“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.”
99
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 by 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 setup 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 forever. Perhaps Melisa had told him they planned to marry and he had taken desperate measures to ensure that it 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 gotten 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’ve 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 traveling 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 are you doing with getting the guidance systems back online?”
“Not so great. We could do with Dr. Kinderman’s help. I hope he’s okay 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.”
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.”
100
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, 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.