The Sound of Seas

CHAPTER 9

Mikel Jasso couldn’t believe his good fortune—or his bad luck.

Casey Skett, master of dead things, apparently knew people better than Mikel did. It was too early to say how any of this would turn out but, against the odds, the archaeologist had gotten more than he asked for. Indeed, now that Mikel thought of it, Skett was more artful and clever than any of them: he had fooled Flora Davies for years. That took skill.

As he and Dr. Cummins made their way through the station to where the truck was parked, the scientist was busy checking the latest images of drifts and ice cracking along the proposed route to the pit.

“The fractures don’t seem to have made it this far,” she said. “Readings from our remote automated systems say the heat has quite receded.”

“It’s fickle,” he said.

“You talk as if it has consciousness,” Dr. Cummins remarked. “Does it, Dr. Jasso?”

“Thoughtful fire? What would Dr. Bundy say to that,” he answered without answering.

Dr. Cummins hmmmed as they walked on in silence.

Mikel was peering ahead, through the alternating light and dark of the interconnected modules, his mind back on Skett… and Flora. He was not sure how he even felt anymore about Flora and the Group. He did not believe it was incumbent on any employer to keep employees informed on the inner workings of the firm. Either you trusted your superior or you did not.

But this withholding… that’s a big one, he thought.

Mikel had trusted Flora and now he did not, and he wasn’t sure where that left him. If she didn’t know everything about the Group’s past, she had to have known—and withheld—at least some vital information about why they were seeking Galderkhaani artifacts. That was a dangerous secret to keep from agents in the field. Mikel and the handful of others should have been given the option of whether to risk their lives to obtain and turn over such powerful tools for something other than pure research.

What was more troubling was that he couldn’t even be sure she was not playing Casey Skett or both of them playing him. Bad cop, worse cop.

Nonetheless, he had no choice but to let this play out as Skett had laid things out. At the very least, Mikel told himself, he would learn more about the power of the stones.

The truck assigned to Dr. Cummins was a Toyota Tacoma. It sat hefty and fat on the ice just outside the exit of the central red module.

“I was hoping for a dozer,” Dr. Cummins said. “The treads are good for getting over small crevasses, the plow for filling them in.”

“Maybe Dr. Bundy doesn’t want us to get where we’re going,” Mikel suggested.

The woman shook her head as she pulled on a wool cap then tugged her parka over it. “He’s a snob, and gruff, but he’s devoted to science and learning and, believe it or not, to this evolving mission.”

Mikel would have to take her word for that. He found it appropriate that while he had lost faith in one woman, he did not hesitate to trust the judgment of another. That was the bequest of his grandmother in Pamplona, a borderline mystic who knew her Bible inside out and also read everything she could find about obscure religions, talked to every priest she ever met, bounced new ideas, strange ideas, off her only grandson. Her interest in the arcane was what spurred his own fascination with ancient civilizations and set him on his career path. Even if his father hadn’t been in prison for armed robbery, Mikel couldn’t have had a more compelling and substantial role model.

The truck had been refitted for driving across the uneven Antarctic terrain. Resting atop forty-four-inch wheels with thick axles to absorb the rugged thumps and dips, the truck had an indomitable suspension system, side skids to prevent the truck from rolling over into a crevasse or sudden break in the ice, thirty-two gears for shifting out of almost any landscape, and a reinforced passenger cabin to protect the occupants against unlikely falls and landslides. There were also forward and rear winches, solar panels to supplement the 2,200-liter fuel tank, several additional tanks of gas, and a powerful V6 engine. On the roof rack were two insulated cases. One was filled with bottled water, oxygen, first-aid supplies, and battery-powered heaters. The other carried shovels, axes, ropes, pitons, blankets, flashlights, flares, spare clothing, and other gear.

No one had bothered to unload the truck from the last move; station personnel were still busy restoring communications and restarting the electrical systems that had been shut down during the unexpected transit. Dr. Cummins brought along a backpack filled with extra water and snacks; as soon as the vehicle was fueled, it was ready to go. Siem was busy taking care of that from a tank that was still attached to the skis that had been used to haul it here. He waved as the two scientists boarded.

The truck’s solar panel had been left on and the inside was warm when the occupants settled in. The parkas, gloves, and scarves came off immediately. Though the gear had been needed for the fifteen-foot trek to the Tacoma, their skin would heat very quickly inside the truck. They didn’t want to perspire, since sweat would heat and chill their flesh to dangerous extremes.

Dr. Cummins raised her sun goggles just long enough to poke on the GPS. The coordinates had been entered from inside the radio room; the truck could practically drive itself. Before they got underway, the scientist looked at Mikel through her dark-tinted goggles.

“You are preoccupied,” she said. “With the mission?”

He nodded unpersuasively.

“But also by something else.”

He nodded again. “Political stuff at the nonprofit where I work,” he told her.

“Ah ha,” Dr. Cummins replied. “You know, Dr. Jasso, it’s dangerous out there—”

“I’m focused, Dr. Cummins. Believe that. I won’t do anything to jeopardize this mission.”

