GIRLFAILURE

Samuel prides himself on being a master of deception. Varying shades of deception, including the unglamorous hue he's currently performing for the woman underneath him. Small adjustments to his hold, an inch deeper here, a degree slower there. A rambling of dirty talk, a knotted brow, a perfectly-timed, shaky exhale.

Her name has slipped his mind.

This motel reeks of carpet cleaner and there's a water stain on the wallpaper above the headboard that he has been staring at for long enough to try and make into something.

A dog, maybe? A zebra? He can't get it to resolve into anything. He's been trying for a while.

He knows exactly how drunk he is. The particular nuisance that comes with his current level of inebriation is that he's sober enough to watch himself from the outside; to note with clinical precision that the room is lopsided and his judgment is compromised and whatever he thought this evening was going to accomplish, it hasn't accomplished it. All the inconvenience of drinking three neat whiskeys and two beers at a ramshackle dive bar, none of the pleasure.

None of the pleasure.

The woman makes a sound as he drives himself deeper in an attempt to chase the sensation he's not getting.

"Fuck-" he hisses, frustration disguised as call and response.

He's always been a quick study - retention has never been his problem. He has retained, among other things, all the sounds made by different men and women and their appropriate counter-sounds, the rhythm and its requirements, all things that read as convincing when you're running on performance rather than… genuine passion.

The woman- Jane… no, Julia? Is it? Whatever. She's warm. Relatively generous. Equally as alcohol-heavy as he is. She's completely harmless, which he's grateful for and somewhat guilty about in equal measure.

He is working at the act with grim, jaw-set effort.

This is like starting a fire in the damn rain.

Focus, for god's sake. He closes his eyes.

This is, historically, his thing - hook the person, reel 'em in, fuck them - fuck them well, so they both enjoy it, and slip out before anyone starts asking questions neither of them want answered. This should not be this complicated. He's done this since he was, conservatively, twenty years old, bar the brief thirteen year hiatus.

He scrunches his eyes tighter and tries to tune in, tries to locate something grounding beneath the static… something, anything to make him feel-

"You're not the only one who likes paying attention."

Elevator doors closing. Her eyes cutting sideways at him, just for a second, and then away, like she hadn't said anything at all. He'd laughed it off. He'd been so proud of himself for laughing it off until she kissed him and left him absolutely stunted.

God.

He shakes his head. Looks back at the stained wall - at this woman's bit lip as she lulls her head to the side, and-

And…the - the way she'd looked up at him after he made her come - not at a weirdly shaped water stain, nor awkwardly to the side or at her own eyelids - at him, had done something to him he'd declined to examine at the time - and his hips, now, find a different rhythm entirely, chasing it, and for a moment there is the first real flicker of something, warmth threading up from somewhere genuine-

He'd woken before dawn. Her back to him, the room still dark, the hushed lapping of waves from just outside the b&b a sombre reminder that the morning was rearing its ugly head. He'd kissed between her shoulders without thinking about it. Pressed his mouth to the nape of her neck and breathed her in, hand splayed across the softness of her stomach and thought, with great clarity, don't. Don't, Samuel. This has to stop.

He'd lain there making promises to himself while her breathing stayed slow, intercepted by quiet snoring that would've pissed him off if it were anyone else, and he'd been so certain they were the right promises- that he would let her go before this goes any deeper; before she really gets hurt. People like him don't fit alongside people like her.

And then her face in the parking lot.

The way the hurt had come first, then the anger.

What's wrong with you, Sam?

He keeps remembering how he'd scared her. How he'd… enjoyed scaring her for a split second because it meant he had the upper hand. He never had the fucking upper hand with her and in the weeks since, he's realised that was part of the appeal. He's regretted it ever since. Why did he have to be so…

The woman's thighs tighten around him a fraction.

But the warmth is gone.

He's spiralled. He's standing in a burning building he set on fire himself, surveying the damage, and he is still, still, trying fruitlessly to chase some kind of pleasure as it withers away.

He's not going to get there.

He knew, probably, earlier. He knew in the bar, if he's being forensic about it - which he is, while this woman who probably deserves considerably better than this evening works through her enthusiasm and he works through the lack of his.

The façade is a good one, at least, because it's not long until her spine curves and she swears into his shoulder; Sam tips his face to one side and pretends to do the rest of it as she spasms around him- the sounds, the shudder, the exhale, the stillness- and then he waits.

Maybe disappointing one night stands are her thing.

