Page 89 of The Salt King

They both sat exactly still. Neither of them spoke. After a while, some of the people who had been walking more slowly passed them by and didn’t look twice, because they were just a mismatched pair of men sitting on either side of a standing stone.

33

Amman, Jordan

Sally, Tallis, the doctors, the ward nurses, three janitors, and the people from the Jordanian atomic ministry were all crowded around the TV in the medics’ staffroom.

The footage from Poland was apocalyptic. Salt sloughed from the wrecked engines of buses and cars in long streams in the wind, snaking above the ground. There was more footage too, from what the news anchor said were cameras shielded with silver. They showed a tornado column of light that looked like amber-violet smoke powering right up into the atmosphere, as though an invisible hydrogen bomb had detonated over the salt mine. A voiceover was explaining that it was thought to be something called salt light, and until today, it had been recorded only at a salt mine in England. Even low-level exposure tinted glass violet and ruined electronics, and somehow the flow of electricity halified.

There was a new word, Tallis thought numbly, that they were going to hear a lot. Halify: turn to salt.

High exposure, and people did too.

Silver blocked salt light, and you could catch it on film with a camera with a silver case and shutter. Aluminium was translucent, so it would protect electronics from very low exposure, and give you a hazier picture through a smartphone.

People in Europe were being advised to move if they were within five miles of a salt mine.

Amman was thirty-six miles from the edge of the Dead Sea. There was no word from the government about whether the city should be evacuated in case five miles wasn’t enough.

For the ninth or tenth time, she looked down at the picture of her and Sally that one of the doctors had taken. The silver-altered camera wasn’t ready yet, but they’d put aluminium over the lens of her phone.

As the report said, the picture was bad. You could only make them out as hazy ghosts, because the aluminium blocked visible light, leaving only the salt light. But salt light there was. You could see them both, spectre figures like the images that flickered in a dying fire. The light clung to them, and the only dark voids in it were the silver beads in Tallis’s hair. Nobody could say if that was enough contamination to eventually . . .

Of their own accord, her eyes dragged to the ward again, where in four beds, there were human-sized husks of halite.

Sally touched her shoulder, and she blinked twice. The news report was over. Nobody was moving.

“We’re not contaminating anything else,” he said. They had checked. Even if they held something for a while, the light around them didn’t rub off. It wasn’t enough to disrupt their phones. “I don’t know about you, but if we’re going to die, I don’t want to do it on a fluorescent-lit hospital ward. I want to go home.”

Traffic in Amman was famously bad, but usually there were cabs; private ones like Tallis was used to, but also others that ferried along set routes like buses. Now, though, none of the rideshare apps were working, and at the taxi stop close to the hospital, a crowd of people was trying to negotiate with things that weren’t money—jewellery, jackets, food. It was cold, but when Sally looked down at her, Tallis shook her head. She didn’t want to join a scrum, especially when she didn’t have enough Arabic to know what was going on, and when neither of them had anything to bargain with but their clothes.

“Can we walk?” she asked.

“Not to your hotel,” Sally said. “The airport is fifteen kilometers away. I live just off Rainbow Street. You’re coming home with me.”

“Rainbow Street?” said Tallis, discombobulated. It sounded like something made up for a children’s television show.

“Mm. It’s a lot closer than the airport. Still a few kilometers, but . . .” His green eyes strayed to the road, which was a broad highway fast congealing into gridlock. Not far away, drivers were starting to open their doors and stand up to see what was going on up ahead. “Honestly, I think everyone will be walking soon if they want to get anywhere.”

“Will your family not mind that you’ve brought home an extra person during a national emergency?” Tallis said.

“I live by myself.”

She paused, because there were some things he wasn’t doing, and wasn’t saying. He wasn’t frantic. He wasn’t saying, My God, I need to check if my parents are all right. He wasn’t saying, I need to call my girlfriend. “Are your parents not in Amman?”

He drew a deeper breath that hitched partway, as though he was about to explain something. But then he only said, “No.”

The both watched as couple of teenagers on foot jumped into the back of a lorry and ran away with crates of flour. The driver saw and climbed out, shouting, but then stopped when more men loped up and did the same thing.

Suddenly it seemed like a stupid idea to be standing still. They set off, quickly.

The outskirts of Amman were not made for pedestrians. Highways swept into the city in an estuary of tarmac, and now, thousands of headlights shone in the deepening twilight. All of them were going back the way Tallis and Sally had come, out of the city. Almost nothing was heading in. The empty lanes under the huge signs flashing meaningless speed limits were thronged with people carrying bags, pulling suitcases, towing children. Most were leaving the city. A well-dressed lady led past three beautiful racehorses.

Tallis’s phone flashed with a text message in Arabic. It was official, and she couldn’t make it out; her Arabic was up to children’s books and restaurant menus, and not much else. She showed it to Sally.

“The government are setting up a refugee camp twenty miles east of Amman,” he said, and drew his teeth over his lower lip. “Should we be going that way?”

“No,” Tallis said, solid. “Every disaster they showed on the news, the radius of the salt was only five miles. We’re thirty six miles from the Dead Sea here even at its closest point. Amman is going to be fine. A lot more fine than a refugee camp. Have you ever seen one?”