A Dream of Ice

CHAPTER 1

Caitlin O’Hara was lying in bed with her hands folded across her ribs. It was just after five a.m. and a weak, dark gray light was leaching into the black room through a crack in the curtains.

Predawn has always been undervalued as a witching hour, she thought. Midnight, in prose and poem, had gotten all the glory. At this hour, though, people had to gather their lonely, enervated willpower and make the first choices of the day. For that you needed raw courage. Or crayons, she thought with a smile.

Occasionally, when she was sitting in her office surrounded by diplomas, international accolades, and personal photographs from a life of world travel, Caitlin sharpened crayons. It was more than just mindless activity; her teenage clients frequently needed more than words to describe what they were feeling. Though new clients were often puzzled when she brought out the sketch pad and a sixty-four-pack of Crayolas from her desk, they quickly succumbed to the freedom of nonverbal expression, to the idea of reverting to childhood, to the comforting smell of the open box.

Right now, Caitlin was contemplating what she would draw if asked. Reluctantly, she stopped thinking and just imagined—a freedom she had been loath to give herself since the occurrences of a week ago because Maanik’s trances, her own seemingly out-of-body experiences, the still-inexplicable visions, pained her. But for the first time since the night at the United Nations, like a child pushing off from the edge of the pool, she let her imagination roam.

She would draw herself in cerulean blue, turned to her right, and leaning into a small garden, smelling flowers. To her left, curving toward and over her, would be—nothing. A massive emptiness. There was no way to draw the muscular void she was imagining; she’d actually have to cut the paper into that curve.

Nearly half a lifetime ago, in her early twenties, she’d perceived a vacuum of any kind as an enemy. Blanks were a waste of time and elicited a deep unrest in her. Life seemed too short. Then, when she was pregnant, Caitlin had been expecting a tidal wave of hormonal upheaval, so she began working with a new therapist, Barbara Melchior. What she received when she left those sessions was internal silence, the deepest yet, and it scared her. There was too much information to process, too many threads to connect. Her brain, albeit NYU-trained, shut down.

Thankfully, Barbara had helped her see that silence didn’t mean a void or failure. Silence was a symbol of something not yet understood, a placeholder until one’s mind caught up to and embraced the new information.

When Caitlin’s son, Jacob, was born deaf, Barbara had tentatively probed her about whether she felt a sense of irony.

“Absolutely not,” Caitlin had said. “Irony is cheap. The universe—” She had hesitated, not sure where she was going with the idea. “The universe doesn’t editorialize.”

At the time, she wasn’t even sure what she meant by that. It just came out. But it applied to her life now. Witnessing the strangely possessed teenagers in Haiti, in Iran, here in New York… her visions of the civilization of Galderkhaan… the universe had given those experiences to her without footnotes or context. They had just happened.

With Jacob, time allowed her to see his beauty, just as it did with each of her patients, one-on-one.

But this? she wondered, returning to the emptiness she was imagining. A world of strange sights, strange beings, and stranger philosophies. Where could she even begin to look for the connective tissue between the “real world” and this strange place called Galderkhaan? Her brain certainly wasn’t providing answers.

So… crayons of the mind.

She lay still and breathed, feeling her joints and limbs slowly waking up. Her mind drifted to the imaginary crayon outline of herself within the chaos of flowers and color. It was as if her body was the garden…

A gentle tap-tap-tapping came at her door. When Jacob didn’t immediately come in, she knew he was already wearing his hearing aid.

“I’m up, honey,” she said.

He opened the door and scooched to her side, said, “Wakey, wakey,” and put a finger in her ear. She jerked and squealed. This was a long-standing routine she wished would end but whenever she considered telling him she didn’t like it, she realized that in the long run she’d miss it. It would end soon enough.

He placed a hand on her eyelids and said, “Don’t look, Mommy, I’m going to walk you to the living room.”

“Okay, not looking,” she said as Jacob put his hands on her shoulders and tugged her upright out of bed. Grinning nervously and keeping her eyes closed, she allowed him to push at her back to direct her out of her bedroom. Caitlin immediately walked into the edge of the open door.

“Oof!”

“Sorry, Mommy. Okay, we’re in the hall, go right.”

“I know where the living room is,” she said, laughing, and then suddenly stopped. One bare foot had landed in something slimy.

“Ew!”

Her eyelids barely fluttered open before Jacob ran his hands over them again. “Don’t look!”

“There’s something gross—”

“Don’t look! Arfa threw up.”

“Is that the surprise?”

“No! Don’t move. I’ll get paper towels.”

Caitlin stood blindly in the hall on one foot. She listened to the sound of Jacob’s feet retreating and paper towels ripping off the roll. He was talking to himself, muttering something about cat puke. He chuckled. The smell of coffee wafted toward her from the kitchen. She didn’t think Jacob knew how to make coffee. Then she felt him wiping off her foot with the paper towels.

“Is it safe for me to stand yet?”

“One second, I’m getting the floor.”

She could hear him rubbing the puke into the carpet.

“Okay. You can walk now.”

Propelled again by her son, Caitlin put one foot in front of the other until she could tell by the blast of sunlight through her eyelids that they had reached the living room. Jacob positioned himself in front of her and said, “Open!”

Caitlin opened her eyes and saw, standing before her, her mother leaning over the dining room table with the coffeepot. A homemade chocolate Bundt cake was waving four candles at her, and crepe paper twirled from the chairs to the ceiling light to make a green and yellow tepee.

“Surprise!” they chorused. Jacob was so excited he started jumping, then stood on a chair near the cake, still yelling, “Surprise! Gotcha!”

“Hey, Jake,” his grandmother piped over him as she poured fresh coffee into two mugs. “Derriere in the chair.”

“I don’t understand French!” he answered back.

“You understand Irish?” she demanded with a touch of brogue, pointing at the wooden seat.

He stopped hopping around and obediently went to where the no-nonsense finger was pointing.

“Were you surprised, Mommy?” he asked in a tone that was both giddy and sheepish.

“Well, I’m surprised I’m forty,” she said, hugging her mother around the shoulders. “What the heck time did you leave home?”

“As soon as the bread rose,” Nancy replied, patting Caitlin’s hands. “Your father would have been here too but we had a no-show at the bakery so he had to fill in.”

“I’ll call him later,” Caitlin said, sitting in the seat of honor. Quickly she glanced around for Arfa. The tabby cat was snoozing in sphinx position on an arm of the couch, obviously no worse for wear.

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” Jacob chanted, bopping up and down in his seat. “Make your wish!”

“All right,” she said, though it was Nancy’s stern gaze that quieted him.

Caitlin looked at the candles, thinking about being forty, about Jacob’s having recently turned ten—

About Atash setting himself on fire, the flames leaping over his clothes…

My god, she thought, and quickly blew out the candles.

She vaguely noticed that Jacob was still leaning forward with expectation. An instant later the candles relit themselves. Jacob shrieked with laughter but Caitlin heard only screaming. She saw the man who burst into flame in the courtyard in Galderkhaan when she’d shared Atash’s vision. Shaking, she blew out the candles again and of course the trick flames came back, now with all the souls of Galderkhaan burning and screaming and dying. Caitlin tried to keep it together, covering her nose and mouth with one hand, but she was visibly shaking. Jacob, unaware, was laughing and clapping.

Nancy O’Hara, who noticed everything, said to Jacob, “Now you get to put them out, the way I showed you.”

Gleefully, he dipped his fingers in a small dish of water hidden under a napkin. He pinched each candle out with a ssst, the smoke wafting upward in tendrils.

Nancy occupied Jacob with helping her pull out the candles and then cut the cake into slices while keeping an eye on her daughter. Caitlin was breathing slowly, purposefully, through her nose, with her hands clasped in front of her face. She closed her eyes, checked her hands to see if they had stopped trembling, and took a few more shallow breaths.

Gradually, Caitlin normalized, nodded thanks to her mother, and sank a fork into a proffered slice of cake. With Jacob safely occupied by his own slice, Nancy murmured to Caitlin, “You’re not done with that previous case?”

Caitlin didn’t answer, and that was answer enough.

“But you’re not going to be traveling any time soon.” It was pointedly a statement from Nancy, not a question.

“I—I don’t know,” Caitlin said quietly. “I never know.”

“Don’t do something dangerous and make me play the mother card with you, Caitlin. Grandparenting is enough.”

“Mom, you didn’t want me going to Thailand after the tsunami. What if I had listened to you? I wouldn’t have met Jacob’s dad, and you wouldn’t be a grandmother.”

“I was worried about your safety. You knew it was a dangerous situation and went anyway. And after your recent experiences, I am still concerned.”

Caitlin sighed wearily. “Mom, you run a bakery—”

“Meaning what, exactly?” the older woman asked. “That I shouldn’t have an opinion about how my daughter conducts her life?”

“No, I meant that our worlds are different.”

“Caitlin, I meet more people every day than you do in a week—”

“I know. And you should be proud, Mom. I am, of you and Dad. I just mean that—”

“You think you know what’s best for you, I know. I’ve heard it before,” Nancy continued. “But here’s my take. You’re world renowned. You’ve ‘made it.’ What I’m saying, with a mother’s pride, is, why can’t you stop fighting so hard and enjoy that?”

“Enjoy? Mom, that’s a word I apply to stepping in cat vomit because it makes my son laugh. Beyond that? I need to understand things, not just fix them. Sometimes that means going where the challenges are. Knowledge is worth the risk for me. Sometimes, like a week ago, things end without being tidied up or understood. Am I satisfied? A bit, sometimes. But I get no real peace or enjoyment. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I can’t run my practice like a bakery.”

Nancy raised one eyebrow, took another bite of cake, and for a second everyone just chewed. Then she said to Jacob, “Don’t forget the other surprise, kid.”

“Oh, I almost did!” he exclaimed, crumbs flying from his overstuffed mouth.

Jacob leaped toward the silverware drawer and pulled out a tiny gift with an enormous pink bow and more tape than wrapping paper. As Caitlin struggled to open it—enjoying the moment, and proving it to her mother with a genuine smile—Jacob stood next to her with his hand on her shoulder, jiggling up and down. At last she got it open and found a key chain with a thin brass circle. There was a maze etched into the brass.

“It’s a labyrinth,” Jacob said, saying the word like he owned it. He pulled it from her hands and brought it close to her eyes. “It’s medieval, Grandpa said. There’s only one path.” His pointer finger traced around the whorls of the maze. “See? You can’t get lost. Whichever way you go, it gets you to the middle!”

She flashed back to the design she had seen in Galderkhaan, the swirls and crescents that left the center isolated, mysterious. She gave him a big hug and kiss and sent him to her bag to get her keys. She let him work on putting the keys on the new ring while she quietly apologized to her mother.

“Look, I didn’t mean to come down so hard on you,” Caitlin began.

Nancy hushed her. “I’m going to give you some advice from your grandmother, a miner’s daughter. She once warned me that if you go too deep into something, you can lose your way or get buried. I resented the metaphor. Life wasn’t a coal mine. But you know something? She was right. A person should have—a person needs—a full and diverse life. So,” she continued, “when I hear your father say that he can’t even start a conversation with you about your choice to go to Iran, it occurs to me that you need a piece of advice: if no one can even tell you no, if you can’t even consider it, you’re in a very dangerous place.”

Caitlin thought a long time before answering, twisting ribbons of chocolate icing onto her fork. Finally, she said, “What did Great-Grandpa do each morning when the coal cart came to him, big and dark and very, very insistent?”

Nancy smiled. “He got in. But—and this is important, dear—not blindly and not alone. That’s why he became a labor organizer, and maybe you’ve got his rebellious blood.” Nancy’s smile warmed. “How about a compromise?” she said. “Find yourself someone who you will trust now and then. Someone who can tell you the truth if you need to hear it, in a way you can take it.”

“I’ve got this one.” Caitlin thumbed at Jacob, grinning.

He held up the key chain, jangling the keys like bells and pursing his lips as if he were blowing a trumpet.

“I’m serious,” Nancy said as she cleared the plates.

“I know,” Caitlin replied, “and thank you. I will consider it. I promise.” Then she immersed herself in another hug from Jacob and a comment about his wizardly key-chain ways.

It was soon time for Jacob to get ready for school and Nancy announced she would take him today; her birthday present to Caitlin was time for a long, hot bubble bath. They hugged warmly as they said good-bye.

And then Caitlin was alone in the apartment. She sat down again at the dining table, gazing at the cat and thinking about her mother. People didn’t have to be the same. They didn’t have to agree with each other. But they didn’t have to judge each other either, simply support each other’s choices.

Arfa twitched, stretched, and jumped down from the couch. He ambled to the table, rubbed his muzzle across her ankles, then sat back on his haunches with his eyes mostly closed, purring. Caitlin regarded him and realized that the tips of his whiskers were moving. Although it was hard to see, she was sure that all the fur on his face was blowing backward as if he were facing into a breeze.

She looked toward the window, which was shut against the fall chill. There was no breeze, no vent, no fan—nothing. Then Arfa stood up, walked around behind her, arched his back, and rubbed his side against empty space, as if it were someone’s leg.

In the still, airless room Caitlin felt a sudden cooling in the small of her back, as if icy breath had been blown down her spine and pooled there. Simultaneously the cat turned to her, hissed silently, and hurried away.

Caitlin didn’t blame her.

Something was here.

Something that didn’t belong.

CHAPTER 2

At noon, the C train was mostly empty. Caitlin shared her car with only a few transit workers at the far end and a young Hispanic couple somehow cuddling around their backpacks.

Smelling of bubblegum—the only flavor of bath bubbles she could find in the apartment—Caitlin headed toward the Brooklyn International School, which offered eighth to twelfth grade for English language learners. A large number of students were not just immigrants but refugees, many of them suffering from a wide range of traumas. Caitlin usually visited the school one afternoon a week to conduct individual therapy sessions but with all her recent trips, she hadn’t been able to find any free afternoons. Earlier in the week she’d received an e-mail asking her to please come on an off day. One student in particular was proving especially difficult to reach.

Caitlin leaned her head back on the glass window of the train and stared at ads for a ministorage chain. Ordinarily, she’d have been rereading the e-mail from the school and thinking about the student, but she couldn’t keep her mind off of Arfa and the presence they had both felt in the room. Most of the time his behavior could be passed off as random feline weirdness but the inexplicably rippling fur gnawed at her. The experience had blindsided her and filled her with a thought that stubbornly refused to go away:

Did I bring something back with me from Galderkhaan? Or, like an animal, has something sniffed me out?

Or was it neither of the above? Reason argued against those. But reason had too many enemies now.

Reality was suddenly very, very difficult to know and impossible to quantify. Souls from an ancient civilization had been stretching through time, trying to bond with souls in the modern day to complete a ritual. Caitlin had interceded, used a self-induced trance to place herself between then and now, breaking the connection. But it wasn’t like an electric circuit where the lines were cut and the energy died. This was different. It had been like walking through a graveyard where the ghosts were visible, aggressive, and unhappy. Not even the great universities had literature to help her understand that. Caitlin was sure; she had checked.

Caitlin sat up straight and forced herself to focus on the present, on what she knew was real. She dug deep into her pocket for her phone and scrolled through e-mails until she found the one from the school. The boy in trouble was an eighth grader, originally a child soldier in the Central African Republic. Deserting one night, Odilon had managed to walk a hundred miles to the capital from his rebel camp without being picked up by any other militia. At Bangui, he hid in a hospital for a week until he passed out from hunger. Doctors Without Borders got him out of the country and now, through a generous line of supporters, he was living in a hastily converted meeting space in the basement of a synagogue in Brooklyn. He had seemed responsive during the summer school that guided the refugees through assimilation into American life. Now, in late October, he was beginning to isolate and was refusing to speak in class or out of it. The school’s counselors suspected he was experiencing flashbacks but they couldn’t confirm.

Caitlin looked up from her phone. A couple of college students had joined the car, both wired into music. She glimpsed several boisterous younger kids in an adjacent car, clearly skipping school. The rocking of the two cars made her aware of the reflections playing off the windows. Images collided with each other as the cars shifted or turned along gentle curves, layering the faces of passengers one upon the other. Her eyes traced the windows and their metal frames, the silvery poles and overhead handlebars, the yellow and orange plastic seats. The passengers and their reflections seemed to dance around the fixed structures as though they were figures around a maypole in some primitive ritual, complete with the transparent souls of the departed. She thought about the dead of Galderkhaan, the Priests trying to bond their souls together and ascend to a higher spiritual plane through the rite of cazh. The poles in the cars were like the columns of the Technologists, planted in earth, extending to the sky, connecting them both.

Her phone fell from her hand and bounced on the floor at her feet, apparently unharmed. She picked it up, squeezed her eyes shut, and shook her head out of its reverie.

Damn it, Caitlin, she thought.

There was a kid who needed her several stops away; she had to be ready. He wasn’t another Maanik. He wasn’t another Atash. This was a child, forced to be a man, who was having a perfectly logical reaction to the horror he had experienced.

She reached inside and drew on whatever latent strength she could find. Opening her eyes, she looked up at the ceiling, then out the window. The familiar world was all around her, the tracks carrying her along a station platform, the horizontal tiles of the walls, black and white signs between the columns. This was reality.

Yet almost as swiftly as it arrived the feeling of confidence dissipated. Down the back of her neck, along the backs of her arms, anxiety spread like a frost. It was an old, familiar, unwanted guest and she knew what it meant.

She was being watched.

Pulling into the station, the train came to a complete stop. She looked around. No one who joined her car was paying her even the slightest attention. A tall girl, probably a model, got on and folded into a seat, sliding a piece of gum into her mouth and opening a book. A teenager boarded with his bicycle. The train pulled away and Caitlin leaned forward to peer through the windows into the jostling cars ahead and behind. No one was looking at her.

She sat up straight again and pulled her shoulders back, but logic and posture weren’t antidotes. There was absolutely nothing she could do to duck the fear, the feeling that eyes were upon her. There was no psychological foundation: she had never been prone to feelings of persecution or exaggerated self-importance. If someone, somewhere, were watching her, she could not fix that. And why should she? People looked at people all the time. Shoving the problem aside, she focused instead on her e-mails, which provided plenty of distractions to choose from.

Most of them, she discovered, were from Ben Moss. He had been combing through the videos of the Galderkhaani language in an attempt to construct a rudimentary dictionary. Linguistic databases—ethnic dialects—Glogharasor; her eyes skipped over sentence after sentence without letting any of the information stick. Then she landed on one she couldn’t ignore: I’m visiting my parents in Cornwall but I’ll be back Tuesday. Would love to see you and celebrate your birthday.

Tuesday was tomorrow.

She had reached her stop. Caitlin put her phone away and dug her hands into her gloves. She would deal with tomorrow, tomorrow.

Downtown Brooklyn was all thoroughfares and blocky buildings with few cafés or public indoor spaces to hang out in where she could take Odilon. But Caitlin knew that Brooklyn International had a Ping-Pong table. It was located in a dim corner of the cramped gym and even though one half of the table was an inch higher than the other and the net sagged, fifteen or twenty minutes of play could create enough of a bond before they moved somewhere else in the school to chat.

Odilon was short for his age and carried himself with the familiar sway-shouldered arrogance of many of the child soldiers she had met before. Handing him a paddle, Caitlin was prepared for him to shrug or sneer or refuse to play, but he did not. He gripped the handle as though it were the hilt of a machete and watched silently as she demonstrated the basics. He nodded to begin and then played without frustration or combativeness.

