The Chamber of Ten

III

I’M NOT used to being away from you,” she said. “Being so out of touch. I didn’t like it one bit.” And it scared me, she wanted to say. But now was not the time, because being scared was connected to whatever had happened down there. Maybe later they would talk about that, but not now. Nico looked so tired, so drained, yet unprepared for sleep.

“Neither did I,” he said. “I didn’t do it on purpose, Geena. It wasn’t my …” Had he been about to say fault? If not his, then whose? “Wasn’t my intention,” he finished.

“I don’t blame you,” she said. “I’m just glad to have you back.”

They were sitting at the small tile-topped table in front of the open French doors of her living room, daylight washing over them. The balcony was so small that it housed only a couple of plant pots containing herbs—rosemary, coriander, some garlic bulbs—but she had the table placed so that it gave the impression of sitting outside. At this time of the morning, sunlight streamed over the rooftops of the facing buildings, splashing the table and warming the room, offsetting the refreshing coolness of the retreating night.

Sometimes blinds clattered open across the narrow street from her, and she would always wave a polite greeting to anyone who glanced over instead of pretending to ignore them. She knew that was appreciated. There was the old man who lived with a dozen cats, the young professional couple with two delightful kids and a live-in nanny not much older than her charges, and the young single man who always made sure he looked her way. She indulged in an innocent flirtation with him, but not this morning. She saw his curtains drawn back and his own doors opening onto his tiny balcony, but she kept her eyes on Nico. He had so much to tell her, but she did not want to scare him off.

That was how he seemed this morning—scared. There was a fragility to him that she had never seen before, and he would not meet her gaze.

“Where did you go?” she asked. She wanted to say, What happened down there, why did you pick up the stone jar, why did you scream, what did you see, why did you run? But there was still a rawness to things, as if the previous day’s events involved blood and death rather than water and worry.

The knives, the dripping blood …

“I wandered for a while,” he said, picking at a plate of dried meats. He had not actually eaten anything yet, though he’d drunk three cups of coffee and was working on his fourth. “After I finished running, that is.”

“But what were you running from?”

He dropped his gaze, unable or unwilling to respond.

She tried again. “Where did you go?”

“Nowhere,” he said. “No destination, I mean. Through alleys and courtyards. Into places I didn’t think I’d been before, but which I found myself remembering. And even the streets I travel every day had a familiarity about them …” He shook his head, draining the coffee and checking to see if there was more left in the pot. “But it was a strange feeling.”

“Strange how?”

Nico thought for a moment before replying, and when he did, he gazed into the middle distance as if he were trying to remember the answer to a riddle he’d first heard years before.

“You know how sometimes when something is removed from a familiar landscape—a line of trees, or a building, a fence of some sort—and at first you don’t recognize exactly what is missing, but you know something is different? Absent?”

Geena nodded, buttering some bread.

“Like that, except all the way through the city. Every time I turned a corner into a place I knew, there was something not quite right. I still knew it, but not how it was.”

He began to shake with growing frustration, gaze darting about the room as if searching for answers that would never be found within those walls.

“So what do you think—”

“Enough! I don’t know,” Nico said, standing abruptly and spilling coffee over the tablecloth.

A chill went through her. Christ, what had happened to him? “Nico?”

“Forget it,” he said. “I’m fine, really. Just a bad day. My mind … I’m always picking up traces and echoes of this and that, and sometimes things … seep in.”

“You never told me that,” Geena said.

He stalked back into her bedroom, drawing the shades to block out the sunlight and hiding in the gloom. Geena followed and stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb. He still stank of that rancid water; strange that she should only notice that now.

“You really need a shower,” she said, and was delighted when he smiled.

“I just …” He stood, already unbuttoning his dirty shirt. “A scare. Panic. Excitement at what we’d found.”

“I understand that,” she said, and she did. But that did not account for the way he’d acted, nor for what she’d seen and sensed through him. Does he even remember? She still had the butter knife in one hand and she touched it to the other palm, casually, stroking it across the skin and feeling a slick of butter left behind.

Nico glanced at her hand—

—the splash of blood, light darkening from pink to red, a collective groan that echoed—

—and then turned quickly away, shaking as he unbuttoned his pants.

