Amara feels less safe here at the edge of town. There are so many strangers drifting into Pompeii only to vanish again like smoke. They wait for a line of wagons to pass, piled up with blocks of masonry, no doubt part of the town’s never-ending building work, then walk under the high stone arch, crossing from the city of the living into the city of the dead. The road here is lined with enormous colorful tombs, some almost as big as the brothel where they work. Only the rich can afford to be remembered this close to the gate. In the doorways of their own graves, the once powerful dead stare out, their brightly painted statues watching the living pass by.

The she-wolves could never have bought Cressa a memorial here; even the smallest would be unimaginably expensive. Instead, Victoria and Amara walk further and further out of town, until the road widens and the crowds thin. They pass a group of mourners gathered round a marble urn in their finest clothes, burning offerings to appease the dead. Amara thinks of her own parents, of all she owes their shades but cannot give, and looks away.

It is Victoria who remembers the turning. A narrow road cutting through a gap between two monuments. The tombs become smaller the further they get from the main highway. They pass a large vineyard, its branches bare above the stone walls. Amara wonders if it might be one of the vineyards Pliny visited on his tour but supposes it isn’t grand enough. She turns and looks toward Vesuvius, the mountain whose plants he wanted to study. Its sharp peak is shrouded in cloud.

Eventually, they reach the place they came for. The paupers’ field. It stretches out in an ugly jumble of mounds and piles of rock and broken amphora necks. The last stick out from the earth like gaping mouths. There is a foul smell from the nearby dump, and Amara wonders, but does not ask, if that is where Victoria was found as a baby.

“How will we know where it is again?” Amara whispers, as if the unhappy dead might hear her. The only other mourner she can see is an old man, crying over a heap of freshly dug earth.

“I know the spot,” Victoria says, picking her way confidently through the jagged field. She stops by a small tomb, barely more than a slab, though still grander than anything else nearby. At its base is a pile of stones. All that is left to remember Cressa. There had been no point in burying an amphora jar; they had no ashes to put in the bottom, no human remains to receive their gifts of wine. Victoria takes the flask Nicandrus gave her and pours the Sparrow’s cheapest vintage over Cressa’s stones. “She always did like a drink,” she says.