The 45th Parallel, page 10
He gaped at me, and I knew for certain we were no longer in Yellowstone.
“I’m Caitlin.” I held my hand out to him.
“Giovanni,” he replied, pressing my hand to his lips. “Please, call me Gio.”
Trying to cover my surprise at his overly familiar greeting, I managed, “Well, Giovanni, where am I?”
“We call it Piedmont.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know where that is. What country?”
“Italia.”
That knocked the wind out of my sails, and I forced myself to close my mouth. “Italy? Where is my sister? Seraphine?”
“She is fine. She is being treated. You may see her soon.”
I lay back and closed my eyes, relief washing over me, but equally kicking myself for using the word sister. My last memory was of Seraphine lying unconscious beside the lake. But something about this man told me he wasn’t like the soldiers on Yellowstone, and it wasn’t just kissing my hand in greeting.
“Talk to me.”
As he spoke, his initially halting English flowed more fluently, which was just as well. I didn’t speak anything more than a few words of Italian, and most of those were the names of foods. Gio told me we were in the Piedmont region of Italy, in another submerged habitat.
“Is this community linked?” I asked, wondering how we had traveled from America to Europe, although at least we were closer to home. “Surely not via antipodes?”
Gio looked at me with his brows furrowed, not understanding my words.
“An-tip-oh-dees?” I tried again, sounding the word out slowly.
His forehead creased as he shook his head.
“How is this community linked to others?” I asked, this time more slowly, using my hands to illustrate my point.
“Il quarantacinquesimo parallel.” He spoke in the most glorious accent, screwing up his face trying to remember the translation. “Argh!” The frustration was evident, making me grin.
Shrugging my shoulders, I held my palms up, indicating I didn’t understand. He tried again, more slowly. “Parallelo.”
“Parallel?”
His eyes flashed. They were a warm caramel color, alive with intellect and curiosity, making my heart lurch. Damn, he was hot. Turning, he took two steps out into the hallway and disappeared, leaving me wondering what I had said. A few minutes later, he swept through the doorway, brandishing an old atlas, similar to the one we had at school on Lewis. Even though it was in Italian, I knew the maps well enough. While we had thought it bizarre at the time, geography had been a compulsory subject. He pointed out where we were, northern Italy, and then ran his finger along the latitude lines. My vision was slightly blurred, my head was throbbing, and I couldn’t make out the tiny lettering. I pulled back, screwed up my eyes, and tried to focus. I had learned about longitude and latitude at school but more from Tadhg. He was a wealth of knowledge about all manner of random facts. He had shown me how to program and reposition satellites using geographic coordinates.
“Ah, latitude. Are you saying that we traveled along the same line of latitude?”
He nodded, flicking through an Italian to English dictionary he had also brought. He looked up.
“Forty-five,” he said, relief crossing his face. “I can’t believe I forgot that. Mum would be ashamed. Piedmont. We are located on the forty-fifth parallel.”
Once more, I looked again at the map. I could make out the colored blotches of countries past my pounding head, but not the detail.
“Why forty-fifth?” I wondered aloud.
“It is halfway,” he said a little haltingly, running his manicured finger along the latitude line on the map.
Everything clicked as I understood what he was saying. “The forty-fifth parallel?” I asked. “Halfway between the equator and the north pole?”
Gio nodded enthusiastically, grinning, showing a mouth of perfect white teeth. As my vision started to clear, I appreciated my first reaction was spot on, and he was very handsome. Classic chiseled features, dark hair, longish at the front that fell over the most beautiful pair of intelligent brown eyes. I reached a hand up to check my bird’s nest of hair and felt it caked in blood and sand. Crap, so I must look as awful as I felt.
Feeling embarrassed about my disheveled appearance, I tried to distract him with questions.
“How many are there?” I asked.
“Worlds?”
I nodded but winced as the pain punished me for moving.
“Six.”