“I’m glad of that,” she said. “However, there’s one more thing. How to put this?” She stopped everything for a moment and looked at Mikel. “As I indicated back there, I’ve been on many, many expeditions with fellow scientists. All ages, all nationalities, all kinds of temperaments, all kinds of agendas. I know when not to press a colleague for information. Many of them—and you too, I believe—are often uncertain about what they are about to undertake. They might be concerned about a vague goal, worried about censure for a radical idea, afraid because they flat-out lied to get funding, said they knew more than they did. That’s Fieldwork 101. So all I’m going to ask is this: Which of those has caused you to clam up?”

She put a little extra burr on the last two words so they came out “clahm oop” and added a touch of levity to a serious question. Mikel smiled a little, then exhaled and stared out the window at the jagged expanse that headed to a rolling horizon.

“All of the above?” she prompted.

“That’s a very fair analysis,” he admitted. He looked back at the weathered but compassionate face. “Dr. Cummins, I don’t like clamming up. I don’t learn anything when I can’t share. So now that we’re alone—we are, aren’t we?”

“No hidden mics or open lines,” she assured him.

He nodded once. “Here’s what I can say with certainty. I have spent my professional life studying a human civilization that, as I began to tell you, thrived approximately thirty or forty thousand years ago,” he said. “But it’s possibly older than that. Much older, if they went through an evolution similar to our own.” He shrugged. “Even that may not be the case. I know absolutely nothing of their origins.”

He paused to let that sink in. Dr. Cummins needed the respite: she said “hmmm” three times before she nodded for Mikel to go on.

“My colleagues and I, and those who came before us—at least four centuries of researchers—thought the occupants of this land might have been protohumans of some kind,” he continued. “Recent experiences I had out there—” he pointed almost accusingly toward the ice, “have proved that idea to be incorrect. These people, the Galderkhaani, were modern in every sense of the word, with sophisticated structures and language, with ships that sailed in the air and sea—”

“Galderkhaani,” she said, making sure she got the name.

“Yes.”

“How?” she interrupted, “How?”

“You mean, what was the scientific mechanism that created ancient technology, or how did we not know an advanced civilization was out there?”

“All of that!” she said. She switched on the ignition and the truck hummed loudly, a fine vibration tingling through the seat, as she put it into drive and set out. “For starters, just biologically speaking, there is no model of evolution that places modern humans in that time ­period.”

“I am very aware of that,” Mikel said.

“Have you seen a likeness? A carving.”

“I have seen… yes. They had ruddy, exotic eyes, but… well, they were groomed, clothed in togalike garments. They had a complex language. They were not Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon. They were Homo sapiens.”

“Dr. Jasso, are there remains out there?”

“There is so much out there,” he answered. He needed to lay a little more groundwork before diving into the spiritual nature of his contact with the Galderkhaani. “As I sit here, looking out at the world, our world, I can hardly believe the things I’ve seen and heard. But it’s all real. More to the point, that explosion we saw, it is linked to ancient conduits that ran beneath the cities, powered by various mechanisms using the heat and flow of deep pools of magma. Something caused the prime conduit, what they called the Source, to overload and destroy the entire civilization. Pompeii writ very, very large.” He nodded ahead. “The pillar of fire we saw was a surviving part of that.”

“And the face within?”

“A surviving spirit,” Mikel told her.

That stopped her, again. After a long moment she asked, “You’ve seen it?”

“Yes,” he said. Then went on: “And others.”

“Living Galder… Galderkhaani?” she asked, pressing him.

“No,” he said. “They were spirit.”

Now she made a face. “That’s just great.”

“I didn’t imagine it, hallucinate it, or make it up,” he said.

“You broke your wrist, bruised your face. You appear to have taken quite a beating—”

“So I could have hit my head and imagined everything I just told you? Yes. That is possible,” Mikel said. “Only that isn’t what happened.”

He held off telling her about the olivine tiles that were like sophisticated living neurons. He didn’t want to hand her so much seeming fantasy that she turned back.

“Fine, Dr. Jasso, you didn’t dream these things and they’re not the result of a concussion. But what evidence do you have for any of it?” Her expression, like her voice, was suddenly very dubious.

“It’s all out there,” he gestured ahead. “If you go down into that pit, enter the tunnels, I have no doubt you will see ruined structures under the ice. You may see conduits that were used to transport the ancients via wind—”

“Wind?”

“Incredible wind generated by the heat of the magma,” he said.

She made another face. “So now they were not just ancient humans, they had wings?”

“Sleds,” he said. “Made of a substance similar to this.”

Mikel reached into his pocket; it was time. He withdrew the hortatur mask he had used to help him breathe. He passed it to her.

“Lord Jesus,” she said, slowing the truck as she stared. “Is that from—”

“It’s Galderkhaani, yes.”

Stopping the truck on a flat, smooth patch of compacted ice, Dr. Cummins stared at the ancient mask then started to reach for it but stopped.

“Are you sure it is safe to touch?” she asked. “Without gloves, I mean?”

He nodded. She took the mask, felt the texture between her thumb and index finger.