Forty-five minutes later he still hadn’t spoken a word, laughed, or given her any glimpse inside. Caitlin was feeling exasperated, not with him but with the situation, though she was careful not to show it. She’d been reading him as he played. His gaze was uninvolved; his hand was studying the movement of the ball, muscle memory responding to something coming toward him, gauging how hard or how gently to strike. He did surprisingly well for a first-timer and did not become aggressive when the ball hit the net or missed the table. His mind and his heart were elsewhere. His dark eyes were steady, a good sign. It suggested memories shielded by time and distance rather than restless, current flashbacks. His soul was locked out, not in. She wondered how old he’d been when he’d first killed someone. Was it at gunpoint? At what distance? Had he cut a throat?

She realized she was impatient and that frustrated her. It was the tangible residue of Maanik and Gaelle and Atash. Those sessions had yielded quick results. How long would it take this boy to feel safe enough to actually play the game instead of working at it? Then add a few weeks to that before he would start talking to her. In the meantime, a thousand dangerous psychological and emotional wires could be tripped. Poor grades were a given since he wasn’t talking in class, he could lose his makeshift bedroom in the synagogue, even a random altercation in the street—anything could seal him shut.

Caitlin wanted a shortcut with this boy too, as unrealistic as that was. She had five minutes left in the session and all they’d done was hit a little plastic ball while she affected cheerful encouragement. How could she give him a feeling of safety and continuity that would last until she came back next week?

Caitlin placed her paddle on the table and Odilon instantly tensed. The ball clacked past him. His eyes were on the woman as she walked slowly around the table until she was standing beside the net.

Caitlin’s mind went to Maanik and Gaelle, the young women who had been in the thrall of the Galderkhaani souls. She remembered the contact she had made with them, and how, through movement specific motions with her hands, she was connected with heaven and earth.

Unsmiling, Caitlin held out her right hand, palm down a foot above the table. Then she motioned for Odilon to do the same. He looked at her quizzically and then tentatively reached out his hand as though it were a Ping-Pong ritual he did not understand. She then flipped over her left hand, palm up, the fingers not quite rigid, as though they held an offering. She kept her eyes on his. He returned her stare, not defiantly but warily, in this moment more boy than soldier.

Sliding her open left hand four inches below his right hand, Caitlin instantly felt something leap within her palm, as if a stone had dropped into water and flung drops in the air. They both gasped. An immense cascade washed down her spine to her feet. She knew that this energy, strong and negative, was from Odilon. Instinctively she pushed her left foot hard into the floor to anchor herself, as she had in the conference room of the United Nations. The energy continued to pour through her.

Odilon broke their gaze and stared at their hands in disbelief. He then took an enormous inhale and suddenly backed away. He leaned forward, put both hands on his knees, and braced himself. She could hear him, see him taking long breaths in and letting long breaths out. Caitlin lowered her hands, turning her right hand down in the process, and she could feel the energy discharging through her. Her own spirit lightened. When Odilon straightened there was moisture in his eyes and, after a moment, he smiled faintly with relief. Holding his right hand before his tearful eyes, marveling and uncomprehending, he turned it toward her.

Caitlin stepped toward him and, this time, very lightly, she gave him a high-five.

The session had lasted an hour. The final part of it had taken less than thirty seconds. It had bonded and impacted them both.

And for Caitlin, it lasted. She felt jubilant as she walked from the high school onto the noisy sidewalk. The traffic was louder than when she had arrived, the fall air suddenly warm, her shoulders no longer compacted. Whatever portal she had opened, she wedged herself firmly into it, not wanting the joyful freedom to close. She laughed, grateful to be reconnected with this place, this time. She hadn’t felt so content in weeks.

Underground, she boarded a slightly more crowded train headed into Manhattan. She had a corner bench to herself and let the cacophony of the subway wash around her, observed the solid and translucent images without becoming unsettled. Now, she thought, was the time to go through Ben’s e-mails.

Oh, Ben—he overexplained his thought process for each linguistic discovery, and second- and third-guessed himself for nearly every translated word. On the one hand, his linguistic mapping of Galderkhaan had confidently identified the two main groups: Priests and Technologists. The Technologists were largely scientists, though the words “faith” and “myth creation” appeared frequently in connection with both groups—a puzzle that suggested they came from the same root beliefs and had somehow diverged.

Ben had other discoveries to share, but all of them had the proverbial asterisk since a diacritical hand gesture could skew the interpretation one way or the other. Maanik had made similar hand gestures when she was under the control of the Galderkhaani soul.

Caitlin lifted her eyes from the phone as the train stopped at a station with a jolt. Several passengers entered the car, looking for places to sit. When they swung into seats, their eyes found hers.

A fresh wash of ice cascaded down her spine. The departure bell sounded but the train stayed in the station. Caitlin looked around, shocked that the fear had found her again and determined not to let it get the better of her.

She then did what she had done with Odilon: turned her right hand down and emptied herself, raised her left hand palm-up to receive, and let her fingers guide her mind. Away from herself, through the car, outward, farther—

In the car ahead, Caitlin noticed a woman with black hair and a deep suntan. She was the reason for the train’s delay: her backpack was between the doors, preventing them from closing, and she was looking at Caitlin. Suddenly the woman, in a small gesture, wiped the air with her fingertips.

Images flooded Caitlin’s mind. Unfamiliar faces, all bronzed, all frozen as if in snapshots—some laughing, some crying, some screaming. They came rapidly, one after the other, faster and faster until they seemed to move: one body with hundreds of expressive faces. Caitlin’s body felt overcome with turbulence, white-water rapids. She tried to raise a hand and couldn’t. Effectively blind, suddenly nauseated, and panicking, Caitlin struggled to shut her eyes, to shut out the images.

And despite those unwanted images she realized she still had some control, her mind still worked, and she thought to herself: You are here, now, in the train, going home. When it starts again you will feel the car swaying, hear the wheels on the tracks. Picture it. Anticipate it.

What was it she heard Jacob’s art instructor say once, the phrase that stuck with her? “If you can visualize it, you own it”?

And suddenly, it worked. Caitlin felt as if the visual aura of a migraine had suddenly dissipated. When she opened her eyes again the doors were closed, the train was rolling forward, and the woman was gone.

That’s what it was, she told herself. The onset of a migraine from the stress of what you did with Odilon. That’s all.

But though normalcy had reasserted itself, something of the assault remained: an unsettled, bordering-on-urgent feeling deep inside her that was somehow familiar. It had all the earmarks of mild anxiety but with a difference:

Caitlin felt the woman’s eyes still upon her, still very near, invisible, somehow watching her.

CHAPTER 3

“Senator Cooper, we don’t have to represent it that way to your constituents.”

Flora Davies forced her voice to stay pleasant and charming on the phone as she pried the Control key from her laptop with a fingernail. An aggravated Flora always meant damage to the nearest object in her office.

“But,” the senator started in his infantilized lilt, “what if the other side finds out about my support for the increased funding you’ve requested and starts spreading rumors that I now believe in global warming or climate change—or whatever they’re calling it now?”

Flora calmly countered, “Then our colleagues, who are numerous and well connected, will simply answer back in the media that the funds you want to study the Antarctic ice melt have nothing to do with the environment. It doesn’t have to do with dying polar bears or rising sea levels. It has to do with your fear, the Group’s fear, that the Russians or the Chinese can expand their presence there and pose a threat to our nation from this new and wide-open platform.”

“I see,” he said. “I like it.”

“Everything is a public relations battle these days,” she said.

The senator sighed. “It is a muddle,” he agreed. “I liked it better when we either did or did not support abortion, without all the debate about this month, that trimester, or which state you are physically in. When we supported human rights across the board, not this for gays or that for women or something else for some other group.”

“You are a true humanitarian.”

“Thank you,” the senator said.

“Which is why it’s important to let your colleagues and constituents know that supporting and supervising the expenditures for our work will allow you to make sure less money is spent on faux science, like whale massage and meditation for schizophrenics.”

“Faux science,” he said. “Yes, I like that phrase. It sounds like ‘foe,’ as in ‘enemy.’”

“Yes, Senator,” Flora said, rolling her eyes. She popped the Control key.

This, thankfully, would be the last phone call she’d have to make this morning. Well, early afternoon—she surmised the time when she heard mail drop through the slot in the front door of the Group’s mansion on Fifth Avenue. Three new senators supporting her publicly acknowledged Antarctic research. Every dollar helped. That was quite an accomplishment, almost as impressive as getting her Berkeley colleague and Group member, Peter, to send her a new science associate even after telling him about the dicey experiment now taking place below her in the mansion’s heavily secured basement.

With Senator Cooper happily burbling away about press releases and news spots, she let her mind wander back to that experiment until it was necessary to answer a question.

“Say, Dr. Davies,” said the senator, “does this mean I can get a trip to Antarctica? My daughter would love to see penguins.”

“Yes,” Flora said, “the Group Science Foundation will be thrilled to give you a junket in Antarctica.” She did not mention that half the continent’s penguins had left due to the ice event that only her aide had witnessed.

They ended the call convivially. Flora used both hands to massage her face out of its scowl, then headed downstairs to the basement corridor, now crammed full of destroyed deep freezers. She really had to figure out a way to dump those unobtrusively. Opening the door to the smallest lab, she encountered the glare of what had turned out to be the best and worst part of the bargain with Berkeley: Adrienne Dowman, a reportedly brilliant if contrary young scientist, newly arrived the day before, who refused to exhibit even a veneer of social grace, from manners to lip balm to deodorant. She looked as if her lips bled every night.

“How’s it coming?” Flora asked as pleasantly as she could.

“It’s not going to work,” Adrienne barked.

“Well, Peter sent me quite the optimist, didn’t he?” Flora whipped back.

“You asked for my opinion.”

“I did not,” Flora replied. “I asked for a progress report. Let’s be clear. While you’re working with me, which will be for the rest of your career, you have an ‘on’ button but not an ‘opinion’ button. Got it?”

“It’s never been done at this scale,” Adrienne said, undeterred. “That’s informational, not an opinion.”

Flora gave up, for now. “When are we starting?”

“In a few minutes.”

Adrienne turned back to work on the room, which had been emptied and its soundproofing tripled in the last forty-eight hours. Flora had made it clear to Peter that the scientist doing this favor for the Group would be hers permanently in order to keep a lock on the Group’s “proprietary information.” Peter had leaped at the chance to offload his least-favorite associate. On the plus side, Adrienne was a profoundly gifted physicist and tech. She had installed eight black panels in the room: two large ones fixed on floor-to-ceiling columns and six smaller but still sizable panels on rotary devices by the walls. A viper’s nest of wires led outside the room to the Group’s private generator and to a control box that looked like the kit of a DJ. On the platform fixed to the floor sat the last stone Mikel Jasso, one of the Group’s field agents, had brought back from the Southern Ocean. Flora had privately dubbed it “the Serpent” because there had been no trouble at all in her garden of relics and finds until this one showed up. Since its arrival there had been a succession of ruptured, melted deep freezers and her researcher Arni Haugan had been found dead on the lab floor, his gray matter liquefied and pouring from his ears. This experiment had to work or Flora would have to seriously consider throwing the artifact back in the ocean. Success here would be preferable.

“Ready for nothing,” Adrienne grumped. She handed Flora headphones with an embedded communication device and placed a set on her own head.

“How audible is this going to be if the soundproofing fails?” Flora asked. “I do not want to be aggravating my neighbors.”

“Nobody’s going to hear it,” Adrienne snorted. “Including us, unless you have canine ancestry.”

Before Flora could respond to the dig, Adrienne flicked a switch and said, “But ultrasound decibels can do damage too.”

Flora most certainly felt the sudden hum of electricity. But far more importantly, the Serpent stone jumped four feet in the air and hung there, at the exact midpoint between the floor and ceiling panels. Flora laughed out loud. To date, the heaviest object to be acoustically suspended was a metal screw. Now they had lifted something magnitudes larger.

Adrienne was not indulging in a celebration. The stone was bobbling wildly and she was quickly but lightly turning knobs, nudging the side panels into different angles. The stone stabilized for a moment, then two—then suddenly flipped upside down, and Flora gasped. Its crescent carvings were now facing the ceiling, the object quivering.

“Huh?” said Adrienne.

“You weren’t expecting that?” Flora said over the hum.

“A stone shouldn’t suddenly become bottom-heavy, like a water balloon.”

“Magnetism?” Flora suggested.

Adrienne glanced at readings on a laptop, shook her head. She bent over her console, turning a knob with a feather touch Flora would have thought impossible from her lumpen personality. In the center of the room the stone returned to its previous equilibrium.

Adrienne stood still, watching intently.

“So…?” Flora asked, pondering.

“That should have been impossible,” Adrienne replied. “I knew there would be minor fluctuations, but in order for an object to flip like that, the sound wave on one side would have had to overpower the other, which would have destabilized the levitation. The stone would have dropped to the floor.” Adrienne peeled her eyes from the major milestone she had just achieved, which no one would ever hear about, and looked at her new employer. “What the hell is this thing, Dr. Davies?”

“A very ancient relic with properties we do not understand,” Flora said. “Yet.”

“You already told me that,” Adrienne said. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Flora’s implacable expression caused Adrienne to snort in frustration and turn away. As she did, her eyes shifted to the door, beyond which sat the destroyed freezers. She looked back at her new boss.

“Flora, did it try—to get out?” Adrienne asked.

“Not exactly,” Flora replied. “Lord, don’t go imparting intelligence to it. It’s just a mass of nickel and iron.”

“And uranium is just silvery white metal,” Adrienne said. “This thing has all the hallmarks of being very, very dangerous.”

Flora glanced at the levitated stone. “Not anymore.”

Adrienne turned a little scarlet. “Christ, you could have told me. What did it do?”

“Hopefully, nothing it will do again,” Flora replied. “In fact, now that you’ve tamed it, why don’t we see what it hasn’t been telling us.”

CHAPTER 4

Andreas Campbell pulled his mail cart west on Ninth Street. He stopped outside the Augustine Apartments and switched off the audiobook on his iPhone. Elizabeth Bennet was just telling Mr. Darcy he was the last man she’d ever marry. Leaning over his cart to retrieve the building’s bundle of mail, Andreas suddenly doubled over with pain. The stabbing in his gut was so sharp, he had to transfer his full weight to the cart, and the pain kept coming. He felt a spike of blinding, searing heat rocket to his head, as if his body temperature had just soared to triple digits—which it had.

Looking down the street, he saw people near Sixth Avenue and called weakly, trying to get their attention. He waved helplessly at the lobby beyond the glass doors of the Augustine. The doorman was chatting with a maintenance man, not looking at the street, and the security camera was pointed in the opposite direction. Andreas fumbled for his phone in his pocket.

As the next assault of pain lunged through his kidneys, he fell to his knees, clasping his stomach and then screaming at his own touch. His midsection felt like it was exploding outward in every direction. He vomited on the sidewalk, trying to scream through his convulsing throat. Then the heat came again and he screamed so hard that blood vessels burst in his eyes.

The doorman finally caught the strange and desperate image through the sliding glass doors and he and the maintenance man ran down the steps to help. There they found the mail carrier lying on the sidewalk, blood pooling around his body, vomit sprayed around his head.

“Call 911,” the doorman yelled, loud enough to attract attention from passersby on Sixth Avenue. He knelt next to the man, hands hovering over him, not knowing what to do as Andreas continued to claw at the pavement, his voice losing force.

A crowd began to gather, gawking and gossiping about the nice man who had worked in the neighborhood for years as they captured the tragedy on their cell phones. In the background the maintenance man attempted to describe the scene in broken English while pleading for an ambulance. Finally they heard a siren in the distance, coming nearer.

“Hold on,” they told Andreas. “Hold on!”

Flora Davies was heading from the basement up to her office when her phone chimed with an alert. A week before, when rats had inexplicably stampeded from Washington Square Park to the basement entrance of the mansion, she had set a dozen tracking systems to alert her if anything unusual happened nearby. These were a confluence of social media platforms that fed her data based on keywords and GPS locales. An algorithm used by the NYPD starred potentially disruptive events. There had been surprisingly few alerts: a couple of muggings, a police takedown of a sword-swinging nut on Bleecker Street, and tiresome celebrity sightings. Now there was a stream of tweets with photos and exclamation points.

“Probably a rock star,” she muttered irritably. Then she noticed the sprawl of a body, and the blood. It was in front of the nearby Augustine. She moved rapidly through the tweets and, yes, someone had snapped the carrier’s ID and posted his name. She knew him, she thought, though she could barely recognize his face.

Flora called to her assistant, “Erika, look up Andreas Campbell, male, late forties, early fifties.”

“Andreas? Our mail carrier?”

“Yes. Start with pharmacy records.”

The Group had long ago established methods for consulting the medical history, bank statements, and credit reports of virtually anyone in America, and they were working toward global access. Any individual would be fairly well delineated with just those sources.

Flora rushed from the building, the front door slamming behind her. Down Ninth Street she heard a siren abruptly shut off. By the time she got to the Augustine Apartments the ambulance doors were closing, Andreas Campbell behind them. She grabbed the nearest bystander, an older man walking his Yorkshire terrier, who was straining toward the blood as far as its leash would allow.

“Did he die?” Flora asked.

“We don’t know.”

“What was it, what was the matter?”

“Something bad,” the man replied. “I heard a paramedic say it looked like he bled out half his body.”

The crowd watched the ambulance drive away and then slowly, conspiratorially dispersed.

“Leave it, Bisco!” the old man snapped as the terrier growled and strained toward the mess. The man yanked definitively on the lead and the two of them walked away, leaving only Flora and the maintenance man to contemplate the remains. Flora crouched down on her haunches as close to the vomit as she could get without contaminating the pool of blood.

“Ma’am, what do you think you’re doing?”

Flora quickly stood and transferred a twenty-dollar bill from her pocket to the maintenance man’s hand. She then pulled out her debit card.

“Whatever you’re going to do, do it quick before the cops come and turn this into a crime scene,” the man said.

Holding the edge of her suit jacket over her mouth and nose, Flora used the tip of her debit card to shift through the puddle of vomit. It was filled with one-inch, pale, squirming objects, hundreds of them, if not thousands. Flora stood up just as her phone rang. It was Erika.

“Our friend has friends, Dr. Davies. He’s got a prescription for albendazole, which is—”

“I know,” Flora said. “Intestinal parasites.”

“Yes. Herring worms, specifically,” Erika said. “How did you know?”

“I think his pals just ate him from the inside out.”

Erika made a gagging sound as Flora hung up. She used a tissue to wipe off her card.

“You all done here, lady?” the maintenance man asked.

“Yes, I’m quite through with that,” she said, motioning at the ruddy mixture. “Make sure you tell the police to bag it and use disinfectant. Don’t let them hose it into the gutter.”

“Why? Is it dangerous?”

“Only if a dog or pigeon or some other unfortunate ingests it.”

The man looked at her in disgust and gave a short nod of his head. “Whatever you say, lady.”

As Flora walked back to the mansion, Arni, the dead researcher, was heavy on her mind. Upon entering the building she asked Erika if there had been anything else special about Andreas Campbell: mental irregularities, any psych meds?

Erika reported nothing unusual about Campbell, ruling out a potential link to Arni, who was a synesthete.

Flora sat at her desk and flipped open her laptop, calling up a map of her neighborhood. Then she remembered Andreas had just been at the mansion. She had heard the mail slot flap open and shut. Fifteen minutes later he was falling catastrophically ill two-thirds of a block away with parasites that never caused that much damage that fast. Yet it had happened, in the brief time that Flora was—

In the basement. With Adrienne and the Serpent.

First Mikel came back with the stone, then the rats stampeded, then Arni literally melted, then intestinal parasites went wild. By no reasonable yardstick was this a coincidence.

She switched to an advanced mapping program and drew two vectors, one from the Augustine to the mansion, the other from the mansion to the arch in Washington Square Park, the origin point for the rats. Her skin crawled as she remembered the undulating mass of clawing, twitching rodents that had covered the arch before they ran down and past her.

