Walker stood up, moving between the cots and the door. “Do we really need to do this right now?”
Feyiz stepped around him. “I think we do.” He crouched in front of Adam and Meryam, glancing from one to the other. “I am and shall continue to be your friend. Of course I wonder, Adam, where your own emotions and behavior ended and the demon took over.”
Meryam exhaled sharply. “We’ll never know the answer to that question.”
“That’s right,” Feyiz said, studying her face. “We never will. And so we go on, all three of us. We get off this mountain alive, and when we’ve accomplished that, we’ll worry about what it means for old friendships.”
He held out a hand. Adam took his arm from around Meryam and shook it. For the moment, at least, they could be strong together.
“That’s lovely,” Walker said. “Now do you want to give them an update on where we stand, or should I?”
Feyiz stood. “You’re a man with sharp edges, Dr. Walker. Sharp edges and many secrets. I’m glad you’re here with us. I’m also glad we’re leaving.”
“Get on with it,” Walker said.
“Seven killed last night, in total.” Feyiz shook his head, his hard shell cracking as he shared the news. “There are sixteen of us left, including the four people in this room. The bodies have been wrapped up tightly and stowed in a stall on level one for retrieval in the spring—”
“We’re taking them with us,” Meryam said. “I’m not… we can’t leave them here.”
“Meryam,” Walker began.
Adam jumped in. “Feyiz just said there are sixteen people left alive. It’s going to be hard enough getting down the mountain in this storm, not even taking into account whatever the demon might do to try to thwart that attempt. If it gets inside someone else”—or back inside me, he thought—“look, we just can’t. You know this. Someone else will come back for them. I feel a responsibility toward them, too—I don’t want to just abandon them, but our first priority has to be the people who are still breathing. The people we can save.”
“Okay,” Meryam said quietly. “I get it.”
“We can’t endanger them any further by asking them to carry the bodies of the dead down off the mountain,” Adam went on.
“I said I get it!”
Her voice echoed in the little plastic box of a room.
Adam caught movement in his peripheral vision and looked up to see Calliope out in the corridor, filming the whole exchange. Heat flushed his cheeks, anger and shame in equal portion.
“Not now, Callie,” he said. “Get the fuck out of here with that thing.”
She flinched. Blond hair tied back in a bun, pale and drawn and exhausted, she looked as broken and vulnerable as the rest of them. She’d been a friend and a comfort and when they’d made love it had felt like true shelter from the emotional wreckage in his heart. In that moment, it had felt right. Punishing her for it was a shitty thing to do, but he told himself this was not punishment. Just privacy.
“Seriously?” Calliope said. “One of us is doing her fucking job, and just in case the ‘her’ didn’t give it away, it isn’t you. I’m scared out of my mind right now, but I figured…”
She shook her head. “You know what? Never mind.”
Calliope turned, lowering her camera.
Meryam called her back. “Hold on!”
The two women faced each other—Calliope in the doorway and Meryam on the cot—and Adam had to look away.
“Keep doing your job,” Meryam said. “When this is over, we’re going to want a record. Whatever happens, people need to know.”
Calliope seemed about to reply, but was distracted by the arrival of Professor Olivieri. She backed up to let him into the infirmary, and Adam sent thoughts of silent gratitude toward him for the interruption.
“All right,” Olivieri began, placing a cloth bag on the counter by the door. He glanced at Feyiz and Walker. “You two are squared away, yes?”
Walker nodded grimly. Feyiz reached inside his shirt and pulled out a black, gleaming charm—a bit of bitumen that hung from twine that he’d tied around his neck.
Reaching into the bag, Olivieri withdrew two just like it and handed one to Meryam and the other to Adam.
“I’m already wearing mine,” the professor said. “Put mine on first, to be honest.”
The bags beneath his eyes were dark and deep. His nose shone red but his dark complexion had gone pale. Adam thought he looked like hell, but he figured they all did. It helped him to not focus on Meryam’s illness. They all looked dreadfully ill.
“Thank you, professor,” he said.
Meryam slipped her bitumen charm on immediately, but Adam hesitated. Father Cornelius had blessed these things, but it wasn’t the faith of the holy man that tripped him up. Rabbi, priest, imam—he figured a blessing was a blessing. But if he was looking for something to believe in, it wouldn’t be a chunk of shiny, hardened, volcanic rock.
“Hey,” Meryam said, nudging him. “It can’t hurt.”
Adam managed a weak smile and slipped the charm around his neck.
“Of course,” Olivieri said, “with Dr. Walker’s other skills, he may not need outside protection.”
Adam tucked his bitumen charm inside his shirt. “I am curious, Walker. I’ve never seen a Ph.D. fight like that before.”
Walker shrugged. “We’re allowed to have more than one set of skills. Being able to handle myself in a fight has come in handy more often than I’d have wished.”
Meryam toyed with the twine around her neck. “Can we focus, please? Has anyone else shown signs of being…”
“Possessed,” Adam finished for her. “You can say the word, Meryam.”
“All right,” she said, glancing at Walker and Feyiz. “Any sign of anyone else being possessed?”
“Nothing overt,” Walker said. “It could be hiding inside someone, pulling strings the way it apparently did with Zeybekci. Maybe he made it easy for the demon, I don’t know. Right now, the only thing I’m noticing is a lot of tension, but that’s natural.”
“There is actually much less tension, now,” Feyiz added. “The things that had splintered us apart before are no longer relevant.”
“Terror is a great unifier,” Olivieri muttered. “They’ve seen murder now. They believe in evil in one form or another. Everyone left alive up here just wants to survive.”
“On that note,” Calliope said from the passage outside the door, “can we cut the chitchat and get the hell out of here?”
Adam glanced at her, but saw only the eye of the camera. Calliope hid behind it, just as he so often did. With a nod, he placed a hand on Meryam’s back, a moment of connection before he rose from the cot. He felt unsteady, but it passed quickly and he took a deep breath.
“Sounds good to me,” he said. “Bundle up, folks. It’s cold outside.”
Olivieri stood with the others out on the ledge, and for the first time the impossibility of the task ahead sank in. Snow stuck to his goggles and he used his left glove to wipe it away. With the blizzard raging around them, it felt as if they were the last people on Earth. Like most of them he wore a balaclava that covered everything but his eyes and mouth. He told himself this was the reason he could not seem to catch his breath. It was the fabric and the storm, not his fear.
I’m going to die on this mountain, he thought. It was a cold sort of knowledge, like an awareness of his age or height or weight. He would die long before they reached the foot of Ararat. Perhaps that would be best.
Around him, people shouted to one another, trying to get in some semblance of order. Hakan had been project foreman, but now he and Feyiz had returned to their roles as guides. The two of them were working with a third guide, a cousin or something, to get the rest started down the mountain. Some carried heavy packs while others helped the weak or wounded, but the people around him had lost their identity beneath hats and parka hoods and behind goggles and balaclavas. They’d become strangers to one another. He wondered if the demon hid inside one of them, its eyes peering out.