“It’s not a bad idea.” Celeste leaned forward. “Giovanni sent you a text, saying we could come back there, right?” she asked Jess. “If we needed help?”
Jess nodded. “But I haven’t talked to him. And how did…?” She looked at Celeste, flicked her chin in Massarra’s direction.
“You fell asleep, but Massarra and I talked for hours. I told her about where we stayed, about your father. If anyone has communication gear to reach Ben, I’d bet Giovanni has it. Short wave radios, all sorts of stuff in his office.”
Jess nodded. It did make sense.
“And…” Celeste whispered, beckoning Jess to lean closer. “…We don’t know what’s happening. Maybe this is just a small part of something larger. We need to get somewhere safe.”
Jess hadn’t thought of that. Was this the first salvo in the start of a global war?
Images of New York burning flashed through her mind. They had the radio on, but they could only find Italian stations. None of them, not even Massarra, spoke Italian well enough to decipher what the radio announcers screamed about. They kept the radio on anyway. After stopping at a gas station on the way out of Rome, they managed to piece together that there hadn’t been any other attacks. Not yet, anyway.
Massarra took the exit for Autostrade A1, the highway connecting Rome and Florence. The skies cleared, patches of blue showing through, and apartment blocks gave way to rolling hills.
“Giovanni’s castle withstood a thousand years of everything the world threw at it,” Celeste said to Jess in a low whisper. “Those Etruscan caves, I’ll bet people hid in there from earthquakes, eruptions…”
Jess stared at a village nestled on a mountaintop in the distance. High up. Protected.
“Okay,” Jess conceded, “let’s go back to Giovanni’s place.”
Celeste squeezed her shoulder. “Good.”
Even so, something about this felt wrong. The most important thing in any crisis was to collect information and find a safe place to regroup. Jess just lived through a horrific disaster, but that wasn’t it. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was, but something wasn’t right.
Then again, they didn’t have many options.
Massarra had probably saved their lives not once, but twice in the past twenty-four hours, and Castello Ruspoli was about as safe a place as she could imagine.
“Massarra, can you take us to the Castello?” Celeste asked, sitting back. “It’s 45 minutes off the A1, to the west.”
“Yes,” Massarra replied. “But I can’t stay. Do you know the way?”
“I know the way.”
Jess settled into her seat and watched the countryside slide by. The drive from Rome to Castello Ruspoli wasn’t far—not in North American terms, not even two hours. The change in scenery was dramatic; in twenty minutes they went from cityscape to the rolling, baked-earth hills of central Tuscany. Surreal. She watched a man in a tractor till his fields, as if that mattered anymore.
At Bettole they pulled off the main highway and wound their way through small towns. At open-air cafés, people stood in groups watching TVs, images of a wrecked Rome flashing as they passed. The setting sun lit high, thin clouds pink as Massarra pulled the car onto a dusty road with a sign for Castello Ruspoli. Climbing the zigzag road up the side of the hill, through the olive groves, at the top they followed a brick-walled alley to the main castle gates.
Massarra stopped the car at the entrance. It was closed. “This is it, yes?”
Staring out the windshield, Jess saw the first star of the night in the darkening sky—not a star, she realized, but Venus. But there were no lights in the castle. Strange.
“Yes, this is it.” Jess stepped out of the car, arranged her crutches, and swung to the small wooden entrance beside the massive iron portico gates. “Hello?” she called out.
“Are you sure you won’t stay the night?” Jess heard her mother ask Massarra.
“I will make sure you have somewhere to stay, but we need to go,” came Massarra’s quiet reply.
“It was nice to meet you again,” Celeste said to Massarra’s uncle as she got out.
Jess searched for a buzzer, a knocker. Nothing. She banged the door with her fist, as hard as she could. “Giovanni!” she yelled. “It’s Jess and Celeste.”
The place felt deserted.
Had something happened? Maybe Giovanni left for Florence. Massarra could drop them there, but the prospect of another city felt dangerous. And how or why would they look for Giovanni anyway? She liked being in the countryside. Open space. Calming her breathing, she listened. Crickets sang in the silence, their chirps echoing off the walls.
