The Sound of Seas

CHAPTER 1

It was nearly dawn when an exhausted Ben Moss left Lenox Hill Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Nothing seemed real to the British-born UN translator. But that was becoming the new normal ever since he and Caitlin had been delving into the long-dead world of Galderkhaan and its living emissaries—ghosts, spirits, energies, or whatever they were; during those few weeks he had lost his old perspective on what constituted “real.”

No, that is not entirely true, he thought. What is very real is that Caitlin is presently unconscious and nonresponsive.

Yet even as he thought that, his arms moved. He had been spending all his spare time trying to piece together and translate the language of Galderkhaan—so much time that it seemed almost unnatural not to make superlative hand gestures as he spoke.

That too was a new normal. Along with watching people who unconsciously moved their hands as they spoke, wondering, Are you descended from Galderkhaani?

Ben walked onto Third Avenue, into the lamplit darkness of the New York predawn. It was late fall and, in addition to the darkness, a cold wind swept in from the East River, adding to his sense of desolation. He was unsure what to do next. That unfamiliar confusion frightened him. Typically, Ben followed the lead of the UN ambassadors. He didn’t have to plan very much, to think further than the next few words. The one time he had tried doing that, as a student at NYU—loving Caitlin—it ended with an estrangement that lasted for years.

Galderkhaan had brought back all the old fears of wanting something, of planning for something, of being disappointed. Now Caitlin’s life might hang on him reengaging.

Not being a family member, Ben was only able to get answers from attending physician Peter Yang because the linguist was the only one who could explain—more or less—what had brought Caitlin to this condition.

“You told the EMT that she was—self-hypnotizing in the park?” Dr. Yang had asked as they stood in the hospital waiting room.

“Yes,” Ben had said. That was the only way he could think to describe what he suspected was going on.

“Do you know why?” the doctor had enquired.

“She was… she thought she might be able to contact spirits,” he said. “It’s become a professional hot topic for her.”

“Why?”

“Several of her patients needed help in that area—she didn’t tell me more.”

“Several?” the doctor had asked.

“Similar reactions to psychological trauma,” Ben replied.

“Coincidence, then?”

“That is what she was—exploring,” he said carefully.

“I see. No mental illness in her past?”

“None.”

“Do you know if she has experienced visions, hallucinations?”

That had been a question full of dynamite. Ben had thought carefully how to answer. “Yes, but I don’t think there’s a neurological—”

“You’re a doctor, Mr. Moss?”

“No. But she chose to do these things,” he said with some annoyance. He didn’t like being challenged on translations, and he didn’t like being challenged on this. “As I said a moment ago, Doctor, she was self-hypnotizing. A choice.”

“All right, then,” the physician went on. “What about drugs, alcohol—”

“No drugs, no alcohol in excess.”

“Depression, schizophrenia, hysterical reactions, near-death experiences?”

He answered yes to the last two, explaining—once again, revealing as little as possible—that Dr. O’Hara had been treating patients who suffered from both of those and she had experienced a kind of empathetic blowback.

“Not uncommon with good hypnotists,” Dr. Yang mentioned. “Is this similar to the trauma work she did in Phuket, Cuba, and elsewhere?”

Ben brightened. “You know about that?”

“I’ve read what she has published.”

“Yes, that work and this are very much related. Back then she was seeking a way to—short-circuit PTSD, if you will. She was continuing where she left off.”

The doctor seemed less alarmed when he learned there was a context for the experiments. The diagnosis, for now, was psychogenic unresponsiveness. Dr. Yang said they would keep her in the hospital for more tests, but that was all he would say. Ben would have to find out more from Caitlin’s parents. He had phoned them, waking them, trying and failing not to alarm them. It was one of the few times his smooth British accent and composure had been a total fail. They were on their way in from Long Island.

So Ben left the complex, largely uninformed, not quite aware of what had happened, and utterly unsure what to do next.

There were no phone messages. He hadn’t expected any; neither Anita Carter nor Flora Davies had his cell number. Anita was a colleague and friend of Caitlin’s, a psychiatrist who had stayed with Caitlin’s son, Jacob, at the apartment; Davies was the head of the Group, an organization based in a Fifth Avenue mansion and which collected information and relics from Galderkhaan. Ben did not know anything about the latter. Neither had Caitlin before she went down to its headquarters, a visit that led directly to her collapse in the adjacent Washington Square Park.

Bundled against the cold, Ben decided to do what he always did: take small steps and see where they went. He paused in the doorway of an office building to call Caitlin’s landline, to make sure Jacob was all right. That was what Caitlin would have wanted him to do.

Anita picked up in the middle of the second ring. She said that the ten-year-old was in his room, up early after a restless night, but that there was something more pressing.

“What’s wrong?” Ben asked.

“There’s someone here,” Anita said with concern in her voice. “First tell me—how’s Caitlin? Where is she?”

“In the hospital.”

“Is she all right?”

“She’s unconscious—doctors wouldn’t tell me much.”

“Shit.”

“Anita, who’s there?”

The woman hesitated.

“Just say it,” Ben told her. “Nothing would surprise me.”

“All right.” She lowered her voice, said closely into the phone, “It’s a Vodou priestess. And her son.”

“Madame Langlois and Enok?”

“Jesus, yes!” Anita seemed caught off guard. “How did you… was Caitlin expecting them? I assume she met them in Haiti—”

“Not expecting that I’m aware of,” Ben said. Caitlin had met the Vodou priestess and her houngan son while trying to help a young girl in Port-au-Prince. Gaelle Anglade was one of the youths whose trauma seemed linked to Galderkhaan. If the duo had been planning to visit, Caitlin would not have failed to mention it. “They just showed up?”

“About an hour ago,” Anita said. “They flew in from Haiti, came right here, and the priestess flat-out announced that Caitlin is in the coils of a serpent.”

“The great serpent!” Ben heard a woman’s voice say in the background.

“Forgive me,” Anita said, lowering her voice. “The great serpent?”

“We did not come right here,” the Haitian woman added. “Should have. I do not like Miami. Too chaotic.”

“Right, right,” Anita said into the phone. “Ben, what the hell is going on?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” he answered truthfully. He did not know how much Caitlin may have told her about Galderkhaan and did not want to get into that now. Leaving the protection of the doorway, he saw a cab, hurried to the curb, and flagged it. “I’m coming over there. Has Jacob been in his room the entire time?”

“Yes,” Anita said. “He’s been in there drawing a comic book about Captain Nemo… he’s fine. Ben, I’m a pretty good psychiatrist and very good listener and there’s something you’re not telling me. What exactly happened to Caitlin?”

“Firefighters found her lying unconscious in Washington Square Park.”

“Oh, Ben…”

“I know. There were fires—maybe a gas leak. Perhaps she was overcome.”

“I got the alert on my phone, didn’t put the two together. Should I call her folks?”

“Done. They’re on the way to Lenox Hill.”

“Jesus. What does the doctor say? Or wouldn’t they tell you?”

“He was like the bloody sphinx, with occasional claws.”

“Jesus,” she said again. “Maybe if I call him, doctor to doctor?”

“From his questions, I don’t think he knows much. I’m more concerned about Jacob and your guests.”

“I understand. Look, I’ll arrange with my office to stay here as long as I’m needed. Meanwhile, what do I do about… them?”

“Nothing, other than keep them away from Jacob,” he said. “Have they asked about him?”

“No—but they’re obviously involved in this whole ‘thing’ somehow,” she whispered. “How else could they know that something was going to happen to Caitlin?”

“I just don’t know,” Ben said. “Look, Caitlin’s got a can of mace in her night table if you need it. I’ll be there in about ten minutes. And don’t ask how I know that.”

“Wasn’t,” Anita replied. “What’s the doorman’s name? In case I need him?”

“I think Elvis is on at this hour.”

“Elvis?”

“Yeah. He’s okay.”

“What about you?” Anita asked. “How are you?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” he told her. “Just moving ahead. See you soon.”

Ben sat back in the cab, watched the video display in the seat, saw the news alert from Washington Square. There weren’t just fires; there were floods, water-main breaks, crowds of students who were being hustled from dorms into the streets. The driver was talking to someone in Nepali on his Bluetooth. Ben couldn’t even tune it out; he understood everything about the family’s dispute with the city over a dangerous school crossing in Queens.

Noise and unrest, Ben thought. It didn’t end with the tamping down of the tensions between India and Pakistan. It just went back underground, unsettling everyone at a low boil. Thanks to Caitlin and her commitment to helping, he was now acutely aware of it.

Caitlin, he thought, choking up for the first time. What happened down there, Cai? But it was more than wondering; it was pain and guilt. While Caitlin sought a way to rescue the kids who had been assaulted by Galderkhaani spirits—Maanik Pawar in New York, Gaelle Anglade in Haiti, Atash Gulshan in Iran—Ben Moss, linguist, had been pushing the Galderkhaani language on her, calling and texting and meeting with her to describe with great enthusiasm each new discovery or supposition. He had made her part of a quest that should have ended, for her, with the curing of Maanik and Gaelle. He tried—and failed—not to feel resentment at the way she had kept him out of her research and discoveries. It brought up old feelings about the way she had conceived Jacob with a man she had only just met on a relief mission, someone who later became the very definition of “absentee father.”

Tears pressed against the backs of his eyes as he thought of the girl he had shared so much with, who he had strongly reconnected with over Maanik, who he was now helplessly in love with. He wanted her back not just from this crisis but in all ways, and he didn’t know how to go about any of it.

Baby steps? Ben thought with sharp self-reproach. His limited research into Galderkhaan barely translated the fragments of ancient language they possessed, let alone provided insights into the existence of souls in the Ascendant, Transcendent, and Candescent realms. How was he supposed to help Caitlin with this?

Maybe the madame has insights, he thought then hoped. The priestess had been helpful in Haiti. She certainly has some kind of second sight.

As the cab sped west across Central Park, Ben tried to be useful—and consoled—by applying himself to the purely scholarly side of the problem. He was amazed at how much cultural overlap had been revealed among Galderkhaani, Vodou, Hindu, and Viking lore—peoples who had no contact in the dawn of our known civilization. Yet, the same cultural archetypes appeared. Inevitability? Or was it something deeper. Was there a connection that went back to this civilization that predated all others?

How can that not be the case? he asked himself.

Nor was this the time to figure it out. He did not see how that kind of research would help Caitlin.

By the time the taxi reached Caitlin’s Upper West Side apartment building, the morning had already blossomed into early dog walkers, rattling breakfast carts, and loud delivery trucks. The bustle seemed to be happening outside a bubble, a combination of exhaustion and distraction. Even the driver’s ongoing school-crossing issue seemed to belong to some other time and place.

And then, suddenly, there was a wave of fear—not unwarranted. No sooner had Ben emerged from the cab than a man stepped up to him. The newcomer was about five-ten, a little shorter than Ben, and in his forties. He was wearing jeans, work boots, and a black beret. His eyes were covered with reflective sunglasses with fashionable white frames. He held his smartphone in his left hand. His right hand was thrust deep into the pocket of his heavy leather jacket.

“Mr. Moss,” the man said. It wasn’t a question.

“Sorry, I’m in a hurry.”

“I understand,” the man replied politely, but firmly, stepping to block his way. “This will not take long.”

The man’s voice possessed a faint but distinctive accent, which Ben placed as Icelandic. It was uncommon here, and in spite of everything—or because of it—Ben gave the man his attention, but not until after he had looked around.

“There is no one else with us,” the man said. “You will not be accosted.”

“All right,” Ben said. “You have my attention. Who are you and how do you know who I am?”

“My name is Eilifir,” the man said softly, “and I followed you from the Group mansion, saw you speaking briefly with Dr. O’Hara.”

“Followed?”

“I have a car. Actually, the driver followed you. I was busy watching.”

“But you just said—”

“That there is no one with us, and there isn’t,” the man said. “We are alone. From the mansion I came here, replaced one of my people. I’ve been waiting to speak with Caitlin—or you.”

“I see. You mentioned the Group. How do you know those people?” Ben asked.

“We—their sponsors and my people—once lived together.”

“On Fifth Avenue?”

“No, Mr. Moss,” the man replied with a little chuckle. His unshaved cheeks parted as he smiled for the first time. “Our ancestors lived together. In Galderkhaan.”

Ben was a little rocked by that—not just the fact that someone else knew about the place, but obviously knew more than he did. Then his mind returned to what he had just been thinking about, what he knew of the postapocalyptic trek of the Galderkhaani up through Asia to points north, including Scandinavia.

“You say you ‘once’ lived together,” Ben remarked. “That, plus the fact that you didn’t go up to the mansion and knock on the door tells me that you are no longer very sociable.”

“Their ideas are different from mine.”

“Are you some kind of rogue scholar?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” the man replied.

“‘Not exactly?’ That’s all I get?”

“For now.”

“Uh huh,” Ben said, and moved to go around the man. “Sorry, Eilifir. I have a lot to—”

“Not yet,” the man said with a hint of menace now. He moved closer.

Ben hesitated. He had been around enough diplomats to know when polite insistence was about to shade into a threat.

“Do the doctors know what is wrong with Dr. O’Hara?” Eilifir asked.

“How do you know anything’s wrong with her?”

“I have a man outside the hospital,” the man replied. “You departed. She did not. Must we do this dance, Mr. Moss?”

“Caitlin is unconscious but it isn’t a coma,” Ben answered. “They don’t know what it is. You probably know that, if you’ve been watching her.”

“No, I only suspected,” the man said. “We make it a policy not to crowd people. The others—they do that. Empathetic souls like Dr. O’Hara pick up on it.” He turned his face toward the brownstone. “The man and woman who are upstairs, why are they here?”

“I don’t know that either,” Ben said. “How do you know about them?”

“Someone was here, watching, until I could relieve her.”

“That’s at least three people,” Ben said. “You have a curious definition of ‘alone.’”

“As you know, words have nuance.”

“Right, but I don’t have time for subtleties. So that there are no more surprises—how many helpers do you have here?”

“Too few,” Eilifir replied. “Do you know Casey Skett?”

Hell, couldn’t the man answer a question directly? “No,” Ben said to move this along. “Who is he? Or is it a waste of breath to ask?”

“I guess you would call him our general,” the man said. “He and I are the leaders of a handful of other field personnel who want to help you save Dr. O’Hara.”

“From?”

“Becoming lost in the past,” the man said.

“How do you know… what do you know?” Ben asked.

“That any form of cazh or the lesser mergings is tricky, dangerous, as I’m sure you well know.”

“Is that what happened here?” Ben asked with alarm.

“I’m honestly not sure,” Eilifir replied. “That’s what we’re trying to determine. If it has, then she is in great danger.”

Ben did not tell the man that it was the second time that morning he’d heard that sentiment.

Eilifir drew his hand from his pocket, handed Ben a card. “Call me when you learn anything, when you need something.”

“You seem certain that I will.”

“No one can face these forces alone,” he said, “the more so when he or she doesn’t know what they are.”

“Do you?”

The man was quiet for a moment—contemplative. “Not entirely, no. But we have tools you lack, tools you may need. And before you ask what they are, I can only say this: Caitlin O’Hara has forged an energetic relationship with just two Galderkhaani tiles. That was enough to send her soul through time and wreak havoc across several acres of New York.” He moved closer to Ben until they were inches apart. There was a new, more ominous quality in his voice. “There are thousands of tiles buried beneath the South Polar ice. If Dr. O’Hara taps into them, wakens them in an effort to get home, the forces she will release would be exponentially more destructive than what we saw last night. And not in the past, Mr. Moss. She would pull that fury with her, into the present. It would travel through her. You can imagine, I think, what would be left of her after that.”

It was as fantastic and sobering a monologue as any Ben had ever heard—and, in the United Nations, he had translated many of those.

“Where will you be?” Ben asked.

“Right here,” Eilifir said, backing away.

Though the air was warming slightly, Ben felt cold inside. Without another word, he turned and went into the apartment.

CHAPTER 2

Mikel Jasso was very tired and extremely frustrated.

The Basque native lay in the cot that had been assigned to him until such time as he could be evacuated from the Halley VI research station. That would take weeks, but he had been ordered to stay out of the way of the thirty-nine scientists, medics, maintenance workers, and other personnel at the base. He was to remain inside the eight modules—which were connected caterpillar-style, like a train—not venturing outside, not observing experiments or research, simply doing nothing.

Doing nothing had kept him awake since his adventure under the Antarctic ice. He desperately needed sleep. But there was something he needed more desperately. He had been among the long-frozen ruins. He had interacted with tiles of staggering power.

He had communicated with the dead.

Mikel Jasso needed answers, not imprisonment.

And I need someone above ground to talk to about it all, someone to listen to me, he thought. There was a vast amount of knowledge out there. The technology alone could occupy him for years. Not just the olivine tiles but treated skins that were still fresh, the breathing apparatus that seemed to employ the mechanism of sea creatures to filter air from a maelstrom; all of that was extremely sophisticated. And he couldn’t get to it, having made himself a pariah by causing the crash of a truck, the denting of a module it was pulling, and endangering the life of an expedition member who had elected to rescue him from an underground cavern.

Mikel also had a broken wrist, which made it difficult to do anything.

And so he lay there, his tablet at the ready, staring at the white ceiling, replaying the last two days for anything he may have missed.

The archaeologist had to laugh, at least inside. He was in a human habitation brought south, and to this spot, with enormous effort. Administered by the British Antarctic Survey, the Halley VI modules had just been successfully towed from a fragile section of terrain on the Brunt Ice Shelf to a more stable region twelve kilometers inland from the Weddell Sea. The accommodation building and garage had come with greater difficulty: not having been erected on skis, they had to be dragged across the ice by trucks and bulldozers struggling against unfavorable winds and cold. Yet nearby, an entire civilization had flourished in this miserable, hostile environment. Even allowing for climatic change, Antarctica was still quite harsh at the dawn of the Ice Age, at the height of Galderkhaani civilization. From what he had gleaned in the caverns, lava had been used to melt and control ice via a network of tunnels. Towers of basalt and other materials had been built. The air had been conquered by ships that spanned the vast continent, and perhaps beyond. Science and religion had struggled with an ambitious, deeply conflicted cultural project, the conquest of the afterlife… incredibly, with some success.

