A Dream of Ice

CHAPTER 12

Mikel flung himself back against the lava tube, trying to keep distance between himself and the red-orange flame. A lone tendril of fire reached along the stone ceiling and for a moment dipped toward his boots, then it vanished and the echoes of the cracking boom faded to silence.

Hyperventilating, he forced out a big exhale, and it emerged as a horrible, choked shadow of a laugh.

“Christ almighty,” he said aloud, as much to check his hearing after the blast as to vent some of the lingering terror. His ears were fine, though the subsequent quiet was far more discomfiting. His vision had temporarily blanked after the glare but was already returning. He fought a desperate urge to strip off some of his layers of clothing. The suffocating heat was going to dissipate rapidly and then the cold would lunge back at any exposed skin.

He took a deep inhale now and realized two things: that there was no odor associated with the blast, which seemed impossible, and that he was breathing far more air than he should have been after an explosion had just gorged itself on the oxygen in this cramped space.

Quickly taking advantage of the residual warmth, he tugged down his balaclava, pulled off a glove, licked his fingers, and held them to the air to determine the breeze’s point of origin. It was in the same direction as the fireball.

Mikel ignored his brain warning him that another fireball could explode at any moment. It could easily have been a solitary incident, right? Or one that occurred, what, every year or two, at the most? Every decade? Every century? There was no way to tell, judging by the lack of old charring under the fresh scars on the walls.

Maybe old Vol had a point, he thought. Nothing is ever learned or discovered by caution. My very presence here is evidence of that.

Mikel pulled on his glove, his hand already starting to feel the chill, and wriggled into a crawling position facing the source of the breeze. One hand nearly landed on the olivine-studded rock and he jerked away from it.

If I’d stayed with the projection, or whatever it was, what would have happened to me? What happened to them?

“Projection,” “hologram,” “vision”—they all seemed too mundane for what had just occurred. And the fire he’d experienced had been no vision. The dripping sounds that reached his ears were evidence that the heat had been very real. Eyeing the basaltic rock anchoring the olivine mosaic stone, he assured himself he’d come back to reengage if necessary.

I know where you live, Vol!

Mikel moved cautiously through the tunnel, though his hands bumped and brushed other half-buried objects, Mikel did not experience any unusual sensations.

The mosaic tiles. The artifact I brought to the Group. All one. But one what? Phosphorous needed oxygen to glow, and that luminosity was definitely coming from inside the stone. No oxygen there. It was not porous.

The crawl was ludicrously short, only about fifteen feet. There at the end of it was something that looked like the top of a chimney, with a generally circular shape that extended down at least twenty-five feet, with a hole at the top four feet across. This structure too was of basaltic rock but it was not continuous with the lava tube. Where the tube had fractured into hexagons while in contact with ice, this projection was as smooth as the walls, shelves, and furniture Mikel had seen in his vision. Inclined at a forty-five-degree angle to the tube, it looked like the lava had hit it, broken it, surrounded it, and then locked it in place as the flow cooled and solidified.

Mikel stopped short. As he shone his lamp ahead into the angled structure he saw stairs.

Not a chimney, he thought. I’m at the top of a tower. A hollow column of some kind.

He bared just a wrist to test the air and felt a stronger breeze coming from within the tower. Had wind from this tower extinguished the fireball? Or had the fireball issued from it?

He crept forward a little. Narrow spiral stairs bubbled from the inside of the tower going down. A direction his gut told him not to go.

A tingling sensation filled him, not from without but from within. Fear. Now that he had stopped, now that he was undistracted by physical stimuli, terror had purchase in his atavistic core. It wasn’t the geographic isolation; he had been in caves before, in tombs.

No, the fear came from his sharp awareness that he was not alone. There were no hidden lions or snakes here, as in the African veldt or the deserts of Egypt. Nothing that might spring at him. This was worse. It was something enormous and eternal, possibly good, possibly not. And he was stumbling through it like a child. The destruction of his body he could live with—so to speak. But a tormented immortality?

That is hell.

Indeed, for all he knew, that statement might be more than figurative. He trembled as he considered how much an educated, experienced man like himself did not know and for that reason, he could not turn back. To live with his ignorance was a worse fate than destruction or damnation.

But then as soon as he took a step forward, the strange, subterranean wind suddenly seemed to have a voice. It was a new voice, a woman’s voice. It seemed to whisper a single word:

Gene… gene…

“What?” he said through his mask.

The wind was just wind again. And then it wasn’t.

Gene… ah…

“Oh, God,” he muttered. “Lord God.”

The voice was saying “Jina.” The name of the Antarctic researcher who had gone missing. Was she now, somehow, part of this place? Was her mind, her soul, her knowledge of English now present in the tiles? Is that how he understood what was being said?

“Release… me… please!”

The utterance was followed by a blast not unlike the one he had heard earlier, only this one was much nearer. It rocked the world around him, on all sides, shaking pebbles from above, and brought with it a fireball that blazed toward him like a hot, red comet until it suddenly came apart. It didn’t explode; it simply seemed to come apart, as though it lacked cohesion. There were no embers raining down; the flaming fist simply vanished taking the ghostly voice with it.

Mikel’s first thought was that there was some kind of gas leak down here, and that he was hallucinating. His second thought was that he had to get out, whether it was to get answers or to escape, he just had to move. He adjusted the lamp on his head and, holding the rim of the tower’s mouth, lowered himself in.

At a catastrophic tilt, the stairs no longer functioned as such, so Mikel clambered down them using both hands and feet. He moved very, very fast, concerned about being trapped with any additional fireballs. His peripheral vision caught glimpses of olivine tiles on the walls but this wasn’t the time to stop and look at them.

Minutes later—maybe a hundred feet down, Mikel propelled himself through the first opening he found. Pressing himself against a wall and briefly shutting his eyes, he was relieved to find solid ground. When he reopened his eyes, he let out a little laugh. He was inside what looked like a man-made tunnel, not a lava tube, and he could feel that the movement of air was stronger now, even through his balaclava.

The tunnel seemed sculpted, because the walls and arched ceiling were smooth except for two long, raised parallel lines that ran along the rock ceiling like tracks—though he couldn’t imagine why tracks would exist anywhere but a floor. They appeared to have bubbled from the overhead rock, as though vacuuformed, and there was a spiral twist to them, like a corkscrew. Had they suspended carriages of some kind?

No, he thought. Spiral tracks don’t make sense.

Still looking up, he realized that the basalt he’d crouched upon above must have, in its molten state, simply flowed along on top of this tunnel. Was this a part of a system that once fueled the Source that they were discussing… poured molten lava from one place to another?

He stood upright and was about to step forward to search for the origin of the breeze when an inner voice stopped him. Over the years, he had learned to listen to that voice. This time, though, it insisted. He stayed by the wall and looked around for whatever was causing the internal alarm.

Just over an arm’s length away was a mass of olivine tiles placed in the wall roughly at eye level, and a small bubble of rock like those he’d seen in the chamber. The olivine was glowing. With half of his body still edged to the wall, he stepped to the mosaic. To the right he saw an arched entrance, clearly a designed opening and not a lava crack. However, the opening was sealed shut with a mass of basaltic stone—hardened magma.

That didn’t make sense, though.

If lava flowed over the tunnel, it should have kept flowing, poured down, and filled much more of this space. Instead, it simply stopped with a curious edge as if heaped against something—but there was nothing to heap against.

Maybe there was a barrier that has since collapsed? he thought. But what kind of structure could have withstood volcanic heat, other than volcanic rock itself?

The olivine mosaic was just as mysterious—not just its chemistry but its design. Given the position of the tiles on the wall, Mikel thought they bore a distinct resemblance to an exit sign in a theater—a cautionary or emergency notice of some kind. Could it have been put there by the mysterious Source-tapping Technologists just in case something went wrong? He was habitually on guard against the unscientific impulse to assume one’s own culture could automatically explicate another. But upon closer examination the drawings etched into the olivine clearly showed gestures. If he was interpreting the drawings correctly, it looked as though the viewer or reader should retrieve something from the bubble of rock and put it on their face.

Mikel touched a small quartz panel on the bubble of rock. The arched entrance immediately opened like the door of a cabinet. Inside, he found a row of hooks holding four sagging, beige bits of what appeared to be remarkably well-preserved cloth masks. He set his teeth against the cold and pulled off a glove to touch one. It didn’t feel like fabric. The swatch had an unrecognizable smoothness, definitely not plastic. He would have compared it to skin but it didn’t move like skin when he lifted it. Somehow it felt flexible and then oddly structured, but the structure disappeared as soon as he moved it again.

Technologist gear? he wondered.

As Mikel pulled down his balaclava and cautiously placed the mask to his face, its edges cinched themselves to his skin. With some effort he could pry it loose again, but it was designed to be airtight, and suddenly Mikel felt why. His lungs felt full and remained that way, holding a flex like a bodybuilder ballooning a muscle. The mask hadn’t appeared to do anything—yet what else could have caused this?

He tried to stay calm, rational, as he contemplated the truly foreign technology… something so alien it was beyond his ability to analyze or understand. He reminded himself that he was here to catalog and move on. Perhaps the larger picture would help to explain these magnificent parts.

The olivine mosaic provided no other clues. Their pulse seemed slightly faster than before, but he had no way of quantifying that. Mikel carefully turned to face the tunnel again. He could see that several feet ahead, there was a larger, closet-size panel with the same olivine design, yet this mosaic was dark and could not be read. Inching himself along the wall, he reached out to open it and discovered within upright stacks of what looked like bobsleds made of Persian rugs, ribbed with some kind of wicker.

Flying carpets, he thought jokingly, reaching for one of them. But who could say whether or not this was where the legend began—carried away by surviving Galderkhaani?

He tugged on it several times, putting real muscle into it, but the contraptions were stuck fast. He shined his light all around them and fumbled between them and around to the back. Although his fingertips sensed protrusions from the wall, there were no vises or hooks. Apparently these could not be obtained as easily as the masks. Perhaps they’d been considered more valuable or, considering that the mosaic wasn’t lit, less crucial.

Mikel spent a good ten minutes trying to figure out the attachment mechanism, wiggling the contraptions in every direction but coming up with nothing. Finally, with a grunt of frustration, he gave up. The ancient locks, whatever they were, had worked. He was starting to feel like a bit of an idiot, like an alien discovering New York City, and spending all its time fooling with a broom closet. He closed the panel and turned back to the tunnel.

So, he thought as he shone his headlamp down the corridor in one direction, then the other. Which way?

He looked up at the place where he’d entered and calculated that to head toward the continent he wanted to turn to his left.

He took two steps forward and was blown off his feet.

Snapped into survival mode, Mikel hunched into a fetal form as a rush of air rocketed him down the tunnel. The airstream was steady only in velocity, not in dynamics. With no warning it would suddenly twist viciously, then again and again. Several times it slammed him into the wall. He’d fall and then with no respite the wind would pick him up again and hurtle him onward. He wished he hadn’t taken off his helmet but so far his arms were enough protection. Then he was slammed especially hard. His headlamp smashed and broke and the tunnel went instantly utterly dark.

A second later the airstream flipped him over and blasted him toward the ceiling, face first. He kicked out to let his feet take the brunt of the impact and felt the jolt all the way up his spine.

Jesus Christ—

He needed a way out of this. He looked around for anything he could cling to.

Another flip, and then he noticed that he was primarily slamming into the wall on the left. To get back to center, he tried pulling his arms tightly to his sides, straightening his legs. The airstream responded with a push. He must have overshot slightly because he was whipped right out of the airstream directly into another one that slammed him into the opposite wall. Quickly he ducked his head back in the original direction, crossed what he sensed was the centerline, and slammed into the left wall again at an angle that would leave a bruise on his arm from elbow to shoulder.