Geena gasped and held on to the door frame. She blinked away the flash of vision. Not even an image. Just a sensation. Then she looked down at her palm, certain that she’d cut herself. But there was only butter, already melting from the warmth of her skin.

Nico pulled down his trousers and boxers and stepped into the bathroom. Moments later she heard the water turn on, then the sound changing as he stepped beneath the spray. He sighed, groaned, and she heard the soft thud as he rested his head against the tiled wall.

Geena went back and cleared the breakfast table, trying to fill her mind with inanities rather than let it dwell on the image of blood. She scooped up the plates, piling them on top of each other, then carried the empty cups through to the small kitchen. Filling the coffee machine with water and fresh coffee, she leaned against the counter and smelled the gorgeous aroma of brewing coffee filling her flat once again.

For a moment I thought I’d lost him.

She and Nico had met two years before at a lecture she was giving, and the attraction had been instant and mutual. He’d persisted in asking her on a date, and it had taken three days for her faltering professional concerns to be cast aside. She knew that fraternizing with students was frowned upon, yet there had been something about him that drew her from that first moment. His good looks and youthful fitness didn’t hurt, but his was also a mind that she perceived as an equal to hers. His eyes betrayed an intelligence and quirkiness that matched her own, and more than anything she’d sensed a passion in him about the past. For many, history was simply times gone by, but for Geena it was a more rounded, real, whole place than the present. The past was set and immutable; it had walls and boundaries, rules and certainty. The present was unreliable.

On their first date he had taken her to the Museo Archeologico, and that night they had made love in his small apartment, windows open, moonlight silvering their sweat-sheened skin, cool air flooding the bedroom. The next morning she had wandered naked into the bathroom, only to be startled by Nico emerging from the shower. His laughter at her shriek of surprise had melted her heart, just a little, and through the embarrassment she had found a smile.

He was twelve years her junior, and she loved him because he did not make her feel younger than her age.

The coffee machine was grumbling as the last of the coffee dribbled into the pot. She focused, trying to see if she could sense his mind reaching out to her, and felt only a warm, gentle satisfaction. She wished there were something more.

Geena pulled off her shirt and slid down her sweatpants. She crossed the small living room, glancing out the window but not caring if cat-man or the young flirter were looking. Steam billowed from the bathroom—he must have the heat turned high—and she stood in the doorway for a while, watching his shadow through the shower curtain. She frowned, trying to sort her confused emotions from those of his she might be feeling; frustration, anxiety? And she thought about what the dreams had been telling her last night—that Nico was gone, that she would never hold him in her arms again, never feel him smile and shudder against her neck as he came inside her. Never again argue with him about who was the greatest painter or sculptor.

She pulled the curtain aside and stepped into the bath. Nico still had his back to her, face turned up into the overhead shower and hands both clasping a tablet of soap. He was rubbing at his shoulders and chest, and his breath came in short gasps.

She stepped forward and reached around to his stomach.

Nico jumped and spun around, almost sending her sprawling. The shower reached her, and it was scalding hot across her face, shoulders, and chest. She gasped.

“I just can’t get myself clean,” he said, and for the first time since she had met him, he sounded like a child.

“I’ll help you,” she said. He nodded and smiled gratefully, and for the next half an hour as she scrubbed his skin pink, he projected only an unfamiliar, heartrending vulnerability.

Domenic returned mid-morning with a doctor, and although Nico protested, he let the doctor look him over. There were no injuries and no obvious indications of any head trauma. He sat through the whole examination looking vaguely befuddled, and when the doctor stood to leave, Nico walked him to the door.

“How is he?” Domenic whispered.

“I don’t know,” Geena said. “It’s like he’s been away a lot longer.”

“How do you mean?”

She shrugged. How could she communicate to Domenic the subtle differences, the awkwardness between them that had never been there before? So instead she changed the subject. Divert your mind and sometimes the answers will creep up on you, her father used to tell her. He’d never given her a piece of advice that had failed her yet.

“Is Dr. Schiavo angry that we’re not at the site?” she asked.

“Of course not. You two have had quite a trauma—”

Geena frowned. “Not more than anyone else who was down there when the wall gave way.”