The anthropologist in him was puzzled by something even deeper: How did the Galderkhaani come to be here? When? By what chain of evolution? The answers would change human understanding of the world. Those answers, those profound truths were also out there, and Mikel couldn’t get to them. He couldn’t convince a group of scientists to help him investigate further. In fairness, Mikel was not being as cooperative, and thus as persuasive, as he might have been. His unauthorized descent into the ancient underground ice tunnels, and his insistence that he could not reveal much of what he had found there—not without the authorization of his employer, Flora Davies and the Group back in New York—had alienated the science team and most of the other occupants. The sole exception was Siem der Graaf. The young maintenance worker appreciated the fact that the archaeologist treated him like a colleague and not a high-priced repairman. Siem also appreciated Mikel’s willingness to charge into the unknown in pursuit of knowledge. If not for the extreme climatic conditions, Mikel wouldn’t be sitting here because of the Halley VI staff. But he wouldn’t get more than a quarter mile without gear and assistance.

Making matters worse at the moment, he had been unable to reach Flora Davies, his superior at Group headquarters, her assistant Adrienne, or anyone else in the NYU-area mansion. The Internet was down, and phone service was poor though he still got into voice mail; for some reason, Flora wasn’t calling back. He had seen on the news that the West Village in Manhattan was still reeling from unexplained fires in the area; no doubt that, and the water pumped at the inferno, had compromised the wires in old conduits beneath the mansion.

His forced isolation wasn’t entirely contrary, however. Mikel used the time to create a written record of everything he could remember about his trip through the ruins of ancient Galderkhaan and his encounter with the spirits of the Priests Pao and Rensat. With one hand, he had arduously pecked out the log on his tablet.

The dead, he had written, are not dead—merely without bodies. The lowest of these appear to be “unascended souls.” Like poltergeists in modern lore, they appear to be trapped in the place where they lived or died. I encountered two of these: Galderkhaani Enzo, who had a modern soul; and scientist Jina Park, who was held here, in her thrall. I do not understand by what mechanism either of them remained in the caverns below the ice. Perhaps by choice? Perhaps by the means through which they died—intense fire? Or perhaps this is the Galderkhaani version of hell, a place where souls are punished for suicide or murder or other mortal crimes.

In the happier order of things, the Galderkhaani believed that at death they ascended—single souls reaching a level of celestial epiphany I still don’t understand. From my studies I learned that Pao and his contemporary Vol created a ritual they called cazh, words and a ceremony that bonded souls, allowed them to shuck the body en masse and, together, rise to an even higher state of spiritual enlightenment—Transcendence, which I would equate with traditional angels or djinn in more familiar ancient lore. Their ultimate goal was to bring together enough souls to—well, transcend Transcendence and achieve Candescence, a state of bliss they believed would make them somehow “one” with the cosmos.

Strangely, it did not sound lunatic as he wrote it. Mikel’s livelihood was to conduct research for the Group, research that sought every fragment of knowledge they could glean about Galderkhaan. During that quest he had encountered many ancient and current faiths that, despite their subtle differences, all had an archetypical similarity: without fail, each of them believed that humans die and a spiritual part of them goes to an afterlife.

Who am I to dispute any of it, he thought as he added material to his tablet. Either I spent hours speaking with a pair of transcended ghosts or I was delirious.

That was possible too.

Mikel ached in every part of his body, having climbed through lava tubes and flown vast distances through a wind tunnel, which was where he broke his wrist, not to mention being thrown from a truck that was hauling a module. He had struck his head numerous times, so many times, in fact, that anything was possible.

But there is no disputing this, he thought as he typed. Since touching those luminous olivine stones that lined sections of the tunnel and its towers, I have felt different. Not alert, because I’m still tired as hell… but more intuitive, I guess you’d call it. He went back and erased that; it wasn’t true. He didn’t know when someone was coming or what was being served for a meal. He wrote:… but more aware of the lives that were lived here.

Whether they were ghosts or angels in any real sense did not matter. Mikel felt as though, through the tiles, he had touched the past… that the past was still out there, somewhere, not dead but alive, not gone but eternal.

He didn’t write any of that. The data wasn’t there to support a living past, and the answers were elusive. He hoped, while he was still down here, he could learn more. However, he did add this:

I’m still at a loss to explain exactly what precipitated the pillar of fire that erupted perhaps fifty kilometers from where I found the Galderkhaan power center, the Source—whose early activation apparently precipitated the destruction of that civilization.

That wasn’t entirely true. It could be explained.

Pao and Rensat had sought an American woman, Caitlin O’Hara, someone with experience in spiritual matters and Galderkhaani artifacts. They wanted her to help them save Galderkhaan from destruction by shutting down the Source in the past. Perhaps they had found Caitlin and she had done just the opposite—activated it here and now, or at least part of it, to obliterate the possibility of rewriting history. Or perhaps she made it burn hotter in the past somehow, and there was blowback in the present. Those details are the ones he lacked.

But he had no explanation to fit the geology and the narrative that had been unfolding. The deep, deep magma would have required a reason to suddenly “burp” at that location.

In any case, Pao and Rensat clearly had not succeeded. Otherwise, he would not be here. If Galderkhaan had survived, it would still be here. The concept of multiple timelines, of alternative histories, of parallel worlds was not something he was willing to consider… yet.

But then, a few days ago, the spirit world was not something in which you put much credence either, he thought.

He flexed his index finger, which he had been typing with. Below him, the module was not quiet. There was the ever-present hum of generators, the occasional hammering shriek of wind, and the creak of the structure as it endured those winds. Yet that was all background noise and Mikel started when his phone chimed.

“Finally!” he said as he saw Flora’s personal number. He pressed the device to his ear and plugged a finger in the other to drown out the noise. “Hello—Flora?”

“No,” the male voice said from the other end. “It’s Casey Skett.”

Mikel was instantly alert. For the last ten years Skett had worked with the Group disposing of biological “accidents” that occasionally resulted from their research. He worked for the New York City Department of Sanitation’s “DAR” division—dead animal removal. That was the only reason he ever came to the mansion. Skett should not be using Flora’s phone.

“Casey, what’s going on over there?” Mikel asked with an unprecedented sense of foreboding.

“I want you to talk to Flora,” he said, his voice crackling through the bad connection. “And then I want you to do me a favor.”

“Put Flora on,” Mikel said. There was something about Casey’s tone that did not sound like Casey, the skinny and slack-eyed figure who rarely strung more than three or four words together.

A moment later Flora was on the line.

“Hello, Mikel. I’m afraid you’re going to have to do whatever Casey asks,” she said in a thick, slow voice.

“‘Afraid’?”

“He—he has shared information that I cannot, at present, divulge,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because he—he does not wish me to,” she replied. “But you will cooperate with him, yes?”

This too was not the Flora he knew. But Mikel knew better than to question her. Not because she was always right, but because there was no changing her mind once it was set.

“Of course,” Mikel told her. “I’ll do whatever you need, Flora.”

“Thank you, Mikel.”

He was immediately aware of—and concerned by—a couple of slight catches he had noticed in her voice, brief hesitations. She was one of the most certain people he had ever known. Were those catches natural, or was she trying to signal him that all was not well?

“Before you go,” Mikel asked casually, “how is my find behaving?”

But Flora was not available to answer. Casey Skett was back on the call.

“Your find is fine,” Casey informed him. “It’s under control.”

“You’ve evidently been promoted,” Mikel said.

“I could not resist the compensation package,” Skett said. “And you, Dr. Jasso—you are a valued reallocated asset.”

“Meaning?”

“That my promotion means you are no longer working for Flora but for me. And the favor I need is for you to go to the site where fire erupted from the ice.”

Mikel didn’t ask how he knew. The Group has access to satellites monitoring every area of the Galderkhaani continent. “Do you know what caused it?”

“Something in the past, I believe,” he answered. “Or rather, something that began in the past and rippled through to the present. That process is one of the things I wish to understand.”

At least he wasn’t cagey about answering. “I have a broken wrist,” Mikel said.

“You still have one hand that works? That’s all you should need.”

“True, if I could get out there,” Mikel said. “But I’ve created problems down here—lots of them. No one is going to do me any favors.”

“Find a way to compel them,” Skett replied bluntly. “They’re already trying to understand it—but from a distance, like the safe and incurious academics they are.”

“How do you—”

“I saw it in a report filed by Dr. Bundy,” Skett said. “I have resources too, Dr. Jasso. Aren’t you curious about it as well?”

“Of course I am,” Mikel said. “But I’m grounded, and frankly, I don’t like being under the whip hand of someone who was until today a custodian, in effect.”

“Who pretended to be a custodian, in effect,” Skett said. “And spare me the hauteur. You took orders from Flora easily enough.”

“She earned my respect. You haven’t even begun.”

“Dr. Jasso, pride has no place in my work. You will do as I ask and that is that. However, I assure you, my reasons are not hostile even if my methods seem to have been. Inform these scientists of yours that you can show them what happened out there. Assure them they will never figure it out just using instruments, but that you can explain it.”

“Just by going out there?”

“Correct,” Skett said. “By going out there and witnessing an experiment that I will be performing from here. Dr. Jasso, you know there’s more to this phenomenon than geology. You were down there, among ruins. Don’t bother to deny it—Flora told me everything.”

“She couldn’t have, Casey. She didn’t know everything. That’s what reports are for.”

“Educate me,” Skett said.

“Why? If you want my help, put Flora back in charge and tell me what you know.”

“I know that Flora and her entire staff will die if you don’t go,” Skett said. “I’ll tell you what: you can keep your secrets for now. Just get out there. You’ll want to share with me in due course.”

Mikel hesitated. Skett was right about one thing: the issue was Galderkhaan, not Group politics. He didn’t seem to have many options.

“What are the risks?” Mikel asked.

“They are abundant, but you’ve taken risks before.”

“I have, but I need a good reason to go out in temperatures that are negative thirteen degrees Fahrenheit and falling,” Mikel said, glancing at the Halley VI weather app on his phone. He wasn’t being entirely truthful: he would risk a great deal to be able to go back out there.

“I already gave you the reason,” Skett said with growing impatience.

“And I’ve agreed,” Mikel said. “But I need to come up with a really persuasive argument to get permission to use Halley equipment.”

“Two words should do it,” Skett said. “Actionable information.”

“I just said, they have their procedures here—”

“And they have funding to consider as well,” Skett said. “They have to produce results or the spigot runs dry. Now go and get this done, Dr. Jasso.”

It was a simple but possibly effective argument. Among the twenty-three scientists, there had to be one who would back him.

“Put Flora back on,” Mikel demanded. Then he added, “Please.”

A moment later Flora was back on the phone. “I’m here, Mikel.” The echo told him she was on speaker.

“Are you all right with this?”

“In theory, yes. I would have preferred more time for preparation, but Skett is running this operation at the moment.”

“Flora, who is Casey Skett? Why is he doing any of this? Why now?”

“It is not just now,” Skett said angrily, grabbing the phone and taking the call private. “My god, Dr. Jasso—it has been this way for centuries. The Group—do you think they are this benevolent research organization funded by the scions of the old East India Company?”

“So I’ve been told,” Mikel said cautiously.

“It’s a lie, Dr. Jasso.”

“Let me hear that from Flora,” Mikel replied.

“I’m afraid she doesn’t know everything either,” Skett said. “Now enough talk. Just get to the site. You will understand better when you see what kind of power we are exploring.”

“We? Who else is involved in this?”

“There is nothing more to discuss,” Skett said. “Call me when you are there.”

“I need to rest,” Mikel said. “I’ve been going nonstop for days.”

There was a brief silence. “Take three hours, then go. I will expect your call.”

Mikel heard a scream.

“Flora?” he yelled into the phone.

“Mikel, be care—”

But Casey had already terminated the call.

CHAPTER 3

This was not a dream. It was not a vision. All of this was real, and the physical stimuli were an assault on the mind of Caitlin O’Hara: the unfamiliar sights and smells, the loose touch of the clothing, the sudden and unfamiliar sense of agoraphobia—she wanted to be home—and her inability to will these things away… the onslaught drove her into a swift, ungovernable panic attack.

She struggled, she rose, she moved, and she remembered little of it until now.

Now? What is “now”? she wondered with considered clarity that was almost worse than the raw panic. What is “is”? She was obviously in ancient Galderkhaan in a body that was not her own. From the bracelet, she assumed it was Bayarma’s body, the mother of Bayarmii.

Standing with her back to the tall, powerful woman who had restrained her, Caitlin breathed slowly and pointed the first two fingers of each hand at the ground. Her vision was sharper, the smell of fish and jasmine filled her nostrils, the air was cool to the point of chilly and free of pollen, and there were no mechanical sounds anywhere in the world around her, her arms and fingers felt different. The sky was a rich blue, the clouds the same as her own time, and there was a thin tendril of black smoke that came from somewhere in the distance.

But she did not feel the one thing she wanted desperately to feel. She could not find the active stones in her own time, and the tiles here appeared to be quiescent. Without them, she did not know how to return to her own time. The one other occasion she was here—­protecting souls in her time from aggressive souls in Galderkhaan—she was disembodied, a spirit, a conduit for energy. Caitlin felt none of that now.

Because the tiles are all in harmony and balance, she thought. Vol has not yet activated the Source. Who knows how many years—or weeks or days—until he does.

Panic was replaced by helplessness. Plugging into the earth calmed her and she somehow managed to remain calm. Perhaps it was the balmy air, cool and refreshing, with the salty smell of a nearby sea. Maybe it was this body, which wasn’t her own; it didn’t seem to want to panic. It didn’t seem to understand, even, what that was.

Caitlin was glad for all of that because she couldn’t afford to lose control again. She did not know if there were psychologists here—there didn’t seem to be a word for one, she realized, as she thought in Galderkhaani. The closest she came was galdani—a physician who heals with a kind of empathic energy. But she imagined that there were prisons and hospitals and she did not want to end up in either.

Being physically present in Galderkhaan felt different from being here in spirit. In her previous experiences with the Galderkhaani, ­Caitlin had felt like a hitchhiker. With Maanik, with the other children, she was not alive in a foreign body but merely observing through their eyes. Eavesdropping. This was not like that. She was inhabiting, controlling, this woman’s body. The chronic numbness in Caitlin’s hip, from childbirth, was gone. She looked at her fingers, saw the whorls of her fingerprints. The encroaching farsightedness, though slight, was also gone. She did experience a little difficulty breathing, however.

No, she realized suddenly. It wasn’t difficulty. It was simply different. Either her lung capacity was less or the oxygen content was diminished.

As she continued to take stock—quickly, intellectually, like when she was an aid worker checking her gear before boarding a truck or helicopter—she realized that her arms were shorter, fingers more slender, but both were stronger. Her upper arms were toned, bronzed, fit, either from whatever work Bayarma did or from speaking in Galderkhaani with the constant superlative gestures that gave depth and nuance to every spoken word and phrase.

Caitlin noticed all this as the woman continued to hold her supportively, gently, despite the obvious strength in her big hands.

The woman asked if she could let Caitlin go. Caitlin indicated that she was all right now. Her captor finally released her and took a step back. Caitlin made sure she could stand on her own, then turned slowly and looked behind her. As she gazed at that strange, alien face, the flesh ruddy bronze with oddly elongated gold eyes, Caitlin fought very hard not to freak out again.

This is real. I am here.

But becoming agitated would not help her get home—if that were even possible—and she did not know how much time she had. If she perished with Galderkhaan, what would happen to her soul?

They spoke, Caitlin gathering her thoughts, not remembering what she said after she said it—she was still trying to find the tiles, to feel comfortable in this body. She continued to breathe slowly. There was a pool of water to her left. She extended two fingers toward the ground near it. She closed her eyes and, through the pool, tried to connect to any of the waters around New York. She did not feel her soul reaching outward as she had when she was on the rooftop and used the harbor to find Yokane, the descended Priest living in the city. She pushed her fingers hard, curled them, tried to pull something, anything, from the water. She heard the sound of the sea nearby, but could not feel it. She pictured her body lying in Washington Square Park—just that—and attempted to return to it, to the moment she fell. There had been firefighters, flame, water from hoses.

Caitlin felt nothing. She sought the bodies that had been buried centuries before in the potter’s field under the park. Again, nothing.

Of course, she thought with rising horror. I can’t reach them because those bodies have not yet lived and died. Manhattan and its waters—perhaps they’re somewhere else on the globe in this era, nearer to the equator as they once were. There was no way of knowing.

My body has not yet been created, she thought with true horror. But then how did her soul exist? And not just her soul, but her memories. She thought about her son and tried to use that to get home. She imagined Jacob in their apartment. He was not born yet in this time, but his spirit lived strong inside Caitlin. That should help… it had to help.

It didn’t. Once again, there was no vibration, no sense of anything beyond her fingertips other than the unfamiliar Antarctic air, the distant cries of seabirds, the receding sound of leathery flaps from the airship not far, the crashing of waves.

“You seem better now,” the other woman said.

Caitlin nodded tightly. They spoke some more, she gestured as they spoke, she confirmed whose body she had… “borrowed.” Caitlin definitely was not better but she had to find a way to appear so. She did that for her patients sometimes, when she had problems of her own and was not quite ready to hear those of others: she compartmentalized, and she had to do so now. She allowed herself to submit to the present… this present, not her own present, millennia hence. She relaxed her fingers.

Caitlin knew she would have to learn more about her surroundings… and, most importantly, what was holding her here. Had she flashed here from the tower where she had faced Pao and Rensat? Or was that in the future? Or the past? Were the tiles of that structure binding her to this place?

If so, why can’t I feel them?

It was a struggle to remain focused, to try and prioritize.

They were talking about Caitlin’s home, about her having come from the north. The psychiatrist found herself doing what she always did, what challenged Ben, concerned Barbara, occasionally shocked Anita: she was telling the truth, regardless of the consequences. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.

