CHAPTER 50
Amman, Jordan
Winter had come at last, and the desert was cold.
Sally and Tallis had stolen some gear from a shop and walked as far as they could, then pitched the tent in some scrubland among dusty rocks that looked as though they might have been the very last tumbled remains of something ancient.
Sometimes, on the way, something had crossed their path.
Something dead, something on fire, or real things, real people.
If it wasn’t real, Tallis could get rid of it.
When there was a real barricade, Sally talked them past.
In isolated constellations, other people were arriving too, camping at a good distance from each other; one way or another, people were realizing that whatever was happening wasn’t so bad if you could get away from the nearest mass of humans.
They heated up some water to cook with over a stolen gas stove, the blue flames making Sally’s eyes turquoise. He was panning around with his phone. Sometimes the screen hazed, but there was no sign of the wires crackling into salt.
Not far from them, the skeleton pylon of the cell tower sang as the wind and the snow blew through its steel rungs.
Whatever had passed over the city must not have gone directly above it, because the little red lights at the top were still blinking, and the dishes and antenna were not bound up in salt.
Sometimes, for ten or twelve seconds at a time, there were a few bars of signal.
If Tallis listened hard and stayed exactly still, she could hear a faint hum.
She had no idea what that was, exactly, but it did mean the tower was working, and she thought it might be the best sound she had ever heard.
Sally stopped suddenly, looking hard towards the city.
“All right,” he said. “There’s one coming. It’s just walking. Let’s see if you can do this on camera. Are you ready?”
“I think so,” she said.
When she looked back, there it was: a single burning figure walking towards them across the sand. She wondered what jinn wanted to do, once somebody had believed them into matter. They had kept seeing tiny points of light here and there, wandering.
Back the way they had come, above Amman, there was sprite lightning: the salt light must have done something to the atmosphere, because that invisible firestorm was becoming visible.
Static electricity hung red in the air, a monstrous set of shapes with great tendrils that trailed almost to the minarets.
In the clouds . . . in the clouds, there were what might have been buildings.
Arches, domes, looping impossibly, glittering in the storm. Thunder rolled, but there was no rain.
They were downwind, and she could smell the ash from that lonely figure on fire. Even that smell wasn’t quite convincing. The memory of smoke, not real smoke.
“Are you sure?” Sally said.
“I’m sure. Where’s best?”
“If you go out towards it,” he said unhappily, nodding to a patch of ground almost spotlit by the lightning.
Tallis walked out over the dark sand. The cold was deep now. Snow flickered everywhere, gritty in the air, chasing nooses around the rocks and the ruins.
“Just there is good,” Sally called.
She waited, and the burning thing walked. She let it come closer, holding her thoughts still. It was the same feeling as holding numbers in her head without doing a calculation, because it would be easier if she just used a calculator.
Once it was close enough to talk to, she let go of the mental reins. Not real.
Like the last one, like she had known it would, the figure crumbled to a heap of embers and billowed away into the snow, which hissed on the last of the tiny fires.
She heard Sally blow his breath out, all relief.
An hour ago, she had tried to say that they needed to tell people that it was about belief and that things were real if you thought they were and not if you didn’t, but Sally was shaking his head well before she finished.
“That’s not going to work. It’s too complicated. This is social media we’re talking about. All this about belief—you’re giving them miles of stick and hoping no one gets the wrong end of it.”
“What should I say then?”
“Just say it’s fake. It’s all garbage. They’re just—I don’t know, projections, illusions, AI companies doing something weird.
It’s about what people believe, right? What’s going to make them do it right—explaining exactly how it works, or just telling them what to believe?
If you say that what they believe will happen, a lot of people will accidentally believe it’s real because it could be. ”
“But . . .” Tallis trailed off. She wanted to say, That’s lying, but she heard how useless she sounded just in time.
“Fake news,” Sally said. “Garbage. AI.”
“I don’t think the people being eaten by jinn will be quite convinced by that!”
“But you’re not talking to the people who believe in jinn enough to manifest them,” he said.
“You’re talking to the people like you. The die-hard bulletproof atheists who could see God on the mountain and say, Nope, you’re just altitude sickness, thanks.