Like the grid of New York, the two vectors on-screen made a right angle crossing at the mansion.

All right, so what? she thought. Then she caught herself. The Group’s mansion wasn’t important. It was the stone that was important. Quickly she looked up the e-mail from Mikel that explained approximately where the Serpent had been collected in the Southern Ocean. She expanded the map and drew a vector from the Serpent’s origin point to the mansion. Next, she marked the location where Mikel said he saw the iceberg calved from the Brunt Ice Shelf, with an airship lodged inside, and connected it to the mansion as well.

What else, what else… Mikel’s albatrosses. Uruguay; hadn’t it been near the Montevideo airport? She added that point to the map, then descended on Erika, demanding immediate research for any unusual animal behavior around the world over the previous couple of weeks.

“Whale beachings, haven’t we been seeing reports on that?”

“A slight uptick—”

“Penguins leaving the Antarctic, we saw a lot of that. Look up any other weird flocking, dog or cat attacks, maulings at zoos, anything.”

Erika’s research was limited by what the media considered newsworthy, but within an hour Flora had virtual flags all across her map, with a line drawn from each to the mansion. A nexus of whale beachings in Hudson Bay. A dolphin attack, of all things, on a motorboat near Sea Gate. A man who lost his flock of homing pigeons when they dove, apparently in a mass suicide, into the ocean off of Breezy Point. An increase in jaguar attacks in Amazonas and parrots falling from the sky, already dead with no known cause, in Rondônia, Brazil. A sea lion reserve in Necochea, Argentina, that lost a third of its sea lions when they attacked each other.

Flora sat back in her chair. The lines drawn to her mansion were as obvious as the spokes of a fan, but she leaned forward and drew in the most important line anyway—the edge of the fan, the vector connecting all of the incidents, including the arch and the points where Mikel found the Serpent, where the iceberg broke, and where Andreas died.

Of course the line looked curved on the globe, but Flora triple- and quadruple-checked. It was a path as straight as a sword leading from the research station Halley VI to the stone’s current resting place.

However, there was one giant anomaly. The albatrosses in Montevideo missed the vector by nearly two hundred miles.

She picked up her phone and dialed Mikel’s number.

Bored out of his head at a pub in Stanley on the larger of the Falkland Islands, Mikel picked up on the first ring. His mind was foggy, directionless, wheels spinning in the mud. Two whiskeys had failed to sharpen it.

“I was just about to call,” he said. “You’ll need to arrange this one.”

“Mikel—”

“Look, there are no ships going anywhere near the ice shelf and the only flight is the British Antarctic Survey. I’ve tried with them but they’re suspicious as soon as I start talking.”

“Suspicious of you? What have you been saying?”

“No, it’s got nothing to do with me. They’re petrified of something.”

Flora took a restrained breath. “Mikel, what do you think it might be?”

“If you got me on that flight I’d be able to ask them, wouldn’t I?”

“I will overlook your tone, Mr. Jasso.”

“Sorry, I’m tired—”

“And I will arrange your transport. It seems we’ve more reason than ever to get you to Halley VI.”

“Why? Something else going on?” he said, ignoring the last of the whiskey in favor of something—finally—more interesting.

Flora described the vector of animal madness.

Mikel sighed. “So you claim the stone I brought to you is interacting with something in Antarctica—never mind the total implausibility of that—but it’s also affecting humans and mammals along a global route?”

“Yes. And I am extremely interested to see what is lying on the Antarctic section of that route, close up.”

“But with the ice moving up to half a mile per year now, and who knows at what rate in the past, and with Galderkhaan existing millennia ago, then—”

“Whatever the other point of this vector is, it has to be under the ice.” She added, “Not far from that research station.”

“As the crow flies, you mean. Halley VI is on the moving ice sheet, nearly forty miles from the coast of the mainland. And to get to the ground, I’d have to do god knows how much tunneling down through hundreds of meters of snow and ice. Dr. Davies, even if you sent me with a team of experts and the British government falling over itself with permissions and assistance, it couldn’t be done.”

“That’s true,” she said, “but only if you never start.”

“Don’t give me that ‘every journey begins with a single step’ line.”

“I’m not. I’m only asking for your best effort, Mikel.”

“Flora—”

“Your best, which I know is considerable. One other thing. Your incident with the albatrosses was not on the vector.”

“Wait,” he said, “how is that possible?”

“Precisely,” Flora said.

Mikel considered what she implied. “Your calculations must be off.”

“They’re not,” Flora assured him. “I’m wondering if you actually experienced what you think you did.”

“Are you questioning what I saw?”

“That’s not what I said. You told me yourself that the flight attendant didn’t seem to know what you were talking about.”

“Yes, but what I said happened, happened,” he barked into the phone.

“So what does that suggest?” Flora asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Think about it,” urged Flora.

“I am. Nothing’s coming.”

“Now you’re just being lazy,” she said. “What if you saw the albatrosses as they were, but in some other time?”

The words cut sharply through the whiskey. That was new. And a little unnerving. But remotely possible? Mikel gazed across the bar as if he were looking through the wall at the birds themselves.

“Mikel?”

“I’m here,” he said. “I think.”

“Touché,” she replied.

“But crap,” he said. “Arni.”

“What about him?”

“Maybe he got hit with the same ‘something’ I did, only his synesthete’s brain magnified it. Maybe I’m lucky I’m not so advanced.”

Flora let the thought sit a moment. “Look, I think it best that you keep track of what you experience with and without supporting evidence. Both are valuable but keep them separate in your reporting. Clear?”

“Very,” Mikel said, and he meant it. He felt as though the grunge had suddenly been cleared from his brain and a universe of possibilities had opened.

CHAPTER 5

As Caitlin hurried from the subway to her office, she left a message for Barbara asking for an appointment as soon as possible. So much had blown in on her in the last few hours that she felt unable to prioritize which questions and feelings she should heed first… which were real, which were intuited, and which might be wholly imagined.

She was certain the exchange with Odilon was real. The rising power she felt in her hands, the look of amazement on his face, and the sudden well of emotion; those were all completely honest.

That’s the place to start, she decided, the part you know is true.

The question she couldn’t answer was how far to take it, how much to tell Barbara.

Maybe the choice wouldn’t be hers. The feeling of openness and expansion had not returned since she’d seen the dark-haired woman on the subway.

What happened?

Had Caitlin shut the power down? Maybe there was a mental off switch in her brain that she’d stumbled onto blindly. Maybe it wasn’t off but simply sleeping.

And then there was that woman herself. Was she just a convenient, innocent figure? Or did she open the power? Had Caitlin’s mind, overloaded, grabbed at a meaningless gesture and ascribed power to it? Was she developing paranoia? Imagining that someone was watching her was certainly a first step.

She was unclear about everything, except for the surprising but unmistakable welter of sadness that had risen since that moment on the train when Caitlin had shut the cascade of faces down. It was a form of mourning, of suddenly losing this new and frightening but vital window on the world… perhaps on several worlds. She imagined her mother chastising her, but there was no way she could let this be.

Caitlin felt suddenly, strangely defensive when she received a text from Barbara confirming an availability the next morning. What if Barbara wouldn’t understand and judged her?

Caitlin was relieved to have scheduled patients that afternoon. More than once in her individual therapy sessions with the high school and college students, she longed to try a repeat of the conduit she had manifested with Odilon.

But these students didn’t need a drastic assist. They were doing the long, slow slog through their psyches, identifying old patterns, accepting their entrenchment, learning and trying and failing and trying again to deprogram from the distortions, succeeding by increments. It was steady, honorable work, made possible by the relatively stable lives they were living. Odilon was different. He’d been on the edge of a cliff and unable to ask for help. These kids faced challenges but no immediate danger. To interrupt their process would have impugned their responsibility for themselves.

After Caitlin’s last session, though, the grief washed back into her so powerfully she put her head in her hands. Thinking was a burden she no longer wished to bear. She needed to talk to someone who wouldn’t need a preamble. It was four thirty here; in Cornwall, Ben would probably still be up.

She checked Skype first and there he was. She hesitated, wondering if he might be talking to someone. Ow, she thought. And her heart floundered when the call resulted in silence. But it was only a delay, and he blipped on-screen with the biggest smile and a warm “Hi.”

“I only have half an hour before I have to pick up Jacob, I’m sorry,” she began.

“I’ll take it,” he said, continuing to smile.

“But if you want to get a late dinner tomorrow, if you’re not too blown out from the flight back—”

“I won’t be,” Ben replied. “I want to take you out for your birthday.” She smiled, but he must have seen the hesitancy she felt because he quickly switched subjects. “Okay, half an hour, counting down. What’s happening?”

“A lot,” she said, looking away from him. “I can’t even begin. Can you do me a favor, Ben, would you mind going over what you’ve learned about Galderkhaan from your translations?”

Ben laughed, and she knew it was a “things never change” laugh.

“Caitlin, it’s in the e-mails I sent—”

“Yes, I know, I read them, but I’d like to hear them from you. It’s just—it’s how I’m thinking these days. Human to human, not soliloquy to soliloquy.”

He grinned and said, “Firstly, that’s commendable. And secondly, can I begin with some new bits first?”

“Wherever you like,” she said.

“Until last night,” Ben said, “I was focusing on the three videos we have of Maanik and the one I took with my phone at the UN when you—when you saw Galderkhaan.”

Caitlin noted his careful choice of words. Not “visited,” not “witnessed” or “experienced,” but “saw,” which could mean “imagined.” Clearly, he still didn’t completely believe her about that night.

“So what’ve you got?” she asked, trying not to lay on the affected cheerfulness too thick.

“Okay. First, I dove into something basic: volcanoes in Antarctica,” he replied. “Galderkhaan must have been located on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Or possibly north in the Scotia Sea. Those volcanoes are submerged now and there’s been quite a bit of earthquake activity there. That wouldn’t be unusual but they really are very distant from the continent. So the west coast is far more likely.”

“Isn’t the west coast the part that’s melting the fastest?”

“Yes, several studies have confirmed that all the western glaciers are going to melt and the whole ice sheet could follow.”

“I wonder—”

“And that’s a yes as well. A couple years ago they found an active volcano under the western ice sheet. If it blows a fissure, the whole area could come out looking like Iceland, all hot springs and thermal vents. Only more melty and less therapeutic. Geologists are pretty sure earthquakes around the volcano line are contributing to the big meltdown, although they’re not the only causes.”

“There’s also idiocy and arrogance.”

“Whether it’s global warming or deep and latent magmatic activity or just a big nasty climatic cycle, the west side is our place. There are no known volcanoes around the other coast. Now, Antarctica being covered with snow and ice, that means that our Galderkhaani friends had to have some impressive tricks for making their city habitable. I’ve started assuming geothermal engineering to an unprecedented degree. Actually, to an unantecedented—” he stumbled over the word a few times until they were both laughing. “To a degree unmatched to the present day. They were oasis builders, Caitlin.”

“Huh, okay… could they have built more than one oasis?”

Ben hmmed noncommittally. “That jibes with a particular word I found: ‘ida-ida.’ Caitlin, I can’t tell you how unusual this word is—half hour, you said?”

“Yes, sorry, Ben.”

“All right, then, to the chase. The word means ‘building,’ but not in the sense of a single structure. It’s more like building something that’s ever expanding, sort of like ‘fulfilling’—dare I say, a manifest destiny.”

“Is it related to the Technologists or the Priests or both?”

“Just the Technologists.”

“Ben, is there anything about expansion in an—internal sense?”

“I don’t follow. You mean like a soul?”

“More like an expanded consciousness.” She stopped there, unwilling to say anything that might lead to a discussion of why she was asking. Ben was a friend, but not an uncritical one. The kind, in fact, her mother wished for her.

Ben studied her for a moment. “A psychiatrist walks into a bar,” he said, grinning, “and sees herself sitting on a stool.”

She smiled back. “Cute.” It was an old joke of theirs, dating back to their college days. Ben used it whenever he had to pull her from what he called her “Hamlet reflections.”

“To answer the question—seriously—there’s no talk of their inner lives, except for the cazh, which is really about an outer afterlife. Maybe this wasn’t a very inward-minded people?”

“I doubt that,” said Caitlin.

“Why? We don’t know if they had art, songs, poetry—”

“They loved,” she replied. “It wasn’t just physical love. I felt it when I eavesdropped on their lives and relationships.”

“Quite possibly,” Ben agreed. “Then again, we did keep encountering them in crisis mode, which would explain an outward focus.”

Caitlin fell into a sudden depression. Earlier, she had thought something might have come back with her from the past; she wondered now if it weren’t just the opposite: that something of herself had stayed behind, connected to these people, hurting with them.

And then, just as suddenly, she came out of it, as cold poured down her spine again as it had at the apartment. She forced herself to focus on the screen. That’s where reality was she told herself.

“Cai,” Ben said, “I see my time is running down and I have a more important question.”

She looked at him expectantly but when he didn’t respond to her cue, she raised her eyebrows, further encouraging him to speak.

“When we have dinner tomorrow night,” Ben said with a direct gaze and a light tone, “how romantic should I make it?”

Caitlin glanced away but had to look back at him. She adored his sweet face, she truly did. But he had the most inelegant way of transitioning between topics she had ever experienced.

“I don’t know, Ben. Can we wait till we’re together to see?”

“Human to human,” he said, nodding.

“Yes, human to human,” said Caitlin.

Ben only broke their gaze for a second and then he was back to his buoyancy. “All right,” he said. “I’ve got another few minutes and I’m gonna use them. Gaelle—over the past day I’ve been studying the recording of her when she was having her crisis in the marketplace. In Maanik’s episodes, she seems to be talking about the Priests and Technologists equally, as if she’s caught between them. But Gaelle—the camera didn’t capture much of her, only a few sentences, unfortunately, and she spoke exclusively of the Technologists.”

“That fits,” Caitlin said. “I mean that Gaelle would be talking about them, since in her vision she died trying to leave Galderkhaan with them. Physically, I mean. Not spiritually.”

“Which brings me to this,” Ben said. “When you were—back there, while we were at the UN, did you see anything in the air? In the sky, I mean.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t want to feed it to you.”

“Okay.” She shut her eyes and carefully, tentatively drifted back to that night. It was all instantly real again and she snapped herself back.

“Cai?”

“Yes,” she said. “I saw clouds, the moon, volcanic ash spreading, and of course the rising souls, though I wouldn’t quite describe that as seeing them, more like sensing them.”

“That’s it?”

“Well, yeah. No birds. Also the columns of the Technologists, which were tall, very tall, and wide. They reminded me of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. That kind of stone, I mean.”

“Hm. Well, there’s a word in Gaelle’s video that—trust me, I have doubted this and struggled to prove I’m wrong, but it’s unmistakable. ‘Aikai.’ ‘Ship of the air.’”

Caitlin sat up straight.

“What?” Ben asked.

“Like zeppelins!” she said. The thought had occurred to her before, when she’d considered how the Galderkhaani might have mapped the region. “Ben, the Technologists’ columns were absolutely tall enough for that.”

“For what?”

“To be docking stations. Remember, like they tried do with the Empire State Building right after it was built?”

“They did?”

“Yeah. Just like the columns, it was low enough to use stairs to disembark, yet not high enough to get clocked by upper-level winds.”

“But you didn’t actually see any airships?”

She shook her head. “Not one. Besides, if they did have airships, why wouldn’t they have tried to escape on them?”

“Maybe they could only fly at certain times?” Ben suggested. “Or they were being prepared, perhaps enlarged, for the coming catastrophe? Remember, the eruption seemed to come earlier than anyone expected.”

“Maybe,” Caitlin replied. “Then again, I wouldn’t necessarily want to fly through air filled with rocks spewing from a volcano.”

“Good point,” Ben said. “Better to die trying to outrace a pyroclastic outpouring.”

“People’s instinct is to outrun something. That’s animal, human nature. Like with the tsunami. I heard it in Thailand over and over, ‘I thought I could run faster than the waves.’ Some of the Galderkhaani might have been running to the sea to try to escape.”

“That does make some sense,” Ben agreed. “Anyway, before you go, here’s what set me off on this, Caitlin. Gaelle says the word ‘tawazh.’ The Norse had a god named Tiwaz. A sky god.”

“The Norse again?” The prow of a Viking ship had been one of their first clues about the existence and potential reach of Galderkhaan.

Ben nodded. “It doesn’t mean that someone escaped on an airship, but maybe part of the language made it out somehow.”

“Meaning people did,” Caitlin said. “By sea.”

Ben nodded again.

Caitlin considered the repercussions of what he was saying. “That’s a big thought. Living descendants.”

“It’s a possibility,” he said, correcting her.

“Yes, but there’s something else. Remember, the earliest I saw of Galderkhaan was just an hour before it was destroyed. They could have been sending airships anywhere, any time before that. Maybe some of them never came back.”

He grinned.

“What?”

He laughed devilishly. “Are you conceding that I might be onto something?” Before she could answer he continued, “Remember the Varangian Rus? The Norsemen who traveled east as far as Mongolia?”

“A little,” she said.

“Well, listen to this: those Norsemen also traveled south, and they became some of the most trusted guards and soldiers of the Byzantine emperor. Most of them started their careers in the navy before they moved into the palace. And on their ships, they used what was called ‘Greek fire’—a substance that burned on water as well as land. It would burn just about anything anywhere, and we still can’t figure out what it was made of.”

“I don’t follow,” she said… and then she did. All the people she had seen erupt into spontaneous flame—she forced herself to push away images of melting flesh. “But, Ben, didn’t the Greeks—”

“Invent it? Who says history’s always right?”

She answered without thinking, “Those of us who actually witnessed it.”

“Cai…”

The certainty of her answer, the conviction, stopped Ben hard.

“Hey, I have to pick up Jacob,” Caitlin said. “Safe trip—I’ll see you tomorrow, okay.”

Ben managed a wary smile before she shut her laptop.

CHAPTER 6

When Caitlin and Jacob arrived home, she suggested they cook something that neither of them had made before. Jacob was always game for new things and right now, Caitlin needed a distraction that had start-to-finish directions.

The result was a frittata that nearly made it out of the skillet intact. They laughed as they poured the runnier parts into their mouths and for a moment, Caitlin forgot everything that wasn’t egg, cheese, ketchup, and her son. After dinner she shooed Jacob off to do his homework. He went gleefully, eager to return to Captain Nemo and find out what had happened to the troubled submariner.

Just as he was about to shut the bedroom door, Caitlin knocked on the table and called out to him. Jacob emerged again into the hallway, to catch her question.

“What do you think will happen to him?”

Jacob shrugged, obviously content to let Jules Verne do the heavy lifting.

“Isn’t he out there sinking ships with his submarine?” Caitlin asked.

“Yes, but people hurt his family,” he signed. “He’s mad.”

“Angry or mad?” she asked, making the loopy sign beside her head.

Jacob scowled. “He’s pissed, Mom. Very, very pissed.” With that, he shut the door.

The initial question hadn’t been answered, but Jacob seemed to be in Nemo’s corner. She supposed he could have worse father figures in his life than a brilliant scientist who was sick of war.

Jacob finished reading and then asked her permission to watch a movie in his room. Caitlin considered joining him despite her work overload. Alone, she felt overwhelmed. She didn’t want to think, didn’t want to answer e-mails, didn’t want to communicate with anyone. She wanted temporary oblivion. She walked into Jacob’s room, gave him a kiss good night, and walked straight to the bathroom to pop half of a sleeping pill, regardless of the early hour. She pulled the shades in her room. Then, lying in bed with headphones on and the sheet pulled over her head, she listened to Pachelbel—less familiar than Bach, more focus required to stay with each note—until she slipped into unconsciousness.

