Kinderman was standing over the woman, holding her gun in his hand as if it might bite him. Shepherd could tell by the way the woman was lying, crooked against the door, that she was dead. Arkadian was still down, blood spreading out beneath him. Shepherd set Hevva down and crouched low to look into Arkadian’s face. His eyes were open and he was still breathing — but only just.
“I didn’t know you had another gun,” Shepherd said.
Arkadian smiled weakly. “I didn’t.”
“Then why…?”
“You needed a diversion,” Arkadian whispered between snatched breaths. “Look after your little girl. Life ceases to have much meaning — when you lose the ones you love.”
Then he closed his eyes and was gone.
103
The first batch of inoculations took place the same day Athanasius woke up. All the infected in the cathedral cave, forty-seven men and women, were given the serum one after the other, almost wiping out the stocks at a stroke.
When every patient had been injected Dr. Kaplan returned to the main lab and took an ampoule of the serum from the fridge. There were just twelve doses left and they were expecting new cases of the infected within the hour.
He copied all the clinical files to a flash drive then hand-wrote a note to his opposite number coordinating the medical effort outside the mountain.
Ekram,
The serum contained in this vial has been successful in curing one patient so far but we are conducting further trials on all remaining patients. I pray it is successful — we all pray it is. I leave it to you and the politicians to decide how much of it should be produced and when but my advice would be to make as much of it as you can right away. We can always destroy it if these trials fail, but we cannot suddenly conjure it out of nothing if they succeed.
All the details of its makeup are contained in the enclosed drive.
Yours, Ahmet Kaplan
He packed the vial inside a shockproof container and placed everything inside a padded envelope, which he took to the tribute cave himself. He had not been in this part of the mountain for months. The air still smelled of smoke from the fire in the library and reminded him of all the bodies he’d seen burned in the garden.
No more — he promised himself — please, God, no more.
The platform was being prepared when he entered the cave, ready to be lowered to collect the day’s batch of infected. The wooden platform rocked as he walked across to the box reserved for correspondence and placed the envelope in it.
He returned to the cave and watched the platform sink down through the hatch and out into the clear air carrying the first bit of good news to leave the mountain in many months.
104
Shepherd carried Hevva out of the kitchen and into the sunlight. He didn’t want her to remain inside with the freshly slain and the smell of gunpowder in the air.
He sat her down in the shade of an awning and bathed her face, wiping away the worst of the blood then dabbing it clean with wet tissues, all the while talking to her, telling her she was fine and even starting to believe it himself as the blood washed away. Head wounds always bled more than most others. The nick in the ear was all she had suffered, at least physically. She had also witnessed her newfound father shoot two people dead. He didn’t want to think what the long-term effects of all that might be.
He looked into Hevva’s eyes and was about to tell her to sit tight while he went in search of a Band-Aid then thought better of it and scooped her back up into his arms. There was no way he was going to let her out of his sight — not now, probably not ever again.
They found a medical kit in an office and he picked up the whole thing, figuring it would be better to get away from here as fast as possible in case the killers were not alone. Only Kinderman seemed to have vanished.
He spotted him up at the top of the hill, sitting in a chair in the shade of the tree and staring down at something in his lap. Shepherd carried Hevva all the way up, sweating from the effort. “We need to leave,” he said.
“Indeed,” Kinderman replied, his eyes fixed on the screen of a laptop connected by a long wire to a portable satellite uplinker. “But the real question is ‘where?’ Look.”
Shepherd moved around so he could see the screen. “This shows Hubble’s new orbit.” Kinderman pointed at a graphic image of a wire-frame globe with a circle around it. “The other image is a direct feed from Hubble itself. That’s what it’s looking at right now.”
Shepherd leaned against the trunk of the tree for support and stared at the crawling satellite image of the earth. At the moment it was showing desert, lots of brown desert, so barren it could easily have been the surface of some distant, uninhabited planet.
“I told you shifting Hubble out of position had a practical dimension,” Kinderman continued. “Not only will Mala worldwide see it appear in Taurus tonight, it will also lead the way back to the home we all lost. Back to the origin of everything, where everything started and everything will begin again.”
“The Mala star,” Shepherd whispered, remembering Kinderman’s messages to Douglas.
They watched the crawl of brown, Hevva getting heavier in his arms with every passing minute until he had to let her slip to the ground. He was exhausted and hot and a little faint after the adrenaline high of earlier. He was anxious to get away and was about to insist on such when a thin line of green appeared on the screen, getting thicker as the world turned, revealing a large patch of green with tendrils snaking out across the brown earth like the roots of a huge plant.
“There it is,” Kinderman said, with something close to wonder. “Paradise found.” He squinted at the telemetry and wrote down the terrestrial coordinates. “It’s southeast from here, about six hundred miles or so, somewhere in Iraq. Less than a day’s drive if we take turns at the wheel.” He hit a command button and another window popped up containing the same countdown application Shepherd had downloaded from Douglas’s computer, the numbers now much lower. “We should just be able to make it in time.”
His fingers drummed on the keyboard as he copied links to the countdown and to the Hubble feed into a Web site and pressed publish. He turned and smiled up at Shepherd. “Mala.org just went live — the modern way to follow a star. Come on, we need to get going. My jeep is right over there.”
“I need to grab Hevva’s things from the other car.” Shepherd stood upright and felt the world lurch. He reached out to steady himself against the trunk of the tree but missed, grazing his cheek against the bark as he fell to the ground. Something sharp jarred his ribs as he hit the ground. He reached for it with his hand and it came away wet and bloody.
Oh Jesus, he thought as darkness claimed him, damn woman didn’t miss after all.
105
Seven days after the initial inoculations, the first patient recovered.
She was a forty-three-year-old bank clerk, born and raised in Ruin, who seemed more impressed by where she now found herself than by the fact that she had just survived a disease that had wiped out a quarter of the city’s population.
The cathedral cave now contained over three hundred beds, most of which were occupied. Normally the numbers remained steady at around fifty, the new intake being roughly balanced by the death tolclass="underline" but no one had died since they had begun the inoculations, the daily ritual of removing the bodies to the garden had stopped and the pyre on the firestone that had burned without pause since the very beginning had now gone out.