Meanwhile, the woman in leather and silver regarded her quizzically. She returned to Caitlin’s name, which she had provided just moments before.

“Cai-tah-lin Oh-ha-rayaah,” the woman said thoughtfully. “The name and inflection are unfamiliar to me.”

I am not surprised, Caitlin thought. The language will not be created for tens of thousands of years.

“As I said, I am not from around here,” Caitlin replied.

“The bracelet,” Lasha said accusingly. “Perhaps it is stolen?”

“No,” Caitlin replied. “I—I would never do that. Maybe I am Bayarma.”

“Ah, so now you are two people!” Lasha said, holding up a pair of fingers, one on each hand. “Maybe you are a flendro as well!”

“There is no need to be insulting,” Qala cautioned.

Lasha grumped back a step.

“Tell me about your home in the north,” Qala said.

“I—I can’t remember much,” Caitlin lied. She didn’t want to alienate the tall woman who seemed intent on actually helping her. It was better to buy time, try and find out when she was, relative to the end of Galderkhaan. She looked at the cloth wrappings on her feet. They were bound with leather strips attached to a wooden sole. The edges were scuffed, old. She looked at her fingernails. They were worn, chipped. She could be a laborer of some kind.

“Do you wish to see a physician?” Qala asked. “There is one on my airship.”

“No, thank you,” Caitlin replied, gesturing sweetly. She didn’t want to end up a guinea pig. She touched the bracelet. “This girl, Bayarmii. I should try to find her.”

“As you wish,” the Standor said. “Then I will leave you to Lasha—provided he promises not to noose you.”

“I am a gentle man, my companion will tell you so.” He wagged a threatening finger at Caitlin. “But she must swear on the scrolls not to misbehave. Can she guarantee that?”

“I am fine now,” Caitlin assured them. “It was the shock of waking in this strange place.”

“Or… it could be overheated fish,” Lasha said accusatorily. “That could be the cause.”

The Standor made a face at him. “Every time I see you, Lasha, you blame all the ills of Galderkhaan on fish or fishers.”

“Not all,” Lasha scowled back. “If you want to know whom I really blame it on—” Lasha began, then bit off the rest of the sentence. He looked around at the crowds still hovering in the shadows. “Well… the fish are the innocent heirs of poor decisions made… elsewhere.”

“Another Khaana beater? Will you also blame the government for the way the air blows?”

“You don’t think cloud farming and airships alter the currents?”

“Please, no politics or science,” Qala said, raising her hand. “I have enough of that aloft, where I cannot escape the mutterings of the crew. I do not wish to speak of our ruling body.”

“Or Femora Azha?” Lasha said, challenging Qala.

At that, Caitlin became alert. “I know that name,” she said. Caitlin had to control herself from overreacting at the mention of the name. She knew Azha too well. It was that Galderkhaani’s ascended soul that had directed her to Pao and Rensat, to the confrontation that had brought her here.

“I’m not surprised you’ve heard it,” Lasha said. “The name is whispered everywhere in Galderkhaan.”

“It will not be here and now,” Qala said. She fixed a critical gaze at Lasha. “Criticize the fish if you will, speculate on shifting air currents if you must, but as a Khaana appointee I will not hear the rest.” Her eyes shifted to Caitlin. “I wish you well. I am due in Aankhaan.”

While Qala spoke, Lasha had opened and closed his mouth several times—like a fish, Caitlin thought. He seemed to want to say something, but before he could muster his thoughts, or his courage, Qala had turned and left.

“Thank you,” Caitlin said after the woman.

Qala half turned and waved with a circular motion of leave-­taking.

Caitlin took another moment to settle into her body and to accept the fact that she had understood and responded to everything that was being said. Some part of the mind of Bayarma was still obviously very present. The reference to Azha also helped her focus. If the woman had already acted against Vol, had failed to stop his premature activation of the Source, then the destruction of Galderkhaan was nigh. Caitlin couldn’t afford to delay for that reason, or in case the captive soul of Bayarma was able to assert itself. That dynamic too was an unknown. If Bayarma returned, would Caitlin automatically be shifted home? Or would she just be kicked out, disembodied in limbo as she found herself after the conflagration in the park?

Lasha sat on a shaded section of the wall surrounding the pool. “Fen is right. My tongue will dig my place in the road. Just as it did for Femora Azha.” He looked up at Caitlin. “You said that name sounds familiar to you?”

“Yes, as well as her sister and lover.”

“I know nothing of them,” Lasha said. “Not before Fen, but before her colleagues in the capital, Azha spoke against the rivalries that are chewing our populace to pieces.”

“I thought she committed violence?”

“Yes, which is the only reason she was permitted to speak against the Priests and the Technologists and their mad hostility. She was exiled.” He threw an arm toward the sea. “Now there are rumors from the fisher fleet that she is dead. I am not yet ready to ascend, so I watch what I speak before the likes of her.” Lasha gestured cautiously after Qala.

Caitlin nodded. Now she had a better idea of when she was. It was after Azha’s airship had crashed, after the Priest Vol had resolved to undermine the Technologists by causing the Source to explode, though with far greater destruction than he had imagined: it was this act that destroyed Galderkhaan. Caitlin did not know how long a period it was between those two events. It could be as little as a day; it could be weeks. Though the Antarctic solar cycle caused the Galderkhaani to frame their time differently from what she was accustomed to, Caitlin understood the terms that were in Bayarma’s mind. They were close enough to contemporary times, based on the flow of the tides.

Caitlin took a moment to try and find Azha with her mind. The Femora had contacted her in the twenty-first century—her ascended soul had to be here as well. If it was, she could not find it. Perhaps she was busy trying to find some spiritual means to stop Vol.

“Your name is Lasha,” Caitlin said, moving her arms now as she spoke. “And you… guard this pool?”

The man nodded gruffly, his leathery skin tight, his dark eyes narrowed. He looked like a purer version of Yokane, the Galderkhaani descendant Caitlin had met in New York. His features—like those of the Standor—were angular, narrow, the bone structure visible beneath the taut bronzed flesh.

“Can you tell me where I am?” Caitlin asked as a large gray-skinned creature scuttled toward the pool. She recognized the animal with its long, floppy ears and a tail; otherwise resembling a modern-day seal in size and general configuration, a kind of pet Bayarmii had. It was chased by Lasha with an adamant “Shoo!” The creature barked at him as it flopped off.

“Bold thyodularasi,” he said. “And they’re getting bolder! Too many fish being harvested, not enough for them to eat. This one is very smart. He endears himself to the children and they feed him.” He stopped himself from another tirade and his eyes returned to Caitlin. “You asked a question. This is the port city of Falkhaan. We feed Galderkhaan, all of it. The fish below and the jasmine leaves grown in the clouds above. You—you look like a capitalist.”

Hand gestures told her that the word had a very different meaning here than it did in her time.

“What makes you think I come from the capital?”

“Your clothes, hands, suggest you are a digger, but your slender arms do not appear to do much digging. So I think you are a supervisor in the tunnels.”

“A good—” she sought but did not find a word for “forensics.” She settled for, “A good analysis, Lasha. Let me think about it.”

“I am sure of it,” he said. He moved his hands as though they were rising on heat but said no words. She understood that to mean it was the way she carried herself, proudly.

“I thought you might be here as a representative of the capital for the Night of Miracles,” Lasha added.

“What is that?” Caitlin asked.

The old man shook his head sadly, wriggled his fingers. “Your memory is truly vapor. It celebrates the dawn of the Galderkhaani, our rise from the fires.”

“The magma,” she said.

“Yes, the magma,” he replied. “The storm from above, the rocks exploding within the fire, life released from the heat and carried forth on the smoke. At least, that is the legend. Told by whom, though, I ask you?” he wondered aloud. “If no one was here, how could we know?”

“Perhaps by studying the rocks?” she suggested.

“The Priests would have you believe that they’ve consulted with the ascended, but—a study of the rocks?” He seemed to have just processed what she said. “What would you do, hit them against your head?”

“I don’t know,” she said, smiling in spite of herself. Science was clearly not so advanced here in some areas. The celebration concerned her, though. Symbolically, that would have been the ideal time for Vol to make his move. And if this were the time when he was to act, there was something else on Caitlin’s mind. Something so elusive she found it difficult to grasp: that conflagration was the time when she herself, at the United Nations, opened a door between her time, her world, and Galderkhaan. Could she, even in spirit, exist in two places at once?

“The capital—is that where the Source is?” she asked, hoping that knowledge of the project was common.

“The Source is there… and here,” he said, stamping his sandaled foot on the packed earth. “That’s what is heating the water—the runoff from the ice that is melting to the west. Do you have something to do with that dig? If so, I have much to say to you. Hot water is good for bathing, bad for fish.”

“I don’t know if I’m involved,” Caitlin replied, suddenly thinking it would be a good idea to go where she knew there might be tiles, where she had faced Pao and Rensat in spirit. “How far are we from there?”

“A timhut by air,” he said, throwing a hand vaguely behind him, to the south. “La-timhut on foot.”

She knew, from the memories of Bayarma, that the first measure described a journey to be taken without need of sleep. The hand gestures indicated that it was half that. Five or six hours, perhaps? The second was about ten times as long. She would have to fly.

Caitlin rose suddenly. “The woman who just left—”

“Qala? The Standor?”

“Yes. Do you think she would take me? Or perhaps someone she knows.”

“I don’t keep her schedule!” Lasha said with annoyance. He ran to the other end of the pool to chase away a trio of mensats that were trying to claw up the wall to get a drink. He swatted the noose at them then flung it under his arm as if it were a martial arts nunchaku. “You’ll have to ask someone at the tower. Her ship is one of our proudest and is almost certainly headed there for the celebration.”

Caitlin was still a little too unsteady to run after her; then she remembered the boy she had seen before. He was still staring at her from the shadows. Caitlin suddenly felt very protective of him. She smiled sweetly, sincerely, and motioned him over.

Lasha laughed. “Good idea!” he said. “Vilu needs no excuse to talk to the Standor!”

Vilu welcomed the acknowledgment. He approached tentatively, his eyes on the woman. The thyodularasi waddled over behind him, huffing eagerly through its whiskers as it sniffed the boy’s moving ankles.

“Your name is Vilu?” Caitlin said.

The boy nodded.

“Vilu, would you do me a favor?” Caitlin asked.

Lasha cut through the negotiation. “Boy, run and ask Standor Qala if she could delay a moment. This lady wishes to speak with her.”

The boy grinned and took off as she had seen Jacob run in the park so many times—bent low, head down, arms churning, legs pumping. Vilu seemed so free. Caitlin’s heart ached for her son, but also for this boy.

Soon he would most likely be dead, she thought, along with every living creature in Galderkhaan. And while she wouldn’t be the reason—Vol would—the interference of her future self with the cazh would prevent their souls from transcending, from living together as spirits. He would be an ascended soul wandering alone for eternity. She wondered if wisdom and maturity came with that state or if he would be locked in boyhood and fear for eternity.

Caitlin turned away, tears behind her eyes.

“What is it?” Lasha asked.

“I’m still uncertain of my body,” she replied, neglecting to gesture to express the kind of uncertainty she was feeling. It was sickness, deep in her belly, in her soul.

“You may sit in the hut, out of the sun,” Lasha said. “That might help.”

“Thank you.” Caitlin was about to turn in that direction when she heard a small voice behind her.

“Mom?”

Caitlin spun and stared at Vilu. The boy had stopped running after the Standor. He was standing unsteadily in the bright sun, his arms repeating a gesture that meant “birth mother” in Galderkhaani.

“Did you say something?” Caitlin asked.

“Yes, Mom,” he said, signing, not in Galderkhaani but in English. Just like the words he spoke. “I would much rather we go to the capital by Nemo’s submarine.”

And then he fell to the ground.

CHAPTER 4

Ben Moss stood in Caitlin’s living room. Anita Carter was behind him, just closing the door. She introduced Ben to the others.

Ben was looking down at Madame Langlois, who was sitting in a rattan chair that Caitlin kept by the south-facing bay window. The Haitian’s son was standing behind her, protectively. The woman was dressed in a colorful orange skirt with embroidered patterns of interlocking half-circles—like “S” shapes, but overlapping. She was wearing a wool sweater. The tall young man, Enok, wore blue jeans and a leather jacket that was still zipped to the chin. Madame ­Langlois held a tall glass of ice water in her hand. Ben noticed a serpent tattoo that wound from the tip of her right thumb down the back of her hand then around and around the little he could see of her forearm.

“I am very pleased to meet you both,” Ben said, though he did not immediately move forward. “Caitlin has spoken to me of you both.” His eyes were on the woman. “Madame Langlois, you said that Caitlin is—”

“The doctor—her serpent came to me in my sleep,” Madame Langlois said in a casual voice.

“‘Her’ serpent,” Ben said. “How do you know it was Caitlin’s?”

“It was the same as she saw in a vision. It was very active. It coiled around me then they bid me come here. Very active.”

Anita Carter was standing well away from the group, near the dining room table, hovering in front of the hall that accessed Jacob’s room. She had been very upset after Ben had phoned and told her what had happened. Now that she’d had a few minutes to collect herself, she was trying to understand where their guests fit into that.

“You said ‘they’ bid you come,” Ben said. “Was there more than one?”

Madame shrugged in a noncommittal manner. “One who is many.”

“I don’t understand,” Ben told her.

The woman said “eh” and shrugged again, as if Ben failing to understand was neither a surprise nor her concern. From the corner of his eye Ben saw that Anita was frowning. But he had worked at the United Nations too long to be insulted by the madame’s dismissiveness; he was busy trying to find a place in Galderkhaani lore for the imagery she had described, and also for the designs on her clothing, which seemed to fit somewhat into the research he and Caitlin had been doing on Galderkhaan. There was a strong resemblance of her tattoo to the dragonlike prow of a Viking ship that Caitlin had drawn after experiencing a profound and terrifying trance… in Haiti.

Madame Langlois turned to stare out at West Eighty-Fourth Street, her dark eyes settling briefly on the rooftops of the brownstones across the way.

“The leaves are dead here,” she said. “The branches are sad.”

“I’m not too happy either,” Ben said.

“Why? You do not die every year,” she said.

Ben didn’t know how to respond to that, so he didn’t. He also wasn’t in the mood for verbal or philosophical game playing. Then she leaned her head into the bay window and looked toward the part of Central Park she could see. The sun was just rising above the nearest line of trees, casting the tips of the bare limbs in a light, almost glowing, shade of bronze.

“But they are God’s fingers, and the promise of resurrection,” she said.

“You’re still talking about the trees?” Ben asked.

Madame Langlois appeared reflective. “He fashion all living things, push them from the earth to the sun,” she said.

“From darkness to light,” Enok added in a quiet monotone, almost as though it were the response to a prayer.

“All right,” Ben said with fast-growing impatience, “what does this have to do—”

“But too much light is death,” the woman went on as though he hadn’t spoken. She turned back toward Ben. “Dr. O’Hara saw the fires.”

“Yes. I was with her when she did,” Ben said.

“Not here,” Madame Langlois said. “Somewhere else. Some time else.”

Ben started. Caitlin had been to Haiti before she had witnessed the destruction of Galderkhaan. This woman could not possibly have known about the incident at the United Nations. Even if they had been in contact—which Ben doubted—Caitlin probably wouldn’t have mentioned it. Her experience in Haiti was not a pleasant one.

The woman’s bracelets rattled as she held out a bony hand to her son. Enok Langlois dutifully reached into a large satchel he carried and removed a cigar, handed it to her.

“Dr. O’Hara does not permit smoking in here,” Anita said firmly.

“The airplane did not allow my matches,” Madame said. “They fear fire too. I will just hold it for now and smell these leaves, remember the smoke.” She put the cigar in her mouth, looked back at Ben, and said nothing. Apparently, it was his turn to speak.

He turned slowly away from them, looking to Anita for direction. The psychiatrist had nothing and shook her head. Ben glanced at Enok, who did not look happy to be there.

“What can you tell me about the snake, about what Caitlin saw and did in Haiti?” Ben asked.

Enok remained defiantly silent.

“We await the snake,” Madame announced. “We wish it to show us things. Then we can say more.”

In an environment where nothing should have surprised Ben, that did. “Are you saying… it’s coming? A snake?”

The woman nodded once. “It ask me to come. To witness things. I did. Now it must tell more.”

“What kinds of things are you supposed to witness?” Ben asked with growing exasperation. “You came all this way because you felt there was danger. You flew up without even knowing if anyone would see you—”

“Didn’t matter,” she said, looking back out the window. “Would have waited out there. There is movement all around. I still feel it.”

“What kind of movement?” Ben asked.

In response, Madame waved her hand in a small, circular motion like the Queen of England waving. “I felt Dr. O’Hara open a door.” She jabbed a finger upward. “There.”

“The roof?” Ben said.

Madame lowered her hand. “And then, as we crossed the water in a taxi, she opened a larger one. This new door, Dr. O’Hara went through.” She touched her chest with an open palm. “This part of her left us.”

Anita gasped. “What are you saying?”

“She is not dead,” Madame Langlois assured her. “She is very much alive.”

Ben regarded the priestess with a blend of confusion and awe. She knew things—or, more likely, intuited them—that she had not personally experienced.

“Madame Langlois, Enok,” Ben said, “at the risk of pressing you on matters you are unwilling to discuss—”

“Except leaves,” Anita muttered.

“—have either of you heard the name Galderkhaan?”

Madame shook her head once. Enok remained still. Ben took that as a no. They did not ask what it was or why Ben was inquiring. It frustrated him that they weren’t curious about anything outside their sphere.

“Ben,” Anita said, “before Caitlin’s parents get here, I think we should put these two in a cab and send them back to—”

Suddenly, as if from a great distance, Ben heard a clacking sound, like dice in a cup. Anita fell silent. It took a moment for Ben to realize that the sounds were coming from Madame Langlois, from around her neck. Mostly concealed by the sweater was a necklace of black beads and hematite tubes. Enok bent over her shoulder and gently pulled the necklace from beneath the white wool. At the bottom of the necklace was a thumbnail-sized human skull artfully carved from what appeared to be polished bone.

