Текст книги "Thunderhead"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston,Lincoln Child
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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

Then one of the figures glided to the edge of the cliff face and gazed down the thin ladder. It disappeared back beneath the brow of rimrock. The figure looked out, into the valley. He was almost directly above the camp now, and the glow of the fire, eight hundred feet below, seemed strangely close, an angry nugget of red in the darkness. A low, guttural sound rose out from deep within his frame, at last dying away into a groan that resolved itself into a faint, monotonous chant. Then he turned back toward the equipment.

In ten minutes, their work there was done.

Slinking further along the rimrock, they made their way to the end of the canyon. The ancient secret trail wormed down through a cut in the rimrock, descending toward the narrow canyon at the far side of the Quivira valley. The trail was perfectly concealed against the rock, and terrifyingly precipitous. The faint sounds of the waterfall echoed up below them, the water thrashing and boiling its way on the long trip down to the Colorado River.

In time, the figures reached the sandy bottom. They moved stealthily out of the curtain of mist, past the rockfall, then along the base of the canyon wall, keeping in the deeper darkness of moonshadow. They stopped when they neared the first member of the expedition: a figure beyond the edge of the camp, sleeping beneath the stars, pale face looking deathlike in gray half-light.

Reaching into the matted pelt that lay across his back, one of the figures pulled out a small pouch. It was made of cured human skin, and in the glow of the moon it gave out an otherworldly, translucent sheen. Loosening the leather thong around it, the figure reached inside and, with extreme caution, drew out a disk of bone and an ancient tube of willow wood, polished with use and incised with a long reverse spiral. The disk flashed dully in the moonlight as he turned it over once, then again. Then, placing one end of the tube to his lips, he leaned toward the face of the sleeping figure. There was a sudden breath of wind, and a brief cloud of dust flowered in the moonlight. Then, with the tread of ghosts, the two figures retreated back toward the cliff face, disappearing once again into the woven shadows.

37

COUGHING, PETER HOLROYD WOKE abruptly out of dark dreams. Some stray breeze had chased dirt across his face. Or more likely it was dust from the day’s work, he thought blearily, still weeping out of his pores. He wiped his face and sat up.

It had not been the dust alone that awakened him. Earlier, there had been a sound: a strange cry, borne faintly on the wind, as if the earth itself were groaning. He might have thought he’d dreamed the noise, except that nothing remotely like it had ever existed in his imagination. He was aware that his heart was racing.

Gripping the edges of his bedroll, he looked around. The half-moon threw zebra stripes of silvery-blue light across the camp. He glanced from tent to tent, and at the still black lumps of bedrolls. Everything was still.

His eyes stopped at a spot on a small rise, perhaps twenty yards from the campfire. Usually Nora would be at that spot, sleeping. Tonight she was gone—gone with Smithback. Many times during the desert nights Holroyd had found himself looking in her direction. Wondering what it would be like to creep over and talk to her, tell her how much all this meant to him. How much shemeant to him. And, always, the last thing he wondered was why he just never had the guts to do it.

Holroyd lay back with a sigh. Even if Nora had been around, though, tonight he had no desire to do anything but rest. He was bone-tired; more tired than he remembered ever being in his life. In Nora’s absence, Sloane had directed him to clear away a tidal wave of sand and dust that had risen up against the back wall of the ruin, not far from Aragon’s Crawlspace. He hadn’t understood why he needed to dig that particular spot; there were many sites in the front of the ruin that had yet to be studied. But Sloane had brushed off his questions with a quick explanation about how important pictographs were often found at such sites at the rear of Anasazi cities. He was surprised at how quickly and completely, after Nora left, Sloane assumed command. But Aragon had been working by himself in a remote corner of the city, his face dark and severe; apparently, he’d made yet another disturbing discovery, and he was too preoccupied to pay attention to anything else. As for Black, he seemed to yield up all critical sense in Sloane’s presence, automatically agreeing with whatever she said. And so, from morning until dark, Holroyd had wielded a shovel and a rake. And now it seemed to him that, even after a month’s worth of baths, he’d never get all the dust out of his hair, nose, and mouth.

He stared up at the night sky. There was a funny taste in his mouth, and his jaw ached. The beginning of a headache was forming around his temples. He didn’t know what he’d expected to do on the expedition, but his vague romantic notions of opening rich tombs and deciphering inscriptions seemed a far cry from the endless grunt work he’d been doing. All around lay fantastic ruins of a mysterious civilization, while they were immersed in gridding this and surveying that. Andmoving piles of empty sand. He was sick of digging, he decided. And he didn’t like working for Sloane. She was too aware of her perfection and the influence she cast on others, too willing to use her charm to get what she wanted. Ever since the confrontation with Nora at Pete’s Ruin, he’d felt on his guard when she was around.