She turned to Massarra and Celeste. “I don’t think anyone is”—the door to the castle swung open—“here.”
Giovanni stood in the doorway, a holstered handgun on his hip. “Yes?” he asked, his brows knitted together in a scowl.
“Ah, sorry for not calling,” Jess mumbled. “But, we got stuck in Rome.” As her eyes adjusted to the darkness inside, she saw two thick-set men in bullet proof vests and dark clothing standing behind Giovanni. Between them stood Nico, who smiled warmly and waved.
But Giovanni didn’t smile. He stared hard at Jess. “And…?”
She hadn’t given much thought to how Giovanni might react when they showed up on his doorstep. He had invited them, after all. She imagined an impassioned reunion, tears over the horrors of Rome. It made sense that they might show up. She didn’t expect this cold, standoffish reaction. She felt self-conscious, exposed, the stump of her leg cold. “We were hoping we might be able to stay here. You invited us.”
Giovanni stared at her. Seconds ticked by. “And who is that?” He flicked his chin in the direction of Massarra.
“A friend,” Celeste answered. “She gave us a lift.”
“And you want to come in?” Giovanni asked. “Anything else?”
Were those bodyguards behind him? That made sense, but not the way Giovanni acted. Hadn’t he asked them to come here if they needed help? What game was he playing? Jess felt her hackles rising. “We need help. That’s why we’re here. We exchanged texts, you said to come back if we had problems.”
“You need help?” Giovanni took a step back. “Then come in, by all means.”
Nico stepped forward. “Jessica, I tried talking to him, but—”
“Silence!” Giovanni turned to glare at Nico. “No more talking.” He smiled at Jess. “Please, come in.”
The feeling of a surreal break from reality intensified. Jess swung forward on her crutches, through the door. Celeste followed. Except for the two bodyguards and Nico and Giovanni, the interior gravel courtyard was empty, the lights everywhere off.
“Did you see what happened in Rome?” Jess asked, taking two loping steps in before stopping.
That had to be it, why Giovanni was acting so strange. Maybe he'd lost friends or family. Jess cursed herself for being thoughtless. For her it was a terrifying shock, but for him, it must be like a New Yorker who lived in lower Manhattan after 9/11.
Jess tried to reach for Giovanni. “I’m so sorry—”
“What do you have to be sorry for?” Giovanni asked sharply, pulling away from her. He turned on his heel and crunched across the gravel, past the gnarled roots of the ancient olive tree. “This way.” But he didn’t lead them up the main stairs to the living quarters. He walked toward an open wooden door with metal bars just off the courtyard.
Jess followed him. Nico hung back behind the bodyguards, his head hanging low between his shoulders. She heard the car’s engine start outside the walls, gravel crunching under its wheels, the sound fading.
“Do they know what happened yet?” Celeste asked from behind Jess.
Giovanni stopped at the door, indicating that Jess should enter ahead of him. “And who is ‘they’?”
Jess and Celeste glanced at each other. What was going on? Jess shrugged and turned back to Giovanni. “The media, the government, I don’t know.”
She s
wung forward through the open door into darkness. He hadn’t even asked what happened to her leg. Inside, she stopped and let her eyes adjust to the darkness. She expected to see a staircase, or perhaps a lobby to rooms on a lower level. These were the stables. Rough stone walls with floors covered in hay. No horses. The door swung shut behind her, a grinding ka-chunk signaling the lock closing.
“But as to what’s going on,” Giovanni continued, “that’s something I would like you to answer.”
Jess wobbled around on her crutches. “What are you doing?”
Giovanni pressed his face against the metal bars of the door’s window, pointed a finger at Jess. “The question is, what are you doing?” He disappeared.
A muffled scream. “Let go of me!” Celeste yelled. Thrashing in the gravel.
Jess hobbled back to the door. “Mom?!”
Another scream, louder this time, and then a door slamming shut.