Ben watched with growing disenchantment. The beads were vibrating because the woman was shaking—very slightly at first, as if she were shivering, and then more pronounced. There was nothing mysterious or supernatural about it, or about her.

She shut her eyes. Ben wanted to ask what was happening but he didn’t think she would answer, or she would respond with one of her riddles, and Enok would remain mute. Ben didn’t understand how Caitlin had survived a full day of being stonewalled like this. He just watched through eyes that burned with exhaustion, with a mind that was struggling to make sense of anything.

Then Madame Langlois spoke.

“They seek…” she said around the cigar in a raspy whisper, raising her index and middle fingers together. “They… seek…”

Anita moved toward the hallway as the madame’s extended fingers turned in that direction. Two long, bony fingers swung around slowly but firmly like the compass on a needle. They were not quaking like the rest of her.

“Ben, you have to stop this,” Anita said as the fingers moved closer to the hallway. “Ben?”

“Caitlin pointed like that,” he said. “Let it play out.”

“There’s a boy here, Ben!”

Ben heard her but he motioned for her to remain calm. Madame Langlois’s hand seemed to be floating on the air, rotating slightly about the wrist, following the extended fingers. He was suddenly fascinated by her motion: now he recognized absolutely some of the moves Caitlin had executed at the United Nations, when she was making her spiritual journey to Galderkhaan.

“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Ben quietly asked as he sidled up to Anita. “The movement, I mean.”

“What? Ben—this is a show!”

“I’m not convinced of that. I’ve seen Caitlin hold her hand like that. And mesmerists. Even Dracula, in movies.”

“Jesus, vampires now?”

“Actors being intuitive, that’s what an archetype is!” he said. “Please, just answer me.”

Anita frowned, struggled to focus. “In the park, I guess—­Columbus Park, in Chinatown,” she said. “Weekend tai chi. It looks a little like that.”

“In what way?”

“Floating hands. You move until they feel like they’re separate from the body, carrying—” Anita stopped as she realized what she was saying.

“Carrying what?”

“All the energy of your body,” she said. “As if your body and arms no longer exist.”

Ben nodded. That, like what Madame Langlois was doing, could well be part of the common human experience. It was the same with language: the elements that show up over and over separate valid experience from affectation and trickery, like the need to shout an oath, not just cry out, after hitting your finger with a hammer. These are buried in the human condition though no one knows why or by what mechanism.

Perhaps they were rooted in Galderkhaan.

Ben pushed aside the woman’s obduracy, watched her with fresh eyes. Madame Langlois’s shaking subsided; she was slipping into some kind of relaxed trance yet the hand itself seemed to be floating, like a cork in water, the fingers moving in unison as if guided by an outside source. He saw the shadow they cast on the area rug but suddenly noticed the angle of the shadow relative to the fingers was increasing, somehow. It was as if the shadow were hooked like one of the curves on Madame Langlois’s skirt, the base of the finger pointing straight ahead, the tip crooked toward one of the rooms.

Toward Jacob’s room.

Anita noticed it too. “Ben!” she said in a loud, insistent whisper. “I don’t care about the academic value of this. You’ve got to stop it.” The shadow grew longer and Anita’s breathing came faster.

“Enok, tell me what’s happening or we must intervene,” Ben said.

“Stop her and the snake will move freely among us,” the man warned stoically.

“What?”

“We do not want that, I think,” Enok said quietly.

“How do you know that will happen?” Ben demanded.

“I have seen it,” he replied. There was respect for the process in his voice, if not in his expression.

Either Enok was correct or Anita and Ben were sharing a delusion. The shadow began to wriggle though Madame Langlois’s fingers remained steady. It was not Ben’s imagination, it was not a hallucination, and from Anita’s frightened expression, she was realizing that as well. The darkness of the serpentine shadow seemed to deepen, obscuring what was beneath it, as they watched it crawl along the rug. And there was something else within it: what looked to Ben like glitter, only it was something transitory. There were tiny facets that appeared and reappeared in roughly the same places, the same relationship one to the other as the shadow moved.

With a back-and-forth motion, the head of the serpent pulled the rest of the body toward the hallway, to where Anita had solidly placed herself.

“Get it away,” she warned, choking on the sentence as she spread her arms and legs.

“It will not hurt you,” Enok said.

“It’s not me I’m worried about,” Anita said, her eyes fastened on the shape.

“It will hurt no one,” he insisted.

“How do you know?” Ben asked.

“That is not its way,” Enok replied.

“More double-talk,” Anita said. “If you don’t make her stop, I will!”

“Let it play out a little longer,” Ben said. “We can always take Jacob and go.”

“Can we?” she asked.

“It’s not solid, Anita,” Ben pointed out. “It doesn’t appear to be noxious.”

“It looks radioactive!” she said.

“That’s not likely,” Ben said. “Anita, please… this is happening for a reason.”

The serpent expanded, thickened, seemed to take on size but not substance; it was like thick smoke with curling eddies of darkness becoming visible within. The tiny fireflies sparked and faded within as the inner clouds moved. Otherwise without features, the snake moved from the rug to the hardwood floor, writhed just feet from Anita where it suddenly stopped. It was almost as if the outer shape had suddenly frozen, while the turmoil and lights continued within. Ben began to walk toward Anita, slowly, around the shape, not sure what he was going to do. He stopped as the black snake rose like a cobra, turning toward him. Its head floated higher, bobbing from side to side until it reached the level of his eyes. A few moments after Ben stopped, the shape turned back toward Anita and moved forward, trailing neither glitter nor making a ripple on the floor. There was terror in the wide set of the woman’s mouth but she did not scream. She placed her hands hard against the frame of the hallway entrance, set her legs, and had no intention of moving.

The shadow came right up to her, face-to-face, but it did not advance. It puffed even wider, as though pressed from within, its circumference increasing.

As the dead, flat head of the thing continued to hover before Anita, Ben heard Jacob moaning in his room. Anita heard him too.

“Goddamnit, get him now!” she said.

“You go,” Ben said, edging around the serpent and taking her place. If it moved, he intended to walk through it, waving his arms in an attempt to disperse it. But the shape just remained there.

Anita turned and moved quickly down the hall, her footsteps on the hardwood floor the only sound in the apartment. Even the cat, Arfa, was missing, cowed by the serpent.

Staring at the thing just inches away, Ben could swear he saw coil-like shapes moving within it, but they were indistinct, like images only visible from the corner of the eye, vanishing when looked at directly. They were hypnotic, wormlike and writhing. But they were not like maggots feeding on a carcass; they were a dark, tightly coiled network from which the serpent seemed to be made. That must be what the madame had meant by “they.” He saw now that where the coils touched, the sparks appeared.

Ben looked at the featureless head, studied the tiny whorls nearest to him. Each one seemed to grow as the snake inflated and then there were smaller snakes inside those other snakes, on and on, deeper into the black pall—

He heard a thumping sound from behind.

“Anita?”

“Shhh!” she said. “Come.”

Ben backed slowly from the serpent. Jacob’s door was the first on his right, Caitlin’s room beyond it. The bathroom was across the hall. He edged backward but the serpent didn’t advance. He didn’t think it was because his eyes were locked on the thing; it had to be something else.

When he reached the bedroom door, Ben saw Jacob standing on the bed, amid the strewn pages of his Captain Nemo comic book. He was facing the wall between his room and Caitlin’s. The boy was sobbing and drumming on the wall with the heel of his palm.

“Mom…” he wept softly. “Mom…”

Anita shook her head hard, as if to say don’t wake him. She hovered nearby, her arms open to catch him in case he fell backward. Whether it was a nightmare or night terrors, Ben left that up to the therapist. He turned from Anita back to the serpent.

It filled the entrance to the hallway but did not approach. It undulated slightly, diffusing the sun but not dimming it: the serpent seemed to have a nimbus, an amber glow as ephemeral as the snaking shape itself. It reminded him then of Wadjet, the Egyptian snake goddess whose images he had come across while researching the Galderkhaani language in ancient hieroglyphics.

Ben stole a quick look back into the bedroom, saw Jacob standing very still now. Then he turned back to the hallway—

The snake was gone. Clean, healthy morning light once more filled the room, illuminating the familiar, creating normal, comforting shadows behind the sofa and under the table. It was as though the apparition had never been.

With a small exhalation, Jacob collapsed to the bed. Anita caught him, lowered him to the mattress, and knelt quickly at his side. She took his pulse, listened to his breathing.

“Call for an ambulance,” she said as she felt his forehead.

“Does he have a high fever?”

“No, but you just saw what he did—”

“His mother said he does this, knocks on the wall in his sleep,” Ben said.

“His mother’s not here and I didn’t bring my medical bag,” Anita said. “Call or get my damn phone and I—”

“No!” a voice burst from the hallway.

Madame Langlois was standing at the entrance where the serpent had been. Enok was beside her, holding her elbow. They were silhouetted by the light, but it struck her necklace in a way that made the beads seem uncommonly bright.

“Screw you!” Anita said, still holding Jacob. “You did this!”

“I did not,” the woman replied. “They did. And medicine will harm him.”

“They who?” Ben asked.

“I do not know them,” Madame Langlois admitted. “But they have vast power. Greater than yours.”

Ben approached her. Anita moved to the door of the bedroom, a protective eye on Jacob, an angry turn to her mouth.

“We should get him to a hospital where he can be monitored properly,” Anita told him.

“I don’t disagree,” Ben said. “But I want to make sure we don’t do more harm. His mother’s in a hospital and they have no idea what to do.” He turned to Madame Langlois. “Why shouldn’t we get help?”

“Because help cannot help.”

“Why?” Ben pressed. “Madame Langlois, please help us here!”

The Haitian woman stayed where she was. She raised her hand again, extending her forearm into the hall, the two fingers once more extended. Anita and Ben both tensed as the single wall-mounted light near the front door threw a dim shadow on the long rug. But the shadow did not grow or move. It stayed, simply, the shadow of a finger.

“The serpent sleeps—they sleep within,” she said. “Nothing happens now.”

Ben was neither reassured nor enlightened. He took a step forward and Enok moved toward him protectively. “It’s all right,” Ben assured him. He looked at the man’s mother and continued in a conciliatory tone, “Who are ‘they’? At least tell me that. Tell me what you know, even if it’s very little.”

She lowered her hand. It flopped at her side. “They tell you when they wish,” the woman said.

“Of course, you charlatan,” Anita said. “You and your ridiculous conjuring, your tricks. What the hell did you do to Caitlin in Haiti?”

“Showed her things.”

“You got in her head!” Anita charged.

“Anita, please—” Ben said.

“No, I’ve had enough,” she said. She went to move around Ben, saw the landline in Caitlin’s room, moved toward it. Ben took her wrist, stopped her. She wrested it away. “I’m calling 911. We need an ambulance and we need cops.” She pointed toward the hallway. “They’re leaving.”

“They can’t,” Ben told her. “We need them.”

“Why? To create more bullshit drama? Shaking, pointing, probably releasing some kind of hallucinogenic—”

“Anita, I’m angry too, but Caitlin helped to create this problem, this dynamic,” Ben said.

Anita looked at him with disbelief. “Are you high, Ben?”

“Dammit, no. Caitlin sought it out, invited it in. She ran headlong into this, ignoring every goddamn stop sign. I know, I was there. I was the one pointing at the flashing exit signs. What we really have to do is learn more before we do anything.”

“How, Ben? I’m listening.”

“And I’m thinking. Jacob’s breathing normally?”

“For a kid who’s unconscious, yeah.” She glared at Ben. “And that crap about Caitlin seeking this? She and I talked about that too. She was trying to provide care for a bunch of kids. She didn’t ask for her boy to be endangered.”

“You don’t have all the facts,” Ben said.

“Okay, I’ll ask again: What am I missing?”

“This ‘thing’ Caitlin was dealing with,” Ben said. “It targeted children of trauma. Jacob was caught in the backwash as soon as his mother got involved, that very day. Whatever it was got some kind of claws in him. She realized the first time she looked at this that there were forces neither of us even remotely grasped. But as you say, there were children at risk so she went ahead. I didn’t want her to go to Haiti. I didn’t want her to go to Tehran. Things came back with her, Anita. Things we thought—no, things we hoped—were gone. But they’re not, and doctors—doctors as smart and experienced as you, Anita—can’t help her or Jacob.” He moved closer. “Anita, I’m sure that right now Caitlin is trying to fix something, again.”

“She’s. Unconscious.”

“As far as the doctors know,” Ben said.

Anita made a sound of disgust. “You’re just guessing now, and it’s a dangerous guess.”

“Actually, I’m praying that’s the case. If it is, then we have to let this play out, at least a little longer. If Jacob shows even a hint of change, then we do it your way.”

“Define ‘hint,’ because he looks pretty pale right now.”

“Paler,” Ben said. “If his temperature rises or his breathing slows or he shows symptoms that are something other than the kind of reaction to a bad dream.”

“He was awake, remember?” Anita said. “This—this show may have put him in a reduced metabolic state.”

“And drugs are not the answer,” Ben said. “There is something bad out there, something doctors won’t be able to fix.”

Anita exhaled angrily and looked back at Jacob, who was sleeping again. They moved away from the door, into Caitlin’s room, and spoke softly.

“I just don’t like it,” she said. “And I don’t trust those two. Caitlin’s in a coma and I think this woman knows why. I want her to tell us.”

“I believe she will, in her own time and in her own way. She helped Caitlin heal the girl in Haiti. And she cared enough to make arrangements to fly up here.”

“‘Cared enough,’” Anita sneered. “About what?”

“What do you mean? She sensed there was a problem—”

“She may have already been here,” Anita said.

“What are you, the INS now?” Ben asked. “You want me to check her papers?”

“No, I want you to consider the possibility that she may have caused this, all of it. Starting in Haiti and continuing here.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know!” Anita said. “A shakedown. She saw a gullible, well-off woman down there, got her bony little talons into her, saw a way to make some money. I mean, she’s just over there, waiting. Offer her money, see if she talks.”

“I don’t believe that’s why she’s here,” Ben said. “I think she’s being careful. She could be afraid.”

“Yeah, of being found out,” Anita said.

Now Ben was getting frustrated. “I’ll say it again, Anita: there are phenomena at work. Genuine get-thee-from-me-Satan stuff. You heard Caitlin last night. You heard her here, in this apartment, when she was physically downtown. Christ, she gave you a message for me!”

“It was a phone, a device, an open line, something,” she said.

“Do you really believe that?”

“I do. I have to.”

“You saw the snake—”

“I saw a smoky shape,” Anita said. “Now that I think of it, maybe there was something in that cigar—”

“Which Madame Langlois didn’t light.”

“Not all psychoactive drugs are delivered by heating,” Anita replied. “The bark of Virola trees are used to create powdered hallucinogenic snuff—she puffed it our way then led us with her fingers, the simplest kind of hypnosis. You said it yourself: Count Dracula stuff.”

Ben shook his head. “You’re not hearing me. I’ve been with Caitlin when things have happened. Weird things.”

“The only weird thing is that I’m not tearing loose on these two and demanding answers,” Anita said. “And I’m not the only one.”

Ben gave her a quizzical look.

“Arfa doesn’t like them either,” Anita said.

“Right, where is the cat?”

“Exactly,” Anita said. “He doesn’t like other animals in the apartment. If there was a real snake out there, he would’ve been hissing and spitting.”

“My point exactly,” Ben said. “It was not a ‘real’ snake.”

Ben turned away from her. He was typically rational, yet here he was trying to argue against a traditional explanation. He shook his head.

“I have to go to work,” he said. He glanced at the clock on the night table. Caitlin had had it for decades, since they were students at NYU. It was not digital: the numbers flipped over on little plastic cards inside the white case. He missed his friend… he missed those days. There were times, like now, when he ached with that longing. “It’s six forty-five,” he said. “Caitlin’s parents will be here in an hour or so and I have an idea. I think. I will bring Madame Langlois and Enok to my place.”

“You’d trust them?”

“With what—my fridge and flat-screen? We can’t leave them with the O’Haras, so it’s either that or we turn them out.”

“I still vote for the latter,” Anita said hotly. “People who want to help… help. That’s what Caitlin did.”

She saw Ben’s sad eyes, quickly realized her mistake, and corrected herself. “That’s what Caitlin does. They don’t play games like our Vodou lady, they don’t talk without listening.” She continued in a softer voice. “Caitlin is a humanitarian. She doesn’t deserve what happened.”

“That’s a separate topic and there, at least, we agree,” Ben said. “But that doesn’t solve the immediate problem.”

Anita’s comments had sounded too much like a eulogy and Ben had to get away, not just emotionally and mentally but physically. He went back into the hallway to prepare to get the Langloises over to his East Side apartment near the United Nations. He looked in at Jacob again, resisted gathering up the boy’s drawings. Jacob and his mother shared a strong bond and there might be subtle, subliminal clues as to what happened. But the boy might wake and look for the sketches: in a world made suddenly very unstable, Ben wanted him to have at least that anchor. He left and headed back down the hall. Arriving in the living room, he swore through his teeth.

“What is it?” Anita asked, hurrying in.

“You got your wish,” he said, turning to the front door, pulling it open, and looking out into the empty hallway. “Madame Langlois and her son have left.”

CHAPTER 5

Vilu lay sprawled on the hard-packed sand of the courtyard. He was lying on his back, his eyes shut, his mouth open.

Caitlin ran to him. Surrounded by slowly encroaching Galder­khaani, she forgot her own plight when she bent over him. For an instant, like the scrape of a knife along her breastbone, she felt that it was Jacob falling, needing her help, needing her comfort.

Lasha had followed with a bowlegged gait and a loud huffing. The other citizens were clustering tighter, trying to see what the woman was doing as she knelt over the prone boy.

“Is there a physician?” she asked Lasha.

The man looked back at the gathered faces. “Weta? Does anyone see Weta?”

“She is in the birth center!” someone shouted back.