He sighed, closing his eyes against the pressure in his head. It wasn’t like him to be this grouchy. Normally, he only got grumpy when he was coming down with something. Sloane was all right, really; she was just outspoken, used to getting her way, not his type. And it didn’t matter if he was digging sand or breaking rocks. The important thing was he was here—here at Quivira, at this miraculous, mythical place. Nothing else mattered.

Suddenly, he stiffened, eyes opening wide. That sound again.

Pushing the blanket to one side, he rose to his knees as quietly as he could. Whatever he’d heard, it had stopped. No, there it was again: a murmur, a low groan.

But this sound was different from the sound that had awakened him. It was softer, somehow; softer and nearer.

In the pale light, he hunted around for a stick, a penknife, anything that could be used as a weapon. His hand closed around a heavy flashlight. He hefted it, thought of switching it on, then decided against it. He rose to his feet, staggering a moment before gaining his balance. Then, silently, he moved in the direction of the noise. All had grown quiet again, but the sound seemed to have come from beyond the stand of cottonwoods near the stream.

Cautiously picking his way around boxes and shrouded packs, Holroyd moved away from the camp toward the stream. A cloud had passed over the moon, darkening the landscape to an impenetrable murk. He felt hot, uncomfortable, disoriented in the close darkness. The headache had grown worse when he stood up, and it almost seemed as if a film lay in front of his eyes. In a detached way, he made out what looked like a patch of highly poisonous druid’s mantle a few feet away. Instead of taking a closer look, he regarded it with uncharacteristic disinterest. He should be resting in his blanket, not wandering around on a fool’s errand.

As he was about to turn back, he heard another sound: a moan, the soft slap of skin against skin.

Then the moon was out again. Stealthily, he moved forward, looking carefully to both sides. The sounds were clearer now, more regular. He tightened his grip on the flashlight, grasped the trunk of a cottonwood, and peered through the curtain of moonlit leaves.

The first thing he saw was a tangle of clothes on the ground beyond. For a moment, Holroyd thought somebody had been attacked, and their body dragged off. Then his eyes moved farther.

On the soft sand beyond the cottonwoods lay Black. His shirt was bunched up around his armpits, his bare legs were splayed, knees bent toward the sky. His eyes were squeezed shut. A small groan escaped him. Above, Sloane was straddling Black’s hips, her fingers spread wide against his chest, the sweat on her naked back glowing in the moonlight. Holroyd leaned forward with an involuntary movement, staring in shock and fascination. His face flushed, whether in embarrassment or shame at his own naïveté, he could not say. Black grunted in combined effort and pleasure as he sheathed himself within her, thigh muscles straining. Sloane leaned over him, her dark hair falling over her face, her breasts swaying heavily with each thrust. Holroyd’s eyes traveled slowly up her body. She was staring at Black’s face intently, with a look more of rapt attention than of pleasure. There was something almost predatory in that look. For a moment, he was reminded of a cat, playing with a mouse.

But that image dissolved as Sloane thrust downward to meet Black, again and again and again, riding him with relentless, merciless precision.

38

WITH A TUG ON THE GUIDE ROPE, NORA brought Arbuckles to a halt. She stood beside the horse and looked down from the crest of the Devil’s Backbone, into the valley the old Indian had called Chilbah. She felt drained, sickened, by the climb back to the top, and Arbuckles was shaking and lathered with stress. But they had made it: his hooves, once again freed of iron, had gripped the gritty sandstone.

The wind was blowing hard across the fin of rock and several ragged afternoon thunderheads were coalescing over the distant mountains to the north, but the valley itself remained a vast bowl of sunlight.

Smithback came to a stop beside her, white, silent. “So this is Chilbah, sinkhole of evil,” he said after a moment. His tone was meant to be light, but his voice still held a quiver of stress from the terrifying ascent of the hogback ridge.

Nora did not reply immediately. Instead, she knelt to reshoe the horses, letting a full sense of control return to her limbs. Then she stood, dusted herself off, and reached into a saddlebag for her binoculars. She scanned the bottomlands with them, looking for Swire and the horses. The cottonwoods and swales of grass were a welcome sight after the long, hot ride back from the sheep camp. It was now half past one. She located Swire alongside the creek, sitting on a rock, watching the remuda graze. As she stared, she could see him looking up toward them.