21
DARMSTADT, GERMANY
“AN EVACUATION OF Rome has been ordered…” said the CNN news anchor.
Ben watched the TV screen in their office with dread. Still no word from the driver. Still no word from Jess or Celeste. He had yelled at Dr. Müller, vented his frustration and fear on him, but really, it wasn’t his fault. After his public tantrum, Ben went and locked himself in a bathroom stall where he cried—and prayed.
When times were good, when he felt healthy and optimistic, there was no need for God. Brought up Protestant, Ben now thought of himself as an atheist. He saw no cracks in the fabric of existence that demanded a Creator.
Not until his existence cracked around him.
But there was no answering call to his prayers, no signs, no telephone calls or emails. It was just the universe, ticking over, oblivious to the wants of humans, even the billions now praying with Ben—and certainly oblivious to the individual needs of Benjamin Rollins.
And so what if a few hundred thousand people were killed? In months they’d all be dead anyway. What was coming, nothing could stop.
“My big question.” Roger sat in his cubicle, bent over his laptop with scraps of paper littered around it. “If Nomad is a black hole, how did it get moving so fast?”
Ben stared at the TV, the image of blackened corpses laid out beside the Tiber. Is one of them Jess? Celeste? Something inside Ben told him, no. If something had happened to one of them, he’d know. Something inside of him would know. For a man of science, the sudden belief in a mystical connection seemed beyond argument.
“Not one black hole—but two.” Ben forced part of his mind back. “Nomad is a binary pair of them.”
It was the only explanation for the rising intensity of gravitational waves LIGO measured. Now that they suspected the readings weren’t a glitch, Ben was trying to match the data to theoretical models. They’d sent a request for all of LIGO’s data from the past three days. If Nomad was a binary pair, two black holes sweeping around each other in tight orbits, this information could confirm it.
They hadn’t told Dr. Müller yet. The ESOC teams were focused on the Gaia observatory and new radial velocity measurements coming in from around the world. The LIGO connection could still be a red herring.
But if it wasn’t, LIGO could pinpoint the incoming velocity of Nomad. So far they only had one data point: LIGO measurements from the end of the day before. In a few minutes, they should be getting all its readings from the past three days. Any changes in intensity should give a straightforward answer to the speed of Nomad. So far, the new radial velocity measurements only provided an order-of-magnitude of a thousand kilometers per second, on a route inside the orbit of Saturn.
Ben glanced back at the TV on the wall. Massive street demonstrations in Karachi and Baghdad.
“…officials in Washington pin the attack in Rome on the Islamic Caliphate terrorist organization. The Caliphate is denying involvement for the attack, but claiming this is the starting signal for a final jihad before the hand of God wipes the Earth clean…”
If the world was thrown into shock at the announcement of Nomad, now it was a mix of equal parts panic and anger. For some people it meant a finite amount of time to prove that they were right—one last chance for vengeance. The ultimate last words were about to be spoken.
“But over a thousand kilometers per second?” Roger furrowed his brows together. “Nothing should move that fast.”
“Not true,” Ben replied. “A billion light years away, whole galaxies are moving away from us at 20,000 kilometers a second.”
“But that’s on the other side of the visible universe. And other galaxies are moving away.”
In 1929, Edwin Hubble had famously discovered that all other galaxies moved away from us; that the universe was expanding. Except that not all galaxies moved away from us.
“Not our closest galaxy, Andromeda,” Ben said. “It’s moving toward us at over a hundred kilometers a second. In four billion years, it’ll collide with the Milky Way.” He smiled wryly. “But that’s a problem for another day.”
“Sure, Andromeda’s moving toward us at a hundred kilometers a second,” Roger agreed. “And our solar system is moving around our galactic core at two hundred kilometers a second, but thousands of kilometers a second? Even in the detonation of a star, the expanding material has to push against something to accelerate it. With black holes, there’s nothing to push against—even a supernova wouldn’t give it that much kick.”
Ben shook his head. “This wasn’t pushed, and I don’t think Nomad was ever a part of our universe, not really.”
