The Anomaly(59)

“And it does now?”

“I don’t know, Nolan. But Gemma’s right. That picture doesn’t look kosher to me.”

“Shh,” Molly said suddenly.

Ken and I fell silent. And then we could all hear the sound of the slow handclap.



It stopped almost immediately, but it was clear where it had been coming from.

We walked together down the passage and stopped a couple of yards short of the stone ball.

“Feather?” I said. “Is that you?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’m glad you’re back. Funny thing…we were just talking about you.”

“I know. I heard.”

“Weird…that you got back just as it was happening.”

“Oh, I’ve been here the whole time, Nolan.”

“You’ve…what?”

“I’ve been sitting here quietly.”

“Didn’t you hear us shouting for you earlier?”

“Of course.”

“So how come you didn’t answer?”

“Nothing to say.”

Ken took over. “Okay, love. So…did you go down the shaft and try to latch up with Dylan?”

“No. There’s really no point.”

“Why?”

“Dylan’s dead, I’m afraid.”

“What?” I said. “What…makes you think that?”

“The fact that I killed him yesterday.”





Chapter

35



Nobody moved.

“Feather…if that’s supposed to be a joke,” I said carefully, “you missed the mark. By a very long way.”

“It’s no joke,” she said. “He was waiting down at the river like a good and faithful servant. He’d met up with some guy and got extra food and water, and came back just as fast as he could. So I climbed down and got on the raft and, well, events ensued. A necessary fatality occurred.”

“Feather,” Ken said, “this isn’t funny.”

“No, I can imagine.”

“So then what?” I said. “You climbed back up and pretended he hadn’t been there? Why?”

“Well, first I took the raft down to the beach where we’d been staying. Which was not easy, by myself. Landed it and put up a couple of tents and tables and chairs. It’s pretty realistic, I think. After that, yes, I came back in the dinghy and back up the shaft. Heck of a day, exertion-wise. I did bring some water, but only enough for me. Sorry. I was tired.”

“The dinghy’s still down there?”

“Yes. But it’s well hidden.”

A large part of me was still trying to believe this was a very poorly judged attempt at humor. The human mind is fiercely protective of what it believes to be true about the world, especially if those beliefs are unspoken or taken for granted at a deep level. It’s like the moment when you learn someone you love has died unexpectedly, or you find out your wife has been having an on-off affair with someone you thought was something like a friend, a man you’d had a convivial lunch with only a couple of days before. Our minds can’t immediately process reversals of that magnitude. They will do everything they can to make the evidence—the phone call from your crying father saying your mother had a heart attack, or the “I thought you should know” email from your wife’s best friend—fit somehow with the previous narrative, in which those inexplicable things aren’t true and never could be.

But your soul knows. Your soul most likely had an inkling long before the events you’re struggling to comprehend had even occurred, sensitive as it is to currents and changes too subtle for the conscious mind to observe, and responsive as it can be to the futures shaping themselves in front of you.

And so your soul sits waiting for you to catch up.

And in the moment when I stood there, not knowing what to say, I had a flash recollection of Feather’s face when she’d gotten stuck on the other side of the main room in the seconds after the big stone ball was unleashed. The way she’d been frozen in fear, or so I’d thought. Some higher-level function of my brain, late to the party but suddenly full of insight, now made a belated but forceful cross-reference to how she’d responded when bucked out of the boat into the hectic rapids on the first day: the fast, decisive, and athletic way in which she’d dealt with both the physical and mental challenge.

I looked again upon my internal picture of her face and wondered whether instead of fear and confusion, I could see calculation—the making of a quick judgment call that needed to be followed by a convincing display of apparent flight.

I wondered this, and immediately knew the answer.

“You said ‘necessary,’” I said. “Why?”

“Dylan was a dick but basically a decent guy,” she said. “When you guys didn’t return, he was always going to go and get help.”

“And why didn’t you want that? What’s going on, Feather?”

“You’ve found something very important, Nolan. Possibly the most important thing that’s ever been found. I wasn’t lying back at the hotel, when I said I’m a big fan of yours. I really am. We all are, at the Foundation. We have other irons in the fire. Other people out looking for us. They don’t know that’s what they’re doing, either, naturally. Not even Kristy, and she’s famously smart.”