Part One
"The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind."
— H.P. Lovecraft
Someone had taped a new sheet next to the mailboxes in the lobby. PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE YOUR GARBAGE IN THE LOBBY, underlined three times. Underneath, in different handwriting, in red pen: FINAL WARNING.
Marco opened the box for 3B. On the little metal door, where the label should have been, there was a rectangle cleaner than the rest, with gray glue in all four corners. He ran his fingernail over it. The glue didn't come off.
Inside, an electric bill stamped PAST DUE in red and a pizzeria menu. He tucked them both under his arm.
The building door opened behind him. Hector, the super, came in backward, dragging a mop bucket on wheels, the mop wedged under his arm.
"Reyes. You good?"
"I'm good."
Hector looked him up and down.
"You look like hell."
"I'm not sleeping well."
"Drink some herbal tea. My wife swears by it. Chamomile, linden, whatever." He propped the bucket against the wall and wrung out the mop with his foot. "And tell the lady across the hall I changed her bulb, huh? She called me three times this week about that bulb."
"I'll tell her."
He climbed the stairs. On the second floor, it smelled like something frying. On the third, behind the door of 3A, a TV was playing a game show, loud, with applause. He didn't knock. He let himself into his place, dropped the bill and the menu on the table, propped his phone against the toaster and put a pat of butter in the pan.
The butter sizzled. Marco cracked two eggs and poured them into the pan.
The smell came before the pain. A smell of grilled meat, a little sweet, that he didn't recognize right away. He looked down. His left hand was resting flat on the edge of the pan. He pulled it away. A red band ran across his palm, shiny, with a blister in the middle that had already gone white.
He looked at it.
The pain came three seconds later, all at once, all the way up to the elbow. He turned on the tap and held his hand under the cold water. The water bounced off the blister. He counted to sixty. He started over.
The eggs burned. He turned off the burner with his elbow, slid the blackened eggs into the trash and put the pan in the sink, where it hissed.
He ate pistachios instead, sitting at the table, his left hand wrapped in a wet dish towel. He cracked the shells with his right hand, with his thumb. The radio was playing a basketball game. Somebody hit a three. The crowd roared in the little speaker.
When he looked down, the empty shells were lined up in front of him. Rows of eight. Four rows. Perfectly straight, every tip pointing the same way.
He didn't remember lining them up.
He scooped them into his palm and threw them in the trash, on top of the burned eggs. He sat back down. He took another pistachio. He cracked it, and he watched his own fingers set the shell on the table, on the left, at the start of a new row.
He took his hand away and put it on his thigh.
The microwave said 7:02.
He got up, went into the bedroom, opened the dresser drawer and took the black notebook out from under his socks. He came back to the table. He opened it to the first blank page, pulled out the pen clipped inside the cover and wrote.
Monday.
Then his name. Marco Reyes. He looked at the letters. They were straight, even, all the same height. He wrote his name a second time underneath. The letters were even straighter.
He put the pen down.
"You there?"
His voice came out too loud in the kitchen. The fridge hummed. In the stairwell, a door slammed and footsteps went down.
"Hey. You there?"
Nothing.
He waited, elbows on the table, his burned hand in the towel. The radiator clicked. On the radio, the announcer called halftime.
"Answer me."
No one answered.
The hum of the fridge changed.
Marco heard it because he was listening. The note dropped, just a little, and stayed low. He got up and opened the fridge. The light came on over the milk, three beers and a jar of mustard. He closed it. The note was still there, lower than before.
He pulled the fridge away from the wall and yanked the plug.
The motor stopped with a hiccup. The note kept going.
He turned off the radio. The note stayed at the same volume, right in the middle of his head. He could feel it in his molars, mostly on the left, a dentist's drill spinning without touching. On the table, the glass of water was trembling: tight circles started at the center, touched the rim, started again.
Above the low note, a high sound appeared. A thin thread that rose and fell over the same few pitches, in a loop, without ever stopping for breath.
The hair on his forearms stood up.
The sound was beautiful. Marco backed up against the counter. The corners of his mouth were lifting. He clenched his teeth to stop them.
"No," he said.
He grabbed his phone off the toaster and dialed 911 with his right thumb.
"911, what's your emergency?"
He opened his mouth.
"Sir? What's your emergency?"
His tongue was lying at the back of his mouth. His throat was open. Air went in and out. No words came through.
"Sir, if you can't speak, tap the phone twice."
He raised his index finger over the screen. The finger didn't come down.
"Sir? I'm going to have to disconnect. If this is an emergency, call back."
The line went dead.
The phone slipped out of his hand and fell on the tile, screen up. 7:26.
The notebook was still open on the table, next to the shells. He picked up the pen. He pressed the tip under his name and tried to write help me.
The pen drew a small straight line. Then another next to it. Then another. Eight small lines, all the same length, all the same distance apart. He lifted the pen. He set it down again to start over. Eight more lines, underneath, perfectly lined up with the first ones.
