Page 16 of The Salt King

“I,” he said triumphantly, “have a dark tent.”

Up by the cars, they ran an electronic dosimeter over each other, got not even a chirp from it, peeled off the suits, and sent messages back to their respective agencies to report their progress. Although it was cooler at ground level than it was in the pit, Tallis still thought she might die. Once the admin was done, they sat in the tent doorway together with their lamps nestled into the salt ground and a glass bottle of Diet Coke each from a cooler filled with ice, and it was the best thing she had ever tasted. She hated camping, but maybe that was because camping in the UK usually involved being freezing and flooded out, and spending most of your holiday huddled in the back of the car wondering how fast you could get trench foot. But if it was like this, on the shore of a lake so salty you couldn’t drown in it, when all your problems could be solved by a cold drink . . .

Sally had delicate tattoos on his fingers—astrological symbols. They suited him. He was one of those people who seemed like they spent much more time outdoors than in. Probably he had a motorbike. Close to, he smelled of cigarette smoke, the savage roll-up sort that murdered you if you so much as looked at the packaging. That shouldn’t have been good, but again, it suited him.

She realized she had been looking at him for too long and tried to take an interest in the stars. The crescent moon was honey-coloured tonight, tipped at an unfamiliar angle. She could never get used to that, the way the moon smiled more the closer to the equator you went.

“Hey, have you seen this?” he said, showing her his phone. Once you were fifty yards away from the site, electronics were fine.

It was a TikTok post. Priest turns to SALT!!

“You’re from England, aren’t you?” Sally added, as if that were desperately exotic and maybe she’d met King Arthur.

The video was convincing. Tallis replayed it. “That’s AI.”

“I don’t know, it’s on the BBC. They say the Vatican has sent someone to look into it.”

“The Vatican,” she said, scrunching her nose and wondering if somehow they had been transported back to the fourteenth century while she wasn’t looking.

“You don’t like them?” he said curiously.

“They’re the Taliban with better accountants.”

Sally started to laugh. “Oh, okay, cool cool cool. Next time I get some leave, I’ll go to Kabul for the tranquillity and wonderful cultural experiences, famously welcoming to all comers as they are there.”

She paused, marvelling that he had just—disagreed with her. At home, more and more, even if somebody said something you thought was mad, it was becoming normal to skate past it and then meticulously never talk to that person ever again. There were unspoken tribes at work; one half thought the other was a leftist wokey Blob, and they thought the others were crazed fascists. They all had coffee and meetings together, and never spoke about anything except nuclear decay chains and the weather. “Are we having a Whose Religious Nutbags Are Best competition?”

“No,” he said. “I’ve already won.”

How could you say to a man barely more than half your age that he was a revelation, without sounding as though you needed a restraining order? “Anyway, if someone really has turned to salt, then what’s the point of sending a priest? They should be sending people from Disease Control.”

“Ah . . . it says they’ve done that too, but it’s hard to do any tests because . . .” He narrowed his eyes at the text. “Because it’s in a place called . . . Huh-ree-od . . . water? And electricity doesn’t work there.”

“Hreodwater, Christ.” She’d been once, because her mother wasn’t just a Christian but radioactively Christian, with shelves and shelves full of pictures of Christ and the Virgin Mary wearing such saintly expressions you wanted to be sick in a bag, and Catholic tat collected from more or less every shrine you could visit. Though Hreodwater wasn’t actually far from London, it took a long time to get there. You had to do the last part on a horse and cart, much to ten-year-old Tallis’s delight. “It’s a huge Catholic shrine. It must be a publicity stunt.”

“Fun though,” said Sally. “I’d go. Why has it got a name nobody can say?” he added, with an open, unembarrassed inquisitiveness that made her like him even more than the haiku had.

Tallis blew her breath out and tried to remember. “They have their own language. Hreod means ‘reed,’ I think. It’s in the fens, so.”

“What’s a fen?”

“Waterlogged land. Imagine a very cold swamp with no interesting alligators, and the only wildlife is a duck and a disappointed ornithologist.”

She was disproportionately pleased when he exploded laughing. She couldn’t remember when anyone had laughed like that at something she’d said. The people she worked with were serious, businesslike administrators, or they were nuclear scientists. They told jokes, but the kind of jokes that involved equations.7

The timer on her phone went off. An hour already. She caught herself wishing it could have been longer.

Because of the sudden noise, Tallis hallucinated a whole flock of hummingbirds bursting up around them both. The doctor said it was unusual to hallucinate actual objects, not just shapes and lights, and now she had a little stab of epilepsy smugness. If you were going to hallucinate, you ought to do it properly. They were good hummingbirds.

“Tallis?”

“I’m good,” she said quickly, but she couldn’t help a furtive glance around, hoping for flamingos.

“Do you think we should leave them a bit?” Sally said. “If the radiation is minimal enough that it didn’t contaminate our suits, it probably won’t be showing on the films yet.”

“Mm. Good idea.” It was only five hours from London to Amman, but all at once, she was tired. Travel was strangely exhausting, even though you were mostly sitting down.

“Tell the people,” he said, holding his phone up.