As she slept, there was a drumming on the wall. It was slow and low at first, then grew louder. The cat jumped on the bed and slunk low across Caitlin’s legs, its tail dragging like a chain. Arfa mewed, stopped just beside her knee, then pawed at the air.

A cool wind rustled the tissues in a box on the night table, blew across the cat’s low back, swept under the door and into the hallway. It moved like a low mist, rolling out, surging unevenly toward Jacob’s room.

It entered.

The drumming grew louder, more insistent.

“Ma. Ma. Ma.”

Jacob’s voice was a dreamy monotone, like exhaled breath that somehow formed the same word with each cycle.

“Ma. Ma. Ma.”

The drumming grew more desperate, like someone trapped behind a door with something they had to escape—

The cold mist unfolded toward the boy’s bed. It stopped and slowly rose up towering above Jacob with a slow, writhing presence that stirred the drawings pinned to his walls and rippled through the open pages of Verne on the bed, then it stealthfully lay across him.

There was a whisper, a breath warmer than the rest. It touched the boy’s cheek and the knocking slowed, then stopped. A word swept into his ear.

Tawazh.

At breakfast, Jacob was grumpy. “Did you take a pill last night?”

“Half of one. Why?”

“You never hear me knock when you take those.”

“Jacob, you’re always asleep when you drum on the wall.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sorry, kiddo,” she said. “Really, I am.” She got up and crossed to hug him but instead tickled him out of his grump.

“I heard something in my sleep,” he said.

“Oh? What was it?”

“A word,” he replied.

“What word? ‘Nemo’? ‘Nautilus’?”

“No,” he answered. “I can’t remember. But I heard it,” he insisted. “Inside my ears.”

“A dream,” his mother said, kissing him on both ears.

After a relatively cheery breakfast and warm good-byes at the school gate, her mood quickly reverted to unease. She was eager for her morning appointment with Barbara and headed straight uptown to arrive early.

Barbara’s apartment was one of the high-ceilinged gems hidden above Manhattan’s flower district, though only a handful of shops there still sold potted trees and orchids. Six floors up, with wood-paneled walls and tall, sun-filled windows, the apartment always reminded Caitlin of an old but beautifully restored ship. The impression was inevitable, given the number of intricate knots displayed around the room—in table legs, fabric runners, throw pillows, and various media framed and mounted on the walls. Barbara’s first career had been as a mathematician specializing in topology. Her friends and family had decided that knots were her thing, and despite the fact that it had been ten years since she’d changed professions, they continued to gift her display-worthy examples for her collection.

Barbara had a round, open face with a strongly pointed chin and sculpted eyebrows. But what everyone noticed first were her crystal blue eyes. If you stayed with them, they shone like hopeful, helpful lights.

The women embraced warmly at the door before Caitlin found the familiar comfort of the armchair across from Barbara’s. Concise and controlled, she then told her everything that had happened, from the first trance with Maanik to the “journeys” to Galderkhaan to Odilon’s energy to the strange woman on the train.

When she was finished, Barbara smiled warmly. “How many times did you rehearse that in your head?”

Caitlin laughed. “Twice on the way here. I wanted to give it to you as objectively as possible.”

“Well, you tipped the narrative into clinical. In your ten minutes left, are you prepared to tip back into the personal?”

Caitlin looked at her watch. “Yikes,” she said, suddenly feeling anxious that she wasn’t going to get what she needed before the session was over. She took a deep breath and pressed her back against the chair, uncrossed her feet so they were flat on the ground, and placed her hands cupped one inside the other on her lap. “Okay, doc. I’m ready.”

“All right, let’s start with something big and basic. Which concerns you most: the idea of new, expanded abilities—”

“Am I crazy to believe they’re even possible?” Caitlin blurted.

“I’m asking the questions,” Barbara reminded her.

“Sorry. Right.”

“Which concerns you most: the idea of expanded abilities, or the belief that Galderkhaan existed and in some way you might be linked to it?”

“Oh god, Barbara. Both. I feel—stupid. Really stupid. And afraid. The lady who runs into disaster scenes is cowering in a closet. Why aren’t I exhilarated? Why aren’t I… I don’t know. Taking charge? Writing a paper about it or…?”

“Didn’t you do that with Maanik and the others? Take charge?”

“Yes, but when it’s just me I can’t… think myself out of paralysis.”

“Is there something specific you are afraid of?”

“Oh yeah,” Caitlin said. “That with all the evidence that’s piling up—”

“Each scrap of which is still circumstantial or has an alternative explanation, as far as I can see—”

“Fine,” Caitlin said. “Fine. I’m still very afraid that everything I’ve experienced is real. I scared myself last night, Barbara. I told Ben unequivocally that I’d witnessed history that’s long gone. Not imagined it, not dreamed it, saw it. I was so sure. Yet even that doesn’t scare me as much as the fact that someone will find out and decide I’m losing my mind.”

“You aren’t,” Barbara assured her.

“I’m not so sure,” Caitlin said. “If we buy that I self-hypnotized at the United Nations, what if I’m doing that unwittingly, over and over, in small bites—on the subway, remembering people and places that may be fiction, imagining the cat brushing against people who aren’t there?”

“Cats were wiccan familiars for a reason,” Barbara said.

“What, you’re saying I’m a witch?” Caitlin laughed.

“No, no—I’m saying cats are unexpected little creatures. That there are explanations for everything, including unremembered dreams surfacing when you’re awake and post-traumatic stress triggered by people making strange gestures in your direction, like Maanik did.”

Caitlin sighed. “Maybe. Maybe. But what if what I’m doing, and the time I’m taking to do it, causes me to lose my job? What happens if the decision makers happen to see or hear and label me a quack?”

“And if you didn’t look at the negative? These experiences have been liberating. I see a change in you, Caitlin. What about Maanik and Gaelle and the other people you have helped and will continue to help?”

“I know, and maybe that’s ultimately what I’m afraid of,” Caitlin said. “That all my training goes out the window and… like I said, I become the crazy lady who does some weird semaphore thing with kids.”

Caitlin moved her arms willy-nilly but what was meant as a joke hit her in a very different way. It felt comfortable, like she was communicating something very personal.

“Let me take this in another direction,” Barbara said.

“Please do.”

“Are you afraid you’ll start having episodes like Maanik?”

“No,” Caitlin answered without hesitation. “This is different. I mean, I don’t feel in danger of causing physical damage to myself or anyone else. But taking this further—” She swallowed a lump in her throat, paused and breathed deeply. “For the sake of argument, whether this is real or imagined, what if I fail to recognize my reality anymore? The one I’m in with my son, and my work? What if I explore in here”—she said pointing to her head—“and I get to a place where I can’t go back to normal?”

“Again, you’re anticipating what may never occur,” Barbara said. “You’re creating the perfect storm for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whatever is going on, might this just be a phase?”

“Jesus!”

Barbara started. “What?”

“I thought you said ‘aphasia,’ like I had a mental dysfunction.”

“Caitlin, I said ‘a… phase.’”

Caitlin fell silent and Barbara gave her the space to calm. She forced herself to breathe. “You know what’s sad? All this talk and thinking and heightened emotions and ‘powers.’ God, it might actually be easier if I were crazy. Easier for me to deal with, easier to fix.”

“I don’t agree at all,” Barbara said. “What’s more, in my professional opinion you are quite sane. And I think you know it. Which is not a bad thing,” Barbara pointed out. “You retain the capacity to be there for everyone who needs you. Focus on that. Stop playing with these ideas like they’re all loose teeth.”

“Easy for you to say. You don’t speak Galderkhaani.”

Barbara smiled strangely. “No, but I came close.”

Caitlin looked at her in shock. “Wait, when? How? What?”

“No. This is your session, not mine.”

“My session ended five minutes ago—I was watching the clock. What are you saying, Barbara? You can’t just let that drop.”

Barbara sighed and leaned back. She dropped her professional mask. “It was while I was doing postgrad at the University of Virginia. I agreed to a past-life regression for a neurobehavioral class.

“With about two dozen people as witnesses, I was hypnotized and led back to some time and place when I could make click consonants like the Xhosa people in South Africa, though I was speaking in a language no one recognized. I did that for about ten minutes, then came back through my own life—speaking English.”

“What did the professor say about it?” Caitlin asked, fascinated.

“That either I went back through racial memory or it was a past-life experience—someone’s, if not my own.”

“Someone’s?”

“I shouldn’t do this.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to prejudice your perceptions or my own.”

“Too late,” said Caitlin.

Barbara shook her head. “The professor said some schools of thought believe that when we are hypnotized we slip into a kind of astral ‘pool’ of experiences, if you will. We just grab one, or it grabs us, and for that time the experiences merge.”

“An astral pool,” Caitlin said thoughtfully. “Like the transpersonal plane some Hindus believe in. I like that—the idea that under a controlled, scientific situation you had a remotely similar experience.” She then stood up, shook out her arms and legs, flexed her fingers, rolled her neck, and sat down in her chair again, feeling lighter, feeling finally ready for her day.

“I have a suggestion,” Barbara said, just as the bell rang to signal her next patient’s arrival. “Don’t worry, it’s Simon, he’ll understand.” Barbara buzzed him into the lobby and continued. “When was the last time Jacob saw his aunt Abby in LA?”

Caitlin smiled at her friend. “Nice carom shot, doctor. I haven’t seen her in a long time either.”

“Go out there,” Barbara said. “Get some family time embedded in your body and your brain. You never know when you might need it as a reference, a touchstone.”

“Okay, maybe. Once I’m fully back on track with my regular clients.”

“All right. How’s everyone else in your life?”

Caitlin ran through the short list, starting with her parents and ending with Ben, their night together, and how it was better that they were proceeding as friends.

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Caitlin said, convincing herself. “For now.”

“For now,” Barbara said, nodding in agreement. She then took a meaningful beat. “Speaking of ‘for now,’ want to schedule another one?”

“Probably a good idea,” said Caitlin. “Strike while the iron’s hot.”

While Barbara walked to her desk, Caitlin let her eyes drift around the room and ended up gazing at a lamp stand, amazed at how brass could be twisted so extensively, with such precision. Suddenly, she wasn’t thinking about the lamp. With eyes still on the brass, she slowly brought her hands together, her right hand slightly curved below her left hand, a few inches away from it. Instantly she felt energy coil in her chest, and her sight changed into—vision. The brass began to move. Just as the silvery metal poles and bars in the subway train had come alive with reflections, the shining patches of sunlight on the brass flared. They began to extend in the same curious geometry, reaching toward and running through her. She felt herself expand mentally, emotionally, and physically. Optimism, ebullience, pure joy surged back into her.

She slowly looked around the room and Barbara’s multitude of knots was magnificent. They were all pulsing as the light side of each rope strand pushed against the side in shadow, and their loose ends extended past their frames through the air. Caitlin laughed in her throat and turned to take in more of them.

Suddenly, the room flashed white, as if an old-fashioned reel of film had snapped and there was just a bare, brightly lit screen. Only it wasn’t entirely opaque; Caitlin could see a turquoise color swirling toward her from behind the white, and there was sound—several quick thuds, a pause, more thuds. They were amplified to the degree that Caitlin could feel them in her chest, in her back. There was an echoing quality to them but no actual echoes, just thuds.

The rest of her senses, she realized, had vanished. She tried to raise her arms and step forward, to find something to hold on to in the whiteness. The motion was almost impossible, as if she were moving through mud. Using every ounce of her strength to push against the arrhythmic thuds, she managed to stretch out her hand. Then something darkened before her, a shape. Was it shoulders and a head?

Caitlin thought she heard her name called, thin and wispy beneath the thudding. Slowly, she managed to pick up a foot and move it a couple inches ahead of her. Suddenly, her chest went empty with horror. She recognized the thudding. This drumming with no consistent beat was Jacob, drumming hard with his fingertips on the wall between their bedrooms.

She tried to scream, tried to curve her hand into knuckles so she could knock back, if there was anything to knock against—but her mouth and her hand would not—

Jacob! she yelled in her mind. Where are you? Who is with you?

“Caitlin!” she heard again, to her left, louder and sharper. “Come back!”

With monumental effort, Caitlin moved two of the fingertips of her outstretched hand slightly to the right, as the woman in the subway had done.

At once, the whiteness and the thuds vanished. Caitlin fell back into the armchair, causing Barbara to pitch forward.

“Oh my god,” Caitlin said, “Oh my god, Jacob.”

Barbara crouched so they were face-to-face with her hands firmly placed on Caitlin’s shoulders. “Caitlin, what just happened?”

“I went away. Somewhere. White clouds, or whitecaps on water, everywhere white. And drumming. I couldn’t find Jacob. Was he… were we drowning? Flying?”

“Neither. You were right here,” Barbara said. “You didn’t go anywhere.”

“Oh no,” Caitlin said. “I was not in this room.”

“Caitlin, you were. Listen to me: are you tired?”

“What? No! Barbara, it wasn’t petit mal. I didn’t have a seizure.”

“How do you know? Perhaps we should schedule an EEG.”

“That’s not it!” Caitlin said, pushing herself from the chair, making and unmaking fists. “No dizziness, muscles working fine. Not sweating and I wasn’t twitching, was I?”

“No…,” Barbara said, rising to face her. “Caitlin, at least sit and talk it through. Simon texted and said he could use some more time to make a phone call.”

“I can’t,” Caitlin said. “I have to go.”

“Caitlin, do you know where you are?”

“Yes!”

“Where are you going?”

“To check on my son,” Caitlin replied, heading toward the door.

“You should go home.”

“No,” Caitlin replied. “I have to make sure he is okay.”

CHAPTER 7

Caitlin was too electrified to sit in a cab.

She began the crosstown trek to Jacob’s school. She did it power-walking, burning off energy, pushing into the fear, into everything that was roiling inside. The session with Barbara had opened doors to… what exactly?

There was no more dodging or denying this new reality.

She continued to walk.

Despite everything she had said to Barbara, Caitlin realized that she was fighting herself. She was a scientist who took rational steps, one at a time. Now she was forcing herself to jump into areas for which there were no reliable textbooks, no maps. There was just one consolation, something that hadn’t been present when she was working with Maanik and Gaelle: I’m not facing the same threat.

But she was facing the mysteries of Galderkhaan and the feeling of awful terror when she thought Jacob was knocking in that opaque blank nothing place.

Caitlin had just taken out her phone, to call Jacob, when the phone rang in her hand. It was a local number, elusively familiar. She answered and it was the vice principal of Jacob’s school.

“Dr. O’Hara, is Jacob with you?”

Nothing from the past few weeks equaled the cold fear that smashed into Caitlin now.

“He is not with me,” she said tightly. “Is he not at school?”

There was the tiniest of pauses during which a well-trained educator kept himself from cursing in the ear of a parent.

“Dr. O’Hara, we have lost track of your son. We think he may have walked from the building about half an hour ago but we aren’t sure. However, we have looked everywhere…”

Caitlin had no idea what the man said next. She couldn’t hear him over her internal screaming. She stood on the street shouting into the phone for a few minutes but it felt like years. Then somehow she said to herself, beneath the screaming, Where would he go? Start there. Somewhere near school?

Caitlin hung up on the vice principal, saying only, “I’ll call you back.” She glanced around, registered where she was, then started sprinting with a stamina she didn’t know she had.

Her peripheral vision grayed out. Looks from the people she passed hardly registered. Vaguely she wondered whether she should try to reach for Jacob using this new power. Was it even possible? But the thought was a bare blip in the total urgency of running. She lunged across the street before traffic had fully stopped. Horns honked, someone yelled, she heard nothing. Her lungs started to beg for a pause. She didn’t notice.

And then she was on Twenty-Seventh Street. Her phone buzzed in her bag while she was pounding up the stairs but somehow she knew and didn’t bother picking up. She shoved open the door to the lobby of Jacob’s cooking school and the receptionist stood up, the phone to her ear.

“Oh thank god, Dr. O’Hara, we were trying to—”

Caitlin ignored her and looked around, gasping. No sign of him. She hurried past the desk and bashed open the door to the long, bright test kitchen. At the far end of the room Jacob was on his hands and knees on the floor. He looked like he was vomiting.

The receptionist rushed up behind her. “He just wandered in here, he was talking but he wouldn’t respond to us—he kept saying something that sounded like ‘towers.’”

Caitlin was already diving across the floor to him, her feet and then her knees skidding across spilled sauces and fragments of food. Large bowls were scattered everywhere. A small cluster of people surrounding him drew back as Caitlin reached him. His small back was arched and he heaved hard, but nothing came out but a horrible rasping. There was no vomit on the floor in front of him.

“What is he trying to throw up?” Caitlin shouted, placing her hands on his back. “What did he eat?”

“He didn’t eat anything,” someone said. “We were watching. He came in and he was spasming, walking and spasming. He looked like he was reaching for us but his arms were all over the place, like he wasn’t trying to knock things over but…”

“We’ve sent for an ambulance,” the receptionist said.

“Not now,” Caitlin said. “Everyone get out. Please.”

The receptionist hesitated but then gestured for the staff and onlookers to leave them be. The door swung shut behind them and the room grew muffled, quiet, still, dead. There was only the mother and her son.

And whatever the hell was preying on Jacob. Caitlin knew it was there, cold and possessing.

“Jacob, it’s me, Mom,” Caitlin said, trying to modulate her voice. She leaned down to look at his face. His hearing aid was still in but he didn’t turn toward her. Then he screamed, and it was like nothing Caitlin had ever heard, not from him, not from the souls in Galderkhaan. Her boy made a sound like aluminum being ripped apart by a high wind.

“Jacob, I’m here,” Caitlin started. She kept up a long murmur to him, hardly knowing what she was saying. It was the sound of her voice that mattered, the tone, not so much the words. Jacob still didn’t acknowledge her. He crawled forward, grasping at the tiles with his nails—but scratching the floor was better than scratching his forearms, as Maanik had done, Caitlin thought with a shudder. His back heaved again but still nothing. Caitlin tried to cup his chin in her hand and turn his face to her. She caught one glimpse of his eyes passing over her face. There was so little of the normal Jacob there that a fresh sob climbed along her throat.

He kept turning, looking over her shoulder and then he forced himself up, to standing. He reached to the counter for support and another bowl overturned, something milky white flying across the surface.

“Fire,” he said and signed. “Fire. Fire below me.”

Christ, no!

Caitlin continued speaking to him. “Jacob, I’m going to start counting now, I want you to count with me. One… two…”

She kept going but he wasn’t listening. Her hands were on his shoulders, which were damp with the sweat rolling down his face and neck. She wasn’t restraining him but hoped that his body would register the weight and familiarity of her touch. She didn’t want to take that away to sign for him, and he wasn’t looking anyway. He was looking at a stove.

Jacob started making sounds and Caitlin’s flesh chilled in anticipation—but it wasn’t Galderkhaani. It wasn’t English either. They were animal sounds, like he was a toddler again learning to use his voice, but with the pacing and pauses of English. Jacob pulled himself away from her toward the stove and Caitlin though of Atash setting himself on fire in the library in Iran. Jacob reached for a knob on the stove, his mouth still working around the same odd nonlanguage. Caitlin grabbed him with one hand to stop him, and at the same time she reached out with the other hand and began knocking on the counter, re-creating his tapping on their shared wall at home. He showed no sign of hearing. His fingers were on the knob but they kept sliding off in an odd way, as if the knob were covered with oil, though Caitlin could see that it was dry.

Suddenly, Jacob’s head jerked in an upward, backward swing that was not normal—still human, but not normal. His head turned so quickly that his shoulders and torso followed, and now he was looking at her. There was a chill in the air around him, something that had no apparent source, something that moved when he moved.

“Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine…” Caitlin kept going, her voice rigidly calm over her fear. Her hands dropped to his elbows, placing pressure there but not squeezing desperately the way she wanted to.

