“Holy shit,” Adam whispered.
The timbers creaked as cold air moved in and out of the ark. The terrified sliver of paranoia left behind after any nightmare tried to convince him to get up, to check outside the tent, look out in the passage to make sure nothing lurked there that might wish him ill, but he wasn’t about to do that.
Neither, however, would he attempt to fall back to sleep. Morning couldn’t be very far off, and Adam decided he’d had enough dreams for one night. Enough nightmares for a lifetime.
Morning had arrived, but only barely. The sky hung low and dark, the clouds enveloping the mountain itself, and the snow swept lightly across the ledge and accumulated inside the cave, covering the timbers of the ark. This wasn’t the storm they were expecting, just a taste of what was to come. At first light—what light there was—the crew had managed to erect new plastic sheeting to keep the snow from blowing in and covering up the areas where the archaeology team were focusing their work.
Feyiz didn’t care about the snow. He stood three feet from the ledge and stared at Meryam. A pale calm had settled into her, though her face ought to have been pinked by the brutal wind.
“He wouldn’t do this,” Feyiz said. “Arjen wouldn’t just leave.”
Meryam glanced around as if to be sure she wasn’t overheard. Feyiz thought she must be looking for cameras, but Adam and Calliope were up in the back of the cave with Father Cornelius and Walker. There were no cameras here.
“I’m telling you—” he went on.
“I heard you,” she said curtly. Feyiz flinched. He understood the stress she had been under, but she had been harsh these past few weeks. He wished for a way to soothe her.
“Meryam—”
“Kemal wouldn’t have just taken off, either,” she said, meeting his eyes, and for the first time he saw her fear and vulnerability. “He’s solid. A thinker. I’m not saying he wouldn’t have left, but at the beginning of a storm…”
Feyiz wiped snow from his eyes. “Arjen could have gotten him down safely.”
“Without saying good-bye?” Meryam asked.
The question hung there between them. People shouted inside the ark. A piece of plastic sheeting had torn away and the team were doing their best to protect the dig. Feyiz knew that he and Meryam should both be helping, but the mystery that had confronted them this morning had stopped them both in their tracks. He feared for Arjen and for Kemal, though he didn’t know the student more than the occasional hello.
“Shit,” Meryam said, shaking her head. At a loss for rational words, Feyiz knew, because he felt the same way.
She glanced past him and he turned to see what had gotten her attention. Hakan strode toward them through the blasting, snowy wind. Several of the workers followed him at a distance, but they paused twenty feet from Feyiz and Meryam. The younger Turkish monitor, Zeybekci, stood with them and several members of the archaeological team, watching Hakan approach.
When first he spoke, the wind stole his voice.
“What now?” Meryam called.
Hakan stepped nearer to them—nearer the edge. Feyiz felt the urge to move away, but he also felt the morbid, magnetic lure of the fall that awaited if he stepped too close. That was always the case with danger, he’d found. His heart felt drawn to it, even as his mind made him back away.
“They left on their own!” Hakan said.
Feyiz glanced at the people gathered a short distance away, sheltered by the walls of the cave. Could they hear from there, over the wind? He didn’t think so.
“How can you know that?” Meryam demanded. “Did someone see them go?”
Hakan shook his head. “No witnesses. But I checked their sleeping quarters myself. They cleared out their things. Everything personal is gone.” He turned to Feyiz. “I know you and Arjen are close. He is my family, just as you are, but he has always been lazy and cowardly. I have no trouble believing he would slip off in the dark—”
“He would not,” Feyiz said.
“—rather than face me,” Hakan finished.
Feyiz hesitated. His nostrils flared, the cold air freezing them inside as he dragged in a breath. Was it really so hard to imagine that Arjen would have snuck away rather than having to tell Hakan, man to man, that he was leaving?
Perhaps not.
But he still did not believe it.
Meryam and Hakan kept talking—both of them still tense and wary after the confrontation last night—but Feyiz had stopped listening. Spiders of anxiety crawled up his back and along his arms and neck, and he shuddered as he stared over the ledge, down into the yawning gorge. It would be some time before they could confirm whether Kemal and Arjen had reached the bottom safely—likely until the coming storm had passed and the chance of getting a mobile phone signal increased. Until then, he would pretend to himself that they had abandoned the project overnight, slipped out of the cave, and begun the climb down Ararat in the dark. In the snow and the wind.
For the moment, Feyiz would allow himself to believe that. Even force himself to believe it. The alternative—that they’d been victims of some unknown violence, some hidden malice—was too disturbing to consider for very long. But as he turned to study Meryam and his uncle again, he knew he would be keeping a closer eye on them. A closer eye on everyone in the cave.
For their safety, and for his own.
Father Cornelius sat on a plastic chair at a table that had been set up just a few yards from the tented area around the cadaver and its casket. A space heater helped take the edge off the cold, but still his bones ached. At his age, arthritis had become a constant companion, sometimes so familiar that it seemed it would never abate. With the icy wind drafting around, the ache seemed deeper than ever before. But he had work to do, so he offered his pain up to God and continued to study the broken chunks of the casket’s bitumen encasement.
Bright lights had been set up around the table. The lid of the coffin—what the KHAP team liked to call “the box”—stood leaning against the tilted wall. Father Cornelius removed his glasses, rubbed at his eyes, and then put them back on before resuming his focus on the large fragments of bitumen. Professor Marshall—Helen—had helped him lay them out as if putting together the pieces of a puzzle. She had photographs, she said, of the unbroken encasement, but he wanted to see the actual bitumen, to run his fingers over the smooth, glassy black surface, to feel the slashes and curves of ancient language that had been carved there.
“What’ve you got?” a voice said.
Father Cornelius blinked as if waking from a dream. He glanced up to see Walker standing at the end of the table as if he’d just manifested there, but from the expectant look on his face, he had the idea Walker might have been standing there awhile.
“You all right, Father?”
The priest nodded, but he did not feel all right. Despite the cold that had settled into his bones, he felt a prickling warmth on his face and the back of his neck. His skin felt clammy, almost feverish, and he wondered if he had contracted some kind of virus.
Walker moved around the table, crouching beside him. “Father?”
“I’m sorry. It is just a bit overwhelming. You understand.” He took off his glasses and used them to gesture toward the wooden lid where it leaned against the wall. “You see the inscriptions there?”
“I see them,” Walker replied, but he wore an odd expression. Unsettled, worried.