She blinked.
Feyiz had begun a prayer of thanks. In her peripheral vision, in that last golden gleam of daylight, she saw his smile. Only then did she understand, and broke out into a smile of her own.
The cave.
Meryam plucked her pick from the mountain’s face and lunged upward, digging in. Pick, boot, hand, boot. Quicker than she’d been at the start, all pain in her head forgotten. She glanced over at the silhouettes of Olivieri’s team, just inky black marks against the darkening mountain, and knew she was going to beat him.
Feyiz followed her. Forty feet below, injured or not, Adam had begun to climb again, with Hakan looking after him.
Remnants of queasiness lingered in her gut, but Meryam kept moving and breathing deeply. There would be more meds when they reached the shelf. But only a tiny part of her brain remained aware of her discomfort. The rest of her thoughts were dedicated to climbing toward the mystery that had brought them here. She tried not to fantasize, dared not to hope, but even if they found nothing but a gaping wound in the side of the mountain, at least she had reached it first.
Her back muscles burned. Her arms felt weak, as if she had been deceiving her body for the past few hours by continuing to climb, somehow persuading flesh and bone that she had not asked them to endure far more than she had any right to expect they could. Now she needed just a little more. Weariness set in, carved its blades deep. Knowing they were so close to finding rest made every handhold harder to find, made her body heavier with every inch she dragged herself up the mountain.
Below, Hakan and Adam spoke to each other. The words floated up to her but she did not bother listening to discover if their conversation was speculation or an evaluation of Adam’s injuries.
“Meryam,” Feyiz said, moving up beside her when she began to slow. “Do you need me to—”
She shot him a withering look. “Do not help me.”
The hard edge in her voice went too far. She knew it, but she saw the shifting shadows across Feyiz’s face and the moonlit gleam of his eyes, and she knew he understood. She hadn’t come this far to accept help from anyone. This had been her quest from the start—not even hers and Adam’s, but hers—and she wouldn’t accept a hand up from anyone unless she started falling. Maybe not even then.
Moonlight, she thought. For the first time she noticed that while they’d been climbing, in just the past few minutes, the sun had gone down. The glow of it still haunted the western horizon but it had vanished off the edge of the world.
In the darkness, she reached up her empty hand and caught nothing but air. A glance upward, and she saw the edge of the shelf. The lowest corner of the new cavern that had appeared in Ararat’s face.
She grinned, warmth flooding her chest, buried the point of the pick into the flat edge of the stone shelf, and dragged herself up and into the cave.
Lying on her back, watching the stars come out, Meryam began to laugh.
Then she turned onto her hands and knees and threw up.
Adam wanted to drop his pack onto the floor of the cave and collapse. The muscles in his calves and shoulders burned and his knees were stiff in what he imagined was a prelude of what it would feel like when his youthful tendency to overdo things brought his joints to arthritic ruin. He wanted water and a bite to eat and to take a moment to revel in the knowledge that they had beaten Olivieri’s team to this cave, even if they found nothing at all.
Then Meryam started to retch.
“Meer?” he said, rushing to her side even as Feyiz and Hakan clicked on flashlights and began to scan the cave’s deep shadows.
In the crescent of moonlight that touched the first dozen feet of the cave’s interior, Meryam lifted a hand to wave him away. “I’m all right.”
“Bullshit.” He took her hand, felt her pulse, asked her if she could breathe all right.
“Not while I’m—”
Another thin stream of vomit interrupted her. Meryam stayed on her hands and knees, trying to catch her breath. Adam put a hand on her back and tried to soothe her.
“You’re okay,” he said with more certainty than he felt. “You’ll be all right. If we need to get you down—”
“No.”
“—we’ve already secured the entrance. We’re here. Olivieri’s team may show up on our doorstep at sunrise, but they can’t claim the dig for themselves—not with the deal you made with the government. If there is a dig, I mean.”
“I’m not… not going down.”
“You can acclimate,” Adam went on. “Take Feyiz with you. Rest here a few hours and then—”
Meryam whispered something he didn’t catch. Adam leaned in, asked her to repeat herself, and she twisted round to stare at him. Her eyes caught the moonlight but instead of silver they glinted a coppery red for just a moment. A trick of the light, and the night.
Taking a deep breath, she reached a hand to him. “Help me up.”
Adam went cold, felt the hairs on the back of his neck bristle. “You know what can happen with altitude sickness. Come on, don’t mess around with this.”
“I’m…” she began, before her body seized up as if she might be sick again. Breathing through her nose, teeth bared, she managed to fight it off.
Adam knelt beside her. He reached for her wrist again, worried about her rapid heartbeat.
“It’s not altitude sickness,” she said, jerking her hand back. “Stop.”
“What is it, then?” He’d been feeling unwell himself—a clammy, almost feverish film on his skin and a thumping in his head. “No matter how many pills Hakan dishes out, you can’t climb as long and as high as we did today and not have it wreak havoc on your body. I’m all twisted up inside myself.”
“It’s not altitude sickness,” she said again. Firmly, hanging her head and taking even breaths.
“Then what?”
Meryam glanced up at him, her gaze pale and sad. “Fine, all right? Maybe it is. But I’m not climbing down. I didn’t come this far to go back without at least—”
Feyiz called to them. Adam studied Meryam’s face, searching for the thing he felt certain she must be hiding. It might have been that she felt worse than she wanted to let on, or it might have been connected to the wall she had been building up between them. Adam had been hiding from that bit of truth for a while, but now he felt it more keenly than ever.
“Meryam…” he began.
Feyiz shouted, and this time they both heard the urgency in his voice.
“Coming!” Adam called back. He unzipped Meryam’s pack and dug out her light, handing it over before retrieving his own.
She took his arm and rose, unsteady as she clicked on her light. The floor canted slightly, slanting downward. Only when they turned together and stepped deeper into the cave—out of that corona of moonlight—did they hear the soft, muttered prayers that came from off to the left. Adam waved his flashlight beam in that direction and saw Hakan. Meryam’s torch beam moved slowly across the floor of the cave and then froze as it illuminated a pattern that might once have been an animal. Shapes like bones lay under a layer of powder that seemed partly snow and partly a chalky dust. A ribbon of thin, leathery skin or fabric flapped in the breeze.
Meryam reached out and took Adam’s hand.
Feyiz continued to call for them, but now neither of them seemed able to reply. Adam noticed Hakan moving toward the back of the cave off to their left but the man’s presence hardly mattered. The only things that did were the next breath, the next step, and the way Meryam’s torch beam and his own continued to sweep across the nearest parts of the cave. The mouth of it—this vast wound in the side of the mountain—must have been at least a hundred feet wide, and the flashlight beams were not powerful enough to disperse all of that darkness. But as Adam and Meryam moved deeper, hand in hand, their torchlight kept revealing more of what waited for them in the darkness.