“Not true,” Domenic said. “I didn’t explain to Dr. Schiavo what had happened with you and Nico—that’s not my business to explain to him—but I told him you’d both had a close call. Ramus is site manager and he’s been there all day, talking with the city engineers about shoring up the canal wall, getting pumps in, all of it. You let us worry about all of that for today.”

“Have you looked at the film yet?” she asked.

“No, but your BBC friend is all over us.” Domenic rolled his eyes.

“Let’s have a viewing here. Finch can come, too.”

“You’re sure?” He looked around uncertainly, and at first she thought he was still worried about Nico. But then she realized the source of his discomfort and smiled.

“Sure. I don’t think we can pretend that Nico and I are a secret anymore, can we?”

“I suppose not,” Domenic said, returning her smile. “I’ll call the others and get them here for … two o’clock?”

“What’s at two o’clock?” Nico said, entering from the hallway.

“We’re going to watch the footage Sabrina shot,” Geena said.

“Of course!” he said, and his eagerness was troubling. He pushed past them with a vague smile and started picking up books and magazines, clearing the sofa, tidying Geena’s room in preparation for visitors. She watched him, wondering why she was unsettled, and it was only when Domenic touched her shoulder that it clicked.

“Geena? I said, do you want me to pick up some food?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, and she went into the kitchen to fetch her purse. He still smells of the canal, she thought. As Nico had passed her by, she’d caught a whiff of Venice’s old, dirty water, even after all that scrubbing.

As if it were as ingrained in his skin as it was in the foundations of the city itself.

Domenic brought pizza and Finch arrived with two bottles of cheap wine, wearing a bemused expression at actually being invited. Geena welcomed him in and chatted inconsequentialities, and when he saw Nico standing by her living room window he nodded once.

“Glad to see you’re well,” he said.

Nico only smiled in response.

Ramus and Sabrina arrived around two p.m., hot and hassled from their dash through the city. The temperature had been rising all day, and now the air had grown motionless and heavy with humidity. Geena had opened all her windows and turned on the ceiling fan in her living room, but all these measures only seemed to push the hot air around rather than provide a cooling breeze. She’d chilled the red wine, much to Finch’s consternation, and they drank from tall glasses filled with ice. She would happily forsake some of its subtler tastes to be refreshed.

With other people in the flat, Nico projected his normal self. There were familiar intimacies: his fingers playing across Geena’s as she handed him a wineglass; the touch in the small of her back that always made her weak at the knees; his smile, dazzling and beautiful, the best part reserved for her. But there was still something different about him that went beyond the faint aroma beneath his aftershave and perspiration. She did her best to shut out the strange time spent in the shower in case lingering sexual frustration was clouding her thoughts. Even then, there was a distance between them that had not been there before. And she could think of no better way to describe it than how she had put it to Domenic.

It’s like he’s been away a lot longer.

She was glad when Ramus closed her blinds and Sabrina loaded up the DVD player.

“Burned this an hour ago,” she said. “Dr. Schiavo wanted to see the footage first, so I left the camera in the lab, told him I had to get home for my grandmother’s birthday. He’s quite concerned.”

“You told him we’re all fine, though?” Geena said.

“Yes, yes,” Sabrina said, then looked away sheepishly. “Actually, I meant he’s concerned about Petrarch’s library.”

“Well,” Geena said, letting the word hang for a while.

“Maybe we fucked up,” Domenic said. No one answered, and for that Geena was grateful. This was her responsibility, and she usually had strong shoulders.

“I haven’t even had time to check that it works,” Sabrina said, slipping the disc into the machine.

“Now you tell us!” Ramus said.

“They usually work,” she muttered defensively.

“Yeah, I’ve heard about you and your home movies,” Domenic quipped.

“Make sure you’ve put the right one in!” Ramus seconded.

“Oh, you’ve seen them as well?”

The banter continued until Sabrina held up a hand, smiled as she made a gun with forefinger and thumb, and shot Ramus.

“Jealous boy,” she purred, and then the screen blinked into life. She paused the picture on the title card, which contained the date, location, and time of the filming. She glanced around at Geena, then her eyes flickered briefly to Finch.

“I invited him here,” Geena said. “Mr. Finch is more interested than ever.”

