Page 91 of The Salt King

Sally looked haunted.

Tallis hoped those people belonged to some kind of cult, because if they didn’t . . . that meant that ordinary shopkeepers, accountants, teachers, nurses, school kids, had gone from their normal lives this morning, to this, in the space of a few hours. She didn’t want to believe that humans could do that.

On the highway, it had seemed as though all of Amman was leaving the city. That was wrong, though. Plenty of people were still here, and most of them were standing in queues that reached right around street corners. At the top of the queues were supermarkets. As the two of them passed by one, a scared-looking store clerk came out to explain that the shop stocks were all gone, and they were closing. He almost disappeared as the queue bunched into a crowd to shout worried, angry questions about when the next delivery would be.

Tallis glanced at Sally. He had been worried about food, and now she was too.

“Maybe we should try when it’s . . . quieter,” Sally said, as someone threw a chair through a shop window.

“How far is it?” Tallis said to Sally, not liking the way the street was beginning to feel. There was no particular detail she could point to and say, Yes, that’s frightening—but there was a tension that felt like a violin string right on the edge of fraying and whipping out of its peg. She could see it would have been a nice place, normally. The shops were polished and the road was pedestrianised, and overhead hung dozens and dozens of open umbrellas, all different colours, all uplight by the streetlamps.

“Just up here,” Sally said, turning onto a side street and up a steep hill.

They both kept looking straight ahead, even when a pack of teenage boys cackled their way down the hill. Tallis set her teeth. One of them hooted something at Sally, and the others laughed. She had no idea what it was, except that Sally’s shoulders tightened, and after that, he moved her in front of him.

And then everything went silent.

The boys, the family struggling up the hill just ahead of them with a suitcase, the crowd back on the main street with the umbrellas.

Joy burst into her mind.

If she had been given the chance to compose the score for an exquisite film with a budget into eight figures, it wouldn’t have felt as good. If her brother earned his parole and admitted he had been wrong all along, it wouldn’t have been, or if she’d won the lottery, or all of those things together.

It felt like being drugged. She hated it instantly. Close behind that hatred came rage like she hadn’t felt since the epilepsy medication had screwed her up so badly, because her mind was the only decent thing she had and how dare something try to flood it like this, and it was coming from . . .

Overhead. It was directional. She could feel it going over them: the joy was dopplering, the quality of it changing as it reached the top of the sky and then shot towards the horizon.

She punched the wall so that pain would override everything else, then swore, because it was a good idea in principle and it worked, but it hurt a lot more than she’d thought. But she had never been so glad to be in pain. It was her pain. That joy . . . hadn’t been.

Everyone else was still.

“Gaudezhte *khiram.”

Everyone said it. Everyone but her.

It wasn’t Arabic. It clicked in the middle. Her father, who had been pretentious, had learned some Khosa poetry so that he could quote it at innocent undergraduates, but even that didn’t sound like this. It was familiar, though, in the same way the tower in the desert had been.

Sally was staring glassily at nothing. She got in front of him and shook him as hard she dared to. His focus stayed somewhere above her head. It was how she looked when she was having a seizure.

“Sally,” she said, crushing down the panic bubbling up through her chest. What if he didn’t come around, what if there was nowhere to go, what if she had to tow him like this all the way to the hotel, what if everyone in the city was . . .

Actually.

She went up to the jackal boys, who had stopped midway through leering at a girl. None of them moved. She peered into the shopping bag one of them was carrying, flicking her eyes up every other second to make sure they were all still in their trances. Vegetables, rice, chickpeas, flour; she suspected they had stolen it from someone else, because it wasn’t teenage-boy fare.

“Thank you,” she said, and hid it in her backpack.

Sally’s eyes came back just as she reached him again. “Oh,” he said, sounding confused. “Sorry. I . . . came over funny just then. Let’s get going.”

He had no idea.

Other people were coming back to themselves too. The boys were skipping past the girl again and yelling at her, the girl was snarling back at them, and the young family up ahead were trying to rearrange their children and suitcase to be less cumbersome on the steps.

“Everyone just stopped and said something. So did you.”

“We did what?”

She looked up at the sky, willing there to be something there, but all she could make out was the orange reflection of the city lights in the clouds and, off on the horizon, towards Dead Sea, the very edges of that firestorm of artificial happiness.