“Six unhabs,” I repeated slowly, trying not to give anything away. This confirmed what Sera and I had read in Yellowstone. I had a reasonable knowledge of geography from school and later from Tadhg, but Gio appeared to be telling me the truth.
“Are all the unhab communities on the forty-fifth parallel?” I asked.
“They are.” He flashed me a brilliant smile, and my insides lurched. I was becoming more and more uncomfortable about my state of unkemptness in his presence.
Glancing down, I saw I was no longer in my wet clothing but wearing a simple white nightdress. Hospital issue. Gio saw my look and tried to assure me. Truthfully, I didn’t care, but it was entertaining watching his face go through a sequence of expressions from embarrassment to shame. I knew men found my body attractive. Not slim and straight like Seraphine and our mother Freyja, I was tall like my parents, but I had ample full breasts, a small waist, and a flat stomach, rounding into curvaceous hips. “She looks like a real woman,” I had heard one of the men on Newgrange describe me, not knowing I could hear.
“My clothes?” I asked gently. “Or better, a shower?”
Instead, Gio held out his hand to me and assisted me out of bed. My head was throbbing, but I didn’t want to alert him to my pain as he ushered me toward a small bathroom cubicle. Sighing with relief, I showered and gently washed out the blood and sand caked into my long, dark hair. Sera crossed my mind again, and I considered calling out to ask about her. I decided against it, not wanting him to join me in the shower. Well, not yet. I grinned to myself. As I washed, I felt a sizeable L-shaped wound with fresh stitches at the side of my head. Pulling the shower curtain aside and fighting to see past the steam, I checked my head in the mirror, carefully parting my hair with my fingers. Wonderful. A head wound. How attractive. Feeling the wound gingerly, it was painful but didn’t require any further intervention. Good. So we could get out of here. I hated hospitals, having spent so much time in the medical clinic as a child with broken bones and various injuries from my many exploits. Sera. Next step, be reunited with my sister. A memory of her lying on the sand flickered into my woolly brain. Drying myself while moving as slowly as possible to avoid jarring my head, I was just about to call out when I heard voices.
“Caitlin!” I heard Sera call and popped my head out of the bathroom, avoiding the woozy sensation.
“Are you okay?” she asked worriedly, checking me over and giving me a quick hug.
“It was you I was worried about,” I admitted, pulling my neatly folded top over my head, my hair falling in my face. My clothes had been washed and dried, I noted. With the state of my hair, my clothes must have been a mess, not to mention that we had been living with limited clothing for a month. Thank goodness we had changed after our stint in prison. I wondered how long I had been unconscious. As I slipped into my jeans, I noticed Gio was still there, trying not to look in my direction. I came around the door and held my sister at arm’s length. She had a wound between her forehead and hairline. With her pale blonde hair, it was far more obvious than mine.
“That’s a ripper.”
“Eight,” she grimaced. “Bloody hell, they hurt too. Concussion. At least it matches yours.”
I reached a hand up to my crown. I thought my head hurt, but now that I had seen the wound, it hurt more. “How many do I have?” I asked her, tipping my head forward.
Gio stepped forward, encouraging me to sit. “I didn’t count.”
Sera flashed me the look. The “don’t mess this up” look, adding her version of “I’ve had enough of being kept prisoner.”
“Thank you for not cutting it,” I said, turning my attention to Gio as I ran my fingers through my wet hair, trying to disentangle the knots, and he smiled.
“I worked around it. It is too beautiful to cut.” God, he is so damned handsome!
Sera stood behind him, watching.
“Are you alright?” I asked.
“Your sister is fine,” Gio told me, his face a fraction too close as he examined my wound.
“Thank you,” I said, as genuinely as I could manage. “I don’t know what happened.”
“You hit your head on a rock,” Sera piped up. “Well, we both did. But you called out and got me help before passing out yourself.”
