He traveled 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 center, the front hanging open on its hinges and 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 awhile, he had stood and spotted a long strand of blond hair — her hair — floating down through the beam of his torch. He caught it in his hand and now kept it wound around 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 where 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 reprogram 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 glycoprotein that acts like a sort of key to fool the cell’s defenses 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 reprogram 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 they didn’t, every cold would develop into a more chronic form such as pneumonia, which is what happens in immunosuppressed 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 reinfected, 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 percent 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 toward the door to the bedchamber. “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 center 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 on to Gabriel’s.