“I am,” Finch said. He sat at the small window table, wineglass already empty before him. He was sweating and uncomfortable, but there was an eagerness about him, too. “After what I saw, I’m certain this could be a fascinating documentary.”

“We lost about half of what was still down there,” Domenic said bitterly.

“And it’s the recovery of what was saved that will make the program,” Finch said slowly, talking down to him, though the silver-haired Domenic wasn’t much younger than Finch himself. Geena was still unsure whether she liked the British man for his candidness, or hated him for his vacuous pomposity.

“Nothing to do with a fucking flood and half of us almost dying,” Ramus muttered. The room fell silent for a few seconds, then Sabrina chuckled and pressed PLAY.

Nico tensed as soon as the first images appeared. Geena felt his thigh harden against hers, and another waft of dirty-water smell stung her nostrils. Doesn’t anyone else smell that? she thought. Perhaps afterward she would ask Domenic. She glanced sidelong at Nico, but his face seemed calm, eyes flickering with the reflected TV picture.

Heads bobbed on the screen as Sabrina and her camera followed them down the curving staircase. They paused at the bottom, then Geena opened the door and stepped into the lower chamber.

I should have held back, Geena thought. I was much too eager to see what was down there, and a lot of that came from Nico. I sensed his excitement. He projected it to me. She glanced at him again but he seemed enrapt with the picture. So why can’t I feel anything from him now?

She rested her hand on his knee—an intimate gesture that she had performed a thousand times before when they’d been sitting beside each other. But this time felt like the first, and he flinched before settling back against her. She gasped softly, confused, and his awkwardness bristled the small hairs at the nape of her neck.

“Get your hair cut!” Domenic said to Ramus. The younger man’s flowing mane filled the screen for a few seconds, and sitting on Geena’s floor he ran both hands through his hair.

“No way,” he said. “Gives me my sexual power.”

Nico shifted a little, but Geena did not move her arm.

On the screen, flashlights were shone around the chamber. She concentrated, trying to see anything they’d missed down there before. In their excitement there might have been obvious features that eluded them, or which the dancing lights had skimmed across too fast to see. She knew that a camera saw things differently.

“Strange columns,” Ramus muttered. “Why have three for support when one would do the job?”

“It’s a hiding place,” Geena said, thinking of how the man had stood within those columns, in his elaborate robes.

“Hiding what?” Sabrina said.

“None of us saw the urn until Nico touched it,” Finch said, and Geena started. It was the first time anyone had called it an urn, and the first she’d thought of it as such.

On screen they circled the room, examining the obelisks and then the granite disk in the stone floor of the chamber. Their voices coming from the TV sounded tinny and distorted.

“What is that?” Nico asked, nodding toward the screen.

Geena frowned. He’d only been twenty feet away while they’d been looking at the granite disk. He must have overheard them. But when she glanced at his face, she realized he had not. His entire focus had been on the stone jar hidden amidst those three columns.

“Some kind of plug, we think,” Domenic offered.

“Plug?” Nico echoed. “Covering what?”

“A drain or a well?” Geena suggested. “Or a subchamber.”

“Is that even possible?” Nico asked.

But no one replied. None of them knew how to answer that, and now the plug was submerged under water in a room whose structural integrity was uncertain. It would have to be a question for another day.

It was strange seeing herself on the television, and stranger still seeing Nico. Geena concentrated on his image, on the way his eyes had widened and he seemed drawn to the shadowy space amongst those columns. She should have noticed something off about him, even then.

“What’s wrong with you?” she whispered, and the screen flickered and blurred.

“Damn it!” Sabrina said, picking up the remote control. The image paused, jerked up and down a little, then started again.

“Dirt on the disc?” Ramus asked.

“No,” Sabrina said, grinning. “I put the right one in.”

On-screen, Nico was standing close to the three columns now, looking into where their shadows met. Geena watched herself approach him, shining her flashlight into his face, then leaning over to see what he was seeing.

Ramus’ head filled the screen, then Sabrina’s hand appeared before the camera, picture shaking, and she pulled him aside. The jar—

—Urn, Geena thought, maybe that is what it was—

—filled the screen, and then Nico’s voice rustled through the speakers, indistinct and yet clear to Geena. She remembered exactly what he’d said before everything changed.