“Can you give me a moment, please?” he asked Sera, assuming his confident, doctorly manner. “I need to check on your sister. You may wait outside.” Flashing me another warning not to get us captured, Sera left, closing the door.
“Your English is excellent,” I said, smiling. “How do you speak English so well?”
“My mother taught me,” he admitted. “But I am out of practice.”
“It is just fine,” I assured him. “It was only the forty-fifth parallel I couldn’t work out.”
Gio turned to get his tray of instruments and asked me to look into the light, checked reflexes, and reviewed my wound. Eleven stitches, he confirmed. One had loosened slightly after my shower, and I smelled his deliciously masculine scent as he leaned close to blot the wound with a sterile pad and reinsert the suture. Closing my eyes, I steeled myself not to react. That would be bad. Catastrophically bad. We needed to get home.
“Are you in pain?” he asked, confused.
My eyes shot open at his words. “Argh!” As the light penetrated and pierced my throbbing skull, I placed a hand over my eye. “A bit,” I admitted.
“More than a bit, but you don’t want to tell me?” he asked kindly.
“Maybe. I don’t like asking for help.”
I watched as he retrieved a glass bottle from the trolley, poured some contents into a glass, and handed me the milky-colored liquid to drink. It tasted foul, and I tried hard not to screw up my face with the acrid taste. Gio laughed, watching me, and handed me water.
“I’ll need something stronger than water to get that foul taste out of my mouth. Where is that wine you promised me?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Does it come with food?” I asked hopefully. After a month of eating half a can a day, then many days in a holding cell with little more than a barely tolerable meal every second day, I was starving. Right on cue, my stomach rumbled. Gio shot me a cheeky look that almost made my heart stop.
“I will take you to the café to feed you and your sister. But tomorrow, it is just us for dinner. Yes?”
Wow, he is direct. “Deal.”
Chapter 19
“Unless you want to explain who you are and why you are here, you might want to stick close to me and not speak to anyone. It will raise many questions if two English girls suddenly come for dinner.”
“Scottish,” I corrected him without thinking.
Before Gio could respond, we reached the end of the long cylindrical corridor and stepped through the double doors into an enormous open space. The ceiling rose into a dome high above us, and Sera and I gasped as we saw the colossal, rounded glass sphere filled with people. It was breathtaking and full of brilliant colors. Natural light filled the room. Plants grew everywhere, draped up and over internal walls, hanging from planters suspended from the ceiling. The windows covered the top half of the external walls, broken only by double doorways at regular intervals. Outside was a panorama over a brilliant blue lake. Throughout the room’s interior, the lower walls displayed beautiful artworks, brightly colored works, neatly arranged. It was plainly a thriving society and nothing at all like the austere gray pod we had passed through in Yellowstone.
“What is this place?” I asked breathlessly.
“This is the Soggiorno deck.” He gave a flourish.
“Soggiorno?” Sera asked.
“Living space, I think, is the best translation.”
I didn’t want to admit that I had seen nothing like it. There were common eating spaces in Clava, but nothing of this magnitude. It was breathtaking. My parents had spoken of restaurants and cafes. I had read about them. But I had never seen one. Sera and I glanced at each other as Gio steered us toward a quiet booth at the far end of the room near the windows, high backs to the chairs to offer privacy. I didn’t know where to look. Outside at the magnificent view with the sunlight glinting on the water, hills in the distance, or inside at these people, going about their daily lives, like it was completely normal to live in such an amazing underwater world. Men, women, and children were sitting at tables, just talking and laughing like this was a regular day. The entire pod was brilliantly lit, the light streaming through the large windows and illuminating everything. After a month underground, my eyes watered against the intense sunlight, and my skin shivered. Plants were growing everywhere, across the ceilings and over the backs of the booth seating. As I touched one draped over the partition between our table and the next, feeling its cool, smooth surface, I thought of Dad and wished I could show him this place.
