“So,” said Luke. “Are you confident enough of your deductive prowess to fly all the way to…”
Luke squinted at the atlas, his finger finding the nearest town to the cross hair.
“Bihr’el?”
Chris looked at the layered images onscreen. Circles within circles within circles. Lines and pictograms, rivers long gone from a world vastly changed. Chasing a phantom of hope across the earth, searching for something that had sunk into human mythology. Was it folly to continue, to shoot across the oceans once again on nothing more than a fanciful and tenuous hunch?
Love was folly.
Faith was folly.
Yet throughout human history, God help the man who stood in their way.
11
The reception cabin was closed by the time Chris and Luke returned to the Black-Footed Ferret Lodge. The night was cooling down rapidly, reaching a comfortable temperature for the first time since they’d arrived in Corrawong. The undergrowth was full of the chirps and burrs of insects, and the sky was a spread of stars.
The air feels so much lighter here
, thought Luke, as he and Chris walked the dirt track to their cabins. It was so much easier to breathe. Perhaps because there was no hive of humanity heckling him for answers. Or perhaps because the sense of purpose, of nearing the end of the quest, was growing. Either Eden was there or it wasn’t. No evasive interpretations, no contradictory ideologies. Within the next few days, Luke would either be standing in the eternal garden or he would be heading back to Varria University and his waiting cubicle. Unless he had already been replaced by the psychic.
Luke had never really been one for adventure. Certainly, he had travelled, crossed oceans and borders, and lived briefly in far-flung lands. However, he had merely been transporting his body around. His heart, his spirit, had felt unchanged as the scenery shifted around him. He felt as though he were searching for something, or running from it. Most days, it was hard to—
“Hey, are you listening to me?” said Chris.
Luke broke from his internal monologue and realised Chris was addressing him.
“Were you having a flashback or something?” asked Chris with a half-grin. “Was it about the Crusades?”
“Why would I be—” Luke cut himself off with a sigh. “What were you saying?”
“I was saying we should have a plan.”
“You have my full support.”
“I was thinking we could catch a commercial flight to Massari, then charter a plane to Bihr’el, then drive from there to the cross hair.”
“Charter a plane?” asked Luke, his brain making a sound like copper coins clanking down a hole. “By ‘charter’ I’m guessing you mean ‘rent.’ And by ‘plane,’ I’m guessing you mean ‘car.’”
“SinaCorp must be days ahead of us,” said Chris. “The only advantage we have is the missing page, so hopefully they’re stuck on the riddles.”
Or maybe they were already long gone, heading back to headquarters in their private jet. Chris could imagine them, sitting amidst the hot bubbles of the on-board Jacuzzi, clinking cocktail glasses and laughing at the thought of her and Luke trekking through the parched dust to find a garden freshly stripped and salted.
“We’re also stuck on the riddles,” said Luke.
“Sleep on it,” said Chris. “Maybe it’ll come to you.”
Luke shook his head as he continued towards his cabin, leaving Chris standing at the door to hers. She watched him disappear between the trees, following the grassy trail. Chris pushed open the flimsy door and stepped into her cabin, flipping on the light switch. It took a few moments for the bulb to glimmer on, powered by some archaic form of solar power. She pulled the thin, grey curtains across both windows before dropping her bag to the sticky floor.
Chris suddenly stopped. In the dim light, she could see the distinct, round bulge of something lying under the bedcovers. It was about the size and shape of a soccer ball, neatly covered by the military-green bed spread. The sensible part of Chris said “Run. Just. Run.” The scientist in her said “Must look now…” Yet another part of Chris said “I hope it’s chocolate.”
By the time the various conflicting voices in her head had made themselves heard, the scientist in her had already reached over and pulled off the bedcover.
On the pilled cotton sheet lay a head.
Still dripping slightly.
Unmistakably iceberg lettuce.
A bent, metal spoon was stabbed into its side.
The sheet was damp with condensation, and the ink on the hand-scrawled note was just starting to bleed.
YOU WERE WARNED
.
Before Chris had a chance to assess whether or not this prank was intended to be humorous or threatening, a burning package smashed through the rear window, flinging flaming debris and shards of plastic around the chipboard room.