She settles, several seconds later. He jolts against her coy laugh and he collapses beside her, one arm covering his face as he tugs the thin sheets with the other to cloak the evidence of an empty condom.

He is precisely as satisfied as a man would be after convincingly performing an experience he didn't have.

Sam counts by the hum of the air conditioning, laughing softly and responding to whatever comment rolls off her fucked-out tongue, until her breathing deepens and slows and she rolls to grab her phone. He turns in the opposite direction, muttering something about 'cleaning up' before scooping up his clothes and stumbling his way into the bathroom. The habit of collecting himself together that he's refined over various mornings in rooms that weren't his. He's good at it. He's good at packing light and leaving clean and being gone before the moment has to become a conversation.

Once the door's locked, he peels the condom off before worrying about pulling the light switch, knots the end out of instinct and drops it in the trash, face crumpled in disgust.

The light is too bright for his spinning head and he turns it off with a grunt almost as soon as it's switched on. Moonlight through the tiny window will have to suffice.

The shower takes a minute to heat, so he grips the sink. His reflection stares back with the judicious expression of someone who has been watching this unfold for approximately three hours and knows they'd dug this particular hole themselves.

He looks, honestly, like hammered shit; three days of stubble past intentional, eyes carrying the glaze of untreated insomnia that has conveniently worsened in the last three weeks and drinking to compensate. A vein ticks at his temple. The room wobbles a little.

He turns on the cold tap and drinks from his hands. Water runs down his chin and neck and he straightens and wipes it with the back of his wrist and looks at himself some more.

Jesus. He should eat something.

He should, statistically, do quite a lot of things. He's aware of the list. It's been accumulating since leaving the UK three weeks ago, and has begun to take on structural elements - a foundation, load-bearing walls. He should eat something. He should sleep properly. He should find work. Call Victor, who has left three messages that Sam has listened to and not responded to because he doesn't yet have a version of events that makes him sound like less of an idiot.

He should... message her. Make sure she made it home okay. Except it's been almost a month- he should've done it weeks ago; should've apologised… except that would've completely destroyed the point he had tried to make to himself-

Nah, nope. He's not going to think about it.

Instead, he watches steam begin to creep its way along the mirror, mercifully morphing his face into a bland impressionist painting. The mild disassociation is only interrupted when his phone rings.

He rifles through the pile of clothes on the floor until he's able to fish the device out of his jeans pocket, squinting against the assault of the screen.

She'd shown him how to dim it on the train to Cornwall - leaned across the table without asking, taken it out of his hand, tongue caught between her teeth in concentration as she tapped through the menus. He'd watched her instead of the screen. She'd given the phone back without looking up, said there, and had gone back to her book.

The screen is, currently, the brightness of a small sun. Why is it so bright? He swipes at it. It does nothing. He gives up and pays attention to the source of the buzzing.

He clears his throat. Squints. Adjusts his posture out of an old reflex, which does nothing for him, then leans across to check the shower with the back of his hand. Hot now. Good. An excuse to dip if the conversation goes south.

He answers, already pacing the cramped square of tile, free hand dragging up through his scalp.

"Heyyy, little brother."

"Where are you?" Nathan sounds irritated. Exhausted. This doesn't bode well.

"Out." Sam shifts, suddenly finding the small constellation of scarring on his knuckles fascinating. "That okay with you?"

"Yeah, no shit-" A sigh, and a pause that does a lot of work. "It's… half two in the morning."

"Is it?" He tips his head back at the ceiling.

A sigh. "Have you been drinking?"

"Nathan-" he scoffs, half a laugh, "Jesus, didn't realise I had a curfew."

His brother exhales. It's a specific sigh that suggests the following: I'm not angry, I want you to know I'm not angry, I have made peace with not being angry about this incessant behaviour. And then,

"-are you coming home tonight?"

Home.

Sam stops pacing.

Ha. Home. It's not home. Nothing about it is home.

Nathan has, by some quiet, creeping act of will, assembled a life - piece by piece. Wife, check. House, check. Baby, check. Mortgage paid. Pension, probably. The whole catalogue of nice, normal bullshit. Sam's worst fucking nightmare, displayed through mismatched magnets on a fridge door and a tasteful array of scatter cushions, and somehow, somehow, he is also corrosively jealous of it. Of all of it. Of Nathan's small, unflashy competence, the way he wakes up and goes to bed and exists inside a structure that doesn't fall over the moment he stops paying attention. The total lack of self-sabotage.

There's a simple word for what Sam is in comparison, and it is failure. Perhaps his old man was right about something.