More people were filtering in. It must have been mealtime, although I had no concept of what time it was. I looked out the window and guessed it was late afternoon, perhaps early evening. As the noise level increased, I paid more attention to the pod construction. This place was enormous, much like I had envisaged a city. I had seen Inverness several times as we passed through our journeys between Lewis and Clava. Glasgow and Dublin too. But they were dead and crumbling. Deserted. This place was alive in a way I had never really seen. It was how I had pictured a city to look when I had read novels or listened to Mum and Dad speak about the old world. There was a constant thrum and people moving everywhere, looking busy. Chatting, eating, reading. Going somewhere like they had a purpose. Sera looked equally speechless as we stared around the noisy space, trying not to draw attention to ourselves.
Gio returned to us carrying a tray laden with food. Three plates filled with lasagna, salad, and water.
“Is that…?” Sera’s eyes sprang wide.
“Lasagna. I am pleased we didn’t miss out. We only get proper food two days a week.”
“What do you eat the other days?” I asked, surprised. “Surely they don’t starve you?”
Gio laughed. “No. But we have limited space here and a large population. So two days, we get a full meal, and Thursdays are usually pasta. The other days we get a protein meal.”
“Protein meal?” I asked, trying not to look like that was the most disgusting thing I had ever heard.
“We are primarily vegetarian by necessity, although we have some animals for eggs and milk, cheese, and the like. Some fish—we have tanks. But there is a limit to the amount of food we can produce. We live in a confined space with no capacity to expand. So, we grow soybeans, peas, and other protein-rich legumes. We can grow these in stacked containers, so they are five high in some pods. Several years ago, when the population kept increasing, the decision was made for centralized meals. Thursday and Sunday are cooked meals; on the other days, people can cook for themselves or have a protein-rich meal. It isn’t as bad as it sounds, but not as good as this.”
“You can cook at home?”
“Our apartments are all the same size and are quite small. We are nearly at capacity, so we are encouraged not to have large families as we won’t be able to accommodate them all.” Gio grinned over at us. “The kitchens in apartments are necessarily small, too. Many people choose not to cook; others do. But they built all apartments the same. One living space with a kitchen. Two bedrooms and a bathroom. Some have one bedroom only but never any more.”
“What happens if you have six children, then? Do you get a bigger apartment?”
“No. Everyone has the same. There are a few families with four children, but very few. Fitting so many children into a small apartment is challenging. Sharing with my brother is hard enough.”
“Are you a doctor?” I asked between bites, truthfully just looking for something to say so he wouldn’t watch me eat. I had only eaten lasagna a few times, and it was nothing like this. Hot, cheesy, full of vegetables, and absolutely divine. Despite my ravenousness, I hoped I hadn’t dripped cheese down my chin and resolved to take smaller bites.
“I am. I hope you wouldn’t let me stitch your head if I were a chef.”
“I was unconscious,” I pointed out, “so I wouldn’t have objected, anyway. My mother is a doctor,” I admitted, “and one of my sisters.” I stopped, realizing what I had just said. Gio caught it and looked puzzled.
“Is her sister not your sister?” he asked Seraphine. “You told me you were sisters?”
“Technically, yes.”
I looked over at Sera. We were likely stuck here for a month. This man had cared for us for no reason and was now giving us the first decent meal we had eaten since we left home. We needed to tell him who we were and how we came here. Or at least a highly edited version.
Sera sighed. “Caitlin and I are biological sisters, full sisters, I mean, but we were adopted. My mother, Illyria, the one who raised me, had three other children. We all have the same father, my three half-siblings, Cait and I. Cait’s parents, who raised her, are our biological mother, Freyja, and her father, Campbell. They also have four other children. To complicate matters, we were raised in the same house with all three parents. Our parents are all from Australia, but we now live in Scotland.”
Gio looked like his head was spinning, and I doubted it was from non-comprehension.
“It’s a lot to take in,” I admitted, wondering how on earth he would take learning we were immune to the protozoa that had driven his ancestors here. Based on experience, I was in no rush to share that minor piece of information.