He tried again directing himself toward the middle with a hell of a lot more caution. He was right, in the exact center of the tunnel the airstream smoothed out and lost some of its turbulence. He caught the sweet spot and stayed there, keeping his head bowed to shield his face. He was moving in the direction he wanted to go and there were no more collisions. For the first time he was able to draw a real breath, as opposed to panicked gasps.

The pneumatic airstream was propelling him at what felt like the speed of a car. Obviously this tunnel had been designed for humans inside contraptions of some kind. The magic carpets? But just in case there was some kind of accident, just in case air pressure became a threat, the designers had provided protection for the body. The mask! he thought suddenly, and almost laughed with the marvel of it. Mikel had felt his lungs firm up but now he realized that his eardrums must have been protected against increased air pressure too; an eardrum would rupture long before a lung collapsed. Perhaps even his bones and muscles had received a boost, which might explain why he hadn’t fractured anything yet. The effects of the mask could have been giving his whole body extra resilience.

Magnificent technology, he thought, humbled, and it would fit in his pocket if he ever headed home. He suddenly felt overwhelmed with the realization that he was plugged into both history and legend. This airstream was Aeolus, the Greek keeper of the wind. Here it was—real, not myth. Undetected by the outside world, perhaps only just revived, and Mikel was in it.

Suddenly, he was weeping.

The tears came fast and puddled inside his goggles, steaming the insides—not that he could see anything anyway. It had finally hit him, after so many close calls. He probably would not make it home. He was underground, in the dark, in one of the most remote spots on Earth. Worse, he was the only person to know one of the secret wonders of the world and he was going to die in it.

Eventually his tears stopped and the profound sense of loneliness froze within him. He was plunging through a pneumatic system that was not designed for human bodies and he didn’t see how he was going to come to a stop except catastrophically. Whatever resilience the mask had given him, it would not help him survive a full stop at a dead end.

Mikel had always thought that if he saw his life flashing before his eyes, it would be the result of an involuntary spasm, but now he felt that he was choosing to do it, seeing his crazy Basque grandmother, then school, university, grad school, Flora and the Group, the scientists—more than one—whom Mikel had stolen artifacts from. With most of his family either deceased or self-absorbed, he didn’t think there was one person on Earth who would mourn him—except maybe Siem, but that would be more a function of feeling overwhelmed by tragedies. Even Flora. She had seemed distraught over the way Arni died and also by his absence—but mourning? No. Mikel couldn’t imagine her grieving for him.

Suddenly, Mikel realized that there might be a way through this. The quartz-and-olivine panels he’d left behind: perhaps they were set in terminals. There might be a way to pinpoint the next one, if there was one.

He listened carefully to see if there was any change in the sound of the wind. His senses on high alert, he wondered how long he’d been suffering the now-painful howling. But then he heard it: a slightly hollow sound, deeper than the shrieking in the rest of the tunnel, nearly a full octave lower.

It came and went and then a minute later it came again, passing him faster than he could make a move. But now he knew what to listen for and when the next one came, he was ready.

Damn it, he missed. But he had the rhythm. Timing it out from memory, he anticipated when he would feel the next sound beside him and jackknifed toward it.

Whipping across the airstream into an opening on the side of the tunnel, his body dropped heavily to the ground as the air support disappeared, but it was not nearly as bad as a crash.

Collecting his wits and his breath, Mikel could not believe he was still alive and in one piece. He waited for the tingling and fear to stop shaking him, then he finally got to his knees and then to his feet. The new space welcomed him like Prospero’s beach in a tempest, sheltering him from the hell of sound and wind.

Still in total darkness, he felt all around the space and realized it was quite small, with no entrance for lava to have spewed through, but it did have what he recognized as another quartz panel. Once again it popped open under his fingertips and just as he’d predicted, it was one of the “bobsleds.” Almost praying, he fumbled around the back of the contraption, trying to free it. Nothing. It was as mysteriously secure as the others.

Many attempts and long minutes later, Mikel cursed and drove his fist into the rock. Feeling claustrophobic and trapped, he began to pry the mask off his face so he could get one damned breath of fresh air. Then, as soon as the mask was in his hands, the area flashed with an extraordinarily bright light. A millisecond later the light was gone. Purple and green afterimages flooded across his eyes. Mikel reached out to feel the niche again to see if he could locate the source of the flash. He was interrupted by a sharp knock on his knee. With a crisp sound like wicker snapping, one of the contraptions had dropped out of the niche and hit his leg, then toppled onto the floor. Mikel had the sudden impression that he’d just been photographed—and approved.

He picked up the sled, praying it hadn’t cracked when it was released.

“Let’s hope you know what to do.”

With one hand on the stone wall to guide him, he stepped back into the tunnel but stopped short of the airstream. He restored the mask to his face, then carefully climbed into the surprisingly firm contraption placing his head in what he saw as a cobra-like hood. He suspected it would fill with wind when he stepped back into the airstream, to carry him along like a sail.

“God I hope I’ve got this right.”

His heart slamming hard, he shuffled to where the sound told him the winds began. Then, like a sledder on a mountainside, he turned ninety degrees and dropped flat into the wind flow.

Incredibly, the slightly concave shape of the struts caused the wind to raise the little vehicle from the floor. There was some initial wobbling, which he corrected by positioning his body in the center. As disconcerting as it was to be moving at this speed in the dark, it wasn’t half as bad as going without. The hood protected his ears, fed on the wind, and he was not uncomfortable. And because he was finally using the mechanism that must have been designed for the tunnel, he felt safe.

There was nothing for him to do except stay still, and because his last dose of REM was incomprehensibly long ago and far away, Mikel actually drifted to sleep. He dreamed of a hand stretched toward his bowed head, the fingers pointing at the nape of his neck…

He woke to a strange sensation. Still floating in the air, he was moving much more slowly. The sound of the air changed again as well, lower than before. It was as if he was being invited to stop.

“Yes,” he answered. “Yes!”

Mikel angled his body toward the wall and the nose of the sled went with him, effectively pinwheeling a quarter turn so it was facing into what he presumed was another niche. His weight, held forward, caused it to lurch in a little farther and stop.

Smiling at the simple beauty of the system, Mikel gratefully stood and moved in the direction where he imagined the wall should be, but he doubled over something thigh-high and very hard. He landed on rippled and rocky stone. Crawling forward, his hands found an arched doorway in the wall that was, like the other, sealed shut by a long-solidified lava flow. Mikel pushed against the wall to stand and feeling his way along it, discovered another set of mosaic tiles under his hands, but these weren’t glowing either. Exhausted by the thought of having to make one more intense decision, he impulsively pressed hard against the tiles.

With no warning, Mikel was suddenly looking into a pair of hazel eyes. White eyebrows sat close above them and a white beard displayed dozens of carefully made ringlets, swoops, and curls.

Mikel Jasso was looking at Pao, the hesitant, recalcitrant man from the stone and fire chamber. Only now the man was very, very different.

He was somewhat translucent, the images of the real world blurring slightly when he passed. The man was pale and gaunt and moved with strange, ethereal sweeps of his arms. He seemed to control objects around him without touching them.

This man was dead.

CHAPTER 13

Questions flooded Mikel’s mind as he watched the spectral figure.

Years before, he had attended a séance at the Group’s headquarters. It was an exercise to contact any surviving spirit of the ancients. Artifacts had been positioned around the table and Arni, the synesthete, had served as a very effective medium. Though the effort had failed in terms of opening a useful pathway, everyone felt a shift in the character of the room. There was a weight, a slight pressure of energy like shallow water. It was as if someone—or several someones—had been present who wasn’t present before. Flora, ever the one for empirical proof, declared it a form of group hypnosis and that was that.

Mikel had not been convinced. For him, the sensation had remained in the room for days after. Now he knew the truth: she had been wrong. The previous “recording” offered up by the tiles had shown living people. This one showed a soul, a ghost, a poltergeist, whatever label one wanted to attach to it.

This man and his colleagues believed in souls, Mikel told himself. They tried to bond them, to unify, to rise to some other plane. Had they succeeded? Had this one intentionally remained behind?

Or is that the fate of a soul that did not bond? he wondered.

Argh! To be so close yet unable to communicate with this man, he thought. To not to have the chance to study the room personally—

“Talk to me!” Mikel yelled.

The figure went about his wraithlike business. With a frustrated cry, Mikel drove the side of his fist into the tile. The image jumped ahead. Now there were two specters in the chamber: Pao and another, an aged woman.

“All right,” Mikel said to the tile. “Why did you stop here?”

There didn’t seem to be anything exceptional about the moment. Had the projection jumped to this spot because there was some kind of bookmark? Then, suddenly, Mikel realized something that sent a jolt through his belly. Or—

Is it real? Is this happening now?

His chest felt heavy under the weight of the thought even as his heart and mind raced.

He hit the tile again. The image did not change. That could only mean that this was no longer an image. Was he watching figures who were present now, behind the tiles. Were the stones relaying activity that was taking place behind them: the actions of spirits in the present day who had been here, he surmised, for untold millennia. He recognized one as Pao, the other was in shadows, barely visible.

As his eyes adjusted to the scene he saw more that confirmed his assessment. There were skeletons on the floor, close to one another. The bones had crumbled almost completely away, but Mikel could still make out the supraorbital ridge of a skull defining the hollow of an eye, and the arch of a pelvis. He felt the cold shock of realization. The skeletal remains belonged to these two souls.

Looking closer, he saw that the spirits were moving among scrolls and piles of stones with markings that appeared to shift and move, like animated drawings. Each time they did, Mikel noticed a barely perceptible flicker among the tiles before him: here and there a glow brightened slightly, as if they were acknowledging—or recording?—the change. That did, after all, appear to be their function.

The two spirits were speaking. Though Mikel was still trying to understand the mechanism by which living spirits were visible to him, the words they spoke were clear and comprehensible. Pao paused to look at a petroglyph.

“We cannot afford to spend more time,” he said.

“We cannot afford to leave,” said the other—a woman, bent and small, her voice low and grave. It took Mikel a moment to realize that this was Rensat, the woman who had seemed much closer to Vol in the last “vision.”

This Pao, too, was much older than he’d been in the chamber. The beard was still lush but age had whitened it even more. His face was etched with deep lines and his voice cracked.

Suddenly Rensat moved from the shadows.

“I will not go without knowing what happened to Vol,” she said. “And we still have work to do, a traitor to locate.”

“And… a mysterious savior, perhaps,” Pao said, more resigned than hopeful. He turned back to the stones moving again from one petroglyph to another.

But something else was different, something more than just the jump forward in time. The air around Mikel himself felt hollow, like the low-pressure system created by an approaching storm. Someone, something, was also present in his time, in the chamber. He wanted to look around but he did not want to take his eyes from the living history. The only experience Mikel could compare it to was the séance, the way the atmosphere in the room had shifted: it felt empty of life, even their own, yet full of something else.

Mikel pulled off his mask, took a deep breath, unzipped a pocket, and stowed the mask inside. He hesitated, preparing himself for the onrush of that feeling again before placing his hands on either side of the tiles. His fingers fidgeted, until he realized there was something for them to fidget with. The bank of tiles was loose. With a quick push and pull, the tiles came off as one whole section in his hands. It didn’t feel accidental. The panel was designed to be removed, and there were tiles around the back as well.

He looked again at the projection of the room. The two people inside seemed suddenly uneasy.

“What was that?” Rensat asked.

“I don’t know,” Pao said. “But we must go. It is time.”

