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  I gave a robotic nod. Far as I knew, the Palatine was this big hill full of ruins, and you could get a combined ticket to visit the whole thing along with the coliseum for twelve euro, which was a fair deal compared to the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican—sixteen euros? Get out! But I figured that Lily didn’t care about that. I pursed my lips in appreciation—of what, I wasn’t sure. “Sounds really cool. It’s great that you still study . . . history.”

  I hoped we were done with small talk and she’d just leave now because I had officially run out of things to tell her. All I knew was that she’d enrolled in Harvard five years ago. I still remembered the day my mom had called to give me the great news. Normally, she’d only call when she received my report cards from Saint-Henry—a unique boarding institution empowering differently abled learners since 1904! Their words, not mine. Mom had said, “Lily has been accepted into Harvard”; then she’d asked, “And what are you going to do?” I knew my card was full of Fs and shit like, “I have never seen this student in my classroom,” or “Emma’s disruptive behavior is preventing her from exploring her potential to the fullest,” so I kept quiet. My mom had sighed and hung up, like always.

  I didn’t realize I’d zoned out until Lily tilted her head again like a pigeon. “Em?”

  My gaze snapped up. “That’s me. Well, um, I guess I’ll be on my way.”

  Her shoulders hitched; she flashed me a pleading look. “Are you doing anything else today?”

  My poker face wavered, and I forced a smile on my lips as I kept lying my ass off. “I was going to visit . . .” stuff. “The coliseum.”

  “Oh my God, are you serious? Actually, I was on my way there. Our digging site is behind the Coliseum, near San Bonaventura.” She grinned. “Come with me, I’ll give you a tour no ticket can buy.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about, but one fact stood out from this slow-motion crash: I had lied my way straight into a concrete wall. I scanned the Piazza, the buses and a couple police cars blaring their sirens to pass them faster. Still no providential cop-out in sight and my brain cells were running on empty. I shrugged helplessly.

  “Okay, follow me, then!”

  Congratulations, Em. You played yourself.

  Well, fuck me. All the turns I’d taken in life had officially taken me back to square one. Except in Rome, and in a mirror reality where Lily and I were on speaking terms, strolling down the Via dei Fori Imperiali, along old brick buildings and ruins. I wasn’t even sure we’d exchanged a single word the last time I’d seen her. I’d been seventeen our last Christmas together—Lily coming back from Harvard to celebrate with the family, me from Saint-Henry because . . . they closed during Christmas break, and there was just no way around it. I made a point to spend as much time outside as possible, only to crash on the couch in Richard’s home office around 4 am, long after everyone had gone to bed. So, this was probably the longest conversation I’d had with her since . . . ever, maybe.

  I took some pics of the ruins and columns you see on all the postcards while Lily basically gave me a course on Ancient Rome, the imperial forums—sorry, fori—how politicians and merchants gathered there to do their business, the baths, the basilicas . . . Honestly, it was a little too much info at once what with all the names and dates, but I didn’t interrupt her. I liked the distance it put between us that she was ranting about stuff I didn’t really care about.

  We’d just passed the massive stack of arches of a basilica, and Lily was telling me about emperor Constantine and how he kicked the ass of another emperor named Maxentius to take the throne, and after that guy drowned in the Tiber, Constantine grabbed his basilica too because these people obviously had no chill. She stopped in her explanations all of a sudden, and I knew my luck had just run out.

  “What about you? I’ve been talking for ten minutes straight, and I realize I didn’t ask about, I don’t know, your life.”

  I retreated behind yet another shrug. “Well . . . I just work, and I guess that’s about it.”

  “Where?”

  “At a restaurant on Broadway.”

  The flash of compassion was easy to read on her dollface, but even with her fricking Harvard degree, she couldn’t see when it was time to drop the bone. “You’re a cook?”

  “I work the dining room.” I figured it sounded classier than just telling her I was a waitress.

  “Oh. That’s great.” There was a lot loaded in that single oh that I prayed we wouldn’t unpack.

  “Money’s okay,” I quickly added. “I got my own place too.” A shoebox efficiency in the Bronx, but I was pretty proud of it nonetheless.