“I’m Caitlin.” I held my hand out to him.
“Giovanni,” he replied, pressing my hand to his lips. “Please, call me Gio.”
Trying to cover my surprise at his overly familiar greeting, I managed, “Well, Giovanni, where am I?”
“We call it Piedmont.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know where that is. What country?”
“Italia.”
That knocked the wind out of my sails, and I forced myself to close my mouth. “Italy? Where is my sister? Seraphine?”
“She is fine. She is being treated. You may see her soon.”
I lay back and closed my eyes, relief washing over me, but equally kicking myself for using the word sister. My last memory was of Seraphine lying unconscious beside the lake. But something about this man told me he wasn’t like the soldiers on Yellowstone, and it wasn’t just kissing my hand in greeting.
“Talk to me.”
As he spoke, his initially halting English flowed more fluently, which was just as well. I didn’t speak anything more than a few words of Italian, and most of those were the names of foods. Gio told me we were in the Piedmont region of Italy, in another submerged habitat.
“Is this community linked?” I asked, wondering how we had traveled from America to Europe, although at least we were closer to home. “Surely not via antipodes?”
Gio looked at me with his brows furrowed, not understanding my words.
“An-tip-oh-dees?” I tried again, sounding the word out slowly.
His forehead creased as he shook his head.
“How is this community linked to others?” I asked, this time more slowly, using my hands to illustrate my point.
“Il quarantacinquesimo parallel.” He spoke in the most glorious accent, screwing up his face trying to remember the translation. “Argh!” The frustration was evident, making me grin.
Shrugging my shoulders, I held my palms up, indicating I didn’t understand. He tried again, more slowly. “Parallelo.”
“Parallel?”
His eyes flashed. They were a warm caramel color, alive with intellect and curiosity, making my heart lurch. Damn, he was hot. Turning, he took two steps out into the hallway and disappeared, leaving me wondering what I had said. A few minutes later, he swept through the doorway, brandishing an old atlas, similar to the one we had at school on Lewis. Even though it was in Italian, I knew the maps well enough. While we had thought it bizarre at the time, geography had been a compulsory subject. He pointed out where we were, northern Italy, and then ran his finger along the latitude lines. My vision was slightly blurred, my head was throbbing, and I couldn’t make out the tiny lettering. I pulled back, screwed up my eyes, and tried to focus. I had learned about longitude and latitude at school but more from Tadhg. He was a wealth of knowledge about all manner of random facts. He had shown me how to program and reposition satellites using geographic coordinates.
“Ah, latitude. Are you saying that we traveled along the same line of latitude?”
He nodded, flicking through an Italian to English dictionary he had also brought. He looked up.
“Forty-five,” he said, relief crossing his face. “I can’t believe I forgot that. Mum would be ashamed. Piedmont. We are located on the forty-fifth parallel.”
Once more, I looked again at the map. I could make out the colored blotches of countries past my pounding head, but not the detail.
“Why forty-fifth?” I wondered aloud.
“It is halfway,” he said a little haltingly, running his manicured finger along the latitude line on the map.
Everything clicked as I understood what he was saying. “The forty-fifth parallel?” I asked. “Halfway between the equator and the north pole?”
Gio nodded enthusiastically, grinning, showing a mouth of perfect white teeth. As my vision started to clear, I appreciated my first reaction was spot on, and he was very handsome. Classic chiseled features, dark hair, longish at the front that fell over the most beautiful pair of intelligent brown eyes. I reached a hand up to check my bird’s nest of hair and felt it caked in blood and sand. Crap, so I must look as awful as I felt.
Feeling embarrassed about my disheveled appearance, I tried to distract him with questions.
“How many are there?” I asked.
“Worlds?”
I nodded but winced as the pain punished me for moving.
“Six.”
