closer. Once it reached the Sun, radiation from solar eruptions would cripple any observatories and satellites. Scientists might be able to pinpoint a location of Nomad, but to get its exact trajectory, they’d need a long axis point.

  Ben turned to Roger and smiled. “Exactly.” He turned to the castle wall, banged on the wooden door, and searched for a buzzer or button. Nothing. He slapped the wooden door again. “Celeste! Celeste, are you there?”

  Looking around, he found a staircase that led down. Jumping down the stairs, he saw that it led into a half-basement of poured concrete with no doors. Maybe he’d have to climb the walls. He dropped his backpack into a dark corner of the cellar for safe-keeping and jogged back up the stairs. The place looked abandoned. A sinking feeling settled into Ben’s gut. They'd better be here.

  “Hello?”

  Ben spun around. A man stood beside Roger, smiling. Roger shrugged.

  “Ah, this is Castello Ruspoli, yes?” Ben asked.

  “Yes, it is,” the man replied in very good English.

  “I’m looking for Celestina Tosetti and Jessica Rollins,” Ben added.

  The man nodded, still smiling. “And you are…?”

  “I’m Jessica’s father, Ben Rollins…I’m Celeste’s husband.” Ben wagged his head. “Or, well, we’re separated…and this is Roger, my student.”

  “A pleasure,” the man replied.

  Ben frowned. “Are they here?”

  The man paused, squinted. “Yes, yes, of course.”

  32

  ISOLA GIGLI, ITALY

  BARE ROCK WALLS supported rough-hewn beams, the room empty except for a metal-framed cot covered with a gray blanket. Jess paced around the room, not more than ten foot square, stopping to hammer on the wooden door again. “Let me OUT!” she screamed, her fist raw and red.

  Still no response.

  A prisoner in a castle for a second time this week. Italy was getting on her nerves.

  She circled the room, limping on the awkward prosthetic. Goddamn thing, it scraped her stump on every step. A single window mercifully let in some fresh air. The window was open with no bars or restraints, about two feet wide and three high. It didn’t need bars. She stopped to look out—she could easily squirm through, but a fifty-foot sheer cliff of stone and brick sloped away beneath it. Below that, a guard stood watch, almost directly below her window.

  Peering left and right, she estimated the island was half a mile long, a craggy rock rising up from a base of stone and sand. The whine of an engine. Looking down, she saw a man with a rifle slung over his shoulder pull up on a dirt bike. He chatted with the guard stationed below her. Doing the rounds. The engine whined again, and the man wound his way down a zigzag trail, through the trees near the water and out onto the dock. He parked the bike and got onto the fishing boat.

  Jess watched the boat pull away from the dock, water churning behind it. On the way in, she watched for any other boats. There was just the one dock. The rest of the island was jagged rocks into the water. She looked at the boat pulling across the water, watched the sandy bottom refract through the waves.

  She craned her neck further out of the window. The sun was low on the horizon. Past seven o’clock. She looked back at the dock. It should be high tide. Squinting, she could just make out the rocks, seaweed hanging off their tops. At least two or three feet below the high tide line.

  So her father’s timing was right.

  A knock on the door.

  Jess pulled her head inside.

  The door opened and Enzo walked in, a grin spread from ear to ear. “Ms. Jessica, I must apologize for the accommodations, and for our—”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Jess sputtered. “Look, I’m sorry about not telling you about Nomad, about hiding it—”

  “This has nothing to with that.” Enzo raised both hands and wiped his eyebrows, adjusted his pork pie hat. “As I was trying to say, I never meant for Antonio to hurt you or steal your leg in Rome. And I apologize for the room here. We had to remove everything, after hearing how…violent you can be.”

  Jess stared at Enzo, her emotions unbalanced, unsure of how to react.

  Why was he apologizing? Enzo never struck her as very intelligent. This wasn’t making any sense. Was this just a kidnapping scheme gone sideways?