“Do you hear it? Like there’s electricity in the walls.”

Finch appeared on-screen behind Nico, muttering something as Geena’s lover leaned in and grabbed the jar. The picture flickered again. Lines crossed the screen, snow made nonsense of the images. And behind the crackle and hiss, something more definable: a hum of potential.

When the picture resolved again, the jar was already broken on the floor. Nico stood with his head back and his hands fisted at his sides, and Geena saw herself slumping slowly down against the nearest of the three central columns, one hand reaching for the back of her head. She was muttering something.

“What’s that I’m saying?” she asked, leaning forward on the sofa.

“Don’t know,” Sabrina said.

Nico was talking on the screen as well, and his voice seemed louder and more insistent, clearer and yet no easier to understand.

“That’s a very old dialect you’re speaking there, Nico,” Domenic said, his voice level, though his eyes were full of questions and mystery.

Geena could read and translate some of the old Venetian dialects easily enough, and her students all had differing abilities to do the same. But the last time she’d heard anyone actually talking like this was Domenic, and even he had to refer to carefully prepared pages to do so.

On the screen, Nico seemed to be standing straighter, his voice filled with confidence, and he raised one shadowy hand to point around the edges of the room. The old words still tumbled from his mouth, but his voice had deepened. His shadow, thrown against one of the obelisks by the camera light, seemed to grow taller, though Nico himself was not moving. Then he held both hands out in front of him and shouted.

“Huh?” Sabrina said, sitting on the rug before the TV.

“That’s weird,” Ramus said. “Don’t remember that at all.”

Geena did not remember it, either. Those few seconds … they all seemed mystified by the moments unfolding on-screen. They had all been there, but none of them seemed to recall what the camera had captured.

“How do you know that dialect, Nico?” Domenic asked.

Nico said nothing, only stared at the screen, and now it was as if the interference from the TV had transferred into his eyes. They looked different. She held her breath and reached for him, glancing around because no one else seemed to have noticed, and then she hesitated.

Who am I about to touch?

She grabbed his shoulder and shook gently.

As Nico turned, the TV went blank again, and this time the picture seemed to have vanished for good.

“Nico?”

A tear streaked from his right eye and ran down his cheek. He did not speak. His face was Nico, and so were his eyes, but for a beat there seemed to be something else inside him.

“What is it, Nico?” she asked softly.

“That’s it,” Sabrina said. “There’s no more. All the filming I did after that …”

“Maybe it’ll still be on the camera?” Finch asked, standing from the small table.

“Maybe.”

Nico glanced around at everyone, then looked back to Geena. For a moment he seemed to be imploring her to do or see something—eyes widening, leaning toward her as if for an embrace—but he said nothing, and the moment passed. He leaned back in the sofa and closed his eyes.

“I’m so tired,” he said. “I’m going to rest.” He stood slowly and walked from the room, and Geena watched him all the way.

“So where’s the rest of the footage?” Finch asked. “And what the hell was he doing down there? He didn’t look like much of an archaeologist to me, not when—”

“Just shut up!” Geena shouted, turning on Finch. He looked away, embarrassed, and stood beside the window staring out.

“Geena, I think you were saying the same,” Domenic said.

“What?” She frowned at him, confused, angry at everyone speaking at once when all she wanted to do was go after Nico, hold him, find out what was wrong.

“On the film. I couldn’t quite hear what you were speaking, but it didn’t interrupt Nico’s words. It flowed with them.” He frowned as if struggling to verbalize his thoughts. “It’s like … you were repeating what he said.”

“But I …” I don’t know that language, she wanted to say. But then she recalled the vision she’d had, broadcast to her from Nico, of those men in the chamber so long ago. The words they were speaking, and how she had understood every one.

“I need to go to Nico.” She stood and left the room, and it was a relief. Glancing back once before entering the bedroom, she saw that all eyes were on her.

Domenic was the last to leave. Ramus had guided Finch from the flat with the promise of a meal in one of Venice’s better restaurants—on the BBC’s expense account, of course—and as Geena heard the two men leave she knew that Finch was in good hands. Ramus was gregarious but circumspect, and he’d leave Finch later that evening with nothing but an impending hangover. Sabrina went next, quiet and brooding. And then Domenic, sparing a glance into Geena’s bedroom as he passed the open door. They locked eyes for a moment, and Geena offered a soft smile. Nico was asleep beside her. She didn’t want to talk in case he woke up.