“Six unhabs,” I repeated slowly, trying not to give anything away. This confirmed what Sera and I had read in Yellowstone. I had a reasonable knowledge of geography from school and later from Tadhg, but Gio appeared to be telling me the truth.
“Are all the unhab communities on the forty-fifth parallel?” I asked.
“They are.” He flashed me a brilliant smile, and my insides lurched. I was becoming more and more uncomfortable about my state of unkemptness in his presence.
Glancing down, I saw I was no longer in my wet clothing but wearing a simple white nightdress. Hospital issue. Gio saw my look and tried to assure me. Truthfully, I didn’t care, but it was entertaining watching his face go through a sequence of expressions from embarrassment to shame. I knew men found my body attractive. Not slim and straight like Seraphine and our mother Freyja, I was tall like my parents, but I had ample full breasts, a small waist, and a flat stomach, rounding into curvaceous hips. “She looks like a real woman,” I had heard one of the men on Newgrange describe me, not knowing I could hear.
“My clothes?” I asked gently. “Or better, a shower?”
Instead, Gio held out his hand to me and assisted me out of bed. My head was throbbing, but I didn’t want to alert him to my pain as he ushered me toward a small bathroom cubicle. Sighing with relief, I showered and gently washed out the blood and sand caked into my long, dark hair. Sera crossed my mind again, and I considered calling out to ask about her. I decided against it, not wanting him to join me in the shower. Well, not yet. I grinned to myself. As I washed, I felt a sizeable L-shaped wound with fresh stitches at the side of my head. Pulling the shower curtain aside and fighting to see past the steam, I checked my head in the mirror, carefully parting my hair with my fingers. Wonderful. A head wound. How attractive. Feeling the wound gingerly, it was painful but didn’t require any further intervention. Good. So we could get out of here. I hated hospitals, having spent so much time in the medical clinic as a child with broken bones and various injuries from my many exploits. Sera. Next step, be reunited with my sister. A memory of her lying on the sand flickered into my woolly brain. Drying myself while moving as slowly as possible to avoid jarring my head, I was just about to call out when I heard voices.
“Caitlin!” I heard Sera call and popped my head out of the bathroom, avoiding the woozy sensation.
“Are you okay?” she asked worriedly, checking me over and giving me a quick hug.
“It was you I was worried about,” I admitted, pulling my neatly folded top over my head, my hair falling in my face. My clothes had been washed and dried, I noted. With the state of my hair, my clothes must have been a mess, not to mention that we had been living with limited clothing for a month. Thank goodness we had changed after our stint in prison. I wondered how long I had been unconscious. As I slipped into my jeans, I noticed Gio was still there, trying not to look in my direction. I came around the door and held my sister at arm’s length. She had a wound between her forehead and hairline. With her pale blonde hair, it was far more obvious than mine.
“That’s a ripper.”
“Eight,” she grimaced. “Bloody hell, they hurt too. Concussion. At least it matches yours.”
I reached a hand up to my crown. I thought my head hurt, but now that I had seen the wound, it hurt more. “How many do I have?” I asked her, tipping my head forward.
Gio stepped forward, encouraging me to sit. “I didn’t count.”
Sera flashed me the look. The “don’t mess this up” look, adding her version of “I’ve had enough of being kept prisoner.”
“Thank you for not cutting it,” I said, turning my attention to Gio as I ran my fingers through my wet hair, trying to disentangle the knots, and he smiled.
“I worked around it. It is too beautiful to cut.” God, he is so damned handsome!
Sera stood behind him, watching.
“Are you alright?” I asked.
“Your sister is fine,” Gio told me, his face a fraction too close as he examined my wound.
“Thank you,” I said, as genuinely as I could manage. “I don’t know what happened.”
“You hit your head on a rock,” Sera piped up. “Well, we both did. But you called out and got me help before passing out yourself.”
“Can you give me a moment, please?” he asked Sera, assuming his confident, doctorly manner. “I need to check on your sister. You may wait outside.” Flashing me another warning not to get us captured, Sera left, closing the door.