  “Is this about money? Giovanni has gold, in the castle.” She pointed out the window. “I know you don’t believe me, but something terrible is about to happen, destruction you can’t imagine will kill us all in a few hours.”

  Enzo took a step toward her. “You are right, a terrible thing has happened, and I am fixing it.”

  “Fixing it?” Jess’s bewilderment rose with her eyebrows. “Why did you follow me? Attack me in Rome?”

  “It wasn’t my intention to attack you,” Enzo replied. “We just needed to keep you here.”

  Keep her here? Jess’s mind raced. “So it was you that texted me from Giovanni’s phone?”

  Enzo frowned. “Text?”

  “Yes, the messages to my phone. You texted me from Giovanni’s phone? Told me to come back to the castle.”

  His face brightened. “Ah yes, I was text to you.”

  Did he just not understand English very well? She didn’t bother to correct him. “Why?”

  “Why?” Enzo took a step toward Jess, their faces not more than two feet apart. “So he never told you? The Baron never told you?”

  Jess was beyond tired of this. “Told me what?”

  Enzo leaned toward her, waved a hand between them. “There has been a fight between our families for hundreds of years. The Ruspoli wiped us out, and it was here on Gigli that they signed the papers that took our villa a hundred years ago.”

  Jess grimaced. “So what, this is that feud? Some kind of vendetta?”

  “A vendetta! Yes.” Enzo’s face lit up. “Our family was forced into disgrace, forced out of the Saline valley six generations ago.”

  A light bulb went off in Jess’s mind. “So that villa across from Castello Ruspoli, the one connected by a cable car across the valley, that’s your family’s villa?” Giovanni said it was a new addition, just added to the family a hundred years ago.

  “Yes, yes!” Enzo’s face lit up.

  His face was right in Jess’s. She smelled garlic and the sour stink of alcohol. Taking a step back, she demanded, “What does this have to do with me? And why do you keep saying ‘our’?”

  “Our family, the Tosetti.” Enzo punched his chest. “We are family. You and I.”

  Jess took another step back and slumped against the stone wall by the window. Seagulls squawked. A tingling dread crept up her spine. “What?”

  “Your mother is one of the last in the direct blood line of the Tosetti.” Enzo stepped toward her again, trapped her against the wall. “We have been planning this for a long time, to avenge the cruelty inflicted on our family by the Ruspolis.” His eyes glittered, sweat beading on his forehead. “But now, we were forced to act.”

  Jess remembered her mother saying her family moved out of the Saline valley, to America over a hundred years ago, part of the immigration wave into New York. But this, this was crazy. “There’s no way I’m related to you in any—”

  “Oh no?” He put one arm on the wall beside her head, raised a finger to an inch from her nose. “Tell me that vengeance doesn’t flow in your veins? I’ve seen it in your eyes.”

  Jess tried to squirm away, but there was nowhere to go. The room spun, Jess’s vision swam. “But now, you choose this moment, with Nomad coming…?” She stole a look out of the window at the setting sun. “This is insane
!”

  Enzo slammed the wall by her head with his fist. “This is the divine hand of GOD! It proves the Tosetti are the favored ones. That He smiles on us. It is a sign, no? There will be no more Ruspoli.”

  “And no more Tosetti,” Jess whispered. She pushed along the wall away from him. Taking deep breaths, she steadied herself and looked down at the floor. “So that was you?” She looked at Enzo. “That was you who sent my mother the Facebook message?”

  The whole reason they came to stay at the Ruspoli Castle, back to the Saline Valley, was the Facebook message her mother received, from a long lost relative. But the person hadn’t responded after they arrived in Italy.

  Enzo nodded. “Yes. I Faced her.”

  Somehow Jess doubted Enzo even knew how to send an email, but he kept nodding his head. Jess watched his eyes carefully. “And this is all a coincidence, Nomad—?”

  “I told you, not a coincidence. This is divine. This is GOD!” The tendons in Enzo’s neck flared out, his face burning crimson.

  “Okay, okay,” Jess held her hands out, appeasing him. He looked psychotic. “It’s God.”

