The Tower (31 page)

All the communications and technology in the compound had either been destroyed or looted, effectively cutting it off from the wider world. So while everyone else was out beyond the perimeter fence Liv traced cables from the dish on the roof of the main building and hot-wired the laptop into the compound’s satellite link.

Like any journalist Liv was a total information junkie and she’d been cold-turkey for days now so the first thing she did when she fired up the laptop and got online was call up some news sites. She scanned the headlines feeling the buzz of an addict getting a fresh hit. Since her brother had fallen to his death from the summit of the Citadel, Ruin and the story that had unfolded in the wake of his sacrifice had never been far from the news. It was her story too – and also Gabriel’s. She did a News search on Google with GABRIEL in the subject line. Pages of results came back, all several days old and just retelling stories she already knew: his arrest at the hospital for suspected terrorist acts and homicide; his subsequent escape from custody; the manhunt that ensued with her picture and name next to his. After that there was nothing. The only more recent stories relating to Ruin were medical ones concerning an outbreak of what some of the more tabloidy sites were calling ‘a plague’.

Liv clicked on the top result, her heart racing at the implications of this. She remembered the symbol she had seen on the Starmap, the circle with the cross through it that made her think of disease and suffering. Was this what it predicted – the event that would result in the end of days?

The article opened and she speed-read it, her mind pulling out the facts as her eyes skimmed the words: outbreak centred around the Citadel – eighteen dead, eighty-six in isolation – the whole city of Ruin in quarantine and under police control.

She opened another window and searched for RUIN POLICE. Skype was already installed on the desktop and she opened this too, logging in through her own account that thankfully still had some credit on it. She copied the number of the switchboard into the keypad, adding the international dialling codes for Turkey then hit the key to boost the speakers as the number dialled and started to ring.

It rang for a long time, long enough for her to read another article about how the infected had been transferred from the Public Church into the Citadel itself. There was a link to a news clip but someone answered before she could play it.

‘Ruin Police,’ a voice said, with chaos sounding in the background.

‘Hi,’ Liv said in fluent Turkish, ‘could you connect me to Inspector Arkadian?’

‘Name please?’

‘Liv Adamsen.’

‘One moment.’

The line switched to musak and Liv flipped back to the news site, scrolling through another article about the outbreak. It featured apocalyptic photos of empty streets and people standing by the public gate to the Old Town wearing full contamination suits. The Citadel soared up in the background, so terrible and familiar. Seeing it in this context made something click in Liv’s head and she pulled the folded piece of paper from her pocket and smoothed it flat on the desk while the tinny hold tune continued to play. She scanned the symbols again, her eyes settling on the beginning of the second line.

The symbol for disease followed by …

She looked back at the photo on the screen, the man in the contagion suit with the sharp outline of the mountain behind him.

… of course …

The second symbol represented the Citadel and the disease had started there and was now spreading. The next part of the prophecy was coming to pass.

The musak cut out.

‘Liv?’

‘Arkadian.’ More noise in the background, like he was on a street full of children. ‘Are you OK? I just saw the news about the outbreak.’

‘It’s chaos here. People are scared. I’m scared. We’re evacuating the children from the city. Where are you?’

She looked out of the window at the distant movement of people working on the hill as they dug the new grave. ‘Still in the desert,’ she said. ‘We found it.’

‘I know. Gabriel told me.’

Liv felt the world shift. ‘Gabriel! You spoke to him?’

‘Yes.’ Another pause filled with the babble of children. ‘Just before he was taken into the Citadel.’

Liv felt like all the air had been sucked from the room.

‘He was sick, Liv, he had the virus – but he was not as sick as the others.’ She gripped the sides of her chair and reminded herself to breathe. ‘Most of them go mad when the disease takes them, but not Gabriel. He rode all the way back here because he knew he had it. He didn’t want it to spread. It was Gabriel who insisted the disease be contained inside the Citadel. He wanted to take it back where it came from. He wanted to beat it. And if anyone can do it, it’s him.’

Liv tried to speak but couldn’t. In her ear she could hear Arkadian still speaking but she didn’t hear his words. Her eyes dropped down to the red stained piece of paper and scanned the second line again, a terrible new meaning emerging from it in the light of Arkadian’s revelation.

Disease

Citadel

A knight on horseback – Gabriel

She remembered the words on the note he had left her, telling her that leaving her was the hardest thing he had ever done. And now she knew why. He must have known he was infected. He’d known that and had still ridden all the way back to the Citadel, just to protect her.

