Newark, New Jersey
‘This is you.’ Ski pushed open the door with a flourish the hotel room beyond did not deserve.
It was stark and functional and not much bigger than the double bed it contained. A feeble amount of dawn light leaked in from a single window opposite and beyond was a prime view of a solid brick wall.
‘It’s perfect,’ Liv said, stepping across the threshold.
Ski stayed outside in the corridor like a nervous date, digging around in his jacket pocket for something. ‘Here,’ he said, holding out a cheap-looking cell phone. ‘It’s got about fifty bucks’ credit on it. You need to call anyone, use that. It’s virtually untraceable.’ Liv took it gratefully. ‘I’ve put my number on there, in case you need to contact me in a hurry. You just take it easy for a while, OK?’ He nodded, as if answering his own question, then turned and was gone. Ski wasn’t one for big shows of emotion, but he had a huge heart, and that counted for more than anything.
Closing the door behind him, Liv twisted the lock until it wouldn’t turn any more before checking out her surroundings. In many ways it wasn’t dissimilar to the hospital room in Ruin. The décor was slightly better and the bed was a double, but other than that it had the same institutional blandness.
Ski had explained to her on the way over that the hotel was used to house key witnesses and jury members during big trials. He had checked her in using a dummy name and false details so that her own name and passport number wouldn’t pop up on any databases. It would keep her off the radar, for a while at least, and that made her feel a little bit safer.
She took her laptop and charger from her bag and plugged them in by the countertop that served as a desk. At one end was a lamp with a mirror on the wall behind it, at the other a flat-screen TV. Liv switched it on and turned to a news channel out of long worn habit. She was about to start unpacking the rest of her things when the news anchor said something that made her head snap to the screen:
‘The first quake occurred last night at eight p.m. local time in the historic Turkish city of Ruin. Though the tremors were not serious, they appeared to set off a chain reaction of other incidents that swept west across Turkey, and south and east into Syria and northern Iraq. Seismologists say this ripple effect has never been recorded before and they have been unable to give an explanation for what may have caused it.’
Liv stared at the map.
Her plane had taken off at precisely eight o’clock.
She recalled the lurch she had felt as the wheels had left the ground, like a cord being snapped inside her, then the lights blinking out below as the plane climbed into the sky. Were these things connected somehow? They couldn’t be. They couldn’t.
‘So far, the only deaths appear to have been at Ruin Hospital. In an official statement, police confirmed that Kathryn Mann – one of the suspects in the recent bombing incident at the Citadel – is among the dead, although it is not known whether this was as a direct result of the earthquake …’
Liv stared at the screen, numb from the news.
‘There are now only three remaining survivors from the Citadel bombing: the monk, whose whereabouts is unknown; Liv Adamsen, who it is believed discharged herself from hospital a few hours before the quake struck; and Gabriel Mann, who escaped from police custody at around the same time.’
Liv felt the blood drain from her face and dry nausea rise up in her throat.
Kathryn – dead.
Gabriel – gone.
She wondered if he had really escaped, or whether something had happened to him too.
Still in a daze, Liv opened her laptop and Googled Ortus, the foundation where he worked. If anyone could make contact with him or tell her where he currently was, it would be them. She skimmed the homepage, found contact details for the Ruin office and reached for Ski’s phone. Having copied its number on to a scratch pad, she dialled the number for Ortus, wondering how long fifty bucks would last dialling international on a no-contract tariff. A foreign ringtone purred in her ear, then someone answered in Turkish.
‘Hi,’ Liv said, powering through the language barrier, ‘do you speak English?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m trying to get a message to Gabriel Mann.’
A pause. ‘He is not here.’
‘I know, but is there anyone who might be able to contact him? I’m a friend of his, and I need to speak to him very urgently.’
‘He is not here.’
Liv wasn’t surprised at the stonewall reception, but it didn’t make it any less frustrating. ‘Can I leave a message for him, please? Just a message.’
‘What message?’
‘Ask him to call Liv. He’ll understand. And thank you, it’s very urgent.’ She read out her phone number, thanked the woman again, then hung up. There was no way of knowing whether her message would be passed on or simply dropped in the trash.
