Feyiz thrust his hands into his pockets. “You and Meryam have to talk to them. Better yet, you’ve got to get it out of here as soon as possible.”
“That is our intention,” Adam said.
Something danced at the edge of his vision and he realized it had begun to snow. Lightly, gently swirling, but snow nevertheless. A precursor to the storm to come.
Zeybekci shrugged himself deeper inside his coat and glanced longingly back inside the cave, wanting the relative shelter of the ark. The walls inside. The blankets and portable heaters.
“My government will provide whatever cooperation is necessary to facilitate this,” Zeybekci said. “We would prefer to avoid being made to look foolish.”
Adam couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “So you share these fears?”
“Not at all. But if the Karga-Holzer Ark Project becomes an embarrassment, it will affect all parties involved.”
“Look, let me talk to Meryam—”
He saw Calliope shift the camera again, and turned to see his fiancée approaching.
“Talk to Meryam about what?”
Shit. This was not a conversation he wanted to have in front of other people, particularly as on edge as Meryam had been today. She looked tired, deep circles under her eyes. The snow fell around her, quietly beautiful, and Adam had to fight the urge to beg her to abandon the project and fly home with him.
“Our friends here,” he said, “have come to demand that the cadaver be removed from the ark immediately.”
“Not immediately,” Feyiz corrected. “It’s too late today—”
“We’re working on it,” Meryam interrupted. “Believe me, I’d like that thing out of here just as much as you would.”
“It isn’t—”
“As any of you would,” she corrected herself. “But here’s what bothers me. Adam is my partner, but I’m project manager. I can’t escape the idea that you came to him so you could avoid a confrontation with me.”
Adam narrowed his eyes, flushing with irritation. It shouldn’t have bothered him—this was the very same conclusion he’d drawn—but the way she spoke it was as if she shared their impression that he was some kind of lackey. He was nobody’s lackey. He breathed deeply. She knows that, he told himself. It’s not what she means. And yet his teeth were on edge.
“I’m sorry,” Feyiz said. “We meant no disrespect. It’s just that you’ve seemed so exhausted, that we didn’t want to trouble you with this until we’d had a chance to—”
“Of course I’m exhausted!” Meryam snapped, and Adam thought he saw her mouth tremble a bit. Was there a quaver of emotion in her voice? “We’re all bloody exhausted!”
She shook her head, stared at the snowflakes eddying over the abyss as the daylight waned.
“Don’t you think I want the damn thing gone? You have my promise that the cadaver will be moved off the mountain the moment it’s possible to do so safely, but unfortunately that means after this storm. Thank you for bringing your concerns to our attention.”
Zeybekci seemed about to argue, but Feyiz tapped his arm and a moment later they were walking back into the ark. Meryam glanced at the camera, and then apparently decided she did not care if Calliope caught her words on film.
“I’ll speak to everyone during dinner and address their fears,” she said. “After that, if anyone wants to climb down the mountain before that storm hits, let them go. I’d rather lose half the staff than deal with a bunch of children who think the bloody bogeyman’s coming to get them.”
EIGHT
Walker and Father Cornelius had one rough-hewn stall to themselves, with Kim in the next one over. They had blankets and heavy sleeping bags, but the stalls had no doors. As cold as it was during the day it would be far colder at night, but now that he’d seen some of the other sleeping quarters he felt a little warmer. Some of the KHAP team had created false walls by hanging sheets of plastic from the roof and nail-gunning them to the floor timbers. The plastic snapped taut with every gust of wind, rustling quietly when it eased, but it did nothing to keep out the chill.
Only the infirmary had more substance. There were walls of preformed, insulated plastic that Ben figured must have been airlifted to the cave and then locked together. The little mobile procedure room came complete with floor and ceiling, and plenty of ventilation. It looked like a children’s playset zapped with some kind of growth ray, but Walker felt envious. There were several cots in the room, and he was sure Dr. Dwyer slept in one of them.
“This is cozy,” he said as he entered.