  Lily’s mouth rounded in admiration, but I couldn’t tell if it was sincere. She said, “That’s amazing!” and reached for my hand, but I snatched it away discreetly. Undeterred, she went on, her voice a notch quieter. “I’m happy for you, you know. I know it’s not always been easy . . . I’ll be home for Christmas; maybe we could organize something with Mom—”

  “I’ve already got plans,” I snapped, a sudden pressure welling in my chest. I hated the way she said it, ‘Mom.’ Her mom. Not mine.

  Lily took a sharp breath and fished for her phone in her black Dior tote. “Okay . . . I’ll give you my number anyway.”

  I pulled out my own phone and gave it to her. She noticed the Minions case; it made her smile. Her fingers skimmed across the glass screen, creating a new contact. Lily. When she was done, she handed it back to me with a hopeful smile. “Text me so I have yours?”

  I clutched the scratched plastic case hesitantly. On a rational level, I’d rather get full-body herpes than give her my number, but I was also painfully aware of this tiny part of me that still wanted to belong somewhere. I watched my pride fly away and flip me off and chewed the inside of my cheek as I texted her. “That’s mine.”

  After I was done, Lily pointed to the coliseum in the distance. I wasn’t sure why, but there was something vaguely threatening about its worn stones and the multitude of empty arches. A dead building, long-gutted from its inside. Creepy. It looked even more massive up-close; I felt like an ant in the shadow stretching across the square all the way to the avenue. Colossal stuff indeed. I followed Lily around a mile-long queue of tourists trampling the pavement impatiently, fanning themselves with colorful leaflets.

  “It’s often difficult to get in, especially at this time of the year,” Lily noted. “But I can use my Katharos pass to take you for a private visit after hours. Tomorrow night, maybe?”

  “Katharos?” I asked, to change the subject.

  “The Katharos Archeological Foundation; that’s where I’m interning. They’re very active here in Rome. They finance expensive excavations, publish books about their finds, and they raise funds to protect sites from developers.”

  “Cool.” I shot a doubtful look at the spotless red varnish of her loafers. “So, you’re digging and, like, dusting stuff?”

  She shook her head and laughed. There was no bite to it, but I still felt dumb. “No, no. Most of the time I help analyzing the pieces we find. I draw them, and then I do research to see how they fit in our current state of knowledge about a given period. I do translation too. I want to do a thesis on proto-Italic alphabets, and the foundation has incredible pieces to study.”

  “Okay.”

  As we kept circling around the coliseum, the crowd became scarce, save for a little cluster of old people bickering around a souvenir shop. Lily stopped in front of a single arch standing a hundred feet away from the arena as if it’d been randomly dropped there. It was the size of a building, and there wasn’t a single square inch that hadn’t been sculpted with guys in skirts, horses, columns, Latin text . . . you name it. I took a pic because everyone else was. Lily watched me do so with a proud grin.

  “It’s the Constantine Arch. He had it erected to commemorate his victory over Maxentius.”

  “The guy he took the basilica from?”

  Lily nodded. “You see the stylistic differences between the top
and bottom half?”

  “Sure.” Not at all . . .

  “It’s because the arch is kind of a collage. The artists reused pieces from Trajan and Hadrian’s period and added their own, but the late Roman style was already veering away from the classical Hellenistic one. It was less realistic, less refined,” she droned, nodding with a frown of concentration. “Constantine’s Arch is a perfect surviving example of that stylistic dichotomy, and some would argue, of the decline of the empire at that time . . . Em?”

  Someone, shoot me please . . . “Yeah, it’s . . . very cool.” It’s the same bearded guys in skirts. Everywhere.

  I drew a quiet breath of relief when she walked us away from the dreaded arch. We made our way in blessed silence toward a green hillside where pines shadowed ruins emerging from the ground. A little farther down the trail, a tall scaffolding fitted with building wrap shielded a big chunk of the site from prying eyes. I stared up at the stone profile printed on the wrap and the sober black logo over it. Katharos Foundation.

  A pair of beefy guards in dark suits guarded the entrance to the site. Lily flashed them her pass and a smile they didn’t return, and we were in. Honestly, the wrapping looked more exciting than the piles of dirt and the excavators it concealed. Lily motioned for me to follow her. “Come, it’s this way.”