He is going 'home' to Nathan's perfect boring life in Nathan's perfect boring house with Nathan's perfect boring-

"Sam?"

Shit. He's clenching his teeth so hard it's hurting his head.

"I'll… get a taxi soon."

"Okay. I'll leave a key un-"

"Under the mat, yeah. I know."

"Be quiet when you come in, please. It took ages to get Cassie down."

Sam says he will. He says it through the low-grade humiliation of being managed by his baby brother, of being the thing in Nathan's house that has to be timed around, like a noisy boiler.

"Drink some water."

Nathan's defeated, slightly irritated way of saying I love you has Sam pinching the bridge of his nose. An apology rises on his tongue-

The line dies before Sam can get another word out.

He stands with the phone in his hand, sick somewhere just under his sternum, and squeezes his eyes shut, the heel of his hand grinding into the socket. He takes a breath and drops the phone face-down on the edge of the sink, the crack of glass on porcelain a touch louder than he meant - and pulls the curtain back.

The water hits him hot enough to flinch.

He stays under it. Lets it come down across the back of his neck, down his spine, sluicing along his collarbones, and he tips his face up into it and opens his mouth and closes it again. The shame is settled at the bottom of him like sediment, and it's lifting now in the heat, clouding back up. He wants to stop thinking.

Sam does not, despite popular opinion, enjoy being inside his own head.

He tries not to think about the woman in the other room and almost immediately fails at this too. He still can't remember her name. He'd had it - early on, in the bar, he'd caught it on the second time she said it and thought he'd locked it down, and then somewhere between the third drink and the cab here it had simply gone. He hopes his performance was disappointing enough to have prompted a quiet exit. Sometimes that's how these things dissolve, by mutual unspoken agreement.

The water hits the back of his neck.

He doesn't make a decision. That's important - he's not making a decision, he's just standing in a shower, he's just letting his mind-

He told her to drink some water, too. The Drake go-to, perhaps. Drink some water. Take care of yourself. I don't want you to suffer in the morning. I love you.

No. He scrubs both hands down his face. Stop.

Petra. The plateau. Afternoon light going gold and flat and her holding her phone up with her back to the view like the view was the thing least worth looking at, her mouth suddenly at his cheek - her hand curled at the back of his neck.

He's not going to-

His hand is already moving. He doesn't stop it. Wrestling his way around the shower curtain, phone snatched from the sink, screen fogging in the steam, unlocked with a swipe before he's consciously agreed to any of this. The gallery opens. He knows exactly how many flicks of the thumb it takes to find the picture - he's found it in the dark, drunk, half-asleep, many times in the past few weeks.

Her face close to his, her eyes shut, kissing his cheek.

He looks at it. At her.

Oh. Fuck.

His free hand is already back on his cock before he's clocked the decision being made.

His back finds the cold tile; shower-hot skin, cold wall, and he sucks a breath through his teeth at the contrast and then he thinks about her. He lets himself think about her, which is something he hasn't allowed himself to do for several weeks until tonight, and it's-

It's a relief.

Her hauling herself out of the water in that pool, wringing out her hair, the way she stood there before she remembered herself, and him looking away three seconds too late and feeling like an absolute animal, and then feeling worse because he wasn't sorry enough.

The pub store cupboard. Her hands on his face with the antiseptic and the flush creeping up her neck that she was working very hard to pretend wasn't there.

Her face on the bridge. Two feet below the rotten plank with her hands slipping and her eyes gone wide with the terror of realising she was actually going to fall - there was no thought, the plank was already under his chest before the risk had been calculated - and her face after, flat on the stone, catching her breath, trying to make a joke about it despite the tears. She'd put her fucking life in his hands. His hands.

He glances down. His grip. A glistening bead at the tip, slipping into the running water.

He scrolls deeper; a picture of her with a mouthful of falafel, a crumby grin meant to make for a disgusting picture - god, she could never be disgusting - deeper still, that damn video of her dancing in the pub with the mop or the broom or whatever the hell-

He breathes out hard. Squeezes his eyes shut against the sobering shame of what he's doing. "Shit-" Breathes out harder.

Her weight on him in the hotel bed, the way she'd moved - the way her hands clung to him and treated him like he was something worth caring for - her hands that touched him all over; that he held when he rolled her onto her back and took over control; all that bravado worn so lightly and then set aside completely, just put down, like she trusted him to pick it back up for her.