Dr. Dwyer glanced up from his laptop and surveyed his new arrivals. Walker had entered first, but Father Cornelius was right behind him. “How’s she doing?”
“Well, I don’t think there’s any need for last rites,” the doctor said, smiling at the presence of the priest.
Father Cornelius gave a soft laugh. “I might need them myself if I stay up here very long.”
Kim lay on her side on the cot farthest from the entrance. She faced them, and though her eyes tracked their arrival, she made no other sign that she had noticed.
“Is she all right?” the priest asked.
Dr. Dwyer closed his laptop and stood, clasping his hands behind his back in the manner of doctors and lecturers from the birth of time. “Seong is awake and alert and certainly able to speak for herself.”
Walker understood the doctor’s deference to his patient, but Dwyer hadn’t been there when Kim had gone racing through the ark, screaming and muttering gibberish. If they were all a bit wary now, that was to be understood.
He went over and sat on the middle cot, facing her. “How do you feel?”
“Tired,” the woman said, tucking back a lock of hair that had fallen across her face. “Embarrassed.”
Father Cornelius kept his distance, standing with the doctor.
“You gave us all a pretty good scare,” Walker said.
Kim’s face went cold. Hard. Somehow it made her beautiful. Walker tried to ignore the observation when it floated into his mind, particularly because he had known such women before. There was fear and pain beneath that cold veneer, and he had plenty of his own. He thought of his ex-wife, Amanda, of the pain he’d tried to spare her and the different stripe of it he’d inflicted upon her instead.
“I’m fine now,” Kim said. “That’s all I can tell you. I’ve had panic attacks—anxiety attacks, I suppose—in the past, but never anything like that.”
She spoke in a kind of monotone that made Walker wonder if Dr. Dwyer had put her on some kind of medication. He studied Kim’s eyes, saw the super-dilated pupils, and realized that had to be it. No wonder she felt fine.
“They’re going to be serving dinner soon,” he said. “Are you up to it?”
Kim’s upper lip twitched. He’d seen her do it before—a sign of irritation, though whether or not she was aware of it, he couldn’t be sure.
“I said I feel fine. And I’m starving.”
Walker glanced back at Father Cornelius and then the doctor. “Doc?”
Dwyer nodded. “Miss Kim is free to go.”
“Good.” Walker leaned toward her, gripping the edges of the cot beneath him. He studied Kim’s eyes again. “This is not a place where it is safe to lose control of yourself. If you feel another attack coming on—if your heart so much as skips an extra beat—you tell me.”
For a moment she just lay there staring at him. Then she sat up straight, blew in her hands to warm them, and stood so that—tiny as she was—she loomed over him.
“I’m not a child, Walker. And I’ll remind you that I do not answer to you.”
Walker stood as well, shrinking the space between the cots so now it contained only the two of them. He stared down at her, analyzing, evaluating, trying to follow the threads forward to find the worst-case scenarios that might spin out of this moment. They were too close, barely any light between them. Kim exhaled a warm breath and Walker breathed it in, an unwelcome intimacy that made him blink and t
urn away, suddenly too aware of her presence and her strength. She’d gotten under his skin, but he tried not to focus too much on why.
“I know you’re not a child,” he said as he walked away. “But if you snap and go off, raving and running around in here, you might run right off the ledge.” He paused, turning to meet her gaze. “I don’t want to have to explain to the UN why you fell off the mountain.”
He thought he saw the flicker of a smile on her lips. Then Kim nodded.
“Understood.”
Father Cornelius smiled softly. “Shall we go down to dinner, then?”
Kim took a wobbly step and caught herself. Whatever Dr. Dwyer had given her, it worked very well.
“Come on,” he said, watching to make sure she didn’t fall. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll be taco night.”
This time Kim definitely smiled. She had a sense of humor underneath that hard veneer. Then again, it might have been the drugs.