“You’re a glaciologist, Dr. Cummins, I’m sure you’ve been around Arctic and Antarctic life,” Mikel said. “Tell me, what animal does that come from?”

“It feels almost like seal,” she said. “Walrus, perhaps.”

“It’s from a creature called a shavula, a kind of sea ram with fangs,” he said.

“You know that how?” she asked. “From their writings?”

“There are libraries out there, down there,” he said evasively. “Very comprehensive. I can read them.”

“It’s still oily,” she said. “How is that possible? Did you treat it?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t know how it was treated—though it wasn’t exposed to the elements for millennia, so that may change. Swiftly.”

She returned the mask to Mikel and started up again. “Why didn’t you tell all this to Dr. Bundy? He’s rough around the hem but he’s not here for his health. He has a right to know.”

“That was not the time and place to explain,” Mikel said. “There are time-sensitive reasons for going out there. And I didn’t want him using it as a reason to delay. You know, sending it to the lab, waiting for results.”

“What could be that ‘time sensitive’ about a dead civilization? Did you open a tomb? Are artifacts decaying?”

“It will be easier if I show you when we get there,” Mikel replied.

They drove for a short period in silence. Then Dr. Cummins said, “When we saw that pillar of fire in the air, we thought we heard a voice. Strange words. So, that might have been Galderkhaani?”

“I am fairly certain it was,” he replied.

“Spoken by—a spirit? A ghost?”

“Something like that,” Mikel told her.

“Christ in his heaven,” Dr. Cummins said. “That was the real reason Siem went back to collect you, that he was allowed to go back at all,” the scientist went on. “He said that you were the only one who might be able to explain. But then you lost credibility with Eric Trout when you commandeered that vehicle. He decided you were—‘unhinged’ was the word he used.”

“Remarkably, I’m not.”

“I mention that in light of what you said, about these ancients having had libraries, technology,” Dr. Cummins said. “Is it possible that rather than being a spirit, the fire activated some kind of recording? Because it’s not as strange as it might sound. The Greeks had all the materials they required to make voice recordings: clay, a stylus, funnels—only they never thought to do it.”

“That’s a smart supposition and there are recordings,” Mikel admitted. “But this was a spirit. She pursued me underground. She tried to kill me.”

Dr. Cummins was silent again. “Galderkhaan,” she said. “Is that their word or yours?”

“Theirs,” he replied. “From the words I saw and heard, I believe that Galder means an amount of some kind and that khaan means ‘a city.’ That was actually something my colleagues and I pieced together years ago.”

“A collective of cities?”

“That seems to be the idea. It’s fairly common in our world, isn’t it? ‘United’ this or ‘Confederation’ of that. Unfortunately, there was a signing aspect to the spoken language to give it nuance, so the words alone don’t tell the entire story.”

“Fascinating,” she said. “Like the click consonants in many African tongues.”

“Exactly. But there is still a big piece of the puzzle I am missing,” Mikel said.

“And that is?” she asked.

He was silent again.

“Are you thinking, Dr. Jasso, or am I going to have to pull each answer from you?” Dr. Cummins asked.

“Sorry,” he said sincerely. “I was thinking. I’m trying to clarify ideas in my mind, which isn’t easy. I’m not accustomed to discussing this away from the Group in New York, where everyone throws ideas into the ring. My confusion has to do with the Galderkhaani beliefs about the afterlife.”

“Religion.”

“Broadly,” he agreed, “though I’m not sure they made a distinction between religion and everyday life. What I mean is, it wasn’t so compartmentalized. Even the scientific class entertained a very strong belief in what we’d call the mystical.”

“Like alchemists or druids,” she said.

“I suppose that would be a good comparison,” Mikel concurred. “Yes, quite apt.”

“I grew up in Scotland, and it is steeped in those old beliefs, as you are probably aware,” Dr. Cummins said. “As a child I first went to the mountains known as the Old Woman of the Moors, as their shape reminds some of a sleeping goddess. Every eighteen years, the full moon moves in such a way that a person standing with arms outstretched like Mr. Da Vinci’s drawing would be perfectly framed by the moon. To those watching from one of the stone avenues constructed for that purpose, time and space vanishes and human and celestial body are one.”

“An illusion of geometry,” Mikel suggested.

“Now who is the doubter?” Dr. Cummins asked. “What you just said is quite true, but there’s more. From that same vantage point, the course of the moon is such that it strokes the sides of the goddess Earth, rousing great energies. Everyone there feels it.” She chuckled. “One reason I am out here with you, Dr. Jasso? Not because you are especially persuasive. The earth is, however. I went back home a year ago. Even with all my mental safeguards working on behalf of scientific explanations, I couldn’t quantify the feeling I got inside. It was a kind of tickling in my belly that rose and fell from my skull to my toes. It made me smile long after the moon was gone. And I’ll tell you this: I do not approach any peaks here, ice or stone, without feeling some of that sensation return. The geology, the cosmos, they waken something. Even in scientists.” She gave him a quick look. “You too? Or are you more hard-nosed than that?”

