The dark eyes brimmed and her head started to shake. ‘You won’t come back,’ she said. ‘Mummy didn’t.’
He dropped down so his eyes were level with hers. ‘It’s not like that,’ he said, taking her tiny hand in his. ‘You’ll be safer here.’
‘I don’t want to stay here.’
‘But I can’t take you, not yet. There’ll be forms to fill in and tests I probably have to do so they can establish that I’m your father.’
‘Problem?’ Arkadian had arrived next to them.
‘I need to go somewhere and Hevva doesn’t want me to leave.’
‘Where do you need to be?’
‘An archaeological site about two hours east of here.’
‘Göbekli Tepe.’
‘You know it?’
‘Everybody in Ruin knows it. It’s supposed to be a rival shrine to the Citadel, built by the enemies of the Sancti. Why do you want to go there?’
Shepherd thought about all the things that had brought him here: the recovered data, the link with Taurus, the cryptic message from Kinderman. It was difficult to know where to start. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said.
Arkadian looked down at Hevva and smiled. ‘Tell you what, why don’t I drive you there, that way we can bring Hevva along and you can explain it all on the way.’
Gabriel never left Athanasius’s side. He had promised he would go on this journey with him and, having walked that painful path himself, it was not a promise he could break. When Athanasius was not sedated he raved and howled and strained against his bindings, like every other victim of the blight had done, but unlike most he was sometimes lucid, just like Gabriel had been. They would talk in these snatched moments, and Gabriel would lie and tell him how well he was doing and how much the doctors were learning from being able to study him. In truth, they were still searching, racing against the clock to find whatever process was happening inside him before it went one way or another.
Gabriel had been unaffected by the cross-transfusion. Whatever defences his body had built were too efficient to allow the infection to take hold again. Dr Kaplan remained in quarantine too, never leaving the room for so much as a minute. He knew he had a very narrow window of opportunity to first identify and then study the reagent as it attacked and defeated the virus, and he didn’t want to waste a moment of that precious time sleeping. He had a cot set up in the corner of the lab for him and the other technicians to use whenever exhaustion overcame them. There were five of them in total, each keeping their own particular brand of vigil: Gabriel, Kaplan, two technicians as dedicated and ever-present as he was, and – at the centre of it all, burning like a hot sun around which the rest of them revolved – Athanasius.
Whenever the attacks got so severe they had to sedate him, Gabriel slept in the cot too, making sure he was awake again by the time the sedative wore off. Then, one morning, three weeks after the transfusion, Gabriel woke in the cot to discover Athanasius was already awake. He rose and moved over to the side of the bed, holding the back of his hand to Athanasius’s forehead. ‘The fever’s gone,’ he said, a smile spreading on his face. ‘You didn’t die.’
Athanasius smiled back. ‘Apparently not.’
Dr Kaplan was summoned from the lab where he was doing blood work. He stared at Athanasius from the safety of the door when he first came in. After so many months of failures and death it was like he had forgotten what success looked like. Athanasius’s recovery was the final piece in the jigsaw. Kaplan and his team had successfully managed to find and isolate the reagent, but had held off from introducing it to other patients until they knew for sure it was going to be effective. They didn’t want patients to have to endure the kind of drawn-out suffering Athanasius was going through if they were just going to die anyway. Better that they die quickly and suffer less than going through that. But now he was better, everything had changed.
The Blight had been conquered. They had found a cure.
And Gabriel could finally make good on his promise and return to Liv.
Hevva fell asleep in the back of the car before they’d even made it out of the Taurus foothills and picked up the toll road heading east. Shepherd kept turning round to check on her, her face a perfect miniature of her mother’s, her very existence casting a much darker light on the countdown that was still ticking away on his phone. He told Arkadian everything, finding that once he started it all came tumbling out until by the time they saw the first sign for Göbekli Tepe, Arkadian knew as much about the investigation as he did.
They turned off the main road and passed through an automatic toll barrier onto a battered track leading away into the parched, undulating countryside. There were no houses here, not even the square, flat-roofed brick blocks that seemed to be the architectural model of choice in this part of the country. There was no sign of anything at all, no greenery, no animals, only the single-track strip of black road leading them straight into the alien landscape ahead. The only reason they knew they were in the right place was the presence of a few road signs, put up for the benefit of tourists, pointing the way to the hill they could just see in the distance with a solitary tree standing sentry at the top of it.
