The Power of Five Oblivion

dark-haired, bearded man, leaning over him. At the same time, he felt the man’s hands pressing into his stomach and with a groan he spewed up what felt like another few litres.
    He was lying on his back on the deck of the Medusa . The boat was still afloat. And he was still alive. He wasn’t sure which of the two facts was more surprising. The last thing he remembered was a roaring, thundering mountain of water, which had fallen on him and smashed him off his feet. The eruption of the volcano had caused a tsunami and they had sailed right into it as they tried to escape from the port of Naples. The boat should have been torn to pieces, or turned upside down at the very least. But the engines were still running. Pedro could feel them vibrating underneath him. They were moving at speed, skimming across the surface of the sea. Somehow, they had survived.
    The man – Pedro remembered that his name was Angelo – called out in Italian and suddenly the other members of the crew were gathered around him, grinning and reaching out to pat him on the shoulder. Giovanni was among them, soaking wet and as white as a sheet, but still smiling.
    “What happened?” Pedro asked, but although he formed the words, no sound came out. His throat was burning from the salt water, and anyway, he had spoken in Spanish so nobody would have understood him. Angelo spoke again and one of the men came over and knelt down.
    “You speak English?” he asked.
    “Yes.” Pedro nodded.
    “My name is Emmanuel.” He was young, about nineteen or twenty, with tangled fair hair and blue eyes. He didn’t look Italian and spoke perfect English, with no trace of an accent. He was wearing jeans and a thick-knit jersey so waterlogged that it had lost all its shape. “You are very lucky to be alive,” he went on. “Angelo steered the ship through the wave. He hit it straight on and he was able to climb over the crest. It was the only way to escape. Otherwise we would all have been killed. As it was, you were swept overboard and if you hadn’t tied yourself with the rope, you would have been killed. We were able to drag you back … but not before you had drunk a lot of the ocean. For a minute, we thought you had drowned. But you are OK now.”
    “Where are we?” Pedro asked. This time, the words managed to come out.
    “About a kilometre out and following the coast.”
    “The volcano…?”
    Pedro allowed Emmanuel to help him to his feet. The Medusa seemed to have come through the tsunami intact. There was water all over the deck and the bilge pumps were already working, pumping out the main cabin. The crew – there were three men along with Pedro and Giovanni – looked washed out in every sense. But at least the sea was more manageable, the waves huge and choppy but no longer lethal.
    Pedro turned back to the mainland, searching for the port they had just left. He couldn’t see it. The entire coast around Naples was wreathed in impenetrable black smoke. The waves simply rolled into it and disappeared. The sea, the land and the sky had all bled into each other. And yet Vesuvius was still making itself known with a hellish red glow that seemed to flicker on and off as the clouds passed in front of it. Balls of lava were still streaking down and more shafts of orange and scarlet glimmered briefly in the haze as the city burned.
    He stood watching this, feeling utterly drained. If he could have imagined the end of the world, it would have looked much like this: the dead sea, the dying land. Suddenly he felt very alone, far from his home, separated from the other Gatekeepers. He barely knew Giovanni, Angelo or the others. He didn’t speak their language. His broken finger was throbbing painfully. His stomach was empty. He thought back to the moment when he had first met Matt in Lima – and had tried to steal his watch. He wished now that he had made a different decision and gone another way. How could he have known that the meeting between the two of them would one day bring him to this?
    Angelo and Emmanuel spoke together for a while. Then Emmanuel turned to Pedro.
    “We know who you are,” he said. “We know that you are important. Francesco Amati, Giovanni’s uncle, told us about you. Our job is to get you to Rome, to the home of Carla Rivera. I know where she can be found and I will come with you and Giovanni because the others speak only Italian.”
    “How do you speak such good English?”
    “My father was English. We will be in