He works himself harder. Grits his teeth. Tile cold on his shoulder blades, water hot down his front, loose droplets gathering on the phone screen as he shakily holds it outside the shower head's main reach; his own hand and the memory of hers - her her her-

The sounds she'd made, soft, involuntary, not performed, not for him but because of him.

He comes- fast, brutal, no warning - and it very nearly takes his legs.

His free hand shoots out for the towel rail and finds it, white-knuckled, and he stays there, head bowed, body attempting to recall the fundamental principles of how it operates. The phone, since dropped, hits the shower floor and skids, face-up against the drain, and she's still lit on the screen - but it's not the selfie, it's the next one along; she'd swiped the wrong way somewhere between Petra and his lock screen and he's looking at it now, water beading across the glass.

With a huff of air, he picks up the phone and shakes off as much water as possible.

She's pulling a face at the camera, just outside the car rental near Petra. Tongue out, a stupid little double-thumbs-up; pure idiocy meant to mock him for taking it. Her hair's a mess from the wind and there's white cast of unblended SPF on one cheekbone.

And in the background, half-turned, caught mid-step, Scott.

Looking at her over his shoulder. A small smirk on his mouth that Sam, in the moment, had clocked and dismissed and not really thought about again, because Scott smirked at everything; it was a tic; furniture. His handsome little smoulder that would render anyone smitten. He looks at it now. The angle of Scott's head. The fact that she didn't know he was looking. The way the smirk sits… and Sam feels something hot bubble up in his chest.

A twinge of jealousy cuts up his sternum and lodges somewhere by his tonsils - and then the screen flickers, stutters, blooms a sickly green at one corner, and dies.

He blinks at it.

Taps it.

"C'mon."

Nothing. Holds the side button. Nothing. The screen sits black in his palm, water beading across it, and he registers, almost peacefully - that he has just murdered his phone.

"Shit." he spits. Thought these damn things were meant to be durable.

He tosses it out of the shower. It lands on the tiles with an unimpressive series of clunks.

And yet despite the concept of a couple hundred bucks down the drain… his mind continues to work against him, drifting elsewhere.

Is she still with Scott? Out of sheer spite, did she… go with him?

Are they working on their own little expedition right now? While he's here in a motel bathroom, post-coital with his left hand over a JPEG, a hookup next door, his brother's spare key under a mat across town, Victor's three voicemails unanswered, his life such as it is collapsed to roughly the dimensions of this cubicle - she is somewhere on the other side of an ocean, doing the thing he was supposed to be doing, with him.

Because Sam, in his infinite fucking wisdom, sent her away.

He sighs at his inability to be angry and instead tries to remember the last time he'd felt so rotten over discarding someone like that. Every person he's wanted since he was old enough to want, and he lines them up one by one and none of them - not one-

He thinks of Nathan's voice. Are you coming home?

Sam has been homesick for weeks and he didn't know what to call it.

Was that what she'd been? The remedy for homesickness?

He's drunk. That's all this is. Drunk, and tired, and every coward's hour is two in the morning. He exhales through his nose, and it comes out unsteady. Both palms find the tile. The water is almost hot enough to burn, drumming the back of his neck, his shoulders, the small of his back. He stays there a long time.

//

“Ow.”

The harness bites as it’s tightened.

It's a four-point industrial rig, all canvas and clinking metal, and Rob is currently checking the buckles around your hips. You stand with your arms held away from your body in the universal posture of someone being patted down at airport security, and try not to think about Heathrow airport.

“Ow, Rob - that’s too tight.”

That's been on the avoid-thinking-about list for three weeks.

“Stop fucking whinging.”

The Heathrow performance is something you have replayed, against your will, at least twice daily. Smiling at the woman at the desk as your passport was handed over. Joking about the weight of your case. Standing between Rob and Nick at the gate while Scott's hand rested casually on the small of your back, just to rub in his sense of ownership. Like you were a couple. Like there wasn't a clip of you on his phone and flying somewhere up in the big fucking internet cloud that ends most conversations before they start.

There was a moment - at security, of all places, where the queues divide and you were briefly out of arm's reach… and you'd looked up and locked eyes with a man in uniform, and there had been one entire second in which you'd thought now, just say the words, and then you'd thought of the footage and your throat had closed and you'd smiled, instead, like the polite young woman you've been manipulated into being, and walked through the scanner, chin trembling.

Pathetic. That's the word you've been unable to stop using about yourself since.

This is the second site they've put you down in this week, and the sixth since Scott took you on as personal property. The first, twenty-odd days ago, sixty miles south of here - was the wrong one. He's been extra careful with his precious cargo ever since.

