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Julia turned back to Loren. ‘Before my father retired to his estate here, he was a travelling merchant. His contracts took him throughout the empire and landed him the favour of Vespasian. This was how he met Servius, who, if you recall from the letter, tried to strike a deal with my father. Rope him into his ring. My father wasn’t pious by any means, but the objects Servius sought . . .’

Loren’s stomach sank with the suspicion he already knew. Still, he said, ‘Valuable. Priceless.’

‘Divine,’ she corrected. ‘Have you noticed his gloves? They cover scarred palms, burned from handling relics beyond what humans can stand. Even so, he persists. Servius has a lust for it, the idea that mortals can touch hands with gods. He went so far as to operate his dealings out of a temple in Rome. And that was too scandalous for my father. He tipped Vespasian off, and within weeks, the smuggling ring was scoured.’

On his perch, Felix stiffened, rigid and lifeless as an amateur painting. A question formed on Loren’s tongue – a shapeless interrogation that somehow would draw a link between Servius, smuggling and Felix – but Julia spoke first, and the thought faltered.

‘Servius’s ire with me is as personal as it is political. You read the letter. Once Vespasian declared his punishment, Servius saw the opportunity to sink Pompeii and thus sink my father, if only he could get his hands on the estate. My father was elderly. Servius decided to bide his time.’

‘But you inherited the estate when your father died,’ Loren said.

‘An untraditional arrangement. Servius didn’t expect it, certainly. I imagine he didn’t see me as a threat, but I’m everything he hates in a person. A woman, educated and clever enough to stay two paces ahead.’

‘So he should kill you. What’s stopping him?’ Felix said, voice flat. Loren winced, but Julia only smiled, cold as ever.

‘If Servius has ever erred,’ she said, ‘it’s by underestimating me. ’

Loren fiddled with a coin, spinning it on its side. ‘How many times did you reject him for marriage?’

‘More times than appropriate. He thought I’d relent eventually. But now he’s grown impatient. Clovia was an unfortunate casualty.’

‘Julia, if Clovia was only a message, surely he’ll do worse to you.

’ Loren cast an eye to Felix. Unless justice was delivered and Servius stopped, he had the sinking feeling the senator would keep hunting Felix.

Even after he put the helmet back. Even after he left town.

Felix’s ability to handle such a relic would be too valuable to let it slip away.

‘And I have reason to suspect he still smuggles, despite his exile. We have evidence. Go to the council. Go to Umbrius.’

At last, Julia’s mask crumbled. Eyes lit, she straightened and gave a shrill laugh.

‘My power is tenuous. I’m a woman who owns property by the skin of her teeth.

Were I to accuse a senator from Rome, of all places, of wrongdoing, we would test how thin that skin is.

Do you think for one moment they would believe my word over his? Damn the evidence!’

‘But it isn’t right. What does the council stand for if not the people? How can we fix injustice if we choose to do nothing?’

‘We can’t.’ Julia slammed her goblet down. Wine sloshed over the rim and onto the map, spreading across Pompeii in a bloody streak. ‘You are no hero, Loren, and your political ambition is at odds with your ideals. You must lose one.’

‘If I don’t?’

‘The alternative is obscurity. Or death if you’re lucky.’

‘Go to the council. They’ll listen, we can show them.’

‘Lorenus, enough .’

Loren’s world halted. In an instant, it pared to a singular moment: Julia’s face, purple and furious, shoulders trembling with barely restrained rage. Felix’s body tensed to flee. Wine saturating cities. His full name on Julia’s lips .

The name Loren hadn’t heard in four years. Not since his father last drawled it.

‘You knew,’ Loren said. ‘This entire time.’

‘Of course I knew,’ Julia hissed, pinching the bridge of her nose. ‘I grew up in trade. You thought I wouldn’t have met your father? I wouldn’t recognise your mother in you? That I’d pluck any random temple boy off the street? I want to solidify my family line, not destroy it.’