Shepherd stared out of the window, feeling the heat coming through it despite the air-con blasting cold into the cabin. It was hard to imagine that this desolate place, burned dry and littered with broken rocks, had been home to a civilization that pre-dated the Egyptians by seven thousand years: all gone now and forgotten, ground to elemental dust by the passing of time, just like everything else in the universe.
‘What if your Dr Kinderman’s not here?’ Arkadian said.
Shepherd looked up at a collection of tents and temporary buildings clinging to the side of the hill. ‘If he’s not here then it’s the end of the road – for me at least.’ He looked in the back where Hevva was sleeping. ‘What’s that thing people say – all your priorities change the moment you have kids?’
Arkadian shook his head and smiled sadly. ‘I’m sure it’s true – it never happened to me.’
‘Me either, until a couple of hours ago. You married, Inspector?’
Arkadian shook his head. ‘Not any more. I lost my wife to the blight around the same time Hevva lost her mother. That changes your priorities too.’
They pulled off the road and bounced up a dust track towards the settlement and came to a parking area big enough to cater for the strange mix of tourists and archaeologists that visited the dig. There was even a trough of straw to feed the camels. Today the area was empty but for a couple of cars so dusty they were almost the same colour as the earth.
Arkadian crunched to a stop beside them and waited for the dust cloud they had kicked up to drift away before switching off the engine and stepping out into the heat.
Shepherd unclipped his seat belt and glanced in the back hoping to sneak out and leave Hevva sleeping. A pair of dark eyes stared at him from beneath a shiny fringe of wavy, chocolate hair.
Shepherd smiled at her. ‘We’re just going to have a look around,’ he said. ‘You stay here. We won’t be long.’
The eyes went wide. ‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘You won’t come back.’
‘Of course I’ll come back. You’ll just be safer here,’ he said, reaching out with a hand to stroke her face.
‘If it’s safer here, you stay here too,’ she said.
Shepherd couldn’t argue with that logic. ‘I’ll only be five minutes. Five minutes then I’ll come right back.’
She shook her head and the tears continued to flow. ‘I don’t want to stay here alone.’
He looked into her imploring eyes, made huge by fear and bright with tears. ‘OK,’ he said, powerless in the face of an emotional child. ‘But stay close and keep quiet.’
Hevva stayed so close that Shepherd kept nearly tripping over her as they made their way up the track to the buildings and the tree beyond.
Arkadian glanced sideways at them. ‘How’s parenthood?’ he asked.
‘Complicated,’ Shepherd said, squeezing Hevva’s tiny hand. ‘I’m sure I’ll get used to it. I’ve only been a dad for a few hours.’
They reached the edge of the dig site marked out with strings of barbed wire nailed to posts. The hill was only partly excavated, like something massive had taken a bite out of it leaving behind the monolithic T-shaped standing stones like lost teeth. They were huge and almost perfectly smooth, their size and finish in marked contrast to the broken jagged edges of everything else around them. Figures were carved on the surface of the stones, low reliefs of animals and human arms stretching round the stones as if hugging them. A wooden walkway cut right across the top of the site, suspended a few feet above it. He could see tools and buckets lying on the ground at various points, as if everyone had just stopped what they were doing and left. It was eerie, a ghost town, one that had been dead for nearly ten thousand years.
‘Guess nobody calls this place home any more,’ Shepherd murmured, imagining the workers responding to the growing tugging sensations inside them, urging them to be elsewhere.
‘We have company,’ Arkadian said. Shepherd squinted up against the bright sky and saw a slender man standing in the shade of the tree, backlit by the sun. ‘You think that could be him?’
‘Hard to tell,’ Shepherd said, instinctively pulling Hevva behind him. ‘He’s the right build. I should go talk to him.’ The tiny hand tightened in his. ‘It’s OK, sweetheart, you’ll be able to see me the whole way.’
‘Take this,’ Arkadian pressed something into his hand. Shepherd looked down to discover a gun. ‘It’s just a precaution.’
