Chapter 25: "I come baring coffee"

Juliet felt her head sag, her eyes watering in the effort of staying open. The characters on the paper before her were starting to swim. A warm hand rested on her back and she sat up with a start. "I'm okay."

"No, you're not," murmured Calvin. "You're tired. We both are. Come on: let's put this away for the night. We'll be better able to make sense of it after a full night's sleep."

"I could just take a nap – just a little one," Juliet protested, automatically straightening her papers. "Just a half hour and then back to work."

"Nope," Cal shook his head. He began his delicate, meticulous method of closing the ancient scroll. A smile crept onto his face when Juliet, still running on autopilot, began helping. Their hands met when the scroll closed. He ran his fingers over the back of her hand and lifted it to his lips. "Tired minds make mistakes, remember?"

Juliet looked up and smiled. "I remember."

XXXX

Just over 6 months ago, 8 days after the fall

"Two rooms, upper floor, both with bathrooms," Cal reported, handing Juliet her key. "They're a few rooms apart, but both open out onto the same part of the balcony up there."

Juliet looked up at the walkway overlooking the interior courtyard of the hotel. They were situated at the edge of Old Damascus, and everywhere she looked the architecture rewarded a second, lingering glance. From the shining patterns of the floor tiles to the varied arches over windows, doors and balcony, some smooth and gliding arcs, others delicately combining curve and corner. Intricate designs were inlaid into the furniture that awaited her in her room too, the bright mother-of-pearl patterns contrasting with the dark-stained wood of the wardrobe, cupboards and elegant four-poster bed.

"Meet you in the courtyard in half an hour?" Cal suggested. "We ought to let the others know we're here."

Juliet nodded. "I could eat, too. They're still serving food, right?"

"If not, there's probably somewhere nearby that is," he shrugged.

Juliet nodded, letting the door swing closed behind her. She dropped her pack on the bed and rummaged for clean clothes and her washbag. Twenty minutes later she was sitting, damp hair drying in the slight breeze, in the hotel's courtyard.

"Hey," murmured Cal, picking a seat by her side at the small table. "How's the signal?"

Juliet turned the sat-phone in her hand towards him. "Good enough. Shall we?"

At a nod from Cal, she dialled the Professor. Vincent answered.

"So, you finally made it, huh?" Vincent grinned. The picture was small, dark and grainy, but they could just make out a stone wall in the background.

"To the hotel," nodded Juliet, "but we haven't met with Professor Zond's contact yet."

"There have been no changes to the arrangements," said Vincent, glancing off to the side. "Ibrahim will be in the main reading room of the national library from eight in the morning until it closes at half past three, every day except Friday and Saturday, when it's closed all day. You have his picture, and Calvin knows him well enough: do you think you can pick him out okay?"

Calvin nodded. "Yeah, we just have to get there before closing time. It's on the opposite side of the old city from where we are, but we should be able to make it okay. We'll pick up something to eat along the way."

"Eat when you can, sleep when you can," mused Vincent. "Feed the body, feed the mind; because you never know when your body might have to skip a meal, and tired minds make mistakes. There's a great restaurant on Straight Street, if memory serves."

"Duly noted," smiled Juliet. "It's about an hour's walk from here to the library, less if we can grab some form of transport. We'll have plenty time to stop and eat on the way. If there's nothing else, we'll head out now and call you back when we have the manuscript."

Vincent nodded a farewell and the screen went blank. Juliet stowed the satellite phone safely away in her bag. She turned to Cal, who was already on his feet. He held out a hand to her.

"Come on, then," he said, helping her to her feet, then reluctantly dropping her hand. "Let's eat."

XXXX

Solomon Zond jerked awake, gasping for air like a man surfacing from the icy depths of a frozen lake. He dragged a hand across his eyes and looked up at the old wall clock above him. Nearly ten past four in the morning. He hadn't meant to fall asleep at his desk, but when did he ever? That was where the clock came from, after all. On their first anniversary as husband and wife, Haley had presented him with that clock, so he would always have a reminder near him of how late he was working. There was still the big red arrow on it, one end pointing to the ten and the other attached to the words "GO TO BED" emblazoned on an ancient square of cardboard pinned to the wooden framework.

He picked up the coffee mug near at hand. There was still some coffee in there, stone cold but still caffeinated. He drained the mug. Solomon was no stranger to cold coffee. The papers on his desk seemed to swim back into focus. Some were his notes, others were Haley's. A few other items came from fellow researchers or, in one case, a dig he and Haley had worked on together. The rosy light of dawn cast long, faint shadows on the faience scarab currently being used as a paperweight. There was some method in the madness. One pile was papers of Haley's that he had checked, one pile was those that he hadn't. A third pile was made up of the non-Haley papers. He hadn't started on them yet. So far, he had noted just seven mentions of the "star" that Sagittarius, sometimes also called Chiron, shot down. One of them was a handwritten copy of the tale in its entirety, as Haley would tell it to Nikko when he was little. It was written in symbols that Solomon, and perhaps Nikko, alone could decipher, as were many of Haley's notes to him. Some of those notes, he considered, contained information Dorna would love to get their hands on. Some, but by no means all. Once upon a time, in a time before e-mails and text messages had sucked the romance out of the world, those secret symbols had merely been a fun way to send letters to one another that nosey friends and relatives could not read. Then Dorna had come into their lives and the cipher had taken on a new role. Haley had only just found out that she was pregnant then.