He let go of the pen. It rolled to the edge of the table and fell.
He went to the front door. He shoved his feet into his sneakers without tying them, turned the deadbolt and opened up.
The hallway was lit by the bare bulb in the ceiling. Across the hall, the door of 3A, with a faded WELCOME mat and a plastic flower wreath. Under the door of 3A came the blue light of a TV. A game show. Applause.
Marco lifted his foot to step out.
His foot stayed in the air above the threshold. He pushed. The foot didn't move. He was gripping the doorframe with both hands, leaning forward, knuckles white, the blister splitting against the wood, and his foot stayed hanging two inches above the mat.
The note rose.
His foot drew back and set itself down on the floorboards, inside. His right hand let go of the doorframe and closed the door. Gently. The latch clicked.
He looked at his hand on the knob.
He went back into the living room. A couch, a coffee table, the TV off, a coat on the hook, a chair. The window. Past the glass, above the rooftops of Queens, the lights of Manhattan made a pale band against the sky.
He found himself standing in front of the window.
His weight shifted from his left foot to his right. Then from the right to the left. Like at a bus stop when the wait drags on. Left. Right. Left.
The low note was pulsing now. Three beats, a gap, three beats. His weight followed it. His knees started to bend in the gaps.
"Stop," he said.
His shoulders rolled. His arms came away from his body. The burned hand slid out of the towel, the towel fell to the floor, and the hand rose above his head, open, the blister turned toward the ceiling. He couldn't feel the burn anymore.
He turned.
One full turn. The couch, the TV, the door, the chair, the window. The lights of Manhattan came back in front of him. He turned again. The window came back, a little more to the left. He turned. The window, a little more to the right.
His feet were pounding the floor. He heard them from far away, a neighbor's footsteps in some other apartment.
The high thread turned with him. His chest opened with every loop. His eyes filled. A laugh rose in his throat, a laugh he wasn't making, and came out.
In the black window, his reflection went by. A man dancing, arms up, head thrown back. A man grinning with all his teeth.
Marco could feel his jaw clenched. He could feel his lips closed over his teeth, which were vibrating.
The reflection came around again. The grin was there.
He tried to close his eyes. His eyelids stayed open.
He thought his name. Mar... c... The name seemed to ring in his head, once, clear.
On the next turn, it rang more faintly.
On the third turn, he reached for his name and found the note instead.
✦
Mrs. Kowalczyk turned down the TV for the third time.
Her bowl of soup was going cold on the tray on her lap. Cabbage soup, too salty. She had another spoonful anyway, blew on it out of principle, swallowed it.
The contestant in the red sweater had just picked "World Rivers" for eight hundred dollars. Through the wall, in 3B, something was pounding like a drum. Boom. Boom. Boom. A pause. Boom, boom, boom.
The frames above the sideboard were shaking: a wedding photo, the photo of the dog, the photo of the grandkids at Coney Island. And on the side table, the water in her glass was making little circles.
Her hearing aid whistled in her right ear. A high squeal of feedback that rose and fell. She took it out, grumbling — "Oh, this blasted thing!" — and looked at it in the palm of her hand. It whistled even louder. She was stunned to hear a noise that loud without the aid in her ear, as badly as she heard.
She grabbed her cane from against the armrest and rapped the wall three times with the handle, to tell whoever it was next door to stop that racket.
"That's enough!"
Boom. Boom. Boom.
But it didn't stop. So she rapped harder, and a chip of plaster fell behind the sideboard.
"Mr. Reyes! It's almost eight o'clock!"
But it didn't slow down, and it didn't speed up either, as if it were stuck at one level. It pounded on a rhythm she couldn't count.
She got up, pushing on both armrests. Her knees cracked. She put on her slippers, crossed the living room, turned both locks and pulled off the chain with a sharp tug.
The hallway smelled of frying from the second floor. The ceiling bulb was flickering. It flickered in time with the pounding. Three times. Dark. Three times.
The door of 3B was closed. Under the door, the light was doing the same thing.
She knocked with the handle of her cane.
"Mr. Reyes. It's Mrs. Kowalczyk. From across the hall."
Boom. Boom. Boom.
"Can you hear me? You're making too much noise! There are people in this building who have to work tomorrow."
Upstairs, a door opened.
"What the hell is going on?" a man yelled.
The door shut again.
Mrs. Kowalczyk pressed her ear against the door of 3B. The wood was cold. Colder than the wall. Behind it, she could hear feet. Feet that stomped, slid, stomped. Short breathing. And a laugh, brief, that didn't sound like anything.
There was no music and no TV. Feet, breathing, and that laugh.
The hearing aid in her hand squealed so loud against the wood that she stepped back.
And everything stopped.
The pounding. The squeal. The hallway bulb stayed on, steady. The silence came down all at once, so complete that she could hear the game show through her own door, the audience laughing, the host's voice.
