Page 4 of Us in Ruins

Dr. Hunt led them deeper into the excavation site—a shell of stone walls with a labyrinthine floor plan and enough tarp-covered pits that they really should have had school-issued helmets. The first doorway opened into a wide foyer. Cracking frescoes caked the walls. Soft blues faded into pastel pinks. They must have been dazzling jewel tones when they were first painted, but everything lost its color with time.

“This summer, you and your partner will document all of your findings and write a report that touches on the meaning of these discoveries and why it was meaningful at its time of creation.” Dr. Hunt steered the class around a bend, revealing a tent-covered courtyard and five roped off dig plots. Pines jutted out from the harsh soil, hedges encircled fountains that must have once drizzled streams of clear water, and ivy dripped down the walls like gelato on a hot day. “Collect your tools, and let’s get started.”

Margot scooped up two full sets of items—brushes, a picket, a fancy measurement device, some shovel-looking things. Rex and Suki knelt at Plot E, already digging into the hardened earth.

Astrid, on the other hand, sulked at the edge of Plot D. Apparently the D in Plot D stood for Definitely going to lose her freaking mind. Astrid’s eyes were darts, and Margot was the target.

“Here,” Margot said, holding out a second set of tools. “I grabbed some for you.”

“I’m good,” said Astrid.

Suki giggled into the palm of her hand. From a leather pouch, Astrid unsheathed a gilded shovel with a glossy wood handle, burnished with an insignia Margot couldn’t quite make out. Astrid huffed onto the metal and polished it on the sleeve of her shirt.

The extra shovel thudded against the dirt, slipping out of Margot’s fingers.

Astrid asked, her ice-blue eyes narrowed, “Why’d you steal a spot on this trip?”

Margot sagged. “I didn’t steal anything from anyone. You heard Dr. Hunt—”

“Please, Pasha Manikas scored a ninety-nine percent on the Classical Archaeology final last quarter. We were going to be roommates.” Astrid sniffed, puckered like she smelled knock-off perfume. “Your essay shouldn’t have qualified. It was fiction, for god’s sake.”

“Dr. Hunt seems to disagree,” Margot countered, but regret wormed into her stomach, burying itself in her gut.

The students who had been selected for the trip had their application essays posted on the school website.

There had been Suki’s—“Charon’s Obol: An Investigation of the Roman Afterlife.”

Astrid had titled hers “Eternal Languages and the People Who Spoke Them.”

Then, way, way at the bottom was Margot’s: “All Rhodes Lead to Rome.”

And maybe it was self-insert fan fiction in the literal definition of the phrase. Margot had written about finding the Vase of Venus Aurelia, pouring in details from Van’s journal. The Vase was Pompeii’s greatest treasure, blessed by Venus herself to grant whoever pieced it back together unimaginable wealth and notoriety, the promise of being loved by all who encountered you. If Margot discovered it, she’d never be dismissed for being too girly, too indecisive, too irrational again—she’d be respected, understood, appreciated. Loved.

The only problem was that, according to legend, Venus shattered the Vase, deeming the power too much for mere mortals. If anyone was able to complete each of her five trials, they would be rewarded with a piece of the Vase. But that was the hiccup. It was just a myth.

There was no road map. No flashing arrow saying Trial of Venus, due north! No one had ever seen all five pieces. No one until Van.

“You’re never going to find that stupid Vase,” Astrid snapped. “People have been looking for it for the last two thousand years.”

Margot shrugged, batting her lashes. “Maybe they just didn’t know where to look.”

“But you do? You don’t know a trowel from a spade.” Astrid laughed, cutting. “Forget it. I’m not letting you ruin my GPA because you think you’re Lara Croft.”

Margot held on to Van’s journal like a buoy in a raging sea. Her heart slammed against her rib cage, emotion bubbling back up. Her dad always said she felt things too much. That she thought with her heart instead of her head. It wasn’t her fault that her heart had a megaphone and her head had anxiety.

Before she could scream or cry or both, Margot bolted out of the tent and scaled the short stone wall, landing in an alleyway. The distant din of Astrid’s laugh trailed after her, but Mount Vesuvius loomed in the distance. On a day like today, the skies blue and a gentle wind lifting Margot’s hair off her neck, it was hard to imagine the mountain demolishing an entire civilization under ash and dirt. For centuries, this town, these roads, had been buried. Abandoned and forgotten.

Now, cobbled streets and colonnades had been pried from the earth’s grip and exposed once again. Margot could almost imagine the faded ink lines of elevation maps the original explorers must have charted when they first arrived, like all the places Van had touched turned golden in the afternoon light.

Margot slid onto her butt, curling her knees to her chest, and wormed her arms out of the straps of her backpack. She pried open Van’s journal and it fell back to the last entry. The spine had probably creased, she’d flipped to this page so many times. Her index finger trailed over his penmanship, feeling the grooves where his pen indented the paper.

Sitting here, she could almost imagine him next to her. His tawny hair, his knife-sharp jaw, the way his linen shirt stretched across his broad shoulders. The heroes in romance novels always smelled like sandalwood, and he probably did, too. Like sandalwood and salt, a trace of evergreen—that intangible scent of a day spent outside.

He’d searched for the Vase even though no one else believed it could exist. Like believing in soulmates or the Loch Ness Monster—both things Margot was happy to trust were out there somewhere. He would have understood Margot. She was sure of it.

Unzipping her mustard-yellow backpack, she dropped Van’s notebook into its depths, right between a beaten-up paperback novel and a wad of linen she miraculously snuck through airport security. She didn’t dare breathe as she unwrapped the artifact.

Red clay, painted black. Streaks of gold wove across the exterior, myrtle blooms and a fragment of Latin painted at the edge, the last word broken off. A piece of something spectacular, like glass before the mosaic.

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