CHAPTER 12
The Dead Sea, Jordan
The sun was rising. It threw gold and a cold, pale pink across the salt formations on the seashore.
Where other seas would have left their tidemarks in the sand, this one left it on the salt, each layer a slightly different colour, patterns grading down under the water.
There were no clouds, and on the ground, the morning cool had a high, clear quality that felt to Tallis like the striking of a silver bell.
They had both fallen asleep on the tent groundsheet with Sally’s phone propped up between them, because they had been watching something on Netflix.
Tallis woke up first. Sally was still curled up under his jacket, facing her, the new light showing the brown in his hair where he’d been out in the sun.
She looked down at him for a long time, longer than she ever would have if he had been awake.
Broad, strong men always looked immovable to her, and something in the back of her head was always aware she should give them room in case they did anything sudden—but lying down like this, he looked lighter than that, light enough for someone to have picked him up and dropped him there.
She wanted to touch his ribs and feel him breathe. She didn’t do that. She crawled out of the tent, pushed the heels of her hands into her eyes until she saw stars, then called, “Akhbar! Wake up!”
“I’m awake,” he said, obviously lying. He came out too, and gave the sun a resentful squint.
She hadn’t seen yesterday in the dark, but he had green eyes, an amazing sea green.
He pulled a cigarette from his jacket pocket, a roll-up with the paper twisted up at the end like a candlewick. “Ugh. Have you seen my lighter?”
“I thought self-harm was haram for Muslims? Doesn’t the cancer stick count?” said Tallis, to hide how homely the tobacco smelled.
“I know,” he said sorrowfully, and lit the cigarette when he unearthed the lighter, which was a terrible acid green. “I never said I was a good Muslim, though. I bet you’re a live-in-the-gym-with-a-vegetable-smoothie person. Aren’t you?”
“Fully yes,” she said. “I’ve probably only got about fifteen minutes left before I hit menopause and I’ll be buggered if I’m going to turn into a tiny bedbound old lady with sticks for arms. Weights and vegetables is the only way.”
“Gross,” he said, poking her. Then, with a wicked light in his eyes that made him look like a tousled devil, “Candy for breakfast?” He held out a chocolate bar.
“Yeah, go on,” she said, to see if she could make him laugh.
He did, and it was a fantastic husky smoker’s laugh with a boyish break in the middle.
It was easy to think, If only I were twenty years younger, but that wouldn’t have worked; Tallis hadn’t been baked yet twenty years ago.
She would have been shy of someone like Sally then, or even frightened.
I do everything too late, she thought suddenly; I graduated too late, I grew up too late, I understood humans too late.
By the time she was ready for the Sallys of the world, her chance with them was long gone.
When she next blinked, there was a soft mist over everything. It wasn’t really there, but it looked convincing. Well done, brain.
“You look sad,” Sally said.
“Ah? Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m never stupid,” he told her, serene.
It felt even hotter down in the sinkhole this time, and the hazmat suit was suffocating.
They collected all the film tests, painfully slow because it took so long to navigate through those vicious spikes and their thorns.
After a while, Tallis realized there was grit all over her gloves, though she was sure she’d been careful to keep them clean; it was rubbing off on the film dosimeters.
She brushed them off, annoyed with herself, but then paused.
The more she brushed, the more grit there was.
No; not grit. Salt. She held her hand up close to her visor.
The folds of her sleeves were covered in a fine layer of salt too. It was everywhere.
“Sally,” she said, and showed him. “Where’s all the salt coming from? It’s not windy.”
“I don’t know, it—”
Something fell out of the air and thumped between them. They both looked down. They had to do it exaggeratedly because of the suits, and to anyone watching it would have looked comical.
On the ground was a little lump of red rock, smaller than fist-sized, oddly round.
“Is that—some kind of hail?” Tallis hazarded, thinking that it sounded stupid even as she was saying it.
Sally picked it up. The red was translucent: crystal, not rock. “I don’t think so. It’s warm.”
They both looked up. The sky was empty and mauve.
Maybe someone was throwing rocks. She had been thinking so much about radioactivity that she hadn’t considered how exposed they were down here.
People didn’t always like government agencies sending hazmat-suited inspectors to poke around.
Not unreasonably, they worried you were doing something sinister.
“Better get back up,” Sally said.
Back at ground level, one of the cars was missing a wing mirror.
It had been smashed, and Tallis swung around, looking for someone sullen with a hammer, but when Sally knelt to look at the mirror where it lay on the salty ground, he stood up with another of those rounded red crystals.
There were a couple more here and there on the ground, not close enough to the cars to have been aimed at them.
“Maybe they really did just fall out of the sky,” Sally said, pulling off his hazmat suit.
The air felt cold when Tallis took her mask off. She tugged on the jumper she’d worn on the plane, wondering for at least the twelfth time what in God’s name accounted for that temperature differential between ground level and sinkhole.
