by Simon Toyne
‘Over the past few months we have tried everything to replicate the circumstances of a primary infection. We screened every newly infected patient to find matches for your blood-type and then created a cocktail of your blood and theirs to see if this mystery reagent would reappear and go back to work, but it never did. Ultimately we realized the problem lies in the fact that we are always working with samples that are already fully infected. Viral infections and their reagents tend to grow and develop at the same time and at the same rate, the one triggering the other and keeping pace with it so the virus can never get fully established. This happens with things like the common cold where the antibodies start being reproduced as soon as the virus appears. If it didn’t every cold would develop into a more chronic form such as pneumonia, which is what happens in immuno-suppressed people.’
He sat down on the chair in front of the screen, his weariness evident in the way his shoulders slumped inside the contamination suit. ‘What we need to do is catch someone with your blood type before the virus has fully established itself and then cross-transfuse your blood with theirs. This will hopefully give us two chances of catching the reagent in action: once in your system as the infected blood starts mingling with yours, and again in the other patient as your healthy blood encounters the infection in theirs.
‘However, there is a risk. If the mechanism has been completely deactivated in your system then you may end up being re-infected, with little chance of survival. There is also a risk for the other patient. This mutated form of the virus you now carry may be harmless to you but could still be very harmful to others. In trying to find a cure for the blight we may end up killing someone.’
Gabriel took it all in, the polished cleanliness of the room, the clinic quiet, the serious tone in Kaplan’s voice. ‘I’m assuming by the fact that you woke me up to tell me all this that you have found someone.’
Dr Kaplan nodded. ‘The problem has been finding someone with your exact blood type, which unfortunately is particularly rare. You are O negative, which in Turkey is shared by less than five per cent of the population. We blood-typed everyone still healthy inside the Citadel and found one match. The reason I woke you is because this person has just exhibited the first signs of the blight.’ He rose from his chair and moved across the room towards the door to the bed chamber. ‘For this to stand any chance at all of working we need to act fast before it fully takes hold.’
He reached the door and opened it.
Beyond was a bedroom, two beds in the centre lined up next to each other, an array of tubes and equipment arranged around them. One was empty, the other contained a man, propped up, strapped down and breathing steadily. His eyes flicked over to the door and locked onto Gabriel’s.
‘Good morning,’ Athanasius said. ‘Forgive me if I don’t get up.’ He smiled but Gabriel could see there was fear beneath it. He moved over to the side of the bed and laid a hand on the monk’s arm. His skin was already starting to burn.
‘I admit,’ Athanasius said, ‘I am surprised this hasn’t happened sooner. I was starting to hope that maybe I too had some form of natural resistance. But this morning I awoke for morning prayers and could smell nothing but oranges.’ He shuddered and closed his eyes as something started to rise inside him. It reminded Gabriel of when the blight had first taken hold of him in the heat of the Syrian desert. He knew the torments Athanasius was starting to experience, the heat, the itching, the panic. The shaking eased and Athanasius breathed out and opened his eyes again. ‘I must also admit,’ he said in a soft voice that still carried traces of the tremor, ‘that I am more than a little afraid.’
Gabriel took his hand, just as Athanasius had taken his so many times in the preceding months when their situations had been reversed. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said. ‘It’s just a journey. Let’s go on it together.’
99
Shepherd spent the rest of the morning with Hevva, sitting by a fence in the playground like a kid himself, telling her stories about her mother, digging back into his memory for all the details he had held on to for so long. She told him stories too, sketching in glimpses of the woman he’d lost. He was amazed at how grown up Hevva seemed as she told him, in the unvarnished words of a child, how she had gone everywhere with her mother because there was no one else to care for her, and how she had helped with her work, learning to deliver babies while she was little more than a baby herself. Hearing these stories made him both sad and immensely proud. But it also posed a difficult question, one which Hevva’s eerie maturity prompted him to ask.
