They came to the turnoff from the highway and shot through a muddy patch at the start of a road whose paving was cracked and uneven. Municipal services were not the country’s strong suit and road repair took a backseat in the fight for what resources there were. But the rains kept coming, seven months out of the year, battering each manmade incursion into the jungle as if eager to erase its presence. They drove over potholes that would make even a New Yorker look twice. You could’ve bathed a baby in some of them.
But even cracked pavement was preferable to an unpaved dirt road, and Gabriel braked to a halt when he realized that was what he was driving on. Already, the mud beneath their tires was dragging at them, making progress difficult—he didn’t want to get the car stuck entirely. Revving the engine, he switched into reverse and backed up out of the muck till he was on asphalt again and under the overhang of a healthy-sized tree limb. Pocketing the keys, he got out. Sheba followed, the towel held over her head.
“We walk from here,” Gabriel said, and led the way.
Their first sight of Sigiriya came with a sudden strobe of lightning overhead. The rock didn’t look like a lion. It looked a little like Devil’s Tower—that same impression almost of a geyser of stone spouting from the ground, like a gargantuan oil strike frozen in mideruption. In front of the rock, a space had been cleared in the jungle, a thousand feet of little square gardens and paths and ponds, all of them now awash with rainwater. He strode quickly along the main path, mud sucking at his boots, the bandage around his ankle waterlogged and cold. Sheba walked beside him, hugging the bag from the plane to her side. Gabriel reached into it and drew out the flashlight—rubber-sheathed and waterproof and with a beam roughly as ineffective as the car’s headlights had been. It was better than nothing.
The rock grew in stuttering snapshot steps as they approached it, larger each time it was made visible by a crooked branch of lightning zigzagging through the sky. In certain spots the highest levels of the rock overhung the lowest, and Gabriel made for one of these. Though the wind continued to blow the rain against them, here at least was some small shelter from the storm. He could see how Sigiriya would have recommended itself to monks in the fourth century—BC or AD, it didn’t matter which—desperate for relief from the island’s thunderous deluges. That there were caves, too—warm, dry, possibly home to a local animal or two who could be cooked over a fire for dinner—was all the more reason.
But he and Sheba didn’t have the luxury of crawling into a cave and waiting out the storm. Shielding it with one hand, he drew Lucy’s device from his pocket once more. Sixty miles exactly. That wasn’t much time at all.
Squeezing through a narrow opening between two tall walls of rock, Gabriel found a set of shallow stone steps leading up along the side. He put out one hand to steady himself against the rock face and shouted back for Sheba to do the same. For a moment she held onto the waterlogged towel, then she crammed it in the bag. “Hell with it,” she said. She didn’t bother putting up the hood. Her hair was plastered to her scalp within seconds.
They climbed slowly, carefully. The path wound around the huge boulder, narrowing as it went till there was no more than a person’s width of stone beneath their feet, and nothing to their left but a sheer drop. The rock they walked on was slick and slippery, and pitted with shallow depressions that had accumulated puddles but looked solid in the flashlight’s glare. A misstep, a loss of balance, a moment’s error, and they’d be falling through the darkness. But not for long. Gabriel thought of the man who’d plunged to his death in front of his eyes back in New York. Even a fall of a hundred feet would take just two or three seconds, not long enough even to mouth a prayer. Not that Gabriel was a praying man, and he didn’t think he’d turn into one at the end, but—
He hugged the rock and climbed in minute steps. He didn’t want to find out.
Behind him, Sheba was saying something but the powerful winds were snatching her words away before they could reach him. He hung back so she could catch up. When she did, he could hear the fear in her voice. “Can you see…how much farther…?”
“Not much,” he said, though the honest answer would have been, No, I can’t see.
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he said, and reached out a hand to stroke her shoulder gently. “Just pretend you’re taking a walk down Grafton Street on a Sunday afternoon. Sidewalk there’s not a whole lot wider than this.”
“Maybe,” Sheba said, “but stepping off the curb’s not such a big deal.”
“I thought you said your father took you climbing and such,” Gabriel said, “and that you enjoyed it.”
“I enjoyed it when he took me hunting and fishing and camping out,” Sheba said. “I always hated the climbing.”
“Well, there’s not much of it left,” Gabriel said. “Just a little bit.”
“You’re fucking lying to me, Hunt,” she said.
“Yes,” Gabriel said.
“Well, thank you,” she said. “Keep doing it.” And she put out a hand again to find the wall beside her.
But it didn’t land on stone.
A noise arose as her hand hit the side of something soft and fibrous, an angry buzzing sound like a hundred cell phones set to vibrate going off at once. Gabriel swung the beam of the flashlight around and it slid across a cluster of dark misshapen sacs hanging from the underside of a small ledge of rock. Sheba’s palm had landed directly on one of them, crushing the side, and through the hole was streaming a cloud of—
“Move!” Gabriel shouted. “Now!”
Wasps. The so-called “wild bees” of Sri Lanka were legendary for their viciousness—some years back there’d been a newspaper article about a wasp attack that had left two hundred tourists in the hospital with swollen limbs and constricted breathing passages. And if you had the misfortune to be allergic to their venom—
He grabbed Sheba’s arm and pulled her around in front of him, putting himself in the raging insects’ path, an act of chivalry that was rewarded instantly when he felt a stinger plunge into the flesh of his neck. He swatted wildly over his shoulder till he felt the back of his hand collide with the wasp’s body, then slapped his hand against the rock, crushing it.
But there were too many to kill one by one. There were too many even to see one by one—what he saw, silhouetted against the general darkness, was a cloud with undulating edges made up of hundreds of enraged wasps unleashed into the thunderstorm. The rain was probably confusing them, but not enough—several dozen came flying toward Gabriel, who threw up one leather-jacketed arm in front of his face and slapped a flurry of the bugs aside.
“The towel,” he shouted, “hold it up and climb as fast as you can.”
He felt Sheba move beside him, saw the white of the towel out of the corner of one eye, heard her taking small but rapid steps along the precarious path.
A wasp darted in under his guard and jabbed into his chin. He could feel the swelling begin immediately.
He turned and ran, the wasps screaming angrily behind him, and not far behind at that. He felt his injured foot slip and caught himself with one hand, digging his fingers desperately into a crevice in the rock. Wasps flung themselves by the dozen against his back and legs, unable to penetrate the thick leather of the jacket or the fabric of his pants. But he felt one in his hair as well and another at his neck, which was already swollen and painful from the earlier sting. He brushed the one in his hair away and kept going, urging Sheba along when he caught up to her.