Scott had been certain it was the right one. Scott had had coordinates, surveys, and a bound research file thick enough to use as a doorstop, and Scott had been wrong.

The chamber, directed to you via the coordinates from Mai’s box in Cornwall, had been picked clean a hundred years ago, possibly longer, and the only thing your… ’possessed’ self had found to occupy herself with once dropped inside - once the necklace was gone and there was nothing in the cave to draw her - was the rock face itself.

You don't remember what she did to it. You remember what she did to your hands, frantically scrambling, a vicious desire to get her hands back on the locket overtaking all else.

Today’s site is what came out of the days he then spent re-reading Campbell's letters in a state of contained panic. He has not used the word guess aloud, but you can read it on him. There’s no seventh site queued up after this one. Which means a great deal - for him, certainly, and for you in ways you have not yet fully traced - hangs on the next twenty minutes.

Your hands are shaking again. Subtly. You watch them - the surgical tape over a missing nail, the plasters on the two split ones, the gauze wound round your left knuckles where the skin is still trying to decide whether to knit or weep, the rest a constellation of scabs in various stages of repair, as Rob crouches at your feet and re-laces your boot.

You take in, with detachment that has set in over the last fortnight, that they've been shaking on and off since Cornwall and that you don't entirely know how to make them stop. They shake hardest in the morning when the reality of waking up in a new unknown location hits. They shake whenever someone behind you moves quickly. They shake when you remember - and this happens about thirty times a day, no matter what you do - that they are also the hands that, with lingering evidence, brutally killed a man.

Or whatever is using them did. The distinction has stopped being meaningful.

"Wouldn't want you to trip and break your neck, would we." Rob mutters, sarcasm threaded into the Aussie twang, tugging the lace tight.

"Wouldn't want that."

He doesn't react to your sarcasm. None of them ever really react to anything you say, which is its own kind of insult; you used to be funny, used to be quick, and now your best lines sail past these men as if they were mere background noise.

This behaviour from Scott and his 'men' is fucking ludicrous; securing you in bubble wrap before tossing you to the lions' den.

Rob double-knots the lace.

The memory ambushes you before you can shut it down - outside the British Museum, Sam dropping into a crouch without a word and tying the lace you hadn't noticed was undone, the whole thing dispatched in about six seconds with a cigarette still tucked between his lips. You can remember the top of his head, the brisk efficiency of it, as smoke wisped its way out of his mouth, the offhand competence, the way he'd stood up afterwards and ground the cigarette out under his boot.

You look at the top of Rob's slick-backed head and breathe through your nose.

The grief always comes first after such a thought. And then, mercifully, on its heels, the anger arrives - because Samuel Drake, the practical man, the competent man who tied your lace before you knew it was undone, is also the man who stood in a car park three weeks ago and watched you cry, encouraged you to believe you're good for nothing other than being led on, and chose, with both hands, to do nothing about it. That man sent you back here. That man is the reason this burly Australian arsehole is currently double-knotting your boot in the middle of the Wadi Rum at half six in the morning.

So. Fine. Be angry. Anger keeps you upright. Anger keeps your hands from shaking quite so visibly. You have been running on it for the better part of a month now, alongside the undermining terror, and it is, if nothing else, an extremely renewable resource.

Underneath the cocktail of emotion, of course - and you poorly attempt to push this down the second it surfaces - is the terrible question of whether he's even still alive to be angry at.

Stop.

The desert at this hour smells like dust and diesel fumes from the truck. The sky is a mix of pastel blues and oranges that you’re struggling to enjoy the beauty of and that alone is enough to be heartbreaking. You haven't slept properly in - you've stopped counting in days and started counting in stretches, which is its own bad sign - and the exhaustion has settled into your body the way bamboo settles under sturdy brickwork; a silent killer. Irreparable damage.

Your ribs ache from the harness pressure and the bruises underneath it and from a near-constant state of low-grade nausea you've been hosting since waking up locked in your own bedroom; it doesn't quite resolve into being sick but never goes away either. Anxiety, probably. Or whatever lives in you, simmering, waiting to strike. Or both. Lucky you.

The truly maddening part - the part you have not yet found a way to be at peace with - is that on paper, Scott is treating you… well.

He is. Genuinely. You have eaten three meals a day. You have a bed in the room next to his at whatever guesthouse you stop at, with clean sheets and a working lock that you both know won't actually save you from anything. He brings you water without being asked. He asks how you're feeling whenever you awaken from a possessed stupor, choking on your own bloody nose.