The curious sounds died away and Jacob was just looking at her. For one moment, Caitlin thought she saw his face shift away from his face. She shivered with terror. It was if his face were momentarily displaced. Underneath were other eyes… dark eyes.

“Jacob!” she screamed, and shook him.

And then he spoke. Not animal sounds, not English, and not “towers.”

“Tawazh,” he said with a voice that sounded like gravel.

He turned very slowly away from her. Again, he reached for the knob. Again, Caitlin stopped him as gently as possible. She did not want to shock him but she watched carefully, closely. He fought her and she held him more firmly. She didn’t wrest his hand back: if she were to know how to treat him, she had to know if he was in the same situation as Maanik and especially poor Atash, who had burned himself to death. The small fingers reached out, tried to turn on the flame.

“No,” Caitlin said softly. “Jacob, you mustn’t touch that.”

The fingers wriggled, tensed, then dropped limply. A moment later, so did Jacob. The cold around him exploded away, like a fever breaking. He was warm again, and Jacob was back. He became alert, suddenly, as if he’d been daydreaming.

“Mom,” he said, and turned to her. “I could hear!”

Caitlin checked his eyes, then wrapped her arms tightly around him and felt his arms circle her back and hold on. After a moment of deep relief, she looked up to see students and teachers peering through a glass panel by the door. Caitlin led Jacob out through the onlookers, took him away before the EMTs arrived. She already knew there was nothing they could do for him.

In the cab home he didn’t say a word.

Caitlin hesitated but asked, “Jacob, did you feel like something was—”

He pulled the hearing aids out of his ears and handed them to her. Then he closed his eyes and burrowed deep into her side, pulling her hand until her arm was tight around him. By the time they arrived home he was asleep. She hated waking him but he was too big for her to carry up the stairs. He trudged with heavy feet and heavier eyelids up the steps, leaned on the wall while she unlocked the door, then walked straight to his bed and climbed in without taking off his coat and shoes. Caitlin carefully slipped them off, pulled the blankets over him and sat quietly, gently stroking his head. She couldn’t help but wade through all of Maanik’s episodes. This event with Jacob was not the same, but it was too close; Caitlin was vigilant lest her own post-traumatic stress return.

She spent the rest of the afternoon there, watching him sleep, seeing and sensing nothing abnormal. She called the school, learned that Jacob had left the building with a group going on a field trip but had never boarded the bus. The vice principal assured Caitlin that there would be an investigation and that—if she allowed Jacob to return—he would be watched constantly.

“How? With an ankle bracelet?” Caitlin asked irritably.

“Nothing of the kind,” the vice principal replied. “He isn’t a prisoner.”

Caitlin calmed, knew she had just been venting.

“We’ll watch him and use your son’s cell phone GPS, if you agree, Dr. O’Hara” the official went on. “I’ll monitor him myself until we understand what happened here.”

Caitlin agreed. She heard it all through a thick mental gauze.

A few hours later she called Ben, intending to cancel their evening. At the sound of his voice, she ended up pouring out the entire story of Jacob’s… whatever it was; his disappearance. Her voice was shaking by the end of it. He listened, sympathized, and didn’t put her through the third degree about symptoms, for which she expressed her gratitude. He refused to accept a rain check, however.

“Are you insane?” Caitlin said. “I can’t leave Jacob. Ben, he said a Galderkhaani word!”

“Maybe he heard you say it.”

“He didn’t.”

“Or maybe he was saying just what the receptionist thought he said: ‘towers.’ You heard what you wanted to hear.”

Caitlin didn’t believe that. But she had to admit she was hardly an impartial observer.

“Anita,” he said. “See if she’d be willing to watch Jacob. That serves two purposes, no?”

Dr. Anita Carter was Caitlin’s coworker, the psychiatrist who filled in for her when there were emergencies—of which there had been quite a few, of late. So many that Anita had joked she wasn’t making any plans until she knew that Caitlin was “back.” Ben was right but Anita could actually fill three roles here: standby babysitter, analyst, and role model. African-American and originally from Atlanta, her no-nonsense approach to problem solving was: acknowledge the problem, solve it, file it, and go to dinner. She knew how to handle emergencies and she might just be the impartial observer that Jacob—and Caitlin—needed.

Caitlin put Ben on hold and called Anita. She laughingly agreed to be there, seven o’clock.

“Another new patient?” Anita asked.

“Yeah,” Caitlin told her. “Me.”

“What’s going on?”

“I need a little air,” she said. “But I can’t go too far—”

“Jacob?”

“Jacob. He’s been having nightmares. I don’t want to hover—”

“I understand,” Anita said.

Caitlin decided not to tell her the details about what had happened. If Jacob’s symptoms recurred, Anita would call her and handle them her own way. Caitlin could use that right now. Smothering Jacob with attention, even passive attention, wouldn’t give either of them a chance to breathe. But there was a larger issue. For her, right now, all roads seemed to lead to Galderkhaan. She had to get some input on that, some understanding. Some solutions. And as long as she was just an elevator ride away…

Caitlin told Ben that he should meet her downstairs at seven; she’d pick the place. In the meantime, she decided to see if Nancy O’Hara’s classic anger management technique worked just as well for her daughter as it did for her: she cleaned her apartment. At the same time she scrubbed her mind, her mood, her loss of perspective.

You are here, in New York, with your son, in the present, she said as if it were a mantra.

Galderkhaan was a project but Barbara was right. All of the manifestations had individual solutions. They could be treated separately. She had to take precautions but she also had to live her life.

By the time Caitlin was folding a load of laundry with a second one rolling in the dryer in the basement, the miasma of frustration and temper had evened out enough for her to sing Motown songs to Arfa. The feline usually sniffed Caitlin’s mouth as she crooned, as if he were confused, trying to figure out what the hell was happening and whether he should seek cover under the bed.

Not this time. Arfa crouched behind the laundry basket as though waiting for a mouse. Maybe there was one, not a wandering soul, a ghost. Funny how she would have welcomed that right now, a real-world problem with a quick, sane solution.

As Caitlin folded the second load, she came around to accepting her new realities with her customary courage instead of fear. She would take the approach that Jacob’s sociologist father Andrew Thwaite had advised when they were helping survivors of the tsunami that had caused unthinkable destruction in Thailand: “If you can’t run from the beast, embrace it.”

Caitlin did her hair and dressed as if she were going to a World Health Organization fund-raiser: a warm, double-lapel zip-trim crop jacket, velvet cropped ankle pants, T-strap pumps. She put on makeup—not a lot, but more than the little she usually wore.

Anita was impressed.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think faculty and trustees were part of your dinner plans.”

“Nope,” she said. “Just Ben. I needed to feel…” She sought a better word than “human,” settled on, “normal.”

Anita’s expression was warm and understanding and she gave Caitlin a hug as she grabbed her purse and headed out.

She arrived in the lobby before Ben did, impressing the doorman and refusing to look at her cell phone while she waited. She stood near the door, watching life and traffic, ivory clouds against a darkening sky, people moving north and south and plugging into their own intangible, invisible worlds of thought and wireless conversation.

I shouldn’t be here, she thought with a welling of guilt. She glanced back toward the elevators, felt the pull. She started back, fished in her purse for her cell phone… then stopped herself.

No. You’re right downstairs. Jacob will be fine. You need this, need to get out, grab distance, perspective.

A cab pulled up and Ben charged from it like Pheidippides announcing that the Persians had been defeated at Marathon. Either he was running from his day or—

His expression as he came through the door settled the question. He stopped inside, stunned to immobility. Ben’s mouth was the first thing to move, forming the widest grin she’d ever seen. He was very happy to see her.

“Crap,” he said.

“Just the word I was hoping you’d say,” she told him.

“No—no, Cai, you look amazing! That’s what that meant. Not ‘crap.’”

She smiled, smelling her own lipstick… and smiled a little wider. She walked toward him, hugged him. They continued to hold one another, moving aside only to get out of the way of other tenants.

“You’re going to get through this,” Ben said in her ear. “You and Jake.”

“I want to believe,” she said.

“Then do. We understand the nature of the problem, if not the specifics. The solutions are out there.”

“Ben, my son was—possessed. That’s the only word that applies.”

“No, it’s a convenient label that conjures up all kinds of negatives,” he said. “What happened is something ancient, something Galderkhaani, and that’s our new business: understanding that world and its processes. We’ve done pretty well so far, I’d say.”

“You would,” she said. “You’ve been studying it… I’ve been living it.”

Ben drew back slightly. “That’s not fair. I’ve been there every step. I’ve seen how ‘possession’ affected Maanik, how it affected you. That wasn’t easy. I wasn’t just an observer.”

“No, you weren’t,” she agreed. “I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted, and I’m going to tell you now what I’ve said before: we are in this way too deep to be objective. We have to regain some of that.”

“I know.”

He stepped back a little farther and offered his arm. She had been sobbing, just a little. She dried her eyes with the sleeve of his jacket.

“Nice,” he said.

“You better mean that.”

“I do!” he said as she hooked her arm in his. “I also want you to know I feel underdressed.”

“You’re not,” she said, finding a little laugh. “You look—Ben-ish.”

He made a sour face. “Is that good or bad?”

“Sartorially neutral,” she replied. “It’s the man in the clothes that matters.”

He took her arm and held the door open with the other. They walked into the cool night, amid but apart from the throng.

“Jesus,” he said, shaking his head. “Cai, you really are beautiful.”

“Thanks.”

“I feel like we should be going to the opera. Well, you should, anyway.”

“There was a time,” she said, “when people dressed for dinner… every night.”

“Only people of means,” Ben pointed out. “Servants like my ancestors, we ate around a butcher-block table in the kitchen.”

Mention of ancestors threw a chill into Caitlin. Ben saw it, put his free hand on hers. “Cai?”

“It’s okay,” she said, putting on a smile. “I’m discovering that there are shiny new trip wires in my life. Got to work around those.” She squeezed the fingers on top of hers. “Let’s eat.”

She gave his arm a tug and headed to the corner, turned west—toward a halal food truck with ten people in line: single men and women, some with dogs; a female cop; and a group of teenagers.

Ben stopped hard when he saw it. He was thrown back to their college days, grabbing street-corner hot dogs before their next lecture. This was classic Cai.

“Zero romance,” he said, raising a hand in surrender. “Just us.”

She grinned. “Just us.”

He chuckled, so did she, and they settled into the line. The cop and a man from her building noticed her, looked partly away as the line moved forward a few paces.

“We don’t have Washington Square Park to sit in,” Ben noted, “no guitars or drummers or hip-hoppers with boom boxes.”

“We have my building’s courtyard and the playlist on my cell phone, if you want. All eighties, all the time. Besides, we may not have many alfresco nights left,” she went on.

“Winter’s around the corner—frost on your rivets and ice in your nose,” Ben said.

He twitched his mouth like his beloved fellow Brit Charlie Chaplin and Caitlin smiled, then hugged him. She held him closer, harder than she expected. He wrapped around her and they just stood in the hug, ignoring the world, the grid of skyscrapers, the impatient horns of taxis jerking across the intersection. Finally, the big guy behind them told them to move up, and they stepped forward with their arms still around each other. Ben gave Caitlin a peck on the top of her head and she disengaged.

“So how are you?” he asked.

“We’ll get to that,” she replied. “How are you?”

Ben laughed, and despite her anxiety over the afternoon’s events, Caitlin smiled too as memories—her own—flooded back warmly, the repetitive, stalling Alphonse and Gaston bits they sometimes stumbled into.

“It’s good to be home,” Ben said to avoid the logjam. “Obligatory question number one: how are you?”

“Better, for the moment,” she answered truthfully.

“Glue or spit?”

“Glit,” she replied. That was something Ben used to ask her before an exam: did she know the material or was she winging it, was she held together securely with glue or tentatively with spit.

God, our past is good, she thought.

“What’s obligatory question number two?” she asked.

“Hold on, woman. I don’t consider ‘glit’ an answer.”

She whispered, “It’s Galderkhaani for ‘I’m going to take whatever the world dishes out, even if it takes some time and adjustment.’”

“I don’t remember that one,” Ben said.

“You’d have to have been there,” she said sheepishly. “In Galderkhaan.”

Ben laughed out loud.

“That’s my Cai,” he said. “Just walk right over to the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room and kick him in the stones.”

“Question two?”

“Us. In English, please.”

“Specifically?”

Ben looked around. “Since our sleepover,” he said delicately.

Caitlin shoved her hands in her jacket pockets. “I don’t know how you’re feeling about our night together, and I’m not completely sure how I’m feeling about it either. I don’t have the first clue about going forward, I just think that we should—”

She stopped as she noticed that Ben was not just grinning but chuckling.

“What?” There was annoyance in her voice but she couldn’t help smiling.

“Oh, I’ve got you. I’ve totally got you.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“This is going to kill you. Caitlin O’Hara,” he whispered into her ear, “it’s only been a week and change. And I’m a guy. And there you are, getting deep and intense about it—”

She narrowed her eyes at him in mock offense, then chuckled and shook her head. “Damn, I’m doing the Girl Brain thing.”

“Like you’re in high school,” he chortled. “You have a crush on me, a crushy crush!”

She swatted him on the arm. “You might speak a dozen languages but modern slang is not one.” Then she laughed wholeheartedly for the first time in days. It felt good.

“Move, ya lovebirds, before I crush ya,” said the construction worker behind them. “The man’s waiting for your order.”

“Sorry,” Ben said, though he continued to mock her while their food was being prepared. They stood in silence and then headed toward the small courtyard behind her building. Caitlin couldn’t wait and took her first bite as they walked, exclaiming how good her dinner was.

“Note to self,” Ben said, “she’s got Girl Brain and she’s a cheap date.”

“Note to self,” Caitlin echoed, “watch out. He’s making noises like he’s planning for some kind of future.”

“Not true,” Ben replied. “I know better. I wish I didn’t.”

They allowed the relationship discussion a respectful moment to die before moving on.

“All right then, Ben,” Caitlin said. “Back to the gorilla. Give me the good stuff.”

He looked around puckishly. “What, here, in public?”

“Grow up. What new translations have you done?”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh. I’m assuming you worked during your flight.”

“Guilty. My astonished cries woke the man sitting next to me. He looked at me funny.”

“You should be used to that.”

“Seriously, no exaggeration, I did actually vocalize at one point. Galderkhaan. Galder. Khaan. Remind you of anything?”

“No.”

“Old Norse and…?”

Caitlin stopped chewing, then stopped walking. “No way. That obvious?”

“That obvious. I have no idea what the ‘Galder’ is but ‘khaan’ means the same thing as the Mongolian word—a title for a lord and master.”

“Who used it more,” Caitlin asked, “Priests or Technologists?”

“Very clever, you. First thing I checked. It wasn’t the Priests.”

“That’s surprising,” she said. “I would have thought they’d be the ones into the ‘supreme being’ thing.”

“You’re thinking like a modern person,” Ben pointed out. “Things were different then and there.”

A long, relaxed walk later, Ben guided Caitlin into Paley Park, a small courtyard that had more benches than trees. They had the courtyard to themselves. The views were mostly of brick, with an oblong of sky above. But it was quiet, save for a freestanding wall at the back lit in russet gold and covered with long, beautiful, gently melodious rivulets of water.

“So was this khaan a god for the Technologists or a great ruler?” Caitlin asked.

“I don’t know. My guess, based on nothing but intuition, is that the volcano was the khaan, given their focus on geothermal energy. Think Vulcan, Hades, the gods of the underworld.”

Caitlin made a face. “Somehow I’m reluctant to ascribe that kind of primal mind-set to them.”

“Why? It was good enough for the Greeks, Romans, and just about every other culture, including ours. Is modern religion any different? How many people believe in the ‘fire god’ we call Satan?”

“Okay, point taken,” Caitlin said. “So with khaan in the name of the city or whatever Galderkhaan was, does that mean the Technologists were in power?”

“Shared and equal power, as far as I can make out, but with increasing hostility between them. Not physical hostility; there was a reference to banishment for anyone who used violence. Anyway, the two groups did split the place.”

“Geographically?”

“Nothing formalized”—Ben nodded at the pieces of the Berlin Wall that were displayed on one side of the park—“but each had their sector and there they lived.”

“Glogharasor and Belhorji?” Caitlin couldn’t believe she was casually pulling names from one of her trances as if they were “Manhattan” and “Brooklyn.”

Ben regarded her. “Yes. Jesus.”

“Don’t do that,” Caitlin said. “I’m trying not to freak myself out.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. The Priests lived in Glogharasor. They used the root word ‘Glogharas’ when they spoke of themselves—the ‘dawn seers.’”

“And Belhorji?”

“Don’t know yet,” he admitted.

Caitlin returned to her food. She wasn’t very hungry but needed something to do. Saying those two names had caused something strange to happen inside her.

“Cai, are you okay?”

“Hmm? Yeah. Yes. Why?”

“You looked like you went somewhere.”

“No, there’s just—an idea. A thought. I don’t know why I had it.”

“Speak,” he said encouragingly.

“Galderkhaan,” she said. “If there’s anything left of it, we should find it.”

“I’m all for that, but how? And why, specifically?”

“Maybe it’s not as strange and remote as we think,” Caitlin said. “How do we know that things haven’t been found and misidentified and hidden in museums and universities somewhere, the way meteors and fossils have been for centuries?”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Ben said. “I had that idea myself. While I was in London I took a turn through the British Museum, looked at the relics with fresh eyes, peered here and there for Galderkhaani writing, wondered the same thing. I couldn’t find anything, though.”

He stared at her as she munched. She looked at the fountain.

“Cai?”

“I’m here,” she said as she glanced at her phone and saw that there were no text updates from Anita about Jacob. “Do you mind if we walk some more—maybe just around the block?”

“Not a bit, if those heels of yours don’t care.”

She smiled a little as they stood and left the courtyard, binning their food containers on their way out.

“The frustrating thing is I’m running out of things to translate,” Ben went on. “I only have about twelve minutes of tape from all those sessions. And I’d really like to know why there were several mentions of agriculture in the sky.”

“You’re sure it says ‘in’ and not ‘under’?” Even as she asked it, she regretted it.

“Caitlin, this is me. I’ve checked it a dozen times and it’s unmistakable. Of course it’s nonsense, unless they were doing something on a mountaintop or caldera—but then they would have said ‘mountaintop’ or ‘caldera’ and not specifically used the word ‘sky.’”

“Right. These people were pretty specific about things.”

“Lots of words, very little nuance when the hand gestures were added.”

She chuckled. “Sounds wonderful.”

“What does?”

“A civilization without nuance. You’re this or that, a word is that or this. Understanding was instant and absolute.”

He put a hand on her arm to slow her to a stop.

“What?” she asked.

“Where would I fit? In that language, I mean?”

She looked into his sweet smoke-colored eyes. And because she couldn’t answer him, she kissed him. She kissed him until she knew that when he asked, she would say yes.

Caitlin briefly considered staying where they were. She discarded that idea, though; she might have felt like a college kid again but being spotted in public could cost her her job. There was the laundry room—but then, she decided, she was just being ornery for the sake of it.

She called Anita.

“How is Jacob?” she asked.

“Fine,” Anita replied. “You don’t have to check every hour—Jacob is sleeping peacefully.”

“Actually, I’m coming back,” Caitlin said. “We’re coming back.”

“Oh!” Anita said. “Reaching for coat as we speak.”

Caitlin ended the call and they went upstairs. Anita greeted them on her way out.

“Halal?” she said, sniffing once.

“From a cart,” Ben said. “Not my idea.” He added quickly, “But perfect.”

“Thank you,” Caitlin said as Anita slipped past them.

“Happy to help,” she replied, pulling the door shut.