Domenic smiled back, feigned speaking into a phone—Call me if you need me—and left.

You were repeating what he said, Domenic had told her. She shivered and wondered what that meant.

“Cold?” Nico asked.

Geena jumped. She’d been certain that he was asleep. Nico turned on his side and rested one arm across her chest, hand cupping her left breast through her shirt.

“Just worried,” she said. “I didn’t know where you’d gone, and for a while today I thought …” She shook her head and gasped, trying to hold back the tears. She hated crying. It took her back to that long period of grief following the death of her mother, after which she had vowed to live well in tribute to her mother’s memory. Tears wasted time that could be happy.

“I’m sorry, Geena,” he said. Nico’s English was excellent, but he knew that she adored his accent. And she knew that he could speak English fluently, if he so desired. Usually he did not.

“Just don’t do that again.”

He caressed her breast slightly, then let go and sat up. Looking around the bedroom, he sighed with what sounded like contentment. But when he turned back to her, she realized that he’d been working himself up to saying something.

“For a while yesterday it was as if I was … somewhere else,” he said. He spoke quietly, as always when he was serious, leaning down on one elbow and not quite meeting her eyes. He looked past her at the bedside table piled with books on history and archaeology, as if the truth of what had happened could be contained within them.

“What did you feel?” she asked. She could never quite get used to talking like this; his strange ability was always acknowledged between them, but rarely discussed.

“Everything was suddenly old. Not just that chamber and the things in it, but the air around us, the water pressing at the walls. The time that was passing us by. I was removed from everything, letting it all flow past. Like a stone in a stream. But everything that passed me left a taint. Old. All old.”

“Something in the jar,” she said, sitting up so that he had to look at her. “When the water burst through you were holding something. Feeling it.”

Nico looked away, running a hand through his hair. He sniffed. Said nothing.

“I felt a lot of what you—”

“I know!” he snapped. “I can’t help it.”

“I wasn’t blaming you.” He was suddenly exuding disinterest—a palpable, almost offensive attitude that made her feel queasy. They’d spoken of love and even marriage, but right then he felt like a stranger. She shuffled behind him and put her arms around his chest, resting her chin on his shoulder. Hugged tight. He resisted for a few seconds, then softened into her embrace, leaning back against her and reaching around to stroke her thigh.

“Let’s sleep on it,” she said, mainly because she was exhausted thinking about it all. He was alive and back with her, and whatever had happened down there would fade with time. Sleep makes everything better, her father had told her in the days and weeks following her mother’s death. And though she knew that was not literally true, she had come to realize that the passage of time did make difficult things easier to cope with. They became history, which could be mused upon and recalled, instead of a painful, injurious present.

They stripped and lay down, Geena cautious about making advances in case that morning’s episode in the shower was repeated. But later, when the sun had fully set and moonlight cast the silvery light of make-believe through the room, she woke to find Nico pressing against her. He was stroking her, hard against her leg, and passion rose from sleep with her, making her wet and receptive to his touch. She turned on her side and hooked a leg over his hip. As he entered her he sighed heavily, and she buried her face in his neck because his breath still carried the taint of Venice.

He took complete control, making love to her as if it were the first time in months. She welcomed the passion and opened her mind to him, seeking the mysterious union that made their loving so powerful. Her skin tingled, and as she closed her eyes she felt Nico’s movements as if they were her own, felt her breath gasping against his neck, the feel of her breasts squeezed gently in his hands. It was always the most powerful sensation she had ever experienced, the sense of someone else enveloped in the open and frank throes of passion. She lost herself to it, tasting Nico’s skin and tasting herself through his mouth, penetrated and penetrating, and she also experienced that brief moment of sheer delicious panic that this would be too much for her, this would drive her mad. But beyond that always lay the staggering impact of mutual climax, and she held him tight, embracing and embraced as they cried out together.

As Nico came he growled, then chuckled in a voice far too low to be his.