“I was,” he admitted as they thumped across a patch of snow that was rippled like speed bumps. “My grandmother’s belief in spirits was absolute, but she was very old world.”

“You say that as if ‘new’ is automatically better than ‘old.’”

“The eyes are fresher, less steeped in accepted tradition than in proof.” He looked in the direction of the pit. “I want, I need proof of what I experienced out there. I didn’t become a scientist to disprove old ideas. Nothing would please me more than to know that what my grandmother felt was right.”

“I understand that and I respect it,” Dr. Cummins said. “Like you, I was set on this path by someone else.”

“Who?”

“My uncle Timothy, who had a ranch in Kirkcudbright, Scotland. The first time I saw a horse shyte, unicorns lost their magic for me. I need things that keep more than my curiosity alive. I am constantly searching for places that rekindle my sense of wonder.”

Mikel replied thoughtfully, “This enterprise with Galderkhaan—it started that way. But the more relics my colleagues and I found, the more we learned of their language, it seemed as if they were shaping up to be a sad microcosm of all humanity: roughly one hundred thousand people who could not get along without dividing into factions. And I have since learned, from my excursion underground, that it wasn’t just something that caused the Source to turn on its creators. There was a Dr. Frankenstein, someone who unleashed it.”

“Mass homicide?”

“Unintentional, perhaps, but yes… the destruction of this entire civilization was spurred by sociopolitical, possibly romantic, fractures that would be all too familiar to any modern human.”

Dr. Cummins considered this new information. “Entire,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

“You said it destroyed the entire civilization,” Dr. Cummins said. “Are you sure?”

“What do you mean?”

“Ancient peoples were remarkably mobile across vast stretches of ocean,” she said. “The Vikings, Kon-Tiki, even Columbus and Magellan…”

“That’s true,” Mikel said.

“Surely you and your colleagues have considered this.”

“We have,” he admitted.

Dr. Cummins regarded him. “Radio silence again,” she said. “So you do have evidence of some diaspora.”

“We have words and claims, not evidence,” he told her. Once again, he didn’t want to say any more. It was one thing to ruminate about a dead culture. It was another to confide in her that hostile agents were trying to finish a struggle they started millennia ago. That might be far, far more than she had bargained for.

The two fell silent as the truck purred across the ice. Mikel thought back to the conversation he had just had with Casey Skett, about the Group having an origin other than the one Flora had told him. This shift from seeking knowledge to seeking power was disturbing. It was fascinating, even compelling, certainly logical to think the Group had been founded by refugee Galderkhaani. It was frightening, however, to imagine these people, and Skett’s people, still seeking to control the tiles. The stones were an incredible source of information. Yet they were also a source of great destructive power. Bringing just one back to New York had caused Arni’s brain to liquefy. It had caused Mikel to hallucinate severely or, briefly, to time travel—he still didn’t know which. In the lava tube to which they were returning, a wall of tiles enabled him to communicate with Galderkhaani dead—and for them to enter his mind from miles away. It had driven animals mad along lines of force that extended halfway around the globe.

Though he was headed back to the site as Casey Skett had commanded, Mikel wondered what kind of experiment the man had in mind… and whether he could actually go through with it. He did not know enough to bounce that off Dr. Cummins.

They crossed the partially drifted-over tracks of their previous transit, when they had been relocating the Halley VI modules from the compromised ice shelf. The rest of the ride continued to pass in silent reflection. For his part, Mikel was imagining a thriving civilization on the wastes across which they traveled. On ice? On clear plains? He didn’t know. He pictured airships in the sky, vessels on the sea, animals long-since extinct like the one he’d seen below, the “guardian” of the chamber. It was not just an exponential Pompeii. In AD 79 when Vesuvius buried that port city, the vast bulk of the Roman Empire and its citizens, its diverse culture, survived. Galderkhaan and its people were obliterated. He did not know the degree to which any refugees may have maintained a pure form of the language, the arts, the faith, the technology.

But there is that magnificent library, he thought covetously. And there were ascended and transcended souls. To be able to talk to them, debrief them—it would be like being able to talk to the monotheistic pharaoh Akhenaten, who some archaeologists believe was one and the same with Moses, or Alexander the Great, or even just a vegetable vendor from Nero’s Rome.

Mikel shivered, and not from the cold. Perhaps, he thought, right now, he was surrounded by ascended souls he could not see or hear. Regardless, the sadness of their loss was suddenly palpable, their trauma felt immediate as if it had just occurred. It was as real and as current as any he had ever known.

It may be that Pao and Rensat are watching, he thought. Perhaps spirits have always been watching.

Angels and devils. Many survivors of the cataclysm may have lost their roots over generations. The idea of Transcendence may have morphed, via Galderkhaani expatriates, into Valhalla, the Elysian Fields, heaven, and other versions of an afterlife. It could be that Candescents became the earliest gods.

“By coming here, we may be returning to God,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“I was just thinking,” Mikel said. “What if it’s the tinsel that’s fake, but the tree is real. What if all the trappings of religion were created to keep wandering minds engaged.”

“I’m not following,” Dr. Cummins said.