“People are evil,” she said at last, lowering the binoculars. “Landscapes are not.”

“Maybe so,” said Smithback. “But right from the beginning, I’ve felt there was something strange about the place. Something that gave me the willies.”

Nora glanced at the writer. “And I’ve always thought it was just me,” she replied.

They mounted their horses and moved forward, making the descent into the valley in silence. Nosing their horses directly toward the grassy banks of the creek, they remained in their saddles while the animals waded in to drink, the water burbling around their legs. From the corner of her eye, Nora could see Swire trotting up the creekbed toward them, riding bareback, without bridle or reins.

He pulled to a stop on the far side of the creek, looking from Nora to Smithback and back. “So you brought back both horses,” he said, looking at Nora with ill-disguised relief. “What about the sons of bitches who killed my horses—you catch them?”

“No,” said Nora. “The person you saw at the top of the ridge was an old Indian man camping upcountry.”

A look of skepticism crossed Swire’s face. “An old Indian man? What the hell was he doing on top of the ridge?”

“He wanted to see who was in the valley,” Nora replied. “He said nobody from his village ever goes into this valley.”

Swire sat silent a moment, his mouth working a lump of tobacco. “So you followed the wrong tracks,” he said at last.

“We followed the only tracks up there. The tracks of the man you saw.”

In reply, Swire expertly shot a string of tobacco juice from his lips, forming a little brown crater in the nearby sand.

“Roscoe,” Nora went on, careful to keep her tone even, “if you’d met this man, you’d realize he’s no horse killer.”

Swire’s mouth continued working. There was a long, strained silence as the two stared at each other. Then Swire spat a second time. “Shit,” he said. “I ain’t saying you’re right. But if you are, it means the bastards that killed my horses are still around.” Then, without another word, he spun his horse with invisible knee pressure and trotted back down the creek.

Nora watched his receding back. Then she glanced over at the writer. Smithback merely shrugged in return.

As they set off across the valley toward the dark slot canyon, Nora looked up. The northern sky had grown lumpy with thunderheads. She frowned; normally, the summer rains weren’t due for another couple of weeks. But with a sky like this, the rains could be upon them as early as that very afternoon.

She urged her horse into a trot toward the slot canyon. Better get through before the system moves in,she thought. Soon, they reached the opening. They unsaddled their horses, wrapped and stowed the saddles, then turned the animals loose to find the rest of the herd.

It was the work of a long, wet, weary hour to toil through the slot canyon, the gear dead weight on their backs. At last, Nora parted the hanging weeds and began walking down toward the camp. Smithback fell in step beside her, breathing hard and shaking mud and quicksand from his legs.

Suddenly, Nora stopped short. Something was wrong. The camp was deserted, the fire untended and smoking. Instinctively, she looked up the cliff face toward Quivira. Although the city itself was hidden, she could hear the faint sounds of loud, hurried conversation.

Despite her weariness, she shrugged the pack from her back, jogged toward the base of the rope ladder, and climbed to the city. As she clambered onto the bench, she saw Sloane and Black near the city’s central plaza, talking animatedly. On the far side of the plaza sat Bonarotti, legs crossed, watching them.

Sloane saw her approaching and broke away from Black. “Nora,” she said. “We’ve been vandalized.”

Exhausted, Nora sank onto the retaining wall. “Tell me about it,” she said.

“It must have happened during the night,” Sloane went on, taking a seat beside her. “At breakfast, Peter said he wanted to go up and check his equipment before getting to work. I was going to tell him to take the day off, actually—he didn’t look that well. But he insisted. Said he’d heard something during the night. Anyway, next thing I know he was calling down from the top of the cliff. So I went up after him.” She paused. “Our communications equipment, Nora . . . it’s all been smashed to pieces.”

Nora looked over at her. Sloane was uncharacteristically unkempt; her eyes were red, her dark hair tousled.

“Everything?” Nora asked.

Sloane nodded. “The transmitter, the paging network—everything but the weather receiver. Guess they didn’t think to look up in that tree.”

“Did anybody else see or hear anything?”

Black glanced at Sloane, then turned back to Nora. “Nothing,” he said.

“I’ve kept a sharp eye out all day,” Sloane said. “I haven’t seen anybody, or anything.”

“What about Swire?”

“He went out to the horses before we learned about it. I haven’t had a chance to ask him.”

Nora sighed deeply. “I want to talk to Peter about this. Where is he now?”