Not
humorous, Chris decided.
The grey curtains whooshed up in flames as though made of gas vapour, and the floor began to melt into bubbling goo. The flaming package burned with bright green fire, spitting gobs of flame onto the bed and walls. Acrid fumes filled the room and stung Chris’s eyes and throat. She ran for the door and yanked at the aluminium doorknob, but it wouldn’t budge. She pushed and pulled at the door roughly, and the doorknob came off unexpectedly in her hand. Luke’s warning about cheap accommodation came whispering back to her, and she wondered briefly if he was teaching her some kind of lesson.
Chris abandoned the door and started to prise at the front window, but it was somehow jammed shut from the outside. She pounded on the plastic pane to no avail, and through blurry eyes she thought she saw movement in the trees outside.
A scream suddenly clawed through the air, coming from somewhere further down the trail.
It was Luke.
That was it. She was not going to die in a rustic lodge that smelled like decomposing pepperoni. Luke’s funeral notice would not read “Died in freakish circumstances too horrible to print.” It would damn well read “Died peacefully in his sleep, aged one hundred, surrounded by loved ones.”
Chris staggered towards the bed and heaved her backpack from the floor. Through the oily smoke, she thought she saw movement from the incendiary package. Suddenly, a searing pain wrapped around her wrist, and as she tried to pull away she felt something restraining her. Groping in the front pocket of her pack, Chris grabbed her pocket knife and slashed blindly around her hand. There was a high-pitched noise, like fresh branches burning, and she felt the pressure around her wrist release.
Choking on the fumes, her lungs on fire, Chris kicked repeatedly at the chipboard door. Finally, with a satisfying crack, the door broke in two like a board in a martial arts display. Chris briefly wished she could have caught that on video before she stumbled outside into the cool air.
Gasping, she ran down the trail, heading toward the screaming.
* * *
Luke had actually been feeling quite good about Corrawong. So far, it had been peaceful, and the landscape starkly beautiful. Lots of broad red plains, wide blue skies, and knotted trees with scribbly bark, standing like relaxed sentinels across the desert. In a way, there was something reassuring about the landscape—it seemed to say “We’ve seen millennia come and go. You’ll be gone before you know it, but we’ll still be here. She’ll be right.”
That was, until the rock came crashing through his cabin window.
Things got even worse when he realised it wasn’t a rock. This realisation occurred when wasps started crawling out of it.
Things were further compounded by the brick which then came hurtling through the window at him.
Luke managed to duck the brick, but this brought him closer to the wasps, who looked very unhappy at being thrown through a plastic window. Crouched near the floor, Luke caught sight of the note wrapped around the brick.
PARASITE
.
It was roughly at this point that Luke discovered with some urgency that the door to his cabin was locked from the outside. The doorknob clattered to the floor, which seemed to incense the wasps even more than it incensed Luke. Having done very little research on wasps aside from what they did to other insects, Luke decided to risk the further ire of the wasps by throwing his bedcover over the wasps’ nest. Although this put a reassuring barrier between him and lots of angry wasps, the buzzing noise from beneath the bedspread grew louder, and the thin sheet started to vibrate in a very disturbing manner.
It occurred to Luke that this tactic resembled the most popular solution for rogue genies: although you might lock them away for a period of time, they were going to be really, really peeved when they finally got out.
Luke was trying to open his jammed front window when he saw a trail of smoke weaving erratically across the clearing outside. The smoky form resolved itself into Chris as she crashed unsteadily into Luke’s cabin door.
“Ow! Luke?” called Chris.
“Wasps! Lots of wasps!” yelled Luke.
“Stand back.” Chris’s voice was muffled through the door.
“Um, maybe it would be better if—”
There was a cracking thud, followed by a tearing noise, as the flimsy cabin door was ripped from its hinges. The door fell inwards, slamming onto the ground on top of the covered wasps’ nest. There was a very unpleasant crunch. Followed by several smaller, but even more unpleasant crunches. Luke tried hard not to listen.
“Where are the wasps?” asked Chris, stepping onto the fallen door.
Crackle. Crunch
.