‘Do you know why your mother never tried to contact me?’
Hevva shrugged. ‘She thought you were dead.’
‘Do you know why?’
‘Grandpa said you died in a fire.’
Shepherd closed his eyes and nodded. He was transported back to the evening when Melisa’s father had sent him on the fool’s errand across town in the middle of rush hour. He had thought it odd at the time and now he knew why. It had all been a set- up to get him out of the way long enough to stage the fire. The fire served as a disguise for their simultaneous disappearance, and as the basis of a wicked lie that would separate his daughter from Shepherd for ever. Perhaps Melisa had told him they planned to marry and he had taken desperate measures to ensure that never happened. The police had said the fire was suspicious, an insurance job gone wrong and they had been partly right, it was only the motive they’d got wrong. Had her father known Melisa was pregnant, he wondered – had she even known at the time? What must her father have shown her to make her believe he was dead? What proof had he fabricated to stop her from looking? If he had gone to such lengths as to burn down a building, he felt sure a fake death certificate would not have been beyond him. Maybe even faked-up news stories coupled with the race- hate angle to scare her away from looking into his evidence too closely.
He felt a small hand on his face and he looked up into the deep knowing eyes of his daughter. ‘Don’t cry,’ she said, ‘Mummy still loved you, even though you weren’t there. That’s why she kept your picture.’
Shepherd smiled and placed his hand over hers. Being with this quiet, wise girl made the painful ache that had grown inside him disappear entirely. In her he had found what he was looking for, only not in the form he had expected.
His phone buzzed in his pocket and the world outside started to creep back in. ‘I got to take this, honey,’ he said and he saw her eyes darken as if she knew it was trouble.
‘Agent Shepherd,’ a familiar voice said the moment he picked up, ‘it’s Merriweather, the Hubble technician you spoke to at Goddard.’ He sounded anxious.
‘Oh, hi.’
‘You said I should call if anything came up. Well it has. Hubble has stabilized. It’s in a new travelling orbit that places it in a fixed position in the northern sky.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘In Taurus, right between Nath and Zeta Tauri.’
Shepherd frowned – directly between the horns. For the past few hours he had succeeded in pushing the investigation into the furthest recess of his mind: now it all came flooding back. He remembered the words of Kinderman’s cryptic message: I’m just standing on a hill looking to the east for new stars in old friends, as those like us have done since the beginning of time.
And tonight Hubble would show up in the night sky as a new object, the sun shining off its reflectors, making it look like a new star in the constellation of Taurus. Shepherd stood up and waved across the playground at Arkadian. He needed to get to Göbekli Tepe before nightfall to stand a chance of catching up with Dr Kinderman. With the new star appearing in Taurus tonight, tomorrow Kinderman would probably be gone and he would have no idea where.
‘How’s the investigation going?’
‘What?’ He had forgotten Merriweather was still on the line. ‘Oh it’s – moving forward. Listen, Merriweather, that’s been a great help. How you doing with getting the guidance systems back online?’
‘Not so great.
We could do with Dr Kinderman’s help. I hope he’s OK and you find him soon. It’s not the same here without him.’
‘Let me call you tomorrow, I may have some good news.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really.’
He hung up and turned to Hevva. ‘Honey, I have to go somewhere but you need to stay here. But I’ll be back tomorrow, I promise.’
The dark eyes brimmed and her head started to shake. ‘You won’t come back,’ she said. ‘Mummy didn’t.’
He dropped down so his eyes were level with hers. ‘It’s not like that,’ he said, taking her tiny hand in his. ‘You’ll be safer here.’
‘I don’t want to stay here.’
‘But I can’t take you, not yet. There’ll be forms to fill in and tests I probably have to do so they can establish that I’m your father.’
‘Problem?’ Arkadian had arrived next to them.
‘I need to go somewhere and Hevva doesn’t want me to leave.’
‘Where do you need to be?’
‘An archaeological site about two hours east of here.’