‘I don’t think that’s …’
‘Take it. I don’t care how many Nobel prizes this man has won, he is still a fugitive from the law, which makes him unpredictable.’
The figure beneath the tree moved forward, emerging from the shadow.
‘He’s coming down,’ Shepherd said, handing the gun back.
‘Keep it,’ Arkadian said. ‘I’m too slow and can’t shoot worth a damn since I took a bullet in my arm.’
Shepherd thought about his own less than glowing record as a marksman but slipped it into the back waistband of his trousers anyway, angling himself so his whole body was between the gun and Hevva.
The figure continued to descend the hill, picking his way down a thin gravel path that snaked its way down from the tree: a slender man with silver hair and a Nobel prize for physics on his CV, Dr Kinderman – fugitive from the law. He reached the upper edge of the dig and did a strange thing – he waved at them.
‘He doesn’t look like a man on the edge,’ Arkadian muttered.
‘He’s spent his life on the edge of the universe,’ Shepherd replied. ‘This probably all feels quite normal to him.’
Dr Kinderman rounded the rim of the crater and approached them, a warm, friendly smile fixed to his face, like a man just welcoming weekend guests to his house. ‘You found me,’ he said, his voice nasal and high, like the whine of an overgrown, over-enthusiastic schoolboy.
‘Joseph Shepherd, sir.’ Kinderman clasped the offered hand and shook it. ‘I worked under you briefly on the Explorer mission.’
‘Please.’ Kinderman held his hands up and screwed his eyes shut like he was in mild pain. ‘Call me William, or Will, or Bill even, but don’t call me “sir”, makes me feel like your father.’ He let go of Shepherd’s hand and dropped down to the ground. ‘And who do we have here?’ Kinderman brought his head right down to Hevva’s level. ‘Are you an FBI agent too?’
Hevva went shy and smiley and buried her face in Shepherd’s side.
Kinderman stood and turned to the dig site. ‘Magnificent, isn’t it? A temple to the stars, built eight thousand years before the pyramids in Egypt and then deliberately buried to hide it and preserve its secrets. You can’t really see it properly from here, it was designed to be viewed from up there.’ He pointed back up at the tree on top of the hill. ‘Interestingly enough the locals call that the tree of knowledge, always have done – even when they didn’t know all this was buried beneath it. Isn’t that fascinating?’
Shepherd felt like a schoolboy on a field trip with one of the better teachers.
‘Shall we go inside?’ Kinderman gestured to one of the larger field tents. ‘It’s cooler in there and I have something I want to show you.’
They filed into the tent and through a visitor’s area with information posters on partition walls and a scale model of the dig site on a table in the centre of the room. There was a washroom through one door and a kitchen through the other with a stove and a table positioned beneath a ceiling fan that turned slowly, stirring the air and blowing dust into the shafts of sunlight leaking in through shuttered windows and a back door that had been propped open to let more air in.
‘You wouldn’t believe there were about thirty people here a couple of days ago, would you?’ Kinderman said, lighting the gas on the stove. ‘Yesterday there were ten and this morning just me, so I apologize in advance for the mint tea I’m about to make. I don’t really have the art of it, which is a shame as it’s delicious when done properly.’ He put a pot of water on to boil and grabbed a bunch of mint from a bowl of water by the sink.
‘I can make tea,’ Hevva said.
‘Are you sure?’ Shepherd said, suddenly worried about the stove and boiling water in his first real moment of everyday parental angst.
‘Mama showed me how to do it. She showed me how to do lots of things.’ Hevva slipped off the bench and headed to the stove without waiting for anyone’s permission and held out her hands for the mint. Kinderman handed it over without a word, then she dragged a chair across to the countertop and started ripping up handfuls of leaves and dropping them into a teapot. Shepherd felt a surge of pride as he watched her, though none of who she was or how she behaved was anything to do with him.
‘So,’ Kinderman said, moving over to the table containing the model of the dig, ‘notice anything?’ Shepherd looked down at it. It was perfectly to scale and even had a model tree at the top. In this shrunken form it was easier to see the configuration of the standing stones. ‘They’re constellations,’ he said, remembering the Wikipedia entry he had read.