Zara Rezai had learned to love numbers precisely because they didn't care about your feelings.
A volcano didn't want anything. It didn't plot. It didn't "wake up" like a myth with eyelids. It was pressure, rock, water, time. Simple ingredients cooked for obscene durations. If it moved, it moved because physics told it to.
That was what she'd believed when she agreed to join an international monitoring team in southeastern Iran, in a province people in London spoke about in the same tone they used for deserts and borders: distant, harsh, complicated.
Sistan and Baluchestan didn't feel distant from inside it. It felt immediate. Wind-dry air against skin. Light so sharp it could cut. And the looming mass of Taftan, Kuh-e Taftan, the "burning mountain" sitting above the plain like a verdict nobody had appealed.
The camp was pitched far below the summit line. That was the bargain between curiosity and survival: you went close enough to measure the truth, but not close enough to become it.
Morning came thin and cold. At this latitude the sun rose quickly, as if embarrassed to be caught. Zara stood outside the equipment tent, gloved hands around a metal mug that scalded and soothed at the same time. Tea, strong enough to feel like it had opinions. One of the local porters had insisted on it the moment she'd climbed out of the truck the night before.
Hospitality here didn't ask permission. It arrived, steaming, and made you human whether you felt like one or not.
A man named Farid, introduced as "our friend, he knows the mountain", had produced flatbread wrapped in cloth. Not soft, not fluffy. Something sturdier. Food meant to last. He'd tapped it with a knuckle and smiled at the sound.
"Stone bread," he'd said in English that carried the rhythm of another language underneath. "Good for climbing."
Zara hadn't been hungry. She'd eaten anyway.
You didn't refuse these gestures. Not because you were polite. Because you might need them later, and because refusing made you smaller in a place already too big.
She set her mug down and checked the tablet mounted to a folding table. Overnight telemetry from the GPS stations arrived in tidy columns. The latest deformation calculations had been processed twice by two different pipelines. Her own, and the team's standardized method.
They agreed.
That was the problem.
Uplift: 0.9 centimeters since the last field check. Smooth curve. No noise. No jaggedness, no stutter-step lurch that would make sense if this were driven by shallow rock settling or seasonal water.
A steady hand.
A heartbeat.
Zara frowned and, out of habit, did the thing she always did when a system looked too clean: she tried to break it.
She pulled up the raw time series. Checked satellite pass windows. Cross-referenced with weather. Looked for instrumentation drift. Sensor temperature bias. A loose anchor screw. Anything.
Nothing.
Taftan, if it was taunting her, was doing it with immaculate manners.
Behind her, the camp woke. Zip noises. Muffled voices. A laugh that died quickly when it realized it had come out too loud. Generators hummed. The scent of fuel tried to argue with the mountain's own smell. Sulfurous, acidic, the sort of scent that made your sinuses tighten as if they wanted to retreat deeper into your skull.
Local people had a name for the fumarolic exhalations near the summit. Dood. Smoke. The word sounded softer than what it was.
Taftan wasn't erupting. It wasn't even showing classic escalation. But it was not quiet, either.
It breathed.
And it had been breathing longer than any human memory in this region cared to claim, vents and hot springs and yellow-white plumes that could be seen from far away on clear days.
Zara zipped her jacket fully and walked toward the instrument rack.
"Dr. Rezai," someone called.
She turned. The speaker was a younger technician from Tehran, hair tucked into a cap, still chewing as if he'd never learned mornings required solemnity.
"We're green," he said. "Wind is low. Visibility to the ridgeline is good."
Zara nodded. "Any changes in gas readings?"
He grimaced. "Same as yesterday. It wants to be smelled."
"Mountains don't want it," she replied automatically.
The technician, (Mahdi, she remembered) smiled, the kind that meant he didn't believe her but enjoyed that she said it like a law.
She could have lectured him. She could have been the type of scientist who made a temple out of objectivity.
But she'd spent enough of her twenties in labs that smelled like solvent and ambition to know people didn't follow you because you were correct. They followed you because you were comprehensible.
So she only said, "Let's keep it that way. No surprises."
Mahdi saluted with two fingers and jogged off.
Zara tapped through her checklist. Ground-based GPS. Seismic nodes. Thermal camera calibration. Sampling kits. Satellite phone charged, emergency beacon armed. The familiar litany settled her nerves the way prayer settled others.
The mountain didn't care about your preparedness. But preparedness cared about you.
They started the ascent in a staggered line, not because it was dramatic but because it was sensible. The slope punished arrogance quickly. Taftan wasn't a single smooth cone; it was a complex stratovolcano, two main summits, multiple craters, old scars and newer features layered on each other like history that refused to be edited into one narrative.
Above a certain altitude, the world simplified. Vegetation gave up. Sound thinned. The wind became a thing with edges.
Zara's boots crunched over gravel and volcanic fragments. Her pack tugged at her shoulders. Every few minutes she paused, "not to rest", she told herself, but to observe.
She was good at observation. It was the one kind of attention that didn't drain her.
And yet the further they climbed, the more she felt something that didn't fit her training.
Not fear. Not awe.
The sense of being… addressed, being watched.
The notion was ridiculous. She hated it on principle.
Still, she couldn't shake it.
They stopped at a rock outcrop that served as a waypoint. A blunt marker against the sky. Farid crouched and brushed grit away from a flat face of stone.
"Here," he said. "Old place."
Zara moved closer.
At first she saw only scratches, shallow lines weathered by wind and ice. But the more she looked, the less random they seemed. The lines weren't letters. Not Arabic, not Persian, not any script she'd studied in the margins of archaeology papers the way normal people studied recipes.
These were… shapes.
A triangle split by a vertical line. A hooked stroke that ended in a dot. A small cluster of parallel marks, too evenly spaced to be incidental.
Carved, not natural.
Not fresh. Not recent.
But not ancient in the way ancient usually looked, either. There was no soft rounding, no complete surrender to time. As if the stone itself resisted weathering here.
Zara's mouth went dry.