CHAPTER 3 #2
Tallis digested that. She had known it was likely to be bad.
Usually you didn’t wander around in the desert at night, even for a radiation problem, and usually there would be more people than just two inspectors.
But you worked at night, and you sent the minimum possible number of people, if someone suspected something nasty.
“What were they digging for, do you know? What brought them out here? It doesn’t seem as though .
. . you know, many people walk their dogs here. ”
The desert was unbroken for mile upon mile; no roofs, no fences, no sign even of tourists camping.
“No, the area’s been abandoned for forty years since the water retreated,” Sally agreed.
“Ground’s unstable, as you can see. A salt mining company bought the land recently, and they were about to start building further up the shore when they took a last round of satellite images.
They saw a huge salt deposit here. And they were confused, because it hadn’t been there a month before.
” He dug in his bag and held out a picture, protected inside a plastic wallet.
Tallis held her lamp up. The picture showed two aerial images of this part of the shore. In one, dated from September, it looked like the rest of the terrain. In the second, right over where they were standing, there was a burst of bright new salt, star-shaped except where it touched the sea.
“How did it get here?” Tallis said.
“They wanted to know too. They sent some surveyors out here, and the surveyors found—that.”
They were at the edge of a sinkhole broader than any of the others.
It was a cavern yawning into the pale earth.
Partially exposed along one side was a tower.
There was something military-seeming about it.
A watchtower, or something like. But before it, spearing up from the ground, were metal .
. . spikes. Huge, as though a spray of gorse had been made gigantic and then transformed into iron.
The metal was black, and the points—dozens of them were visible, and more vanished into the earth on either side of the sinkhole—looked savage.
Each spike had its own thorns. In order to reach the watchtower, someone walking would need to ease through that horrible forest. Closest to the place where the archaeologists had been working, someone had speared tennis balls onto the thorns, at least a dozen or so, but the bright yellow of the felt had already been greyed by salt.
Tallis had a strange drop of recognition. She felt as if she were seeing something she knew very well indeed—only, she had never been to Jordan before, and had never seen anything like this.
She ignored it. Epilepsy gave you bonkers déjà vu. Calm down, silly occipital lobe.
“It’s old,” Sally said. “So old nobody can tell exactly when it’s from. They gave the archaeologists two months to dig out as much as they could.”
Scaffolding stood down the nearer side of the sinkhole, and a series of wooden ladders.
It must all have been put up for the archaeologists, because there was graffiti on it, some in English, some in Arabic, and all of it was competing in the Naffest Archaeology Joke contest. A little sign in marker pen said ASK ME OUT, ARCHAEOLOGISTS DATE ANYTHING!
! and another, with some gold-star stickers stuck around it, said MY LIFE IS IN RUINS.
On the abandoned site, seeing it through a hazmat mask in the desert dark, Tallis felt a mixture of sadness and disquiet.
It had been lively here, and fun, and then .
. . what? An encounter with something that made humans sick and slaughtered machinery.
It couldn’t be anything but ionising radiation, even if, somehow, it wasn’t leaving a trace.
The rubber gloves of the suit squeaked on the wooden ladder rungs, and her breathing sounded loud.
It was even warmer in the sinkhole than on the surface.
Sweat was soaking into the back of her T-shirt.
She had to slow down. Breathing through the mask was unpleasant.
The inside of it felt damp, and the air already tasted recycled and stale.
“Careful at the bottom,” Sally said. “There’s something on the ground, it’s sharp.” He held his lamp out to show her. It squeaked on its handle, gas shushing.
Something on the ground . . .
He was right. On the ground were heaps of what looked like tacks, the kind designed to burst car tyres.
Mindful where she was putting her feet, because the spikes would go straight through her boots, she picked one up.
It was heavy, and sharp, as if those gigantic gorse spars had blossomed and dropped vicious fruit. “What are they?”
“No idea. The archaeologists were excavating them from the gateway there.”
She looked. In the tower there was indeed a gate, only partially uncovered.
The top section of it was cleared, but there was a slag heap of the tack things covering the rest, at least as tall as she was.
Until the sinkhole formed, they must have been held in place by the weight of the earth.
She had thought they were iron, but when she tilted hers to the light, it gleamed along a scratch.
“Jesus, is this silver?”
“Silver?”
She showed him. She knew a geologist at work who swore up and down that the best way to identify a rock or a mineral was to lick it, but she was pretty sure he was just trying to prank the interns. “Steel wasn’t invented until more recently, was it?”
They both looked up at the tower. Close up, the angles of its walls made her feel as though her teeth were turning to glass. Even without the gorse-forest of spikes outside, it would have been a place she wanted to leave well alone.
Sally turned the tack over in both hands. “Why would someone use five tonnes of silver to block a door?”