Gabriel had been unaffected by the cross-transfusion. Whatever defenses 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 vigiclass="underline" Gabriel, Kaplan, two technicians as dedicated and ever present as he was, and — at the center 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 that 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 as if 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 that 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.
101
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 around 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 predated 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 anymore. 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 toward the settlement and came to a parking area big enough to cater to the strange mix of tourists and archaeologists who 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 color 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-colored 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. “Okay,” 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, as if 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 around 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 anymore,” 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?”