Walker stepped out of the infirmary and felt a sudden surge of nausea that made him stop and hold the doorframe. He took a deep breath as his skin prickled and a sickly sweat beaded on his skin. No, no. Not this again. He’d thought it was the elevation or the helicopter ride, but now he wondered if he’d come down with some kind of virus. He couldn’t afford to be sick.
“You all right?” Father Cornelius asked.
Another deep breath and Walker dropped his hand, forcing a smile. “Just a long day, I guess.”
The chill wind snaked back through the ancient timbers and slithered around the manmade efforts to keep it out. To his left, plastic sheeting flapped in the wind, torn loose from the nails that had pinned it down.
Something moved at the corner of his eye, but when he turned to look he saw nothing but shadows.
* * *
“Can I have everyone’s attention, please?”
The rumble of conversation continued for a few seconds, dishes and silverware clinking, and Meryam thought she might have to speak up again, louder this time. But then forks and cups began to lower and the staff shifted one or two at a time to face her.
There were half a dozen lightweight plastic tables, stackable things that were only brought out at mealtime. The chairs were just as lightweight, just as stackable, but there weren’t enough of them. The crew took turns standing. From Meryam’s perspective they ought to have been happy to have tables and chairs at all. Happy they weren’t, scooping cold canned beans with their fingers.
Be kind, she told herself. But she wasn’t in a charitable mood. She felt a buzz of aggravation at the back of her skull like a small headache that she couldn’t seem to shake.
“I understand some of you are nervous about continuing your work on the Ark Project,” Meryam began. She scanned the space ahead of her—the archaeologists and students, the workers, the guides, the doctor, the Turkish monitors and the paleopathologist, Olivieri, and Adam. Walker’s little trio sat farthest away from her, near Helen Marshall, who Meryam knew wanted to keep in view of the roped-off area she’d been working in that day to make sure no one stumbled into it.
“Some of you are religious people. Some of you have superstitions that stem from those religions or from childhood,” she went on. Anger flickered across several faces. Off to her right, Hakan uncrossed his arms with a sneer she had seen before. “I am not questioning your spirituality or suggesting that your faith is in any way illegitimate. There are Jews among us, as well as Christians and Muslims and atheists. I’m not here to tell you what to believe. What I will tell you is this—you have nothing to fear.”
An American—an NYU student named Errick Noonan—sat up straighter in his seat. “How can you promise that?”
Meryam relaxed. It was the question she had hoped for. They would listen much more closely to her answer to a challenge than if she’d made a simple statement.
“You’re all intelligent people. Many of you are experts in your fields of study, or on your way to becoming that. Others have an intimate knowledge of this mountain, of this region. We’re living inside an ancient ship—an ark. There’s a lot we don’t know. Who built it? How did it get up here? Why was it built? These are the questions and the onus is on all of you to find the answers.”
“Those aren’t the questions on my mind tonight,” Errick said.
“Must we bother with this idiocy?” called an older Turkish student, a master’s candidate called Kemal. “Some of us are tired of the constant chatter. You want something to fear? Worry about the storm that’s coming, or whether your foolishness will get you dismissed from a once-in-a-lifetime project.”
Errick stood up quickly, plastic chair falling over backward. “Are you kidding me?” he demanded, jabbing a finger in the air, pointing at Kemal. “You can’t tell me this isn’t getting under your skin. Any of you.”
“Sit down, Errick,” Wyn Douglas said. “Meryam was—”
“I know what Meryam is trying to do. But I heard Dr. Patil talking about the cadaver you’re all so protective of.” He whipped around, gesturing at several other students, most of them Americans who were on Wyn’s crew with him. “This thing’s got horns. It’s not human. Dr. Patil said himself that it looked like a demon—”
Dev Patil held up a hand. “Now, hang on a minute. I never said it was a demon, only that it had horns like a demon.”
Errick threw up his hands. “There you go!” He spun to face Meryam again, voices rising around him, some in support and some calling for him to return to his seat. “Doc Patil knows more about this than anyone and he won’t even use a human pronoun to describe that thing. Why? ’Cause it isn’t human.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” someone shouted.
