Adam tucked his camera into the deep pocket inside his jacket and zipped it back up, thinking he ought to head back inside. When he glanced he saw a figure moving out of the ark at a staggering hurtle. Head bowed, hands at its side, the figure trudged through the blizzard, straight for the edge and the long fall that waited there.
“Who the hell—” Adam began, starting to run before the words were even out of his mouth.
His feet skidded in the snow and he put his arms out like a child playing airplane, heart galloping with the fear that one wrong step would send him sliding right over the edge. In the ethereal blue light that breathed inside the blizzard, the silhouette picked up speed, but so did Adam. His feet had found their rhythm on the snow and he knew he was going to make it, to save this one life.
Then his left foot hit a patch of ice under the snow and went out from beneath him. He spun as he fell, crashing down on his right side with a grunt of breath and a shock of pain in his ribs. Momentum carried him a foot or two and he felt the nearness of the edge and the certainty that even to flinch might mean going over.
No, he thought, craning his neck, knowing he’d never make it now. He rolled onto his chest and started to rise, body tensed with failure.
A second figure came after the first. It emerged from the storm like an apparition, arriving between gusts of wind, a curtain of snow whipping back in revelation. Panic seized Adam as he imagined these only the first two of a sudden mass exodus, a flight of suicides as members of the team hurled themselves off the mountain.
Then he saw that the second figure was Hakan, and held his breath. Hakan shouted as he lunged after the first man, grabbed him by the back of the jacket and yanked him down into the snow. They tumbled over each other and Adam whispered a prayer when they came to rest on the ledge. Hakan’s leg jutted over the side as the first man continued to struggle. Eyes wide with primal fear, desperate for his own life, Hakan struck the other man twice in the face.
Adam reached them then. He offered Hakan his hand, gave him leverage to move away from the edge. Together, they dragged the first man toward the cave. Hakan punched him again and then tore the scarf away from his face.
“You could have killed us both!” Hakan shouted, spittle flying from his lips.
Armando Olivieri stared back up at them without fear or shame, face filled instead with disappointment. Anger boiled up in Adam’s chest. He grabbed Olivieri by the coat and dragged him onto safer ground. The professor cried out, slapped at Adam’s arms, demanding to be released.
Adam slammed him onto the snow. “Are you kidding me? You pull this shit and bitch about me putting hands on you? I just saved your damn life!”
Olivieri went rigid and tears began to well in his eyes. Snow whipped at them, the icy temperatures slowing the professor’s tears. Adam wondered if they would freeze on his face.
“You don’t understand,” Olivieri said, the wind so strong Adam doubted Hakan could hear it. “I felt it in me, like poison in my veins, and I knew God couldn’t stop it. Do you see? God isn’t here anymore. He can’t help us.”
The words were ugly coming from a man who had spent his entire adult life studying the Bible, but the tone of Olivieri’s voice made Adam shiver in a way the blizzard never would. And his eyes… Adam had never seen hopelessness like that before. Haunted, he shuffled backward on his knees and looked up at Hakan.
“Take him to Dr. Dwyer. Tie him down if you have to,” Adam said. “This is out of control. I’ve got to see Meryam.”
Hakan took the man by the shoulders, making certain he would not run for the edge again.
“You may wish to wait to see her,” he said with such disdain he might as well have spit the words. “Or you may not like what you find.”
As they walked away, Adam stared at Hakan’s back. A tight knot of silence in his chest blossomed into something larger, a strangely calming dread that accompanied his first step and his second as he began to follow.
His guard duties forgotten, even Olivieri’s attempt at suicide only a vague motivation, he made his way out of the worst of the wind and along the level-one passage where most of the staff made their quarters. Some had moved up a level for a bit more protection from the elements while others had simply shored up their meager shelter. Adam and Meryam had their own quarters up on level two, but the stall she called her office was here, and he knew she would still be working.
Warm orange light glowed inside the stall, a combination of a generator-powered lantern and a small space heater.
Adam’s footfalls were almost silent in the thin layer of snow that had drifted this far inside. He could not feel his own heart beating or the rise and fall of his chest as he came within view of the stall’s interior.
Meryam stood inside, just as he had predicted. What he had not foreseen was that she might not be alone. In that warm glow, she had her arms around Feyiz, her face buried in his chest. From his vantage point, Adam could not see her face, but Feyiz had his eyes closed in an expression of heartbreaking contentment.
Adam began to shake his head as he backed away. Confusion and denial gave way to a bitter rush of bile and resentment as he started back along the passage. Then came the fury, at her for this betrayal and at himself for being so stupid. A phrase floated into his mind, something from a hundred books and comics he’d read over the years. Lovestruck fool. That’s you. Fucking idiot.
Moments later he found himself back where he’d begun, out on the ledge with the blizzard screaming around him, snow whipping at his face, cold searing what little skin he’d left exposed. He stared at the place where Olivieri had tried to commit suicide, at the way the wind and snow seemed to create little swirling ghosts that swept off the cave’s edge, mimicking the act Olivieri had intended to perform.
Adam took another step.
A hand touched his back. Anger seized him, a visceral inferno that radiated from within as he turned around, expecting Meryam. She must have heard him, must have followed.
Only it wasn’t Meryam at all.
Calliope flinched at the severity of his expression, and Adam softened.
“Hey… what is it?” she asked.
Pain and humiliation stoked his anger but he forced it down, shook his head. “Nothing important. What do you need?”
Calliope refused to believe him. She searched his eyes and reached out to take his hand, shining with compassion.
“Adam,” she said. “Please. What is it?”
There in the midst of the blizzard, lost in the darkness and the white scream of the storm, so close to the edge of the abyss, he kissed her. Calliope’s lips were warm and soft and her breath against him had the faint scent of wintergreen.
She pushed him away. “Stop.”
Adam breathed deeply and stepped back. Then he saw the worry on her face and he understood.
“Not here,” she said.
So they went somewhere else.
THIRTEEN
The snow did not reach down into the farthest corners of the ark. At the back, where the coffin still rested on the slanted floor and space heaters provided at least a little warmth, Walker had no idea just how bad the blizzard might have gotten. What he did know was that nobody would be sneaking out tonight. If anyone went missing in this weather, there would be zero room for doubt as to what had become of them.