“…the Pentagon raised the alert status to DEFCON 2,” said the news anchor on the TV. “…only seen a few times before, during the Cuban missile crisis and after the 9/11 attacks…”
Ben looked at the TV again. The idiots. By the time Nomad arrived, humans might have already destroyed the world. Maybe this was the hand of God wiping the Earth clean.
The TV announcement was enough to pull Roger from his computer screen. He watched with Ben for a few seconds before asking, “So what do you think Nomad is, then?”
“I think Nomad is a black hole pair, formed during the creation of our universe.”
“Still doesn’t explain how it’s moving so fast.”
Roger wasn’t thinking deep enough. “Ever hear of gravitational recoil?” Ben’s laptop pinged. The data from LIGO. He opened the attached spreadsheet and looked at the data from the day before.
“Ah…” Roger squeezed his eyes shut so hard it looked like it hurt. “When two black holes merge?”
“Exactly. When they coalesce, their combined gravitational waves carry linear momentum, sometimes enough to eject the core from a galaxy. Theoretical limits are accelerations of thousands of kilometers a second.”
“Okay, that’s possible.” Roger nodded. “Unlikely, but possible.”
“Some people think the universe hasn’t existed long enough for the massive black holes at the center of galaxies to form. That it would take longer than fifteen billion years for the million-plus solar mass monsters to exist just by stars falling into them.”
Ben entered the LIGO data into his calculation spreadsheet.
“Primordial black holes might have formed during the creation of our universe,” he continued. “Maybe the start of our universe was a giant game of billiards, with trillions of medium-sized black holes merging into the galactic cores, while some of them, like Nomad, shot free. If I’m right, I think Nomad is shrapnel left over from the Big Bang.”
He frowned at his spreadsheet. That couldn’t be right. A knot formed in his stomach, his cheeks flushing. He stared at the number on his screen. That can’t be right.
“Can you check this for me?” Ben clicked forward on the LIGO data email, sending it to Roger. “See if you can come up with a relative velocity?” He glanced at the TV. The images of street protests changed to a room with a table of men in ill-fitting suits. Scientists.
“…latest reports indicate that there is no significant radiation detecte
d in central Rome,” said one of the men around the table, “leading our experts to conclude that the bomb over Rome was not a nuclear device.”
“What was it then?” asked the news anchor.
A grainy image of a large air transport filled the screen. An object dropped from the back of it, a parachute opening above it. A second later, the screen went white. “This is a security camera footage of what we believe to be the device detonated over the Vatican. It resembles a Russian MOAB, a ten-ton conventional munition similar to the BLU-82 used by American forces in the Vietnam War. It has a yield of about twenty tons of TNT, with a blast radius of…”
So it wasn’t a nuclear device. There was a chance. The TV switched to an aerial view of central Rome. While the Vatican, and buildings around it, were rubble, on the other side of the Tiber, the buildings stood intact. That’s where Jess and Celeste were. They had to be alive.
“Jesus Christ.”
Ben blinked and turned to Roger. “What number did you get?”
“This can’t be right,” Roger whispered.
Ben saw the shock on Roger’s face. “What did you get?”
“Eight.”
“At what combined mass?”
“About forty.”
Ben swallowed hard. “Me too.”
“What trajectory did you get?” Roger looked nervously at Ben.
“…the Pentagon is saying that Chechen rebels worked with a splinter group of the Pakistani army to steal a MOAB from the Russian army,” said the news anchor in the background. “…would never have been so bold to launch an attack, but were spurred by the announcement of Nomad which they view as a biblical event like the one described by Noah…”
Calculating the three dimensional path of an invisible object was no easy thing. Ben checked his spreadsheets, clicking in the data from LIGO. Together with the new radial velocity searches and visual observations of Uranus, it narrowed down the list of solutions. He checked the numbers again. “Declination of one-eighty-one, inclination of one-point-five with closest solar approach of seventy four million kilometers, and forty solar masses, plus or minus.”
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