  She glanced out the window at the setting sun. Less than twelve hours. “What about Hector? He doesn’t know about all this. Why don’t you let him go?”

  Enzo laughed. “There is a plan for him.”

  Jess closed her eyes, the vision of the little boy’s face, ringed in white, swallowed by the black hole. She opened them, took a step toward Enzo. “What if we”—she pointed at him, then at her chest—“took him, raised him as our own?”

  “We?” For the first time, Enzo looked unsure.

  “Yes, you and I.” She took Enzo’s hand. “We’re family. That would be sweet revenge, no? To take the final Ruspoli heir, turn him into a Tosetti?”

  A scowl passed across Enzo’s face, slowly replaced by a menacing grin. He laughed. “You see, I told you that you were a Tosetti.”

  Jess forced a smile, squeezed his hand. “We have to hurry.” She pointed out the window. “We need to get away from the coast. This place will be destroyed tomorrow.”

  Enzo shrugged. “Perhaps, perhaps not. Today is a beautiful day, the most beautiful of my life.” He kissed Jess’s hand. “We will talk tomorrow morning.” He dropped her hand, took three paces to the door and rapped on it. Metal scraped against metal and the door opened.

  Jess pulled the cot into the middle of the room so she could stare out the window. Steely pinpoints of stars pierced the inky sky, a silver moon rising over the fishing village nestled in the hills by the shore. Lights twinkled in the houses, almost a mile away across the water. Jess checked the dock every half an hour, as best as she could estimate, and watched the water sink lower. It was at least four feet below the high tide line on the wooden dock supports.

  Far below any tide this place had ever seen. Looking out the window, a ghostly green flickered across the sky, like God shining a flashlight over the roof of the world.

  It had begun.

  How was this possible? How could her and her mother have been dragged into Italy, into the middle of this ancient blood feud, just at the same moment as the Nomad disaster was announced? And her father being tied up in the middle of discovering it? It defied all explanation, seemed to exceed all possibilities of odds or coincidence. Was it chance? If not chance, then what?

  But it didn’t matter anymore. Not how she got here. That was the past. Jess wrung her hands together and paced around the room. She didn’t bang on the door. She didn’t beg for release anymore. She had to think.

  All her life, she’d never really committed. Not really. She’d always run away. Like to the Marines. Just another half-baked escape. She always thought she was running away, but alone in this room, she realized she was only running from herself. She’d never even allowed herself to love anyone. It wasn’t that she didn’t want love. She did. If she was honest, she wanted it desperately. But she didn’t deserve it.

  And in a few hours, she would die here, alone.

  She always scorned the idea of a family, yet now, at the end, all she wanted was to be near hers. All the pain she put her mother and father through, all the things she did to them, she regretted now. The great secret she’d been carrying all these years.

  The pain and guilt gnawed at Jess’s soul.

  She was the nomad. She was the terrible thing hurtling through peoples’ lives, tearing them apart.

  A half-finished degree; a half-finished tour of duty; the endless road kill of half-finished relationships in a half-finished life. Was this how it was going to end? She even only got halfway out on the ice that day…

  Right now, she could run.

  If there was ever a time to run, it was now. Save herself. Get back to the castle, find her mother and father. Burrow into their embrace.

  But she’d be running again.

  Or would she stay?

  And save the boy from the black hole.

  OCTOBER 24th

  33

  ISOLA GIGLI, ITALY

  BOATS IN THE fishing village harbor tilted left and right as their keels came to rest on the sands, the water at least fifteen feet below high tide now. Jess estimated it was 2 a.m. The ocean wasn’t disappearing, though; it was being sucked away to the other side of the planet by Nomad. Jess imagined the Indian Ocean swelling upward, pulled by tidal forces already ten times the moon’s—and this was just the beginning, the gentlest of caresses from Nomad before it pummeled the planet.

  Jess closed her eyes, tried to visualize the Earth in her mind, spinning like a top.

