Page 36 of The Salt King

The salt had eaten through her sleeve.

“What does this?” Sally said, disbelieving.

“No idea. But this happened after the door into the tower crumbled,” she said, thinking aloud but certain all the same.

Neither of them said, What if that thing in the tower really is alive? Neither of them said, What if it’s out of the tower now? What if it’s following us? There was no point. They couldn’t see it. Tallis pressed her teeth together hard enough to hurt, trying to silence the panicky feverish certainty that she was about to feel them crumble into salt.

“I think I need to . . .” Sally was breathing too shallowly, and plainly trying not to. She stopped and touched his shoulder as he slowed down to nothing, his fists clenched. She’d thought he was just out of breath, but after a second it was clear it wasn’t that. He had gone a terrible colour.

“It’s okay,” she said, much softer. “It’s just going to be a long, annoying walk with an elderly lady who thinks unreasonable things and will probably shake her walking stick at a cloud along the way. I’m sorry about that.”

Like she’d desperately hoped he would, he laughed, or, sort of. He leaned sideways and hugged her. She held him tight for a second, hating how her mind was filing it away as a precious thing, then went still, because she had just seen the scars on his arms.

There were dozens of them, very fine, cut close together and over each other, all exactly straight. A fresh graze raked some of them, from throwing himself out of the car. For all he was a head taller than her, that new blood over the scars made him seem unspeakably fragile. She wished she could make him sit down. No; she wished there was a tower she could put him in and keep him away from the world and whatever had made him do that to himself. Crazily, it occurred to her that whoever had built the tower behind them and walled it up with silver hadn’t been trying to trap anything, but to protect it.

He saw her notice, and she saw the dread come down in his eyes.

“I think I should try my phone,” she said, wanting to add that of course she would never ask him; who had he been talking to, who had? “Maybe I’ll have some signal?”

“But if your phone explodes . . . we’ll have nothing,” he said. His breathing was better now. He had calmed himself down astonishingly quickly. Tallis had never had a panic attack, but she had seen other people have them. It was only a shade less crippling than coronary failure. There were tears in his eyelashes, unshed. “I think we should try for the main road. Someone might stop for us.”

Now that he had said it, she realized that had been her plan too; and that they couldn’t do it. “Even if they do—Sally, we shouldn’t get in a car with anybody. Or public transport. I know it doesn’t seem like it could be radiation, but we’ve been exposed to something that turns glass purple, so . . .”

She didn’t need to finish. If it was radiation, they were both so contaminated that they might make someone else sick, just by sitting beside them.

He hesitated, then nodded. He was still gripping her arm, and despite the heat, his hand was freezing. She touched his hip, halfway to putting her other arm around his waist before she caught herself and stopped. “Okay. Let’s try your phone. If it’s okay . . . I’ll see if I can get someone from my ministry to send an ambulance to pick us up. Or something. What do they send?” he asked.

“Honestly, I’ve no idea,” she said.

She pulled her phone out, and they both looked down at it, willing everything to be all right, before she turned it on. She held it out at arm’s length so that she could drop it fast if anything happened.

The logo flashed onto the screen cooperatively enough.

Passcode . . .

No signal.

Sally’s shoulders went back. “Okay, we need to make a video. You’re good at talking; do you mind doing it if I film it?”

“A video? Why?” This wasn’t the time to worry about social media fodder, but Sally wasn’t stupid, so that wouldn’t be what was happening.

Sally met her eyes with a sadness that went all the way down. “Because if we die before we can get back into Amman, there needs to be a record of what happened to us.”

There was a tremendous weight in that, but thinking about it wouldn’t help. “Okay,” she said.

She opened the camera app, but then stopped, because the last photograph she had taken was there in a miniature icon to the left side. It was of her shoe and a clutter of what were unmistakeably xylophones. They were all over the ground, ten or twelve of them. “Sally,” she said carefully. “Can you—see xylophones?”

“Can I see what?” he asked, but he took the phone to look. He frowned. “Yes. What is that?”

“I . . .” She didn’t know what to say. People said that all the time, I don’t know what to say, but it had never truly happened to her before, the failure of language. “I—well, because of the epilepsy, I hallucinate things sometimes, if there’s a loud noise or something, and when you yelled after you’d developed the pictures, I saw . . . xylophones.”

His green eyes met hers over the phone. “They’re in the photo, though.”

“But there definitely weren’t xylophones on the ground at the camp, right?”

“No. There were not.”

“What the fuck is happening?” she asked uselessly.