THE SKY · AD 79 · THE BAY OF NAPLES
Pompeii is evacuated before Vesuvius
AD 79. For days the wells have been failing and the ground has been shivering, and Pompeii has learned to ignore both. In our timeline the town was still full when the sky came down. This is the timeline where somebody read the warnings out loud.
AD 79 · THE LAST MORNING
The mountain had been talking for days. Wells failed in the upper town; dogs would not settle; small quakes rattled the garum jars, and Pompeii, which had rebuilt itself from a great earthquake seventeen years before, shrugged, because the ground in Campania always shivers. In our timeline the shrug was the whole story. In the timeline recorded here, an old duumvir who had lived through the year 62 stands up in the forum while the paving is still trembling and says the sentence that saves twenty thousand people: the mountain is not finished. Go to the sea.