Last week he put a plate of something in front of you and held a fork out and purred please, in a voice so nice and steady it didn't sound like a threat at all, and you'd realised, somewhere through the fog of whatever stage of fury you were in then, that you hadn't eaten in over three days and were swaying slightly and that he was, on some unbearable level, correct to be making you eat. You'd taken the fork, pushed through the self-hatred, and eaten the food.

The lack of sleep, to be fair, is your own fault. You can't. Not properly. You lie down and your body refuses, and you've stopped fighting it; you read instead; your notebook that’s been kindly returned to you, or Martha’s autopsy notes to try and find out more about your own symptoms… or how long you’ve got til your own brain turns to gory sludge. Sometimes you stare at the ceiling, quietly cataloguing the things you'd say to Sam if you could, which is its own sour flavour of self-harm.

Rob stands. Slaps the buckle at your hip with the palm of his hand, twice, the way men do to indicate something is sound.

"You're good," he says.

"Thanks, Robert,” you say. “Five star service as per.”

He smiles wryly and you note it - you've started taking note of everything, small reactions, who has what kind of relationship with whom, who looks tired, who flinches when Scott raises his voice - because somewhere in the long, sleepless small hours you've decided that information is the only thing they haven't taken off you, and you intend to collect quite a lot of it before this is over.

The more you know about people, the easier they are to manipulate. Hence Scott and his long game with you and Sam.

Fucking Sam. Fuck off. You hope he is dead.

Twenty feet away, Scott is on a satellite phone, smiling at something the person on the other end has said. He looks well-rested. Of course he does. He sleeps. Why on earth wouldn't he sleep. The stupid cunt even found time for a nice haircut.

You stare at it - neat at the nape, freshly tapered, the choppy 'messy but manicured' look stuck on top - and feel a slow, oily wave of self-disgust churn in your guts, because there was a window of time, not very long ago, in which you had thought he was attractive. Genuinely. You had liked him. You had fancied him, and now-

Now you live inside the consequence of having been a person who could be charmed. Now you have to look at the man who has put you in a harness above a hole in the ground and remember, with full clarity, that you once thought he had nice eyes and a pretty smile.

You do not, currently, have the bandwidth to forgive yourself for it. Maybe later. Right now it just sits in you, bubbling acid stewing away in your insides, alongside the question you've been carefully not asking, which is what becomes of the woman in the harness when the harness comes off for the last time. Scott has been so kind. Scott has been so generous. Scott has fed you and watered you and you cannot, for the life of you, work out whether you're a one-trick-pony to him or a longer-term project.

Either way, the methodology is the same: a man fattening the goose slowly into something docile and dependent and not inclined to wander - kept comfortable, kept compliant, kept on a permanent low simmer of low-grade gratitude. And in the unlikely event that the stupid goose ever does start eyeing the gate, well - there's always the two-minute video on his phone and the Metropolitan Police's online tip line, conveniently bookmarked.

The well sits at the centre of the clearing, ringed in old, sun-bleached stone, and from where you're standing it looks less like a feature of the landscape and more like a mouth.

Scott crosses the clearing toward you with his easy, unhurried walk, the satellite phone tucked under one arm. He's smiling. He's almost always smiling now. The smile used to read as charm and now reads as data - a thing he produces because he has decided it's the appropriate output for the situation, the way a thermostat clicks on in cold weather.

"How we doing, darl'?" Cheerful. Genuinely cheerful. That's the worst of it. "Harness comfy?"

"Couldn't be cosier." You grit out, tugging the tight strand that’s cutting off circulation at your thigh.

“Great stuff.” He stops a respectful distance away - he is always punctilious about your personal space now. He unfolds a piece of paper. The desert map. He angles it for you politely.

"Right. Quick refresher." He taps the page with the back of one knuckle. "Campbell's letters, the one I pulled out of Cornwall - the one from him to that financier mate of his in '94 - mentions a 'site change' on Emaan's end. Hejaz survey parties were getting too close to the tomb. Emaan panicked. Moved the cufflink before he could send Mai the corrected letter, and then -" he shrugs, with what you've come to think of as his 'isn't life funny!' face - "got himself killed before anyone got the update."

"Tragic."

"Mm. Cross-referenced the Hejaz survey maps against known Sadir holdings, narrowed it down to three sites. Then there was a lovely fella called Youssef, in Madaba - his great-great-grandfather guided Emaan around in his last year. Family story about a 'second resting place' outside the camp. He wasn't keen on sharing at first, bless him, but -" Scott shrugs, a smirk toying on his lips, "we got there."

