“Let’s just hope our side wins, or we’re going to have some very ugly company,” Walker said.
They began to disperse, Beyza and Dunlap on their mission, Dr. Tang to check on her new patients, and Walker and Kim last of all.
“I’m sorry,” Sophie said to Kim before they left the worship chamber.
Kim frowned. “For what?”
“I shouldn’t be the one telling the sergeant what to do. It’s your show down here.”
Kim reached out and took her hand. “You’re a good leader, and so far you’re keeping your head when a lot of people would be out of their minds. This was your show to start with, and it’s easy to see why. But we’re in this together now, whatever happens.”
Sophie squeezed her hand and thanked her, and then she stood in the entrance to the worship chamber and watched Kim and Walker head back toward their temporary quarters.
Only when they’d gone did she lean against the wall and lift a shaking hand to her mouth to stifle the cry she’d been wanting to unleash for hours.
God, she needed sleep.
In the quiet of the worship chamber, gunfire drifted down through the ventilation shafts again. It occurred to Sophie that if they were not very lucky, she and her team might be the next generation of ghosts haunting Derveyî.
SEVENTEEN
Walker and Kim lay facing one another on a pair of cots. He felt torn in half, part of him certain he ought to stay with Kim even as the other part was drawn to the conflict aboveground. He hated how vulnerable it made him feel to be out of the fight and to be ignorant of the situation. He had gone up to the entrance and spoken to the volunteers who were monitoring things. Major Bernstein had apparently sent a young soldier over some time earlier with a message for everyone in Derveyî.
Tell them to keep their heads down, Bernstein had said. We’ll let you folks know when we’re done with these fuckers.
Walker liked the major’s confidence, but it was difficult to share it when a different sort of battle was raging underground.
“I’m not going to be able to sleep,” Kim said. “It’s insane to think any of us can.”
Walker studied her, all thoughts of the battle overhead forgotten. “I wish you’d told me how panicked you were. About your claustrophobia.”
Kim gave a small nod, her face brushing against the pillow. “I had to face it. Just you being here helped me more than spending a lot of time talking about it would have.”
Walker reached across the space between them, and their fingers latched together for a few seconds before she released him.
“Are we going to get out of this?” she asked.
Walker sat up and fixed her with a hard look. “We’ve been through worse than this and survived. Whatever happens, we’ll take one crisis at a time. Let’s try to rest awhile. I know you said you can’t sleep—”
“I’m afraid to sleep,” she said quietly. “I’m so tired, but I feel like the second I close my eyes, something worse will happen.”
“We have to try if we’re going to be any use to anyone in the morning.”
“I know,” Kim replied. “I just … I still have nightmares about the mountain. About the ark. When I’m home, I wake up and it’s okay; I can catch my breath and know that I’m safe. But it’s different here. I know you have them, too. Sometimes you wake up and you’re panicked and pale, and one night you were shouting. I don’t know if you remember.”
Walker had been having nightmares for a very long time.
“I don’t remember that specifically,” he said. “But as awful as Ararat was, my nightmares aren’t usually about that. The worst ones, the ones that wake me up like that, are about Guatemala.”
Kim said nothing. Walker glanced into the darkest corner of the room and tried not to think about the worst night in Guatemala. Another night in a cave. The first time he’d survived a horror that had ended with most of his team dead. He’d fucked up that night, and it had cost him a great deal, but not as much as the people he’d let down. What were nightmares and a lifetime of chronic pain in his back and his leg compared to what had happened to them on his watch? Dr. Tang had talked about ghosts, but Walker believed it was the things inside people that haunted them the most.
A low whistling noise drew his attention, and he glanced over to see that despite her reluctance, Kim had fallen asleep and begun to snore lightly. He knew he had to try to do the same and was just about to lie down when the curtain drew back and Dr. Tang entered.
He raised a hand and gestured to Kim. Dr. Tang nodded tiredly and walked toward the third cot in the room.
“You don’t mind if I sleep in here?” Walker said quietly.
“I’m barely on my feet,” Dr. Tang rasped. “Sleep wherever you like.”
Walker felt relieved. He wanted to stick close to them—to Kim, especially.
“How were they?” he whispered. “Rachel and Dmitri and the others?”
Dr. Tang kept her back to him, standing for a moment in thought. “They’re worse. The whole south wing has symptoms. Nobody in the north wing admitted to having a rash or much more than cold symptoms, but some of them might have been lying. Regardless, they’re all confined to their rooms until we get more medical staff here. The infected are going to need treatment as soon as possible.”
“But how do you know how to treat them?”
“I don’t know yet. USAMRIID will have a mobile lab. We’ll run some quick tests on things that seem likely. Whatever this is, it probably at least shares roots with something we’re familiar with. There will be medications we can try once we know more.”
“And if you’re wrong?” Walker asked.
Dr. Tang tilted her head as if she hadn’t understood the question. Or as if she’d thought he ought to know the answer.
Walker thought he did know, after all, and the answer chilled him.