“I’m not sure I am either,” Mikel admitted, smiling and once again falling silent.

Dr. Cummins slowed the truck and raised her goggles slightly. The insides of the lenses were misty and she wiped them with the side of her thumb. It could just be humidity. Or maybe she had felt something emotional here and shed a few tears. She said nothing as she replaced the dark glasses and urged the Toyota across the last, smooth leg of their journey.

As they neared the mouth of the round pit, Mikel saw that it was nearly perfectly round, about one hundred feet in diameter, with a shadow just below the lip that was as flat black as the snow was brilliant white. The edges had been melted unevenly by the flame then refrozen, creating the illusion of a small, circular waterfall stuck in time. The hairline fractures had also been filled in with melted ice and covered with windblown flecks. Dr. Cummins pressed on cautiously, both of them listening for any sound that could suggest the ice had weakened. The external thermometer mounted to the hood showed no discernable rise in temperature as they approached. There were no sudden dips in the ice field.

“I don’t see any steam out there,” Dr. Cummins said. “How deep were your tunnels?”

“The crevasse I descended was maybe a hundred feet,” Mikel said. “I can’t be sure. I fell some of the way.”

“It was artificial?” she asked.

“A lava tube, as I assume this one is, since the fire was able to shoot through rock,” Mikel said.

“We should go the rest of the way on foot,” the glaciologist suggested. “Reconnoiter only. We can break out the gear when we know what we’re looking at.”

Mikel agreed, though at some point very soon he was going to have to tell her his assignment and contact Casey Skett and find out exactly why the man wanted him out here.

Dr. Cummins reported back to the communications center at Halley VI and after suiting up for the cold they hopped from the cab to the surface. The desolation was not as profound as it had been when Mikel first arrived in Antarctica. Dr. Cummins obviously felt it too: when she climbed from the cab she was not just looking at the pit, she was turning around.

Mikel walked over. “Anything wrong?” he asked over his muffler.

“I don’t know,” she admitted.

“But you feel something different from before.”

The woman nodded.

Mikel didn’t have to ask what that was. The Old Woman of the Moors was here—at least, her presence and mystery were.

Mikel moved first and Dr. Cummins followed. The crunch of the ice under their boots was muted by the drifted snow. Their toes kicked up little puffs that swirled in unseen eddies of air. The winds were calmer out here and everything else was quiet, save for something they noticed as they neared the pit: occasional, echoing raps.

“What’s that?” Mikel asked, hesitating as he tried to make out the sound.

“Icicles falling,” Dr. Cummins said. “It probably looks like a long white beard down there with the fast-frozen drips and runoff.”

“The Old Woman has a companion,” Mikel quipped.

Dr. Cummins flashed him a thumbs-up that relaxed them both. Mikel hadn’t realized how on edge he was until then.

Walking almost shoulder to shoulder so that one could help the other in case of uncertain footing, they approached the pit with the same gingerly steps they would take approaching a fissure or crevasse. Along the opposite rim of the pit, Mikel saw only the fast-frozen ice, not ground. There wasn’t a single visible crack in the deep cover here; it was like vanilla frosting laid on with a thick spatula.

“I’ve seen geothermal heat generate melting like this on the Amundsen Sea, but not here,” Dr. Cummins said, leaning toward him as they trudged across the ice.

“That’s quite a distance away.”

“About two thousand kilometers,” she said. “To be honest, we don’t know the extent to which subaerial volcanism may be responsible for any of that. Even so, to have reached this far? That wasn’t even part of the most ambitious thinking. Dr. Jasso, is it possible that your ancient civilization covered the entire continent to the western region? It was pretty icy there during the period you indicated.”

“I don’t believe so,” he said. “From the research, I believe there were densely populated pockets across the continent. I would imagine that population, if not controlled, was strictly determined by the food supply.”

“Obviously, they would have had fish, sea mammals, birds—”

“Possibly each other,” he added. “I know nothing about their interment practices.”

“That’s an unpleasant thought, though you’re right. I have heard about isolated pockets that practiced cannibalism along the Amazon.”

“The Galderkhaani were big on jasmine,” Mikel said. “Drank a lot of warm tea, I’d imagine.”

“I like that better,” Dr. Cummins said. “The practice, not that flavor of tea. Dr. Jasso?”

“Yes?”

“Am I whistling past a graveyard?” she asked.

“It’s quite possible,” he said. “I’m uneasy here too. I would be interested in going back through reports from this region, see if other researchers have experienced anything—” he stopped as he sought an appropriate word.

“Off? Ripe? Gray? Oppressive?” Dr. Cummins contributed.

“All of that,” he said.

There was a high, warbling rush of sound. The two of them stopped at the same time. Dr. Cummins pulled her parka from one side and turned her ear toward the pit.

“That’s not the wind,” she said. “Did you hear anything like that below?”

Mikel shook his head. Whatever it was, the sound came from inside the pit, soft and melodious, modulating slightly and echoing on its way up and down.

“It could be an ice flute,” she suggested. “Wind through a hollow icicle—”

“That’s not whistling,” Mikel said. He had heard those in Norway, frozen “panpipes.” Wind passing through a hollow tube of ice has a shriller quality. “That’s humming.”