You don't say anything. The ways in which the Youssef was convinced to impart such information doesn’t bear thinking about.

"So." He gestures to the well behind you with his folded map. "Here we are."

"How nice for us."

He grins. He likes you when you're like this. That's the part you can’t get used to and probably never will - that the dryness, the bite, the tiny refusals you can still mount; he treats them like a perk of the job. The man enjoys your company. He has enjoyed it, comprehensively, this entire time. You could throw up just thinking about it.

He hands you a fresh walkie-talkie. New batteries, by the weight of it. He's nothing if not equipped.

"Right. Listen up, this is the bit that's changed." His voice drops into something quieter. Practical. "We're not - we are not doing what we did at the last one. Yeah?"

You don't answer. You don't need to. You look at your busted hands instead.

He nods like you have. "Going down slow this time. You radio up, just so we know you're conscious. Soon as you hit the bottom, you tell us what you see. All of it. We are not pulling that necklace until you tell me you can feel something with that wonderful sixth sense of yours.”

The thing in you turns over, lazily, at feel.

"Okay," you mumble.

"You don't feel something, we pull you back up. We move on. We come back tomorrow, the day after, whenever. We don't -" his jaw tightens, briefly, in what is either professional regret or a very good imitation of it, "we don't put you through that again."

You stare at him.

It is, if you let yourself look at it sideways, almost touching. Except it isn't because he's only protecting his investment - he has run the cost-benefit and that is on the wrong side of the ledger. You are, mercifully, more useful to him alive than not.

You think, for a clean half-second, of how close you came at the last site. The flashback arrives without permission and you let it land, because letting it land is sometimes the only way to stop it bleeding out across the rest of the day.

The cave. Coming back to yourself face down in grit, mouth full of blood and something you couldn't identify, your tongue swollen and tasting of iron. Your nails. Your nails. Some of them split down past the bed, one of them missing entirely, your fingertips a pulped mess where you had - where it had - clawed at the rock face for however long you'd been gone.

There had been blood on the wall, Nick said. Quite a lot of it. A long smeared streak of it where she'd dragged her hands down trying to find purchase, trying to dig back through the stone toward the necklace, because there had been nothing in the cave to find and nothing to do and the only fixed point in her tiny terrible world was the locket they'd hauled twenty metres up a rope. Rob, kneeling beside you, his face the green of a man trying not to throw up. Scott on the radio to someone shouting in Arabic. Your own breath wet, your own heart pulling at your ribs in a frightened, animal rhythm. You'd been bleeding from your nose, your mouth - your gums, it felt like. Rob had said the word seizure twice and Scott had cut him off both times.

You'd thought, lying there: this is what happened to Martha.

You hadn't said it. You don't know how you knew it. But you had been, in that moment, so close to whatever had taken her in this country thirty years ago that you could feel the shape of it just behind your eyes, and the shape was -

The shape was patient.

You've been thinking about that ever since.

"You with me, darl'?"

You blink. Scott. The clearing. The harness. The day continuing.

"Yeah."

"Good." He clicks the walkie-talkie on for you with his thumb and hands it over. "In you get."

Nick clips your line through the rig at the edge of the well. There's a moment, while the slack is checked and the brake tested, where you look down into the shaft, and the dark looks back. You have learned, over the last three weeks, not to dwell on this kind of thing. You step over the edge.

The descent is slow. Your boots scrape stone and find no purchase, the line creaking through the pulley above as you drop in measured increments. The shaft is narrower than you expected at the top - two metres across, maybe - and the walls are pale and dry, scored here and there with old tool marks soft at the edges with age.

The shaft widens around you somewhere around the eight-metre mark - yawning out into something bigger, the walls falling away into a chamber whose dimensions you can't yet make out. You crane your neck. The light swings.

“How’s it looking, babe?”

Your fists clench and you hiss at the feeling of pressure against your aching nails.

"It's getting bigger," you say, eyes rolling. "Cave system, maybe? I can't see the bottom from here."

"Take your time."

Take your time. You scoff mirthlessly.

The chamber, when you reach it, is wider than the shaft by a long way - a vaulted space, vaguely dome-shaped, with at least one passage that you can see leading off into deeper black. The ceiling is high enough that the beam loses itself before it finds the top. Your boots hit stone and then water, with a splash that echoes more than you'd expect. Cold seeps through your laces within seconds.