“Run! Get her!” Lasha said then turned to Caitlin. “That building is at the far end of the village, away from the sea chill, and Weta is aged. It will take time.”

Time. It kept coming up, seemed to be Caitlin’s enemy in every possible way. She focused on the boy. She didn’t bother to explain that she was a doctor herself: what she wanted immediately for the boy was a bed, shelter, and someone to watch him after she did triage. Most likely they had herbs or compounds, though she didn’t know that any of them would work. Ancient medicines and cures were hit-and-miss. When they missed, they often made the patient worse.

She also prayed, audibly, under her breath, that her worst fears weren’t realized—that this was not a transference of souls.

Her first thought was that Vilu had suffered heatstroke or dehydration, and she told Lasha to bring water. Unbending with a grunt, the old man turned and scurried back to his hut for a ladle.

Motioning for people to step back and give Vilu air, Caitlin saw that he was perspiring and, feeling for his heartbeat, found it normal. So was his temperature—assuming that the Galderkhaani “normal” was the same as that of modern humans. It wasn’t heatstroke, but that forced open the door to those other, deeper concerns. Jacob had been reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. She prayed that that had nothing to do with what this boy had uttered, but in her heart she didn’t believe it.

He followed me here, she thought ominously. There can be no other explanation.

Lasha arrived with an alok, a wooden, short-handled ladle that he’d filled from the pool. Apparently, they knew nothing of bacteria or parasites in Galderkhaan. Nonetheless, she took it and wet the boy’s lips from a bony rim. He responded weakly and she put a hand behind his head to support him as he tried to take more. The feel of his hair seemed so familiar. Caitlin struggled to keep back deep, heaving sobs. But she could not help herself from looking down at the sweet face, the ruddy skin with just a hint of pale white freckles, the dark hair that fell in natural ringlets over a broad, innocent forehead. Caitlin used the sleeve of her loose-fitting tunic to dab away the sweat that was beading under his eyes and on his cheek.

His four-flippered friend waddled through the legs of the crowd.

“Shoo!” Lasha growled, kicking lightly at the thyodularasi.

Without taking her eyes from the boy, Caitlin passed the ladle to Lasha.

“What could have happened?” the old man asked, peering over her back.

“Excitement,” said a teenaged girl who was looking on. “He so loves the airship.”

“Then why did he say—what did he say?” Lasha asked. “Sybamurn?”

Caitlin realized with a jolt that the boy had spoken it in English; Lasha had uttered a Galderkhaani approximation.

“Submarine,” Caitlin clarified without thinking—also in English.

“What is that?” Lasha asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, trying to forestall any further questions. “That’s what I heard.”

The woman fanned the boy with an open hand, blew gently on the sweat, touched his warm flesh. She used her body to block the harsh sun. Someone yelled that Weta would come as soon as possible. Caitlin was considering what to do next when the crowd that had gathered parted slightly and a familiar figure returned, tugged along by the thyodularasi Lasha had chased away. Standor Qala patted the thigh-high creature on its elongated snout and it released its grip. She strode through the group and crouched beside the boy, beside Caitlin.

“It was all too much for Vilu, I see,” Qala remarked.

“This has happened before?” Caitlin asked.

“Not like this,” Qala admitted with a half-smile. “Usually he just jumps around. Ever since Femora Azha took the children aloft in a fisher’s airship, his life has been about flight.”

“There is no blood, no injury,” Qala said after reaching softly behind the boy’s head. “Do we know if he’d eaten?”

No one answered. Reaching into the sashlike pouch at her side, Qala withdrew an oval pellet that looked like a ruby and held it just below the boy’s nostrils. Qala adjusted it so the rays of the sun were striking it directly. The sunlight illuminated small, dark, opaline facets inside. Fragrance rose from the crystal, which began to decay as the scent grew stronger. Caitlin saw now that it was not mineral but vegetal, the surface made of petals crushed around slivers of what looked like dried berries. Oil dropped from the shrinking object, absorbed by the boy’s flesh, just under his nostrils.

The boy stirred but his eyes remained closed.

“Odd,” Qala remarked as the pellet finally fell to pieces. “I’ve seen the dumatta awaken those who were near death from drowning. This appears to be a different kind of sleep.”

Qala allowed the lingering thyodularasi to lick her fingers. Lasha frowned.

“Don’t feed it,” the pool guardian said with exasperation.

“Quiet, Lasha. She deserves a reward for her loyalty.”

“Loyalty! She’s loyal to those who feed her!” Lasha shook bony fists at the animal, which snorted at him. “Perhaps it was spoiled fish that felled the boy! The fishers used to feed those to these beasts—now they sell them!”

“Complain about the fish again and I will see you assigned to a fisher ship in the western freeze zone,” Qala said as she scooped up the boy, put him over her shoulder, and rose. “I’m taking him to the airship physician.”

“I’m going with you,” Caitlin said.

Qala regarded Caitlin. “I thought you had other business.”

“Not now.”

“Perhaps you know him?”

“I—I don’t know,” Caitlin said. “But everyone else on the airship will be busy. He may need a nurse.”

The word she used was xat, which literally meant “health observer.” All that mattered was she would be near him.

Qala turned to Lasha. “Inform his caretakers. I will send the boy back when he has recovered.”

“But you’re leaving, Standor,” Lasha pointed out. “Aren’t you? Imminently?”

“I am,” Qala said, holding the boy a little tighter. “Let them know that as well.”

The water guardian seemed perplexed but would rather pass the word to simple fishers than to ask for further clarification from a Standor. It wasn’t as if the official carried any authority outside the operation of her airship. But the romance of her profession, the loftiness of her title, and Qala’s personal popularity would make it difficult to muster popular support against her. Even mad Azha had been given every opportunity to atone for her murderous efforts and foreswear any similar actions in the future. A common Galderkhaani would never have been heard before the full council in the Aankhaan House of Judgment.

Turning from Lasha, Standor Qala looked at Caitlin. “Perhaps the physician should look at you as well.”

“Let’s take care of the boy first,” Caitlin said.

They made their way through the crowd, which parted eagerly and respectfully. Qala was thoughtful as they walked.

“It is rare, in Galderkhaan, for children to receive the kind of priority you’ve suggested,” the Standor finally remarked.

“Is it?” Caitlin replied.

“If riders in an airship are injured during a storm, who should be tended to first? Those who can manage the ship or suckling babes?”

“I did not realize we had such a crisis on our hands,” Caitlin said. She wondered if her sarcasm came through in the exaggerated hand gestures.

Qala was quiet for another long moment then said, “Perhaps you have mothered before? In this place you know you’re from, yet cannot seem to remember.”

“Perhaps,” Caitlin said.

They left the courtyard, Caitlin still a little wobbly under Qala’s watchful eye. But she managed to keep up. She thought of Ben, imagined what he would give to be here, studying, listening, learning. Or Flora and her… her pirates. For all the intellectual sanctuary they took in their lofty, erudite trappings and ways, she did not believe it was scholarship they sought. It didn’t take an enlightened soul to feel that way. Like too many people she had met over the years—especially autocrats—they reeked of dangerous self-interest.

Caitlin’s gaze shifted from face to face among the locals who were working outdoors on small boats, on sails, nets, and mirrorlike devices she didn’t recognize—perhaps a form of solar power, she thought. Some were walking with others, holding hands, holding children, accompanied by the seals. Ratlike creatures flitted in the shadows, long, froglike tongues whipping out at large insects that rested on the walls. She noticed mounds that ran alongside the streets. Did those humps conceal pipes that carried water? Sewage? Steam from magma? She couldn’t be sure. A few citizens were eating at stand-alone buildings that were comparable to twenty-first-century taverns. A few of the people seemed to notice Caitlin—or Bayarma—and tilted their head to the right as she passed.

“You acknowledge no one,” the Standor observed.

“I—I thought they were greeting you,” Caitlin said. “Or the boy.”

“The boy?” Qala laughed. “He’s not conscious.”

“They might have been wishing him well.”

Qala frowned. “Then they would nod forward,” she said. “They are greeting a newcomer, inviting you to return. The other way,” Qala tilted her head to the left, “would be a sign of disapproval, such as the Technologists receive in Glogharasor.”

“The Priest stronghold,” she thought aloud.

“That’s right.”

“And Belhorji is for the Technologists,” Caitlin said.

They were names she had discussed with Ben during a nighttime walk in Paley Park. For a moment—gone before she even knew it was there—Caitlin almost felt as though she were back there. It came as a very strong—“snapshot” was the only word that came to mind. A rich image accompanied by a frisson, a tickling at the base of her skull.

“So you do remember something,” Qala said. “Perhaps your memory is returning?”

“Possibly,” Caitlin replied. She sought to reconnect with the park, with Ben, with anything during that night. But it was all gone.

There was speed but no sense of urgency in Qala’s long stride. Though the boy was in need of care, Caitlin recognized the Standor’s manner as typical of command: she had seen it at disaster sites around the world, where men and women moved with purpose to instill confidence, alleviate fear, and to preserve calm. This woman was not just a leader, the lingering eyes of onlookers told Caitlin that she was widely respected.

As they walked, Caitlin to the left of the Standor, where Vilu’s head lay on her shoulder, Caitlin was able to see the boy’s face. He would be all right physically, she believed, but his condition now was not what concerned her. If she permitted the destiny of Galderkhaan to take its course, Vilu would most likely be dead very soon—unless she informed the Standor what was to come and got him away from here.

But even that, like my presence here, may alter the course of future history, she thought. What if the Standor uses what I tell her and tries to prevent the catastrophe?

As they continued toward the shore, Caitlin briefly felt another tingling at the base of her skull, this one slightly longer than the previous experience. It had a pulsing, electric quality and only lasted a few seconds, but it had been there. There was no image associated with it, but when it left, Caitlin felt as though she were more alert, more present, more guarded, as though she’d had a shot of espresso.

She didn’t know what it was, but she knew what it wasn’t. It was not an assault, like being in the subway when she first saw Yokane causing her energies to come alive; it was not a reaching out, as when she channeled the power of the stones in Washington Square Park. This was something that came from within her, on its own.

Is it me or is it Bayarma trying to assert herself?

Uncertainty filled her soul. She did not want to leave if some part of Jacob were here, in this boy. And the question of what would happen to her soul if Bayarma reasserted control was anyone’s guess. She didn’t think she would just skip into another body—Qala’s or whoever else they might encounter. She had bonded with this family once before, and now she had connected with Bayarma for a reason.

Whether Caitlin wanted to or not, she was going to have to try and hold on long enough to determine whether it was Vilu or Jacob who was in the boy’s body.

“How is your strength?” Qala asked as they walked.

“All right, so far,” she replied.

“The tower is quite near,” the Standor said. “But if you like, I can send a carrier for you.”

“I’m able to make it,” Caitlin assured her.

Caitlin had no idea what a “carrier” might be until they reached another courtyard. The open, sun-drenched area was at least three times the size of the pool yard and there were at least twenty cigar-shaped airships about the size of minivans. She focused on the objects, not the light; it was disorienting to imagine that this is the same sun, the same light, that would one day shine in her own welcoming apartment, light the breakfast table she shared with her son.

The airships were hovering an average of ten feet above the ground. Plants that resembled modern jasmine were being unloaded from nets that hung tightly between them. Indeed, the balloons themselves bore a slight resemblance to their cargo: there were leaflike fins high on the envelopes, fore and aft, presumably to control the vessel in the strong atmospheric currents as it hovered in the clouds.

Jasmine, she thought. It had been present in some form since she had first met Maanik in the Pawars’ apartment. Was she drawn to it, it to her, or was it a coincidence? Or was she simply noticing it in her time because its presence here was informing the future… her future?

Caitlin couldn’t quite grasp that idea, the mechanics of that idea, so she forced herself to stay mentally rooted in this place—observing, collecting information, seeking some way to rekindle her energies.

Beyond the courtyard, down a wide, open road to the shore, Caitlin saw dozens of surface vessels, their small nets full of fish. They were riding waves that had a different action from any she had ever seen: the sea was smooth and then, about ten yards from shore, waves rose up and smashed down as if they were pumped from some deep coastal trough. She had no way of knowing whether it was a local or continental phenomenon. Local, most likely, since ships were coming to shore off to the sides. She wondered if it were artificial since the breakers created a breeze that blew a refreshing coolness into the courtyard and chased away the smell of fish. Heat, odor, and spoilage—as heralded by the obsessed Lasha—would be a problem during interminable hours of daylight.

Caitlin also saw more airships high in the sky, among the clouds. The same kinds of nets were strung between them with foliage of all kinds crowded against all four sides of each. Apparently, the clouds were a more accessible source of freshwater than whatever ice surrounded Galderkhaan. From the barrels that lined the streets she assumed that the harvest here was primarily jasmine, which must grow readily in this climate, by these means, and was light enough to be supported by the airborne nets.

It was a small but impressive spectacle of agrarian and oceanic commerce, as well as simple but effective engineering. Yet the tableau was almost unnaturally quiet, at least to her New York–accustomed ears; even Haiti and Phuket had more ambient noise than this with cars, radios, jets, helicopters, cell phones, and the other trappings of modern civilization. As far as she could see there weren’t fuel- or even steam-powered apparatuses; all the work was being managed by well-oiled pulleys, by weights and counterweights, and by hand. She also did not see smokestacks or chimneys, or even a hint of pollution corrupting the blue of the sky. Given what she knew of the Source, and what Lasha had said, the dwellings in Galderkhaan were apparently warmed during winter by subterranean pools of magma and water.

It was a clean, efficient way of living—more so, it seemed, than other ancient civilizations of more modern times.

And it is about to end, she could not help thinking.

Caitlin felt sick in her soul, even as she reminded herself that it was a Galderkhaani who would cause the catastrophe. Though she could not help but remember, with awful clarity, the vision of the dying as they tried to save their souls through the ritual of cazh, even as their bodies turned to ash, and how she had worked so hard to prevent that ascension—

“Now that we’re away from the others, I would like you to tell me the truth about the bracelet,” the Standor said. “About where you come from.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t look like a thief. And I do not think you are a liar.”

“It’s true, I am neither,” Caitlin assured her. “At least, I don’t think I am a thief. I truly do not know. What prompted you to ask?”

“Your jewelry is not made of Falkhaan silver.” She regarded Caitlin. “I have friends who are miners here. I know the local minerals and their impurities. The name on the bracelet is someone not from around here, or she would be known. You yourself say that you are from elsewhere. That you have a son elsewhere. Yet you also have some connection with this boy, who has never left this village. I saw it in the way you touched him.”

“That is true.”

“And being true, there must be an explanation.”

“I wish I had one,” Caitlin said, and meant it. “I felt as if I know him. Standor, maybe you can help me. You must have traveled the continent. Have you ever met anyone who has lost their memory?”

“Once, when I was still a novice,” Qala said. “I met a Priest. He was experimenting with a ritual and emerged from it saying strange things about other lands… nothing anyone could understand. And he couldn’t remember who he was, even when others told him.”

“Is this Priest still alive?”

“I don’t know,” the Standor replied. “The last I heard of him, his body was alive but he neither spoke nor responded to any kind of stimulus.” Qala regarded Caitlin across Vilu’s back. “Do you think you participated in an experiment of some kind?”

“Again, I don’t know,” Caitlin replied.

“And… north,” the Standor said. She looked out across the sea. “I have flown a considerable direction to the north. There is nothing. Nothing except floating mountains of ice, great sea beasts, and no birds. If there were land, there would be birds. Yet you say you come from there.”

“I—I may have been confused,” she said.

“I believe you have made yourself a crossed net line,” Qala said.

“I’m sorry?”

“When an airship turns suddenly, without notifying its companion, the net between them gets tangled,” the Standor told her. “I suspect you just told a lie to protect a truth.”

Qala didn’t press Caitlin, for which the psychiatrist was grateful. It was the mark of a wise and seasoned commander. Reading about the Vikings to try and understand Galderkhaan, Caitlin had learned that hands were axed for theft. But shipboard, one-handed sailors were of little use, so captains learned to accept small lies told from a crew that dipped, without permission, into the stores of grog or cheese. Qala had just done that for her.

They rounded the end of the street and turned to a road along the coast. The waves were indeed tame beyond the natural horseshoe-shaped harbor, but the sudden expanse of blue-white ocean was not what caught her eye. Caitlin and the Standor were making their way toward a column that was roughly three hundred feet high. It was a smaller, slimmer version of the tower of the motu-varkas, in which she had confronted Pao and Rensat. Her pace slowed as she took in the spectacle of the great airship moored to the top, like some tamed, dark storm cloud, its envelope being replenished by tubes that ran from the nose into the depths of the tower. The airship was, in effect, a highly elongated hot-air balloon, elegant in its simplicity.

“Majestic,” she said.

“The sight of it always stirs me—and others,” Qala agreed.

Caitlin didn’t understand her meaning until she followed the woman’s eyes to Vilu.

“Now we know that the boy is well asleep,” Qala said.

Caitlin leaned toward the boy as they walked. His breathing was normal, the inhalation of sleep, not unconsciousness. She touched his hair.

“We are going to the airship, sweet one,” she said softly. “If you open your eyes, you will see it.”

The boy stirred slightly—

Because of what I said, or because it was my voice, my touch? she wondered. She took his fingers in hers. Please, Jacob, if you are in there let me know.

The straight line of the boy’s mouth curved into a small, sweet smile. Caitlin kissed him as they continued to walk.

The path to the tower stretched about a quarter mile ahead, along a rocky, heavily eroded section of beach. At least two dozen wharves had been erected there, beyond the horseshoe harbor, each extending about a hundred feet from the shore. On this side of the tower was a sliver of beach: black sand where Galderkhaani presumably enjoyed recreation, though not this early in the morning. Perhaps it was reserved for the crews who had limited downtime.