She stood in front of 3B, her cane raised.
The deadbolt turned.
The door swung wide open.
Marco Reyes stood in the doorway. Jeans, gray T-shirt, untied sneakers. Soaked with sweat. His left hand hung at his side, with a split blister in the middle of the palm.
"Mr. Reyes," she said. "You need to—"
He looked at her.
His eyes went from her face to the doorframe, from the doorframe to the mat, then came back to her. They didn't change as they went from one to the other. His face didn't move at all. He was looking at her the way he looked at the wood.
Her hand tightened on the cane. She didn't finish her sentence.
Behind him, the apartment was pitch dark. The hallway light came in through the door and lit up a patch of floor covered in glass: the bulbs in the ceiling fixture had burst. The coffee table was knocked over on its side, a dish towel lay on the floor, and at the far end, the windowpane was bulging inward, cracked in a star in the middle.
Something was moving on the floor.
At first she thought it was a dog, because it was about that size. A black stain next to the overturned chair, with legs: four thin, straight legs, a flat back, rungs. The exact shape of the chair, lying right next to it.
Then the shape came apart. The stain spread out, rose, and took the shape of the coat on the hook: two hanging sleeves, a collar.
It came apart again.
It stood up. Small. Stooped. One shoulder lower than the other. One arm reaching toward the floor, the hand closed around nothing, leaning on nothing.
It took Mrs. Kowalczyk a second to understand what she was looking at.
The shape was standing the way she stood.
Then it fell flat, liquid, without a sound, and ran down between the floorboards. Nothing was left. A dark, dry mark the size of a hand.
Marco had turned around only once.
Then Mrs. Kowalczyk looked back at Marco's face, or at least at what she could see of it. Her whole body froze. She wanted to scream, to make a sound, even to look away for a split second, but she couldn't.
Of what was left of her, or of her mind, there was only one thing: no... body...
A flood of hideous, shrill sounds, like nails scraping a blackboard, noises, and something that was making her blind, insane. And yet it was all happening inside her own mind.
Her body and her mind bent out of shape, then rebuilt themselves perfectly, exactly the way they had been.
She turned to leave.
Marco closed the door. Gently. The latch clicked.
Mrs. Kowalczyk crossed the hallway again and went into her apartment without a sound. She shut her door, put on the chain. She turned off the TV. She turned on the living room lamp, then the one in the entryway, the kitchen, the bathroom.
She sat down in her armchair, the cane across her knees, as if there were nothing wrong with her legs.
After a while, she picked up the landline from the side table and dialed the number written in marker on the wall next to the light switch: SUPER — HECTOR.
It rang four times.
"Yeah?"
"Hector. It's Mrs. Kowalczyk. In 3A."
"Mrs. K. What's going on?"
She opened her mouth.
"There's a problem in 3B."
"What kind of problem?"
She looked at the shared wall. The frames were straight. The water in the glass was still.
"The light bulbs," she said. "All his light bulbs are broken."
Silence on the other end.
"I'll come by in the morning, Mrs. K. Okay? In the morning."
"Okay."
She hung up. She kept her hand on the receiver.
At two in the morning, she was still in her armchair, the cane across her knees, every lamp on.
On the other side of the wall, water started running. A faucet. You could hear the stream hitting the bottom of the sink in 3B, then the water stopped. A drawer opened. A drawer closed. The water ran again, a few seconds. Stopped.
Then three little knocks. Sharp. Against the edge of a sink.
Mrs. Kowalczyk waited, both hands on her cane.
The water. The drawer. The water. Three little knocks.
She listened until the sky turned gray behind her curtains. It started over every few minutes, the same, in the same order. She didn't sleep a wink.
✦
The Ancient One was pouring tea into Master Hamir's cup when the fear came.
It lasted less than the blink of an eye. A clean cold, from the nape of her neck to the small of her back. Her hand stopped. The stream of tea broke off above the cup, and a drop fell on the saucer.
She stood up abruptly, as if she were about to be sick.
Then there was nothing.
She set the teapot back on the tray. Her hand was dry. It wasn't shaking. Her heart had given one beat too hard, just one, and it was beating at its own pace again.
"Master?"
She raised two fingers. Hamir fell silent.
Her senses searched her body from top to bottom, then the library. The fire in the hearth. The clock on the landing. The pages of a book left open, lifting in the draft from the door. Then she felt the wards in the walls of the Sanctum, one by one, the way you run your tongue over your teeth. They were all in place. Taut. Silent. Nothing had touched them. Nothing was pressing on them.
She looked for where the fear had come from. She found no direction. The fear had left no trace of its passing, not in the room, not in the walls, not in her, as if it didn't exist.
Only one thing, as far as she knew, could get in like that without brushing a single ward.
She crossed the library to the black lacquer cabinet at the far end and opened it. On the middle shelf, wrapped in gray cloth, lay an obsidian mirror the size of a hand. She took it, but didn't uncover it right away.