"At the bottom. There's - there's water down here. Stagnant- fucking stinks. There's at least one tunnel going off to the - to my left. Maybe more."

A pause. Scott's voice when it comes back is careful.

"Anything?"

You stand still.

You wait.

The locket is heavy at your throat and the silence is enormous and you wait.

"Not yet."

"Walk the chamber."

You walk. Boots squelching, water lifting in a thin cold ring around each ankle, the light beam carving narrow channels through dark. The walls are cut stone; there are niches carved into them at irregular intervals, the kind that might once have held lamps or offerings. You sweep them. Empty. Empty. Empty.

You move further in. 

Your footsteps lose their close-quarters slap and start coming back to you with a delay; the chamber is bigger, somehow, than it had any right to be from the surface. And underneath the sound of your own boots, threaded faintly through the dark to your left, something else - a low constant whisper of moving water.

Toward the mouth of the largest tunnel - which yawns blacker than the rest of the chamber, exhaling a colder air at you - the floor changes. The shallow water gives way to dry stone, then to a series of steep, rough-cut steps falling away in tiers around the lip of a deeper drop. The torch beam runs out before the bottom does. You can hear the water down there now, properly - a faint, constant rush, somewhere a long way below - and the air coming up from it is older and colder than any air you have breathed in weeks.

That’s where you feel it.

A humming. Low in the chest. An errant-heartbeat throb behind the temples that you have come, by now, to recognise. Two more steps toward the tunnel mouth and it sharpens into something rhythmic; the same resonance you'd felt with the ledger at Umm ar-Rasas; a clear luring, here. Closer. Yes.

You stop walking.

Cold water ripples around your boots as you let it tell you what it wants to tell you. The pull is forward, into the tunnel, deeper into the system. Whatever is in here is in here.

“Something’s here,” you say to the radio. Quietly. As though Scott might not hear you if you said it softly enough.

"Atta girl. Necklace.” 

You reach up and unclasp the locket with sore, trembling fingers.

The chain pools warm in your palm for the briefest moment - and then you thread it through the carabiner, fasten the clasp to itself, and press the button.

"Pull it up. Get this shit over with."

"Alright, bossy. Hang tight."

The line tightens.

The locket lifts off your palm.

It rises through the head torch beam, swinging slightly as it goes - a glint, a swing - and you watch it ascend with helpless attention of a person watching the only thing tethering them to their own body float away into the dark. Three metres up. Five. Seven. The glint becomes a pinprick. The pinprick becomes a mere memory of one.

Then, it’s gone.

You exhale.

Waiting.

The first thing that goes is the back of your skull.

Low pressure - dragging, tightens within a few seconds into something claw-like. Your shoulders rise. You know what's coming. You have learned, over the last three weeks, the precise rhythm of these - first the pressure, then the throb, then the heat behind the eyes, then the long terrible second of waiting in which you know exactly what your body is about to do to you and there is nothing, nothing, you can do to intervene. You stand very still in the cold dark and you wait for it, and almost immediately taste the warm copper at the back of your throat that means your nose has begun to bleed.

You bring two fingers up. Touch your upper lip. They come away slick.

"Okay," you whisper. To no one. "Okay, okay-"

The headache jumps.

It is not the slow climb of the previous episodes. It is a jump - a sharp, vertical ascent, as though something has hooked into the base of your spine and yanked, and your knees buckle before you've registered the buckling. You go down hard. Cold water hits your hip and your ribs and the side of your face. The torch slips. The beam strobes wildly across the curve of the chamber.

You curl. Knees toward chest, forehead toward water, the harness biting hard into your ribs as your body tries to fold itself smaller around the pain. One hand grips at your own hair without you having decided to. The other claws at the wet stone beneath you, scrabbling for purchase, scrabbling for anything-

A short cry comes out of your throat - a gasp, barely - and then your whole body convulses once, hard, and the locket is gone, the locket is gone, and there is nothing in this chamber to ground you and nothing in your hand and nothing in the world at all except the thing inside you that has been waiting for exactly this. Blood spills down your chin and when you cry out in pain, splatters fly into the puddle of water beneath you, rippling out into reddish pink.

Your vision tunnels. You are suddenly, savagely certain that this is what that Martha girl felt in her last conscious second thirty years ago, the patient shape arriving at its appointment and her with no locket and no rope and no Sam and no one - and you don't want to die here, you don't want to die like her, you don't -

The last thing you are aware of, before whatever happens next, is that your body is no longer entirely yours to operate.

Then -