Page 25 of The Salt King

“Sorry,” Avelyn said. “Salt light. It’s . . . ignore me.”

This was why Jericho had seemed like he was in deeper shadow than he should have been last night.

Bizarre.

9 A Church term to which Avelyn was anaphylactically allergic. It meant thinking, but implied it was much more important thinking than your common, silly thinking done by laypeople. Father Li protested that it just meant specifically religious thinking, and it was nice to have a word for that, but Avelyn’s position was that if you felt the need to dress up your thinking in Latin to make it sound fancy, you were not having any worthwhile thoughts.

10 He suspected that at conventions of famously difficult languages, like Navajo and Xhosa, the ones that made Mandarin and English look like baby talk, Hreod breezed in wearing a T-shirt that said HOLD MY BEER. It had one hundred and ten words for the. Its poetic register had eight tones. The grammar of the way you prayed to the King, meanwhile, was different in summer and in winter. Generations of scholars had cried themselves to sleep over it.

12

The Dead Sea, Jordan

The sun was rising. It threw gold and a cold, pale pink across the salt formations on the seashore. Where other seas would have left their tidemarks in the sand, this one left it on the salt, each layer a slightly different colour, patterns grading down under the water. There were no clouds, and on the ground, the morning cool had a high, clear quality that felt to Tallis like the striking of a silver bell.

They had both fallen asleep on the tent groundsheet with Sally’s phone propped up between them, because they had been watching something on Netflix. Tallis woke up first. Sally was still curled up under his jacket, facing her, the new light showing the brown in his hair where he’d been out in the sun. She looked down at him for a long time, longer than she ever would have if he had been awake. Broad, strong men always looked immovable to her, and something in the back of her head was always aware she should give them room in case they did anything sudden—but lying down like this, he looked lighter than that, light enough for someone to have picked him up and dropped him there.

She wanted to touch his ribs and feel him breathe. She didn’t do that. She crawled out of the tent, pushed the heels of her hands into her eyes until she saw stars, then called, “Akhbar! Wake up!”

“I’m awake,” he said, obviously lying. He came out too, and gave the sun a resentful squint. She hadn’t seen yesterday in the dark, but he had green eyes, an amazing sea green. He pulled a cigarette from his jacket pocket, a roll-up with the paper twisted up at the end like a candlewick. “Ugh. Have you seen my lighter?”

“I thought self-harm was haram for Muslims? Doesn’t the cancer stick count?” said Tallis, to hide how homely the tobacco smelled.

“I know,” he said sorrowfully, and lit the cigarette when he unearthed the lighter, which was a terrible acid green. “I never said I was a good Muslim, though. I bet you’re a live-in-the-gym-with-a-vegetable-smoothie person. Aren’t you?”

“Fully yes,” she said. “I’ve probably only got about fifteen minutes left before I hit menopause and I’ll be buggered if I’m going to turn into a tiny bedbound old lady with sticks for arms. Weights and vegetables is the only way.”

“Gross,” he said, poking her. Then, with a wicked light in his eyes that made him look like a tousled devil, “Candy for breakfast?” He held out a chocolate bar.

“Yeah, go on,” she said, to see if she could make him laugh.

He did, and it was a fantastic husky smoker’s laugh with a boyish break in the middle.

It was easy to think, If only I were twenty years younger, but that wouldn’t have worked; Tallis hadn’t been baked yet twenty years ago. She would have been shy of someone like Sally then, or even frightened. I do everything too late, she thought suddenly; I graduated too late, I grew up too late, I understood humans too late. By the time she was ready for the Sallys of the world, her chance with them was long gone.

When she next blinked, there was a soft mist over everything. It wasn’t really there, but it looked convincing. Well done, brain.

“You look sad,” Sally said.

“Ah? Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m never stupid,” he told her, serene.

It felt even hotter down in the sinkhole this time, and the hazmat suit was suffocating. They collected all the film tests, painfully slow because it took so long to navigate through those vicious spikes and their thorns. After a while, Tallis realized there was grit all over her gloves, though she was sure she’d been careful to keep them clean; it was rubbing off on the film dosimeters. She brushed them off, annoyed with herself, but then paused. The more she brushed, the more grit there was. No; not grit. Salt. She held her hand up close to her visor.

The folds of her sleeves were covered in a fine layer of salt too. It was everywhere.

“Sally,” she said, and showed him. “Where’s all the salt coming from? It’s not windy.”

“I don’t know, it—”

Something fell out of the air and thumped between them. They both looked down. They had to do it exaggeratedly because of the suits, and to anyone watching it would have looked comical.

On the ground was a little lump of red rock, smaller than fist-sized, oddly round.

“Is that—some kind of hail?” Tallis hazarded, thinking that it sounded stupid even as she was saying it.

Sally picked it up. The red was translucent: crystal, not rock. “I don’t think so. It’s warm.”