  I didn’t want to take her hand, but when she threatened to twist her ankle for the third time on protruding rocks, I let my hand dangle near hers in a silent invitation. She laced her fingers with mine, a smile on her lips. As we got closer, I stuck to my first impression that there wasn’t much to see around here, except . . . a big hole. Workers wearing blue helmets bustled around a pit some fifteen feet wide and so deep I couldn’t see the bottom from where I stood.

  I watched them set up pickets and yellow tape around the hole and yell stuff to each other in Italian under the attentive eyes of a black guy who looked all business in a classy gray suit and camel coat. At his side a younger dude with a navy sweater and jeans ran two hands through his curly brown hair, looking awestruck. Lily waved at him excitedly, but he didn’t react. His gaze was set on the hole, eyes wide and unblinking, and I couldn’t place why his fascination sent a chill of unease crawling under my skin like that.

  “Dante!”

  Alerted by Lily’s squeal, the younger guy’s chin jerked up. He turned to acknowledge us with a ridiculously white smile.

  He kind of almost winked. She blushed. I sensed an explanation coming. “Dante and I—” she began.

  “—are fucking,” I completed in a matter-of-fact tone.

  Lily’s jaw went slack, but her shock soon became a guilty grin. “He’s my boyfriend. He works for Katharos too. That’s how we met . . .”

  “Not judging.” I shrugged, my palms up.

  Why wasn’t I surprised that Lily’s boyfriend looked like an Armani ad, on top of digging top-secret archeological holes? She ran to him like in a movie and hugged him. It made my chest tighten a little because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d hugged anyone like that—maybe as a little kid? I averted my eyes and pretended to be super interested in the excavator gathering a big pile of rubble away from the hole instead.

  When he tipped his head to look at me over her shoulder, she whirled around. “Dante, this is Emma Nielsen, my stepsister. Em, meet Dante Alessandri.”

  He waved at me with a good-guy grin. I waved back. Again, awkward five seconds. The black guy walked up to them to whisper something in Dante’s ear, his face completely blank. If he noticed me, he gave no sign of it. I took a few cautious steps toward the hole to get a better look because I had no idea what to do with myself, but also, admittedly, because I was a little curious. It went much deeper than I expected, at least a hundred feet. Ropes hung all the way down from several reels, and a few workers equipped with climbing harnesses were busy scraping dirt from some sort of large circular stone plate half-buried in the earth among broken columns and cracked slabs of rock. With each swipe of their gloved hands, symbols appeared that looked like letters, but nothing I could decipher.

  I stared, feeling a little . . . off. I was hyperaware of the noise of the engines and the voices ricocheting my way from the bottom of the hole. My ears were buzzing, and I thought maybe I’d drunk more beer than I thought.

  Dante’s suave Italian accent filtered through my daze. “Chronos’s Table. It was part of a small shrine to Cronus—or Chronos, for the Greek. The building collapsed in the fifth century during a landslide, and the table was thought to have been destroyed.” He shifted closer to me with Lily latched around his arm. “It’s a completely unique piece.”

  I stared down the hole at the concentric lines of characters covering the stone disc. “It was a table?”

  “Not made for eating, though,” Dante said with a chuckle. “Rather, a ritual artifact.”

  “What kind of ritual?” I asked.

  Lily’s smile wavered. “We don’t know yet. We need to translate the inscriptions.”

  “That’s what you meant when you said Katharos had incredible pieces,” I mused, eyeing Lily.

  “Yes. The inscriptions on the table are a form of proto-Canaanite script like nothing we’ve ever seen before.” When my face remained stuck in a grimace of mild confusion, she explained, “What we call proto-Canaanite is a very early alphabet that was used to transcribe Semitic languages. It’s basically the ancestor to Greek and Latin, derived from hieroglyphs, but here, the characters are different, and so far, the table’s alphabet seems twice as crowded as Phoenician, for example.”

  “More letters, more sounds?” I ventured.

  “That’s the idea,” Dante confirmed. My lips quirked in fleeting pride as he went on. “It could be a written trace of an archaic language we’ve never encountered before, with a broader, more complex palette of phonemes.”