"Close the door."
Hamir closed the library door and stayed in front of it, his back against the wood.
She undid the cloth.
The mirror didn't reflect the room. It opened onto a violet depth, bottomless, where great shapes moved with the slowness of continents. She drove her gaze into it, far, farther, all the way to the border. The border was intact. The seals burned each in its place, without a crack.
And beyond the border, immense, he was there. A head of dark flame wider than mountains, turned toward his own darkness. Right where he was. He wasn't looking toward Earth. He wasn't looking toward anything.
She watched him for a long time. He didn't move.
She covered the mirror.
A trick, then. A fear planted in her like a hook, so that she would open the Mirror Dimension, so that she would look, so that a door would stay ajar for the length of a glance. It was exactly what he would have tried.
She put the mirror back in the cabinet and turned the key twice.
Then she sat down in her armchair, closed her eyes, and went through her own mind, room by room. Her memories were in place. She sifted through everything, memory by memory, looking for a thought that wasn't hers or a door she hadn't opened herself.
She found nothing.
She opened her eyes. Hamir was still waiting, his back against the door.
"Nothing," she said.
She went back to the table, picked up the teapot and finished filling the cup. With the edge of her sleeve, she wiped up the drop that had fallen on the saucer.
"We were talking about the student in Kathmandu."
Hamir left the door, visibly relieved.
"Sit. Your tea is getting cold."
✦
Samir sounded out the word under his breath.
"Thresh... old."
He typed the word into the dictionary of his offline reading app with his thumb, on the cracked screen. Threshold: doorway; the point where something begins. He went back to the book. The sentence ran on for two more lines. He followed the words with his fingernail.
He was sitting on the rocks above the mouth of the cave, a blanket over his shoulders, the rifle across his thighs. Below, the whole camp was asleep. Two red fires, nearly out. Somebody coughing behind the trucks. Ten meters away, Jawad was smoking with his back against a rock, and the ember of his cigarette rose and fell.
The sky was still black.
"Still reading your American thing?" Jawad said without turning his head.
"It's teaching me English. And I like reading, it passes the time."
"It's teaching you not to sleep." He took a drag. "You get a signal up here?"
"No. I downloaded it in Jalalabad, before we came up."
"What's it about?"
Samir searched for the words.
"Things. That THEY will come. And that they're waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
"Don't know yet. It's like a call. I'm on page two hundred eleven."
Jawad blew smoke out through his nose, shaking his head.
"Two hundred pages of this crap. Ha! Americans. And now you've caught it too."
Samir scrolled the page up. At the top of the screen, in small gray capitals: WHAT COMES WHEN YOU CALL IT. Page 211.
He read the next sentence, moving his lips.
A few moments later, a light blinded him, full in the face.
He turned away, swearing.
"Who did that?"
Jawad stared at him, stunned.
"What's with you?"
"The light, right there. It was shining in my face."
"What light? The lack of sleep and that book are starting to make you crazy, looks like."
"It's more this desert, if you ask me," Samir answered. "All this time out here."
Then he let it go.
A little later still, his teeth started to vibrate.
First the back molars, on the left. He put it down to being tired. He clenched his jaw. The vibration went down into his throat, into his chest, and settled behind his breastbone. The glass of tea set against his boot clinked on its own, once, then started to shiver.
The phone vibrated in his hand. There was no notification and no call. It just vibrated. Three times. A pause. Three times.
Samir looked up.
"Jawad. You hear that?"
Jawad took the cigarette out of his mouth.
"What?"
"That."
Jawad listened. The wind. The generator, down in the cave.
"I hear your big mouth," he said. "Read your book."
Above the low note, a high sound rose. A thread. It went up, came down, went back up, always on the same pitches. Under the blanket, the hair on Samir's arms stood up. A warmth rose in his chest. His legs wanted to get up. His mouth wanted to laugh. He gripped the rifle with both hands.
On the screen, the letters moved.
He thought his vision was blurring. He blinked. The letters were sliding. They came loose from the lines, one by one, and ran down toward the bottom of the page, black, thick. They piled up at the edge of the screen. A puddle of ink. It overflowed.
The ink came out of the screen and ran over his thumb.
It was cold. It weighed nothing. It climbed onto the back of his hand, went around his wrist and slipped under the sleeve of his jacket.
Samir jumped to his feet. The blanket fell. He shook his arm, slapped his sleeve against the rock, yanked the fabric up to his elbow. His skin was clean. Not a mark. He rubbed it anyway, hard, with his palm, until it burned.
"What the hell are you doing?" Jawad said.
Samir knew Jawad would put this down to lack of sleep again.
"A scorpion."
Jawad half got up, looked at the rocks around him, sat back down.
"You get it?"
"No. It's gone."
Samir picked up the phone. The page was blank. The whole page. At the bottom, the number was still there: 211. He scrolled up. The page before was full of text. He scrolled down. So was the page after.