There was no longer compacted sand underfoot but large square slabs of stone about a yard on each side. They appeared, like the tower, to be carved from basalt. There were designs cut in many of them—the names of Galderkhaani. Though Caitlin could read them, she had no idea who any of them were. As they crossed over one, she noticed Qala shift her grip on Vilu so that he was nestled in the crook of her elbow, leaving her hands somewhat free. She touched her forehead lightly with her left thumb while holding her other hand flat toward the ground.

To you who sleep.

Caitlin initially thought they were the equivalent of commemorative steles honoring the dead. Perhaps the one they had passed was someone Qala had known. But that idea changed as she peered ahead, into the morning mist that still clung to sections of the shore. The road of stones stretched into the distance as far as she could see along the coast. These weren’t just road stones, she realized: they were most likely graves. Considering their size, either the people within had been cremated or they were interred vertically. Or perhaps the sea claimed the remains from below, through liquefaction.

“Where are you truly from?” Qala asked suddenly.

The question was asked with greater insistence than before. “As I said, I can’t seem to—”

“You do not honor the ascended,” Qala remarked. “You cannot have forgotten something so basic—not when you know how to speak, to read, to minister to a child. If you are not lying, then you are certainly withholding information.”

Caitlin quickly replayed Qala’s words and gestures in her mind, realized with a jolt that she had missed it: the “ascended” Qala had used in her gesture was plural, not directed at a specific individual but at all of them. It was a custom, no doubt, to pay homage when one set foot on the road. Caitlin should have been present enough, at least, to mimic the salute, even crudely.

She did not consider saying that her mental state had caused her to forget. Qala was not a fool. And it occurred to Caitlin, then, that she might need an ally for whatever was coming, especially one with an airship. She hoped it was possible to explain some things without revealing them all.

Caitlin stroked Vilu’s hair once again, then turned toward the strong gaze of the Standor and fixed those gold eyes with her own.

“You probably will not believe what I am about to tell you, Standor Qala,” she answered as they continued along the path, “but I am from the north. Only not from this place… or time.”

The Standor made a face. “Is this more wordplay?” she asked. “Another ‘time’?”

“Yes,” Caitlin said, gesturing carefully, seeking superlatives that could help her state precisely what she meant. “I am from the distant future, not by design but by accident. I am here because a pair of transcended souls forced me to come.”

CHAPTER 6

Mikel slept heavily, as though he’d been drugged.

After setting his phone to wake him, he collapsed, sprawled across a bench in the library of the module that served as a social and recreational area of the base. He did not dream, did not get to think of “things” before he drifted away. Casey Skett had relieved him of having to make any decisions. All that Mikel had now was an assignment and he had to be clear-headed to make it happen.

The ibuprofen Mikel had swallowed before sleep kept the pain of his broken wrist from being much of a distraction. The screeching winds were now the equivalent of white noise. Mikel stayed put until the alarm sounded.

Waking with the beep, Mikel found the room still and quiet with only distant sounds as the team of scientists and engineers went about securing their relocated base and undoubtedly researching the phenomenon they’d witnessed—the pillar of fire, biblical in dimension, that inexplicably erupted from the ice. Mikel knew they would not come close to understanding it without his help. Now he had to go down there and convince them of that.

Rest kept his eyes from drooping, but it provided neither clarity nor focus. He was still bombarded with random thoughts, things that sleep had allowed to bubble to the surface. He went back to his log to make a few final additions.

Several things occur to me now that I’ve had a bit of rest, he typed.They are puzzles that must be solved. I do not know whether the ascended soul of Enzo remained trapped in the magma of the Source, burning for millennia, or whether her soul somehow leaped immediately from her death ages ago to exist in the present. I am sure the answer could be found somewhere in the olivine tiles, but if I encounter them again I have—and will continue to have—too much respect for them to do more than skim the surface. When triggered slightly, just the single artifact that was appropriated from the geological survey vessel in the Falklands liquefied a human brain. I am not prepared to play Galderkhaani roulette.

What I know for certain is that the dead are somehow able to interact with the living, but, curiously, not with each other unless they cazhed. Other­wise, Pao and Rensat would have been able to communicate with Enzo. And I would not be alive to write this journal. I suspect the impediment was something the Priests suspected: that transcended souls are quite literally in a different time, realm, or dimension from ascended souls. Yet all can interact with the living—Pao and Rensat with me, Enzo with Jina Park. What is it about living matter that is a conduit, a conductor?

Clearly, Casey Skett wanted answers to those and similar questions. And while Mikel would welcome an ally, the risk was not just seeking to obtain knowledge; it was what Skett might do with it.

Now that his head was a little clearer and he had a chance to process his conversation with those in New York, there was the startling revelation about the Group. Mikel had been recruited straight from Harvard by Chairwoman Flora Davies. A Pamplona-born archaeologist, Mikel had indeed believed they were originally underwritten by a wealthy merchant who discovered Galderkhaani relics on a journey to Bengal in 1648. Mikel had seen those artifacts—shards of pottery with strange writing and pieces of an unknown skin that Mikel now knew were parts of the hortatur mask he had donned to help him breathe. The idea that the story was a lie, or at the very least incomplete, was disturbing. Especially when Mikel thought of the power the Group, or Skett, was on the verge of possessing. They still had two tiles in New York: by themselves, they were devilishly powerful.

Which one of the groups do you help? he asked himself.

Walking away was not an option. This had been his professional life’s work and there were profound questions he and only he could still answer. That was why there was no question about going out there, by bulldozer or Ski-Doo, or even on foot if it came to that.

So, he thought. Time to try and convince either base commander Eric Trout or chief scientist Dr. Albert Bundy to let me have one or the other.

Trout was the least likely. The burly, mustachioed former Royal Marine commando engineer was a hard-nosed manager, in charge of everything that wasn’t science. Mikel had nearly wrecked a key module of the base: Trout would not give the man access to anything with wheels or treads. The Oxford man was the better target. Bundy had previously given Mikel what he wanted thanks to Flora’s connection with the RAF—though that was before the base suffered its series of setbacks. Bundy would be less receptive now. Moreover, if the ice shelf had been compromised—and there was as yet no indication that the new location was secure—then it might be necessary to move again. Every means of transportation would be required.

The key may be assuring him that you can answer his questions as well by going back to where it all began, Mikel told himself.

Feeling cautiously optimistic, Mikel slipped from the bench. He walked past the rock-climbing wall that was used for exercise then headed down the spiral staircase to the cafeteria. Several of the staff had gathered there, hungry after the long hours of relocation and data crunching. Dr. Bundy was among them, sitting with several of his top scientists. The six-foot-seven-inch frame of Siem der Graaf was alone at a separate table, which was how and where Mikel had first met him. The maintenance worker was visibly stiff from having shared some of Mikel’s adventures.

“How’s everything going?” Mikel asked, pausing beside the table.

The young man looked up from a bowl of pea soup. His disinterested expression brightened slightly.

“I’m okay, my crazy friend. How’s the wrist? And, how are you even standing after the fall from the truck? I feel like a sack of corn.”

“I’ve learned to ignore superficial bumps and bangs,” Mikel answered. “A hazard of the trade. Also, I’m sort of built like a cat. I bend.”

“You under six-footers have an advantage there,” the big man said. “I move like a log. A hungry log,” Siem added as he returned to his soup. But his eyes remained on Mikel. “Speaking of which, you have a rather hungry look. Not for food, I think.”

“What kind of a mood is Bundy in?” Mikel asked, his eyes on the scientists’ table.

“Not bad. He seems to like having a crisis to manage,” Siem replied. “I don’t mean moving the base, that was mostly Trout. No, I’ve been hearing things like, ‘What bloody caused this instability?’ and ‘There isn’t a bloody computer model that predicted or can explain this!’” Siem said, mimicking Bundy’s stentorian British accent. “Oh, and he doesn’t believe it has anything to do with global warming.”

“The greenhouse effect wouldn’t quite explain a column of flame.”

“Apparently, none of the satellite images or data suggests any cause, which is why they started spitballing,” Siem said. “A new Russian superweapon. Shifting interaction between the Van Allen radiation belts and the plasmasphere. Dragons.”

“Dragons?”

“Yes. That was Dr. Cummins’s suggestion. She meant it in jest, I think. I hope. We don’t have armor-piercing weapons at the base.”

“Good God, Siem, why would you kill a mythical creature come to life?”

Siem snickered. “That’s a very good question, you know? Too many movies, I guess. And I never was much of a conservationist. I’m a big fan of the Industrial Revolution.”

Mikel smiled as he continued to watch the group. They either didn’t know he was there or were ignoring him. “Is Bundy planning to go out there?”

“Not yet, as far as I know,” Siem replied. “They want follow-up satellite imagery and more data from the remote automated systems before making any decisions.”

“Whatever happened to eyes-on scientific reconnaissance?”

“Gone with the insurance documents we all signed to be here,” Siem said. “They want to make sure it’s not going to go off again.”

“It isn’t,” Mikel replied quietly.

Siem looked up again. “How can you be sure? It’s happened three times already. Nerves are a little unsteady.”

He was referring to the initial appearance of the flame, the one that killed scientist Jina Park, and to the flare they had all seen while preparing to move the base.

“Because I know what caused that last flare-up, and I know it’s burned-out,” Mikel said. “The trick will be convincing them.”

“Just on your say so?”

“In addition to being a lousy spelunker, I am a first-class PhD,” Mikel pointed out.

Siem snickered again as he picked up the bowl and drank down the remainder. “Friend Mikel, I like you. And I might very well believe you. But even I wouldn’t risk a research party on your say-so.”

“We don’t need a party,” Mikel said.

“Just you?” Siem said knowingly.

“Just me.”

“Good luck,” Siem said in earnest, then wiped his mouth. “But if you wouldn’t mind—what did cause the explosion?”

“It was an ancient power source, fueled by deep-flowing magma that’s still under the ice,” he said.

“What kind of power source?”

“A mineral,” Mikel said. “One that is extremely powerful and apparently unique to the region.”

Mikel didn’t bother adding that the blast was actually the result of an ascended soul releasing its hold on a portion of that energy. Ascribing the incident to lava was cleaner.

“A new mineral?” Siem said dubiously.

“That’s what brought me down here in the first place,” Mikel said. “A sample I found, from the waters off the Falklands.”

“You have it?”

Mikel shook his head.

“Too bad. But the other part of your theory is a problem too,” Siem went on. “Lava would be difficult to overlook, and I don’t believe anyone has found geologically active pockets out there. It would be talked about. I would have heard about it.”

“The minerals may be screwing with their instruments,” Mikel said.

“Ah.”

Mikel also did not want to explain that the magma was not active now but in another epoch. He looked over at the scientists. “I should probably talk to Bundy about this.”

“Probably,” Siem said. “And I wish you luck. I do.” His eyes held Mikel’s. “You were pretty wild down there, Mikel. Are you convinced that you didn’t strike your head when you broke your wrist? Or perhaps the air was toxic?”

“I don’t blame you for being cautious, Siem—”

“It isn’t caution,” the maintenance engineer replied. “Frankly, it’s doubt. I’m a mechanical engineer.” He rapped the table. “Reality, not speculation. Also, I have some concern.”

“For?”

“Whatever you do out here will follow you when you go home,” Siem said. “I studied Antarctica, its history, before agreeing to accept this appointment. For centuries—going back to the seventh century, if you believe some accounts—people have come to the South Pole and left with crazy ideas. I’ve read about those ideas and their adherents. Holes to the center of the earth, spaceships of ancient aliens, living dinosaurs, dinosaurs from space living inside the earth. Trust me, Mikel. Careers have been ruined.”

“But imagine the contribution to science of the first researcher to find a prehistoric beast down here—even a frozen one.”

“And, with it, an ancient bacterium for which there is no known cure,” Siem added.

“The price of science,” Mikel replied. “How do you know there aren’t any of those vessels or creatures out here? You yourself, the others—you all saw a burning face.”

“We think we did, which is my point exactly,” Siem said. “The air, the cold, the magnetic pole, the movement of vast oceans around us and under us—the isolation. I’ve listened to the scientists as I work on the gear. It all affects the mind. That’s why we rely on impartial equipment, on data, to tell us what is real and what is not. And there is nothing that confirms a jot of this right now.”

“As I said, there won’t be,” Mikel replied. He was still looking over at the scientists. Two had left, leaving Bundy and glaciologist Dr. Victoria Cummins alone with their laptops. Mikel clapped his good hand appreciatively on Siem’s shoulder.

“Thank you for your advice, my friend,” Mikel said.

“You are welcome,” Siem replied. “Good luck getting out of this with your life,” he added as the archaeologist walked away.

Mikel didn’t know whether the engineer was referring to the impromptu meeting with a hostile scientist or the mission he proposed to undertake.

Probably both, Mikel thought. Siem was not wrong. But Casey Skett had left him no other opitions.

Dr. Bundy was facing Mikel as he approached. The geologist looked drawn but his brown eyes were as lively as ever. His natural frown deepened as Mikel neared.

“Speak of the bloody bête noire,” the middle-aged scientist said.

Dr. Cummins turned. Her gray eyes were pale against skin that was still bronze from a long, very recent research trip down the Amazon River. A glaciologist, she had spent four months studying the drop of sea levels in the region during the last ice age. Dr. Cummins was in her midforties, her dull red hair streaked with gray and pulled into a single tight braid. She said she had used it in Brazil to swat flies, like a horse.

“Doctors,” Mikel said in the conciliatory tone he used when he needed something.

The woman nodded and flashed a thin smile. Bundy looked back at his colleague as though they hadn’t been interrupted.

“Exhausting all preliminary, standard explanations for a jet of flame in the South Pole,” Bundy said, recapping, “and categorizing, for now, as a form of mass hysteria the shape that appeared to be a face of fire we all saw before that, we also happened to be talking—Dr. Jasso—about the way you hijacked my truck just before the explosion, as if you knew the bloody thing were about to happen.”

“I didn’t,” Mikel said. “Not exactly.”

“Meaning?”

“While I was in the caverns, I saw a ball of fire,” Mikel said. “It appeared to be—well, looking for a way out.”

“Consciously seeking an exit?” Dr. Cummins asked.

“It didn’t act like any flame I ever saw,” Mikel said evasively.

Bundy pinned the archaeologist with a look. “To be specific—a quality you seem reluctant to embrace—you referred to that phenomenon as being, and I quote from vivid memory, ‘What a soul looks like when it is sent back to hell.’ Since you happen to be here, despite being uninvited to my table and a private meeting—”

“In a public space,” Mikel pointed out.

“Public for members of this party,” Bundy said. “Putting that aside for the moment, would you care to explain and elaborate, Dr. Jasso?”

Before he could speak, Dr. Cummins said, “Mind you, I am very much inclined, as I just told Dr. Bundy, to ascribe the face to some version of Saint Elmo’s fire.” She tapped her laptop. “There was a coronal discharge and a very strong electric field in the region at that time. The crackling could have been mistaken for a voice.”

“Which supports my theory of collective hypnosis of a sort,” Bundy said, resuming their previous debate as if he had not spoken to Mikel at all. “We heard a voice and, therefore, we saw a face.”

“But Dr. Harvey’s point about rising gas catching and refracting sunlight must also be given consideration,” Dr. Cummins said, more to Mikel than to Bundy. “The motion of the gas and the sun itself would cause it to appear to move.”

Mikel pulled out a chair and sat easily to avoid shocking his bruised posterior. “It was not any kind of gas or luminous plasma, Dr. Cummins. The fire was not an illusion from out there.” He motioned vaguely toward the ceiling and the sky beyond. “The flame was real, it came from below.”

“Bloody rubbish,” Dr. Bundy said. “There is nothing active down there. Nothing that would have caused fire to spit up like that. We are still not reading any kinds of energy bursts, nor are any of the other outposts we’ve contacted. The RAF is looking into a possible missile strike, or space debris.”

“They can look all they want,” Mikel said with confidence that bordered on calculated smugness. “It was geologic.”

“This is not goddamn Yosemite,” Bundy said with rising anger. “We are not sitting on a bloody supervolcano.”

“Not now, no,” Mikel agreed.

Bundy exhaled, loudly. “You know, I keep hoping for bloody science from you,” he said, “and am constantly denied.” Then he spat a series of expletives. Despite his long string of degrees, the man had the mouth of a North Sea oil-rig worker, which is how he put himself through school. It was also the reason he made a point not to mingle with anyone who didn’t have a PhD. That part of his life was done. It was the only reason Mikel was allowed at the table, despite the strikes against him. If not openly blacklisted, Siem and the other engineers were definitely graylisted.

Dr. Cummins turned fully to the new arrival. “I don’t disagree that there is some kind of latent, potential danger out there,” she said quietly. “That is precisely what Dr. Bundy and I have been discussing. But what do you mean? What do you know? As far as we and our very sophisticated, very expensive instruments can tell, there is nothing down there, no caldera, no ancient lava flows, nothing even extinct.”

There was a hint of sarcasm in her voice. Mikel didn’t mind; at least she was asking questions.

“The key phrase is ‘As far as we can tell,’” Mikel said. “There are lava tubes down there. I’ve been in them. There are massive wind tunnels. That is how I got this.” He raised his slinged arm.

“Dormant!” Bundy said. “Not presently active!”

“And, if I have been correctly advised, all of that seen in the dark, in the cold, by a battered and confused man in an environment where the senses might be easily confused!” Dr. Cummins said. She nodded toward Siem. “That, from a man who was with you part of the time.”

“Exactly so,” Bundy said. “Where is the bloody proof?”

“That, Doctors, is why I am here now,” Mikel said calmly, cutting through the debate. “I want to go out and get it.”

“You want to go back out?”

“I want to conduct firsthand research,” Mikel said. “That’s what archaeologists do. Research. In the field.”

Bundy laughed. “Brilliant. And you want my blessing?”

“If not that, then at least a conveyance of some kind, even a very modest one.”

Bundy was still laughing. “As much as I would love to be rid of you,” he replied, “what you propose is absurdly unsafe. Even if the winds were calm—and they’re fickle, having just today approached sixty miles an hour and climbing again—we don’t know the status of the ice cover around that crater. It may not hold a vehicle of any kind. Or even a man.”