‘Göbekli Tepe.’
‘You know it?’
‘Everybody in Ruin knows it. It’s supposed to be a rival shrine to the Citadel, built by the enemies of the Sancti. Why do you want to go there?’
Shepherd thought about all the things that had brought him here: the recovered data, the link with Taurus, the cryptic message from Kinderman. It was difficult to know where to start. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said.
Arkadian looked down at Hevva and smiled. ‘Tell you what, why don’t I drive you there, that way we can bring Hevva along and you can explain it all on the way.’
100
Gabriel never left Athanasius’s side. He had promised he would go on this journey with him and, having walked that painful path himself, it was not a promise he could break. When Athanasius was not sedated he raved and howled and strained against his bindings, like every other victim of the blight had done, but unlike most he was sometimes lucid, just like Gabriel had been. They would talk in these snatched moments, and Gabriel would lie and tell him how well he was doing and how much the doctors were learning from being able to study him. In truth, they were still searching, racing against the clock to find whatever process was happening inside him before it went one way or another.
Gabriel had been unaffected by the cross-transfusion. Whatever defences his body had built were too efficient to allow the infection to take hold again. Dr Kaplan remained in quarantine too, never leaving the room for so much as a minute. He knew he had a very narrow window of opportunity to first identify and then study the reagent as it attacked and defeated the virus, and he didn’t want to waste a moment of that precious time sleeping. He had a cot set up in the corner of the lab for him and the other technicians to use whenever exhaustion overcame them. There were five of them in total, each keeping their own particular brand of vigil: Gabriel, Kaplan, two technicians as dedicated and ever-present as he was, and – at the centre of it all, burning like a hot sun around which the rest of them revolved – Athanasius.
Whenever the attacks got so severe they had to sedate him, Gabriel slept in the cot too, making sure he was awake again by the time the sedative wore off. Then, one morning, three weeks after the transfusion, Gabriel woke in the cot to discover Athanasius was already awake. He rose and moved over to the side of the bed, holding the back of his hand to Athanasius’s forehead. ‘The fever’s gone,’ he said, a smile spreading on his face. ‘You didn’t die.’
Athanasius smiled back. ‘Apparently not.’
Dr Kaplan was summoned from the lab where he was doing blood work. He stared at Athanasius from the safety of the door when he first came in. After so many months of failures and death it was like he had forgotten what success looked like. Athanasius’s recovery was the final piece in the jigsaw. Kaplan and his team had successfully managed to find and isolate the reagent, but had held off from introducing it to other patients until they knew for sure it was going to be effective. They didn’t want patients to have to endure the kind of drawn-out suffering Athanasius was going through if they were just going to die anyway. Better that they die quickly and suffer less than going through that. But now he was better, everything had changed.
The Blight had been conquered. They had found a cure.
And Gabriel could finally make good on his promise and return to Liv.
101
Hevva fell asleep in the back of the car before they’d even made it out of the Taurus foothills and picked up the toll road heading east. Shepherd kept turning round to check on her, her face a perfect miniature of her mother’s, her very existence casting a much darker light on the countdown that was still ticking away on his phone. He told Arkadian everything, finding that once he started it all came tumbling out until by the time they saw the first sign for Göbekli Tepe, Arkadian knew as much about the investigation as he did.
They turned off the main road and passed through an automatic toll barrier onto a battered track leading away into the parched, undulating countryside. There were no houses here, not even the square, flat-roofed brick blocks that seemed to be the architectural model of choice in this part of the country. There was no sign of anything at all, no greenery, no animals, only the single-track strip of black road leading them straight into the alien landscape ahead. The only reason they knew they were in the right place was the presence of a few road signs, put up for the benefit of tourists, pointing the way to the hill they could just see in the distance with a solitary tree standing sentry at the top of it.