Rensat shook her head and returned to her work. With a glance toward Mikel—and eyes that appeared to be searching, seeking—Pao sighed and then also resumed his studies.

What are you looking for… still, after all these eons? Mikel wondered.

He looked at the panel of tiles in his hands. They were pulsing and burning, not just with heat but with light. He had the sense that if he screamed at them, into them, the ghosts would hear. But Mikel was methodical. He was not there yet, not ready to act rashly… irrationally.

If any of this can be called rational, he thought.

Mikel set the tiles down and rooted his fingers into the empty slots where they had been fixed. The ghosts didn’t change, reinforcing the idea that they were present in the moment. But by accident, fumbling around in the opening and perhaps activating another tile, he revealed a map. Ancient, it seemed, with unfamiliar contours. It appeared like a scrim between himself and the specters, and then was gone.

“Damn it—I want that!”

He jabbed his fingers in all directions, but nothing. And then he hit a sweet spot. Images flashed this way and that like minnows. Airships with nets strung between them, plumes of lava shooting into the sky, crops growing in clouds, seagoing vessels, faces, pyres, alabaster buildings, plans for buildings and then—the map was back. Mikel froze his fingers. Relaxing his hand slightly without so much as moving his fingertips, he glided the map into a prominent place. Swelling—seeming to anticipate what he wanted before he struggled to achieve it—the map filled his vision, layering across the tunnel and glowing blue. It was beautiful. Its key elements were ten black dots or points grouped in one area—settlements, towns, cities, hunting grounds… he had no idea which. There were also orange dots clustered around one region. He memorized the pattern. If he could figure out where he was, he could find the others.

Mikel took a moment to regard the image in its entirety, continental contours familiar in some spots, utterly unrecognizable in others. Still, there was no doubt what he was looking at.

Galderkhaan, he thought. After all these years, after centuries, the Group would have it.

Mikel Jasso did not have an ego, not in the same way Flora did, but there was pride of accomplishment: he would be the one to bring it home.

The emotion of the moment was overwhelming but there was no time to savor it. Not far from the orange spots was a fine, fine series of lines in red, blue, and black. He concentrated on the network and it expanded.

So you can read my mind, he thought incredulously. The mechanism didn’t matter right now, but he couldn’t help but wonder what else the tiles could do. And how they did it. Clearly, the infinite possibilities in the arrangement of the stones brought up different information—an impossibly complex but brilliantly compact data storage system.

In one spot on the map, he recognized the path he had taken. It was black. He pinpointed his location generally and mentally marked the spidery legs of the tunnels. He assumed that blue meant water, red—magma? He wondered if those substances still flowed there. Probably not; tens of thousands of years would have altered the pools or bodies of water from where they’d originated. Mikel let go of that spot on the wall and the map disappeared.

He carefully replaced the panel and positioned his hands in their previous position on the tiles. Pao and Rensat filled his vision as before, the room reappearing as if the tiles had gone transparent—or, more likely, were projecting data like the big TVs at sporting events, only at a far greater level of detail. He wondered if they were doing the same thing on the other side, feeding data to the Galderkhaani. The two were in slightly different positions; of course they were. The present day had unfolded while he studied the map.

Once more mentally present, Mikel was swept up in the shuddering feeling of unearthliness. The tiles also felt it, felt something, or maybe they were causing it: the glow intensified slightly.

What’s going on? Mikel thought uneasily.

He looked into the ghostly room. Rensat was closing a door in the glass panel behind her, having just come from the massive chamber.

“I do not understand,” she said. “You felt it, I felt it, yet the tiles tell me there is no one else out there.”

Are they feeling it too? Mikel wondered. Or are they somehow sensing me?

“Is it possible?” Pao asked, a trace of hope in his voice. “After so much time, their eternal silence—is it possible?”

“I would like to think that devotion is rewarded,” Rensat said with a bitter smile. “But why would the Candescents wait until now to reveal themselves? Now, when we are very nearly beaten.”

“Perhaps that is the reason,” Pao suggested. He raised his shoulders weakly. “Who can know the mind and will of the Candescents?”

Unlike Pao, the woman’s voice and expression seemed utterly without hope. “Everyone has been so elusive for so long. The traitor. Our dear Vol. This witch or ascended soul or demonic Technologist—whatever she was who tore the rest apart at the end.” She looked at Pao. “Maybe it is time to depart.”

Pao looked around. “Our existence mattered, though, Rensat. We have failed to save Galderkhaan but we proved the cazh, finally. We remained bonded.” His eyes sought hers lovingly. “That is not a small thing.”

“I still feel as though I have failed.” Rensat smiled thinly. “We are denied the higher planes. We are denied the fellowship and richness of others, of rising to the cosmic plane. That was the reason for the cazh. That was the reason you joined us that first time when we were much younger.”

“I stayed because I loved you as I loved Vol,” Pao said, gently correcting her.

Rensat hugged herself. “I am afraid to leave, Pao. I am afraid to face an eternity in this way.”

“At least we are transcended, not merely ascended,” Pao pointed out. “We are not in silent isolation.”

Mikel recognized the words from the library. Ascendant… transcendent… Candescent. Was there a hierarchy, like angels? Was this the root of all faith? There was still so much he did not understand in just the few things they had said. A witch—what kind of aberration was that?

Without realizing it, Mikel’s hands had moved, like they were resting on the planchette of a Ouija board. Suddenly another image, this one clearly a window into the past, swept across his field of view. Momentarily disoriented, then horrified, he was looking at a courtyard, hearing human screams. The floor of the courtyard was full of carvings—and stones. Olivine tiles. All around him people in yellow and white robes were engulfed in walls of fire. They were shrieking in anguish as they died a torturous death. Feeling sick, Mikel forced himself to keep looking, to see the volcano erupting in the distance.

A caldera filled with lava, he thought. One of the orange spots on the map?

As he let his mind absorb the spectacle of people burning, their souls clinging to their tortured, disintegrating bodies, their hands linked and their melting tongues trying hard to utter words, he experienced some of the fury of the volcano. But this was not just a window to a disaster. It showed more: bodies falling from ethereal shapes—souls? Some were only there for a moment before blinking out. Others rose away in pairs.

He looked desperately through the image for the Galderkhaani Pao and Rensat had been discussing: the witch, the demonized figure, the one who would not seem to belong. His eyes were drawn to a dim figure above the flames, above the city, hovering in the sky like a banshee of Irish lore. He tried to bring her into focus but lost the image when his fingers returned to their previous position.

Pao and Rensat returned, standing still and silent like clothes stored for the winter. Is this how they had spent part of their endless time as earthbound spirits? In some kind of contemplative stasis? Did time even have any meaning for them? Without periods of sleep to measure the hours, did the destruction of Galderkhaan seem no more than a few decades distant?

Mikel began to search through the images again, posing himself a scientific question: here on this side of Antarctica there were no volcanoes. The bedrock had long since been mapped. Yet if he was here watching history, there had been a volcano, at the very least the remnants of a caldera somewhere. Unless—

Absolute devastation, he answered himself. The mountain must have been leveled, then swallowed by the sea, then ice.

Rensat and Pao began to move again. They were still very silent. Suddenly, Mikel felt a very low, slow vibration pass through the room. The walls themselves were vibrating. The tiles were becoming almost blindingly luminous. The sound was deeper, much more internally loud than the erupting volcano had been. Amazingly, as Mikel’s body wavered under its force, he watched Pao and Rensat tremble in exactly the same manner and motion. Mikel felt terror return, stronger than before.

“What was that?” he said to himself.

Rensat asked the same thing, a moment behind him.

“I don’t know,” Pao admitted.

Behind Mikel, the tunnel began to glow with a dull orange. He heard a distant cry from the direction in which he’d encountered Jina.

Something was coming. Something—tracking him or the other two? Was that what Rensat and Pao had felt, what she went in the other room to find?

Rensat looked in Mikel’s direction. “There is another… no, several others,” she said.

Pao studied his companion. “Rensat, is it possible that it is Enzo?”

“How?” Rensat asked. “She was lost, her mission unfinished. And the ascended cannot communicate with anyone, not in her plane, not in ours.”

“What if she has found another voice?” Pao asked with rising enthusiasm. “What if she has found a body?”

“But how? I don’t understand.”

“You remember Sogera, his experiments with braziers,” Pao said. “Enzo was there, I remember her clearly. She saw how the flaming sunbird continued to hiss as her flesh was consumed.”

“But not her soul,” the woman said. “Blessed Enzo, if it is so!”

Rensat began to share Pao’s renewed—fervor was the word that came to Mikel’s mind. It was as if they were born again, their eyes and expressions almost manic.

The rumbling remained constant, the glow grew brighter, and now the heat began to rise. Mikel began to feel like he imagined the poor figures in the vision had felt… only in slow motion. Helpless as the fire neared, with nowhere to turn, except to each other. He wondered if the tiles had somehow anticipated his future, showed him something he needed to know, to experience by proxy—death throes,by fire—in order to escape his own possible fate.

Dear god, he thought. To die without sharing what I’ve discovered—

That mustn’t be, it would not be. If it were true that the stones had some kind of access to his mind, they might also save him. He looked at the ghostly couple and placed his hands in the widely splayed position he had in the previous chamber.

Do something! he yelled in his mind.

But he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, except escape, and, obviously, the tiles could not teleport him free.

Looking into the room Mikel realized, suddenly, that the material Pao and Rensat had been studying was an instruction manual for the tiles. His eyes scanned them desperately for guidance. He saw one figure walking—and a wall opening.

Right, he thought. The tiles can be removed. He looked them over from bottom to top, side to side. Which one is the key?

Now a tile just to the right of his face began to glow brighter. Without hesitation he placed both hands on it, just as the figure in the drawing did. One hand above, one below, fingers spread. Nothing happened. He moved his fingers slightly. Then again. Then again.

Come on, Mikel!

All the while the heat grew against his back with a predatory ferocity: this wasn’t a fireball spit up by the earth. Something was coming toward him and bringing with it a shrieking victim. Perhaps, as Rensat had said, it was Enzo—with her newfound and unwilling voice, Jina Park.

Another minute shift of his fingers and, almost at once, the tiles opened like the door to the cave of the forty thieves. He surged through like a bull, the tiles snapping shut behind him, locking him in and blocking the fury on the other side. The heat was gone.

Mikel came to a skidding halt, standing upright in a moldering room with dry powdered bones beneath his feet and the living tiles bright before him. The smell of something akin to gunpowder hung in the air like incense, tart and inexplicable.

And there was something else: he was not alone. Before him stood the two spirits of the dead Galderkhaani.

Spirits who were seeing him.

CHAPTER 14

It was dark in Caitlin’s apartment but even darker inside her head. She refused to allow her fears to drag her into despair, which meant doing what she always did: fighting back. As much as she wanted to be alone, watching over her son, she knew she shouldn’t be. Which was why she let Ben stay.

Caitlin kept Jacob home from school, something she didn’t like to do, but after his experience the day before, she thought it prudent. The vice principal concurred. Ben called in sick.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor while Jacob read in his room, they had spent the morning and early afternoon reviewing everything they knew of Galderkhaan, trying to figure out the meaning of what Jacob had said: “en dovi.”

“Those letter combinations don’t appear in any of the language we’ve encountered so far,” Ben said conclusively. “Which leaves us two possibilities. First: they aren’t Galderkhaani. Jacob might have been speaking English. Or maybe phonetic French. That novel he’s reading, Jules Verne, is in both languages.”

“What’s the second possibility?” Caitlin asked.

“The second possibility,” Ben said, “is that they are proper nouns. The names of places or people.”

