The factor that might speed things up was that the hole in the canal wall was dangerous. It could grow and undermine the Biblioteca, causing the entire building to collapse. The effect on tourism alone—one of the landmarks of St. Mark’s Square devastated—would be enough to get the city moving. They would already have engineers planning and a repair crew would be gathering.
Still, it could take days even for a temporary solution, such as pumping the chamber out, and Geena had no intention of waiting that long. If Tonio had not already put it in motion, she intended to send Sabrina and a team of divers down into the flooded chambers today. She wanted to know what those obelisks were, what might be in them—though she had an idea—and to see if there was anything else that they had missed.
But Nico had to be her first priority, and though she hoped that he would show up for work today, she feared otherwise.
The curtains billowed with a warm morning breeze as she hurried from her bedroom to the apartment’s tiny bathroom. She ran the shower and then tied her hair back with a rubber band, not waiting for the water to get hot before she stepped under the spray. Her shower last night had been refreshing, but she did not want to take the time to wash her hair again, so she soaped up and rinsed off and then toweled dry, all in a matter of minutes.
Trying to distract herself.
Nico’s my top priority.
She had responsibilities to the university and to her team. Tonio might have been worried about her after things went haywire and sympathetic in giving her time to recover yesterday, but today he would expect answers and action, and he had every right to that expectation. She had work to do. The public would be intrigued, the media would try to find some way to paint them all as incompetent, and scholars would scream for their heads. They had saved roughly eighty-five percent of the books and manuscripts from Petrarch’s library—most of which had already been removed before the incident—but some would no doubt shriek over the loss of fifteen percent and claim that those were the most valuable of the manuscripts.
All of these things had been rolling around in her mind over the course of the hours of darkness since she had woken to find Nico gone. She had slept and dreamed and then woken to thoughts about the project—who would handle the media inquiries, and whether or not she should expand her team once she had the BBC funding.
These were genuine responsibilities, real problems to be solved, but she focused on them in order to prevent herself from thinking about the thing that was really troubling her: the silence in her mind.
Other than the vision she’d had during the night, she had not felt the touch of Nico’s mind since they had made love. And even during their lovemaking, there had been something cold and unfamiliar in him, as though she had touched the mind of a stranger.
Been touched by, she reminded herself. Her closeness to Nico sometimes made her forget that he was the sensitive, not her.
Now she moved about the kitchen, cracking two eggs into a frying pan and then shredding some cheese and strips of ham into the mix and scrambling the whole thing together. Two slices of toast. A glass of bitter orange juice—you couldn’t get decent OJ in Italy—and a cup of coffee strong enough to make a lesser woman cry. And while she prepared her breakfast … and while she sat and ate it … and while she pulled on a clean pair of black jeans and a sleeveless white top, leaving her hair in the ponytail … she thought about Nico.
Not just about him, but to him. Geena kept her mind open, waiting for that familiar prickling of the skin at the back of her neck, the comforting caress of his thoughts against her own. When Nico was close by she felt it nearly all the time, often with images and words and emotions. But even when they were apart, as long as he was in the general vicinity she could get a sense of him—his moods, mostly. It had made her relationship with Nico the greatest of her life, not only because of the extraordinary way their thoughts mingled during sex, but because he kept himself so open to her. She had a freedom that she could never have had with another man—the freedom to love without reservation, knowing that if Nico stopped loving her, or fell for someone else, he would never be able to hide it from her. She hungered for him all the time, but more than that, she felt safe with him. At home.
Now, her thoughts wide open as though trying to lure him in, she could not sense him at all. For a short time after the incident yesterday it had been like this, with Geena so cut off that she had been certain he was dead. Now she knew that Nico was alive, and so this silence could mean only two things. Either he had left Venice completely, or he had gone silent purposefully.
She tossed back the last of her coffee and rose, scraped the remains of her breakfast into the trash, then left the dish in the sink for later.
It took her a minute to find her cell phone. She had no memory of bringing it into the bathroom with her, but there it was on the shelf above the toilet. The battery needed charging, but she refused to take the time for that now. There were half a dozen messages from Tonio and members of her team, but nothing more. Nothing from Nico.
She called him, waiting for the ring.
An ancient David Bowie song played somewhere in the apartment—Nico loved Bowie—and for half a second she let herself believe that her boyfriend had returned. Stupid, of course. Nico’s phone was here, but that didn’t mean he was.
Following David Bowie, she found the phone on the windowsill beside her television in the living room, but the song ended just as she reached for it. Her call went through to voice mail and she hung up. She would take the phone with her, and return it to Nico when she found him. She hated being out of touch.
Geena thought about writing a note but then didn’t bother. Anything she might say in a note, he would already know.
“What the hell’s happening to you?” she whispered into the empty apartment, and she didn’t know if she meant the question for Nico, or for herself.
Tucking her and Nico’s phones into her pocket, she left, locking the door behind her. As she went down the stairs, she forced herself to be calm despite how weird it all was.
She would go to the university first—she needed to touch base with Tonio—and then she would head over to the Biblioteca. If she did not cross paths with Nico at either location, then she would have to go looking for him.
The church bells were silent this morning.
Nico frowned, staring not out one of the arched windows but into a corner of the square bell tower. The heavy bells loomed above him, their weight oppressive, as though they might tumble down at any moment. Plaster strips on the walls led up into the cell that surrounded the bells.
The bell tower had been constructed of brick in the waning days of the 15th century and the first few years of the 16th, but remained an elegant and impressive combination of styles, including the Byzantine dome at its peak. Yet it was the corner that drew his attention—ordinary brick, put together by Venetian masons, which was to say, the greatest in the world.
How the hell did I get up here?