The Anomaly(60)

“What,” I said slowly, “are you talking about?”

“The permafrost crack in Alaska. There was speculation there might be something of interest to us deep down in it, another example of what we believe is here in this canyon. It’s a long shot, but you never know. I don’t know what’s happened with that one yet. You’ve got my phone, of course.”

“Feather,” Ken said. His face was composed and his voice extremely calm. I’d seen him that way once before. A bar fight broke out soon afterward. “How about you stop being a cunt and tell us what the fuck is going on.”

“That’s not a nice word, Ken.”

“I know. But unless you’re a fantasist having a mental breakdown then you’ve murdered the one bloke who could get us out of here. Deliberately fucking us up. So pardon my fucking Anglo-Saxon, love, and just tell us.”

“I’m not going to do that,” she said. “My instructions are to let events unfold. To wait, and hope.”

When she spoke again her voice was quieter, as though she’d moved farther away. “But out of respect, Nolan, I’ll tell you that you already know what you’ve found. Or could work it out, at least. I wish you were on this side with me. There’s so much we could do together. You’re cleverer than people think, and you’ve got all the pieces in there. You’ve just got to put them together. It won’t save you, unfortunately. But it might be satisfying to know you’ve been right all along.”

“Feather…”

“You’re going to change the world, Nolan. Forever. Be proud.”

And then she was gone.





Part Three



“Then why do you want to know?”

“Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do, and perhaps should not do.”

—Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose





So the Lord said,

“I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.”

—Genesis 6:7





Chapter

36



We walked back up to the main room and sat in a circle. For a while, nobody had anything to say. After we’d heard Feather’s footsteps receding, Pierre called out to her. The sound rebounded flatly in the passage. And sounded dumb. It wasn’t Pierre’s fault. It was the fact that this name—the name each of us had called out many times in the last twenty-four hours, out of concern for her safety and in the increasingly urgent hope that she was on her way back with help—now conjured a very different picture. She’d never needed our help, and she had never gone to seek any for us.

I could see several of the others struggling through the mental process I’d undergone, reframing everything Feather had done. Pierre and Molly were the most withdrawn. Gemma had been a few steps ahead of us, of course. She’d rapidly jumped to conclusions after going through Feather’s phone—and she’d been right. She too, though, seemed extremely tired and drawn.

Ken’s face was unreadable, but I knew he was capable of getting his head around a dark new world faster than any of us. He was a pragmatist, used to rolling with punches, from actors being airlifted to rehab in the middle of expensive shoots to being fired the day before principal photography on what would have been the biggest movie of his life, a career game-changer, because the studio felt like it.

And me? I was there, pretty much. Certainly there enough to know anything that had happened before this didn’t matter.

All that mattered was what we did next.



One of the advantages of being a smoker is you are never in doubt as to the most appropriate response to any circumstance, whether it be good or…really, really bad. I lit up a cigarette and passed it to Ken. He smoked half of it without looking at me, and then passed it back.

“What’d she mean?”

“When?”

“When she said you had all the pieces.”

“Don’t know. She’s obviously been sitting on the other side of that rock the whole day, listening. And we all talked to her last night, told her what we’d found up to that point. So she knows everything we know. Presumably it’s a piece of that information, or a combination of pieces adding up to something bigger.”

“So what do we have? List it.”

“A bunch of passages and tunnels, with rooms, most of them completely empty. The pool with the metal spheres, which have now moved.”

“Moved?” Gemma said.

Ken told everyone what we’d found just before the phone thing with Feather blew up. He did not need to explicitly explain it meant that any hope of additional water had vanished.

Then he nodded at me to continue.

“Plus there’s a room with black stuff on the ground that smells bad and may be loosening up. And a fissure out the back that leads to that cave beyond. Then there’s Gemma thinking something brushed against her in the dark.”

“It did.”

“Okay.”

Ken nodded thoughtfully. “That’s it?”

“And it adds up to zip so far as I’m concerned. I’ll kick it over to the boys in the back brain and see if they can connect the dots, but right now…I got nothing.”