If Loren’s carefully constructed false identity hadn’t just been wrenched apart at the seams, he might have laughed. How could he have missed it? The wine jug in her study, how she hadn’t questioned his lacking backstory – of course she knew.

She had never wanted him. Just his name.

Loren stood, nearly overturning his chair. The cord around his neck hung heavy.

‘I’m not your doll,’ he bit through clenched teeth, ‘to manipulate. Find someone else, Julia.’

He stormed out. Behind, Felix’s footsteps were close on his heels, but whatever he had to say, Loren couldn’t stomach it.

He burst into the Forum, where the party still thrived, infectious, careless joy.

A jolt shot through his veins. Sitting in the study, surrounded by maps and money, it had been so easy to forget that this was Pompeii’s beating heart.

This was his home. He’d struggled here, cried here, true, but Pompeii had been the first to offer him any chance at existing on his own terms, outside his father’s villa. Pompeii gave him hope.

Ghost-Felix’s words rang back: You did this to yourself.

Aurelia’s next: You can’t stop the fire.

His uselessness tore him apart.

Loren loved this city the way Icarus loved the sun. Bold. Bright. Willing to burn for it.

‘You’re all in danger,’ he breathed .

Felix crept up quietly. Gentle fingers curled around Loren’s wrist, a rare touch that emboldened him to act.

‘Damn it all.’ Loren pulled away and strode forward.

Government buildings and temples surrounded the Forum on all sides, stuffy halls of law and order, but the point of the place was to open the floor to the common man.

Any free citizen could speak, and even if Loren had objections to who that list excluded, by the gods, he’d use this platform for all it was worth.

Because Julia wouldn’t do anything about Servius.

Because Loren could do something.

He hitched the hem of his toga and clambered onto the nearest stone block.

‘Stop, everyone, stop!’ he shouted. ‘You must listen!’

A group nearby shot Loren dirty looks, but the crowd danced on. It was too loud. Thinking fast, he pulled off one sandal. Apollo help him . He threw it.

He’d aimed between the flautist and the drummer, only to get their attention, but his shot was off, and the shoe smacked the kitharist square in the face. The boy stumbled back, music grinding to a halt. The dancing slowed. Heads turned. Sudden, stunned silence.

Loren stared, hand over his mouth. But he’d got what he wanted. He pulled his palm away, and said, loud and shaky, ‘You’ll all die if you don’t leave the city. Now.’

A thousand pairs of eyes fell on him. Well, if his political career hadn’t already withered, it had surely crumpled now. He pressed on.

‘It sounds absurd.’ A few people in the crowd shifted, shot each other apprehensive glances.

Encouraged by the possible stirring of belief, Loren raised his voice to carry across the square, despite his panic.

‘But a horrible catastrophe is about to fall upon the city. The quakes are no coincidence. They’re a warning.

Days, weeks, I don’t know when. You must leave. Immediately. ’

‘What evidence?’ a man shouted back.

Loren paled. What evidence indeed. His parents had urged him from childhood, ever since he first dreamed of a woman from town drowning, only for her bloated body to wash up days later, to keep his visions secret.

They were an embarrassment, a defect, a sure sign he was mad or cursed or both.

His father once said, There is no tolerance for madness, boy. Not here, not out there.

Across the Forum, Loren locked eyes with Julia, haloed against the open door of the lantern-lit study. She was all marble and glowing gold, cold and furious as a distant star. Strange, friendless Julia. In the end, he supposed they weren’t so different.

Two people dripping with privilege, but neither had power when it mattered.

And Felix, who had nothing at all.

It slapped Loren with brutal irony that Felix, a flighty thief, had become the true constant in his life.

Not just in the past days, but years now, ever since the angry ghost first stepped into his nightmares.

Because if no one else believed his visions, Ghost-Felix did.