Frantically she ran through a mental list of the people she had met during her time in Ruin who might know something, but realized with a creeping sense of dread that most of them were now dead. Perhaps Ski was right about her being cursed. The history of the Sacrament was littered with curses and dire prophesies. Liv had been part of one herself. She remembered sitting in the shadow of the Citadel and discussing them with …
Opening another tab in the browser, she Googled ‘Dr Miriam Anata’. In amongst the hits was a link to a website. Liv opened it and a picture filled the screen of the same formidable woman she had last met in the old town of Ruin. There was a contact page with publishers’ details for all her books, a talent agent for public speaking engagements, and an email contact for the author. She clicked on the link and started to write.
Dr Anata,
This is Liv Adamsen. If you know how to contact G then please get him to call me urgently. I am safe and so is this number.
She copied Ski’s cell into the message then sent it.
As she watched it leave the outbox a sense of uselessness and frustration settled on her. She was running out of options and had got precisely nowhere.
Flipping back to the Google results, she trawled through them in search of another number. In an hour or two she could call one of her colleagues at the paper and get them to dig out a home or mobile number for Dr Anata from the database, but she didn’t want to wait that long, nor did she want to get caught up in a conversation with a reporter who would inevitably want details of everything that had happened to her in the last two weeks.
From somewhere down the corridor came the lonely sound of a door slamming, followed by footsteps hurrying away. It occurred to her that she could sit here all day, if she felt like it, until Ski came back to check on her and politely tell her that they needed the room and was there anyone she could stay with? But there was no one. Her family were all dead. Everything she had been was gone.
She wondered how many of this room’s occupants had experienced the same feeling; key witnesses, preparing to burn down their old lives by giving testimony in big trials. Perhaps the room was somehow tainted by too many desolate thoughts of lost histories and uncertain futures. How easy would it be to give up, standing in a room like this with a brick wall for a view?
Unnerved by the dark dead-end route her mind was taking, Liv jolted herself into action. She emptied the remaining contents of her holdall on to the bed and started to fold the clothes, giving order to the few things she still possessed. She placed the history book on the nightstand along with her notebook and found the envelope that had contained the Turkish currency. She was about to drop it in the bin when it occurred to her that the few receipts it contained might hold some clue as to where she had been during her time in Ruin. Inside were a couple of taxi receipts, one for food, and a large piece of folded paper. She opened it up, hoping it might be an itemized hotel bill or something more informative. She was completely unprepared for what it turned out to be.
One whole side was smudged with charcoal where it had been rubbed against a stone relief. And where the charcoal was missing, symbols were revealed: the same symbols she had seen in the book. She turned it over and found a handwritten note:
This will not explain everything, nothing ever could, but it may be a start. I hope, having eased your escape from the mountain, things will change and we can talk of this further in person. But if the Citadel remains closed, as well it might, know you always have a friend here. To contact me, give confession at the public church and ask for Brother Peacock. Any sealed message you pass on will come to me unopened.
Yours
Brother Athanasius
The note jarred a series of fresh memories loose.
She remembered the monk, his smooth head glowing in the dark of the chapel as he led them away through the smoke-filled tunnels of the mountain and down to where the outside world had broken in. He had helped them get away – he was offering help still. She turned the page and stared at the smudged symbols, so strange yet familiar. The main body was in a solid block, but at the bottom they formed the shape of the T. It was the biggest example of the lost language she had seen – bigger than any of those pictured in the book.
As her eyes traced the outlines, the whispering in her head began to rise in volume and her skin started to prickle. She had been out of the hospital far too long now to write these symptoms off as some kind of drug-induced side effect. Whatever was causing them wasn’t chemical; it had to be psychological or something else she wasn’t fully prepared to consider.
Spreading the piece of paper on the desktop, she focused once more on the symbols. Almost immediately the whispering rose again, getting louder the harder she concentrated. It swamped the hiss of traffic from the road outside, filling her head while her skin crawled with tiny pinpricks. Liv rode it out, forcing herself to bear it as if she were holding her hand over a flame.
The whispering took form, becoming a voice in her head, and the symbols before her eyes began to shift, revealing words that explained everything …