“Can’t be,” Dr. Cummins said. “Can it?”

“I have learned to dismiss nothing where Galderkhaan is concerned.”

Dr. Cummins shook her head as if to say, I’m just not ready for that.

They started walking again, cautiously, when the frozen water on the lip of the pit nearest them, the northeastern rim, began to darken. It was like watching bread turn moldy in time lapse: something unhealthy was moving toward them.

“Doctor?” Mikel asked.

“I don’t know what it is, I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “Let’s go back to the truck.”

She started to move but Mikel stayed where he was. He had an idea what it was… and what might stop it.

“Dr. Jasso?”

“Something may be trying to communicate.”

“That is an optimistic take on a mass moving beneath the ice!”

The shadow rolled toward them unevenly, like an incoming tide, until Mikel could see for certain what it was made of.

“Goddamn him,” Mikel said.

“What?”

“Get back in the truck.”

“What is it?”

“Please go!” Mikel yelled. “They’re being controlled by a tile in New York!”

Dr. Cummins did not need to be told again. She backed away then ran as fast as her boot-heavy feet could take her.

Snatching off his glove, the archaeologist grabbed his cell phone from the pocket of his parka and punched a button.

CHAPTER 10

In New York, at the subdued headquarters of the Group, the call came as expected.

Downstairs in the laboratory, Casey Skett winked at Flora, who was seated in a folding chair, her hands tightly knit on her lap. Adrienne Dowman was on the other side of him, in an old, thickly cushioned chair, sitting supernaturally still and just staring. Skett had one hand on the keypad controls of the acoustic levitation device. He had his eight-inch knife in the other. He slipped the blade into a sheath attached to the back of his belt. “I can get to it quickly,” he cautioned Flora.

“I have no doubt,” she replied.

Skett answered the phone. “Hello, Dr. Jasso. I’m glad to see you made it.”

“I said I would!” he yelled. “Now call them off! You didn’t have to do this!”

“I was testing the acoustic suspension,” he said. “Consider it a dry run and also a little bit of insurance.

“They are Belgica Antarctica, flightless midges. On average, only a sixth of an inch long… but there are a lot of them, eh? They were awakened from hibernation by a frisson of ancient Galderkhaani power, following the arc from here to there.”

“I know the mechanism, damn you, Skett. Cut it. Now!”

“But they’re harmless,” Skett assured him. “Unless they gum up your engine or crawl up your pant legs, nibbling and nesting. Which they will do, seeking the warmth they’ve been deprived of.”

“I swear to you—”

“What, Dr. Jasso? What will you do?” Skett’s tone lost its affected bonhomie. “I know—perhaps you’ll keep in touch with me instead of hopping about on your own, leaving me blind?”

“Yes, fine. We just got here by truck and were reconnoitering the pit.”

“We?”

“Myself and Dr. Victoria Cummins.”

“The glaciologist?”

“That’s right! Now cut the link!”

“How did you get there?” Skett asked.

“Toyota Tacoma.”

“Excellent,” Skett said. “Very good. Makes things easier.”

Skett was facing the monitor that controlled the acoustic levitation waves. He punched the numbers up. In front of him, the stone Mikel had recovered from the Falklands was crushed by sound, its energies dampened.

“Back the truck away roughly ten meters,” Skett said. He glanced at a laptop on the laboratory table. “The insects won’t come any closer as a group… the line vectors off there. Unless I amp up the power.”

Mikel’s voice was muffled, no doubt shouting instructions to his companion. The scientist was definitely outside the truck; Skett could hear the wind’s raspy brush against the audio.

After a moment Mikel came back on the line. “Is that why Flora screamed, Skett?” Mikel asked. “You were flexing your long-distance muscles?”

“Poor dear overreacted,” Skett said. “I think she thought that allowing the tile to power up, you would be attacked by penguins or whales.”

“How did you know I wouldn’t be?”

“You’re well enough inland,” Skett replied. “There are two tiles—I brought one to the party, you see. Two tiles, two separate but proximate lines of power, one weak, one stronger—the stronger one being the one I presently control. Sections of the coastline may be covered with penguin feathers thanks to the other… a whale or two might have butted a ship… and I think I heard some dogs baying on this end. But that’s all. The arcs from here to there are very precise. You will notice, I think, that the insects left their nesting ground and lined up pretty much in a southwesterly direction, well, westerly to you, since south has little meaning where you are. Are they disbursing?”

Mikel was silent for a moment. “If you could call being buried by icy snow disbursing.”

“Don’t worry about them,” Skett said. “Most will get away. They are very, very hardy. They will dig down and hibernate. It is remarkable though, isn’t it? The fact that the slightest variation in the acoustic modulation being employed here can impact a life-form at the end of the earth. It’s a shame Arni didn’t know that, eh?”

“We’ve all had a very steep learning curve,” Mikel replied. “All right, Skett, it’s cold where I am. What am I doing here?”

“You’re going down into the pit.”