Helen Marshall called for Errick to sit and listen.
Kemal got up from his chair. “The only demons around here are the little terrors running around inside the heads of anyone who believes there is something to fear! There is no devil! There is no evil! There is—”
“I never thought so, either,” Errick said. “But now we’ve got a goddamn demon about eighty yards from where you’re standing, man.”
“There is no—”
“No?” Errick echoed. “You keep saying ‘no?’”
He twisted around, scanning for someone, and when he spotted Kim Seong he marched in her direction.
Walker stood abruptly. “Back the fuck off, kid.”
Errick hesitated, and voices rose up to fill the pause, arguing.
“Hey!” Meryam shouted. “That is bloody well enough!”
The last few words made her throat raw, the quivering rage in her so startling—to her and her staff—that all eyes turned toward her again. At last.
“Errick,” she said, quietly now, but her voice carried in the sudden silence. “Sit down. Don’t make me say it again.”
Meryam waited, calming herself as the student returned to his table, righted his chair, and sat heavily. Walker, Kemal, and several others who had leaped to their feet also returned to their chairs. Those who had already been standing seemed to wish they had somewhere to sit, if only to avoid Meryam screaming herself hoarse.
“I’m going to be honest with you,” she said, and saw them all stiffen. Most of the time, people who had to announce their impending honesty were about to lie to you. But the words that followed surprised her with the way they made her heart thump and the way her cheeks flushed as she spoke them.
The truth felt raw, even as it came out of her mouth.
“I don’t believe in devils or angels,” she said. “Maybe there’s some kind of great, wise being out there in the cosmos—I think there probably is, but mostly ’cause I think it’s arrogant for us to think we’re the smartest things the universe has to offer. But demons and ghosts, the voice of God, heaven and hell? Not a doubt in my mind that it’s all shit. Here’s my confession, though, and you need to understand this. I want it to be true. If the ark is real, if God told some bloke called Noah to build this old tub ’cause he was about to flood the damn world, that means
there is a heaven. It means death isn’t the end and we carry on afterward, and maybe I get to see my gran again someday. She never put much stock in God but was kinder to me than anyone else has ever been.”
Several people glanced at Adam, wondering how he felt about this statement, given that she’d agreed to marry him. Meryam didn’t care how he felt about it just then.
“Here is what I do know. The body we found is deformed. We haven’t established its sex, so ‘it’ is a perfectly acceptable pronoun. As soon as the storm is over, we are going to transport it to Istanbul. Until that time, if it makes you nervous or your superstition is so great that you are actually afraid, I suggest you focus on your work and stay away from the tented area at the back of level one. Now, if that’s all—”
Hakan clapped his hands once, loudly, the sound echoing.
Every head turned. Meryam wanted to murder him. He’d clapped to interrupt, to get attention, but he’d done it like a dog calling his master to heel, and he was the project foreman. He had been rude to her all along, dismissive, critical of her gender, but never this openly.
“You have something to say, Hakan?”
He sneered. “You say ‘superstition’ the way people say ‘dog shit.’”
“I don’t think—”
“It doesn’t matter what you think,” Hakan went on.
Feyiz swore and began moving across the cave, as if to separate Meryam from his uncle. Hakan saw the younger guide coming and dismissed him with a scowl. Feyiz was not a factor to him.
“Maybe you are right,” Hakan said. “Maybe there is nothing to fear. But if there is, you are putting every one of us in danger by not giving us a choice if we want to stay or go.”
The talking started again, the worrying, the doubt.
Son of a bitch, Meryam thought. His resentment at having to answer to a woman had been simmering for weeks, and now it had surfaced.
“You want to go?” she said, glaring at Hakan. “Then fucking go!”
Feyiz reached his uncle then, tried to grab his arms, to move him away. Hakan shoved him. Feyiz reeled, arms pinwheeling, and crashed into one of the plastic tables, cracking it in half.
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