Caitlin considered that. “I wish I’d paid more attention to names when I was back there,” she said. “Then I could be of some freaking use here.”

“Hey, hey, hey,” Ben cautioned. “Beating yourself up: not gonna help.”

Caitlin nodded. “Maybe I should go back and steal a goddamn telephone directory and a dictionary.”

“Not the worst idea I’ve heard,” Ben told her. “I wonder if they had something other than scrolls and tablets to write on. Just because they were pre-everything, doesn’t mean they were as relatively primitive as the ancient civilizations we know.”

While they spoke, Ben had been passing a large, green glass orb back and forth between his hands nonstop. The piece was beautiful, with an almost spectral aura created by the way the lines caught the light and shone white within the green. An artisan acquaintance of Caitlin’s had crafted it years before, using a kiln to bake the glass sphere and then submerging the orb in ice water.

Caitlin finally stopped him with a gentle hand.

“Sorry—making you nervous?” he asked.

“No, nothing like that,” she said. “But you keep doing it, you may induce a trance.”

He stopped at once but he didn’t put the orb aside. They just stared at each other.

“Well, hell,” Ben said after a moment.

“I know,” Caitlin agreed. “When all else fails, do what’s left.”

Ben couldn’t know how real Caitlin’s experiences were but they both knew, in that moment, they weren’t going to make any further progress unless he erred on the side of taking it very seriously. Though Ben couldn’t deny that he’d walked the rim of some of those experiences, he had said repeatedly through the afternoon that he preferred to seek a more logical, analytical approach to the questions they had to answer.

“I don’t know, Cai,” he said.

“I do,” she said. “When it’s the only proactive option on the table, you take it.”

Ben agreed that he would help to re-create an environment similar to what Caitlin had experienced before at the UN and see where it took her as long as she didn’t use the cazh.

“But you keep your hands away from me,” he said. “You can try any of the other techniques you know—hypnosis, energy direction, astrally projecting above the city—anything, but not that.”

“Why? You afraid it might work and you’ll be stuck with me for eternity?”

“You know I’d sign on for that,” he said, correcting her. “But right now we’re exploring, trying to help you and Jacob. That doesn’t include buying a one-way ticket to Neverland. Isn’t that exclusively what the cazh was designed for? Knock-knock-knocking on heaven’s door?”

“We don’t exactly know, do we?” she asked. “That’s one of the things we’re trying to find out.”

“No, it isn’t,” he said. “We’re trying to find out who may—may—have their hooks in Jacob and why. That’s it for now. Are we on the same page?”

“Don’t be dumb,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Of course this is primarily about Jacob but if I see something interesting, I’m going to check it out!”

“No! Caitlin, I am not going to try to explain to a 911 dispatcher that my friend has fallen into the past and can’t get up. If you can’t agree to that, then get yourself another playmate.”

Caitlin sighed hard. She could not help thinking that all the information about Galderkhaan was holistic: if she unraveled the riddle of their belief system she could understand everything about them and help Jacob at the same time.

But Caitlin put a hand on top of his. “All right. I mean it. You’re absolutely right. The chant isn’t appropriate for this situation. I have to get back to Galderkhaan and have a look around, that’s all.”

“Okay, then,” Ben said, smiling.

Following her instructions, Ben held the orb before her. He moved it slowly, the light shifting in her eyes, in the back of her eyes, in her brain. Nearby sounds were magnified: his breath, her breath, the cat moving away.

And then she was back.

“Shit and shit,” she said.

“What’s happening? Or not?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Something’s holding me back.”

He pushed his face toward her. “Don’t let it. I’m here. You won’t get lost there, I promise. Hey, remember? I’ve been down that road with you, Cai. I haven’t lost a trance walker yet.”

Caitlin smiled and nodded sweetly. Ben smiled back.

“Ready for takeoff?” he asked.

In response, she relaxed and stared into the orb. He began to move it again.

Almost at once, the tendrils of the glass turned from green to red. The red—

“Contrails,” she said softly. “I see… fingers of color, like smoke.”

Without stopping, Ben stretched his fingers to the dining room table and grabbed his phone. He began to record. He felt like the Infant of Prague, the orb resting in his cupped left hand, the phone upright in his right. He couldn’t help but wonder if every archetype in the history of humankind repeated itself and was perhaps traceable to Galderkhaan.

And then a sudden iciness fell on the room, as though someone had turned an air conditioner on low. Ben felt the shift instantly and then watched Caitlin’s hair begin to rise, as if reacting to static electricity. In the distance, Arfa bolted into the bathroom, to his litter box.

“There is ice… below,” Caitlin said. “Acres… more acres… miles… peaceful.”

She forced herself to look back up, back at the contrails.

“Red… above and… and behind,” Caitlin went on. “Fire!” she said more urgently. “Flames… Enzo! No!”

Caitlin’s eyes were still open, staring. They grew wider. Her breath came faster, harder. Her hands were reaching for something, holding something, pulling—ropes? She looked like a fisherman pulling his boat to its moorings.

“You’ve killed us! Why!?”

Caitlin began swatting at her face, as though she were surrounded by gnats. She winced with pain.

“The name!” she said. “I will tell you… tell you…”

And then Caitlin screamed in her mouth. It rose up her throat and stuck at the top, as though she were vomiting.

Ben discarded the orb and phone down and took her hands in his, holding them tight. Almost at once he released one hand as if it were electrified: Ben had forgotten his own admonition. He did not want to give any Galderkhaani access to the cazh.

Even holding one of her hands, anchoring Caitlin in the present, caused the cold to begin to dissipate.

“No, Dovit! Let me go!” the woman wept.

“Cai, it’s Ben!” he said softly but insistently. “Cai, where are you?”

“Falling from the sky!” she said, gasping. “I told Enzo… why did she do it? It will never work!”

And then Caitlin was back, panting, leaning forward, collapsing into Ben’s arms.

“I’ve got you,” he said.

“I… thought I died!”

“It wasn’t you,” he told her.

“I know, but I felt it. I felt it!”

“Who was it?”

Caitlin shook her head firmly. “I don’t know her name. We were in the air, in an airship of some kind, and it was on fire.”

“Who is ‘we’?” Ben asked.

“A man and a woman—the woman was on fire, burning the ship with her own body. I couldn’t stop her.”

“It’s over,” Ben said. “And you got what you went back for: names. That’s what Jacob was trying to say.”

Caitlin pulled back. “Ben, is that woman here?”

“You mean talking through Jacob?”

“No, now. Did you see anything?”

“No, but I felt cold,” he admitted. “Very, very cold. I saw your hair rise, like it did at the UN. And the cat ran away.”

Caitlin continued to breathe heavily. She jerked her head around as if looking for something.

“What is it?”

“She’s here. She is here.”

“Caitlin, no—we’re alone.”

Caitlin got up, ran down the hall, putting her ear to Jacob’s door. He was reading aloud. Captain Nemo was having a hard time of things with his ship but Jacob sounded fine. She turned and shuffled back unsteadily, falling into the nearest chair and stared at the floor. After a moment, her eyes rose and found Ben.

“It was Maanik all over again,” she said.

“No, it was not that. What you saw was an old vision of fire.”

“I don’t mean that,” Caitlin said. “I don’t mean they were souls trying to do a ritual. The woman I saw, the woman I was, is trying to communicate something now, through a child. Why? Why Jacob?”

Ben crawled toward her. He took up her hands again. “Maybe it’s got nothing to do with a child, or with trauma as it did last time,” he suggested. “Maybe they’re doing it because they know you will listen.”

Caitlin stared at Ben and nodded. “Okay. That may be true. But… listen to what?”

“I don’t know,” he said, picking up his phone.

“Did you at least get any new words?”

“Just the names. Which is pretty considerable, if you think about it. We can start building a who’s who with Enzo and Dovit—”

No sooner had the names been uttered than the burst of cold returned with a plummeting shriek, a whistle that could have been the wind or a scream. It swept around them like an unbottled genie until they felt as if they were inside a column of ice.

“No,” Caitlin yelled, scowling at a point between her and Ben. “No!”

The wind stopped and an instant later Jacob cried out. Caitlin bolted from the chair and ran to his room. Squatting by his bedside, she looked into his eyes to make sure he was present.

He was. His eyes were searching behind Caitlin, but they were not lost in an ancient place. They were darting through the room as though he were looking for a loose parakeet.

“What is it, hon?” she asked, touching his hair with one hand as she signed with the other. “Did you just call me?”

“I thought there was a snowman,” he said.

“A snowman?” Caitlin said, forcing a smile. “Tell me about him.”

His eyes stopped moving and narrowed in contemplation. “Maybe not a snowman,” he said. “A snow woman. A pretty lady made of ice.”

That was all Jacob said before lying back on the bed. Caitlin did not press for more. She placed the covers under his chin and then lay beside him. Ben, who had been observing from the doorway, smiled and left them alone.

Mother and son stayed that way for quite some time as late afternoon shaded to dusk.

Ben stood staring out the window, where the last of a brilliant red sunset was ebbing from the dark sky.

“What do we do next?” he asked after she finally emerged from the bedroom.

Caitlin shook her head. “I hate to say it, but I’m thinking the next move is up to a snow woman.”

Ben made an unhappy face. “I don’t feel good about leaving you here.”

“You know, I’m okay with that. Despite all that’s happened with Jacob,” Caitlin said. “This time I didn’t get the feeling that… whoever I was wanted to hurt him, or me. Any of us.”

Ben’s mouth twisted slightly. “Let me ask you this—and I need an honest answer. Would you have come back if I hadn’t brought you back?”

“I don’t know, Ben.”

“So what will you do if it happens again?”

“I don’t know that either, Ben.”

“Two ‘Ben’s,” he said. “In Caitlin speak, that means, ‘Time to go.’”

“It is, but only because I’m really beat,” she said. “I’m gonna make dinner for me and the lad and try not to think about any of this tonight.”

Ben nodded in accord. That was easy to do when there were no other options.

She thanked him for his help and for taking the time off from work and kissed him good-bye on the cheek. He gave her a brief, part-sad, part-wry look of That’s it? before she shooed him out the door. The click of the latch sounded uncommonly loud, like the door of a walk-in freezer.

Caitlin stood by the window and looked at the remaining crescent of sun, the same sun that had set over Galderkhaan.

She woke Jacob for dinner and together they made franks and beans; why was it that passed gas always lifted boys’ spirits? When they finished, they channel surfed for a while until Jacob fell asleep with his head in her lap. Not without effort, Caitlin carried him to bed. She wondered how many more times she’d be able to do this. The kid was getting big. She wondered if he would be six-foot-five big like his father, or five foot six like her father.

A pointless mom-exercise, she thought, smiling at herself. But right now, pointless felt good.

The apartment was quiet. The whole city felt quiet. Caitlin looked at lamplights across the street, figures sitting down to meals, and thought about the people she and Ben had passed on their walk toward Paley Park. Everyone had seemed remarkably buoyant. It had been such a difference in tenor from the weeks when Kashmir had verged on nuclear war. Individual confidence had surged back. People’s lives were brightening here despite the darkness in other parts of the world.

The observation gave Caitlin no comfort. The opposite, in fact. The last recession had driven home the fact that confidence too easily spawns rashness, then crashes, then despair. She felt like she was seeing the beginning of the next end already.

She sat on the couch and rubbed her temples, trying to relax. It wasn’t coming. Of course not: there was unfinished business. Whether it was her own life or the life of a patient, she could never compartmentalize that easily.

Caitlin was almost grateful when her phone rang and though her screen gave only a number, she accepted the call.

“Yes?”

“Dr. O’Hara?” said a young woman’s voice.

“Yes, who is this?”

“It’s Maanik Pawar.”