They need to believe it’s not real, not that it might be if they trip over the wrong thought. ”
Now she turned back to the camera, as they had practised.
“These things aren’t real. They’re just mirages in salt light.
You’ve seen hologram musicians perform: this is the same.
All this stuff online about them hurting people: it’s bollocks.
Here’s the challenge. Find one in the street, go up to it, and put your hand straight through it.
We’re going to boost the best videos you tag us in.
Sally will be awarding extra points for stupid, unworthwhile things like . . .”
“Any available flamingos, zebras, sloths, dinosaurs, or otherwise hilarious animals,” Sally said cheerfully.
“And Tallis will be joyless and depressing, with marks for elegance and creativity and, I don’t know—what’s your favourite thing, Tallis?
Don’t tell me, I’ll guess. Is it . . . some kind of flatworm? Unflavoured chickpeas. Igneous rocks?”
“We’ll be posting for as long as Sally’s phone lasts or until I murder him,” Tallis rounded off. “Happy hunting!”
Sally gave her a thumbs-up and stopped the recording. “Now let’s see if the cell tower will let me . . .”
The vastness of the desert stretched out endlessly under the sea-monster shapes of the red lightning.
Uninterrupted by mountains, the wind powered across the scrub, pulling snow with it and fluttering the canvas of their tent, where the glow of the camp stove struggled on, forlorn.
The cell tower seemed tiny and insufficient.
Tallis bit her lip, trying to keep herself from believing it couldn’t work. Hold it, hold it, hold it.
“It sent,” Sally said.
Tallis thought she would feel relieved and hopeful, but she didn’t. Instead, there was a void of nothingness in the immediate future. What were they supposed to do now?
“Dinnertime,” Sally said happily.
She made an effort to smile.
So they sat in the doorway of the tent and cooked some chickpeas, and Sally made some bread from nothing but flour and something that might have been kefir, but it came together in a beautiful dough and fried into flatbreads like she’d never had before.
She said so. Sally looked pleased and told her it was just because she was hungry, and then giggled when she told him to fuck off.
“What’s your range, do you think?” Sally asked. He had done something magical to the chickpeas too, and now Tallis was wondering how she had ever thought supermarket ready-meals were even distantly related to food.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I could go for a walk after dinner and see if I can practise?”
“We,” he said seriously, “we can go for a walk. You can’t imagine away looters and armed militia.” He paused. “Can you?”
She had been thinking about that. “I don’t think so.
Unless I caught it in the split second where I wasn’t sure if I was hallucinating or not.
” She struggled, because all this required her to articulate things that she had never had to say aloud before.
“I think . . . I think it should be possible, but you’d need .
. .” She found herself crossing her hands over as if she were trying to show him a mirror image.
“You’d need the exact opposite kind of mind to mine.
You’d need to be able to really believe it.
Whereas . . . what I’m doing is unbelief. ”
He nodded slowly, as though she was making any kind of sense.
She was afraid she wasn’t. It sounded so arbitrary and so like the kind of thing somebody at a country fair might say, over a crystal ball decorated with plastic ivy and fairy lights.
She pushed her hands over her face, wishing for a vocabulary that was different to that, and then kept them there, because her nose was cold.
Opposite her, Sally was hunched down into his coat and scarf, watching her as if he was thinking about saying something.
She looked down at the ground, grey with sand and snow.
It was settling on her little by little that there was nobody to go back to. She had been unmoved by the idea of dying and leaving nothing behind but the cactus; but the idea that she might live and have nothing but the cactus was as frozen and punishing as the desert.
“O-oh, look at that,” he said. He had checked his phone. It could only have been half an hour since he had posted the video, but his feed had exploded with likes and reposts and replies. “We aren’t the only ones with signal.”
Thousands, already.
“Am I going to do a little I-told-you-so dance? I think I might. You have a hashtag. HowToKillADemon. Nice.”
She looked over his shoulder. “But look at what’s trending. TheyAreAngels. Christ, it’s that sodding priest they sent to Hreodwater . . . for God’s sake, he’s got millions of views.”
“Of course he has,” Sally remarked. “People go crazy for a hot priest.”