Page 26 of The Salt King

They both looked up. The sky was empty and mauve.

Maybe someone was throwing rocks. She had been thinking so much about radioactivity that she hadn’t considered how exposed they were down here. People didn’t always like government agencies sending hazmat-suited inspectors to poke around. Not unreasonably, they worried you were doing something sinister.

“Better get back up,” Sally said.

Back at ground level, one of the cars was missing a wing mirror. It had been smashed, and Tallis swung around, looking for someone sullen with a hammer, but when Sally knelt to look at the mirror where it lay on the salty ground, he stood up with another of those rounded red crystals. There were a couple more here and there on the ground, not close enough to the cars to have been aimed at them.

“Maybe they really did just fall out of the sky,” Sally said, pulling off his hazmat suit.

The air felt cold when Tallis took her mask off. She tugged on the jumper she’d worn on the plane, wondering for at least the twelfth time what in God’s name accounted for that temperature differential between ground level and sinkhole.

Sally ducked into the tent to start developing the tests. She waited in her hire car with the door open, reading her emails, and the news, and then opened her social media for some mindless scrolling in case any kittens had done anything especially funny.

She had scooped up almost five hundred new followers overnight.

It was Sally’s video of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”; it had nine thousand likes. She blinked. She had never been that popular. There was even a little note from the Jordanian ministry, clearly from someone who wanted to cause maximum embarrassment: Romance on a nuclear inspection!!! They had even put on a winky face, the psychopath. She messaged back that there was nothing going on, thank you, and there was no need for anyone to call child protective services.

The next autoplay after that was a viral thread from a monastery in Tibet. It showed some tiny children with shaved hair playing with silver coins. Yuan coins didn’t have heads and tails but flowers and numbers, and every time the boys flicked the coins, they landed on flowers. The more it happened, the more the little boys laughed and laughed.

There was an answering thread of other people who were doing it too. Some teenagers somewhere called Wieliczka in Poland; a lady in Salt Lake City; a handsome man on the back of a motorbike in Khewra in Pakistan. The coins always landed the same way, time after time. All the videos were full of captions promising the coins weren’t weighted, and it wasn’t fake.

Feeling silly, Tallis took a dinar out of her pocket and flicked it. Heads. Heads . . . heads . . . heads. Feeling even sillier, she filmed herself doing it, almost sure that it wouldn’t work on camera, but it did. Heads ten times in a row.

Hmm.

When she was about to post the video, the app asked if she wanted to tag it like other similar videos with #CrazySaltLuck.

Salt.

Wasn’t Khewra the big salt mine in the Himalayas?

After some online searching, she found that it was. Wieliczka was an ancient salt mine in Poland.

No doubt because the algorithm thought she was now fascinated by that Tibetan monastery, a news notification flashed up and informed her that a young disabled monk there, hit by a car in front of a railway station when he was little, had been miraculously cured.

The monastery was at a place called Lancang.

It was a famous salt mine.

What?

“Oh, fuck!”

She jolted upright and almost fell, because suddenly the ground was littered with dozens and dozens of broken xylophones, swore when she dropped her phone and the camera-shutter noise reported that it had just taken a picture of her shoes, plunged through the imaginary xylophones—Why, why xylophones, why do I never hallucinate anything sensible?—which then disappeared apologetically, and reached the tent just as Sally lunged out of it.

She put her hands out instinctively but then clenched them and took them back again before she could touch his arms.

“Sorry! Sorry,” he said, but he looked shaken. “There’s—I need you to look at something.”

She followed him into the tent, where he had set out developer trays and pegged up the pictures on a string overhead. It smelled densely of chemicals. She had to wait for her eyes to adjust. It was dark inside: he’d put up an extra shroud of canvas to keep the sunlight out. He had a red lamp on, and it traced insufficient light over him, the developer trays, and a strange, concertina device like an upside-down camera obscura.

He turned on a proper lamp.

“So,” he said, then swallowed and started again. “So, something odd is showing up on the tests. The plastic sections are whited out—like they were exposed to sunlight.”

“No, they were sealed—”

“I know, I know, but look . . .”