Page 35 of The Salt King

“But—that must be well out of your way?” Tallis said, taken aback. The district her hotel was in, on the edge of the city and quite close to the airport, didn’t seem to be a residential place. People who lived in Amman lived much nearer to the centre, in those fabulous crowded terraces and blocks painted all different colours, with their gardens full of date trees and fairy lights.

“I know you come from a weird broken country, but we do hospitality properly here,” Sally told her firmly. He smiled. “But if you’re going to tie yourself in knots about it, you can take me inside and buy me a drink to say thank you.”

He didn’t mean that in the way he might have if he had been speaking to someone younger, but it didn’t matter. There was nothing she wanted to do more than buy him a cocktail in the pretty hotel bar in the foyer by the fountain, among its neon lights that shone on the silk ties of businessmen and the white veils of the women who worked at the army base, the ones who, when Tallis had arrived, had been comparing the virtues of different fighter jet engines over expensive baklava while the concierge looked worried about the dust on their combat boots.

It was a hollow wanting. Her grandfather had once said that it had made him sad to see the moon landing, because it was so magical, but he would never go. She knew what he meant.

“Yes please,” she said, and saw a tree right in front of her. Deliberately, she stepped forward into it, and it vanished obediently. She touched the side of her own head, as if that would soothe all the misfiring electricity there.

Still, on the border of everything, singing.

As Sally started his engine, Tallis remembered to pick up their empty Coca-Cola bottles where she’d left them on the ground. As soon as she did, though, the sun hit them wrongly.

The bottles had been clear when they’d finished the drinks. Now . . . they were a deep, brilliant violet.

“Oh, wait,” Sally said through his open window, sounding puzzled, at exactly the same time that she said, “Um, Sally,” with a building strain deep under her lungs.

The thrum of Sally’s engine sputtered, then cut.

Something exploded, and she hit the ground faster than she had ever imagined she could react to anything, because it sounded like gunshots—only it wasn’t. It was the headlights shattering, salt smashing outward, and then a crackling roar that was salt blasting out of the engine. There was no fire, but the bonnet shrieked and tore. Sally tumbled out and staggered away from the car. Tallis caught his arm and pulled him back further, half expecting it to explode.

No; nothing. No flames. The broken steel groaned, quieter and quieter. There was an insectile clicking that was salt building insane arcs above the car’s smashed engine. It looked hideously alive.

“Sally,” she managed, and came back to common sense enough to move around in front of him. “Jesus Christ, are you hurt?”

He was grazed, but he was shaking his head. “No. No, I’m . . . what . . .”

“I don’t know. I don’t know, but whatever it is, it turned the Coke bottles purple.”

He finally turned his head to look at her properly. “The windscreen and the windows too.”

He was right. They were dark, too dark, and so were hers. She hadn’t noticed: she’d thought they were just tinted.

“Up,” she said tightly, slinging her backpack on. She was the kind of person, it turned out, who remembered her passport even whilst being catastrophically irradiated. “Up, right now. Run. Run.”

The reason that some quartzes were such beautiful colours was natural radiation. It usually took thousands of years, but atom by atom, the radiation dyed them, the colour deepening down the millennia. If it sat beside some thorium, clear quartz would turn amber, then blue, then a magnificent purple. That was how you got citrine, aquamarine, and amethyst.

If you blasted it with gamma rays, though, you could turn glass purple within minutes. If you found strangely tinted glass on a site with suspected radioactive contamination . . . well, you left. Quickly.

It was a stumbling, tripping run to the road. Tallis almost fell twice where the salt-eaten ground plunged into hidden sinkholes. Sally snatched her arm and pulled her back. Then they were on the edge of the road, among the suicidal goats who baa’d at them, clearly wanting know why they were rushing around so disruptively. The goats, Tallis noticed, were fine. Not sick. Not sick.

“Any burns, any symptoms?” she asked Sally, breath ragged. They hadn’t slowed down on the road. The tang of salt was lacerating her lungs. It was unbelievably strong. Sally was breathing hard too.

“No. No, I don’t think so—I don’t feel sick, or—what about you?”

“No, nothing so far—”

“It isn’t radiation,” he said. “It can’t be radiation, we would know, it would have shown up on the Geiger counter, on the film tests, it . . .”

“It’s something,” she said. In front of them, the dusty road was glittering with heat mirages. She slowed down, coughing. The salt was punishing. “Sorry . . .”

“No, me too,” he rasped, and they faded to a walk, coughing into their sleeves. “It feels like I’ve swallowed seawater.”

“The Dead Sea, Christ . . .”

“It isn’t normally like this.” He straightened up and pushed his hands through his hair, then stopped. “There’s salt in my hair.”

“Me too.” It was right in the roots of her braids. “It’s everywhere.” She ran her hand down the sleeve of her shirt and rubbed off so much salt that it covered her palm, leaching the moisture from her skin. “I . . . oh, my God,” she said.