Ring of Fire by Pierdomenico Baccalario Read Free Book Online Page A

Elettra says calmly, moving a few steps beyond the doorway. Harvey holds up the lighter so they can see the row of ugly black boxes, inside of which sparkle metal disks, which are perfectly still.
    “It looks like they’ve stopped completely.”
    “There’s an echo in here,” Mistral points out, a few steps farther down.
    “And a nasty old mouse, too,” adds Elettra, checking the meters. “You’re right, Harv. They’ve stopped.”
    The flame from the lighter flickers in the darkness. The American boy’s eyes are big and deep. “Yep, Elly,” he answers her, resting a hand on her shoulder.
    Elettra blinks a couple of times. And she thinks,
Elly? No, no. That’s no good
. She hates nicknames. And she’s got to be the one who decides how friendly a boy can get with her.
    “My name isn’t Elly,” she says, stepping away from him.
    “Then my name isn’t Harv,” he replies stonily.
    Then he lets the lighter’s flame go out.
    The basement is plunged into darkness.
    I like this guy
, thinks Elettra.
    * * *
    Covered with snow, the courtyard of the Domus Quintilia has a special charm of times gone by. Hearing a single, prolonged tolling of a bell, Elettra feels a cold shiver creep down her back beneath her pajamas.
    “Maybe I should go wake up my dad. Or my aunt.”
    “But why?” Harvey asks her. “If the power’s out, there’s nothing they can do about it. Besides, unless I’m mistaken … that bell tower’s out, too.”
    Mistral is beside them at the threshold of the front door. She points out the vertical silhouette of the Santa Cecilia bell tower to the others. “Harvey’s right. It was lit up when we got here tonight.”
    “It’s true!” cries Sheng, who adds,
“Hao!”
    “Why do you keep saying that?” Mistral asks.
    “Hao?
It’s an exclamation. It’s like saying ‘cool’ or ‘great.’”
    Elettra shakes her head, not listening to them. “It can’t be. Nothing like this has ever happened before.”
    “The power of February twenty-ninth,” remarks Harvey.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Four people born on February twenty-ninth wind up in the same city, at the same hotel. …”
    “In the same room …,” Sheng specifies.
    “And they make the lights go out all over Rome. It seems pretty normal to me. Or at least not very strange.”
    Elettra looks at the snow piling up on the well. She can feel her heart thumping in her chest and her thoughts whirling through her head. Harvey’s right. The lights went out the moment she transmitted her energy to Sheng. And when she did, the lamp exploded and the boy’s eyes turned into two golden nuggets.
    “We could go take a look,” she said, summarizing all her concerns.
    “Where?” asks Sheng.
    “Outside.”
    “Outside where?”
    “Outside the hotel. We could take a walk down the street and find out if there’s really a blackout everywhere. Or only here at our place.”
    “And once we find that out?”
    “I don’t know. We’ll have found out. That’s all.”
    “But why should we find out?”
    “Because we’re the only people in the hotel who are awake?”
    Mistral shivers. “I’m not going. It’s too cold.”
    They’re all still in their pajamas, except for Harvey, who’s already in his jeans.
    “We’d all catch a cold,” says Sheng.
    “Your clothes are back in the room,” replies Harvey, catching Elettra’s eye. “We’ll just put on something warm and then take a look around the city.”

7
THE BRIDGE

    T HE T RASTEVERE DISTRICT LOOKS LIKE IT’S BEEN DRAWN WITH CHARCOAL . Silent and still, it rises up over a white carpet of snow. Austere buildings, sloping rooftops, dark porticoes, slanted gutters, tilted chimneys.
    Everything dark.
    The kids warily leave the hotel, turn their backs to Santa Cecilia and head toward the river. Their footsteps crunch down gently into the compact layer of white snow.
    Sheng is the only one of the four who hasn’t stopped talking. To keep his hair from getting wet, he’s put on one