There was a brief silence. “With a broken wrist?”

“I didn’t say you were going to climb,” Skett said. “Good God, I’m not a lunatic. The Tacoma must have a winch and you can rig a sling. In any case, you are going into the pit.”

“And once I’m there?” Mikel asked.

“You will send me video of whatever is there as you see it.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Mikel said.

“Oh?”

“That one’s not me being obstinate, Skett. I could barely get a signal the last time I was there. I’ll record images and send them later.”

Skett considered that. “As insurance for you, no doubt?”

“That too,” Mikel said. “If anything happens to me, to any of us, you get nothing.”

“That’s not true, you know,” Skett said. “All it means is that I’ll have to send someone else, and that will mean a delay. And Flora will be dead: I will kill her and burn her with my various rodents and pigeons. Anyway,” Skett went on, “I don’t think you’ll be uncooperative.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“I am,” Skett said. “You can stonewall and posture all you want, Dr. Jasso, but you want to probe the knowledge of that civilization. Why else would you be in the South Pole? Why did you risk death?”

Skett had a point. Mikel did not answer.

“To do all that before you freeze, you will need my help,” Skett went on.

“Skett, you do understand what you’re playing with?”

Skett snickered. “Do you understand who you’re talking to? Dr. Jasso, I’ve spent decades studying this subject… waiting for global warming to catch up to my needs, to show me what hacked satellites and outpost communications could not, to reveal Galderkhaan. I have waited patiently for this moment. I need eyes on—now, if you please.”

There was another short silence on Mikel’s end. Skett’s careful eyes slid toward Flora. He was accustomed to watching everything from the shadows: studying the reactions of people on the street to the dead animals he collected for the city, watching how other animals responded to death, even watching how people responded to their own death, like Yokane and the others he had been forced to murder for his people. He knew fear and defeat, compliance and docility, when he saw it. All those qualities were present in Flora Davies. It hadn’t been necessary to restrain her: as long as he controlled the acoustic monitor, he controlled the two tiles and their fearful power—even the near-dormant artifact in the freezer. Flora knew what his colleague Eilifir Benediktsson and the team in Connecticut knew. They had all seen what those unbridled forces did to poor, fumbling Arni Haugan in this very room… and to Caitlin O’Hara in the park. The reason she hadn’t perished was not known to Skett. That too was something he needed to uncover.

All in its time, he told himself.

Flora knew all of that too. She sat quite still-not because she feared for her life, but because she did not want to distract Skett needlessly. Not with the forces at his fingertips. And as heartless as it was, she too was curious. Adrienne was already in the thrall of the stone in the laboratory; Flora had noticed her fingertips stiffen when Skett boosted the power slightly. They were relaxed now. She suspected that Adrienne was the target of the experiment on this end. She had no idea what he was expecting on the other end.

“How is it going out there, Dr. Jasso?” Skett demanded.

“The truck is getting into position.”

Skett glanced at his watch. “You have another minute. One. That’s how long it should take.”

Mikel went silent and Skett saw Flora glaring at him.

“Oh, poor Flora, sidelined and denied her place in the modern Galderkhaani pantheon.”

“It’s nothing like that,” she said. “All I ever wanted to do was learn, to work with the tiles. You want to control them.”

“Like love and marriage, you can’t have one without the other,” Skett said.

“It’s your mind-set that is objectionable,” she said. “All these years, these centuries of exploration and struggle, and this is how it finishes. With a prize in the hands of some Technologist.”

“Not ‘some,’” Skett said. “‘The.’ He is the senior surviving Technologist. His name is Antoa.”

“And what are you?” Flora asked. “A hireling.”

“You cannot humiliate me, if that is your intent,” Skett said.

She snickered. “You still have blood on the side of your hand… like a butcher.”

“It’s honorable blood, blood spit from the mouth of Yokane, the blood of a Priest,” he said.

“Lunatic hatreds,” she sneered.

“Which you have helped to perpetuate.”

“Not true!” she said. “I rejected the overtures of Priests, of those like Yokane. I knew they existed but I refused to communicate with them. I only served one cause: knowledge.”

“But you took their funding,” Skett said. “You had to know.”

“I didn’t know and I would have stopped, at once, had anyone interfered,” Flora said. “Whatever was arranged was set up long before my grandparents were born. And never did I kill, or advocate killing.” She raised a chin toward the tile. “Mikel was very careful about obtaining that. Stealth and thievery, not murder.”

“What about Arni? What about two decades ago, Dr. Meyers, who was killed in Hong Kong trying to buy an artifact from the Triad.”

“Unfortunate,” she admitted. “We all know this is dangerous work. I’m not naïve, Skett. We’ve robbed museums, private collections. People have gone to prison.”

“Not you, though. You are careful and pragmatic, and I salute that. But you also have no right to judge me.” Skett squatted to face her, held the side of his bloody hand to her cheek. “In the old days, I’m told, before ‘civilization’ came to Galderkhaan, human blood was a means of communication, of writing, of art.”

“Of sacrifice.”

“That too,” he admitted. “There was barbarism. The adolescence of an ancient people.”