The note stopped.
The high thread stopped with it. The glass of tea was still. His teeth weren't vibrating anymore. There was only the wind and the generator.
Samir switched off the phone and held it in his hand for a moment, not knowing what to do with it. Finally he took out the plastic bag his cigarettes were in, emptied the cigarettes into his pocket, put the phone in their place and tied a knot. Then he knelt, lifted a flat stone near his foot, slid the bag underneath and set the stone back down, pressing on it with both hands.
Jawad watched him, the cigarette halfway to his mouth.
"You burying your scorpion?"
Samir sat back down on the rock and picked up the blanket.
"Yeah."
✦
After their watch, Samir and Jawad went back down to sleep.
Samir woke up because Omar had stopped snoring.
There were eleven of them in the big tent. Omar slept two cots down, against the back wall, and since the start of the night he'd been snoring like an engine that keeps stalling. Now, nothing. The others were breathing. Somebody was talking in his sleep. Outside, the wind was slapping a rope against a tent stake.
Not Omar.
Samir felt around, found the flashlight under his bag and switched it on, keeping his hand over the beam.
"Omar."
Omar's blanket was on his cot. It had the shape of a body. A shoulder, a hip, bent knees.
"Omar. You asleep?"
He got up, stepped over Hakim's bag, went closer. Omar's boots were at the foot of the cot, side by side. His rifle lay underneath.
Samir took the edge of the blanket and pulled.
Omar wasn't under it.
The canvas of the cot sagged. It sagged in the middle, where Omar's back should have been, and it sagged lower than that. Lower than the legs of the cot. Lower than the ground. The flashlight beam went into the hollow and didn't hit bottom. The canvas sank, stretched tight, and at the end it was dark.
Cold air rose out of the hollow. It had no smell.
Samir stayed bent over it, the flashlight in one hand, the blanket in the other.
He let go of the blanket. He reached out his left hand. He lowered it into the hollow. The wrist. The forearm. The elbow. The canvas didn't touch him. At his fingertips, nothing. No bottom. No sides. Cold. He went down to the shoulder, his cheek almost against the frame of the cot.
Far below his fingers, the vibration came back. In his teeth. Faint.
He yanked his arm out.
He fell backward against Hakim's cot. Hakim swore and pushed himself up on one elbow. The flashlight rolled across the floor, its beam pointing at Omar's cot.
The canvas was flat. Stretched between the two bars. An empty cot, with a blanket bunched at the foot.
"What's wrong with you?" Hakim said.
Samir was looking at his arm. It was dry. It was cold all the way to the shoulder. He had goosebumps up to his neck.
"I don't know, but Omar's gone."
They searched the tent and all around it, but didn't find him. So Hakim went to get the boss.
Raza showed up five minutes later, in his shirt, boots unlaced, an oil lamp in one hand and his pistol in the other. He ordered everyone out and lined them up in front of the tent, in the cold. He counted. Ten.
He went back into the tent, crouched by Omar's cot, rested the pistol on his thigh and pressed the canvas with his palm. The canvas gave two centimeters and came back up.
"Who saw him last?"
Samir didn't know what had really happened earlier, when he'd reached out his hand, and he didn't want the boss to think he was imagining things.
Nervous, he answered:
"Me. He was snoring."
"And then?"
"Then he wasn't snoring anymore."
One of the men snickered. Raza turned his head toward him, and the man stopped snickering.
Raza looked at Omar's boots, side by side at the foot of the cot, and the rifle underneath. He picked up a boot, turned it over, shook it. Nothing fell out. He put it back exactly where it had been.
"Nobody walks out of a tent without his boots," he said.
He stood up.
"Abu. Whole camp up. Now."
Within ten minutes, the entire camp was outside. Lamps moved back and forth between the tents. Abu Bakaar shouted Omar's name toward the valley, hands cupped around his mouth, and the valley sent nothing back, not even an echo. Men searched the latrines, the trucks, under the trucks, the ammunition store, every crate, the cave all the way to the workshop curtain. Raza walked among them, pistol in hand, sweeping his lamp low over the ground around the tent. Boot prints everywhere. Not a single bare footprint.
At dawn, he split up the men.
"Three pickups. North, east, south. Four men per truck. You follow the tracks, you check every ravine, every cave, every pile of rocks. You're back before noon."
Samir climbed into the back of the north truck with Jawad. Hakim drove. Abu Bakaar sat next to him, rifle between his knees, a folded map on his thighs.
✦
The pickup went down the camp track in the gray light. Behind them, the camp shrank: the antennas, the smoke from the fires, the tarps. Ahead, the valley opened north between two lines of ridges. Hakim drove slowly. Abu watched the left, Jawad the right, Samir the back. At every ravine, Hakim stopped the truck, and Jawad and Samir jumped down from the bed, climbed up on the rocks and called out.
"Omar!"
