Fury

‘You deserve so much more than this,’ I murmur. ‘Than me.’

I can’t bring myself to tell him I love him, for fear it’ll all go to hell the way Luc and I did. I’m cursed, and maybe I always will be.

‘I couldn’t even dream up someone like you,’ Ryan mutters, his hands tightening on me, drawing me closer, wanting more, in the human way of things.

But then I hear the sound of something mechanical, far, far below us. A noise so faint it could be the sound a pebble makes hitting the bottom of a dry well.

‘What is it?’ Ryan says, confused, as something primal flares in me, some instinct for danger.

Fear propels me instantly into motion. I start moving upwards again, hauling him along by the front of his leather jacket.

‘C’e qualcuno?’ a man says below, faintly but clearly in Italian. Is anyone there?

‘Cosa c’e?’ another voice replies sharply, also in Italian, also male. What is it?

‘Noises — listen,’ the first man replies.

Ryan’s footfalls, his laboured breathing, sound so terribly loud.

‘I hear nothing; you’re jumping at shadows,’ the second voice says dismissively after a pause.

‘I tell you, I heard something,’ the first man insists.

‘Pietro’s voice is loud enough to wake the dead,’ comes the reply. ‘He’s probably on his way to meet us with the others.’

There’s the faint sound of tapping. The noises move steadily closer, and I’m starting to pick up the interior buzz the two men give out, as if each carries a hive inside him: of thought, feeling, imagery, energy.

‘Ryan,’ I say, my voice low and desperate. ‘You have to hurry. We can’t be seen here. We can’t be questioned.’

‘By who?’ Ryan says, exasperated, unable to hear the echo of footsteps from below. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I tell you, there’s someone up there!’ The first voice is insistent. ‘Pietro?’ he calls.

‘We can’t be found here, Ryan!’ I hiss, exploding back into motion. ‘I won’t allow myself to be trapped again.’

We stumble towards the doorway that leads out onto the lower level of the roof. As we exit beneath the stone lintel onto the north-facing walkway, I’m immediately hit with a sensation of vertigo so powerful, I have to lean against the inner wall, let Ryan take in the jaw-dropping view on his own until the world ceases to buckle around me.

When my sight grows clearer, I see a faint pink line streaking the far horizon, growing steadily all the time, eating away the edges of night, the roofline of the Galleria smouldering to our left. Though there are miles of open sky all around me, I feel like a rat in a cage.

‘We have to hide!’ I tell Ryan pleadingly.

Ryan doesn’t turn, still awed by the whole of Milan spread out before him. ‘Not before we get our bearings, Merce, there’s still time. There’s no one up here and a million places to hide.’

He tries to draw me towards a double row of intricate stone lacework, the stones set one behind the other like shark’s teeth, that forms a kind of natural barrier to the dizzying drop below.

‘Come see,’ he says, leaning out, looking down. ‘It’s so beautiful. You’re never going to fall. Not when you’re with me.’

I shake my head, look back fearfully at the doorway we just came through. But Ryan takes me by the hands and draws me in front of him, crossing his arms around my waist, pulling me against him so firmly that I cannot move, cannot fall.

His cheek is against mine as he says, ‘Look. Just look. It won’t erase what he did to you — nothing could ever do that — but every time you face down your fear is an act of defiance.’

Just for a moment, against my better judgment, I let myself lean into Ryan. And though I must close my eyes briefly to overcome a chill horror at the distance we are from the ground, little by little I find myself gazing further outward, taking in the march of rainwashed streets and buildings that appear to crowd right up to the horizon in every direction. Milan seems to radiate outwards from the Duomo as if the cathedral is the city’s literal heart.

I turn in his arms and point shakily to the north, at the line of hills I see there, purple in the wintry light, the jagged line of mountains rising behind them. ‘That’s where we need to be.’

I peer down at the northern edge of the Piazza del Duomo so far below. Immediately to the Galleria’s right, opposite us, stands an undamaged stone building roughly the same height, with a series of imposing arches marking the ground-level entryway. Solid and austere, it has a modern rooftop terrace with a curve-fronted glass and steel structure rising behind it. Both are deserted at this hour. A barrier of live greenery about chest height runs along all three sides of the terrace, and there’s a head-high barrier of glass and steel that stands between the hedge and a collection of outdoor umbrellas and groups of matching tables and chairs, set out in neat rows.

‘Seems close enough to touch, doesn’t it?’ Ryan says, echoing my own thoughts. ‘It’s like we could just step down and take a seat. If you ignore the, uh, massive drop.’

Then time seems to slow, and speed up, at the same time.

For I see three men appear on the stairs at the far end of the walkway, all dressed in plain, black, heavy robes and shapeless black overcoats, a small stain of white at the base of each man’s throat. They are framed in a succession of flying buttresses with identical rectangular doorways set beneath them, each doorway cut to the exact same dimensions as the next; the whole vista so detailed, so dreamlike, it could have been lifted from a work by Escher. The old men stop dead at the sight of us, just standing there. The one in the lead gives a shout.

I feel Ryan’s arms go rigid around me as he sees them for the first time.

‘State li! Stop! We would talk with you!’ the priest says, flinging one hand out towards us.

My head fills with the sound of their distinct energies, their peculiar human signatures, drawing closer and getting noisier as they move towards us along the walkway. I take in the terrifying drop before me — almost one hundred and fifty feet down — and feel the chill wind of vertigo sweep through me, that sensation of falling as if I will never, ever stop.

The elderly priest, arm still outstretched, shouts from the other end of the narrow corridor of stone, ‘Che vuole con noi?’ What do you want with us?

‘Pietro? Is that you?’ I hear from inside the stairwell.

I feel that sense of convergence strengthening, the cacophony of five separate living beings moving towards me, all set at different frequencies, concerned with vastly different issues, their thoughts a mixture of the alarmed and the mundane.

‘Mercy!’ Ryan gasps, turning his face in the direction of the new voice, then back towards me. ‘What do we do?’

I turn to face him, grip him fiercely by the arms. ‘Are you sure this is what you want?’ I say feverishly. ‘You and me?’

‘You know it is,’ he gasps, ‘but why do you ask?’

His last word turns into a yelp as I grasp him tightly beneath the arms and vault onto a carved stone finial that forms part of the first of the stone barriers. We teeter for an instant as I take in the way the tiled roof drops away from me into the second barrier and then into empty … space.

‘Mercy!’ Ryan yells, unable to process what he’s seeing: the ground so far below. I’m doing the impossible, balancing here, taking the whole of his weight easily when there’s no solid ground beneath his feet, or mine.

But Ryan’s with me, and if he’s with me, I won’t ever fall. That’s what he told me and it’s what I tell myself now.

I turn my head for an instant, the chill breeze lifting the curling ends of my dark hair, my eyes narrowing first on the astonished trio of men clustered at one end of the roof, then on the young man with dark eyes and