As they moved into the apartment, neither of them reached for a light switch. They went to Caitlin’s bedroom, where they circled each other, peeling clothes, turning slowly closer and closer to a window full of distant, scattered lamplights. Falling onto the bed below, pressing into him, Caitlin felt like she was inhaling Ben’s skin. The sensation felt full of nostalgia and promise, and almost relief. She bathed in the perfection of normality for a long while. Then, still touching him as completely as two bodies can, she let their linked limbs flow like the brass in Barbara’s Celtic knot.

“Oh god,” Ben breathed, and she knew he was feeling the vastness too, dropping down and reaching into and through them. It was utterly, wholly dark. A darkness never seen on Earth—but not threatening. Not in the least frightening. An ancient and serene darkness.

And then something happened to Caitlin. Something more potent and longer lasting than she had ever experienced.

Later, as Ben was getting dressed, he attempted to put words on it.

“No,” she cut him off. “Let it be what it was. You got it. You don’t need to translate it.”

His arm went around her waist and she felt again the wild joy of having both touch and—beyond touch.

“Words are what I do,” he half-apologized.

“Yes? And what did I do?”

“I don’t follow.”

She squirmed against his arm. “That wasn’t—like before.”

“No.” Ben smiled as he let go of her and looked dreamily out at the lamps across the blocks of Manhattan. “It was great, beyond great, and we can leave it at that.”

Caitlin smiled as she watched him leave in the dark. She was glad he agreed, because she didn’t want to explain what she really meant.

That toward the end, something indistinct had appeared in her mind, silhouetted against the light and dark in its own changing pattern. Something dimly familiar, vitally alive.

Ben was not the only one with whom she’d been joined. Someone else had been reaching toward her from beyond and that someone was not a man.

CHAPTER 8

Seated in a tiny red Twin Otter plane, Mikel couldn’t recall a bumpier, more unnerving flight. Every thrust of turbulence jostled him up, down, and to the sides, often in rapid succession. Nonetheless, he kept his cheek pressed to the window and his eye scanning the ice as they headed to the Halley VI base.

The dozen others on board were mostly British Antarctic Survey scientists. The only one who seemed not to fit—besides Mikel—was a young man sitting across the aisle, Siem der Graaf. Prior to takeoff, Mikel had overheard that he was half Dutch, half Kenyan, with British citizenship. Siem wasn’t a fellow researcher, which meant he was maintenance, which meant he was a replacement for either the dead or the missing staff member at Halley. The scientists weren’t rude to him; they just had other things to discuss, data to review, topics of mutual importance to mull in huddled secrecy.

Mikel had not learned much more than the fact that troubles at the base, and momentarily favorable weather conditions, had caused the flight to be moved a week ahead of schedule. The scientists had tolerated Mikel’s presence only because Flora had pulled some strings with the Royal Air Force; although what strings Mikel was not privy to.

At some point over the Weddell Sea, Siem—his six-foot-seven-inch frame wedged with miserable discomfort into his narrow seat, head barely clearing the bulkhead—gave up waiting for a friendly chat that never came and plugged his ears with music while he reviewed documents on his tablet. The music leaking from his headphones was heavy metal, especially slow and grim, probably from Finland. Mikel knew he could use this man. Now all he needed to find was his target.

Just a half hour or so out from the base, still over the Weddell, Mikel identified it. Mentally noting the location using landmarks, he said nothing to the other passengers.

There was one other outsider on the flight, Ivor, a garrulous Glaswegian who was getting on just fine with the scientists because he had information they needed. At different times during the eight-hour flight he had walked them through laptop training sessions about the eight main modules of Halley VI and the outlying buildings, dressing for the weather, the components of a climbing kit, and driving a Ski-Doo. Mikel paid as much attention to all of these as discretion would permit. He’d learned his survival skills when he traveled to McMurdo Station in Antarctica a few years back, but a refresher was most welcome. The Glaswegian made the scientists parrot back what seemed like six hundred safety concerns and precautionary measures, and couched everything in terms of potential damage to the base and the machines, not the people.

The plane landing was lumpy, skidding, and as backbone-unfriendly as the flight itself. The passengers zipped and buttoned their coats, donned tinted goggles against the near-perpetual brilliant daylight, and hurried to the nearest module.

Mikel was taken to a guest bunk but did not stay there. Instead he kept close to Siem as the young man oriented himself to his new surroundings. Finally, Mikel found his moment to approach Siem in the large red modular building that served as the social heart of the base.

He and the replacements were being served one of the additional meals that enabled Halley VI residents to ingest the six thousand calories a day required for the climate. In the dining area, the Glaswegian placed his tray as close as possible to the pool table and challenged one of the female scientists to a game. Siem walked carefully across the blue carpet, trying to avoid building up static, though he’d been told it was a futile effort in Antarctica. He stopped at a table full of red chairs and maintenance staffers and almost as a body they found excuses to stand and leave.

When Mikel sat opposite him he saw that Siem’s nose was bleeding. He handed the young man a tissue and smiled.

“Those are fairly standard around here,” Mikel said, slicing into his passable version of chicken cordon bleu. “Cold, dry air, increase in blood pressure—bad combination.”

“So I’d heard,” Siem mumbled, stuffing shreds of tissue in both nostrils. “What do they think, that I’ve got a disease?”

“No, I’m sure they’re used to it.”

“Then why—?”

“It’s their version of a hazing,” Mikel explained. “You’re one of them when you don’t bleed or get debilitating earaches. Didn’t you get briefed?”

“Briefly,” Siem joked, “and not about the social customs. This was all very quick.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Siem turned to his own plate, began slicing. “Where are you from?”

“Pamplona, originally.”

“You’re not a scientist, though? You weren’t in on the discussions.”

“No, I’m not part of the cabal,” Mikel laughed. “I’m an anthropologist with a strong streak of archaeologist.”

“A sensible combination. What are you studying here—are there ancient igloos?”

“It’s independent research newly underwritten by the US government about Bronze Age magnetic fields and their effects on early civilization.”

“That’s not something I’d think politicians would care about,” Siem said.

Mikel leaned forward conspiratorially. “It is, when it’s supported by big donor constituents.”

“Ah. ‘Money makes honey,’ as my father used to say.”

“Very true. So I’m here to collect rock samples when I can find them, and spend the rest of my time on readouts, like everyone else.”

“Very, very heady.”

The cover story was not entirely farfetched. While Mikel was still in the doctoral program at the University of Córdoba, he had published a paper on the impact of the geologically active Ring of Fire on early Asian society. That study caught the attention of Flora Davies, which was how he came to be employed by the Group.

“I’m always looking for grand answers,” Mikel went on. “I get that from my grandmother’s side of the family. She was very religious, believed there was a kind of sticky fluid substance that bound everything in the universe to every other thing. Called it ‘the Adur.’”

“What kind of religion teaches that?”

“It’s a Basque pagan faith from before the fourth century. My grandmother was Catholic, devoutly so, but for many Basques the old ways were an inseparable part of their culture.”

“Do you believe in that?”

“I don’t know about the Adur, exactly, but I want to believe that there’s still a little bit of wonder out there,” Mikel replied. “You find similar concepts in many, many cultures—the Chinese, the Navajo and Cheyenne of North America, the Polynesians. These and many other people had no contact with one another yet they came up with the same ideas, the same archetypes.”

Siem made an approving sound. “So what makes the Basque idea special?”

“Good question,” Mikel said. “The Adur connected not just objects to objects, people to people, and people to objects, but all things to their names. One of the major evolutions of the human brain was its leap to symbolism, to understanding representation.”

“Like cave paintings?”

“Exactly like that, whether it was depicting a battle or drawing a map to the nearest hunting ground. Euskara is arguably one of the oldest languages of Homo sapiens, and in it the Basques had made that crucial leap in cognition—object and name, one and the same. And they actually named the leap itself.”

“You mean that ‘Adur.’”

Mikel nodded. “My grandmother had been raised on the universal, all-encompassing importance of this concept. So she read everything she could find, talked to every priest she met, never stopped searching.” He leaned in slightly. “I’m the same. It’s why I started researching ancient cultures, to learn what they knew. To rediscover what the world has forgotten.”

Siem struggled with that, but nodded. “I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t think I could chase phantoms. I like to work with things I can feel and fix.”

“Oh, I do a lot of that,” Mikel said. “There are no phantoms, but there are always relics, ancient tablets, buried cities, tombs.”

“And magnetized rocks,” Siem said.

“Everywhere,” Mikel answered. He waited a moment, did not want to seem too eager. “Actually, that’s one reason I want to look at the site of—the incident.”

Siem lost interest in his food. He pushed his tray away and tended to his nose.

“Sorry,” Mikel said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have—”

“No, I’ve been wanting to do the same,” Siem said. He looked around. “It’s been very frustrating. Everyone here has been avoiding it because it’s so horrible. Strange.”

“Which one of the two are you replacing?” Mikel asked, loading his voice with kindness.

“The woman,” Siem said, lowering his eyes.

“The missing one.”

Siem nodded.

“Do you mind talking about it?” Mikel asked, just to be sure.

Siem shook his head slowly.

“I heard they haven’t found a trace of her,” Mikel said.

“Nothing,” Siem replied. “They checked for a couple miles around her Ski-Doo. There were no crevasses, no piled snow or ice. Just—nothing.”

“Any idea what happened to the other one? Sorry, what was his name?”

“Fergal, I think.”

“Right, right,” Mikel said, subtly collecting as much information as possible. Familiarity helped to construct subterfuge. “His Ski-Doo flipped, right?”

Siem nodded. “He broke his neck. During the briefing in Stanley, they said he was probably careless, maybe racing to the woman.”

“Yes, but it’s strange. Ski-Doos only flip on rough ground. They’re hefty objects; they don’t turn over for just anything. Wasn’t he on a smooth surface?”

“Yeah, I’m supposed to get out there and look at that,” Siem said. “They have big fat holes in their reports. They’re also having a problem with the GPS unit, which stopped working again. My first job is going to that site later today with one of the researchers.”

Siem took another bite but he was force-feeding himself now.

“What do you think you’ll find there?” Siem asked.

“Sorry?”

“At the accident site?” Siem said. “You’re not going to find rocks. Steam vents or something?”

Mikel chuckled. “Who knows, right? Vents would leave a molten residue but—I was actually wondering if all of this could have something to do with the edge where that berg dropped a week ago.” Finally he’d found a chance to sneak in his real question. “Did they tell you about that calving?”

“I saw something mentioned about it,” Siem told him. “But that was dozens of kilometers away.”

“True, but I was thinking that underground liquefaction might have impacted the site where the woman went missing.”

“Huh. You mean a kind of quicksand effect—with snow? When they went looking for her, the surface was undisturbed.”

“I’ve been around all kinds of primordial geologic events that destroyed societies and buried all trace of them. In Pompeii, for instance. People just evaporated. It might be worth getting over to the source, see if there’s anything that compromised the underlying landmass.”

“That’s a little outside of my job description,” Siem admitted.

“Of course,” Mikel said. “Hey, do you see any problem with me tagging along today?”

“I don’t see why not,” Siem replied, shrugging. “The Survey’s anxious for answers. The more minds working on it, the better for everyone, right?”

“Exactly.”

“You had better check with the boss of field ops, though,” Siem added.

“And that would be…?”

“Dr. Albert Bundy, a.k.a. Dog Alpha. He was the one who ignored us most on the flight.”

Mikel smiled. Flora had furnished him with a list of personnel being rushed to the station.

Outwardly, Mikel started up a conversation about survival skills. But inwardly, he was smiling with satisfaction as he neared accomplishing one of his goals. After this short trek with Dog Alpha, it would be that much easier to tag along on future trips to the ice shelf edge. His other goal—getting forty miles inland and then through the ice to the ground—was exponentially tougher. But he figured that after a few days here he could steal a Ski-Doo…

When Siem left to take a pre-excursion nap, Mikel approached Bundy about the reconnoitering mission. The deal was easily sealed and the run was set for two hours hence. Mikel spent some time refamiliarizing himself with extreme-weather gear and a climbing harness, and asked Ivor to reacquaint him with snowmobiles.

At zero hour Mikel tied himself to his Ski-Doo and tied his Ski-Doo to Siem’s. Siem’s machine was tied to Bundy’s, so that if any of the machines fell through a suddenly breaking snow bridge, the snowmobile—and the man—would only dangle instead of plummet. As this was Bundy’s seventh summer at the base, he led their small convoy southwest across the ice.

They traveled in sharp sunlight; at this time of year the Brunt Ice Shelf saw only an hour of darkness per day. Once watching for cracks in the white surface had become automatic, Mikel’s mind began to drift. The vast blue and white landscape could not hold his attention; landscapes never did. That was one of the major reasons he got out of Pamplona, with its big skies and endless plains. Even as a child, Mikel had chafed against the place. The only two mildly interesting things about the region were the fact that the residents of Navarre wind-farmed the hell out of it, beating even the Germans at renewable electricity, and a strange blip of mountainous desert that looked like it had been airlifted from the American West. Mikel had done a fair bit of rock climbing there but not to enjoy the landscape. Choosing the right grip on a cliff face was an intellectual game for him, high-stakes chess.

His thoughts were interrupted when he noticed Siem waving at him. Mikel was slightly off course and if he kept going in this direction the rope would jolt his Ski-Doo. He veered. Siem continued to wave his arm—now he was pointing in the distance, toward the left. Mikel saw a collection of vertical sticks that would have disappeared in a landscape less stark. There was motion at the top of one of the sticks. He squinted and caught sight of the turning blades of a windmill.

Didn’t Siem say the GPS station was broken? Why are they turning?

The next instant, Mikel was looking at the sky as he fell backward. The seconds that followed seemed slow and endless. The whine of the Ski-Doo surged into a scream as it lost its grip on ground. The surface beneath the rear of the snowmobile vanished and as the machine slipped backward, the snow dropped from under the front as well. At once, Mikel felt the Ski-Doo fall out from between his legs. He lost his grip on the handlebars and the Ski-Doo crashed against the sides of the crevasse. The shocks traveled up the cable catching him, while the nose of the Ski-Doo pointed to the sky, which was a now a fathom away and very, very small.

Mikel slammed against the dangling Ski-Doo as the rope to Siem’s snowmobile jerked taut. He tried to grab it but he tumbled over it instead and fell away from the Ski-Doo as his own screams echoed in his ears. Flailing at the walls of the crevasse, his thickly gloved fingers clawed uselessly. The vertical cliffs were far beyond his reach; this was a big goddamned hole. Then the ropes wrenched at his waist and groin and jerked him backward till his feet flipped higher than his head.

Mikel swung on his back, gazing at the undercarriage of his machine. Far beyond that, against the tiny patch of sky, he could see a black object intruding on the light like a partial eclipse. The back of Siem’s Ski-Doo had nearly dropped into the crevasse as well, prevented from doing so by a swift turn.

Mikel had to force himself to stop hyperventilating lest he pass out. And then there was silence—pure blue silence, for that was the color all around him. An impossible blue, ethereal and hollow.

My god, he thought, even in the midst of his desperation. It’s beautiful. And peaceful.

“Mikel!” he heard reverberating around him. “Mikel are you alright?!” Siem’s calls shocked him back to reality. Mikel yelled back with every ounce of strength left in him that he was fine. He was told that they would set up a rig to hoist him up but it might take a few minutes. Mikel imagined how Siem’s blood must have been running cold right now. He could not be the replacement for one presumably dead colleague and lose another the day he arrived.

Silence came again, vast and embracing. Mikel looked around at all the blues layered like petals, the vertical striations of the ice and great fist-sized nubbles extruding from the walls. He noticed one horizontal slice—a ledge. He could fit half of each foot on that he thought. Gently, so gently, he swung himself inch by inch closer to the wall, as the Ski-Doo turned above him. His toes reached the protruding corner and he managed to grab two nubbles, first with his fingertips, then, once balanced, with his entire hand.

When he felt secure he let go with one hand and pulled his ice ax from a pocket on the leg of his salopette. He thwacked the stainless steel tip into the ice as hard as he could and it stuck fast. Now he had three secure points. He looked down again at the cold, crystal cathedral vanishing into darkness below him.

Without thought, Mikel unstrapped his helmet, took it off, and refastened its strap with one hand, holding it still against the wall with his chest. He slung the helmet back on his forearm out of his way, reached up, and pulled his fur-lined hood over his head. Then he rested the side of his head against the wall of ice and just breathed. He heard nothing—a total absence of sound. But on the wall, right at eye level, a drop of liquid water caught his attention. Covering his mouth to make sure that he wasn’t melting the ice with his breath, he peered closer. There were a number of drops.

The Adur, he thought, not entirely in jest. And as he stared, he realized with a jolt deep in his gut that he was witnessing the droplets of water slowly trickling upward, like rain blown against a pane of glass. He held his breath and remained very still to make sure he wasn’t causing the motion. The droplets continued to travel up.

He peered below him and saw nothing but blue upon blue. He certainly couldn’t feel anything through his layers of cloth. Staring at the drops again, he almost willed them to stop in their tracks. If they somehow did, it would make his life simpler.

Flora would be angry with that, he told himself. “Mysteries are clues,” was her constant refrain.

A rope descended from the small, distant sky and the clamp on its end thwacked against Mikel’s hood, then his shoulder and back. Siem shouted for him to attach himself to the cable, then detach from the Ski-Doo connection.

Mikel looked down again. How many of Flora’s “clues” lay deep in that abyss? Maybe none. Maybe the water was full of sun-seeking microorganisms, colonies of them. Or maybe the cause was wind stirred by something otherworldly. How had the Old Testament described the force that opened the Red Sea? “A blast of God’s nostrils” or some such?

Regardless, right now, by ascending he risked giving up everything—not just important data but his very concept of what it meant to be a researcher, a scientist, a member of the Group. What if he left and couldn’t return?

“Are you all right?” Siem called down.

Mikel pulled an ice screw from a pocket and tapped it into the wall of ice. When it was secure, he detached from the Ski-Doo rope and reconnected—not to Siem’s line and certain rescue, but to the crevasse.

“Hey! What are you doing?” Siem cried out.

Maybe Mikel had just sentenced himself to an early death, but maybe before he died he would find out what, below the surface of Antarctica, caused water to flow uphill.

CHAPTER 9

Dangling in the crevasse, Mikel pulled spiked crampons from his backpack one at a time. He heard Siem calling down to him, his voice echoing like a distant foghorn, but Mikel did not answer. He was too busy concentrating on the task at hand. Carefully, he latched the crampons to the soles of his boots knowing that dropping even one of them would end the journey before it began.

Hooks on, he arranged his ropes, then pushed away from the ice wall and down. For the next few minutes, Siem continued to call out to him. Then silence. Mikel looked up at the tiny bright hole to the world and it was empty. He thought he could hear muffled noises over the ridge, but with his next swinging descent that sound disappeared and Mikel heard only his own rapid breathing and the rasp of the ice as he thrust his spikes into it.

He felt that he could be mesmerized by all the shades of blue in the ice but losing focus might cause him to lose his grip, his life. So he focused on the water droplets instead. There were never many of them, but always enough to confirm that their upward motion was neither temporary nor a fluke.

Soon he had descended deep enough so that the darkness of the crevasse forced him to fish the headlamp from his backpack and turn it on. Mikel was not enamored of flashlights. They were necessary things but they limited his view and threw off the true colors of a surface. They illuminated dust particles, flecks of ice, and other distractions. Just now the shifting circle of light made everything pop from the surrounding darkness, like it was all pressing in on him. The place felt even more claustrophobic than it was. The creak of the rope seemed like a voice and the shadows seemed to creep.

Damn it.