The wind. Their own voices, which didn't come back.
On the odometer, three kilometers. Then six. The sun cleared the ridge and landed on the backs of their necks. Nine. Samir couldn't feel his fingers on the edge of the truck bed anymore. Jawad was lighting his third cigarette off the butt of the second.
At eleven kilometers, the track ran alongside a dry riverbed. Hakim sped up a little. In the cab, Abu was tapping the map with his finger.
"There's a village eighteen kilometers out," he said through the open window. "If he walked, that's where he went."
Samir was looking out behind the truck. The dust. Their tire tracks on the trail, two straight lines running south, toward the camp you couldn't see anymore.
His molars started to vibrate.
One second. The low note, faint, very far away. He clenched his jaw. It passed.
The truck drove on for a while.
Then Jawad elbowed him.
"Look."
Samir turned to face the front.
At the end of the track, straight ahead, there were antennas. Tarps. Two columns of gray smoke rising from fires that were nearly out.
The camp.
Hakim braked. The pickup stopped in a cloud of dust that caught up with them and rolled over them.
No one spoke.
Abu Bakaar looked at the compass stuck to the dashboard. The needle pointed north. The nose of the truck was facing north. The camp was in front of them, to the north.
"We left heading north," Hakim said.
"I know."
"We drove straight."
"I know."
Hakim stomped on the floor of the cab, furious.
"Shit, is that all you can say?"
Abu tapped the odometer with his fingernail. Twelve point two kilometers.
Hakim started the engine again. He drove at a crawl to the camp and came in by the south track, the one none of them had taken that morning.
The east truck was already there. It had come in from the west. Its four men were standing beside it, and the tallest one, Rahim, was talking loudly to Raza, pointing back at the track behind him. Twenty minutes later, the south truck came in from the north.
Three trucks. Three directions. Three odometers stopped at twelve kilometers and a few hundred meters.
✦
Raza heard out the three teams one after the other, without interrupting. Then he held out his hand to Hakim, and Hakim gave him the keys.
"Abu, you're coming." He pointed his chin at Samir. "You too. In the back."
Samir climbed back into the truck bed.
Raza drove himself, fast, up the north track, his eyes on the odometer. In the cab, nobody talked. Samir held on to the edge with both hands and watched their own tire tracks from that morning unspool ahead of them, two straight lines running north that never turned anywhere.
At eleven point eight kilometers, Raza slowed down. At eleven point nine five, he stopped.
He got out and walked up the track. Abu followed him, rifle in hand. Samir jumped down from the bed and stayed close to the door.
Raza counted his steps under his breath. Fifty. Sixty. He stopped, looked back at the truck, then ahead at the valley that went on north, empty, with its ridges on both sides and its dry river. Nothing marked the spot: no stone, no line, no change in the color of the ground.
He picked up a pebble the size of a walnut and threw it ahead of him, far, to the north.
The pebble rose, started to come down, and about twenty meters in front of Raza, at head height, it stopped in midair. It didn't fall. It went back the way it came, along the same arc, at the same speed, and landed in the dust at Raza's feet.
Samir felt his teeth vibrate, once, at the moment the pebble turned around.
Raza looked at the pebble at his feet. He picked up another one, bigger, and threw it harder.
The rock came back harder. It went past Raza's shoulder, whistled by Abu's ear and hit the truck's front headlight. The glass burst. Samir felt the shards sting the back of his hand.
Abu had raised his rifle without realizing it. He didn't know where to point it. The barrel went from the empty valley to the rock on the ground and back to the valley.
Raza didn't step back. He scooped up a handful of gravel and flung it out in a fan in front of him. All the gravel stopped on the same line, at the same instant, as if against a pane of glass, and came back all together. It rained down around him, on his shoulders, in his hair, on the hood of the truck, with a sound like hail.
He stood in the middle of the gravel, arms at his sides.
"Nobody shoots," he said.
Abu lowered his rifle.
Raza walked forward to the place where the stones had stopped. He raised his hand, palm open, and pushed it out in front of him, slowly, the way you feel for a wall in the dark. His hand went forward. His arm went forward. He took a step. Two. Samir saw him take a third.
And Raza was facing them.
He was walking toward them, toward the truck, with the same slow step, his hand still held out in front of him. Held out to the south now. Toward them. He hadn't turned around. Samir hadn't taken his eyes off him for a second, and he hadn't seen him turn.
Raza stopped. He looked at his hand. He looked back at the empty valley behind him. He looked at the truck.
He came back to the truck without a word, got in and slammed the door.
On the way back, he didn't say a thing. Samir could see him through the rear window of the cab: both hands on the wheel, eyes on the track, gravel still in his hair.
✦
At sunset, Raza had the whole camp assembled on the flat ground in front of the cave. Everyone. The guards from the posts, the two radio men. He had them form two rows, facing him. The fires were lit behind him, and his shadow stretched all the way to the front row.
He had his pistol in his hand.
