A gust of wind knocked him two steps to the left—toward the edge—and he bent forward, fighting the storm. Wiping the snow from his goggles again, he was surprised to see a figure emerging from the cave, backlit by the dull glow from within. The figure paused and glanced around, scanning for someone—looking for me? Adam wondered if it might be Meryam, or even Calliope. But as the figure spotted him and started toward him and their steps brought them closer together, he realized it was Feyiz.
His fists clenched. He could barely feel his fingers inside his gloves, but the bones ached when the anger tightened them together. His guilt muddied his feelings toward Meryam tonight, but what he felt for Feyiz… that was crystal clear.
“Thank goodness,” Feyiz said, shivering and stamping his feet as he paused in front of Adam. “I couldn’t find you and then Calliope told me you were on sentry duty and I thought ‘tonight?’ But then when I came out and didn’t see you I thought… well, never mind. It doesn’t matter. I need to talk to you.”
“You shouldn’t,” Adam said quietly.
Feyiz barely seemed to hear. Adam wanted to smash him into the ground, to hammer at his face and make him bleed into the snow, to pitch him right over the edge.
“It’s about Meryam,” Feyiz said.
The words knocked the breath out of Adam. This son of a bitch dared to face him here, in the middle of this project, on the side of a fucking mountain, in a goddamn blizzard? He wanted to talk about the woman Adam had planned to marry? Just the look on Feyiz’s face, that sanctimoniously earnest expression that suggested he knew Meryam better than Adam did was enough to earn him broken bones.
“Go on,” Adam heard himself say, teeth gritted. Wanting to hear him say it, now. Wanting Feyiz to confess his sins before receiving the beating that was coming his way.
“I almost didn’t seek you out,” Feyiz admitted. “I promised her I wouldn’t say anything, but I can’t keep it to myself. I don’t think it’s right that I should know the secrets a woman keeps from the man she intends to marry.”
Intends to marry, Adam thought. Meryam still thinks we’re getting married?
Adam hadn’t been in a fistfight since the eighth grade. As a boy, he’d struggled with a difficult temper and been in trouble more than once, gone home with scrapes and bruises and swollen knuckles. He had taught himself to be more civilized, to find another path in his life. But tonight he did not want to be civilized. He didn’t want another path. His guilt over having sex with Calliope fell away as if it had been the one thing chaining down his rage.
“You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that,” he muttered.
The wind swept the words away. Feyiz frowned and studied him. He’d heard Adam speak but hadn’t made out what he’d said.
“She’s going to be furious,” Feyiz went on. “But you deserve to know, Adam. She thinks she’s protecting you or something, but I can see the way it’s pushing the two of you apart.” He threw his hands up. “Listen to me, talking in circles. I’m sorry. I hate breaking her trust, but you have to know she’s sick. You must have noticed, right? Maybe you just don’t see how sick.”
It took several seconds for the words to sink in, to sift down through the fugue of his anger. When they did, the heat of his rage faded and the icy teeth of the wind bit deep. Frozen, freezing, Adam stared numbly at Feyiz.
“What did you just say?”
“She’s sick, Adam. Meryam’s been hiding it from you because she’s afraid of how it will change things. She confided in me because I lost my father and my sister the same way and I’ve let her lean on me, but now—with all that’s going on, all that she’s been carrying on her shoulders—it just isn’t fair for her to—”
“Sick how?”
“—keep it from you. I tried to get her to tell you, but she—”
Adam’s hands moved on their own. Shot out and grabbed Feyiz by the front of his coat, dragged him forward so they were eye to eye, close enough to establish their own new and terrible intimacy.
“What is wrong with her?” he demanded.
Feyiz didn’t try to push him away, didn’t even fight the grip on his coat. It was that more than anything that told Adam just how bad the news would be. Full of sorrow, Feyiz only exhaled.
“She has cancer, Adam. Meryam is dying.”
Trudging into the cave—into the ark—Adam felt like a sort of ghost himself, like a revenant in an old film, appearing from the maelstrom accompanied by an ominous clamor of chords. Somehow outside his own body, he watched powerless as the Adam Holzer he’d always seen in the mirror made his way past the staff encampment, where the warmth inside of plastic shelters caused the snow blown against the tarps to melt and run in small icy trickles.
He watched himself and saw only a kind of marionette. The human body was a puppet, wasn’t it, with the mind—perhaps even the soul—pulling the strings? Adam didn’t know who was pulling his strings now. His feet moved but he barely felt them. When he reached up and tugged off his goggles, drew down the scarf to bare his face to the cold emanating from the rock and timber and snow, he hardly recognized the motions as his own.
Numb, he came to stand outside the stall Meryam called her office. The heater rattled inside and the bright light created two Meryams, one who sat at the plastic table and a shadow Meryam, a dark twin whose silhouette seemed strangely misshapen. Inhuman. It occurred to him that neither of them was the woman he’d thought he knew.
His boots shuffled in snow, scuffed the timber beneath it.
Meryam looked up from her work with an air of impatience, almost consternation. Then she saw who it was, must have read the expression on his face, and she knew. Her lower lip trembled and for a moment she looked angry, as if she might have been nurturing some private reserve of rage that she would now unleash on him, or on Feyiz for telling her secret. Then the moment passed and she shuddered as she lowered her head.
“Damn it,” she rasped.
The wind gusted in the passage behind Adam, almost shoving him into the stall with her. Snow cascaded from his clothes as he stumbled.
“It’s true?” Two words. They were all he could manage.
Meryam met his gaze, spine stiffening with bravado, and she nodded. It was that moment of mustering her courage that broke him. Adam took three steps toward her and went to his knees. Meryam reached for him and he dragged her from her chair into an embrace that had them both on their knees. Body wracked with ragged breaths, sobs that could not seem to drag tears from his eyes, he cried out.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Adam inhaled sharply, the smell of Calliope still in his nose. Horror spread through him. He was still angry with himself and with Meryam, but the most terrible poison infecting him now was the truth he’d discovered. All his life, he had held himself up as one of the good guys. In old Western movies, he’d have worn a white hat. Now he was just as broken as everyone else, just as tainted. Not a bad guy, maybe, but not a good guy in the end.
What have I done?
“Tell me,” he said.
She met his gaze firmly, chin high. Confronted, she would not shrink from it now. “It’s a special brand. Acute myelogenous leukemia. They tried a couple of things, but even from the start I never saw a glimmer of hope in their eyes. I’ve been told to get my affairs in order.”
Adam lifted a trembling hand to cover his mouth, grief hollowing him out.