Tears flowed down Shepherd’s cheeks when he saw what was inside. It was a tiny photo of Melisa, bordered in black, and opposite it – a picture of him.
Gabriel continued to improve.
His occasional fits dwindled to nothing and after a few weeks he no longer needed to be strapped to his bed. But as his strength returned, so did his desire to leave the mountain and return to Liv. Dr Kaplan assured him that, though great progress was being made with his blood work, they still had not found a cure, nor had they ruled out the possibility that Gabriel was an asymptomatic carrier. He still had the virus inside him, it just wasn’t killing him any more.
Rather than sitting around he made himself useful where he could. He spent a lot of time sifting through the ash and rubble in the Crypto Revelatio, hoping he might find some of the clues they needed to interpret the Starmap. But the fire had been so intense that even the clay tablets had baked to dust and the few stone items that survived offered nothing but more lost languages and further riddles to solve.
He travelled only through the upper stairwells and corridors so he would encounter no one. On his way back he sometimes took a detour to the chapel of the Sacrament with the hideous Tau silent at its centre, the front hanging open on its hinges revealing the spike-lined interior. It was a hideous place, a place where the Sacrament had been held captive for millennia until Liv had finally freed it. And it was for this reason alone that he came here, just to walk the same floor she had walked, and sit on the same floor where she had lain. Once, after sitting there a while, he had stood and spotted a long strand of blonde hair – her hair – floating down through the beam of his torch. He caught it in his hand and now kept it wound round his finger like a ring.
Weeks passed in this way. Months passed.
Then one morning, Gabriel was shaken awake as dawn had just started to lighten the blue and green glass of the peacock window. It was Dr Kaplan, black rings circling his exhausted eyes. ‘Come with me,’ he said.
Gabriel had not been through the main door since entering on a stretcher almost seven months previously. They turned right outside, heading away from the cathedral cave into a section of the mountain Gabriel had never been before. The corridors were wider here and well lit with doors set into the stone at regular intervals. One of them opened ahead and a visored face peered out, saw Kaplan and Gabriel and ducked straight back in, closing the door behind him but not before Gabriel caught a glimpse of the complicated laboratory set up in the room.
‘In here.’ Kaplan stopped outside a door with a circle cut into it and a plastic tube poking out from within. ‘I think it’s best I give you some context first.’ He opened the door and stood back to allow Gabriel to enter.
The room was a smaller version of the Abbot’s quarters with a main reception room and another door set in the far wall. It was filled with so much equipment it made the one he had just seen look like a high-school chemistry class. There were banks of sleek, hi-tech-looking microscopes, scanners, computers, centrifuges and a large air-conditioning unit keeping it all cool, the snake of its plastic vent poking out through the hole he had seen in the corridor.
‘Very impressive,’ Gabriel said, taking it all in.
‘The outside world has been very generous,’ Kaplan replied, heading over to a large machine with a video monitor set up on a desk next to it. ‘Anything we ask for gets shipped in the next day. Things move pretty fast when everyone has such an interest in our success.’
He flicked a switch and the monitor glowed into life showing a hugely magnified image of an uneven sphere with lethal spikes coming out of it. ‘Meet KV292, more commonly known as the Blight or the Lamentation – the enemy. Do you know much about viral infections?’
‘Only that they hurt.’
‘But do you know why?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘What they do is invade a host and hijack healthy cells then reprogramme them to start manufacturing the virus instead.’ He hit another key three times and the image stepped in until the tip of one spike filled the screen. It had a small bar across the end, making it look like a tiny, elongated letter T. ‘Each one of those spikes you can see is topped off with what’s known as a glyco-protein that acts like a sort of key to fool the cell’s defences into letting the virus pass through its protective membrane. Once inside it releases strands of rogue DNA that find their way to the nucleus and then reprogramme it.’
