Page 2 of Us in Ruins

He was the closest thing Van had to a best friend, a brother.

“Don’t do anything until I get back, okay?” Atlas called back. “Promise me.”

“Promise,” Van yelled after his receding footsteps.

And then he waited, still until the temple door slammed. His palms slicked with sweat. Could he really do this?

Steadying himself, he withdrew the fourth shard from his pocket. And then a fifth.

Gold danced across the surface of the Vase’s pieces. Delicate brushstrokes depicting myrtle blooms and rolling waves were woven together by a string of Latin that could only be read when all five shards were reunited. If Van had been able to understand Latin at all.

Flat on the altar, he pressed the seams of two pieces together.

Aureus, amor aeternus et cor—

As soon as the last shard was fitted into place, the Vase burned Van’s fingertips. Hot. He staggered backward as the pottery began to float, light emanating from each shard. Gold dripped in the seams, fusing the shards back together.

Then, it stopped. The light dimmed. Van batted away the sudden darkness like he did after one of Atlas’s poorly timed photo ops.

This was it.

Before he could step to the Vase, it shattered. Five shards clattered against the stone altar, but they didn’t break. Van reached for them, and a shout died in his throat. Where his fingertips should have brushed porcelain, there was nothing. The shards had vanished.

They couldn’t have vanished. That was absurd. The Vase of Venus Aurelia was myth, not magic. The key to a hidden treasure: vast piles of gold, undying fame, a way to finally be someone.

They’d fallen under the altar. That must have been it. There was always a logical explanation.

He moved to take a step, but his foot turned heavy. Stuck. Van strained, stretched. It did nothing. He couldn’t move. He glanced down at his boot as the leather paled, faded, warm brown sapping to cool white. And like twining ivy, it climbed. Marble spread from his fingertips up his forearms, over his shoulders, down his chest.

Van struggled, fighting a scream for no one, until the very moment his heart turned to stone.

1

Margot loved nothing more than a good story. A call to action that couldn’t be resisted and a sweeping adventure, a big reveal and a grand gesture. A kiss at the end, obviously. Windswept and sunlit and lipstick stained. The kind that made a girl believe in happily ever afters.

As she strode the paved streets of Pompeii, Margot flipped through a leather-bound journal, soaking up each slanted line like it was a New York Times bestseller. The pages had warped and wrinkled, yellowed at the edges from the last century. Dirt smudged over sharp-edged penmanship. At the front, written in heavy letters, ink pen dripping, it read: Property of Van Keane.

Each entry was dated back to the summer of 1932, starting on a June day not unlike this one. Van was only eighteen, but his team included some of the first archaeologists to dig their shovels into Pompeii’s sunbaked earth. She paused toward the journal’s middle, where the scribbled entries abruptly stopped. Nestled between the pages was a photo.

There were others, of course. Black-and-white snapshots capturing first glimpses of Pompeii as he dredged the city up—but this was her favorite. Van’s hair was light, cropped on the bottom but longer on top, somehow both coiffed and careless. He had been sculpted in harsh lines and sharp relief. His mouth was pressed tight, eyebrows cinched. Hunky. Brooding. Totally her type.

It was the last photo of Van ever taken. He didn’t know it back then, but later that night, while he scraped back the centuries by the light of an oil lamp, the ground would shake, shift. Unstable, the dig site collapsed. He’d gone too deep when the ceiling caved, crushed beneath the rubble with no chance at escape. It wasn’t just Pompeians buried here. Somewhere below the earth were his bones, too.

He died making history.

In his last entry, he’d written, Out here, there are only elements—sun, earth, a freesia breeze, and a sea so sparkling it isn’t hard to believe Venus herself rose from the foam and chose this land as her own.

Margot lifted her head to survey the city, letting the salt air thread through her chin-length curls. On a good day, they were unruly, but Italy’s June-warm humidity had turned them outright unmanageable. She kept them out of her face with a satin scarf tied behind her ears. In this century, everything smelled like the teetering cypress trees and the oily faux-coconut of Banana Boat sunscreen. Still, Margot might have been walking exactly where Van had, surveying the same land.

Except she should have been watching her step. Too late to do anything but brace for impact, Margot barged straight into a classmate. She rebounded, scuttling backward and losing her footing, and plummeted directly into an ocean of plastic tarps.

Okay, ouch. That was definitely going to bruise. She blinked up at the frescoed ceiling, cherubs flying dizzy circles overhead.

None other than Astrid Ashby peered down at her. Her fair skin didn’t stand a chance this summer beneath the harsh Italian sun, and her stark blonde hair had been pulled into a high pony, letting curtain bangs frame her face. Like the rest of the students at their excavation site, she wore a white T-shirt with Radcliffe Prep Archaeology stamped in the school’s maroon on the breast pocket.

Astrid crossed her arms against her chest and barked, “Watch where you’re going, Rhodes.”

Another face appeared, one with wide-set brown eyes and a permanent wrinkle between her eyebrows. Radcliffe’s head of classical studies was a suntanned white woman with deep brown hair that refused to stay coiled in a chignon at the base of her neck, turning a neat bun into little more than curly tendrils spraying out every direction. Dr. Hunt at least looked concerned for Margot’s safety as she extended a hand. “This is not exactly what I meant when I said we’d get up close and personal with history, Miss Rhodes.”

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