Sally ducked into the tent to start developing the tests. She waited in her hire car with the door open, reading her emails, and the news, and then opened her social media for some mindless scrolling in case any kittens had done anything especially funny.
She had scooped up almost five hundred new followers overnight.
It was Sally’s video of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”; it had nine thousand likes.
She blinked. She had never been that popular.
There was even a little note from the Jordanian ministry, clearly from someone who wanted to cause maximum embarrassment: Romance on a nuclear inspection!
!! They had even put on a winky face, the psychopath.
She messaged back that there was nothing going on, thank you, and there was no need for anyone to call child protective services.
The next autoplay after that was a viral thread from a monastery in Tibet.
It showed some tiny children with shaved hair playing with silver coins.
Yuan coins didn’t have heads and tails but flowers and numbers, and every time the boys flicked the coins, they landed on flowers.
The more it happened, the more the little boys laughed and laughed.
There was an answering thread of other people who were doing it too.
Some teenagers somewhere called Wieliczka in Poland; a lady in Salt Lake City; a handsome man on the back of a motorbike in Khewra in Pakistan.
The coins always landed the same way, time after time.
All the videos were full of captions promising the coins weren’t weighted, and it wasn’t fake.
Feeling silly, Tallis took a dinar out of her pocket and flicked it. Heads. Heads . . . heads . . . heads. Feeling even sillier, she filmed herself doing it, almost sure that it wouldn’t work on camera, but it did. Heads ten times in a row.
Hmm.
When she was about to post the video, the app asked if she wanted to tag it like other similar videos with #CrazySaltLuck.
Salt.
Wasn’t Khewra the big salt mine in the Himalayas?
After some online searching, she found that it was. Wieliczka was an ancient salt mine in Poland.
No doubt because the algorithm thought she was now fascinated by that Tibetan monastery, a news notification flashed up and informed her that a young disabled monk there, hit by a car in front of a railway station when he was little, had been miraculously cured.
The monastery was at a place called Lancang.
It was a famous salt mine.
What?
“Oh, fuck!”
She jolted upright and almost fell, because suddenly the ground was littered with dozens and dozens of broken xylophones, swore when she dropped her phone and the camera-shutter noise reported that it had just taken a picture of her shoes, plunged through the imaginary xylophones—Why, why xylophones, why do I never hallucinate anything sensible?
—which then disappeared apologetically, and reached the tent just as Sally lunged out of it.
She put her hands out instinctively but then clenched them and took them back again before she could touch his arms.
“Sorry! Sorry,” he said, but he looked shaken. “There’s—I need you to look at something.”
She followed him into the tent, where he had set out developer trays and pegged up the pictures on a string overhead.
It smelled densely of chemicals. She had to wait for her eyes to adjust. It was dark inside: he’d put up an extra shroud of canvas to keep the sunlight out.
He had a red lamp on, and it traced insufficient light over him, the developer trays, and a strange, concertina device like an upside-down camera obscura.
He turned on a proper lamp.
“So,” he said, then swallowed and started again. “So, something odd is showing up on the tests. The plastic sections are whited out—like they were exposed to sunlight.”
“No, they were sealed—”
“I know, I know, but look . . .”
He showed her some of the developed pictures, which he’d enlarged.
On all of them, on the left side—the place that on the film dosimeter had been covered over with copper and plastic—the pictures were pure, bright white.
On the right—the side that had been covered by the aluminium—there was some kind of fog, but not evenly spread across the frames. It sat in irregular wisps and bands.
And, incredibly, it silhouetted those vast metal spikes spearing through the ground, and their thorns, all pin sharp.
“That’s . . . not radioactivity,” she said.
“No,” he said. “But look what happens to the ones that were closer to that gate.” He handed her another.
The left-hand side was blasted white, like the others, but on the right, where the film had been covered by the aluminium again, the light was brighter, the shapes of the spikes even starker. And another one; brighter again.
“What about the one I put on the gate?” she said, with something molten starting to flux in her chest.
“Yes,” he said tightly. “Yes, exactly.” He hesitated though, then picked up an image he’d left face down on the table.
Again, the left side was just white.
On the right, where the aluminium had been—there was a person.
Or something like a person. It was a whirl of brilliant light, and within that whirl were arms, faces, wings, horns, round streams like wheels, the furl of what might have been fabric, a chaos of many things all in the same space, but . . . slightly blurred. It had moved.
Tallis stood holding the picture. She had pinned the test on that door. Whatever this thing was, it had been right in front of her, just on the other side of the wood.
“Is there any way we could have accidentally exposed this one to . . . or overlaid another image on . . .?”
Wordless, Sally handed her the other pictures that had faced the same way.
The thing was on all of them.
“All right. Let’s get these emailed to both our agencies,” Tallis said, very carefully. “And then I think we should leave.”