She’d faced Dalton’s lens every half hour or so, feeding the connected world’s insatiable hunger for new information, regardless of how much—or how little—new information she actually had. Her throat felt numb, her nerve endings raw, her legs rubbery, but she wouldn’t have had it any other way. The whole world was sitting up and listening, hanging on every tidbit of information they could find. Every news broadcast was carrying the story. And she was right there, at the heart of it all, the singular face and voice that everyone on the planet was now hooked on.
And yet she still couldn’t believe it was happening, still couldn’t fathom the fact that she was there, doing this, living through the epochal events right alongside the man who was quite possibly an envoy from God.
They’d brought Father Jerome down off the roof for safety, given the mob that was massed outside the gates. After the dawn appearance of the sign, the crowd had grown tenfold, and more people were still streaming in from all corners. Father Jerome had been escorted into the bowels of the monastery by the abbot and Brother Ameen. He’d been baffled by the whole experience, and looked visibly drained. He needed time to recover and take stock of what had happened. Dalton, Finch, and Gracie had climbed back up onto the roof on a couple of occasions, and Dalton had crept right up to the edge and filmed the scene outside the monastery’s walls. He’d been desperate to use the skycam, but he’d reluctantly agreed with Gracie and Finch that it would be unwise, given the highly volatile nature of the crowd.
So far, ever since the sign had faded fifteen minutes or so after it had first appeared over Father Jerome, things out there were calm, if tense. The violence hadn’t flared up again, but the crowd had entrenched itself into separate areas, rival camps that were eyeing each other nervously: Christians who were gathering there to worship and pray, Muslims who were enthralled by the miracle they had witnessed and had joined the others in prayer even though they were unsure about how to interpret the appearance of the sign over a priest’s head, and fired-up groups of more fundamentalist Muslims who rejected any suggestion of a new prophet and whose mere appearance was pushing the more open-minded moderates among them to the sidelines.
In between broadcasts, Gracie, Finch, and Dalton were monitoring news reports streaming in from across the globe and getting updates from the network’s contacts in Cairo. The first major religious figure to make an official comment on what was happening was the patriarch of Constantinople. Unlike the pope, who was the undisputed leader of Roman Catholics and whose word they considered infallible, the patriarch had little direct executive power in the fragmented world of the Eastern Orthodox Church. It hadn’t stopped him from using his resonant historical title to promote his concern for the environment, presenting it as a spiritual responsibility. And in that context, he’d just released a statement that asked the people of the world to pay heed to what they were witnessing and to express his interest in meeting with Father Jerome to better understand what was happening.
Presently, as Gracie looked out over the teeming plain below, she felt increasingly uneasy about their situation. The air was heavy with a charged silence. The threat of a bigger eruption of violence was palpable. She gratefully accepted some fresh lemonade from one of the monks and sat down, cross-legged, on the far end of the roof, her back against a pack of gear. Dalton and Finch, glasses in hand, joined her.
They sat in silence for a moment, allowing their brains to throttle back and their pulses to settle.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Finch just said, looking out over the irregular, domed roofs inside the monastery’s walls. “How everything can change like that, in a heartbeat?”
“Weren’t we just freezing our nuts off in the South Pole like yesterday?” Dalton asked in a weary, incredulous tone. “What just happened?”
“The story of our lives, that’s what happened,” Gracie replied.
“That’s for sure.” Dalton shook his head, a wry smile curling up one corner of his mouth.
She caught it. “What?”
“Weird how these things happen, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t know what you want to call it. Luck. Fate.”
“What do you mean?”
“We could have missed all this so easily. Imagine . . . If you hadn’t taken that call from Brother Ameen, back on the ship. Or if he hadn’t