Shepherd stared out of the window, feeling the heat coming through it despite the air-con blasting cold into the cabin. It was hard to imagine that this desolate place, burned dry and littered with broken rocks, had been home to a civilization that pre-dated the Egyptians by seven thousand years: all gone now and forgotten, ground to elemental dust by the passing of time, just like everything else in the universe.
‘What if your Dr Kinderman’s not here?’ Arkadian said.
Shepherd looked up at a collection of tents and temporary buildings clinging to the side of the hill. ‘If he’s not here then it’s the end of the road – for me at least.’ He looked in the back where Hevva was sleeping. ‘What’s that thing people say – all your priorities change the moment you have kids?’
Arkadian shook his head and smiled sadly. ‘I’m sure it’s true – it never happened to me.’
‘Me either, until a couple of hours ago. You married, Inspector?’
Arkadian shook his head. ‘Not any more. I lost my wife to the blight around the same time Hevva lost her mother. That changes your priorities too.’
They pulled off the road and bounced up a dust track towards the settlement and came to a parking area big enough to cater for the strange mix of tourists and archaeologists that visited the dig. There was even a trough of straw to feed the camels. Today the area was empty but for a couple of cars so dusty they were almost the same colour as the earth.
Arkadian crunched to a stop beside them and waited for the dust cloud they had kicked up to drift away before switching off the engine and stepping out into the heat.
Shepherd unclipped his seat belt and glanced in the back hoping to sneak out and leave Hevva sleeping. A pair of dark eyes stared at him from beneath a shiny fringe of wavy, chocolate hair.
Shepherd smiled at her. ‘We’re just going to have a look around,’ he said. ‘You stay here. We won’t be long.’
The eyes went wide. ‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘You won’t come back.’
‘Of course I’ll come back. You’ll just be safer here,’ he said, reaching out with a hand to stroke her face.
‘If it’s safer here, you stay here too,’ she said.
Shepherd couldn’t argue with that logic. ‘I’ll only be five minutes. Five minutes then I’ll come right back.’
She shook her head and the tears continued to flow. ‘I don’t want to stay here alone.’
>
He looked into her imploring eyes, made huge by fear and bright with tears. ‘OK,’ he said, powerless in the face of an emotional child. ‘But stay close and keep quiet.’
Hevva stayed so close that Shepherd kept nearly tripping over her as they made their way up the track to the buildings and the tree beyond.
Arkadian glanced sideways at them. ‘How’s parenthood?’ he asked.
‘Complicated,’ Shepherd said, squeezing Hevva’s tiny hand. ‘I’m sure I’ll get used to it. I’ve only been a dad for a few hours.’
They reached the edge of the dig site marked out with strings of barbed wire nailed to posts. The hill was only partly excavated, like something massive had taken a bite out of it leaving behind the monolithic T-shaped standing stones like lost teeth. They were huge and almost perfectly smooth, their size and finish in marked contrast to the broken jagged edges of everything else around them. Figures were carved on the surface of the stones, low reliefs of animals and human arms stretching round the stones as if hugging them. A wooden walkway cut right across the top of the site, suspended a few feet above it. He could see tools and buckets lying on the ground at various points, as if everyone had just stopped what they were doing and left. It was eerie, a ghost town, one that had been dead for nearly ten thousand years.
‘Guess nobody calls this place home any more,’ Shepherd murmured, imagining the workers responding to the growing tugging sensations inside them, urging them to be elsewhere.
‘We have company,’ Arkadian said. Shepherd squinted up against the bright sky and saw a slender man standing in the shade of the tree, backlit by the sun. ‘You think that could be him?’
‘Hard to tell,’ Shepherd said, instinctively pulling Hevva behind him. ‘He’s the right build. I should go talk to him.’ The tiny hand tightened in his. ‘It’s OK, sweetheart, you’ll be able to see me the whole way.’
‘Take this,’ Arkadian pressed something into his hand. Shepherd looked down to discover a gun. ‘It’s just a precaution.’