He tapped another key and the picture on the screen changed to a similar-looking ball. ‘This is also KV292, only we found this one in your blood. See the difference?’ The ball in this image was covered with much smaller spikes making it look like a burr. ‘Something is happening inside your system that knocks the ends off the spikes so they can’t interact properly with healthy cells. They just float around in your blood where they get covered with antibodies until the white blood cells pick them up and digest them. They never get a chance to reproduce because they can’t get inside your cells. They’ve lost their keys.
‘Ever since we isolated you over here in this part of the mountain we’ve been looking for the mechanism that does it. The trouble is, with the hostile virus deactivated in your blood, the reagent that interacted with it no longer has a job to do and so has vanished. We haven’t been able to find a single trace of it.
‘Over the past few months we have tried everything to replicate the circumstances of a primary infection. We screened every newly infected patient to find matches for your blood-type and then created a cocktail of your blood and theirs to see if this mystery reagent would reappear and go back to work, but it never did. Ultimately we realized the problem lies in the fact that we are always working with samples that are already fully infected. Viral infections and their reagents tend to grow and develop at the same time and at the same rate, the one triggering the other and keeping pace with it so the virus can never get fully established. This happens with things like the common cold where the antibodies start being reproduced as soon as the virus appears. If it didn’t every cold would develop into a more chronic form such as pneumonia, which is what happens in immuno-suppressed people.’
He sat down on the chair in front of the screen, his weariness evident in the way his shoulders slumped inside the contamination suit. ‘What we need to do is catch someone with your blood type before the virus has fully established itself and then cross-transfuse your blood with theirs. This will hopefully give us two chances of catching the reagent in action: once in your system as the infected blood starts mingling with yours, and again in the other patient as your healthy blood encounters the infection in theirs.
‘However, there is a risk. If the mechanism has been completely deactivated in your system then you may end up being re-infected, with little chance of survival. There is also a risk for the other patient. This mutated form of the virus you now carry may be harmless to you but could still be very harmful to others. In trying to find a cure for the blight we may end up killing someone.’
Gabriel took it all in, the polished cleanliness of the room, the clinic quiet, the serious tone in Kaplan’s voice. ‘I’m assuming by the fact that you woke me up to tell me all this that you have found someone.’
Dr Kaplan nodded. ‘The problem has been finding someone with your exact blood type, which unfortunately is particularly rare. You are O negative, which in Turkey is shared by less than five per cent of the population. We blood-typed everyone still healthy inside the Citadel and found one match. The reason I woke you is because this person has just exhibited the first signs of the blight.’ He rose from his chair and moved across the room towards the door to the bed chamber. ‘For this to stand any chance at all of working we need to act fast before it fully takes hold.’
He reached the door and opened it.
Beyond was a bedroom, two beds in the centre lined up next to each other, an array of tubes and equipment arranged around them. One was empty, the other contained a man, propped up, strapped down and breathing steadily. His eyes flicked over to the door and locked onto Gabriel
’
s.
‘Good morning,’ Athanasius said. ‘Forgive me if I don’t get up.’ He smiled but Gabriel could see there was fear beneath it. He moved over to the side of the bed and laid a hand on the monk’s arm. His skin was already starting to burn.
‘I admit,’ Athanasius said, ‘I am surprised this hasn’t happened sooner. I was starting to hope that maybe I too had some form of natural resistance. But this morning I awoke for morning prayers and could smell nothing but oranges.’ He shuddered and closed his eyes as something started to rise inside him. It reminded Gabriel of when the blight had first taken hold of him in the heat of the Syrian desert. He knew the torments Athanasius was starting to experience, the heat, the itching, the panic. The shaking eased and Athanasius breathed out and opened his eyes again. ‘I must also admit,’ he said in a soft voice that still carried traces of the tremor, ‘that I am more than a little afraid.’
Gabriel took his hand, just as Athanasius had taken his so many times in the preceding months when their situations had been reversed. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said. ‘It’s just a journey. Let’s go on it together.’
