Adam came to a stop. Standing in the darkness, his footfalls silenced by the wind, he stared at the two people bathed in that warm light inside the office stall. Meryam and Feyiz. Nothing unusual in their being together. They stood a few feet apart, perhaps a bit close—a bit intimate—but it wasn’t as if they were in some kind of lover’s embrace. They were colleagues. Friends. Meryam trusted Feyiz, and Adam had never been jealous of that because he felt the same way.
Yet though he could hear only the urgent tones of their voices and not the words being spoken, he saw the open, plaintive look on Feyiz’s face and Meryam’s broken, vulnerable expression—a piece of herself, a revelation of the real Meryam after weeks behind a hard mask—and he could not help but wonder. Breathless, face chafed by the wind, he watched them and asked himself if Feyiz might be the reason for the distance that had been growing between them.
Fists clenched, he turned and moved silently back through the passage, reversing his steps in the snow. He worked his way to the front of the cave and started for the ladder, barely noticing the figure that appeared beside him, as if from nowhere. A silhouette, one layer of darkness against another.
It loomed toward him and he jerked away, heart thumping.
“Jesus,” he hissed. “Don’t do that!”
In the soft glow of the work light that shone down from the top of the ladder, he saw Calliope smile.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to spook you.”
“Sneak up on a guy in the dark, that’s gonna happen.”
Calliope put a hand on the ladder. “Especially here. What are you doing awake, anyway? Everything all right?”
Adam thought about lying. She stood close and he could smell the cigarette smoke on her clothes and knew she’d been one of the three people out there on the ledge, breaking the rules. Right then he liked her all the more for that. Some rules needed to be broken.
“Nothing’s even close to all right,” he said. “It’s all going to shit, isn’t it?”
Her face creased with compassion and then just the flicker of a new smile. The face of a friend. She reached out and took his hand. His fingers were so numb he barely felt her touch.
“It doesn’t have to,” she said.
Adam almost believed her.
Helen woke with a start, inhaling sharply, as if in the midst of sleep she had forgotten to breathe. Her eyes went wide for a moment and then fluttered closed again. She blinked, drifting in that twilight space between dream and wakefulness, content to be cradled in the thickly lined warmth of her sleeping bag. Her breathing slowed and she felt her muscles easing, body melting. The whistle of the wind created a comforting white noise. Her head lolled to one side.
She surfaced again. Her brows knitted and she lay listening for whatever had disturbed her. Well over a dozen people slept in the makeshift camp around her. Some were inside tents, while others buried themselves in all-weather sleeping bags. A few small stoves gave off warmth, but not enough to make a real difference with people spread out in stalls and a large room whose purpose they still hadn’t determined. Just some kind of cargo hold, Helen felt sure, but wouldn’t state without reservation. Not yet.
With a long sigh, she nestled deeper into her sleeping bag and just listened. In the middle of the night she had sometimes heard people making love, or engaged in quiet conversation, taking comfort from whatever they had to offer one another. She never begrudged them that comfort, although she herself would have found any kind of sexual or romantic entanglement far too much of a distraction. Though the paleopathologist, Dev Patil, did make that part of her sit up and take notice, prick her ears, and purr.
A smile touched her lips as salacious thoughts filled her head. That familiar pressure—her sister, Kristen, always called it “the original itch”—made her squirm a bit and she grew dismayed. No point in letting herself get hot and bothered when her only options would be breaking her personal rules about fraternization on the job or finding some dark corner to get herself off and hope nobody came along to spoil it.
Her heart skipped a bit quicker than normal. Lying there, she listened to people breathing and wondered if any of them were awake. Would they hear her if she just went for it, right here? Wrong question, Helen, she thought. Question is, how quiet can you be? The answer, she thought, was not quiet enough.
Sighing, amused, she turned onto her side, relished the original itch a moment, and then tried to drift off again. Helen had spent much of her adult life at one archaeological dig or another, some of them in remote environments where this kind of communal living was unavoidable. For the most part, she didn’t mind it, even took a kind of comfort from it.
But she couldn’t go back to sleep.
A flutter touched her heart. Not excitement and not that old itch. This was something unfamiliar and uneasy. She felt a kind of pressure against her back—not a physical weight, but the weight of regard, the sense that someone must be there, just behind her. Her heart quickened and she swallowed hard, flooded with the sudden certainty that someone was there, very close now. Looming.
There. Was that the rustle of clothing or just someone shifting in their sleep? And that breathing… had it moved closer? Had it deepened?
Long seconds passed as Helen lay there and listened. She felt too warm, suddenly, only her face exposed. The sense of not being alone did not abate at all, but as the moments ticked by she began to recognize the absurdity of her fear. There were people only six feet away, and others beyond them. If some creepy bugger wanted to watch her sleep, she had only to turn and confront him. It was almost guaranteed to be a him, after all. Some men seemed to have a certain setting, a switch on their dial, that women hardly ever managed.
All right. Enough of this.
With a quick snicker of disdain at her childish fear, she began to roll over.
The first blow struck her nose, shooting a wave of obliterating pain through her face, enough to make her gasp and then hold her breath as the figure looming above took a fistful of her hair, yanked tight, and struck again. The second blow made her whimper, and she sucked in air, disoriented but not enough to blot out her anger and fear. She opened her mouth to scream and the third blow hit her in the temple hard enough to make the edges of her vision go black. So did the fourth. And the fifth.
If a sixth blow fell, Helen didn’t feel it.
Darkness. A pulsing, aching, throbbing darkness that resembled the cradle of sleep in the same way that screaming resembled laughter. Awareness crept back in fits and starts and then she realized she was being tugged along, dragged along the snowy timbers in her sleeping bag. The only noise her abduction had made was a quiet shushing sound, and for a dozen long seconds, Helen could do nothing but blink and listen to that soft, lovely noise. The whisper of brutality. Of capture.
She blinked, wondering where her attacker hoped to take her. There was nowhere to go.
Snow whipped at her face, icy pinpricks on her bleeding, swelling flesh. The pain exploded in a brilliant flare and she thought her cheek must be broken, maybe the orbit around her right eye. The wind buffeted the sleeping bag and her blurred thoughts began to clear and quicken. She tried to twist herself inside the sleeping bag, tried to wrest her arms free, and her attacker picked up the pace.