“Better to risk that than the modules,” Dr. Cummins noted.

Bundy shot her a critical look. “You agree with this?”

“Yes, but for very practical reasons,” she said. “We may, quite literally, be on very thin ice, even here. If we don’t know the root cause, we won’t know how to prepare—or for what, exactly.”

“You’ll never know what’s out there unless I go,” Mikel added quickly. “And over days, over hours, important data may be lost.”

“Or the entire base could be lost,” Dr. Cummins added, addressing Bundy.

Bundy shook his head once. “Go out there and you may be lost,” he said. “Again. And this time Siem won’t go rushing out to save you.”

“I’m not asking him to save me, or to save anyone for that matter,” Mikel said, “except maybe the research station. Look, I’m not an official part of this team. I can walk out of here if I want.”

“And bloody good riddance—”

“Fine, I accept full responsibility for myself and for any damage or loss you may incur,” Mikel said. “Just a Ski-Doo, that’s all I want.”

“And those people who were going to pay for the last damage you caused?” Bundy asked. “The ones in New York? I suppose they will cover this too?”

“Working on it,” Mikel said.

“You’re all empty promises and hot air,” Bundy said. “That’s a boy talking, a boy caught in a half-truth, not a scientist.”

Mikel looked over at Dr. Cummins. “Do you agree with him?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “You propose to do this with one functioning arm?”

“If I have to.”

“You’ll never survive,” Bundy snapped.

“That’s my concern,” Mikel replied.

“Not when my equipment is involved it bloody isn’t,” Bundy said. “No, absolutely not.”

“I’ll go with him,” Dr. Cummins said suddenly.

Bundy fired off yet another critical look. He seemed to have a bottomless supply. “Are you bloody serious?”

“Positively sanguine,” she told him. “Look. We’ve been sitting here for hours, getting nowhere. I want to know what’s down there too. But of more immediate concern, the ice around the pit is cracked. The melted ice inside may have solidified and secured it, but we don’t know. The satellite images don’t tell us that much. Furthermore, they don’t tell us what kind of areal degradation may have occurred below the surface. That’s where melting begins, along the ground line, and thanks to that flame geyser we saw—and maybe some we didn’t see—we could be sitting on a section of shelf that is weaker than we know. There could be hairline fractures or crevasses due to oceanic erosion. We must know the cause and we must try to determine the extent.”

“Which is the reason I’m imploring you to let me go out there,” Mikel said. “If there is a ‘next time,’ we may not have time to evacuate.”

“Or a place to evacuate to,” Dr. Cummins added. “I’ll admit, Dr. Bundy, that frightens me.”

The face of the geologist relaxed slightly. Mikel could be denied; a fellow scientist was different. Especially one who voiced legitimate concerns. He looked at Mikel.

“This man frightens me,” Bundy said. “He is impetuous. And I don’t think he’s telling us everything.”

Dr. Cummins turned to study the archaeologist. “Dr. Jasso, I agree with Dr. Bundy. I believe you know things that we do not. Let me tell you, I have no patience for deceit. I worked with a botanist along the Amazon who sounded just like you. Same careful phrasing, same hesitation, same urgency. He said he had to take our raft, double back and study some rare flower he thought he had spotted growing near a tributary. I later discovered he had seen mud flecked with what he thought was gold. It turned out to be iron pyrite. I know because I had one of the natives watch him. He no longer had any credibility with me, and I sent him packing, Dr. Jasso.” She examined the scientist. “What is it with you, Doctor? What are you not telling us?”

Mikel was silent. But his expression registered respect for the scientist and she saw that. She fell silent as well.

“That was unilluminating,” Bundy remarked. “Dr. Cummins, I wish I shared your enthusiasm for this course of action. I do not. Dr. Jasso, since your arrival it isn’t only the ice that has eroded. My authority has gone to bloody hell. Research is—must be—systematic or it is useless.” He shook his head. “But I’m tired… too tired to argue about this. Until we know something about what is out there—which, right now, amounts to very, very little—I cannot and will not personally authorize an expedition.” He placed his pale hands on the table and rose. “Now, I am going to sleep. We will revisit this matter later, after we have heard from the British Geological Survey, the U.S. Geological Survey, and other organizations whose job it is—not ours—to assess the situation.”

“A situation on the ground that they will only study from outside the atmosphere,” Mikel said disgustedly.

“At last, you understand,” Bundy said.

The barrel-chested scientist departed. Siem had also left, leaving Jasso and Dr. Cummins alone.

The glaciologist rose suddenly. “Come on.”

“Where?” Mikel asked, startled from his sudden dejection. He wasn’t looking forward to trekking out there.

“To the garage,” she said. “Your friend is preparing one of the trucks.”

“My friend?”

“Siem. Good lord, I hope you read archaeological signs better than you read human ones,” she said. “Dr. Bundy is a scientist. A good one. He wants answers as much as we do, and he wasn’t saying no. He was simply abrogating responsibility for the decision I made to take you out there. Meaning, it’s my ass if we screw up. Your friend Siem was watching, saw my eyes give the order, and left.”

Mikel continued to stare at her. Dr. Cummins was correct. He had missed every piece of that.

“I understand that you work for a woman, the head of a small research organization,” Dr. Cummins went on, rising with some effort; she too was tired. “Going forward, we are not, are we, going to have a problem as to who is in charge?”

“We are not,” Mikel said, “with one caveat.”

The woman froze, her mouth turning up in a not very surprised half-smile. “You’ve got spine, I’ll give you that. What’s the caveat, Dr. Jasso?”

“You defer to me regarding a single matter.”

“Which is?”

“The ancient civilization that once held absolute sway over this continent,” he replied.

She took a moment, just staring at him. Then she said, “A… civilization?”

“Yes, quite large and advanced well beyond where the Aztecs and Mayans were at their height,” Mikel said. “A civilization that is not quite dead and is definitely not quiescent.”

CHAPTER 7

Standing in the sunny but otherwise empty living room, Ben was not just tired and angry, he was perplexed. The Langloises were definitely gone; not only couldn’t he hear her jewelry here or in the hall—he opened the door to check—but he noticed Arfa emerge from under the sofa and leap gracefully onto the windowsill. The cat skillfully nestled in the small space between the flowerpots.

Against his strongest instincts, Ben Moss phoned Eilifir. He couldn’t think of anything else to do.

“Mr. Moss, what can—”

“Have you been watching the building since I went in?” Ben asked.

“Yes—”

“Did you see the Haitian couple leave?”

“No—”

Ben swore and ended the call. Eilifir called back but Ben ignored him. He tried to think of where the Langloises could have gone—and then it occurred to him: they would have followed the energy. Not that of the smoke snake, but the one Madame Langlois herself had referred to.

Leaving Anita in the apartment, Ben dashed up to the roof. Madame Langlois was now sitting on a lawn chair that was bolted to the roof and Enok was behind her. She was facing south. The smell of cigar smoke reached Ben as he approached.

“I thought you said you had no matches.”

“Someone had a birthday recently, there were matches in the kitchen,” she said.

Ben noticed them, now, in Enok’s hand. “It was Dr. O’Hara’s birthday,” he said absently, longingly. He had to admire the woman’s resourcefulness. “What made you come up here?”

“You never know where a habit may take you,” she said.

Ben eyed the woman. “Is that all?” he asked. “This is just a place to smoke?”

“Smoking is never just to smoke,” she replied. “It helps me think. And I think that Dr. O’Hara was up here.”

“Many times,” Ben replied.

“I say recently,” she said, raising her arm and pointing to the southeast while she puffed on her cigar. “Very recently. The snake flows there. It tells me of a death.”

“In the past or future?”

“It already happened,” she said.

Ben peered out. “That’s the direction of the park where Caitlin was found.”

“It is not she who is dead,” Madame Langlois said confidently.

“Do you know exactly when she was here?” Ben asked, approaching her under Enok’s watchful eye. “Or rather, was she here in body?”

“In body and soul,” Madame Langlois assured him.

Ben looked back at the woman, disapproval in his expression. “Madame, I’m sure you understand how frustrating this is for me.”

“You are in love.”

“Yes. Yes, I am. You say Dr. O’Hara is alive but in danger, yet that isn’t much to go on. Can you please tell me anything more?”

It was Enok who answered. His eyes were hard, his voice even harder.

“You must learn to listen,” he said as the smoke from his mother’s cigar swirled past his face. “You do that for your livelihood, I am told, yet you are lost in words and not meaning.”

“I don’t agree,” Ben said. “I struggle every minute with nuance and subtext—”

“You deconstruct, that is all you do,” Enok said. “Dr. O’Hara tried. She was fully committed. She heard. You talk about going to your job. You only hear your own voice.” He touched his own forehead, right between the eyebrows.

“The third eye?” Ben said. “That’s a Hindu concept, the seat of wisdom—”

“It is present in many cultures,” Enok told him. “I was with the doctor when she heard other voices. Heard, not just listened.”

“I was with her on one of those occasions as well,” Ben shot back, “and Dr. O’Hara—Caitlin—has now paid a price for ‘hearing’ without fully understanding.”

“She saved the child from the serpent,” Madame Langlois said pleasantly. “We here are not ready for it.”

“Are you talking about a cult?” Ben asked. “Snake worshippers?”

It sounded trivial as he said it. Not silly, but small. Madame Langlois confirmed this impression.

“Not worshippers,” she replied. “The most important loa himself.”

“The god?” Ben said, making sure he understood.

“It is so.”

“What is he doing?”

“You saw,” she replied. “Damballa, the serpent loa, the Sky Father, the creator of all that live—he sent his herald. His endless coils that fill the heavens—they are coming.”

“I saw lights inside the smoke,” Ben said. “I thought those were what you meant by ‘they.’”

“The loa’s skin will be shed again, not to create the seas but to create new living things,” she continued as if she had not heard. She blew smoke at the sky. It formed a sinuous shape before dissipating to the southeast. She cackled low in her throat. “He is gone. He must go to his job too.”

Ben was more confused than ever. He did need to go to work, not just to work but also to clear his head. He turned to Enok.

“I have to leave and you cannot stay up here,” he said.

“Why not?” Enok asked.

“Because Dr. O’Hara’s father is coming and he will not understand. Would you agree to go somewhere else?”

Enok deferred to his mother. She shrugged. “Okay. Loa knows me. He will find me wherever I am.”

Ben didn’t like that, and now he wasn’t sure he wanted to take them to his apartment. He did not believe his renter’s insurance would cover the kind of damage a giant Damballa made of smoke could inflict. He also wasn’t sure his neighbors would understand. But he suddenly had another idea.

Motioning them to come along, Madame Langlois carefully extinguished her cigar on the roof then tucked it back in her pocket. Then the Langloises followed Ben down the stairs, Enok hovering attentively by his mother as she descended between the two men. Ben stopped by the apartment to let Anita know he had found the couple and was taking them somewhere else. Then he texted Eilifir and told him to meet them at the front door of the brownstone at once. When Eilifir asked why, Ben said he would let him know when they got there.

Ben walked ahead of the mother and son. A brisk wind had kicked up while they were still on the roof, and even the bright sunlight could not dampen the chill. Eilifir was waiting by a tree just west of the door to Caitlin’s building. He remained there, his smartphone in his left hand, his right hand in his pocket. He kept it there even after Ben had emerged, followed by his guests. Ben approached the man, watching Eilifir as he would watch a diplomat at the United Nations: with innate mistrust.

“Have you ever seen these people?” Ben asked.

Eilifir peered over his sunglasses. “Only photographs taken by the individual I relieved,” he said. “Who are they?”

“Vodou practitioners from Haiti,” Ben said.

“You have made some interesting friends,” Eilifir remarked as Enok and his mother walked up.

Ben introduced them. Eilifir acknowledged them with a slight dip of his head.

“Caitlin met them there while working on… this matter,” Ben went on. “They came here because, according to Madame Langlois, they knew she’d be in danger.”

“Great danger,” the woman corrected him.

Eilifir smiled. Ben did not.

“The woman has some kind of connection with Caitlin O’Hara,” Ben went on, “though I’m not sure how that works: snakes seem to be a key. This woman says a snake god is coming.”

“Is coming,” she said with emphasis.

“Caitlin saw a snake in a vision,” Ben went on. “The madame invoked some kind of snake—a mirage, I guess you’d call it, upstairs.”

“A harbinger,” the woman gently corrected him again.

“That’s the foundation of—what word did you use? A ‘connection’?” Eilifir said mockingly.

Ben nodded. “I have to agree it’s not very impressive, except for one thing. The arm motions in Galderkhaani, the curlicue designs in their writing—they’re all very serpentine.”

“So are the movements of a ballet dancer, and the art form did not originate in Galderkhaan,” Eilifir remarked. “It is of fairly recent vintage. I have season tickets to the Kirov.”

“There’s more, but I can’t go into it now,” Ben said impatiently.

“I’m certain there is,” Eilifir remarked. “What would you suggest I do with this information—and them?”

“I can’t leave them here and I can’t take them with me to work,” Ben said. “I assume your people have a base somewhere, a headquarters.”

Eilifir regarded Ben. “Are you pumping me for information, Mr. Moss?”

“Jesus, no,” Ben said. “Friend, I don’t give a good damn about you and your associates. In fact, I’ve had it with cloak-and-dagger, and I certainly have no patience for it now.”

“You know, I believe you, Mr. Moss,” Eilifir said. “But I am supposed to watch this building. I can’t take charge of them. Anyway, I think you got what you wanted.”

“I don’t follow.”

Eilifir cocked his head toward the two. “Them, out of the house. Do you care if they stay here on the street?”

“I do,” Ben said. “I tell you, there’s something between them and Caitlin.”

Eilifir grinned. “I believe you. I just wanted to make sure.”

“God, can I just have my life back without the games?” Ben asked. “Listen, nothing will be happening here, I assure you. Do you think I’d be leaving if I thought Caitlin would be coming back for breakfast? All you’re going to see happening here is her parents arriving. That’s it. They’ll be coming to take Jacob O’Hara to school and they’ll be here when he gets back. You will also see an exhausted, frustrated psychiatrist named Anita Carter leaving.”

“Madame Langlois seems to believe something else will happen,” Eilifir pointed out. “Snakes.”

“Like Saint Patrick, the snakes will go where she goes,” Ben said. “I’m sure of that too. They’ve only appeared in her presence.”

“As far as you know,” Eilifir said.

“Yes. As far as I know.”

The shorter man gazed at the Haitian pair. Madame Langlois had gone back several paces to sit on the stoop of the building. Huddled in her sweater, she had resumed staring at the dying leaves of the trees. Enok stood at the foot of the steps and watched the two men with unflinching eyes. His face looked, just then, like a skull.

There was a ping. Ben’s eyes dropped to Eilifir’s phone. It had been dark. Now it was beaming with a text. Eilifir looked at it and then at Ben.

“All right,” Eilifir said. “I will take them to our sanctuary.”

“You had me on speakerphone?” Ben asked.

“I did.”

“Nice of you to let me know,” Ben said. “With whom?”

“My superior,” Eilifir said. “We host, but the two of them must go willingly. And they remain with us.”

“You have a deal,” Ben said, pushing his indignation far to the side. “Where—and what—is this sanctuary? Is it a religious institution? A fortress of some kind?”

“Nothing as formidable as that,” the man replied. “It’s an estate in Connecticut. Very large, very comfortable, very isolated. There is an SUV on Central Park West. I will call it to come and collect them.”

Ben exhaled. “So now I have to persuade them to take a ride outside the city.”

“All you have to do is persuade them to get in,” Eilifir said. “I won’t force them to do that.”

“No,” Ben said, “and you will definitely want their cooperation. Hers to get Enok’s. Where in Connecticut?”

“Right on the Long Island Sound, in Norwalk.”

“Water,” Ben said. “I think she’ll like that. All right, give me a moment to talk to them. And Eilifir? The intrigue aside, thank you.”

Eilifir grinned. “The intrigue is not even what makes this work intriguing,” he quipped.

Ben acknowledged that with a nod and Eilifir watched as he walked over to the Langloises. Enok’s eyes followed Ben like those of a predator watching prey. Conversely, Eilifir did not seem interested in Ben; Ben didn’t know whether he should be flattered that he seemed trustworthy or insulted that he suddenly seemed beside the point.

Ben stopped in front of Enok and his mother, took a moment to collect his thoughts.

“Madame Langlois, Enok—the gentleman behind me is a colleague who knows more about this situation than I do,” Ben said. “Would you consider staying with him outside of New York while I—”

Madame Langlois held up a hand and Ben stopped. She removed her necklace, aided by her son, and peered through it at Eilifir.

“I see him still,” she announced. “I feared he might be bokor. He is not. We will go.”

Enok placed a restraining hand on her shoulder. She lightly shrugged it off as she replaced the necklace.

“We came so far,” she said. “We must go farther.” She waved a hand above her. “And I am cold here.” She leaned around Ben. “Have you tea?” she yelled to Eilifir.

“I will make sure you get some,” he responded with a smile.

Ben stood there watching as Madame Langlois raised her elbow and, taking it, Enok carefully helped her to her feet. Together, they walked over to the man. As they did, Ben googled the word she had uttered on his phone.

He was not surprised. Bokor meant sorcerer. The woman might have her quirks and magick, but she was consistent. She really did seem to believe.

Eilifir texted the driver of the SUV, then told the pair a car would be there momentarily. Madame Langlois asked if she would be free to smoke. Eilifir said she would. He asked what she was smoking. She told him it was a Cuban cigar.

“We have not enough land to farm our own,” she informed him.

Enok said nothing.

Walking over, Ben said, “They must like you. Until now, they kept to themselves.”

“Not true,” Madame Langlois said, retrieving her cigar and addressing no one in particular. “Everyone knows us in Port-au-Prince. Everyone.”

Ben wanted to give up. He didn’t know whether Madame Langlois was being difficult or whether she was just that literal. It didn’t matter. In a moment, she would be Eilifir’s problem, at least for a while.

While they waited, Ben leaned close, facing away from the Langloises.

“She was afraid you were a sorcerer,” Ben said. “Why?”