She looked at the remaining symbols on the second line of the prophecy, hoping she might find something hopeful in them, but all she saw was more misery.

She knew what it meant now. The T was her, the circle confinement and the moon and chevron told her how long it would all last.

Nine moons – Eight months.

She clicked on the video clip embedded in the news article. It had been filmed from a news helicopter at night so the quality wasn’t great. A bright searchlight picked out a procession of patients strapped to stretchers and being carried to the mountain. She studied the faces, all looking straight up into the sky. Even through the grainy images she could see the masks of pain their faces had become. Tears started to run down her cheeks then the light swung away, settling again on the last stretcher to emerge from the church. She hit the space bar to pause it just as Gabriel looked straight up at the camera. It was like he was staring straight at her, like he was saying goodbye. Her love. Her life – being carried away on a stretcher, and into the heart of the hateful mountain.

Franklin finished his cigarette and flicked it out of the window. ‘You ever been married, Shepherd?’

‘No.’

‘And you don’t have kids, do you?’

‘No, I don’t.’

They were on the outskirts of the town now with widely spaced houses emerging from the trees, a general store with lights burning in the windows and a sign outside saying
St Matthews Piggly Wiggly
. There was a gas station on the other side of the road, also open for business. Franklin drove past them both, all pretence of getting food and gas now abandoned.

‘When you have kids, everything changes. It’s like taking your heart out of your chest and watching it walk around. You’d do anything for them, anything at all. And if you have a daughter,’ he shook his head, ‘well that’s a whole other ball game. The world suddenly seems ten times more dangerous than it did before, a hundred times, and she is so vulnerable and fragile in it.’

He slowed down and took a right into a one-lane street lined with neat, single-storey houses with wooden porches and brick chimneys, their front lawns all blanketed in white.

‘So you work your ass off to put a roof over her head, give her a good life, protect her from all the crap that you know is out there, the stuff that you see every day. Everything you do takes on new meaning, every bad guy I ever put away was dedicated in some way to my daughter. I did it for her, to make the world a safer place for her, and for her mother.’

He took another left onto a road lined with bigger houses, some with four-car drives.

‘And you try so hard to shut off the darkness you have to deal with but it’s always there, like a stain. So you keep it from your kids by keeping yourself from them, because, in a way, you are the thing you want to protect them from.’

He brought the car to a halt outside a house with a long sloping roof like a ski jump. Franklin fixed his eyes on it and killed the engine.

‘Then one day you realize you don’t know who they are any more, either of them. You’ve spent so long working to give your family a better life that you’re no longer a part of it. You’ve become a stranger in your own home. You can’t talk to them, you can’t understand them, you’re only aware of the distance between you where once there was no gap at all.’ He looked away and Shepherd wondered if the tough old bastard was actually crying.

‘I’m sorry I dragged you all the way out here,’ Franklin said, turning back and looking him square in the eye. ‘I kind of convinced myself it was all about the investigation but in the end it looks like it’s all about me.’ He nodded at the sideways house. ‘And you were right about the homing instinct.’

‘You don’t have to explain it.’

Franklin turned to him. ‘You said you didn’t have a home.’

‘I don’t, at least not like this. But home means different things to different people.’ He took a breath ready to tell him … about Melisa, about his missing two years, even about how he was using the MPD files to try and find her again. But just then the door of the house opened and a girl of about twenty stepped out.

Cold air flooded in as Franklin got out of the car. Shepherd watched him walk up the drive towards her, like he was being pulled by an invisible thread. He stopped a few feet short of her and they stared at each other. Then she stepped forward and wrapped her slender arms round his neck and buried her face in his chest. Behind them another woman, an older version of the girl, stepped onto the porch and stared at them for a moment. Then she too came forward, a smile breaking on her face like a sunrise, and Shepherd looked away, feeling uncomfortable about sharing such a private moment even from a distance.

He stared down the street at the other houses. Some were empty and dark, the drives showing the fading tyre tracks of cars no longer there. Other houses glowed, their festive decorations lighting up the snow like Christmas cards.

Witnessing the power of the homing instinct and its effect even on someone like Franklin made him realize that the pull to find Melisa and the reckless things it was making him do was simply the same thing working in him.

The rap of a knuckle on his window snapped him back to the present.

Franklin was standing outside the car. Shepherd got out, snow crunching beneath his shoes and cold air on his skin.

‘You want to come in, grab some lunch?’

Shepherd looked over at the porch where the two women were standing watching them. ‘I don’t think so. I’d just be in the way.’