Nausea and fear filled her throat. Caitlin hunched and both hands involuntarily clutched the phone in panic. It’s starting again! her mind screamed. She fought hard to sound natural.

“Maanik, hello! It’s so nice to hear your voice. How are you doing?”

“Really well!”

Caitlin suddenly felt like crying. “Tell me!” she said.

“I’ve gained back all the weight I lost and you should see my arms. My papa arranged for a doctor to use this stem cell spray stuff. They said it was the fastest recovery they’d seen so far. My skin completely healed from the scratches in like a day. Well, they were more than just scratches, I guess.”

“Gouges,” Caitlin said very gently.

“Yes.” Maanik sounded thoughtful, not upset.

“That’s, well, incredible, Maanik. How are you sleeping? Are you having any strange dreams or even daydreams?”

Maanik laughed. “I’ve been daydreaming about becoming a bioengineer instead of a diplomat, does that count?”

Caitlin laughed. “Sorry, no. By the way, you know I spoke to your parents last week.”

“They told me.”

“They said you didn’t seem to remember anything that had happened?”

“Yeah,” Maanik said. “To be honest, I’m kind of relieved about that, Dr. O’Hara. Do you think my memory will return?”

“No,” Caitlin said. “At least it hasn’t for others who experienced trauma like that.”

“Anyway, I wanted to call and thank you personally. I don’t know what you did for me specifically but you saved my life. I don’t think my parents were exaggerating when they said that. And I’m so grateful.”

Caitlin couldn’t say anything for a moment. She was wiping tears from her eyes.

“How are you?” Maanik asked, her voice full of concern. “You experienced these things with me, right?”

“Fine,” Caitlin lied. “I absorb a little something from all my patients. I’m used to it. Lots of lead shielding.”

“My father has that too,” Maanik said. “I hope to be like you both.”

“I do hope you’ll keep in touch sometimes,” Caitlin said, sad to let her go.

“Absolutely. Okay, I have to go now—”

“Quickly, Maanik,” Caitlin said, “how is Jack London?”

“Oh.” Maanik was silent for a long moment. “Well…”

Caitlin’s stomach dropped through the floor. She remembered Maanik’s mother threatening to put him down.

“He was a little crazy last week,” Maanik continued.

Caitlin was about to ask what kind of crazy, but Maanik kept going.

“We decided to put him through obedience school again,” the young woman said. “He had his first class yesterday and he was a superstar, so we think that will do the trick.”

“That’s good,” Caitlin exhaled.

“And now I have to go,” Maanik said. “But thank you, Dr. O’Hara. Thank you so much.”

They said good-bye and ended the call, and Caitlin sat there for a few minutes holding her phone like a warm mug of tea. The words had been comforting but the reconnection, even through the phone, had been unsettling. She was trying to understand why.

Unbidden, a thought occurred to her.

The cazh got the Priests’ minds out of the way. Without it, they were no better at focusing than the rest of us.

And Maanik’s phone call had gotten Caitlin’s mind out of the way. Distraction as she well knew, could be a useful psychological process, helpful for finding answers. Just stop thinking and it will come…

She and Ben had spent hours talking and thinking. Time to stop.

Caitlin put the phone down and uncurled herself on the couch, feet flat on the floor. She was going to begin with what she knew the gesture she’d learned from Atash on his hospital deathbed. Caitlin crooked her right arm over her torso with her right fingers pointing toward her left shoulder. Then she angled her left hand to point away from her knees toward the floor, and immediately she felt something lift away from her left shoulder in a wave. The Galderkhaani gesture for “big water”—“ocean”—had worked. All of her intense emotions washed from her head down her spine and seemed to fly away from the base of her back. For the first time since she had helped Odilon, she felt in perfect balance.

She looked up and her eyes fell inexorably on her green globe. As if the orb felt her eyes upon it, the glass responded. The white web of lines inside elongated past the curve of the sphere into the air. It looked like the fin of a sailfish, glowing in light that wasn’t really there, now that the living room had darkened into full night. It was so beautiful Caitlin wanted to infiltrate it, be part of it. The lines extended forth, growing through the room until they filled half of it, with some of their tips touching Caitlin’s throat. This was different from before. There was no other person present, just… joy? She found herself singing in her mind. She and the orb were in tune with each other.

The music of the spheres, she thought. The harmonics of the universe. She didn’t feel safe but she felt comforted, somehow. Not with a spirit but not alone.

Maybe you’ve been cazhed with someone without knowing it! she thought, not entirely in jest.

In Iran, Vahin had suggested that the psychiatrist’s closeness to patients who had been traumatized essentially bonded her to them, and through them to past events—the trauma of Galderkhaan.

Caitlin returned her focus to the living room. In memory, not vision, she saw Vahin drinking jasmine tea across from his red-patterned wall in Iran—but inexplicably, an image of Madame Langlois followed with even more intensity. Cigar smoke wafted between her and Caitlin.

This is not of Vodou, the priestess had said toward the end of Caitlin’s time in Jacmel.

And that, Caitlin thought now, is why I need you here, someone here who understands. I need an anchor.

Holding the madame’s gaze through the smoke in her mind, Caitlin closed her eyes. Unbidden, she still felt the fingerlike span of light from the orb. Relenting, giving in to their touch, she gathered her deepest sense of self and slowly spun it forward, merging with the orb, while drawing on the energy of those she had met and bonded with over the last week—

And then the energy of another person was back, the newest bond, the dying woman falling from the clouds, fire all around. But in that fire was something else. Something green appeared in her mind’s eye. Not a bottle green. Paler, more yellow in it, tessellated and glowing with its own light.

The object was oblong, a tile of some kind pulsing with incredible power, like a magnet whose arcs of energy were visible. It blazed through the dying woman, all but obliterated that image, and dominated Caitlin’s mind with other images.

Beckoning. Somehow, the object was pulling her toward it.

Caitlin suddenly felt an enormous pressure on her eardrums followed by rapidly increasing pain. The pain was not in the vision: it was real. The green object, too, seemed to have substance, presence, power.

Break the connection, she told herself.

With a physical jerk that nearly sent her sprawling from the sofa, she found herself back in the living room. She was disoriented, frightened and even more so when she realized she was looking at a woman—a woman with short black hair, the woman who had shoved her backpack in the door of Caitlin’s subway train and then had wiped the air, flooding Caitlin’s mind.

And here she was in Caitlin’s apartment, down the hall from where Jacob lay sleeping. Caitlin pushed herself up from the couch. As she came to standing, the woman wiped the air before her, propelling Caitlin backward as if she’d been punched in the gut.

And then she was gone.

CHAPTER 15

Mikel’s brain was a suddenly empty vessel.

The two souls from Galderkhaan gazed into the eyes of the living man who had invaded the ruins of their city.

Rensat spoke first with some disbelief. “You are alive.”

“Yes,” Mikel said. “So far.” He added, “I think. How—how are we communicating?”

“The stones in the corridor,” she said with pleasure. “You physically activated them. They have connected us.”

Pao circled the intruder as if he were a specimen in a jar. Perhaps he was. “You have a stone of your own?”

Mikel followed where he was pointing. “That—that’s a radio,” he said. “I use it to communicate with fellow men but only on the surface.”

“Why did you enter this room?” the Galderkhaani man asked.

“Something was out there,” Mikel said. “A presence of some kind.” He shook his head. “Forgive me, but—how am I understanding you? I do not speak Galderkhaani.”

“The stones in this library have the wisdom of language,” Pao said.

“But my language did not exist when you did, when they were… made,” Mikel said.

“Then someone who spoke your tongue has ascended near this place,” Pao told him. “What the living knew, the stones now know.”

“How? By what mechanism?” Mikel asked.

Pao started to answer but a touch from Rensat stopped him.

“Your attire, the materials are—unfamiliar to us,” Rensat said. “Where are you from?”

“The north,” he answered. “Far from here, both in time and place.”

“By your reckoning, how old are we?” she asked.

“Judging from the map I saw out there, the contours of your coastline are familiar yet they had not yet been defined by the end of the Ice Age. That would make it about thirty thousand years ago.”

“An ‘ice age,’” Pao said, shaking his head. “The Technologists were right about that, at least.”

“Yes, and they should have stopped where they did,” Rensat said.

“Please explain,” Mikel implored. “There is so much I do not know. These Technologists—what were they trying to do?”

“In the beginning of their rise to power, they sought to tap heat from inside the earth, to melt the ice and protect our city,” Rensat said. “That project was accomplished and it led to the development of a larger idea. To burn their way to Candescence.”

“What you were discussing with the other man, Vol, at the ritual,” Mikel said.

Pao’s eyes showed surprise. “You saw that too?”

Mikel nodded.

“Have you seen Vol elsewhere?” Pao said, pressing him.

Mikel shook his head.

Pao and Rensat exchanged glances. A flicker of hope had risen and quickly perished.

“You’ve mentioned the Candescents several times,” Mikel said. “Who were they?”

“Who are they,” Rensat said, gently correcting him.

“I’m sorry,” Mikel said sincerely. That was clumsy. He had to be careful.

“They are unimaginably ancient beings who inhabit the cosmic plane,” Rensat explained.

“So you believe,” Pao added. “We do not know.”

“The tiles,” she said confidently.

“That is one explanation for the power of the stones,” Pao said. “Some of us agree with the Technologists that the tiles are simply minerals that vibrate in alignment with the planetary poles, that by some unknown mechanism they store and release everything they encounter along those lines: the energy of human thought, of animal memory, of all that has ever been witnessed or conceived.”

Mikel thought of Flora’s vectors. He was with the Technologists on this one.

“Some of us do not believe in miraculous physical ‘mechanisms’ that have defied understanding,” Rensat said. “The stones could not exist without intelligent creation.”

Mikel had heard this very same argument many times in many contexts; it would not be resolved here and now.

He had the sudden urge to drop it on the conference table before the Group, let them finger through it like an unassembled jigsaw puzzle.

Pao interrupted his thought process. “You said something was out there.”

Mikel nodded. “Fire. The… the ghost of a woman who died recently, on the ice. Burned to death.”

“You saw this—this ‘ghost,’ the ascended one?” Pao asked.

“No, she said her name,” Mikel answered. “I knew of her.”

“Did she say anything else?” Rensat asked.

“Yes,” Mikel told her. “She said, ‘Release me, please.’” He studied the two. “What was holding her?”

The spirits did not answer. But he remembered something they had been discussing earlier.

“Is it your ‘blessed Enzo’?” Mikel asked. “Is Enzo in the flame?”

“It is to be hoped,” Rensat said.

Pao regarded her sternly. “Enough!”

They stood mutely, stubbornly. That line of questioning was closed but Mikel had a great many other things he wanted to ask.

“Tell me about the Source,” he said.

“The Source is everywhere in Galderkhaan,” Pao told him. “Tunnels of magma connecting pool to pool.”

The orange spots on the map, Mikel realized. “The winds I rode to get here,” he said. “Those tunnels were conduits for lava?”

“Yes,” Pao said. “The entrances to the tunnels were placed where the winds were fierce and could be channeled underground, used to drive the sails of the digging apparatus.”

“They were expanded in secret, like so much of what the Technologists did,” Rensat added. “It is why the Source was so much stronger than any of us knew. No one realized the pools were already linked.”

Pao approached Mikel. “It is one of the reasons we have remained here,” he said. “We seek the identity of the one who turned the Source on. Do you know anything of that?”

“No,” Mikel said. “And—why should that matter now?”

The two souls fell silent. Their selective cooperation was starting to frustrate him. They were like Flora, always holding secret cards.