Solomon paused. Rifling through the pile, he dragged out the envelope containing the story. It had been long enough since he had looked at it, but the cipher was still clear in his mind. He marvelled that, in all his years researching Haley's work, he hadn't spotted it before. It was just a story – a bedtime story she had told their son – so why write it in code?

XXXX

Just over 6 months ago, 8 days after the fall

The food had been delicious, but when you'd spent the last few days grazing on granola bars, any alternative probably would have been. The walk through the streets of the old city had helped shift the drowsiness that followed their first good meal in a week, but Juliet was still glad this part of their trip was nearly over and she would be able to sleep in a real bed that night. She was particularly glad that she would be sleeping in a real bed in a room of her own. The Damascene Sword monument rose before them, looking out over the great wheel of parks and roads in the square beyond it. The library was two roads over from the sword, its stolid, squat, concrete form reminiscent of mid-twentieth century university buildings the world over. The row of doors that formed the entrance sat, atop four short flights of steps, shaded by the storey above and flanked by plain, rectangular pillars.

Finding the reading room was simple enough: if the signs were unclear people were always willing to give directions, if you were willing to ask, politely. Finding Ibrahim was another matter. It wasn't that the room was terribly busy. It wasn't exactly quiet, in the figurative sense of the word, of course, but it was easy enough to scan each face for the one they would recognise. Calvin knew Ibrahim from days before Juliet had joined the team: he had been a part of the team, working with them as an anthropologist studying the spread of humanity across the globe. As such, he had spent a lot of time working with Calvin on the evolution of different languages, and what they could tell us about the people who spoke them. He had been partly responsible for steering Cal down the philological path he was currently on. They had been friends. There was no way the two could be in this room and not spot each other. Juliet spotted the tell-tale tightening of Cal's jaw and laid a hand on his arm.

"Maybe he just stepped out for a minute," she whispered, drawing him over to a desk. "He has to eat too, you know. And everything else."

Cal nodded, but only once, and sat down beside her. Within a minute, his knee had began jumping. Juliet pressed it into stillness and glared at him. He held the glare for a moment, then rolled his eyes and gave up. Leaning down, he dragged his laptop out of his backpack. Juliet frowned and raised an eyebrow at him. Cal shrugged and waved an upturned palm at everyone else. Juliet rolled her eyes and removed a newspaper from her bag. This time it was Cal's turn to blink and frown. It was a local newspaper. Juliet smirked and unfolded the paper. They had each been reading, with one eye on the movements around them, for a good ten minutes when Calvin felt a hand fasten on his wrist. He looked up, automatically glancing to the door they had entered by then turning to Juliet. She was staring at a news article. Wordlessly she passed it to him. He looked down, rearranging his brain to read Arabic rather than Latin characters. He felt his heart sink. The article was an obituary.

XXXX

Nikko was dreaming. It had been years since he had last had The Dream, but the passage of time hadn't changed it, much. Once again, he mounted the curving steps, letting Mikhail lead him away from his mother and the door. Once again, he saw the walls around him brighten, isolated shadows appearing where once there had been nothing but. Once again he turned, he ran, he stopped, he saw. Light filled the chamber, wrapping round his mother like mist. She disappeared into the light, engulfed as surely as if she had sank into a lake. Or an ocean. Time seemed to slow, the light creeping back to its origin like waves on a beach. A jet of light flared towards him… and stopped.

Nikko peered at the luminous tendrils, the walls around him, the ceiling, the floor. He became aware that he could move. He had never done so before. But then, he thought, time had never stopped in The Dream before. Tentatively, he reached a foot out sideways and stepped left. His perspective seemed to shift. The light seemed lower. Nikko frowned and looked to where he had been standing, then looked down. His younger self stood there, as frozen as everything else, one hand reaching out to his mother, and the light. Nikko looked back to the stairs. Mikhail, a hand raised to his eyes, was paused mid-step. Another frown tugged at Nikko's eyebrows. He hadn't seen Mikhail come for him. He hadn't seen anything but his mother and the light until he woke up back at camp. Nikko turned back to the light. Maybe, then, he could get closer: find out what it was his mother had touched or done to set off the pulse. His eyes flicked back to his childhood self. Mikhail had been right: there was definitely a distinct jet of light reaching out to him. He followed the line of it back to the stone wall. It came from the half-dome of the sun symbol: the symbol he should have been able to see his mothers hand upon, but couldn't. Even now, before the pulse hit him, she had been gone. There had been nothing he could do, neither then nor now.

Somewhere a weight seemed to lift from Nikko's shoulders. He sighed and turned his attention to the glyphs around the sun symbol. There was something familiar about them. Something he couldn't quite put his finger on. His mind whirred. He almost had it.

"Nikko!"

Nikko ignored the voice hissing into his consciousness.

"Nikko!"

This time the voice came with an earthquake, or at least a Nikko-quake. While his body shook, the scene around him stayed disconcertingly still. Again the voice called him, louder this time. Again his shoulders shook. His surroundings cracked, glitching like a poorly coded computer game, and vanished. He floated in darkness.

"NIKKO!"

Nikko woke up. He rolled from his stomach to his back and squinted up at his visitor. "Dad? What time is it?"

"Just after five," Solomon replied, absolutely devoid of any hint of an apology. "There's something you need to see."

"It couldn't wait until after breakfast?"

"I come baring coffee," replied Solomon, waving a mug under his son's nose.

Nikko sat up, yawning. "It's a start," he groaned.