He stopped moving and took a deep breath. Now was not the time to start imagining things. The crevasse was daunting enough as it was.

Focusing again on the tears running up the ice, Mikel became aware that the cold was not one of his challenges. The temperature certainly wasn’t balmy but at this depth he should have had to crack some hand warmers at least. Instead, the air felt about as cold as the surface and no more.

He tugged at his rope to test the latest ice screw, then pushed out and down.

The Brunt Ice Shelf was only one hundred meters deep on average but this crevasse seemed deeper. As if to confirm that, Mikel reached into his pocket for another ice screw and came up with nothing. He checked all his pockets hopelessly, knowing he’d put all the screws in one place. With a very strong grip and cautious movements, he held his backpack open while he searched through it. No luck. He was out.

A wave of anger swept through him. He shoved his backpack over his shoulders again, dangled in the air a moment, then kicked at the wall, hard. Cursing, he spent the next minute jerking his stuck, spiked foot back out of the ice. Then as he tugged his balaclava down for a breath of fresh air to clear his head—he felt it. A subtle, gentle, but unmistakable breeze.

The propellant for the water droplets.

Excited by his discovery, Mikel Jasso did something incredibly stupid. He used one ice ax as an anchor, reattached his ropes to it, descended, and used the other ice ax as another anchor descending as far as he could go into the darkness.

Literally at the end of his rope, he peered down into the maddening hole. His flashlight beam disappeared into nothingness. He glared at the ice, the running water, looked down again—and caught his breath. He’d seen a flash of green.

Tiny, just a spark, but familiar—he slowly swept his headlamp over the diameter of the hole. Then he stopped sharply. There it was again, and not just any green. If he was extrapolating correctly through the yellow of his light, this was olivine green, the same as the crystals in the last stone he’d picked up for Flora, the stone that caused them so much trouble.

Mikel lowered his goggles and squinted. There appeared to be a surface he could stand on about twenty feet below him. He couldn’t be sure; it could have been just a shadow. But if he hesitated, if he started to think, he would be paralyzed. Finding cracks in the wall of ice that he could fit his fingers into, he unhooked from the rope and slowly, very slowly, climbed by hand and spiked foot down the wall. Then he hit a spot where there was nothing to grip. Mikel closed his eyes and rested his forehead on the ice. He had to continue, no matter what the cost. He jerked one foot out of the wall and, gripping his last handholds, jerked the other foot out. Lowering himself by extending his arms, he let the spikes on the soles of his feet search for purchase—

Suddenly, he lost his grip and with the claws on his crampons screeching against the ice, he slid. The drop lasted no more than two or three seconds, though it felt like ten and ended with him landing hard on solid rock. His ankle twisted beneath him. Whether it was a ledge or the bottom of the crevasse didn’t matter so much in that moment.

I’m breathing, he thought. Why the hell am I breathing? This should be ocean down here. He didn’t even hear the sea.

Gingerly, he curled over and got up on his hands and knees. He looked around, no longer damning his headlamp and froze.

The gray-black rock he was on looked tiled. It was all hexagons fitted perfectly together. His mind leaped to ancient peoples, their carvings, but reminded himself more rationally that, under certain conditions rock could form hexagons by itself. Slow lava could harden and fracture into six-sided columns if it was cooled by contact with ice, and if ice sheets moved across the surface for years it could smooth the rock to this even expanse. He would begin with that sensible assumption—well, it was sensible if he conveniently forgot the fact that there are no volcanoes on the east side of Antarctica.

He was kneeling on a long lump of rock. He paused, questioning his judgment—was this really a lump of rock? He searched through his pockets for the first expendable item he could find, which turned out to be a pencil. He placed it on the rock and it rolled haltingly to the left. There was a slight curve here. Could he be on top of a lava tube?

He then cast his light over the ice above him.

There were moving water droplets here too. Could something have melted all the ice that once filled this space?

Mikel noted the direction the water droplets were blowing and began to crawl toward whatever was blowing them. Could something have melted all the ice that once filled this space? he wondered. He had not moved more than half a body length, before his hand knocked against something. He backed up and pivoted his neck so that the headlamp hit the spot.

A human fist was protruding from the rock.

With a stab of horror, Mikel scuttled backward but kept the light on the hand. The fist did not move. Finally he crawled close again, taking off his headlamp so he could direct it more easily. To his relief, the fist was not human. It was rock, purposely sculpted to look like a human hand. And it was not the only sculpture—adjacent was another wrist that ended in a differently shaped hand, one with two fingers pointed outward, the other fingers curled in. A bar, like a scepter, was in another hand, pointing up. Mikel was too stunned by his finding to think about what it was he was seeing, to process the enormity of the discovery. He tugged on the object but it was stuck fast.

Edging forward, Mikel stopped again almost immediately. This time he swept the light over the whole surface. What he saw did not seem possible.

It was like finding Pompeii. The basalt rock held dozens of objects. He recognized a knife, bizarrely twisted; a bowl; a carving of the face of a baby. A huge rock thrust from the surface was in front of him and it was tessellated with a mosaic of olivine-green crystals. The archaeologist in him trumped all else and he pounced forward. He approached it with joy bordering on rapture. When he touched the stone he felt it vibrating.

No. Humming.

Mikel yanked off his glove, and as he gripped the stone, a wave of red broke across his mind. The world skewed, exploded, filled with a sulfurous smell like he was back on the airplane at Montevideo—

Then a weight fell on his left shoulder. Mikel screamed, turned and, skittered backward. When his light finally landed on his target, and a string of curses flew from his mouth with the speed and duration that only a Basque could deliver, there was Siem kneeling on the rock next to him, stunned and shaking. He was still reaching out with the hand he’d placed on Mikel’s shoulder, but his gaze was on the protruding objects all around them.

“What is this?” whispered Siem. “How is this?”

“Shut up,” Mikel snapped.

Siem closed his mouth and just looked at him, scared.

Collecting himself, Mikel sat up, and waited for his pounding pulse to subside. Siem had pulled him back—but from where? Damn it, he thought, now he had a witness. “How the hell did you get down here anyway?”

“I… rappelled,” Siem said, following the glow of his own headlamp. “There was an argument. Bundy didn’t want me to follow you but I made him see we couldn’t let you—I mean—we already lost two people out here.”

Mikel had to make a decision quickly. If he allowed Siem to see this, then Siem had to die. Mikel could make it happen, regardless of the man’s six-foot-seven frame. But he was just a kid, and scared, and he trusted Mikel. So the archaeologist moved to block further inspection with his body.

“Siem,” Mikel said, “get back up to the surface.”

“Why?”

“Somebody has to tell them to move Halley VI off the ice shelf.”

Siem started to ask why again but changed his mind.

“Because it’s melting,” Mikel answered anyway. That much was true. “These objects, probably from an old shipwreck, will be gone soon. You will be too if you don’t go.”

“But what about you?” Siem asked. “I saw the rip marks in the ice. It looks to me like you fell.”

“I climbed down,” Mikel answered. “Not elegantly, but I made it… and I’ll make it back. I really have to examine a few of these objects before I follow you. But you—you might be saving some lives if you leave now. They’ll need time to make evacuation plans.”

Siem almost turned to go but stopped. “Climbing down is easier than climbing up. I’m not sure you can make it.”

“I’ll make it,” Mikel insisted. “Thanks for the concern. Truly.”

With a sigh, he turned to go. “I hope it’s worth it,” he said as he started back up.

Mikel watched him disappear into the blackness, then looked back at the olivine mosaic and thought, unequivocally, “If anything is worth dying for, this is it.”

CHAPTER 10

Mikel didn’t move for at least ten minutes after the last scuffling sound drifted down from Siem’s ascent. He just stared at the olivine mosaic with a feeling of almost physical hunger.

Each of the olivine tiles embedded in the rock had been etched. Each had an ethereal, internal glow that he could not explain other than through some kind of phosphorescent content. The characters showed a predominance for snakelike crescents and S-shapes, resembling those that comprised the triangular symbol on the troublesome artifact he had brought back to New York. But these were more complex and had many more variations. He was definitely looking at a written language. Seen in aggregate like this, it was obviously more advanced than the artifacts the Group had collected over the years had led them to believe.

Mikel’s hand strayed to his radio. The Tac-XI unit was international, keyed to either general radio receivers or specific programmed phone numbers. His impulse was to contact Flora. But of course, the radio wouldn’t work this far down. Not unless there was a direct opening to the surface. His hand dropped and he felt almost grateful. There were no hoops to jump through, insufficient explanations that would feel like silt in his mouth compared to the magnificence of what lay before him.

Where to begin?

He moved with caution, remembering the incapacitation he’d felt on the airplane as that small artifact had hummed through the camera case into his chest, how his mind had reeled and possibly hallucinated. He could have been setting himself up for far worse than that now.

So what are you going to do? he asked himself. Scurry back up with Siem?

Practically in slow motion at first, then with a bold thrust, Mikel reached toward the stone, his fingers opening like fronds. His hands hovering over the stone, he felt the humming without touching it. It reminded him of a tuning fork, soothing rather than disturbing. After nearly a minute he let one hand drift down and grasp the mosaic.

A red flood rushed into his mind so vigorously, that he felt as if he were falling over. He cried out and clutched at the olivine-studded stone with his other hand. A rank odor rose toward him, the smell of sulfur filling his nose and throat—making him gag. He could feel the hum of the stone growing more vibrant, as if it were using his entire body to amplify itself. Afraid that it would shake loose his grip, he leaned forward, resting his head in his hands and gripping the stone as tightly as he could. The mosaic was fading now, though it was still there, still tangible.

And then suddenly, he was looking at a room. It was all around him but he wasn’t in it—his hands were still on the mosaic and his knees felt like an extension of the rock. He willed himself to look around the hallucination, the vision, whatever it was.

He saw a tall chamber with smooth but fantastically twisted walls, all dark gray. Basalt, he realized, but no lava flow he’d ever seen created such spirals or—his eyes traveled up—a latticework dome. The grid held glass and above that, thin smoke drifted across a bright blue sky.

This was the work of artisans.

Of Galderkhaani.

His heart pounded against his chest as he peered incredulously into the living past. The latticework, a complex of knots, had an overall counterclockwise spiral shape that was mirrored by the floor, which held an enormous double-armed spiral. One arm of the spiral was the same smooth basalt as the walls but made simply, without twists or adornments. The basalt also provided a solid center to the spiral. The other, recessed into the floor, was filled with clear water. Every few feet, a cluster of flames seemed to float mysteriously upon the water’s surface with no materials or gas pipes feeding the small fires.

These fires had to be decorative he thought. Nothing about their strength or position suggested they were used for light or heat. Nor was there direct sunlight anywhere in the chamber. He believed he could make out a walkway just below the dome that sported flames dancing in stone braziers built into the wall—or did they protrude from the wall?

Everything seemed to have the same regular texture, like plastic poured in a mold. Below the walkway, the walls were sculpted in the shape of shelves. Panes of opaque white quartz enclosed the shelves, but enough of the panes were open for Mikel to see stacks of parchments, hundreds of them, piled in no particular order. This had to be a library, but the librarian would not have met Flora’s meticulous standards.

Flora.

It was a real-world thought reassuring him that at least he still had some control over his own mind. And, yes, he still felt the stone in his hands and smelled sulfur. This was merely a projection of some kind, like a hologram. Suddenly, he was staggered by the realization of where he could go, what he might learn, if he figured out how to “drive” the mosaics.

Returning to what he could actually see with his eyes, he surveyed the room. A second, wider walkway directly beneath the first provided access to the shelves as well as space for furniture, which seemed to bubble from the rock. Small tables held stone cups with steam rising from them. Suddenly, the smell of sulfur lessened, replaced by the gathering scent of—what was that?

It was jasmine tea.

Stone couches and chairs cushioned with bright, gem-colored pillows stood near the tea tables and as Mikel’s eyes adjusted to the dimmer light here, he saw that there were a few dozen people in the room.

Not just people: citizens, he thought. Adults, all. Proud and rich with purpose. They had the carriage of women and men who belonged here. He longed to catalog all the detail. He was so accustomed to taking cell-phone images that recall, mental snapshots, was a nearly forgotten craft.

Don’t try, just let it in, he told himself.

And then, curious, he lightly squeezed his fingers on the transparent tile as if on a touch pad. The flames froze. So did the people. The shadows were all locked in place.

He could control this. Tightening his grip froze the image. No doubt it could be rewound, replayed. He relaxed his grip and the display resumed.

On the whole, the citizens did not appear relaxed. Only a few were sitting down, their yellow and white robes draped around their feet. They were drinking tea with curiously coordinated movements: when one reached for a cup another always did the same. Then each person inhaled steam from the other person’s cup while maintaining eye contact, and usually smiling, before drinking from their own. It was something like a toast but more intimate.

The more restless citizens were standing and talking urgently to parchment bearers. The parchments were changing hands with nervous movements and gestures and hastily scrawled signatures.

That’s not paper or papyrus… it’s too malleable. Vellum? No, it’s too fine for animal skin. At least, the skin of animals known in the modern day. The writing implements—fish bones, possibly. Or teeth mounted in wooden or stone styluses?

Hands touched hands as the swaps were made, fingers trailing in lingering, comforting gestures. Everyone’s faces were lost in downward looks so Mikel couldn’t see their expressions. He could not hear them nor see what was on the parchments. He let his eyes wander through the many shadows.

For a library, the chamber was remarkably ill lit. One could retrieve parchments from the shelves, then move to the upper walkway to read them, but that would require holding them dangerously close to the open flames in the braziers. Below, there seemed to be no way to read closely at all. Perhaps the ink glowed, Mikel thought, like the olivine in the stone he was holding. Maybe they had a phosphorous content that glowed when exposed to light?

Or perhaps the parchments weren’t the point. Along the floor-level walkway, statues were arranged among all the furniture. Mikel’s eye had skipped over them; he’d assumed they were decorative. At second glance, he realized that the furniture was oriented toward the statues, regarding them. He studied the figures more closely with rising excitement. They were all black basalt human forms but they were not paeans to the elegant musculature and shape of the human body. The asexual torsos and arms were exaggerated in size, while the rest of the bodies were carved wearing long robes that seemed to cling only occasionally and only at the bottom to indicate the position of the feet.

Why the feet? And the hands? The hands were oversized, and they displayed a wide variety of different positions and gestures.

Mikel moved closer without changing the position of his hands. He felt like a kid with his nose pressed to the candy store glass. He wanted more.

The easiest statue for Mikel to see in the dim space stood straight with the robes hiding its feet. The left arm was close to the torso but the left hand pointed away from the hips with all fingers parallel to the floor. The right arm was crossed diagonally over the chest and the right hand pointed with all fingers across the left shoulder. Mikel felt that he’d seen this placement of hands before but he didn’t have time to rake through his memories. Absently, he moved a thumb as he tried to lean closer still.

“Damn it!”

The tableau jumped ahead. There was suddenly more light in the room. Was it earlier? Later? Mikel had no way of knowing. He remained still, not wanting to miss anything. There was so much to see.

Excitement washed over him as he left his hands splayed wide and let the drama play out. A tall man with Dravidian skin and rugged features unfolded himself from one of the couches. By his undeniable sense of belonging, Mikel guessed this was the librarian.

“Egat anata cazh…”

“So, we attempt the ritual…,” the tall man was saying.

Somehow, Mikel understood the words. But wait, the tiles couldn’t have been translating; English hadn’t existed then. There was some other mechanism at work.

But before he could put his mind to it, a door banged open, wood against rock, and a short man with a splendidly curled white beard hurried into the room. The man left the door open and Mikel could see to the room beyond. Like a horde of red ants, glaring red-orange lava was inexplicably moving up a trellis forming a spiral not unlike those on the library walls. Pale yellow fumes were quickly pulled away from the growing column by a mechanical process that sent the smoke floating out of the building and across the blue sky.

“Pao,” said the tall man.

The man with the beard quickly retraced his steps and shut the door, commenting as he went, “Vol, why are we doing this now with all that’s still going on in the next room?”

Vol smiled. “Why don’t you read our declaration. It’s quite—”

“I’m asking you,” said Pao.

Vol’s smile faded. “We must know if the ritual works.”

“But how can you know unless you die?” Pao asked.

“The soul lives even when the body dies,” Vol replied. “There are risks in everything a person does. That’s why we have all signed a declaration.” His emphasis seemed designed to remind Pao that he had not affixed his own signature. “My friend, don’t you think the Technologist plan has risks?”

“Of course,” replied Pao, “But there are controls built into that process.”

“So we’re told,” Vol said. “Does anyone outside the elite core know what those are?”

“We know these people well,” Pao said. “They are honorable. This ritual—we just don’t know what it will do, what it can do.”

“Which is why we must try it,” Vol replied patiently.

“I don’t agree. It’s premature,” Pao said, stroking the rolls of his beard. “I’ve been watching the Technologists’ project. It shows promise.”

Vol smiled. “You know the saying: ‘Give all a chance, but trust your instincts.’”

Pao frowned. “That wasn’t a saying. It was from one of my poems.”

“And wise words they were,” Vol said, nodding. “My instincts, our instincts”—he indicated the others—“tell us that this is the right path. Come back to us, Pao. Come with us. Help us to find out.”

The two men stood like the statues. Then the tall man extended his arms. The bearded man accepted them and the two men linked forearms, lightly, the shorter man seemingly fearful of a tighter embrace.

“We loved, once,” Pao said. “Was that not a bond greater than the flesh?”

“You know it was,” Vol replied. “But the body was a part of that, an important part.”

“That is an understatement,” his companion replied.

Vol smiled. “True enough. Now we must know if that flesh can be shed.”

“Votah! Inevitably we will lose our bodies, death will see to that,” Pao said. “Why be impatient?”

“To learn,” Vol said. “To see if we can become Candescent.”

Pao’s face twisted unhappily and he released the arms of the other. “That is Rensat’s influence, my friend. She still lives on the myths of the past. Legend will not save you… but the Source might.”

“So might the ritual that you yourself composed,” Vol said.

Just then, at the command of one of the women, half of the people in robes and carrying parchment moved through the room and filed through the door. The others appeared to be trying to see over their shoulders but were not allowed beyond the entrance.

“Pao, Pao!” an older woman called as she passed through the doorway.

Pao looked up to find her, but a moment later she was barely visible as the other parchment bearers swept into the room beyond.

Vol tilted his head at his bearded friend with blatant judgment. “We said no physical attachments before this test. You know this, Pao. The connection must be solely of the spirit. When we achieve that, without distraction, then the body can trained to move aside at will.”

“I tried to create distance,” Pao said, “but she comes to me—”

“And your focus changes to the physical.”

“Of course.”

Vol slightly tightened his grip on Pao’s arms. “I cannot blame her, or you,” he continued sadly. “It tortures me not to have a physical connection with my lovers. A complete connection, to accompany the spiritual.”

“Then make that connection with whomever you wish,” Pao said, urging him. “But give this up, at least for now.”

Vol deflated. He released his friend and turned away. Then he stopped and looked back.

“Pao,” the librarian said, pressing him, “you once had more faith than any of us. Yet now you want to put your trust there?” He pointed toward the door.

“Not trust,” Pao said. “Hope? Optimism? The point is, we don’t have to decide that now, which is why I ask you to wait.”

Vol eyed his friend carefully. “Tell me. Do you truly believe in what the Technologists are attempting to do? Or is it that you lack faith in the alternative, in us?”

“Both,” Pao admitted. “More study is required on both sides.”

Vol regarded his friend silently. The door was shut and the remaining dozen people had now gathered loosely around the two men. Vol turned from Pao and began to walk around the basalt arm of the spiral.

“Pao,” a woman called and took several steps toward him. “Do not let Technologist propaganda cloud your eyes.”