“Pao, Rensat—I don’t know much, but I’ve learned enough to know that there are inordinately dangerous forces here. I need to understand much more in order to protect my people.”

“How are they in jeopardy?” Pao asked, suddenly.

“I found a stone,” Mikel said. “It was drawn from the sea near here. It had the same olivine insets as these many others, and like them, it would vibrate, unpredictably. It gave me… visions. One of my associates was studying it. We think it killed him. It melted his brain.”

“Describe this stone in detail, please,” Rensat said.

“I just told you it melted a man’s brain,” Mikel said with rising irritation. “Does that even matter?”

“I am sorry he died,” Rensat said. “So many have, you know.”

Mikel did not appreciate the mild rebuke.

“The stone,” Pao said. “Tell me about it.”

Mikel did not have the patience to argue. He closed his eyes, visualized the design, and described it in detail.

Pao nodded, nodded again. “You found a stone from the motu-varkas—the tallest and most powerful tower, farthest out at sea. One point of the grand triangle.”

“That ring of tiles was the oldest and strongest in all of Galderkhaan,” Rensat said. “It contained a great concentration of energy.” Her tone grew somber. “That ring was crafted by Aargan, the chief Technologist, the one who made the whole construct come together.”

Pao added, “I have long suspected that she was the one who activated the Source, just to prove she could control it with the ring of motu-varkas.”

Rensat took a moment to consider her next words. “The Technologists used to call us, the Priests, a ‘cult of suicide,’ yet they were the ones who ravaged Galderkhaan. The Priests believed—we proved—that bodies are simply a vehicle to the ultimate goal of soul bonding to reach the higher planes.”

“You proved the existence of these other planes—how?” Mikel asked dubiously.

“In the cazh rituals we performed, stopping short of physical death, we had visions of the transpersonal plane, even the cosmic plane,” she said.

Pao approached Mikel. There was something new in his expression: impatience.

“There is another one we seek,” he said. “We have been searching for her as long as we have been down here.”

“Who is she?” Mikel asked.

In response, Pao plunged his hands at the tiles again. The tiles hummed, formed an image of a woman’s face. It was indistinct, distant, but obviously in pain or stress. Given the flames that glowed below it, it appeared to be a part of the same recording Mikel had seen earlier, of the destruction of Galderkhaan.

“You must tell me,” Pao said. “In your searches, you have encountered no one like this woman?”

Mikel looked at the face. Nothing registered. “Why is she so important?”

“Concentrate,” Pao said with obvious frustration.

Curious himself, and becoming inured to the spirits’ occasionally brusque manner, Mikel ran through the catalog of faces from his decade with the Group. He wished he had a laptop or tablet with the Group’s facial recognition software. He really wanted to help these two, who were truly lost souls.

Suddenly, he recalled that just over a week ago, when he’d been on board the ship on the Scotia Sea, right before seeing the airship burst from the iceberg. Flora had been sending notifications about the stone melting her deep freezers. She’d also mentioned a woman in a video in Haiti. Mikel had been too busy to chase will-o’-the-wisps. He remembered streaming the video at some point, with a lousy Internet connection. Though it had been a pinpoint of thought, now it was bright and clear—and important.

“That’s her,” Pao said, and turned from Mikel.

Oddly, horribly, Mikel felt like a drained glass. Had Pao been inside his mind? Or had the tiles done that? Without realizing it, during this brief interlude, Mikel had leaned against the wall. He could feel the power of the stones vibrating through his shoulder.

Mikel broke the connection by pushing off with his back. He looked at the two spirits, their expressions suddenly triumphant.

“You have seen her! She is of your time!” Pao said. He turned briefly to Rensat. “We cannot leave. We cannot give up now.”

She nodded in firm agreement.

“You must find her,” Pao said to Mikel. “You must bring her to us.”

“Why?” Mikel asked, surprised by the timidity of his own voice. “What good can that possibly do you? You can’t change the past.” Then, with a shudder that started in his knees, he added, “Can you?”

“You saw!” Rensat said with a cruel twist to her mouth, as if he had been complicit in something. “It has already been done.”

“When?”

“At the end,” Pao said. “Someone was present who did not belong.”

“You mean, this woman? From my own time?”

“So it appears,” Pao said. “A few of us managed to bond before she appeared in the sky and prevented the great final cazh.”

Mikel did not share the jubilation of the two Galderkhaani. He felt very, very sick. “You want me to bring her here to change the past,” Mikel said with awful clarity.

“To stop an annihilation!” Pao yelled.

Mikel cried out with shock as his eyesight was ripped away from him and turned toward the previous vision. He was back in the courtyard with the screaming, dying horrors rising above their burning bodies. It was like a Doré etching of hell from Dante’s Inferno come to ghastly life, with shrieks and flames mingled and rising through a canopy of black, cloudy death. He heard the souls of the dead shrieking with agony as they blindly passed other ascended souls in the sky—all of them lost, untranscended, alone, drifting aimlessly above the churning smoke.

Mikel regained his equilibrium somewhat and continued to watch the image. Then he saw the ultimate, final destruction of Galderkhaan. He saw a momentous pulse of fiery energy fueled by pool after pool of magma shooting from the direction of the sea. It rushed into the pavement below their feet and above, immolating the survivors, driving the mass of souls apart.

Above the dying city, he saw the image of the woman hovering and then the image vanished so swiftly that Mikel felt psychological whiplash that left him spinning. Pao was standing very still, his hands hanging at his side, his eyes on the bones on the floor. Mikel didn’t think he’d ever seen anyone look so sad. Rensat took a step closer to him but could only hover, could not touch him.

“The cazh was working, damn her blood!” Rensat said. “We might have taken thousands of souls to the transpersonal plane instead of leaving them stranded, strewn about in horrible isolation, unable ever to rise.”

“Why?” Mikel asked. “Why would someone from my time do that?”

“I don’t know,” Pao admitted.

“And I ask again: finding her now,” Mikel said, “what good will that do?”

It was Rensat who answered. “We seek two,” she reminded him. “This woman… and whoever activated the Source. Finding that genocidal maniac, we will use her to stop him.”

The implications were immediate and deep and they staggered Mikel. He couldn’t even respond. Pao and Rensat intended to rewrite all of history by preventing the destruction of Galderkhaan.

Desperate, impossible questions flooded Mikel’s brain. If they succeeded, if Galderkhaan were saved, would the whole course of history change? Would he suddenly cease to exist, since his own lineage would be altered through tens of thousands of years? Or did his existence prove that they had failed, since history had not been changed?

Mikel stood there shaking his head. “You will save—tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands at the cost of billions?” he asked, stumbling through his own thoughts.

“What would you do to save your home?” Pao asked.

“To prevent its loss, I’d do a great deal!” Mikel agreed. “But I wouldn’t go back centuries to do it!”

“You are not cazhed in permanent, eternal stasis,” Pao said. “So few Galderkhaani were able to reach the transpersonal plane, even being stuck here with a loved one… it can be desolate.”

“So you restore Galderkhaan,” Mikel said, “put the Source on hold, work out your issues with the Technologists, create a playground for your souls… and six billion people still die! No, far more than that—all of the people who lived for the last thirty thousand years!”

“Your thinking is flawed,” Pao said hotly, for the first time. “Ninety-seven thousand Galderkhaani would get to live and the result would be billions of Galderkhaani born in succeeding generations! Advanced, enlightened beings!”

“We have been blessed by the Candescents, we honor the Candescents, and we will be with the Candescents,” Rensat said. “That is our destiny and that is our mission.”

Mikel felt his gut knot and his mind blaze. If he could have struck these two, he would have. Their scheme defined religious fanaticism: no matter what the cost, they and their acolytes had to have their way. Even if they were right, even if some cosmic glory and eternal survival awaited the hundreds or thousands of Priests and Priestly followers who remained ascended but alone, not joined and transcended in some mythical higher plane, that did not justify imposing their will on countless civilizations that followed.

He had to get out of here. He needed counsel, not just Flora but this other woman… the one they sought. How had she gone to the past, and why, and what information could she add to this numbing mix?

The good news, for Mikel, was that Pao and Rensat had spent a long time looking for two people and had failed to find them both. He, at least, had a clue from the video about how to find one of them.

There was other good news. He didn’t have to stay here and listen to them anymore. He was pretty sure these beings could not hold him.

He hoped.

Pao had turned to Rensat while Mikel processed what he had heard. There was tenderness between the two, and Mikel reminded himself that even the world’s most notorious tyrants had families they loved. He did not feel compassion for this man, but a kind of terror he had never known. Mikel understood a love of home; of course he understood that. But theirs was gone because of its own failings. Other homes had taken its place, homes that they had no right to obliterate.

Mikel used Pao’s distraction as an opportunity to pull out the skin mask. He slapped it to his face and visualized the tunnel map he had seen. He couldn’t go backward, to where the tunnel had been aflame. There was only one other exit, the large chamber with the glass panel door through which Rensat had entered. If Mikel read the map right, it opened into another series of tunnels.

Not that it mattered, really. It was the only option he had.

Boring through the startled specters, he launched himself forward and threw open the glass panel.

CHAPTER 16

“We must do something.”

Adrienne Dowman turned to look at Flora, who had spoken almost inaudibly. She was staring through the window panel at the relic as if it had mesmerized her. After two full days, the stone was still floating, still stable.

“So,” Adrienne said. “You’re one of those.”

“One of what?” Flora said, not turning her head.

“One of those people who has a single success and takes that as a mandate to do anything you want.”

Now Flora deigned to look at her. She had avoided her new associate as much as possible, spending the day trying to find out where the hell Mikel was and looking for any scraps of new data about anomalies in the South Pole. So far, both endeavors had been unsuccessful. She was feeling uncommonly frustrated and didn’t feel like listening to a subordinate.

“I thought we had the conversation about my being uninterested in your opinions,” Flora said.

Adrienne smiled an annoying half smile. “The way I look at it, Dr. Davies, you do not have a choice but to listen.”

“Not?” Flora suggested.

“I don’t see that as an option,” Adrienne replied. “You’ve said it before: the rest of my career is going to be spent right here, working for you. You can’t let me off my chain until you go public with your results about these objects, and you know next to nothing about them. So that’s pretty far in the future. The equation, then, is: ‘you need me’ plus ‘I wish to be heard’ equals ‘you will listen.’”

Flora stared at Adrienne for a moment longer, not quite believing what she was hearing, then looked back at the stone. “And you will find that I’m capable of very selective hearing.”

“We’ll see,” Adrienne said. “Let’s start with this. You’ve solved a problem with that stone. I suggest—I urge you not to turn off the system and start messing with it again or you may have to solve others before you’re ready.”

“We have no choice,” Flora said. “You’ve been taking readings since it’s been in stasis and learned very little—”

“Oh, I haven’t learned very little,” Adrienne replied. “So far, I’ve learned nothing. This object is like an electron. Stop it and it’s just another particle. You only learn when it’s active, in motion.”

“Then what choice do I have but to shut off the—what did you call it?”

“The node,” Adrienne replied. “That’s the location in the array of sound waves capable of sustaining the levitation.”

“Yes. All right, Adrienne. Give me an option.”

“Patience,” Adrienne replied. She cocked her head toward the stone. “I’ve had to tiptoe around this relic, literally. Every garbage truck, every bus that passed by on the street had me on edge. Vibrations of any kind affect sound.”

“I understand that,” Flora said. “But I don’t think you understand what we have.”

Adrienne opened her mouth to speak but thought better of it.

“The stability of a singularity that suddenly, inexplicably reaches out and expands, that creates massive inflation,” Flora said. “What does that describe?”

Adrienne replied immediately. “The Big Bang.”