Shepherd spent the rest of the morning with Hevva, sitting by a fence in the playground like a kid himself, telling her stories about her mother, digging back into his memory for all the details he had held on to for so long. She told him stories too, sketching in glimpses of the woman he’d lost. He was amazed at how grown up Hevva seemed as she told him, in the unvarnished words of a child, how she had gone everywhere with her mother because there was no one else to care for her, and how she had helped with her work, learning to deliver babies while she was little more than a baby herself. Hearing these stories made him both sad and immensely proud. But it also posed a difficult question, one which Hevva’s eerie maturity prompted him to ask.
‘Do you know why your mother never tried to contact me?’
Hevva shrugged. ‘She thought you were dead.’
‘Do you know why?’
‘Grandpa said you died in a fire.’
Shepherd closed his eyes and nodded. He was transported back to the evening when Melisa’s father had sent him on the fool’s errand across town in the middle of rush hour. He had thought it odd at the time and now he knew why. It had all been a set- up to get him out of the way long enough to stage the fire. The fire served as a disguise for their simultaneous disappearance, and as the basis of a wicked lie that would separate his daughter from Shepherd for ever. Perhaps Melisa had told him they planned to marry and he had taken desperate measures to ensure that never happened. The police had said the fire was suspicious, an insurance job gone wrong and they had been partly right, it was only the motive they’d got wrong. Had her father known Melisa was pregnant, he wondered – had she even known at the time? What must her father have shown her to make her believe he was dead? What proof had he fabricated to stop her from looking? If he had gone to such lengths as to burn down a building, he felt sure a fake death certificate would not have been beyond him. Maybe even faked-up news stories coupled with the race- hate angle to scare her away from looking into his evidence too closely.
He felt a small hand on his face and he looked up into the deep knowing eyes of his daughter. ‘Don’t cry,’ she said, ‘Mummy still loved you, even though you weren’t there. That’s why she kept your picture.’
Shepherd smiled and placed his hand over hers. Being with this quiet, wise girl made the painful ache that had grown inside him disappear entirely. In her he had found what he was looking for, only not in the form he had expected.
His phone buzzed in his pocket and the world outside started to creep back in. ‘I got to take this, honey,’ he said and he saw her eyes darken as if she knew it was trouble.
‘Agent Shepherd,’ a familiar voice said the moment he picked up, ‘it’s Merriweather, the Hubble technician you spoke to at Goddard.’ He sounded anxious.
‘Oh, hi.’
‘You said I should call if anything came up. Well it has. Hubble has stabilized. It’s in a new travelling orbit that places it in a fixed position in the northern sky.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘In Taurus, right between
Nath
and
Zeta Tauri
.’
Shepherd frowned – directly between the horns. For the past few hours he had succeeded in pushing the investigation into the furthest recess of his mind: now it all came flooding back. He remembered the words of Kinderman’s cryptic message:
I’m just standing on a hill looking to the east for new stars in old friends, as those like us have done since the beginning of time.
And tonight Hubble would show up in the night sky as a new object, the sun shining off its reflectors, making it look like a new star in the constellation of Taurus. Shepherd stood up and waved across the playground at Arkadian. He needed to get to Göbekli Tepe before nightfall to stand a chance of catching up with Dr Kinderman. With the new star appearing in Taurus tonight, tomorrow Kinderman would probably be gone and he would have no idea where.
‘How’s the investigation going?’
‘What?’ He had forgotten Merriweather was still on the line. ‘Oh it’s – moving forward. Listen, Merriweather, that’s been a great help. How you doing with getting the guidance systems back online?’
‘Not so great. We could do with Dr Kinderman’s help. I hope he’s OK and you find him soon. It’s not the same here without him.’
‘Let me call you tomorrow, I may have some good news.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really.’
He hung up and turned to Hevva. ‘Honey, I have to go somewhere but you need to stay here. But I’ll be back tomorrow, I promise.’