“Why are you smouldering?” asked Luke faintly.
He stared at Chris’s wrist.
Don’t ask
, he told himself.
Chris followed Luke’s gaze to her wrist. A charred piece of vine was knotted around it, nubs of burnt leaves and thorns still attached. Chris gasped, whether in horror or delight, Luke couldn’t be sure. Chris reached into her pocket and pulled out a specimen bag and a set of tweezers, carefully unwrapping the blackened creeper.
“Is that some botanical Kabbalah?” asked Luke.
Chris held up the vine, inspecting it closely. Beneath the charred exterior, it was a tender length of creeper, highly flexible, with significant tensile strength. It exuded a sharp, pungent odour, like an old swimming pool.
It twitched.
Luke leapt backwards.
Crunch
.
Chris’s eyes lit up. The green flames—high levels of boron. The toxic fumes—burning chloride.
“
Animata botanica
…” whispered Chris. “Every botanist knows that plants can be incredibly violent. They tear down buildings and rip up roads. They can crack open pipes like peanuts. Plants just do it really, really slowly. If plants moved at the same speed as animals, they’d be damned near unstoppable.”
Luke looked uneasily at the limp, sooty piece of plant. Chris continued to scrutinise the vine in unadulterated fascination.
“One stream of thought in cryptobotany proposes that if plants contained higher concentrations of micronutrients, for example boron and chloride, and evolved a faster metabolism, they could actually move in competition with animals,” said Chris.
Luke looked around at the wrecked cabin, at Chris caked with ash and in bad need of a handkerchief, at the brick with the handwritten note. Now plants that could strangle you even if you weren’t Sleeping Beauty. Where to begin?
“But it’s not SinaCorp’s style,” mused Chris. “They’re more bullet to the head, or robbery gone wrong.”
Things weren’t just getting dangerous. Things were getting weird. Chris glanced at Luke—a permanent tension seemed to run through his body, his face slightly flushed from agitation. He really didn’t do well with bugs.
“I guess next stop Massari,” said Luke, his eyes shining with something resembling a fever.
Crunch
.
* * *
It was another panoramic morning in Dubai, where you could almost see the curvature of the earth along the glittering blue horizon. Docker’s boots marched down the hotel hallway, across the smoky marble, barely pausing at the room door before pushing it open with a soft click.
Roman leapt to her feet as Docker stepped into the suite, her gaze flickering nervously around the room.
“Report,” said Docker, dropping the heavy case to the floor.
“The algorithms have found a correlation between the diagram on the Sumerian tablet and our satellite charts of the region to an accuracy of eighty-four percent,” said Roman smoothly. “Bale reports that the indications in the text suggest a location near the city of Massari.”
“Bale? Are we ready?” asked Docker.
Bale looked up from the calfskin text, which he had been reading without the aid of dictionaries or translation programs.
“We’ll need further clues to decipher the instructions,” said Bale.
Docker glanced at Emir, who stood grimly by the balcony, looking even more brooding than usual. Docker turned back to Roman, noticing the muscles on her neck were tense to the snapping point. Roman cleared her throat.
“Stace had to go home, sir,” said Roman, staring directly ahead.
“What is this? Kindergarten?” said Docker with a hint of disgust.
“He forgot to shake out his boot this morning,” continued Roman uncomfortably. “He was stung by a jellyfish and had to be airlifted.”
Docker’s expression was glacial.
“A jellyfish,” said Docker. “In his boot.”
“I’m just saying what happened, sir,” said Roman, still staring ahead.
There was a sticky silence.
“Jet heads for Massari in eighty,” said Docker. “Move out.”
* * *
Timing was a difficult thing. Much was forfeited by those who lacked the patience to wait for the right moment, while others lacked the ability to recognise when the right moment had presented itself.
Marrick had achieved a great deal in her life by having both an excellent sense of timing and the kind of patience required by desert frogs who slept for years beneath the baked sands, waiting for the rains to come. She also recognised that when the rains didn’t come, you had to sow a little silver nitrate.
“Yes, Hoyle,” said Marrick, not turning from the massive, eerily blue fish tank.
“Eden Two are headed for Massari,” said Hoyle.