Page 41 of The Salt King

“How old is he?” he heard Annunciata ask, hushed. They must both have thought he was asleep. “He sounds really young.”

“He is. He must be . . . twenty-seven, twenty-eight?”

“Jesus. I’d have been in bits if this had happened to me when I was twenty-seven.”

“Honestly, I don’t think he particularly noticed,” Jericho said, from closer. He tucked a hot water bottle under Avelyn’s arm. Avelyn felt dishonest and opened his eyes to show that he was awake. Jericho made a pretend-stern face at him. Avelyn hugged the hot water bottle, guiltily loving being looked after. “But being repulsively young, he’ll get better quickly down here.”

Avelyn grinned and sank further down.

“Yes,” Annunciata said pensively, as though she would have liked to say something else.

“What?” said Jericho, looking back.

“Jericho . . . is there any chance you’ve got black hair with a white mark through it?”

Jesus.

Avelyn sat up.

Jericho held up both hands. “Can you see how many fingers?”

“Seven,” Annunciata whispered.

14 The UK’s national health service. Doctors treated you for free, something Father Li brought up a lot when he wanted to enrage Americans. In practise though, Father Li had warned Avelyn not to get sick while he was in England, because the whole idea—even though doctors worked heroically hard—proved tricky to enact on a damp island almost in the North Pole with millions of people on it, most of whom were chronically ill because of age, the pandemic, living chiefly off chemicals cooked in a microwave, or the landlord’s point-blank refusal to do anything about the suspicious mushroom growing through the bathroom floor. If you had a problem that wouldn’t kill you, nobody was interested, a broken leg could take weeks to treat, and even if you had been run over by an industrial lawn mower and were currently in pieces in the hospital foyer, there was probably a waiting list.

17

The Dead Sea, Jordan

The main road was further than Tallis remembered. It took them more than an hour to reach the turning that, when she had been driving, had felt as though it came right before she saw the goats. She wasn’t tired, though. She could have started running again. She felt overcharged, crackling with static.

They had sent the video to their agencies, but there was still no phone signal. Whenever she checked the screen, it was stuck on message sending . . .

“We should be dead by now,” she said. “Enough gamma radiation to turn glass violet instantly? We should be slush. I feel fine. Do you?”

“Yeah,” Sally said, looking more and more unsure about it, as though he could have missed organ failure and whole-body haemorrhaging. He rubbed his arm absently. His skin was dry and cracked, but it wasn’t like a radiation burn. “It’s not radiation, is it?”

“I don’t think so,” Tallis said, and it felt wrong, but it couldn’t be ionising radiation. How long had they been walking—two hours? They should have been feeling sick, at least.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s think about what we do know. We know that a month ago, that site was underground. Then the salt production company saw the new salt formation on the satellite image, and when they went to investigate, that salt had caused the sinkhole to open. Then the tower was partially exposed. So whatever is in there, it became active then.”

“How long did the archaeologists dig before they got sick?” Tallis asked.

“About a month.”

“And they were uncovering that gate. Behind that is—something, blasting out . . . some . . . kind of light that isn’t visible but isn’t ionising radiation either, but gets through wood and aluminium just like gamma rays would.”

“Yes. And we felt the effects more strongly once the gate collapsed and all that silver moved.”

“Something like gamma rays, but isn’t, and . . . is blocked by silver,” Tallis said to the heat haze above the road.

She ploughed past what that could possibly be. The electromagnetic spectrum was straightforward. There was visible light. Then, when the photons were a little zingier, there was ultraviolet, which could burn you. X-rays were more energetic still: enough to pass through human tissue. And then, finally, the deadly drill force of gamma rays, so powerful that they smashed DNA. There was nothing left to discover, no gap where a new light could sit.

So why did a light that could be stopped only with silver sound so familiar?

“Okay,” she said. “So why now? Whatever’s in there, it can’t have been blasting out all this—all this mystery contamination ever since the tower was built, because the soil would have dried as the salt formed and collapsed years ago. But now, suddenly . . . that huge salt deposit. Why? What’s changed?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He looked helpless, and too young for any of this. “Nothing has been disturbed, there’s been no building work at all. It’s just been the surveys and the aerial photos. That massive salt deposit, that came from nowhere.”