* * *
Sophie lay alone with her fear. How had it come to this, some sort of blind chess match against one illness or another? Talk of ghosts? She knew she ought to have asked Dr. Tang precisely how sick her staff were and their prognoses, but she didn’t want to know. All her life she had been haunted by disease, by the memory of hospitals and the smell of the sick. There on the cot, alone in her quarters, she could remember the torrent of emotions she’d gone through during cancer treatment. She had made friends with Caryssa, a girl whose birthday had been a year and a day before Sophie’s and whose chemo schedule tended to match up with hers. Their mothers had become friendly through the shared fear and the courage of their daughters.
Then Caryssa’s schedule seemed to change. Sophie had asked her mother about it several times before, at last, she admitted that Caryssa’s chemo had not been as successful as Sophie’s. Months later, her mother had told her that Caryssa had died. By then, Sophie had been in complete remission, and she couldn’t help but wonder why she had been spared and Caryssa taken. In a secret place inside her, a place where she put all the feelings that made her ashamed, she felt glad that if it had to be one of them, it hadn’t been her. The feeling tortured her, but she could never make it go away. She remembered the sparkle in her friend’s eyes, even when she had been at her sickest, and always wondered whether Death had chosen wisely.
After that, she had found it harder to make friends, harder to get close to people. It hadn’t helped that she had felt so isolated during treatment. Some people came to see her—family, a few friends with their parents, even her teacher, Mrs. Campos—but most stayed away. Her mother told her people felt awkward, they didn’t know what to say, and Sophie knew that must be true because even the ones who did come to see her seemed as if they would rather have been anywhere else.
Human connection seemed like too much effort, too much pain.
And now her father didn’t even know her anymore. Disease had taken him away, and he wasn’t even dead yet.
She wanted to reach out now, which seemed so surreal to her. All those years trying to avoid becoming too dependent on fr
iends and lovers, trying to prevent herself from loving anyone too much to lose them, and now she yearned for contact. Lamar had been her friend, and he had betrayed her. He had been the closest to her among the staff, and now who could she turn to? Not Martin, wherever he was. Their rapport had been defined by his crush on her. She prayed he was all right.
Sophie knew she could talk to Beyza or even Alton, but they were both trapped in here with her, and it would be unfair—even foolish, or cruel—to look to them for comfort. Alton did not even have a filtration mask.
Her gaze shifted to her laptop, and she considered trying to get Alex Jarota on Skype. The thought gave her stomach a sick twist. How desperate did she have to be in order to think of Alex?
On the small table between her cot and the next one, her cell phone sat, quiet and dark. Selfishly, she wished she could call Steven, but after she had left him confused and angry in New York, it had taken him over a year to find a new beginning. To phone him now when she needed solace would be wrong, and she would never get a signal this far underground, anyway. For that, she needed her laptop.
Anyway, it wasn’t Steven’s voice she really wanted to hear.
Sophie opened her laptop and started up a phone app, then called her mother. Somewhere in France, her mom’s cell phone began to buzz. On the fifth ring, a sleepy voice picked up.
“Whoever this is, do you know it’s the middle of the night and decent people are sleeping?” her mother said.
At first, Sophie had difficulty speaking. The sound of her mother’s voice had unraveled something in her, and now she wanted to scream or cry.
“Hello? I’m hanging up in three seconds,” her mother snapped. “Middle of the goddamn—”
“Mom, it’s me.”
“Sophie. Honey, what’s the matter? Are you okay?”
She took a breath and grinned, thinking the smile—fake as it was—might translate into her voice. “I’m fine. I just miss you. Both of you. I wish I was there.”
“Well, you’re nearly done, aren’t you? That’s what you said. You should come and see us as soon as you’ve wrapped up your project. You should see your father soon.”
The message came through loud and clear. You should see your father soon. The way her mother had said it, Sophie understood that if she did not see him soon, she might never see him again.
“How are you, Mom?”
“Tired,” she said with a little laugh. “But I’m glad to hear your voice. You sound strange, though. Are you sick?”
Sophie nearly burst out laughing with the bubble of hysteria that rose in her chest at that moment. “I think I am,” she said, shaking. “But I’ll be all right.”
“You have to take care of yourself, Sophie.”
“I’m working on it.”
The line went quiet for a moment, both of them sleepy enough to let the conversation lag, neither apparently knowing what to say next until, at last, her mother spoke again.
“He had a good day today, Sophie. For a few hours, he knew exactly who he was and who I was. He asked for you.”
A knife to her heart. For all the mixed emotions she had about her father, to know that he had asked for her in a moment of lucidity and must have been disappointed that she hadn’t been there … it stabbed deeply.
“What did you … I mean, he really knew who I was? He wanted to see me?” Sophie asked.
“I told him he would see you soon. That I would call you tomorrow and he could talk to you on the phone if he was feeling up to it. I think he knew then that he’d be fading soon, but he said … he said, ‘When you talk to her, tell her I love her, and I’m sorry.’”
Sophie shook and began to cry silently. Tears rarely flowed easily with her, but tonight was different.
“I asked him what he was sorry for,” her mother said. “And he told me, ‘For missing my chance to be better.’ He really does love you, Sophie. Down inside, the part of him that hasn’t been erased … he loves you so much, and so do I.”