Loren searched for Felix now with a desperate ache, for any sign he wasn’t some fool alone in the world, but his thief was long gone.

Felix had no reason to stay. He wasn’t Loren’s friend. He’d made that clear.

Finally, Loren turned back to the gathering. These were people he saw daily in the market and tavern, exchanged smiles and handshakes with, but they glared now with anger and distrust. The cheesemonger he waved to only yesterday flashed a crude finger-sign.

‘I don’t have any,’ Loren admitted. The crowd tittered. Any rapport he had garnered quickly faded. ‘No, but you must listen—’

‘Start the music!’

The kitharist, having recovered from the sandal assault, shot him a horrible glare, made uglier by his freshly bloodied nose. He strummed his kithara defiantly. After a beat, the flautist and drummer joined in.

‘No,’ Loren whispered. Then, louder, ‘Please, trust me.’

‘Get out of here!’ A cold, wet splat hit Loren’s shoulder, fruit that dripped and stained his toga. Sniggers erupted.

Loren fled.

He hopped from the speaking stone and ran. The crowd didn’t part for him, forcing him to weave and stumble as people jostled and shoved and laughed. Loren kept his face down, fighting back the humiliating sting of inevitable tears. One foot was still bare. Somehow, that made everything worse.

Finally, he crashed outside Isis’s temple, the only place he could think to run to.

With Julia’s manipulations revealed – that she only meant to use him for his family name – returning to her estate was unthinkable.

Facing Elias at the brothel would be worse.

Here, Loren could at least be quiet for a while.

He shut the door behind him and leaned against it.

‘Tell me,’ said a gratingly familiar voice, ‘are you finished humiliating us yet?’

‘Don’t, Camilia.’ Loren opened his eyes to find her braced over the altar. She wouldn’t look at him, just stared at embers in the bowl. ‘Please. I can’t bear it.’

‘ You can’t bear it? You overstepped your role, so the Priest dismissed you.

Now you gallivant around with people far above your station.

’ Camilia shook her head, lips pursed. ‘You mock us, but still you come for sanctuary. You used us as a stepping stone into the council and the Temple of Jupiter, like Celsi did. Worse, because he had the excuse of being a child with no choice.’

Loren crossed the courtyard. Smoke filtered the air with grey haze. ‘You know I’m loyal to Isis. You know me.’

‘Do I?’ She looked up at last, eyes ringed with smudged black liner. ‘I thought I did. We were friends once. Now I’m not convinced.’

‘I’ve never lied to you. Not when it mattered.’

‘Everything about you is a lie, Loren. When was the last time you were honest? Not with me. With yourself. And don’t say a damned thing about your visions.

’ Herbs snapped and sizzled. Shapes seemed to twist in the smoke, but Loren’s eyes were too tear-blurred to make any out.

‘Everyone knows you in this city because you can’t keep your nose out of things.

Everyone knows you as Isis’s temple boy, and everything you do reflects on us. ’

‘You didn’t want me here in the first place,’ Loren said, flushing hot all over again. ‘None of you did.’

‘We tried to include you for years. But from your first day, you looked beyond us.’ Camilia shoved off the altar and stripped her temple robes. ‘Our reputation has suffered enough. You should go.’

‘I still follow Isis. I have the right to be here.’

‘I don’t mean back to the brothel, or wherever you sleep now.’ She paused hanging her garments. ‘I meant go home. Back where you came from. Don’t bother us here anymore.’

His gut clenched. ‘Why are you saying this?’

The cabinet door shut with a resolute snap. ‘Because I’m not the only one tired of indulging your saviour complex.’

Camilia left without looking back. Loren waited until the door slammed and her footsteps faded before he let the last of his walls crumble. Eyes burning, he stumbled for the cabinet and what he knew was stashed inside.

A clay jug of wine, stamped with that familiar emblem: a stern L , looped in vines.

‘Cheers, old man,’ Loren said. He popped the top and drank.