Mahdi leaned over her shoulder. "Maybe shepherds?"
"Maybe," she said.
Her voice sounded wrong. Too careful.
She snapped a photo with her phone, then another with the calibrated camera. Added a scale marker. Noted coordinates. The act of documenting steadied her.
The glyphs didn't feel like a message. They felt like a boundary marker someone had bothered to label.
Farid watched her quietly. "My grandfather," he said, "he told story. That near the smoke there are words that are not for us."
"Who are they for?" Mahdi asked.
Farid shrugged. "For mountain."
Zara almost laughed. Almost.
Then a gust of wind hit the outcrop and the smell of sulfur sharpened so abruptly it felt like a slap. She swallowed against nausea and forced herself to focus on the physical: the vents higher up, the chemistry, the hydrothermal system, the plausible explanation that didn't involve a mountain reading anything at all.
"Okay," she said briskly. "We're not here to chase stories. We're here to measure."
Mahdi's eyes flicked to the carvings again, but he nodded.
They continued.
As they climbed, the fumaroles became visible. Fissures and crevices near the crater edges, vents staining the rock with sulfur deposits, yellow and white and sickly beautiful. Taftan's "burning" wasn't flame. It was chemistry escaping captivity.
Zara set up the thermal camera first. She liked starting with heat because heat was honest. It moved the way it should. Mostly.
The screen filled with false colors and temperature gradients. The vents glowed. The surrounding rock was colder. A clean contrast.
Then, for a second, barely long enough to be sure, one section of the ground cooled sharply as if something deep beneath it had inhaled.
Zara blinked. "Mahdi."
He looked up from the gas analyzer. "Yes?"
"Did you see that?"
"What? See what?"
Zara stared at the thermal feed. The anomaly was gone. The gradient returned to normal.
Her heart didn't race. That would have been dramatic. Instead she felt a slow tightening in her chest, the way she felt when she realized a difficult equation wasn't wrong, just more complicated than she'd hoped.
"Nothing," she said. "Probably a calibration jitter."
Mahdi nodded, but his expression was wary now. Even the skeptics had their limits.
Zara checked the feed again. Pulled up the raw sensor output. No sign of the cooling dip.
Which meant either she imagined it, or something had happened too cleanly for the system to record.
She hated both options.
They worked through the morning, collecting samples and measurements, updating log entries, swapping equipment batteries, re-checking anchors. Zara kept herself busy on purpose. If you moved fast enough, your mind couldn't wander into myth.
Around midday they sheltered behind a ridge and ate.
Farid shared a small packet of dried meat with Mahdi and one of the other porters. Zara recognized the method more than the recipe: preservation by salt and air, flavor held back rather than shouted. People who lived with harsh terrain learned to respect simplicity.
"Try," Farid insisted, offering her a strip.
Zara hesitated, then took it. The taste was rich, smoky, unfamiliar in detail but familiar in intent. Survival as cuisine.
"It's good," she admitted.
Farid's smile widened. "Mountain food," he said, as if that explained everything.
Maybe it did.
They resumed work. Afternoon light shifted, flattening shadows, making distance hard to judge. The summit line looked closer than it was. It always did.
Zara checked her tablet again.
Another uplift update had come in from the lower station. It shouldn't have updated while they were out of range, but the satellite link was intermittent and stubborn.
Uplift: +0.2 centimeters.
Since this morning.
Zara stopped walking.
Mahdi turned back. "What is it?"
She held up the tablet. "This is too fast."
Mahdi stared. "Could be noise."
"No." Zara hated how sure her voice sounded. "Noise doesn't climb like that."
She forced herself to breathe slowly. Once. Twice.
A rational mind would list possibilities. A rational mind would not leap.
Gas pressurization in the hydrothermal system. Shallow movement. A locked pocket of steam. There were studies, examples, entire textbooks describing how a volcano could deform without erupting, how "unrest" could fizzle out.
And yet…
Zara looked up at the crater rim, at the fumaroles staining the sky with pale plumes. Dood. Smoke. The mountain's breath.
She thought of the carved glyphs below. Not letters. Boundaries.
Not for us.
For the mountain.
She reached for her radio, thumb hovering over the push-to-talk.
Static.
She tried again. "Base camp, this is Rezai. Do you copy?"
Static, then a thin crackle that might have been an answer or might have been wind.
Mahdi's face tightened. "Signal's bad up here."
"It wasn't bad yesterday." Zara tried the satellite phone next. No connection.
The mountain, the rational part of her insisted, did not interfere with communications.
But the rational part was losing voices.
Zara made a decision she did not announce as a decision.
"Pack up," she said. "We're heading down."
Mahdi blinked. "We're not done."
"We're done."
One of the porters glanced toward the vents, eyes narrowed, as if listening for something. Farid didn't argue. He simply began gathering gear with the calm speed of someone who believed in leaving before the storm, not during it.
As they started descending, Zara felt it again: the sense of being addressed.
Not with words.
With pressure.
Like a fingertip pressed against the underside of the world.
She wanted to look back. She didn't.
She focused on the trail. On the weight of her pack. On each breath.
Halfway down, her phone buzzed once, as if waking from a coma.
A message with no number displayed, appeared on the screen.
ZARA REZAI.
No greeting. No introduction.
Below it:
LEAVE THE RIDGE. NOW.
Her throat tightened.
Mahdi noticed her face. "What?"
Zara didn't show him the screen. Not because she didn't trust him, but because she didn't trust what would happen if the message became real in someone else's eyes.
She stuffed the phone away. "Move," she said, sharper than intended.
They moved.
The wind rose. The sulfur smell thickened. Somewhere above them, something hissed. Not loudly, not explosively, but like a valve turning in a system that did not like being observed.
Zara's mind tried to name it: hydrothermal venting, fumarole intensification, pressure release.
The names didn't help.
Her phone buzzed again. This time it was a call, satellite routed, clean connection.
She answered without thinking. "Hello?"
A man's voice, calm, clipped, accented in a way that made it hard to place. Not local. Not British. Not American. Trained neutral.
"Dr. Rezai," he said, as if continuing a conversation they'd begun long ago. "My name is Marcus Okonkwo."
Zara kept walking. "How did you get this number?"
"You are on Mount Taftan," Marcus replied, ignoring the question. "Which means you are already too close to something you don't have words for yet."
Zara's grip tightened on the phone. "If this is a prank…"
"It isn't." A pause, then, softer: "Listen to me. Keep your team moving. Do not stop to collect more data. Do not take samples. Do not look for explanations."
Zara swallowed. "What is happening?"
Marcus exhaled once, quietly, like someone choosing honesty that would cause trouble.
"Dr. Rezai," he said, "this site is no longer yours."
And then, in the background of the call, faint but unmistakable, Zara heard the hiss again, closer now, as if the mountain had shifted its breath to follow them downhill.
Marcus's voice tightened by half a degree. Still calm. Still controlled.
"Leave," he repeated. "Now."