“Your English is excellent,” I said, smiling. “How do you speak English so well?”
“My mother taught me,” he admitted. “But I am out of practice.”
“It is just fine,” I assured him. “It was only the forty-fifth parallel I couldn’t work out.”
Gio turned to get his tray of instruments and asked me to look into the light, checked reflexes, and reviewed my wound. Eleven stitches, he confirmed. One had loosened slightly after my shower, and I smelled his deliciously masculine scent as he leaned close to blot the wound with a sterile pad and reinsert the suture. Closing my eyes, I steeled myself not to react. That would be bad. Catastrophically bad. We needed to get home.
“Are you in pain?” he asked, confused.
My eyes shot open at his words. “Argh!” As the light penetrated and pierced my throbbing skull, I placed a hand over my eye. “A bit,” I admitted.
“More than a bit, but you don’t want to tell me?” he asked kindly.
“Maybe. I don’t like asking for help.”
I watched as he retrieved a glass bottle from the trolley, poured some contents into a glass, and handed me the milky-colored liquid to drink. It tasted foul, and I tried hard not to screw up my face with the acrid taste. Gio laughed, watching me, and handed me water.
“I’ll need something stronger than water to get that foul taste out of my mouth. Where is that wine you promised me?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Does it come with food?” I asked hopefully. After a month of eating half a can a day, then many days in a holding cell with little more than a barely tolerable meal every second day, I was starving. Right on cue, my stomach rumbled. Gio shot me a cheeky look that almost made my heart stop.
“I will take you to the café to feed you and your sister. But tomorrow, it is just us for dinner. Yes?”
Wow, he is direct. “Deal.”
Chapter 19
“Unless you want to explain who you are and why you are here, you might want to stick close to me and not speak to anyone. It will raise many questions if two English girls suddenly come for dinner.”
“Scottish,” I corrected him without thinking.
Before Gio could respond, we reached the end of the long cylindrical corridor and stepped through the double doors into an enormous open space. The ceiling rose into a dome high above us, and Sera and I gasped as we saw the colossal, rounded glass sphere filled with people. It was breathtaking and full of brilliant colors. Natural light filled the room. Plants grew everywhere, draped up and over internal walls, hanging from planters suspended from the ceiling. The windows covered the top half of the external walls, broken only by double doorways at regular intervals. Outside was a panorama over a brilliant blue lake. Throughout the room’s interior, the lower walls displayed beautiful artworks, brightly colored works, neatly arranged. It was plainly a thriving society and nothing at all like the austere gray pod we had passed through in Yellowstone.
“What is this place?” I asked breathlessly.
“This is the Soggiorno deck.” He gave a flourish.
“Soggiorno?” Sera asked.
“Living space, I think, is the best translation.”
I didn’t want to admit that I had seen nothing like it. There were common eating spaces in Clava, but nothing of this magnitude. It was breathtaking. My parents had spoken of restaurants and cafes. I had read about them. But I had never seen one. Sera and I glanced at each other as Gio steered us toward a quiet booth at the far end of the room near the windows, high backs to the chairs to offer privacy. I didn’t know where to look. Outside at the magnificent view with the sunlight glinting on the water, hills in the distance, or inside at these people, going about their daily lives, like it was completely normal to live in such an amazing underwater world. Men, women, and children were sitting at tables, just talking and laughing like this was a regular day. The entire pod was brilliantly lit, the light streaming through the large windows and illuminating everything. After a month underground, my eyes watered against the intense sunlight, and my skin shivered. Plants were growing everywhere, across the ceilings and over the backs of the booth seating. As I touched one draped over the partition between our table and the next, feeling its cool, smooth surface, I thought of Dad and wished I could show him this place.