“Nico?” she said after she’d caught her breath. She was shaking. Their minds were suddenly parted, and when he lifted his head and looked down at her, his face was expressionless. “Nico?” He slid aside and lay on his back, one arm above his head. His eyes closed. Asleep.

But Geena lay awake for a long time. Her heart was thumping, but no longer with exertion. She wanted to rouse him, look into his eyes to see who she would see. The lovemaking had been as amazing as ever, but somewhere there at the end, hazed by passion, there had been an instant of utter dislocation … as if she were making love with a stranger.

She lay down beside him at last, but still she could not sleep. And with every intake of breath, she searched warily for the scent of that old flooded chamber.

There’s a mist coming in from the sea. On the left is the Madonna dell’Orto church, its façade glittering with moisture from the mist. To the right, a canal leading out to open water. It’s quiet—no motors, no voices, only the gentle wash of water against the shore. It’s a very long time ago.

The man through whom she is viewing this memory—the same tall man from that flashback in the chamber, she is sure—walks beside the canal, heading for a boat moored against a wooden jetty. Several steps ahead of him walks another man, wearing wide trousers and tights, a narrow cloak, and a codpiece studded with fine jewels. He carries a sword, which remains in its scabbard. There’s a grace about him, but when he glances back his face shows signs of illness. The left side droops, eye downturned and opaque, mouth dipped.

There are several soldiers waiting in the boat, all of them heavily armed, each of them shifting nervously as they watch the approaching group.

Surrounding the droop-faced man are several more soldiers. They give him a wide berth, but their pikes are held horizontally, blocking any route through their ranks.

The tall man who owns this memory is chanting, and dark droplets spatter the cobbles behind him. In this pale, gloomy morning they have no color, but they splash like blood.

The canal beside them does have color. It is red.

They reach the waterfront and the soldiers in the boat stand to attention. They blink quickly, breath pluming from their mouths, and their fear is a palpable thing.

“So those cowards wouldn’t come to see me on my way, Volpe?” the droop-faced man asks.

“On my advice, Giardino Caravello.”

“You fear me.”

“No,” the tall Volpe says mildly, and Caravello’s confidence seems to fade.

“You have no right—” he begins, but Volpe intercedes.

“I have every right!” he roars. A flock of startled pigeons lifts off behind them, wings snapping at the air as they flee through the mist. “The safety of Venice is paramount in my mind and heart. You would seek to corrupt it. Tear it.”

“And you believe that you are incorruptible—”

“No! No more talking, Caravello. The Council of Ten has decreed that you be banished from the State of Venice forever, and if you return you will be executed.” He steps forward, passing between the line of soldiers until he is almost face-to-face with the other man. He smells garlic and wine on his breath. “Your death will be quiet and unobserved, in some dirty courtyard. Your body will be weighed down with rocks. Added to the foundations of the city.”

Caravello tries to smile, but his illness turns it into a sneer. “You cannot frighten me.”

“I have no wish to frighten you,” Volpe says. “Just to kill you. Give thanks to the Council that you suffer only banishment.”

He steps back and nods to the soldiers, and they move forward hesitantly, none of them catching Caravello’s eye as they herd him slowly toward the boat.

“Faster!” Volpe hisses. “The man is no longer Doge. He’s lower than you all, and I’m already sick of the stench of him.”

Caravello glares at each soldier as he boards the boat, and every one of them averts his eyes.

Volpe grins. “Enjoy your small victories. They will be your last.” Then he presses both hands together before him, chanting, shoulders tensing, and Caravello falls onto his back in the boat. He shouts, but his voice sounds muted and pained. A hazy redness surrounds his face.

“Go well,” Volpe says. He turns his back on the boat and walks toward the heart of the city, and as he passes by, the canal turns from red to black.

Geena snapped awake, gasping into her pillow, reaching for Nico but finding only cool sheets. She sat up and scanned the gloom of her bedroom, but he was not there.

I knew everything they were saying, she thought, but already the vision seemed to be fading. Like any vivid dream, it seemed to be built on air and mist, and waking cast the first eddies that would disperse it.

“That was no dream,” she said out loud, hoping to hear a reply. But her apartment was silent, empty of anyone but her. She sat there for a while, sore from the night before, wondering where Nico had gone and wishing for the safety of dawn.