"We have a problem," he said. "Someone got into this camp. An intruder, hiding among you. There's no other explanation."
Nobody moved.
Raza lowered his voice, but Samir still heard him say to Abu:
"What's he after? Getting Tony Stark out? From now on, I watch the cave myself. And everyone who goes in."
Then he called up the ten men who had slept in Omar's tent and put them together in the second row.
He walked slowly along the front row.
"A mutant. The Americans have them. Some of them bend distance. Some of them wear another man's face."
He stopped in front of the first man.
"Name."
"Rahim."
Raza turned his head to the man on the left.
"Is this Rahim?"
"It's Rahim."
To the man on the right.
"Is this Rahim?"
"Yes, Commander."
Raza moved the pistol to his left hand. With his right, he searched Rahim: jacket pockets, chest, back, belt, legs down to the boots. He made him open his mouth and looked inside by the light of the lamp Abu was holding behind him. He made him show his hands, palms, then the backs. Then he moved on to the next one.
"Name."
It took a long time. The sun went down behind the ridges. The cold dropped all at once. The men waited in line, and every time Raza stopped in front of someone, the two men beside him stiffened and stared at him as if they were seeing him for the first time.
Samir was in the second row. He could feel his left arm under his sleeve. The arm was normal. He couldn't stop feeling it anyway.
Raza reached him.
"Name."
"Samir."
"Is this Samir?"
"It's Samir," said Jawad, on his left.
"It's him," said Hakim, on his right.
Raza searched him. Pockets. Chest. He stopped at the breast pocket, took out the pack of cigarettes, opened it, closed it, put it back. Samir had stopped breathing. Raza took his left arm and pushed the sleeve up to the elbow. The skin was clean. Raza examined it under the lamp, for a long time. He pulled the sleeve back down.
"Open your mouth."
Samir opened his mouth. Raza looked.
He moved on to the next one.
At the end of the second row, he stopped, turned around, and looked at his men. Thirty-eight. He had laid hands on every one of them. He had had each of them named by two others. No one had hesitated. There wasn't one unknown face.
There was no intruder.
Raza stood still in front of the fires for a moment. Then he slid the pistol into his belt.
"The phone."
Abu ran to the command tent and came back with the satellite phone. Raza unfolded the antenna and waited for the screen to find a signal. The bars climbed. Four. He dialed a number from memory and held the phone to his ear.
Nothing.
Not even a ringback tone. The screen said CALLING. It kept saying it. Raza hung up, tried again. Another number. Nothing. A third. Nothing.
Under the radio tarp, the two operators had switched on the big set and were turning the knobs. From the line, Samir could hear the hiss of the speaker, the same on every frequency. Under the hiss, very far away, he heard the note. He looked at the men around him. Nobody else had raised his head.
Raza lowered the phone. He looked at the screen for a long moment.
Then he turned toward the cave.
"Now there really is someone out there. Or something not right," he said to Abu, low. "And this dome, like a shield... I didn't pick up any energy around here, not even with my equipment." He straightened up. "The radios and the rest of the equipment. All of it. Bring it down."
✦
Raza walked into the workshop. Abu followed him with two handheld radios and the big set from the tent, its cord hanging over his shoulder. Raza put the satellite phone down on the workbench, between a copper tube and a spool of wire. Abu set the radios next to it.
"No calls go out," Raza said. "Nothing works. And check if there's some kind of energy around here. Look at what's going on with these radios and this controller. Fix it. Both of you. Twenty minutes, or else..."
He was staring at Yinsen.
He called a soldier in.
"Watch them. When they're done, you bring them to me."
Tony looked at the phone. Then at Raza. Then at Yinsen, who had stopped cleaning the tip of the soldering iron.
Raza walked out, Abu at his heels.
Yinsen picked up the first radio, opened the case and checked the battery contacts.
Tony picked up the phone. The battery was full. The antenna was unfolded, undamaged. He dialed a number he knew by heart and held the phone to his ear.
It rang.
He felt relief rising, but he didn't let it show: the soldier was right next to him.
He pretended to hear a strange noise on the line and cocked his head, as if he were diagnosing the problem.
A long, clean ring. A silence. A ring. A silence. Tony counted. At twenty, still no voicemail, no cutoff, no error message. At forty, only one thing had changed: the silences between the rings were getting longer. A little. A little more each time.
He pressed the red button.
The ringing went on in the earpiece.
He looked at the screen. CALL ENDED. He put the phone back to his ear. A ring. A long silence. A ring.
He flipped the phone over, popped the cover off with his thumb and ripped out the battery.
The phone rang one more time in his hand. Then nothing.
Tony set the phone down on the workbench. He set the battery next to it. He wiped his hand on his pants.
"Well?" the soldier said.
"It's not broken."
"So it just doesn't work," the soldier grunted.
"It's a satellite network problem. It works fine. It dials. It's ringing at somebody's place." Tony looked at the battery on the workbench. "I don't know whose."
