LITMIR.BIZ

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knelt by my side and took my hand. None of the instability I’d seen last night, or the insecurity I’d seen this morning, was visible now. Even when my brother had trouble being strong enough to take care of himself, he could be strong for me. “She needs to rest; that’s all. Just put us in a taxi back to the hotel,” he said. “I’ll see that she gets some sleep.”

      Mrs. Weaver looked around, as if she wanted someone else to tell her what to do. But there weren’t enough adults on this trip, and she had about another twenty minutes to get the rest of the group back on the tour bus for the afternoon trip to the Castel Sant’Angelo. That, plus Cairo’s steadiness—his apparent recovery from last night’s upset—must have convinced her. “Don’t set one foot outside the hotel,” she said. “When we get back at six, I expect to see both of you waiting for us.”

      “We will.” I would have said anything to get out of there.

      Only when Cairo and I were truly alone—me flopped in exhaustion across my hotel bed, and him sitting yoga-style on Audrey’s—did we speak to each other. “What happened?” he said.

      “I was talking to this guy, Giovanni, but . . . he wasn’t real.”

      “What do you mean, not real?”

      “He didn’t have a shadow. Nobody else could see him. And he said—he said I was the only person who’d seen him since he died.” I clutched the cover on my bed into a knot between my fingers. “That can’t be real, right?”

      Only after I said the words did I realize—I didn’t have to tell Cairo the truth. I could’ve pled sunstroke or dizziness or something else and denied what had happened to me. But I never lied to him; it hadn’t occurred to me to start now.

      Instead of calling the nearest psychiatrist, Cairo remained by my side. He even smiled. “It all makes sense now.”

      “What makes sense?”

      “Don’t you get it? I wondered about this before, but . . . when it was just me, I couldn’t be sure. Now I am. We’re psychic.”

      “Psychic?”

      “Or . . . talented, somehow. I don’t know the right word for it. But I have moments when I can hear people’s thoughts, and you can see the dead. We’re twins; I guess it makes sense that if it was happening to me, eventually it would happen to you too. Maybe it’s the . . . family inheritance. Something like that.”

      I wanted to tell Cairo to stop talking about hearing people’s thoughts, just like I had the night before, but I couldn’t, and not just because I had begun experiencing something even stranger. I wanted to go back in time to the night before and not be such a bitch to Cairo, to come through for him the way he came through for me.

      Most of all I wanted to go back to the life I’d had just this morning, where fitting in seemed possible. If Cairo was right, then I would never fit in. My brother and I really were freaks, and we’d be freaks forever.

      But down deep I knew, for certain, that I’d seen Giovanni.

      “How can we be sure?” I said. “It could have been heatstroke, or . . . déjà vu, or something.”

      Cairo folded his arms. “Do you honestly believe that?”

      “Can’t you tell?” I retorted. If he wanted me to take him seriously as Mr. Mind Reader, he was going to have to offer more proof.

      “When I can hear thoughts, I can hear all of them. When I can’t, I can’t,” he said. He was bouncing on his heels, energized by the possibilities. “I can’t turn it on or off, but lately I’ve started thinking there might be a pattern—but I’m not sure yet. Enough of that. Back to you. Ravenna, do you really think what happened to you was as simple as heatstroke?”

      “No,” I admitted. “But I need to understand what’s going on before we try to diagnose ourselves because of a vision I saw in the catacombs.”

      He checked the time on his phone. “If we cab it out there, we can get to the catacombs and back before the others return to the hotel.”

      Breaking Mrs. Weaver’s rules didn’t bother me nearly as much as seeing Giovanni again. When I looked into my brother’s eyes, I could see that he understood my fear.

      I said, “I don’t know why he appeared to me. What Giovanni wants.”

      “Neither do I. What was he saying to you?”

      “Ordinary stuff.” I shrugged. “Actually, I thought he was flirting with me. But I guess he was just excited that someone could see him finally.” It had been nice, thinking some hot Italian guy was into me. I should’ve known something was up.

      “Well, we’ll go back. I’ll be with you. I can’t see the dead— not yet, anyway—but you won’t be alone. And you can figure out for sure whether or not this is real.”

      “Thanks.” It came out in a small voice.

      Cairo gave me a look. “If this had happened to you first, instead of me? I wouldn’t have believed you either. So stop feeling guilty. We have bigger things to deal with.”

      When we returned to the catacombs in the early afternoon, the summer sun had intensified until even the roads seemed to sizzle. Although trees grew on the grounds outside the tombs, shade didn’t help much. My skin felt grimy with sweat. For a while we stood around where I’d first seen Giovanni that morning, but nobody appeared except a gaggle of blue-habited nuns awaiting their own tour.

      “Maybe it doesn’t happen every time,” I said. “Maybe I can’t predict when it happens.”

      “Possibly.” Cairo wasn’t ready to give up. “We should go back to the last place you saw him.”

      Nobody could walk down into the catacombs without being on a guided tour, so we had to buy more tickets. The seller said crisply, “The next English-language tour is in just over one hour.”

      Too long, I thought, to give us time to explore the catacombs and yet get us back to the hotel on time. “What’s the very next tour?”

      “French, in five minutes.”

      “We speak French,” I said. “Deux billets, s’il vous plaît.”

      As we walked toward the gathering spot for the tour, Cairo said, “You wouldn’t have admitted that yesterday.”

      “I wouldn’t have admitted a lot of things yesterday.” My long-cherished desire to look and act normal had so obviously died that there was nothing to do but let it go. If I could see the dead, “normal” was never going to happen.

      We arranged ourselves at the end of the French tour. For the first little while, nothing appeared out of the ordinary—but as we descended the uneven stone steps toward the chamber where Giovanni had walked through the wall, my heartbeat quickened. It wasn’t just nerves; it was like my body knew he was near.

      When I walked back in, Giovanni stood there, as if he’d been waiting for me the whole time.

      He looked so relieved to see me. Almost on the verge of tears. I thought I might cry too. Giovanni was more beautiful to me now than he was before—now, when I knew what he was, when he ought to have terrified me. But there was nothing scary about him. He was simply someone who had died—something that happened to everyone, eventually.

      He was the proof that I was sane.

      And he was the proof that Cairo and I really were twins of the soul and always would be.

      “You have come back,” he said.

      “Yeah. Sorry I panicked.”

      “He’s here?” Cairo whispered to me, looking around wildly in pretty much every direction but the right one.

      “You can’t see him?”

      Cairo shook his head. Whatever powers he possessed, they weren’t like mine. Just

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