“I don’t know,” Sloane said. “He went down the ladder from the summit before I did. I figured he’d gone back to his tent to lie down. He was pretty upset and . . . well, frankly, he wasn’t making much sense. He was sobbing. I guess that equipment really meant a lot to him.”

Nora stood up and walked to the rope ladder. “Bill!” she shouted down into the valley.

“Ma’am?” the writer’s voice floated up.

“Check the tents. See if you can find Holroyd.”

She waited, scanning the tops of the canyon walls. “Nobody home,” Smithback called up a few minutes later.

Nora returned to the retaining wall, shivering now. She realized she was still wet from the trip through the canyon. “Then he must be in the ruin somewhere,” she said.

“That’s possible,” Sloane replied. “He said something yesterday about calibrating the magnetometer. Guess we lost track of him in all the confusion.”

“What about the horse killers?” Black interrupted.

Nora hesitated a moment. She decided there was no point in alarming everybody with Beiyoodzin and his story of witches. “There was only one set of prints on the ridge, and they led to the camp of an old Indian. He clearly wasn’t the killer. Since our equipment was smashed last night, that probably means the horse killers are still around here somewhere.”

Black licked his lips. “That’s great,” he said. “Now we’re going to have to post a guard.”

Nora looked at her watch. “Let’s find Peter. We’re going to need his help setting up some kind of emergency transmitter.”

“I’ll check the roomblock where he stashed the magnetometer.” Sloane walked away, Black following in her wake. Bonarotti came over to Nora and drew out a cigarette. Nora opened her mouth to remind him that smoking wasn’t allowed in the ruin, but decided she couldn’t summon up the energy.

There was a scuffling noise, then Smithback’s shaggy head appeared at the top of the rope ladder. “What’s up?” he said, coming over to the retaining wall.

“Somebody snuck into the valley last night,” Nora replied. “Our communications gear was smashed.” She was interrupted by an urgent shout from within the city. Sloane had emerged from one of the roomblocks on the far side of the plaza, waving an arm.

“It’s Peter!” her voice echoed across the ghostly city. “Something’s wrong! He’s sick!”

Immediately Nora was on her feet. “Find Aragon,” she said to Bonarotti. “Have him bring his emergency medical kit.” Then she was running across the plaza, Smithback at her side.

They ducked inside a second-story roomblock complex near the site of the burial cyst. As Nora’s eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, she could see Sloane on her knees beside Holroyd’s prone form. Black was standing well back, a look of horror on his face. Beside Holroyd lay the magnetometer, its case open, components scattered across the floor.

Nora gasped and knelt down. Holroyd’s mouth was wide open, his jaw locked solid. His tongue, black and swollen, protruded from puffy, glaucous lips. His eyes were bulging, and a foul graveyard stench washed up from each shallow breath. A slight, thready gasp escaped his lungs.

There was movement in the doorway, then Aragon was beside her. “Hold my light, please,” he said calmly, laying two canvas duffels on the floor, opening one of them, and removing a light. “Dr. Goddard, could you please bring the fluorescent lantern? And the rest of you, please step outside.”

Nora trained the light on Holroyd, his eyes glassy, pupils narrowed to pinpoints. “Peter, Enrique’s here to help you,” she murmured, taking his hand in hers. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

Aragon pressed his hands beneath Holroyd’s jaw, probed his chest and abdomen, then pulled a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff from the duffel and began to check his vital signs. As the doctor opened Holroyd’s shirt and pressed the stethoscope to his chest, Nora saw to her horror a scattering of dark lesions across the pale skin.

“What is it?” Nora said.

Aragon just shook his head and shouted for Black. “I want the rest of you to get a tarp, ropes, poles, anything we can use for a stretcher—and tell Bonarotti to get some water boiling.”

Aragon peered intently back into Holroyd’s face, then examined the man’s fingertips. “He’s cyanotic,” he murmured, fishing in one of the duffels and pulling out a slender oxygen tank and a pair of nasal cannula. “I’ll set the flow at two liters,” he said, handing the tank to Nora and fixing the cannula into Holroyd’s nostrils.

There was the sound of feet, then Sloane returned with the lantern. Suddenly, the room was bathed in chill greenish light. Aragon pulled the stethoscope from his ears and looked up.

“We’ve got to get him down into camp,” he said. “This man needs to go to a hospital immediately.”

Sloane shook her head. “The communications gear is completely trashed. The only thing still functioning is the weather receiver.”

“Can we cobble something together?” Nora asked.

“Only Peter could answer that question,” Sloane replied.