  “And that it just awaited us for all this time inside a Roman temple; it’s insane,” Lily added in an awed breath.

  I gave a slow nod and silently thanked Dante when he thought it useful to provide just a teensy bit of context. “We think the table largely predates the foundation of Rome—middle of the Bronze age, probably. Ancient Romans tended to either assimilate or erase older civilizations as they expanded—like the Etruscans, for example—so it’s extremely unusual that someone took the pain to preserve the table throughout the centuries and place it in a Roman shrine.”

  “So that it can end up in a museum,” I noted dryly, watching workers position huge belts under the muddy slab of granite.

  If he picked up on the sarcasm, Dante chose to ignore it. “And it’s all thanks to the next professor, Professor McKeanney,” he chuckled, wrapping his arm around her shoulders—God, did these two ever stop cuddling? “We would never have found the table without Lily’s research.”

  I tilted my head at her. “Professor McKeanney? Like your grandpa?”

  Her gaze grew wistful. “I’m not quite there yet; I’ll need to get my PhD first. It’s his discovery anyway, not mine. I just used his final notes and filled in the blanks.” Her eyes met Dante’s, who gave her shoulder a light squeeze. She smiled. “I owe him everything.”

  “As do I,” Dante replied, in the kind of husky and tender voice I thought you only heard in movies.

  Lily gave a happy nod. “He must have been watching over us, somehow.”

  Ah, the legendary grandfather—my mother’s pride and joy. Back when we were kids, she never missed an opportunity to slip it into any conversation that the father of her trophy husband was a distinguished professor of archeology who’d been featured in several BBC documentaries—on TV. Just in case you didn’t get that right; he had been on TV.

  Joke aside, the old McKeanney had been Lily’s childhood hero, some kind of Indiana Jones, but without the whip or the adventures. He’d written tons of books, taught at Harvard, and they’d even set a memorial plate there after he killed himself, a few months before I dropped from Saint-Henry. I didn’t know the details—only what I’d overhead fr
om Richard and my mom during our final Christmas together. Apparently, the old man had never gotten over the death of Lily’s mother from Hodgkin’s lymphoma when Lily was three. He’d buried himself in his work for almost two decades to fight off depression until he jumped from a window.

  Sad stuff, especially since he’d struck me as a decent human being the couple of times I’d met him as a kid. The kind of guy willing to pretend he was interested in my textbooks, even when I snubbed him like a little turd. My stomach coiled unpleasantly at the realization that he had ended it here, in an apartment in Rome. I shot a sideways glance at Lily, who rested her head on Dante’s shoulder while they discussed their mystic Ikea Table. It dawned on me that must be weird for her to be back here, right in her grandad’s footsteps . . . after that.

  She turned to smile at me while Dante droned on. Like a bucket of icy water suddenly dropping over my head, I heard my mother’s voice again. Can’t you be a little less selfish? Lily lost her mother! How would it feel for you to lose me, Em? I swallowed the bitter taste in my mouth. I knew how it felt. Like you’re stripped bare and you belong nowhere.

  “Ehi! Torna qui!” Hey, get back here!

  All heads flipped where that gravelly shout came from, mine included. On the other side of the hole, some hobo with a beer in hand staggered dangerously close to the edge. Blatantly ignoring the guards and workers yelling for him to get back, he let his body tip forward, even closer to the pit, reaching through thin air with a weird cane made of gnarled wood.

  Dante’s eyebrows jerked a fraction, before he told me, “Sorry. They’re everywhere in the center because tourists keep giving them change.”

  Lily watched with big sad eyes as two guards hooked their arms into the hobo’s to pull him away from the hole. He dropped his beer in the grass and managed to reach for his face to readjust small round sunglasses. I scanned him, an old habit even though he posed no threat to me at the moment. Long worn coat, wrinkled and patched up. Corduroy pants, threadbare at the knees, but not really dirty. Dark T-shirt, nice steel-toes showing through his busted boots. Dude hadn’t shaved in at least a couple of months, and the mess of sandy curls on his head could use a cut—or just a comb, really.