Page 133 of The Salt King

“What the . . . fuck did we just see?” she said, with no expectation Sally would have any more idea, but not able to keep the consternation bottled up.

In the wake of whatever that mass flight had been, the salt light trails were fuzzing and blurring into a fog that fell softly over the city, enchanting and horrifying. Through the phone screen, all of Amman was shrouded now in a violet-amber mist.

“That,” Sally said, “was troop deployment. Whatever is in the west—they don’t like it. Oh, God, all this light.” He was holding the phone up so that they could both see, but he was shaking.

They both watched it falling. Tallis felt unutterably small. You grew up hearing stories about how one determined person could change the world, but it just—wasn’t true. The world was too big, the catastrophes were too oceanic. What was a lethal dose of salt light? If the two of them were to walk back into Amman now, would they find people and jinn and monsters, or a salt nothingness that only suggested buildings? Sally put his hand down and gripped hers.

Of course, it shocked her into seeing—

Sally jumped. “Oh—God, is that—”

Giants. Giants, pacing through the desert dark beneath the red lightning sprites, barely more than silhouettes.

“No, no, that’s me, I’m sorry,” she managed, and snapped her fingers in front of her face. Under the next flicker of the lightning, the giants were gone.

Sally turned a full ninety degrees to look down at her. “Tallis,” he said, quiet and urgent. “The more light there is, the further you reach. See if you can . . . see if you can fix the weather.”

She glanced at him, and he nodded encouragingly, then up into the sky. The red lightning made the snow into black fallout.

Snow, in Jordan. Ludicrous. Ludicrous, and not real. Enough. It was all rubbish, it was all just people making real the things they saw from the corners of their eyes or the things they feared they could not see, because nobody had any practise at crushing those thoughts.

Not real. Not one atom of it.

And then . . .

There was no more snow. The cold had lost its grip. Above them, the night was clearing, the thunderheads fading. The red lightning still flickered above Amman, but it was much fainter.

And there was no such bloody thing as jinn, or the dead rising, or Judgement Day, or any of it. It was a normal December morning in the desert just beyond the Dead Sea, and soon the dawn would come in the east, and the red moon would set, that was all. Although it was a tragedy, although it was the saddest thing she knew, she did know nonetheless: there was nothing in the world but atoms moving and entropy creeping, and radioactive decay.

Nothing.

Way out in the darkness, the fiery lights of wandering jinn winked out.

She realized she could smell hot milk. Sally was making hot chocolate on the little stove. She had been staring into the weather for longer than she had thought. It steamed. All at once she wanted that more than anything.

“So,” he said. “I think that whatever they’re attacking out that way . . . we should probably get you there and help.”

She folded slowly down beside him on the ground again. The Baltic gnawing was gone from the cold, but it was still cold, because it was still the desert in winter. “Sally,” she said, trying to think of a graceful way to say it. “I know we keep talking about us and we, but—there’s not an us. You don’t need to do anything for me. You’ve done enough. If you want to go and find your mum—you should do that. You don’t have to stick with me all the way to wherever that is.” She nodded to the west. On the horizon, there was still that glorious not-music, calling.

He gave her a cup of hot chocolate. “My mom’s dead,” he said, with a calm that was fathoms deep. “I haven’t got anywhere else to be.”

She took it, carefully, because her hands were numb and the cup prickled heat up her fingers in a way that felt like pins and needles. He was a pins-and-needles person. “You . . . you still don’t have to stay with me. You met me three days ago.”

“Don’t be stupid, of course I do. You’re a tragic Brit, how are you going to get across the whole Middle East on foot with baby Arabic and the street sense of a squashed pigeon? We have to get you there, Tallis. Whatever’s there—they want it dead. The enemy of my enemy and all that.”

“That isn’t your problem. You can’t just set out across the world for some middle-aged lady you met a couple of days ago on the chance it might help.”

“Why do you keep saying you’re old?” he asked, with the same unloaded inquisitiveness with which he had asked whether she was religious, and about Hreodwater. “I thought you were kidding for the videos, but you’re not.”

“Because . . . I suppose I want you to know that I know,” she said. It was a terrifying honesty, but he seemed to bring it out. She had talked more to him with more truth in the last few days than she had to anybody in the last ten years. “So that if you see me staring at you, you . . . you know that I know it’s ridiculous.”

His eyes were like sea glass. The expressions in them were smoothed out from all the punishing tides he’d lived though, with all that clarity and calmness she didn’t think she was ever going to learn—but sometimes he tilted them at exactly the right angle, and she could see the fissures there, the ones that had never quite worn away. She could see them now. “Why is that ridiculous?” he said quietly. “I’m not a child.”

“No, I just think—I think you miss your mum, and . . .”

“Ah. I’m old enough to be exposed to possibly deadly radiation but not to be looked at by someone a bit older than me. I see.” He smiled his slow mischief smile. “God forbid I look at you.”

“I feel like we’re arguing about something theoretical.” She felt like she had when she had been diving once, exploring a reef and paying no attention to anything else, and then looked down and found she was hanging over an abyss.