“Quite so,” Flora said. She gazed at the artifact. “This is the beginning of the universe in a bottle. And it is artificial, though constructed of naturally occurring minerals, and possibly made by intelligent hands. That’s significant.”

“Dr. Davies, it’s an ancient stone in a node,” Adrienne said, correcting her.

Flora chose that moment to selectively not hear.

“And you said ‘intelligent,’ not ‘human,’” Adrienne pointed out as she replayed the statement in her head. “What did you mean by that?”

Again, Flora ignored her. Instead, she asked, “What would happen to me if I walked in there? It’s just ultrasound, right? The same that’s used on pregnant women?”

“And that we use to break up kidney stones. Or, perhaps, Group directors.”

“So it could be destructive.”

“Yes,” Adrienne sighed. “I’ll just say I hope you won’t do that. It would be a seriously flawed decision.”

Flora smiled.

Adrienne was not warmed by the smile. “You’re not going to listen.”

“All those vehicles that passed by, the trucks and buses—they did not cause an imbalance, did they?” Flora asked.

Adrienne’s mouth tightened. “Dr. Davies, you were smart enough to hire me and now I’m asking you to be smart enough to stay out of the lab until I figure out a safe, sane next step.”

“When will that be?”

“Next Friday, four-oh-one p.m.”

Flora ignored Adrienne’s unwelcome quip. “Worst case—what happens if I go in?”

“All right, here’s the truth,” Adrienne said. “Let’s ignore the question of stability. It’s ultrasound on steroids in there. What that means is, if you don’t stay inside too long and if you’re protecting your eardrums, any other effects on you should be minimal. Your body heat will probably rise.”

“How long is too long?”

“When you start feeling like you have a fever, that’s too long.”

“Seconds? Minutes?”

“Maybe two minutes,” Adrienne said. “I just don’t know. And I repeat, I do not want to find out.”

Flora had faith in the iron constitution that came with her Welsh heritage. She wanted to test that envelope. “Anything else?”

“There’s a minimal risk of cavitation, bubbles forming in your blood, tissues, or organs.”

“The practical effects of which are?”

“Your blood vessels could rupture.”

Flora gazed at the stone. “How minimal is minimal?”

Adrienne rubbed her eyebrows. “Almost nonexistent if you don’t linger once the other symptoms set in.”

“Good.” Flora swung away from the window and strode down the hall.

“Get me out of here,” Adrienne said under her breath, her eyes betraying fear as she watched the relic hovering, quiet and still and ominous.

Flora came back gloved and holding a tray with eight objects, all about the same size and shape as the artifact. Adrienne could see at a glance that none were made of the same type of stone. She guessed ancient clay, wood, and copper right off the bat. One looked like it might be alabaster, and another looked sheathed in a beige leather with an odd sheen. Flora balanced the tray carefully in one hand, thrust a pair of surgical gloves at Adrienne, and tweaked her headphones more securely over her ears. Then she opened the door to the chamber.

“Come on,” she ordered.

“Thank you, no,” Adrienne snapped.

“You’re not going to be inside,” Flora returned. “You’re going to stand in the doorway and hand me these.”

Adrienne stood still for a moment, then pulled on the gloves with an insolent look. She received the tray dubiously. “Do any of these have a history of acting up?”

“No, they’ve never misbehaved,” Flora said as she eyed the room, the boundaries of which were set by the black panels on the walls, floor, and ceiling.

Adrienne reached into the pocket of her lab coat and thumbed on a recorder. She announced the time. Flora stood still and shook out her hands. After taking a long breath, she slowly stepped into the frame of inaudible sound waves—

And felt nothing. Flora did a head-to-toe check. Heart rate: unchanged. Breathing: normal. Vision and hearing: neither deprived nor hallucinating. She grinned and approached the artifact.

“Dr. Davies, can you hear me all right?”

“I can.”

“If you start to feel that the world is going swimmy in any way, or if you suddenly feel like you’re sort of distanced from everything, like it takes extra effort for your hand to reach an object, that’s a warning sign.”

“I’m always distanced from everything. It’s called objectivity.”

“Is that a joke?”

“Yes. Hand me one of the artifacts.”

Adrienne surveyed the objects. She selected the alabaster one and leaned forward into the room to convey it to Flora’s outstretched hand. Once Flora had received it, Adrienne quickly backed out into the doorway.

Flora regarded the carvings on this stone and compared them to the triangle on the relic. She had memorized the patterns long ago, knew that there was no obvious sequence among them.

“At the risk of stating the obvious,” Adrienne said, “do not move the main stone in any way.”

“Okay. It stays on its back. So. What’s the pattern? The creators of these were not children playing with dominoes.”

“Unlike you.”

Flora did not bother responding to that. She continued where she’d left off. “I’m going to align the faces first.” And with that, Flora carefully slid the alabaster artifact into the space above the main stone, as close as possible without their touching.

“What does it feel like?” Adrienne asked.

Flora was glad her companion’s first priority was still science. “I feel a slight repulsion between the objects.” Quickly, she flipped the alabaster so that its carvings faced the ceiling instead of the main stone. A very gentle feeling of suction resulted and she let go of the alabaster. She heard Adrienne gasp. Immediately the stone settled in, floating in the air a bare millimeter above the other.

“The node’s not big enough to hold all of these up,” Adrienne said.

“Next,” Flora ordered.

Adrienne regarded the tray. Carefully, she picked up the wooden artifact. Its center had begun to petrify but its edges had the fragility of very, very old organic matter. Adrienne held up the object carefully, then leaned in to hand it to Flora.

“This is about an ounce, roughly one-third the weight of the first stone passed into the chamber,” Adrienne said into the recorder. “We should have taken accurate measurements.”

“It’s twenty-six point four grams,” Flora said.

Adrienne’s mouth clapped shut as Flora slid the wooden artifact above the alabaster one. Again, with a slight suction the object began to levitate, not touching the one below it.

Both women remained silent as, one by one, Adrienne passed the items from the tray. She didn’t speak again until there was only one artifact remaining.

“This is impossible,” Adrienne said.

“Isn’t it, though?” Flora asked with an edge of delight. Her ears were pounding slightly and she felt warm but not enough to be concerned.

“Dr. Davies, I don’t think you realize—they don’t all fit in the node. The artifacts are helping each other. You’re sure they’re not magnetic?”

“Wood? Fabric?” Flora said.

“They could still be affected by any magnetic fields in the stones.”

“No.” Flora slid the last artifact onto the top of the stack. “They are not magnetic. The other objects are not being impacted by paramagnetism or diamagnetism. We did those tests.” Then she just stood there and looked at them.

“I just want to remind you that you’ve been in there for well over two minutes. How do you feel?” Adrienne asked.

“Wonderful, actually,” Flora replied. “It’s… clean here. Pure. I don’t know how else to describe it.”

Adrienne’s eyes shifted from the objects to the Group’s director. It was the first time she’d seen her smile like this. “Dr. Davies, why are you obsessed with these?”

“A scholar’s interest in the inexplicable.”

“No,” Adrienne said. “A scholar would be publishing articles about these in journals, and asking every scientist and researcher she could contact for help with studying them.”

Flora ignored her.

“You’re keeping secrets,” Adrienne said.

Again, she made no reply.

“Who or what are you protecting?” Adrienne asked. “What did you cover up a death for?”

Flora turned ever so slightly and glanced back. “What death?”

“My predecessor,” Adrienne said. “I asked around, I heard about Arni Haugan.”

Flora smiled mirthlessly. “You appear to be a better detective than you are a scientist.”

“Not fair and not true,” Adrienne said.

Flora turned her back on the younger woman.

“Any idea what really happened to Haugan?” Adrienne asked.

“The artifact,” Flora said grudgingly. “But we don’t know how. We have no idea what he was doing with it at the time.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Not enough,” Flora admitted. “This is a lab and it was a workplace accident. They happen.”

Adrienne frowned but she decided not to pursue the issue now. She didn’t like Flora but she couldn’t afford to conflate that with the truth of what Flora had just said.

Flora surprised her then. “Besides, Haugan is not gone. Not really. Not if some theories are correct.”

Adrienne took a step forward. “Doctor, I think the ultrasound may be affecting you—”

“Be quiet. Here’s something you don’t know,” the woman went on. “The civilization that created these artifacts proved that there is life after death. More than proved it, in fact. We think they systematized their access to it.”

Adrienne stared at her. “Myth.”

“Fact.”

“What are you going off of?”

“Partial translations. Very partial. Drawings. A gut feeling and dreams.”

“Dreams?” Adrienne’s voice was soaked in doubt and frustration.

“Shared dreams,” Flora stressed. “As we gathered these artifacts together, my associate Mikel and I began to have the same dreams.”

“Elaborate, if you don’t mind,” Adrienne said.

Flora did not respond. She felt fine, still, but she was puzzled and transfixed by the miracle of what she was seeing in the chamber. Cautiously, she reached into the node and removed the top artifact. When nothing changed, she slid it, carvings faceup, beneath the main stone.

Instantly they felt the room heat up. Within three seconds sweat was beading on their foreheads.

“Whatever you just did, undo it!” Adrienne pleaded.

Flora didn’t hear her. She was suddenly having difficulty breathing. The heat was as powerful as a sauna set on high. Her head felt heavy and she put a hand on the back of her neck.

“Dr. Davies!” Adrienne shouted. “Grab the artifacts and get out!”

Flora heard a hum and saw that the main stone was vibrating. She reached a weakened hand forward and carefully removed the top artifact from the stack.

“Doctor!” Adrienne screamed. “Don’t be gentle about it!”

Flora took two at once but she was trembling at the knees now. She placed the objects in the crook of her arm. Then she realized she was not the only thing shaking, so was the floor. Suddenly, all the stones began to wobble madly. The bottom one dropped from the stack and hit the floor. Flora reached down as fast as she could manage and saw that the black floor panel was bubbling. She pulled the artifact from the chaos.

Adrienne yelled something incoherent and started to move into the chamber, but she found that her feet wouldn’t lift properly. The concrete floor was liquefying and creeping toward the doorway, as if trying to escape the room. With effort she could lift her boots free from the slow sludge but it took a lot of muscle.

She looked up to scream at Flora again and saw the entire stack of artifacts collapse and fall to the floor. The main stone almost leapt from the pile and Flora was able to snatch it midflight as the other artifacts hit the bubbling, oozing black panel. She grabbed at the scattered stones and managed to retrieve them all, albeit dripping black liquid. Then she tried to turn and run but the floor gripped the edges of her shoes as it flowed.

Adrienne took a giant, heaving backward step from the doorway. She almost fell over but shoved the edge of the tray at the wall to gain equilibrium. She was horrified to feel the wall soften beneath its edge and jerked the tray away as soon as she felt balanced. Then she yanked her other leg out of the doorway too.

“Throw them to me!” she told Flora.

Flora, still lunging slowly forward, threw the first artifact, then the next, and the next. It was so hot she wanted to vomit. She felt tears in her eyes as she saw fragments fly from the wooden artifact as Adrienne caught it. Only the petrified center was left now as the rest of it melted into the custard concrete floor.

Flora held the last artifact, the main stone, the Serpent, which was vibrating so hard she could feel the waves through her arms down to her feet. Her vision clouded, suffused with red and she thought she smelled sulfur. Vaguely she could hear Adrienne screaming at her. She took another weak step forward and with all her willpower, she let go of the Serpent in Adrienne’s direction.