More people were filtering in. It must have been mealtime, although I had no concept of what time it was. I looked out the window and guessed it was late afternoon, perhaps early evening. As the noise level increased, I paid more attention to the pod construction. This place was enormous, much like I had envisaged a city. I had seen Inverness several times as we passed through our journeys between Lewis and Clava. Glasgow and Dublin too. But they were dead and crumbling. Deserted. This place was alive in a way I had never really seen. It was how I had pictured a city to look when I had read novels or listened to Mum and Dad speak about the old world. There was a constant thrum and people moving everywhere, looking busy. Chatting, eating, reading. Going somewhere like they had a purpose. Sera looked equally speechless as we stared around the noisy space, trying not to draw attention to ourselves.
Gio returned to us carrying a tray laden with food. Three plates filled with lasagna, salad, and water.
“Is that…?” Sera’s eyes sprang wide.
“Lasagna. I am pleased we didn’t miss out. We only get proper food two days a week.”
“What do you eat the other days?” I asked, surprised. “Surely they don’t starve you?”
Gio laughed. “No. But we have limited space here and a large population. So two days, we get a full meal, and Thursdays are usually pasta. The other days we get a protein meal.”
“Protein meal?” I asked, trying not to look like that was the most disgusting thing I had ever heard.
“We are primarily vegetarian by necessity, although we have some animals for eggs and milk, cheese, and the like. Some fish—we have tanks. But there is a limit to the amount of food we can produce. We live in a confined space with no capacity to expand. So, we grow soybeans, peas, and other protein-rich legumes. We can grow these in stacked containers, so they are five high in some pods. Several years ago, when the population kept increasing, the decision was made for centralized meals. Thursday and Sunday are cooked meals; on the other days, people can cook for themselves or have a protein-rich meal. It isn’t as bad as it sounds, but not as good as this.”
“You can cook at home?”
“Our apartments are all the same size and are quite small. We are nearly at capacity, so we are encouraged not to have large families as we won’t be able to accommodate them all.” Gio grinned over at us. “The kitchens in apartments are necessarily small, too. Many people choose not to cook; others do. But they built all apartments the same. One living space with a kitchen. Two bedrooms and a bathroom. Some have one bedroom only but never any more.”
“What happens if you have six children, then? Do you get a bigger apartment?”
“No. Everyone has the same. There are a few families with four children, but very few. Fitting so many children into a small apartment is challenging. Sharing with my brother is hard enough.”
“Are you a doctor?” I asked between bites, truthfully just looking for something to say so he wouldn’t watch me eat. I had only eaten lasagna a few times, and it was nothing like this. Hot, cheesy, full of vegetables, and absolutely divine. Despite my ravenousness, I hoped I hadn’t dripped cheese down my chin and resolved to take smaller bites.
“I am. I hope you wouldn’t let me stitch your head if I were a chef.”
“I was unconscious,” I pointed out, “so I wouldn’t have objected, anyway. My mother is a doctor,” I admitted, “and one of my sisters.” I stopped, realizing what I had just said. Gio caught it and looked puzzled.
“Is her sister not your sister?” he asked Seraphine. “You told me you were sisters?”
“Technically, yes.”
I looked over at Sera. We were likely stuck here for a month. This man had cared for us for no reason and was now giving us the first decent meal we had eaten since we left home. We needed to tell him who we were and how we came here. Or at least a highly edited version.
Sera sighed. “Caitlin and I are biological sisters, full sisters, I mean, but we were adopted. My mother, Illyria, the one who raised me, had three other children. We all have the same father, my three half-siblings, Cait and I. Cait’s parents, who raised her, are our biological mother, Freyja, and her father, Campbell. They also have four other children. To complicate matters, we were raised in the same house with all three parents. Our parents are all from Australia, but we now live in Scotland.”
Gio looked like his head was spinning, and I doubted it was from non-comprehension.
“It’s a lot to take in,” I admitted, wondering how on earth he would take learning we were immune to the protozoa that had driven his ancestors here. Based on experience, I was in no rush to share that minor piece of information.
