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the significance of this grave now, or the importance of the person who rested here.
    ‘I need to go and see to the horses,’ Tariq said. ‘You should come inside the compound, it’s getting dark and it’s not safe for you out here.’
    ‘I’m fine. I’ll just be a minute.’
    Tariq nodded and drifted away, leaving Liv alone by the grave.
    She stared down at the stone. Most of the text was on the other side of it, but she reached into her pocket and pulled out the rubbings she had found in the comms room, her eyes seeking the sheet containing the symbols that were now hidden.
    The text was written in two languages. One was the lost language she had been able to understand when she was carrying the Sacrament. She concentrated on the symbols and discovered that, even though the Sacrament had left her now, she could still understand it:
    The Sacrament comes home and The Key looks to heaven
    A new star is born with a new king on Earth to bring order to the end of days
    She frowned and felt a coldness creep over her. The first line was clear enough because she had lived it: she was the key that had unlocked the Sacrament, carried it out of the Citadel and brought it home to this lost place in the desert. But that was where her understanding ended. The second line suggested something else entirely, something still to come – something ominous that would be heralded by the arrival of a new star. She looked up at the evening sky, still too bright for the first stars to show. All the other prophecies, the ones that had brought her to this place, had outlined the future in ambiguous terms and with various possible outcomes. This one seemed too absolute, a star would appear and that would be it, the end of days – whatever that meant. There had to be something else here, something in the second block of symbols.
    She studied them now, strange icons that looked like no language she had ever seen with the lines of different constellations weaving in and out of them: Draco, Taurus, the Plough.

    The symbols were crude and simple but when she concentrated on them the strange facility she had with language, her parting gift from the Sacrament, did not reveal their meaning. Instead, her head filled with impressions of things and feelings, some of them hopeful, some of them disturbing. She considered each symbol individually – a river, an eagle, a skull – trying to link them together into some kind of narrative, like piecing together fragments of an ancient truth she had once known and now forgotten. But though she felt she understood something of what each symbol individually represented, their collective meaning continued to elude her.
    She spent a long time studying the symbols, but in the end, the earth turned, the sun set and the symbols faded to darkness before her eyes. And though Liv had not pinned down anything close to a translation, the emotions they had summoned remained. And the overriding thing they had left her with was a sense of foreboding. Whatever was coming, whatever was written on the ancient stone, she could feel its power and she feared it.

10
    They arrived at the Goddard Space Flight Center a little after ten, just as the storm got about as bad as it was going to get. Rain gusted into the car as Shepherd cracked a window to flash his pristine ID. The guard handed him two security passes and a visitor’s map and directed him to one of the smaller executive staff parking lots by Building 29, the huge hangar-like structure that sat in the middle of the complex. Shepherd hadn’t been here for almost ten years but as he slid the Crown Vic into gear and hissed through the puddle under the raised barrier, it looked like nothing had changed much at all.
    Building 29 rose out of the howling night, a huge white block of a building with two strips of darkened windows on the ground and first floors and none at all on the other four. Most of the offices and control centres inside Building 29 didn’t need windows,