Yinsen closed the radio.
"This one works too. It transmits. All it receives is static."
Raza came back, Abu behind him.
Tony quickly snapped the battery back in, discreetly deleted the number from the call log and handed the phone to Raza.
Raza looked at the phone, the radios, Tony. Then at the tarp at the back of the workshop, and the tall shape under it. Yinsen took a step to the side and stood in front of the tarp, soldering iron in hand.
Raza reached out and took the lamp off the workbench. The only lamp in the workshop. He wound the cord around its base.
"Thirty minutes," he said.
He kept the phone in his hand, eyes on the screen, to see if anything changed.
He walked out. Abu left the radios on the workbench and followed him.
✦
That night, Abu Bakaar went through every tent with the new order. Everyone slept in pairs. One sleeps, one watches. Nobody slept alone. The men drew lots for who would sleep first, with straws clenched in Abu's fist.
Samir drew the short straw.
Hakim lay down on his cot with his boots on and his rifle on his stomach, and stared at the canvas above him.
"If I stop snoring, wake me up," he said, still lying there.
Samir sat on a crate next to him. Every so often, Hakim snored, a little noise in his throat, and Samir's fists unclenched. When the snoring stopped, Samir pointed the flashlight at the cot, just to make sure Hakim was still there, and sat back down.
After an hour, he got up for a drink. From the tent flap, under the moon, you could see the rocks above the cave, and the flat stone. It was right where he'd left it. He looked at it for a long time, the cup in his hand.
He went back and sat next to Hakim.
Later, his teeth started to vibrate.
Stronger than on the track. The low note, and above it, the high thread. He clenched his jaw and held on to the edge of the crate. Hakim was asleep. Around him, the others keeping watch didn't move. Samir counted without meaning to. One. Two. Three.
At eleven, it stopped.
Hakim snored. Samir's fists unclenched.
. . .
There was no lamp anymore, and the only light in the workshop came from his chest.
A pale blue disk through the T-shirt. Enough to see the edge of the workbench, the radios lined up on it, the outline of the tarp, Yinsen's face, asleep against a rock, worn out, his mouth half open. A small noise at the back of the cave. Behind the curtain, two guards were talking quietly, and every now and then one of them laughed.
Tony was sitting up. He was tinkering with the cables, building something in secret and glancing at the cave door.
Behind the curtain, the voices stopped. In the middle of a word.
Tony looked down. The disk was fading. He put his hand over it. Under his palm, the metal was warm and the hum was still there, lower, much lower, an engine being choked.
A cold point dug in under his breastbone, on the left. A thin, precise pressure that moved in a millimeter.
He rolled onto his side, reached out and felt along the floor. The ground. A crate. The corner of the car battery. The cables. His fingers found one clamp, then the other. He held them, one in each hand, without really knowing why.
His heart was beating in his throat, out of step. One beat. Nothing. Two beats.
He counted.
One. Two. Three. The light was nothing but a gray dot in the center of the disk. Four. Five. He opened his mouth to call Yinsen, and shut it. Six. Seven. The pressure under his breastbone moved in another millimeter. Eight. Nine. He opened the jaws of the red clamp. Ten.
Eleven.
The light came back.
All at once. The blue disk, full, bright. The rock ceiling, the workbench, the tarp, Yinsen asleep. The hum went back to its note. The pressure under his breastbone eased off, then disappeared.
Tony stayed on his side, a clamp in each hand, his mouth open.
Behind the curtain, the two voices started again. In the middle of the sentence, right where they had stopped. One of the guards laughed.
Tony sat up. He sat with his back against the rock wall, the cables on his knees, two fingers on his own wrist, and watched the light in his chest until daylight came into the cave.
When Yinsen woke up, he found him like that.
Yinsen looked at the cables. Then at Tony.
"What happened?"
Tony held out the clamps to him.
"If it goes out again, you don't wait for me. You don't ask questions. You hook it up. Red on positive, black on ground."
"Again?"
Tony didn't answer. He got up, took the roll of duct tape from the workbench and taped the two clamps within reach of his hand and within reach of Yinsen's. Then he tore off a strip of tape, wrote on it in marker, and stuck it to the bottom edge of the reactor, where he would see it every time he looked down.
11 s.
"Eleven seconds," Yinsen read.
"Back to work," Tony said. "We've got less time than we thought."
Before touching the tarp, he dumped a crate of capacitors onto the workbench. He sorted them by value, in rows, with the tip of a screwdriver. He soldered them onto a copper plate, a block the size of a pack of cigarettes, and ran two wires from the block to the edge of the reactor. His hands were still shaking a little. He redid two of the solder joints.
Yinsen watched him without asking anything.
When it was done, Tony slipped the block into the breast pocket of his shirt and felt it through the fabric. He felt it a second time. Then he turned to the tarp and went back to work.
✦
End of Part One