“Thanks, Mom,” she managed. “I’ve … I’ve gotta go. I’m sorry I woke you. We both need some sleep.”
Her mother started to go on, but Sophie ended the call and then closed the laptop. Head hung, she let herself cry for another minute or two, and then she took several deep breaths and wrested control of her emotions.
Whatever happened next, tears would not help them.
She lay down, thinking about her father and his disease and the jar sitting even now inside that contagion box in the Pandora Room. She would never have believed the myth of Pandora might be true, but there seemed no other explanation. But why couldn’t it have been the jar of blessings? The jar of cures?
Somehow it seemed only natural that the only true legends would be the awful ones.
* * *
Beyza unclipped a flashlight from her belt and shone its light down a narrow, sloping corridor the Beneath Project had lost interest in several months earlier. The corridor led to a series of chambers that were virtually identical to one another, the dwellings of some of the people who had lived in what they now called Derveyî. The lighting rigs had been removed from here a while back and repurposed elsewhere.
“Where’s the light switch?” Sergeant Dunlap muttered, voice low.
“There isn’t one.”
“I can see that. It’s a joke,” he said, taking out his own flashlight. He clicked it on and held it with his left hand, pistol in his right. “Why don’t you let me go first?”
Beyza ignored him and started down the corridor, hating the awareness of the gun at her back but not interested in letting Dunlap precede her. If they did run into Martin down there in the dark, she thought there might be a fifty-fifty chance Dunlap would accidentally shoot him.
She thought about Cortez, waiting back in her room. He would be wondering what had become of her, worrying. Or perhaps he had fallen asleep. She hoped he had, for his sake, and hoped he had not, for her own.
“You always this quiet, or was it something I said?” Dunlap asked, his voice seeming to fill the darkness around them.
“I am focused on the task at hand,” Beyza replied.
“Okay, let’s focus. No sign of Martin so far. Why are we headed this way? You have a reason to think he’s down here?”
She bristled at his presumption that she should explain herself. “If you have a more efficient plan, by all means, suggest it.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“We’ve checked the obvious places,” Beyza replied. “Now there are a few I’d like to check that aren’t quite so obvious. Martin likes to wander when he’s upset.”
“He get upset a lot?”
“He’s not good at hiding his emotions, so when he’s depressed or upset, he vanishes.” She glanced at Dunlap, wondering why she felt she could be so open with him. “Martin has had a crush on Sophie for months. Maybe ever since he met her.”
“Can you still call it a crush if it lasts that long?” Dunlap asked.
Beyza said nothing. They reached the end of the corridor, where she shone her flashlight left and right. It appeared to be a dead end at first, but there were doors in both directions that led to staircases. To the right, if they’d shifted the door, they would have found stairs leading upward. She held up a hand to halt Dunlap, then reached out and gave the outer edge of the round door a gentle push. It turned as if weightless, a bit of architectural magic Beyza had never failed to find magnificent.
“Secret passages?” Dunlap asked.
“Related more to privacy than secrecy, we believe,” Beyza replied.
She slipped sideways through the door, entering a section of narrower tunnels, rougher-hewn chambers, and smaller rooms. In silence, she led the sergeant around corners, down short ramps, and up staircases comprised of as few as three steps.
“What are these, servants’ quarters?” Dunlap asked several minutes into this strange labyrinth.
“We don’t think so, but certainly the rooms of those less fortunate. There are several s
mall worship chambers here, and workshops as well. Animals were kept here, too, presumably prior to slaughter.”
“That’s a pleasant thought.”
Beyza paused and directed her flashlight beam into one small room after another, then up a narrow staircase that led into a strangely isolated room they believed had been used as a quiet place for meditation, or perhaps a nursery.
Dunlap stepped past her. Gun in one hand and flashlight in the other, he turned toward her, and she saw the furrow of his brow above his filtration mask.
“What’s that noise?” he asked.
Beyza stiffened. She had not wanted to admit to herself how much it unnerved her to walk through this darkness. Without Dunlap, she would never have come here looking for Martin, no matter what she’d promised Sophie. A flashlight made zero difference, and a dozen of them wouldn’t have helped much. But at least she wasn’t alone.
“I don’t hear anything,” she said, though that wasn’t strictly true.
“Come here. Closer to the wall,” Dunlap said.
The wall had a rough quality to it as if, unlike the rest of Derveyî, these rooms and passages had been carved and hollowed in haste. Beyza had long wondered if the work had remained unfinished, if one of the dead-end corridors had been meant to lead to a new entrance. The city had still been growing when its people had abandoned it.
“There. You hear that?” Dunlap asked.
“I do,” she admitted. A shushing noise, a whisper from below them, perhaps far below.
She trained her flashlight beam on the wall and saw the two small open holes where the wall met the floor, and the grooves in the wall that led up to similar holes above their heads.
“You spooked me,” she said. “They’re just air vents. No ghosts here.”
Even as she said it, though, it occurred to her that the flowing air sounded stronger here than elsewhere in Derveyî. Louder and layered as if there might be another susurrus of noise beneath the gusting drafts.
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