“What about the cell phone?” Aragon asked. “How far to the nearest area of coverage?”

“Up around Escalante,” said Sloane. “Or back at Wahweap Marina.”

“Then get Swire on a horse, give him the phone, and tell him to get going. Tell him to call for a helicopter.”

There was silence. “There’s no place to land a helicopter,” Nora said slowly. “The canyons are too narrow, the updrafts on the clifftops too precarious. I looked into that very thoroughly when I was planning the expedition.”

Aragon looked at Peter, then looked back at Nora. “Are you absolutely certain?”

“The closest settlement is three days’ ride from here. We can’t take him out on horseback?”

Aragon gazed at Peter again, then shook his head. “It would kill him.”

Smithback and Black appeared in the doorway, carrying between them a crude stretcher of tarps lashed to two wooden poles. Moving quickly, they set Holroyd’s rigid body on the stretcher, restraining him with ropes. Then, carefully, they hoisted him from the ground and carried him out into the central plaza.

Aragon followed them with his kit, despair on his face. As they came out from beneath the shadow of the overhanging rock and approached the rope ladder, Nora felt a cold drop on her arm, then another. It was beginning to rain.

Suddenly Holroyd gave a strangled cough. His eyes bulged wider still, ringed red with panic, searching aimlessly. His lips trembled, as if he was trying to force speech from a paralyzed jaw. His limbs seemed to stretch, stiffening even further. The ropes restraining him creaked and sighed.

Instantly, Aragon ordered them to ease the stretcher to the ground. He knelt at Holroyd’s chest, fumbling in his duffels at the same time. Instruments went clattering to one side as he pulled out an endotrachial tube, attached to a black rubber bag.

Holroyd’s jaws worked. “I let you down, Nora,” came a strangled whisper.

Immediately, Nora took his hand once again. “Peter, that’s not true. If it weren’t for you, none of us would have found Quivira. You’re the whole reason we’re here.”

Peter began to struggle with more words, but Nora gently touched his lips. “Save your strength,” she whispered.

“I’m going to have to tube him,” Aragon said, gently laying Holroyd’s head back and snaking the clear plastic down into his lungs. He pressed the ambu bag into Nora’s hands. “Squeeze this every five seconds,” he said, dropping his ear to Holroyd’s chest. He listened, motionless, for a long moment. Another tremor passed through Holroyd’s body, and his eyes rolled up. Aragon straightened up and, with violent heaves, began emergency heart massage.

As if in a dream, Nora sat beside Holroyd, filling his lungs, willing him to breathe, as the rain picked up, trickling down her face and arms. There were no sounds except for the patter of the rain, the cracking thumps of Aragon’s fists, the sigh of the ambu bag.

Then, it was over. Aragon sat back, agonized face drenched with rain and sweat. He looked briefly up at the sky, unseeing, and let his face sink into his hands. Holroyd was dead.

39

AN HOUR LATER, THE ENTIRE EXPEDITION had gathered around the campfire in silence. Swire joined them, wet from the slot canyon. The rain had ended, but the afternoon sky was smeared with metal-colored clouds. The air carried the mingled scents of ozone and humidity.

Nora glanced at each haggard face in turn. Their expressions betrayed the same emotions she felt: numbness, shock, disbelief. Her own feelings were augmented by an overpowering sense of guilt. She’d approached Holroyd. She’d convinced him to come along. And, in some unconscious way, she realized she had manipulated his feelings for her to further her own goal of finding the city. Her eyes strayed toward the sealed tent that now held his body. Oh, Peter,she thought. Please forgive me.

Only Bonarotti continued with business as usual, thumping a hard salami down on his serving table and setting loaves of fresh bread beside it. Seeing that nobody was inclined to partake, the cook flung one leg over the other, leaned back, and lit a cigarette.

Nora licked her lips. “Enrique,” she began, careful to keep her voice even, “what can you tell us?”

Aragon looked up, his black eyes unreadable. “Not nearly as much as I would like. I didn’t expect to be performing any postmortems out here, and my diagnostic tools are limited. I’ve cultured him up—blood, sputum, urine—and I’ve stained and sectioned some tissue. I took some exudate from the skin lesions. But so far the results are inconclusive.”

“What could have killed him so fast?” Sloane asked.

Aragon turned his dark eyes to her. “That’s what makes diagnosis so difficult. In his last minutes, there were signs of cyanosis and acute dyspnea. That would indicate pneumonia, but pneumonia would not present that quickly. Then there was the acute paralysis . . .” He fell silent for a moment. “Without access to a laboratory, I can’t do a tap or a gastric wash, let alone an autopsy.”