  A growing wall of water, now fifty or even a hundred feet high at the coasts, was being pulled around the surface of the Earth at more than a thousand miles an hour. And that wall would grow exponentially higher in the next few hours. Now Nomad drained the Mediterranean, but soon, as the Earth turned and Italy spun from darkness toward the sun—toward the onrushing black holes—a wall of water, hundreds or even thousands of feet high, would crash through the Red Sea, roll across Greece and into Italy.

  Time had run out.

  Opening her eyes, Jess walked to the door of her room and banged on it. “I need to talk to Enzo, please. It’s very urgent.”

  “Che cosa?” came an answering reply.

  “Enzo!” Jess yelled. “I need to speak to him.”

  “Uno minuti.”

  Walking back to the window, she checked the dock one last time. No guards, and the dirt bike was still there. Sticking her head out the window, she looked down. The guard down there seemed asleep. She paced back and forth, and was about to bang on the door again when the heavy bolt squealed and the door swung open.

  “What is—” Enzo started to ask.

  Jess threw herself at him, wrapping her arms around his neck, forcing herself not to recoil from a cocktail stench of booze, cigarettes and sweat. “You were right, nothing is more important than family.” She kissed him on the neck, forcing back bile in the pit of her throat, and kissed him again.

  With Jess’s weight on him, Enzo took a few steps back to balance, moving back into the middle of the landing.

  The guard who opened the door stepped away, raising his eyebrows and smiling.

  Jess glanced at him and smiled back, taking a moment to size him up: slender, not more than a hundred and thirty pounds. Just a boy, really; he wore beige linen slacks with a white shirt stuffed in at the waist, a brown beret on his head cocked at an angle, his rifle slung carelessly over his right shoulder with the safety still on.

  Enzo hesitated when Jess first threw herself at him, seeming to half-expect a punch in the face, but he put his arms around Jess. “Ah, so you are not angry?”

  Jess stepped back, still keeping hold of his hand. Two hallways led off the landing; one extended to her left, with three doorways. She’d heard Hector whimpering over there. To the right an exterior door led to the terrace she saw from her room. “No, I’m not angry. You just took me by surprise. I didn’t know that was you in Rome.”

  She
glanced down the stairs. It led to a main hall where five men played cards on a table littered with empty wine bottles and overflowing ashtrays. This wasn’t a castello, it was more of a villa, a large house. Like the one across the valley from Castello Ruspoli.

  “We talked about all this, in my Facebook emails, about the Ruspolis?” Jess continued. “Don’t you remember?”

  A gamble.

  Enzo’s brows came together in a frown. “Facebook?” The frown vanished, replaced by a smile. “Yes, the Facebook, of course. But why didn’t you say something before?”

  “I was trying to do the same as you.” Jess squeezed his hand. “Seduce the Baron, get inside the castello, you understand.” She beamed her best high-wattage smile.

  The frown returned to Enzo’s face. “You were?”

  Jess leaned in to whisper in his ear. “But now, that’s all over. Come inside”—she nodded to the open door of her room—“and let me show you.”

  “Show me?”

  Jess nuzzled his neck, whispered into his ear. “Privately.”

  Narrowing his eyes, he took a long look at Jess. “Private?” He looked at the young guard. “You took everything out of that room, yes?”

  Enzo wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but he wasn’t that stupid. He said it in English so Jess understood he didn’t trust her.

  The guard nodded. “Yes, everything. Just the cot and blanket.”

  “Okay.” Enzo nudged Jess forward. “Show me then.” He smiled at the young guard and winked as he followed Jess into the room, closing the door behind them.

  Walking into the middle of the room, Jess sat on the cot and pulled the blanket over herself, patting the spot next to her and inviting Enzo to sit.

  “So what did you want to show me?” Enzo asked as he sat down, reaching under the cover to hold Jess’s thigh with his left hand. He kept his right on the gun holstered on his hip.

  Jess didn’t flinch, but overcame her revulsion and inched closer to him, putting her arm around him. “I wanted to show you that.” She pointed out the window.