CHAPTER 17
The Dead Sea, Jordan
The main road was further than Tallis remembered.
It took them more than an hour to reach the turning that, when she had been driving, had felt as though it came right before she saw the goats.
She wasn’t tired, though. She could have started running again.
She felt overcharged, crackling with static.
They had sent the video to their agencies, but there was still no phone signal. Whenever she checked the screen, it was stuck on message sending . . .
“We should be dead by now,” she said. “Enough gamma radiation to turn glass violet instantly? We should be slush. I feel fine. Do you?”
“Yeah,” Sally said, looking more and more unsure about it, as though he could have missed organ failure and whole-body haemorrhaging. He rubbed his arm absently. His skin was dry and cracked, but it wasn’t like a radiation burn. “It’s not radiation, is it?”
“I don’t think so,” Tallis said, and it felt wrong, but it couldn’t be ionising radiation. How long had they been walking—two hours? They should have been feeling sick, at least.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s think about what we do know.
We know that a month ago, that site was underground.
Then the salt production company saw the new salt formation on the satellite image, and when they went to investigate, that salt had caused the sinkhole to open.
Then the tower was partially exposed. So whatever is in there, it became active then. ”
“How long did the archaeologists dig before they got sick?” Tallis asked.
“About a month.”
“And they were uncovering that gate. Behind that is—something, blasting out . . . some . . . kind of light that isn’t visible but isn’t ionising radiation either, but gets through wood and aluminium just like gamma rays would.”
“Yes. And we felt the effects more strongly once the gate collapsed and all that silver moved.”
“Something like gamma rays, but isn’t, and . . . is blocked by silver,” Tallis said to the heat haze above the road.
She ploughed past what that could possibly be.
The electromagnetic spectrum was straightforward.
There was visible light. Then, when the photons were a little zingier, there was ultraviolet, which could burn you.
X-rays were more energetic still: enough to pass through human tissue.
And then, finally, the deadly drill force of gamma rays, so powerful that they smashed DNA.
There was nothing left to discover, no gap where a new light could sit.
So why did a light that could be stopped only with silver sound so familiar?
“Okay,” she said. “So why now? Whatever’s in there, it can’t have been blasting out all this—all this mystery contamination ever since the tower was built, because the soil would have dried as the salt formed and collapsed years ago.
But now, suddenly . . . that huge salt deposit. Why? What’s changed?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He looked helpless, and too young for any of this. “Nothing has been disturbed, there’s been no building work at all. It’s just been the surveys and the aerial photos. That massive salt deposit, that came from nowhere.”
“I think,” she said, with building certainty, “that even if we’d dug that site up and stuck a film test right on that gateway a month and a half ago, we wouldn’t have picked anything up. Whatever’s in that tower . . . it wasn’t active.”
“But it has been, in the past,” Sally said gradually.
“Say again?”
He looked across at her. “The tower. Blocking the door with silver. Those—spikes outside. Someone knew. A long, long time ago, someone built that tower, sealed the door, and put those structures outside. I think they did that once the thing was dormant, in case it ever . . .”
Tallis swallowed down the need to say woke up. “In case it ever became active again.”
“God, but we need to get to some signal,” Sally said, twisting to see further down the main road. “I know we shouldn’t contaminate anyone else, but we also can’t just leave that place open for anyone to wander into. I think I’m going to try and flag the first car that—”
Tallis saw something plummet out of the sky and snatched him backwards right before it hit him.
It was another of those chunks of red crystal.
Sally looked upwards. Tallis picked it up.
Like the others at the site, there was a curve to it, as though somebody had started to carve it and smooth it down.
And now she was touching it with her bare hands, not gloves, she could tell it wasn’t quartz, like she’d thought.
It was dry, and gritty, and when she brought it up to her face, she could smell the sharpness.
With her thumbnail, she scraped at it, and a fine powder came away. She touched her tongue to it.
Rock salt.
“Oh God,” Sally said, and yanked her in front of him, pushing her down almost to the ground, curling over her, and then—
Thump. Thump, thump, thump.
The red crystals were falling out of the sky all around them, dozens of them, thudding into the verges, cracking where they hit the tarmac, shattering into smaller pieces.
Sally gasped as one hit him—Tallis felt the bang right through his ribs—and another clipped her boot, and she had a mad fear that it was some kind of meteorological thing happening because of some side effect of climate change nobody had anticipated—
It stopped.
“Are you all right?” Tallis demanded, shocked. Shocked that it had happened, shocked that his instinct had been to protect her. She wasn’t important. He could just as well report to the agency if she got an unlucky knock on the head. “I mean—thank you, thank you, but—”
“I’m okay,” he said, rubbing his shoulder and smiling his crooked smile, which was too old for him. “They weren’t falling that far, I don’t think, or it would have . . .” But he trailed off. He was looking at the one Tallis still had in her hand. “Oh,” he said softly.
“What?”
He turned it around in her palm, the other way up, and then she could see it too. The curve was a wing.
“They’re birds,” Sally said. “They fly through—whatever it is coming from the dig site, and they . . .”
Tallis lifted her eyes properly. “That priest in England,” she said. “Hreodwater. Electricity doesn’t work there either. And—it’s a salt mine.”
Her phone pinged.
Message sent.