“Shouldn’t you ask her?”

“I don’t have time for more riddles, from them or you,” he said. “Is there something in your past, from Galderkhaan, that she might have picked up on?”

“Probably,” Eilifir said.

That caught Ben off guard. “Care to explain?” he asked.

“I apologize, Mr. Moss,” Eilifir said. “But one must be authorized to divulge information to outsiders.”

“I freakin’ read Galderkhaani,” Ben said. “How am I an outsider?”

“Being a scholar does not make you of our blood,” Eilifir said.

“By ‘blood,’ you mean Galderkhaani?”

“You already know my heritage,” Eilifir said.

“Right. And I’m asking if that’s what you just meant. Or by ‘blood’ do you mean something else, something clannish?”

“I will request permission to tell you more. If it is granted, I will contact you.”

As they spoke, a white SUV pulled over and double-parked near the tree. Eilifir turned; Ben grabbed his arm gently.

“These two people are not bound by your rules of omertà,” Ben said. “I want—I would like to know if they say anything that could help Caitlin.”

“Of course,” the man replied as he turned to open the door.

“One more thing,” Ben said, still holding his arm. Eilifir turned back with less patience. “You said earlier that your ancestors once lived with the Group members, yet you don’t communicate with them now. I assume you’re rivals.”

“Our argument is not with the personnel of the Group as such, but—what you said would be somewhat accurate. And now, that’s all I can say.”

“So your dispute is with… their sponsors,” Ben continued to press.

The other man was silent.

Ben released his arm and took a step back. Without saying anything, the man had confirmed what Ben had already begun to suspect.

Excusing himself, Eilifir prepared to put Madame Langlois in the SUV while her son examined the inside. Only when he stepped back did she get in.

Eilifir shut the door, then went to the passenger’s side and climbed in. He nodded a farewell. Ben briefly saw himself reflected in the dark window as the vehicle pulled away. He looked like crap. He felt like crap.

Plus now he was truly frightened. The world as he knew it had suddenly ceased to be. Despite his silence, Eilifir and his companions were not just descended from any Galderkhaani. He didn’t know which was which, but they were descended from either the Priests or the Technologists.

And they were still at war.

CHAPTER 8

Hearing Caitlin’s claim that she was from the distant future, brought here by transcended souls, Standor Qala stopped so suddenly that she had to throw an arm across Vilu to keep him from slipping off her shoulder. A half-smile quickly settled on Qala’s face, as though she couldn’t decide whether what Caitlin had just told her was a joke or whether she was mad. It certainly couldn’t be the truth. Undecided, the air officer continued walking toward the tower.

“The idea is absurd,” Qala said.

“No less absurd than Candescence.”

“That is irreligious.”

“As your comment is ill-informed,” Caitlin replied.

Qala slowed, studied her as they continued toward the tower. Her eyes were suddenly like tiny machines, studying her… evaluating her.

“You are in earnest,” Qala said. It wasn’t a question. She wasn’t insulted by Caitlin’s remark. She wasn’t afraid that someone might overhear them questioning the foundation of Galderkhaan’s religious faith. The Standor was genuinely curious.

“I am quite serious,” Caitlin replied.

“Are you going to tell me you are Candescent?”

Caitlin had not been expecting that. She frowned. “No. I don’t think so. What I can tell you is that I am new to this culture, its language, its religion. Events here will occur that impact people I know, far from here in time and place.”

“In this future time. From which you say you come.”

“I am from the future.”

“And you have somehow dropped into the body of another.”

“That is correct, by means I don’t entirely understand.”

The Standor was quiet again, contemplative rather than doubtful. “The Drudaya were forbidden,” she said. “Do they return?”

There was no English word that matched. The closest would have been a phrase: the children of the earth.

“That name is unknown to me,” she said.

“If such is true, then it is best that we not speak of it.”

“Why?”

“Did I not just say they are forbidden?”

“I’m sorry,” Caitlin said, deciding not to press the matter. She wanted to try and find out everything she could in order to understand why she was here, in this city… and whether she should remain in Falkhaan or go to the capital. Because Bayarma was not present when Bayarmii and her grandmother died, Caitlin was reluctant to place this body anywhere near there. It might change events, cause them to transcend, alter the way Caitlin interacted while she was trying to protect Maanik. The young Indian girl might be lost as a result.

Nothing must change, Caitlin told herself.

Yet if Vilu were going to Aankhaan, there was no way Caitlin would not go with him. The burden was ferocious in its complexity, and Caitlin was still fighting hard to accept the reality of what was happening.

The road was wide enough for two, or for one of the many bicycle-like carts that passed them. They seemed to be constructed of tightly woven vines covered with some kind of smooth, brown pitch. The wheels were made of some kind of rubber substance. Perhaps sap or animal fat or even skin. She had seen some citizens with masks around their necks that appeared to be made of a similar substance.

Nonetheless, once the conversation was ended—as Qala made clear by the forward set of her head—Caitlin fell in directly behind the Standor, now and then touching the forehead of the unconscious boy. As they walked, it was deeply distressing to Caitlin when she considered that the person she was desperate to return to had not yet been born. That thought made her want to scream—and yet it also had an unexpected, calming quality.

If Jacob does not exist, he cannot be missing me, she thought.

It was a strange, elusive comfort but it was the only one she had and she forced herself to hold on to it. She failed. Her memory was her reality. She also wondered about Ben, what he must be thinking, trying, fearing. And her parents. It occurred to her, with a flash of horror, that she still had a body in her time. She suspected—hoped, prayed—that it was still alive and that Ben would somehow see to its care.

If it is dead, then there will be no “me” to go back to, she thought with deep horror.

And if the spirit of Bayarma began to push, tried to reclaim her body, where could the spirit of Caitlin O’Hara go? Would she be like Azha, ascended, stuck in limbo?

No, she told herself. Azha was cazhed with Dovit. She had transcended. A single soul would merely ascend—alone, witnessing without experiencing, moving through eternity with mute awareness.

Would I have to wait millennia to see myself, and Jacob, alive? Could I go wherever I want? Or are the ascended locked in one time, one place?

There wasn’t a thought that didn’t chill her, didn’t make her want to scream. And now she had the added burden of being with someone who, at best, wasn’t sure she could believe Caitlin; at worst, might think she was crazed.

The familiar sea and sky around her made the strangeness of the situation even worse. There were differences, but nothing alien. She had looked up at the blue sky and clouds from Central Park, had looked out at the Atlantic Ocean, with Jacob, from Coney Island. They had appeared more or less like this. Caitlin felt that she should be able to close her eyes, open them, and be in one of those places. But as much as she pointed her fingers down while she walked, the energy was gone, or at least depleted. Her spirit was inert.

Her curiosity about Galderkhaan was even less than that. She did not know how these people came to be, who they really were, how long the civilization had thrived. She should be asking questions, making careful observations in case she did get back. Ben—she actually chuckled a little maniacally inside when she thought of this—would probably be watching every gesture, noting every word, looking at every marking, satisfied just knowing more than he did.

But he doesn’t have a child. He doesn’t have other children who depend on him. He has ambassadors, most of whom he doesn’t even like.

What touched her, maybe even helped to anchor her a little, was the realization that Ben would swap places with her even knowing he might be booted out of this body and cast into limbo. He wasn’t a loving soul, but she knew he loved her.

Caitlin forced her brain to stop thinking. She was here because she wanted to help others, and she had succeeded. That was her job. Whatever has happened, you earned this, the gold star of collateral damage, she thought.

The walk to the tower was brief… or at least it seemed so, as Caitlin contemplated other things. When she had been at the motu-varkas it was dark, she was being assaulted by Pao and Rensat, and she was unable to appreciate the construction of the tower. Though smaller by about one-third than that largest of the columns, it was nonetheless an imposing structure. Constructed of blocks that resembled granite but were possibly volcanic basalt—and lined, she knew, with olivine tiles—the tower tapered slightly as it rose, with two inverted V-shaped structures on either side of the mouth: these were the moorings for the larger airships, of which there was only one at the moment. The vessel was about three hundred feet in length, with a long, open gondola suspended beneath the dark gray balloon. A large platform similar to but wider and longer than a window washer’s scaffold was suspended from ropes that hung from a long, pointed prow.

A prow with a dragonlike carving on the front. It was similar to the one Caitlin had drawn while doodling on the airplane while returning home from Haiti.

That was too much to add to the mix, so she didn’t. How could she possibly have anticipated seeing this? Unless she was remembering from the past…?

Good God, don’t try and make sense of this now, she told herself. Stay in the moment.

A second scaffold was suspended from the rear of the airship. Hoists lowered bags that she assumed were filled with waste or casks that needed refilling. It was a clean, efficient operation powered by weights like elevators in some of the older buildings in New York.

The trio was quickly under the shadow of the airship. Caitlin felt a chill going from bright sun to gray shadow; it had nothing to do with a change in temperature but a sense that recess was over. Unprepared as she was, events were about to become far more challenging. And though her instincts told her she could trust this woman, Caitlin still had no idea what Standor Qala meant to do with her. Perhaps Qala would lock her up in the airship. Still, Caitlin allowed herself to go forward.

The scaffolding that was lowered from the front of the airship was for personnel. She was correct about crew having time on the beach to stretch their legs and wet their feet. From what she overheard, with its fish-spotting duties done, the airship would be making cargo runs to other locations in Galderkhaan on its way to Aankhaan. The plan seemed to be to arrive while the celebration was just beginning, adding even more majesty to the night.

They boarded the lift at the base of the tower. There were hip-high metal rails around the sides and Caitlin held one with both hands in anticipation of the platform being jerked aloft. To her surprise, the ascent was quite smooth. As they rose, the splendor of Falkhaan, of ancient Antarctica, revealed itself in epic pieces. Ahead and below was the village itself, a collection of some two dozen wheel homes and courtyards and a roused populace going about their day. To her right, which was north, was the sea—windswept with choppy breakers in the horseshoe, smooth without. Neither wave nor wind posed a peril to the small crafts on it. In the distance, large fish leaped from the seas in unison, smaller fish among them who were seeking safety from ­albatross-like seabirds. There was a great deal of hunting and pecking from the birds’ large beaks as they tried to nab the smaller prey. Some succeeded, some failed, but even failure left some fish wounded. These fell back and were easily carried off from the surface.

The small airships above were silent, save for the flapping of the finlike projections that obviously controlled their rise and descent, others that managed forward and backward motion. Nets maneuvered into position to catch the leaping fish. To her left, beyond Standor Qala and Vilu, was a very distant vista: a plain of ice and distant peaks. She had no idea whether settlements like Falkhaan were created by channeling magma from the Source and melting the ice or they were simply oases in the ice sheet. As they neared the top of the column she saw another village some two miles distant with what appeared to be another cemetery road connecting it to Falkhaan. The village looked to be a cluster of farms growing something that resembled cotton, definitely a fiber of some kind. Carts laden with cloth were moving along the cemetery road that stretched beyond it into a hazy valley.

The wind was louder up here, not quite thundering in her ears but making it very difficult to hear anything else. The slight smell of something sulfurous also became more pronounced as they neared the top. She likewise felt an increase in the heat, the little that drifted down instead of rising.

That must be the magma of the Source located in the belly of this tower.

It caused the vista of the harbor city to ripple gently.

Soon to be leveled… all of it, Caitlin thought with a fresh sense of horror. She did not want to be a part of this. She did not want the responsibility. I’m going to wake, I have to wake—

“Mother?”

At first, Caitlin wasn’t sure she’d heard the whispered voice speaking in English. She had been looking away from Vilu. Now she turned toward him and saw his eyes partly open. The boy was smiling thinly.

“Mother,” he repeated, not as question this time but as a statement.

Caitlin started, did not know how to respond verbally. She touched his forehead comfortingly and returned his smile. Despite her expression, she prayed she had misheard, that this was not Jacob.

Standor Qala heard the boy as well. “Did he say something?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” Caitlin lied.

The Standor turned to the boy just as the elevator scaffold reached the top of the column. She stepped onto the far side of a ledge below the large inverted V. The platform was nestled firmly against the side of the tower. There was a ramp that led from the center of this platform into a gated opening in the side of the gondola. The gate was open. The gangplank wobbled slightly as they stepped on it, and a moderate wind blew across them. Caitlin was glad for the handrails along the sides, and held them as she followed Qala. Vilu’s eyes were on her the entire time. The gangplank was about a dozen feet long. Halfway across, the boy stretched his arms over Qala’s shoulder, toward Caitlin. Qala twisted her head around slightly. Her eyes followed the small hands, saw the fingers wriggling playfully.

“What’s going on?” the commander demanded.

“It seems the boy is awake,” Caitlin said as matter-of-factly as possible.

“It is not like Vilu to be more interested in a stranger than an airship,” Qala remarked. “What is going on?”

Caitlin remained silent.

With a disapproving look, Qala turned her eyes ahead and strode forward, Vilu squirming to keep his eyes on Caitlin, his hands reaching for her. A guard at the open gate saluted by touching the fingers of his left hand flat against that side of his head. Qala bowed her head slightly in acknowledgment.

As soon as they were both on the open deck of the gondola, Qala turned to Caitlin. “I asked a question,” the Standor said.

“Let’s talk after we see the physician,” she suggested.

Qala hesitated. It was a look of a woman who was not accustomed to having her orders replied to with an alternate suggestion.

“The boy first,” Qala agreed. “Then you will share what you know.”

“Even what you might not believe?” Caitlin asked.

“Everything,” the Standor said, strongly emphasizing her words with a movement of her hands.

Caitlin nodded firmly.

Draped over Qala’s shoulder, looking at Caitlin, Vilu responded by signing at her. Caitlin’s heart began to rise in her chest: once again, the gestures were not Galderkhaani.

“This is not the Nautilus?” he said. “Am I dreaming?”

“You are awake, sweetheart,” Caitlin replied.

“I can hear,” the boy continued, in signed English. “I know it’s you—but why don’t you look like you?”

“It’s… complicated, baby,” Caitlin replied in English. She suddenly felt her grasp of the Galderkhaani language slipping, and not because she was communicating in English. The tingling had suddenly returned to the back of her neck.

“Kuvez ma tulo?” Qala asked, turning the boy’s face from Caitlin.

She looked at Qala sharply. “I… understand… not,” she said in broken Galderkhaani, her arms fumbling with gestures that had been so easy a moment before.

“Buz eija lot?”

“Christ God, no!” Caitlin responded in English, grabbing for Vilu.

But her fingers found no purchase, either falling short or else she had turned—she couldn’t be sure, for at the same time Caitlin’s vision grew misty, as if she were seeing through tears. And then she was seeing tears, weeping and screaming inside and out as the world swirled away and she fell to the floor of the airship gondola and found herself once more in blackness.

The last word she heard was “Mother!”

“Mother?”

Caitlin awoke looking into her mother’s eyes. They were framed in a familiar, worried face that was barely visible against a bright overhead light.

“Doctor!” Nancy O’Hara called.

Caitlin heard her mother, heard her own voice through the folds of a stiff pillow that was bunched up against her ears. There was something in her nose, something in her arm, something on a finger—

“Ja-Jacob,” Caitlin rasped. Her throat was raw, sore, not at all like it felt in Galderkhaan. The air was machine-blown, unnatural, unhealthy. Everything around her reeked of illness. Her shoulders ached as though her arms had been pulled at, hard. When she opened her eyes she had to blink several times to clear away a thin film of gunk that was on them. Her face smelled of rubbing alcohol, beneath which there was a hint of—ash? Smoke? In her hair?

Why was that there? she wondered. The last thing she had felt was clean air and tears. The last thing she had smelled was the strong smell of hemp. The last thing she had heard, and the last thing she had seen—

“Vilu…” she wept softly. “Jacob.”

Nancy O’Hara had turned away and didn’t hear her daughter. Caitlin heard her calling for someone. She tried to get up, felt—

That isn’t the handrail of a gangplank, she thought with horror that made her recoil. They were the aluminum bars of the hospital bed. Her eyes coming into focus now, she became aware of the equipment blinking and humming to her left. She saw her mother, but did not recognize the figure moving toward her through the open door.

A man in a lab coat bent over her, looked into her eyes. They still felt gummy; the tears she had felt had belonged to Bayarma, in Galderkhaan, not to her. The white light of an ophthalmoscope seemed to pin the back of her skull to the bed. She fell back as though she’d been shot. She tried to blink but two fingers firmly held one eye open, then the other. The man said something she couldn’t quite make out.

“…haf pen anywar?”

“S-sorry?” Caitlin said. “I don’t… don’t understand.”

“Do you have pain anywhere?”

“I—I don’t know… arm… IV?”

“Yes.”

“No… I’m numb. Shit, I’m back.”

“Just rest,” the man said as he killed the light. The hospital room came into clear focus. Caitlin saw an Asian man and her mother’s face.

“Jacob,” Caitlin said to Nancy O’Hara. “Where is he?”

“Honey, Jacob is home, with your father,” Nancy assured her.

“No!” Caitlin cried. “I mean—his soul. His spirit. Him. Where is he?”

“Where? Caitlin, I promise you, he’s home, he’s all right,” she insisted.

“No, please listen,” Caitlin said. She tried to rise again from her pillow, from the bed. “Something has happened to him!” she said, her fingers fumbling with the bedrail. “He needs me!”

There was talk, there was movement, there were hands on Caitlin’s shoulders and legs. Caitlin struggled against all of it.

“Let me go! Ben? Ben!”

“Calm down, Dr. O’Hara,” a male voice said soothingly. “You’ve inhaled a lot of smoke and were nonresponsive—”

“Dammit, I’m fine! Fine!” Caitlin yelled. “I am not suffering from disorientation, confusion, delirium, or any goddamn thing else!”

“… five milliliters,” she heard the doctor say over his shoulder.

“Mom, call Dad—ask him to check on my boy!”

There was a pinch, an injection of diazepam, and Caitlin stopped struggling almost at once.

“Goddammm,” she slurred. “Please! No! Must… get… back…”

And then she slept.