The stone tumbled through the air and Adrienne dove forward and snatched it from the liquid concrete. Then the girl disappeared from the doorway. Flora heard the sound of running and suddenly realized she was hearing again. Her mind was clearing. The heat was lifting. She was gaining more control of her limbs. She lurched from the room and the floor seemed steady beneath her so she stopped, resting against a wall. She looked back at the chamber. The black panels had melted halfway down the walls. Long drips trailed from the panels on the ceiling. But the melting had stopped. The floor was still. The panels were no longer bubbling.

“Damn it!” she heard from down the hall. “We need another room!”

Adrienne was heading back down the hall in Flora’s direction, yelling. “I’ll get the rest of the panels. That deep freezer will give us fifteen minutes, max!”

CHAPTER 17

“But he’ll die!” Siem der Graaf shouted.

The taller man blocked Eric Trout’s path to the spiral stairway. They were standing nearly nose to nose in the “jam tart,” the large red module that served as Halley VI’s social hub. Eric’s mustache hung in two tendrils past his chin, and days of sharp frustration had burned his typically jovial expression to a frazzle.

“Der Graaf,” Trout huffed, “this is essentially the only situation where the title ‘base commander’ actually means something. Step aside.”

The younger man opened his mouth to speak but just shook his head.

Trout’s chin sank into the collar of his heavy turtleneck. “Der Graaf, we’re following orders strictly on this. We start the move off the ice shelf in thirty minutes.”

Trout raised a thick-fingered hand and gently pushed Siem to the side, then hurried down the stairs.

“But surely you don’t need everyone for the move,” Siem argued, following on his heels. “You will have excess personnel, in fact. Or do you plan to have them sitting around inside the modules as you tow them?”

“Anyone without a specific job will be in the trucks and bulldozers, heading to the new location.”

“Fine. Then give me two men for just that amount of time, before you need them to start hanging pictures back on the walls.”

Trout fired back a severely disapproving look.

“Two men and Ski-Doos to save a life!” Siem said, pressing the commander.

Trout turned to face him in the empty dining area.

“You cannot have them,” Trout said finally. “We have to turn off everything for the move except the hydraulics. No electronics. Communications will be off. It’s unconscionable to send out one man, let alone three, on a dangerous rescue mission with zero radio contact. I simply cannot, der Graaf. I will not.”

“Then you’re killing him.”

“He did this to himself, without orders,” Trout replied. His expression softened. “Has it not occurred to you he might want that?”

“What, to die?”

“No,” Trout said. “Not to endanger anyone else! You said he sent you back—”

“I don’t think he fully understood the danger,” Siem replied. “No,” he went on. “I think he just made the greatest discovery of his life and he wasn’t thinking clearly. He would want to live to see it brought to daylight.”

“Der Graaf, I’ve spent five winters and summers on the ice, watching people’s minds bend in the twenty-four-hour darkness or light. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s not to ascribe logic to someone behaving illogically. That’s how to get more people killed!”

“He was as sane as any of us,” Siem snapped.

“Really? You mentioned that he ran out of ice screws so he slid the rest of the way down the crevasse.”

“It was not very far.”

“Far enough that he couldn’t climb it?”

“Yes—”

“Thereby leaving himself without a way back up. He knew this, did he not?”

“He did, which is why I hammered in the screws he’ll need.”

“Did he ask you to do that?”

Siem was silent.

“Der Graaf. Did Mikel Jasso ask you if you had extra ice screws?”

After a long moment Siem answered, “No.”

“Then he was mad. Or a reckless fool. I don’t know which, and sadly, I cannot afford to care.”

“So, then, we let a mad, reckless fool die in a crevasse, because it is dangerous and inconvenient to rescue him and recover his scientific find—which, I may add, is one reason we are out here. To expand human knowledge.”

“Damn you. You’re not even a scientist! You’re maintenance!”

“That, sir, is not an argument.”

Trout waved away the rebuke. “Anyway, you know me better. We have to get the station onto grounded ice, ice that isn’t inexplicably melting, ice that isn’t subject to unpredictable seismic occurrences as our Norwegian friends have cautioned us. Now, you are wasting my—”

“We can do both,” Siem said. “We can. We must.”

“No.”

With a brusque sweeping movement, Trout made sure Siem left the module ahead of him. He also assigned the young man to assist Ivor and Dr. Bundy on all tasks, so that he couldn’t steal a Ski-Doo and try to rescue Mikel by himself.

Outside, tempers were hair-trigger and the clipped conversations were tense. It was more than just the pressure of setting up to tow the jam tart and its seven blue sisters, one by one, across almost forty miles of ice. Every person on the team felt that the outside world was filled with odd shadows that did not seem to align with the position of the sun. Over and over the workers’ eyes snapped toward things that weren’t there. No one ever took safety and security for granted here. But no one had ever feared their surroundings quite like this, either.

The weather was cooperating at least: almost no wind, and not cold enough to comment on it.

Eric Trout did the rounds, checking in by radio with each person to make sure they were a go. Then, from inside one module, he started flicking switches. First their radios died. Then the modules. Everyone felt instantly forlorn and abandoned; even Ivor, who had been singing a Scottish drinking song, stopped.

Trout clambered down and signaled to the engineer in charge of the first blue research center to be towed.

Siem, who had been working with Dr. Bundy securing the laboratory, stopped suddenly.

“Do you feel that?” he muttered to the scientist.

“What?”

“In your stomach,” Siem said. “Pressure. Waves of pressure.”

Bundy hesitated, then replied, “A little. It’s just nerves.”

“Just nerves… doing what?” Siem asked earnestly.

Bundy looked at him strangely and didn’t reply.

Several men worked with shovels around the ski tip of one strut of the blue unit until it began rising. Siem joined them, trying to give himself something to focus on besides his uneasiness. When the leg had completely retracted, they began to pack snow a meter deep beneath it. Repeating this process with the other three supports would create a new, sturdy foundation for the structure to rise on its hydraulics, allowing for its hitch frame to be attached. Then the team would attach it to a bulldozer and a truck for its long trip across the ice.

As they worked on the snow beneath each leg, Siem noticed that his discomfort increased when the jacking stopped and the team was working in silence. He also noticed that he wasn’t the only one feeling it. Several of the people paused to adjust their waistbands or rest their hands on their ribs.

Even Bundy noticed and glanced around, his goggled eyes coming to rest in Siem’s direction.

Suddenly Ivor griped, “What in the great white hell is goin’ on? I feel like I’m at a bloody rock show!”

With little wind to scatter sound, his words rang clearly over the work site. There was a chorus of agreement.

“That’s exactly it,” someone said. “I feel like I have a big sound speaker on my stomach.”

“Not a speaker,” Ivor said. “A subwoofer.”

“Yes,” Siem said. There seemed to be a very low-pitched, sub-audible frequency, something none of them had ever experienced.

The team was silent a moment, looking toward the horizons. But their world was still empty save for the modules and vehicles… and shadows that looked out of sync.

Everyone jumped when the last hydraulic leg started jacking up.

“That’s all we need,” muttered Bundy. “Mass hysteria.”

“What about the PALAOA recording?” Siem asked. “Could that be the problem?”

The Perennial Acoustic Observatory in the Antarctic Ocean was a German effort located northeast of the Troll station, under the ice and underwater. A year or so ago they had picked up a remarkably loud, very deep buzz that sounded like a droning airplane engine. “A bit like the world’s largest didgeridoo,” as one of the Australians had described it. And the Germans had confirmed that there were no ships anywhere within a thousand miles of the receiver, so to date the source was another of Antarctica’s multitude of mysteries.

“We’d actually hear it if that were it,” said Bundy.

“And we’re not underwater anyway,” Ivor said, wandering over.

“Maybe we’d better call the Norweg—” Trout started, then looked back at the dark power module. “Oh. Damn.”

“You think it could be seismic?” Siem asked.

Trout shook his head. “If it was an earthquake, we wouldn’t feel it in our guts but nowhere bloody else.”

The hydraulic leg stopped when it had fully retracted. The silence was as empty as the vista surrounding them. Everyone set their shovels to the snow. Because the air was still and crystal particles of ice did not stir, no one saw a blank space of air pucker about a hundred feet from the module. Slowly, the void sucked itself into the invisible shape of a circle. Then it blew itself out.

The team didn’t see it but they felt it in their bellies. Nearly everyone cursed and swung their hands to grip their torsos, dropping their shovels.

The air puckered again in a different spot, in the shadow of a module, collapsing on itself like a vertical sinkhole. The shadow shrank, then expanded, so this time half the team saw it and cried out. A moment later the air snapped back to normal. Amid the shouting, Bundy, the nearest, ran to the spot and stood in it, waving his arms around.

“I don’t feel a damn thing!” he called.

Then there was a horribly recognizable sound—metal, wrenching. They spun and watched as the facing wall of the nearest blue module pinched inward, as though grabbed from the inside. It continued to implode with a crunching noise until it formed the shape of a circle. Then the metal flew outward with a metallic shriek. The surrounding joints held, the wall did not detach, but it warped as it expanded, leaving it bulbous and grotesque.

Almost instantly, the air behind Siem sucked back, his shoulders with it. Trout grabbed his sleeve and pulled hard. Siem opened his mouth but couldn’t scream. Trout jerked him free just as the air blew convex, knocking Siem to his knees, then facedown. In shock, he quickly raised his head and shook the snow from his face as Trout bent protectively over him.

There was another metallic squeal. This time it was a leg of the module they’d been working on. As the air pulled back, the leg bent with it, and suddenly there was a flash of light like sustained lightning, brilliant and unyielding. As the first painful shock of the magnesium-white flare subsided, the glow seemed to possess a shape.

“Do you see that?!” Ivor shouted.

“Yes!” everyone called out.

They were staring at the mostly featureless mask of a human face. As it continued to form it began to burn. Strangely, the high, all-consuming fires did not throw off any heat.

What appeared to be a mouth opened wide.

“Ul… !” it cried in a voice that sounded like a monstrous Antarctic gale.

Almost at once another metal leg bent the other way. Unsteady now, the huge module began to list to one side. The team shouted and ran from under it. Fingers struggling beneath his thick gloves, Trout dragged the still-prone Siem by the shoulders, as the big blue beast leaned until its side crashed to the snow.

The team was openly scared now, looking in all directions for the next anomaly, unconsciously clumping together for protection. Trout urged Siem back on his feet.

There was another suck of air about seven or eight feet above them—and the face beneath the fire took on greater substance, now with more rough detail: its mouth open, eyes wide.

“Ul…vor…ul…vor!”

Two men fell to their knees, clutching their sides.

“What is it?” Trout said in a trembling voice as he retreated from the group

“This is insane!” Bundy shouted back, looking from Trout to the circle.

“I see… eyes… the mouth!” Siem whispered.

Bundy didn’t answer. He was looking up at the face of fire, its dark eyes scanning the group as though they were searching. The manifestation seemed to be struggling, repeatedly trying to stabilize and failing.

“Ulvor!” it cried again. “Ulvor o Glogharas!” This time it was clearly a human-sounding voice, intensely magnified, the words echoing across the ice like a sonic boom.

The face gained sharpness, clarity, even as the flames licked at it. The eyes were pearls of black amid the bronzed silhouette.

Parts of a body became visible now too. There was a bare shoulder and hands that were engulfed in tongues of flame moving in slow, sinuous gestures.

The air was pulsing more violently now. A full figure formed, all of it ablaze, hovering in the air, looking, looking…

“Vol!” it screamed. “Enzo pato Vol!”

And then the air exploded and the figure was gone.

The researchers remained where they were, stunned into silence. All except Siem who sought and found Trout.

“Can you explain that?” Siem demanded.

“Localized aurora… St. Elmo’s fire. There is a sane explanation.”

“Well I know someone who might be able to,” he said. “I am going to get Mikel Jasso.”