“What I want to know,” Black said, “was whether this is infectious. Whether others might have been exposed.”

Aragon sighed and stared at the ground. “It’s hard to say. But so far, the evidence doesn’t point in that direction. Perhaps the crude bloodwork I’ve done, or the antibody tests, will tell us more. I’ve got test cultures growing in petri dishes on the off chance it is some infectious agent. I really hate to speculate . . .” His voice trailed off.

“Enrique, I think we need to hear your speculations,” Nora said quietly.

“Very well. If you asked me for my initial impression—it happened so fast, I would say it looked more like acute poisoning than disease.”

Nora looked at Aragon in sudden horror.

“Poisoning?” Black cried, visibly recoiling. “Who could have wanted to poison Peter?”

“It may not be one of us,” said Sloane. “It may have been whoever killed our horses and wrecked our communications gear.”

“As I said, it’s speculation only.” Aragon spread his hands. He looked at Bonarotti. “Did Holroyd eat anything that the others didn’t?”

Bonarotti shook his head.

“And the water?”

“It comes from the creek,” Bonarotti replied. “I run it through a filter. We’ve all been drinking it.”

Aragon rubbed his face. “I won’t have test results for several hours. I suppose we have to assume it might be infectious. As a precaution, we should get the body out of camp as soon as possible.”

Silence fell in the canyon. There was a roll of distant thunder from over the Kaiparowits Plateau.

“What are we going to do?” Black asked.

Nora looked at him. “Isn’t it obvious? We have to leave here as quickly as possible.”

“No!” Sloane burst out.

Nora turned to her in surprise.

“We can’t leave Quivira, just like that. It’s too important a site. Whoever destroyed our communications gear knows that. It’s obvious they’re trying to drive us out so they can loot the city. We’d be playing into their hands.”

“That’s true,” said Black.

“A man has just died,” Nora interrupted. “Possibly of an infectious disease, possibly even by murder. Either way, we have no choice. We’ve lost all contact with the outside world. The lives of the expedition members are my first responsibility.”

“This is the greatest find in modern archaeology,” Sloane said, her husky voice now low and urgent. “There’s not one of us here who wasn’t willing to risk his life to make this discovery. And now that somebody has died, are we going to just roll things up and leave? That would cheapen Peter’s sacrifice.”

Black, who paled a bit during this speech, still managed to nod his support.

“For you, and me, and the rest of the scientific team, that may be true,” Nora said. “But Peter was a civilian.”

“He knew the risks,” Sloane said. “You didexplain them, didn’t you?” She looked directly at Nora as she spoke. Though she said nothing more, the unspoken comment couldn’t have been clearer.

“I know Peter’s presence here was partly my doing,” Nora replied, fighting to keep her tone even. “That’s something I’ll have to live with. But it doesn’t change anything. The fact is, we still have Roscoe, Luigi, and Bill Smithback with us. Now that we know the dangers, we have no right to jeopardize their safety any further.”

“Hear, hear,” Smithback murmured.

“I think they should make their own decisions,” Sloane said, her eyes dark in the stormy light. “They’re not just paid sherpas. They have their own investment in this expedition.”

Nora looked from Sloane to Black, and then at the rest of the expedition. They were all looking back at her silently. She realized, with a kind of dull surprise, that she was facing a critical challenge to her leadership. A small voice within her murmured that it wasn’t fair: not now, when she should be grieving for Peter Holroyd. She struggled to think rationally. It was possible that she could, as expedition leader, simply order everyone to leave. But there seemed to be a new dynamic among the group now, in the wake of Holroyd’s death; an unpredictable urgency of feeling. This was no democracy, nor should it be: yet she felt she would have to roll the dice and play it as one.

“Whatever we do, we do as a group,” she said. “We’ll take a vote on it.”

She turned her eyes toward Smithback.

“I’m with Nora,” he said quietly. “The risk is too great.”

Nora looked next at Aragon. The doctor returned her gaze briefly, then turned toward Sloane. “There is no question in my mind,” he said. “We have to leave.”

Nora glanced at Black. He was sweating. “I’m with Sloane,” he said in a strained voice.

Nora turned to Swire. “Roscoe?”

The wrangler glanced up at the sky. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said gruffly, “we should never have entered this goddamned valley in the first place, ruin or no ruin. And now the rains are here, and that slot canyon’s our only exit. It’s time we got our butts out.”