Pao regarded her with fondness. “You have no fear about what we do?”

The woman’s eyes grew stern. “I am afraid, yes. To die, to ascend, but not to transcend—eternity on earth, immaterial and alone? That frightens me more. But there are other views, even among the Technologists. The earth is restless, the ice moves, the animals are fearful. We may not have time to explore alternative rituals as much as we would like.”

“Certainly not if we continue to debate the topic,” Vol pointed out, turning to Pao.

Everyone was silent.

Vol walked back toward the woman and took her arms as he had taken Pao’s. “I will be honored to go forth with you, Rensat, but I do not want to take you from him whom you love.”

“I love you both,” Rensat told him. “Ultimately, however, I love the Candescents above all. If I cannot have that, no life, no love, is worth possessing.”

Her words had an impact on Pao. He moved closer to the other two, and Mikel could feel their energy shift. “I have spent my adult life looking at existence from many viewpoints,” Pao told her. “That is why I have written—not just to share ideas but to see them as if they belong to someone else, to consider them impartially. And I have come to believe some of what we believe but also aspects of what the Technologists believe.” He faced the other members of the Priesthood. “There are basic questions that remain to be answered. I say wait.”

“What questions?” Rensat asked.

“The question of infusing ourselves into the cosmic plane.”

Vol released Rensat and waved with disgust. “The Technologists are not planning an ‘infusion,’” he said. “They are planning to break into the highest plane, like thieves. Never mind the animal violence inherent in that—by what logic can anyone think of overpowering limitless power? No.” He shook his head. “Our souls must bond. Together we must present ourselves to the infinite. We must merge with the cosmos. That is how the Candescents survived their obliteration.”

“You think that is what they did,” Pao said. “You believe that based on stories passed down since the world was young.”

Vol stood strong, wordlessly defending his faith.

“And you are wrong about the Technologists,” Pao said, correcting him. “They look to target a point in the cosmos, not to crack it or assault it.” Pao looked out at the others. “My friends, think about your approach. Even bonded souls may bounce from the cosmic plane like light from polished metal. One soul, a dozen, a thousand—it may not matter.”

“The Candescents proved it does,” Rensat retorted.

“And you suggest that rising like a geyser-powered stone on molten rock will achieve that goal?” Vol asked.

“I don’t know!” Pao confessed. “I don’t. That is why I say we must wait. The Technologists have built a device that may give us the opportunity to ascend. Even the legends tell us the Candescents rode into the cosmic plane on an inferno.”

“The word is haydonai and no one is sure what it meant,” Vol reminded him. “The ancient Galderkhaani may have meant ‘great glow,’ not ‘fire.’ The great glow may have come from luminous souls working together, not a column of fire. It may be figurative, not literal.”

Pao smiled thinly. “All I am asking is that we save, for later, the one option that might kill everyone here—and then prove too weak to allow us to reach any of the planes beyond death.”

“And I say again, there are risks inherent in all things,” Vol said. “Your thoughts and words and poetry were instrumental in creating the cazh. Do not abandon us now.”

Vol studied Pao’s reluctant face. Then he made a little open-handed gesture, as if to say, Join us.

“I do not wish to,” Pao said at last. But then he looked long and openly at his two former lovers. Their faces were so familiar, so dear, that the thought of living without them was unthinkable. “And yet I cannot abandon you,” he said.

With an encouraging look from Rensat, Pao finally nodded. Vol clapped the man’s shoulders joyously, then turned and pulled a parchment from its display on a wall and followed Pao as he strode without another word around the spiral toward its center. The other dozen arranged themselves along the basalt path so that they were evenly spaced, close to the fires floating on the water. Pao sat cross-legged in the center. Vol placed the parchment in Pao’s lap, then stood behind him.

The bearded man looked around. He still seemed uncertain.

“These are your words,” Rensat reminded him.

Pao looked at the parchment. It was a gesture, no more, but he placed his name on the document. Then he took a dramatic breath and bowed over his knees, exposing the nape of his neck.

Vol stood before him with his feet shoulder-width apart and closed his eyes. His breath became tremulous. The others held a respectful silence. Vol opened his eyes and extended the first two fingers of his right hand to point exactly at Pao’s neck. He raised his left hand above him and pointed those first two fingers at the lattice dome. Then he looked directly into Mikel’s eyes and smiled.

“Welcome, all,” he said. “In the name of the Candescents, we commit our spirits to wherever the ritual takes us!”

Almost at once, an invisible surge began to manifest itself, a shock wave that grew in power until it was no longer rippling but forcefully expanding—

Mikel jerked back in terror. His hands recoiled from the mosaic and the vision ripped away from his mind. Almost simultaneously, a massive fireball exploded nearby.

Three hours by plane, northeast of Halley VI, on the north coast of Antarctica, the commander of the Norwegian Troll base pushed his way through a huddle of scientists to get a full view of the jagged lines on the computer screen they were all staring at. He had NORSAR, a geoscience research foundation, on the phone and the phone to his ear.

“We’ve never seen seismic activity like this,” he said in awe.

“And no aftershocks?” asked the seismologist on the phone.

“Just that brief burst,” the commander said. An inveterate fidgeter, he began to drum with his fingers on the desk. As if he were reading music, he tapped the long and short lines from the Antarctic bedrock’s seismometer, but the resulting beat was far too arrhythmic to be music.

There were two people in the world who would have recognized the sound.

A psychiatrist seven and a half thousand miles away and her ten-year-old son.

CHAPTER 11

A cat woke from a nap on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and lightly descended from the couch to the floor. He stretched his shoulders, then stood for a moment, still half-asleep. Then he ran at full speed out of the room, down the hall, out of sight.

Caitlin and Jacob O’Hara sat at the table having breakfast, watching Arfa’s impromptu sprint. Caitlin was tempted to go find him but Jacob was in the middle of a dramatic reenactment of what it must have been like to be the chef on the Nautilus and refused to be distracted. He was so fired up he’d been holding a glass of almond milk for at least five minutes despite occasionally sloshing it onto his hand.

Suddenly, Jacob dropped the glass on the table. Raising both fists in the air, he threw his head back, eyes squeezed tight, a picture of frustration.

“Jake, honey?”

Caitlin knelt by his chair suddenly worried that perhaps Jacob’s recovery from the episode at the cooking school was really just the eye of a storm.

“En…do…,” he said, as though he were struggling to form words. “En…dovi…”

Caitlin reached out and touched him lightly on his face. Jacob reared back as though repulsed by human contact.

Then he brought both fists down on the table. It was a tense but controlled movement—not in a rage, not aimed at anything, more like trying to gather himself—except that the table met his fists with a massive thump. The impact startled him, as if he’d forgotten the table was there. His eyes jerked open and Caitlin, horrified at what she was seeing, realized that Jacob was suddenly himself again. Which meant, even more terrifying, that for those few seconds he had not been himself.

Jacob looked at his hands, looked at the table covered in milk, looked at his mother, and began to cry.

For more than ten minutes, Jacob continued to writhe in Caitlin’s arms.

First he would twist away so he could sign with both hands, then he would turn to his mother to clutch at her neck. Signing was his default, emergency mode, and though he was wearing his hearing aid, he wasn’t responding to anything Caitlin was saying. She didn’t want to break the embrace to face him and sign herself. He was only signing one thing.

“I want to go to bed… I want to go to bed.”

Caitlin stood, hoisted his legs around her waist and carried him. Any other time she would have felt the burn in her legs under the weight of a growing ten-year-old, but not now. She walked quickly down the hall, feeling Jacob’s wrists move against her back as he continued to sign, clutch, sign.

But as much as he wanted to go to bed, he was not quite ready to be left alone. As if he were three years old, Jacob wanted the comfort of the full bedtime routine, including help from Caitlin taking out his hearing aid and changing into his pajamas. He even demanded to floss and brush his teeth, something he typically disliked. Finally, with his head on the pillow and the sheets and two blankets pulled up to his chin and perfectly smoothed over his chest, his stuffed, fraying whale from the Museum of Natural History under his left arm, he sobbed his last sob and calmed. Caitlin slipped her left hand under his right hand and he slapped her hand away.

“No talking, Mommy,” he signed. “Hug.”

She curled over and hugged him tight. Then, sitting back, seeing that he was still gazing at her, she finally signed, “What happened?”

“It didn’t work,” he signed back, his eyes downcast.

“What didn’t work?”

“There was sky and then there was ice and water that was on fire.”

The mention of fire sent a shiver up Caitlin’s back. This was the second time he’d had a vision that included fire. Her whole experience of Galderkhaan involved fire, and then there was Maanik and Atash, the latter of whom had died from it.

“What are we talking about?” she asked with slow, patient gestures. “Can you tell me that?”

He shook his head, then signed, “I have to sleep now.”

She wanted to ask if he was alone, if he had seen people, heard them talking, felt something, but she didn’t want to put any ideas in his head.

“All right, honey,” she signed. “You sleep.”

Caitlin was reluctant to leave it at that but knew that Jacob didn’t do his best when pressed. She kissed his forehead.

“Sleep,” she signed.

“Sleep, Mommy,” he said in agreement.

He turned over, curled in the fetal position, and put his forefingers in his mouth. He hadn’t done that in six years.

Caitlin closed his door behind her and stood for a moment with her hand on the doorknob. Have I brought this on my son?

She stalked back down the hall to the sunny living room, awash with an anger and guilt she had never felt in her life. She couldn’t keep her thoughts straight, couldn’t sit, couldn’t control her breaths and didn’t want to. The memories were battering into her brain—Maanik screaming, squirming in bed, barely making sense before descending into gibberish, then screaming again. Was Jacob taking his first steps into that same cycle? If so, why? She had stopped the assault, over a week ago. Those souls were gone.

Caitlin whipped back and forth across her living room cursing.

Her phone rang. She let it go for a couple of seconds, then crossed the room to grab it from her purse. The screen said it was her father and she thought, Not now! as if she were yelling at him. She flung the phone onto the table and returned to the living room.

What if those Galderkhaan souls are back, somehow? If they didn’t die before, I’m going to make sure they do this time. And where the hell is the cat?

Had Arfa sensed something in the apartment again? Was that why he ran out of the room before Jacob fell apart?

Caitlin felt something rising inside of her, something dark and ugly that wasn’t just a protective parent, wasn’t simply outrage. It rose up her back like molten rock, turning every nerve to fire. She had to fight to keep from breaking something.

At that moment the cat entered from the hallway, ambling at his usual pace. He walked straight to his food dish by the archway to the kitchen and settled on his haunches for a long chow down. Still frustrated and wanting to scream it out, Caitlin got close to him to test his responsiveness. He didn’t even twitch an ear. Nothing amiss there.

So this isn’t the same as Maanik and her dog, Caitlin thought. This is something different.

Because life wasn’t strange enough, it had to get stranger. And endanger her son.

She jumped when the phone rang again. On autopilot, she grabbed it from the table. This time it was Anita. She rejected the call, dropped the phone on the table, and hurried back into the living room. She needed the wider space around her, needed to think, but she couldn’t. Nor was there any reason to think: she knew what she had to do.

She had to get back to Galderkhaan to see what, if anything, might be causing this. But then she remembered the horrible white ice trap she’d traveled to last time she tried, where she’d heard an invisible Jacob knocking for her and she couldn’t reach him.

Stark fear saturated her anger. Was there a connection? Had she done this to him?

The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. What if she tried to go back there and only caused things to deteriorate further?

You left me without a bloody guidebook! she screamed at everyone who had brought her to this moment—herself above all. She wished she could take a week off and pick the brains of Vahin, the Hindu cleric she’d met in Iran, and Madame Langlois, whose Haitian Vodou world was as vivid as it was foreign. They had provided such strong insight with Maanik’s case.

But this was Jacob. She couldn’t leave him and she couldn’t take him with her. She didn’t even know if she could get back into Tehran now.

She paced to the hall and listened for anything from Jacob’s room, but all was silent. For a second she sank onto her heels and put her forehead in her hands. Almost instantly she stood again, unable to be still. Staying there by the hallway, she closed her eyes and ground her left heel into the floor. She stretched her left hand toward the chair Jacob had been sitting in and extended her right hand toward the floor, willing herself back, back, back, to Galderkhaan, to any place that wasn’t here—

Nothing happened.

Damn it!

She opened her eyes, shook out the stance, then looked at the nearest piece of curved metal, her coffeepot on the table. Again, she willed herself into the alternate mind stream or whatever the hell it was—and again, nothing happened. She cupped her right hand under her left palm, not touching, but she didn’t even feel the centering that had been occurring regularly for weeks.

Whatever power she’d discovered had died in her. She was dead.

Why? How?

She had shut it down in the subway. Had she willed that to happen again?

Anger and fear cascaded over her again. The ignorance and uncommon stupidity in her skull made her want to tear at her hair.

Then the apartment intercom buzzed. She grunted with frustration, paced to the screen, and saw that Ben was outside the apartment building. She punched the “talk” button.

“Not a good time, Ben.”

His face turned to the fish-eye camera. “That’s why I’m here.”

“Ben—” she said, resisting.

“Let me up, Cai. Just let. Me. Up,” he insisted.

She hesitated. She wanted to say no but realized that this could after all be what she needed. Not Ben but whatever gifts Ben bore. She buzzed him in.

A minute later he was walking in the door, having taken the stairs two at a time. He looked drawn and pale and was speaking before she had a chance to.

“I felt you,” he said.

“What?”

“I felt something snap—wrong,” he explained. “I don’t know how, whether we’re still entangled on some level or something from the United Nations, but it was stronger than just an intuition, something I couldn’t ignore.”

He reached out to pull her in but she backed away. She had noticed that Arfa was sniffing Ben’s ankle—the same way the beagle, Jack London, had done in the Pawars’ apartment.

“Cai?” Ben said.

She shook her head several times. Not here. Not the same situation. Not in my home.

“Cai!” Ben said more insistently.

She motioned him in, shut the door, and launched into a description of Jacob’s episode, speaking so quickly even the UN interpreter could barely follow. Finally, he interrupted her.

“What were the words he said?”

Caitlin thought back. “En. Dovi. I think they were two words. He struggled a few times to get them out.”

“Probably just fragments,” Ben said. “He didn’t get to finish.”

“Right. I should have let him just scream it all out.”

“I didn’t say that,” Ben said soothingly. “Where is he now, can I see him?”

“Why?”

“If I knew, I’d tell you,” he said. “More information, he may say something else—I don’t know.”

Reluctantly, she walked him down the hall. When she opened the bedroom door, Jacob was visible in the bed, his stuffed whale cast to one side, his fingers no longer in his mouth. For a moment there was only the sound of his deep sleep breathing.

No, it wasn’t just his breathing. There was a sound like… wind? Breakers on a beach? It was distant and indistinct but it was not his breath.

She tugged the sleeve of Ben’s jacket and they backed into the hall. Caitlin shut the door and waited until she was back in the living room to speak again.

“It’s Galderkhaan,” she said. “I have to go back and I haven’t been able to. But with you here maybe I can try using the cazh.”

“Whoa,” Ben said, cutting her off. “The chant you went into at the UN? The ritual that talked about you going ‘Hundreds of feet in the air, I want to rise with the sea, with the wind’?”

“Yes.”

He looked at her with surprise and she started when she realized why. He had quoted it in Galderkhaani and she had understood him. The sound of those very elements seemed to creep in around them. Behind them the cat was curled under a chair. Its fur rippled faintly.

“Holy shit,” Ben said.

“Yeah. There is something going on,” she said. “Do you disagree?”

He shook his head.

“All right, then. At the very least, going back will help me to establish whether the souls are somehow still in this goddamn spin cycle, whether they’re still trying to use that final cazh.”

“I’ll be damned if you’ll do that, Cai,” Ben said. “Wherever it took you, it’s a dangerous tool.”

“No, this is perfect, Ben. You’ve seen the process, you’ll know if you need to stop it. And you’re familiar with everything Maanik went through so if Jacob wakes up, if he—” She stopped herself. “If he needs anything, you’ll be here to give it to him.”

“And you? What happens to Jacob if you get lost in Galderkhaan or inside your head somewhere?”

“Inside… my head?” Caitlin’s fury flared out of her. “You’re still not convinced any of this is happening, are you?”

“Something is going on, I just don’t know what!”

“Didn’t you just say you got a ‘ping’ from me, miles away!”

“Maybe it’s ESP, or a strong sixth-sense animal instinct, absolutely worth exploring with controls… but not something to jump headlong into. And I have to say it: why are you convinced this stuff is absolutely, no-question, for real? You’re the psychiatrist, the scientist! We had the language, Maanik’s fits, the power of suggestion they created—”

“No,” she said. “Ben Moss, don’t you dare do this to me.”

“Do what, exactly? Caution you? Think, Cai! You used that chant as a last resort to save a life. Maanik was literally generating fire in her body.”

“Another strong indicator that this is real, wouldn’t you say?”

“Pyrokinesis, spontaneous combustion, I don’t know,” he said. “Please listen. Jacob is down the hall, asleep. For right now, he’s perfectly okay. And from what you described, whatever he experienced bore no resemblance to any of the other kids’ experiences. Besides, you can’t know for sure that going back won’t exacerbate the problem. Tell me one reason you should go jumping into some self-induced hypnotic state that may not have an exit strategy!”

“Because Jacob wasn’t here, Ben. For a couple seconds it wasn’t him. That happened with Maanik too, you saw it. And let’s not forget yesterday, at the school, he went away somehow.”

“But what he did was totally different.”

“No.” She pointed at the almond milk still covering the table. “It was violent and angry.”

“Show me.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to see what you saw.”

With a cringe, Caitlin sat in Jacob’s chair. She mimed the dropping of the glass, then re-created the two fists in the air, the arc of them downward. “That’s when he hit the table,” she said. “It seemed to jar him out of the episode.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t see anger there, Cai. What I see is frustration, pure and simple.” He read her doubting face, motioned for her to stand. He sat in her place and re-created the sequence. “Which way do you see it, now that it isn’t Jacob?”

She half-turned, nodded, then released a huge breath. “Okay, not anger. Not wrath. Something more like… disappointment? Resignation about something? I… I don’t know but he was affected by something.”

“Regardless, not worth risking your mind or life for. Not yet.”

She gazed at him mutely and at last shook her head no. “But I have to do something, this is Jacob! So what the hell am I going to do, Ben?”

“I don’t know yet but you can’t go about it like this,” he said.

“I know, but I am so angry,” she told him as she flopped onto the sofa. “And my apartment’s already clean, so housework therapy is out.”

“Well, my apartment’s not.”

She smacked him in the arm.

“Not bad.”

“What?”

“If my UN stress counselor were here, he’d tell you to throw a couple punches at a pillow.”

She made a face. “Bad Psychiatry 101.”

“Mommy?”

Caitlin’s head snapped toward the hallway. Jacob was standing there, smiling, with Arfa prancing toward him. He waved at his mother.

“Hey,” she said, forcing a smile as she signed. “What happened to your nap?”

“It’s done,” he said, brushing his hands against each other.

“Did you have any dreams?”

“Yes,” he gestured excitedly. “I was flying.”

“Sounds fun,” Caitlin said, still pretending to be calm.

“Tawazh!” he spoke aloud as he ran forward.

Ben and Caitlin exchanged quick looks. Ben was visibly surprised to actually hear the Galderkhaani word, to know that the boy wasn’t saying “towers.” She hugged him and he hugged her back in a long “normal” embrace.

“He said it,” Ben whispered. “You didn’t imagine it.”

Caitlin nodded over Jacob’s shoulder. “Thank you.”

“And it didn’t come from me or from you.”

She shook her head.

Ben stayed where he was, studying Caitlin. He noticed that her eyes were wet, and that not all of her tears were from relief.