39

Alex glanced out from under the bridge and realised that time was running out. In the sky, the fiery ribbon seemed to announce the imminent end of its trajectory. Closing time, ladies and gentlemen, last orders, last round.

It all happened in an instant. Alex’s eyes closed as the words of the Malaysian fortune teller began whirling through his head.

I see you take great leap … great leap in black ocean.

Then a flash took him back to the night before, when he had seen the symbol on the hardhat worn by the father of the family that had taken them in.

That symbol … it was on the fortune teller’s card. He showed it to me. It was my future.

‘Follow me, Jenny! We have to get to the excavation site!’

Alex grabbed her by the hand and they started to run past the bridge, along the highway, as the land on either side of the road was enveloped in flames. Now and then they went past burning cars and clusters of people fleeing to nowhere in particular. The hailstorm intensified, kicking up more and more dust. They realised that there was no rain in that thunderstorm. There was nothing but grit and detritus. Millions of tiny fragments that pelleted in all directions, like a mass of pawns preceding the arrival of the king.

And the king was about to make his last move.

Alex and Jenny ran through the middle of that tornado of whipping shrapnel, their arms bent over their foreheads to protect their eyes. He knew the area, which was the same as it was in his original dimension: the construction site for the new shopping mall was just a few hundred metres away, a place he knew well, a place that he had visited frequently with his father. It was one of those details that both his and Jenny’s realities had in common. In both worlds, at the same point along the highway, a new mall filled with shops of all kinds was being built.

They moved as fast as they could, never stopping, going past a small supermarket with a sign reading Ben’s Corner and a shattered window. Both their minds went to the story they’d heard about looting. They realised that the last meal they’d ever eat in that lifetime had been stolen from that ravaged supermarket.

When the excavators with the logo Caterpillar written on them first heaved into view in the distance, next to a construction crane, Alex started running even harder. Jenny kept pace with him, panting, her heart in her throat and her hair flying in the wind that filled it with dust and grit.

‘This is it,’ he said, slowing down when he came up to a line of blue portable toilets. ‘The fortune teller already knew where we’d be today. It’s incredible …’

‘Why are we here, Alex?’ Jenny asked after they made their way past a series of barriers, and the gigantic excavation for the foundations of the shopping centre gradually appeared before them: an enormous cavity in the earth at least one hundred metres wide, two hundred metres long, and a good twenty-five metres deep. The wall of fire coming towards them out of the countryside was getting dangerously close to the crater.

‘Because so it is written,’ Alex replied, staring into space.

I see you take great leap … great leap in black ocean, the voice of the fortune teller continued echoing through the walls of his skull. Now even Jenny could hear it.

‘Everything we’ve done has led us here. It had to lead us here.’

I’m afraid, Alex, thought Jenny.

It was at that moment that their eyes flew to the sky: the fiery trail that the asteroid was tracing over their heads suddenly veered earthwards. It took no more than a couple of seconds: the red-and-yellow wake that had just penetrated the atmosphere widened rapidly and vanished behind the mountains of Bergamo that rose on the distant horizon. If there had been roars capable of drowning out all other sounds before this, the sound that ensued this time was a hundred times louder. The shock wave was terrifying, so powerful that it shook the earth beneath their feet as if someone out in space were shaking the planet like a giant snow globe, to create a toy blizzard of shredded plastic. An enormous cloud of smoke rose from the other side of the mountains and started pushing into the sky, as Jenny and Alex stood watching the scene in amazement, holding each other tight.

‘We’re out of time!’ shouted Alex, turning to Jenny and staring her in the eye. The fury of the wind seemed like the powerful breath of an invisible giant that was hurling flames in their direction from the countryside.

‘This is the end,’ she whispered, as she clutched the triskelion in her hands and lost herself in Alex’s eyes.

‘I love you, Jenny,’ Alex said, his eyes shining. He was trembling with fear.

‘I love you too. I always have …’ she said, leaning into him, both hands on his chest, as their lips met in one last kiss. A moment out of time, a promise of eternal union. They kissed as if for the first time. As if they were on Altona Pier, alone in that silent, magical place, with the waves all around them. But there was no constellation of Orion watching over them.

They suddenly both opened their eyes wide.

‘We’re going to burn, Jenny! We have to jump,’ said Alex as he worked his way around the last barrier at the edge of the cliff. She grabbed his hand even tighter; she’d never let it go, for anything on earth.

‘One …’

A gust of heat enveloped them, as if the asteroid had opened a gash in the Earth’s atmosphere so large that it could no longer stand up to the sun’s rays.

‘Two …’

Alex and Jenny looked down at the abyss beneath their feet, as dozens more fireballs shot across the sky, as if in some gigantic fireworks show. These fragments had broken away from the asteroid at the moment of impact with the Earth’s atmosphere, and now they were hurtling in all directions at immense velocities: hundreds of atomic bombs poised to raze the continent to the ground. The most incredible manifestation of her infinite power that Nature had ever displayed to humanity. The cosmos’s ultimate demonstration of its power, as if to emphasise the crushing superiority of the laws of the universe over the insignificance of the human race.

Alex shouted: ‘Three!’ and Jenny’s hand practically became one with his.

With a brief running start they leaped into the void, just an instant before a burst of incandescent rock projectiles ravaged everything around them, burning the words ‘game over’ onto the remnants of the history of civilisation.

As they fell, the most intense images and memories of their lives played in their heads.

There was Roger Graver telling little Jenny the stories of the constellations, using funny voices and dramatic gestures to impersonate the gods of Olympus.

There was Marco, a broad smile on his face, his colour-coded remote controls in his hands, grilling Alex on what functions each control performed.

There was Clara preparing her delicious herbal teas when Jenny had a stomach ache, caressing her and making her burst out laughing every time her finger grazed her belly button.

There were Giorgio and Valeria Loria, sitting in the front row during the primary-school skit, when Alex had played D’Artagnan and won a standing ovation from all the parents.

Then, in an instant, everything went black.