“Galderkhaan banished it,” Flora said.

“Did they?” Skett said. “Even after violence was outlawed, bloodletting continued under the aegis of the Priests. Blood caused words to grow, quite literally.”

“That’s not been proven.”

“We have writings that verify it,” he said. “They describe how the mosses and molds that sprouted from paintings executed in blood gave rise to the accents, the hand movements, of the Galderkhaani. The ancients believed that the Candescents were speaking to them… through blood.”

“Divination has always embraced strange, ultimately disproved customs,” she said.

“Questioned, yes. Disproved? Never quite that. Mosses grew differently, more eloquently, on certain stones. These stones. The ones that vibrated. If they were not special, why would we all have sought them these many centuries?”

“Not because we believed that a god was trying to talk to us through fungus sprouting naturally from biological material,” Flora said. “We were looking for deeper secrets that were locked in the stones, in matter that we believe dates to the dawn of the universe.”

“Then we should agree on what is about to transpire,” Skett said. “That is what I am looking for—more proof of all those ‘we believes.’”

“Skett?” a voice said in his phone.

“Here,” Skett replied.

“We’re ready to move on this,” Mikel informed him. “Do you know anything about that—hold on. Dr. Cummins, do you hear that?”

Skett heard a mumbled response.

“Mikel, what is it?” Skett demanded.

“I hear a sort of cooing. Definitely not a geologic sound,” Mikel said. “Skett, the thing that created this pit—could that entity still be down there?”

“It’s possible. What do you know about that?”

Mikel didn’t answer. Skett hadn’t expected him to. Always and still the careful Group agent.

“We’re setting up a rope,” Mikel said. “I’m going to keep this line open. If I need information, you will give it to me.”

“Of course,” Skett replied. “We both want the same thing. To understand.”

“I don’t believe you,” Mikel told him. “If you wanted to pool our resources, you would have done it long before this.”

“As would have Flora and her people.”

“Then you’re all stupid,” Mikel said.

“Save the editorializing, highwayman. You brought something to a city of more than eight million without vetting it, without quarantine. That, Dr. Jasso, was stupid. It caused death. Not just Arni, but Andreas Campbell, a mailman down the street. Maybe others. All I’m asking you to do is observe and report. Innocent stuff. Now, do you want to stand there and freeze or will you do what you went to the South Pole to accomplish—just for a different chief executive?”

“I’ve already agreed,” Mikel said. “Let’s get on with it.”

Skett was standing again, looking at the stone. It didn’t seem to have changed, nor had the digital numbers gone up or down on the monitor. Peripherally, he saw sudden anxiety on Flora’s face. It wasn’t just for Mikel Jasso: she was also no doubt starting to be concerned about her stone and the future of the Group. For all her faults, Flora had always been about the work.

Maybe that’s why she’s so good at this job, Skett thought. Her agenda is unbiased toward Priest or Technologist.

“I’m ready to make my descent,” Mikel said at last. “For the record—and I hope you’re keeping one—there is some kind of humming down there. It sounds almost like cooing of some kind. My companion hears it too.”

“Human?”

“Difficult to say.”

Skett motioned his head at Flora. She followed where he was pointing, saw a tablet on the table. It was the same one Arni had been using when his brain liquefied. She used it to turn on the audio recorder, to open a new file.

“I’m recording now,” Skett said. “I want to know everything.”

“You will,” Mikel replied. “Assuming that even the audio signal can get out.”

There was a low, smooth grinding sound—the winch on the truck, Skett assumed—and Mikel was quiet for another long moment. The Technologist agent noticed Flora’s breath quicken slightly. For Mikel, or for what the Technologists might be on the verge of acquiring?

Finally, the voice of the archaeologist came over the phone once more: “Beginning my descent.”

CHAPTER 11

“Mother?”

Standor Qala craned her head to watch as Vilu raised his cheek from her shoulder. The boy tapped both index fingers against his temples. There was a blossoming look of wonder in the child’s face, like a baby discovering its toes for the first time.

Beside Qala, Bayarma was looking around with frank confusion. “Where—where is this?” she asked in Galderkhaani.

“Mother?” the young boy said again, in English.

“Vilu, are you all right?” Qala asked.

The boy continued tapping the area in front of his ears and smiling strangely. He was not looking at either woman but rather staring off at nothing in particular.

“Vilu!” Qala said.

The boy looked at the Standor. “I can hear you,” he replied in effortless Galderkhaani.

“Then why didn’t you answer?”

“I am. I said, ‘I can hear you!’”

“Where am I and who are you both?” Bayarma asked. Her eyes moved to the side of the gondola. A small gasp puffed from between her lips. “I am aloft?!”

“You are aboard my airship,” Qala answered, frowning as her eyes shifted to the woman. “Apparently, high-cloud madness has touched the two of you. You claimed to be from another time and place,” she told Bayarma, “and you,” she continued, looking at the boy, “suddenly fell unconscious in the street where Lasha and this woman found you.”

“I don’t remember,” the boy responded. Vilu looked at the other woman. His hands moved from near his ears, made little gestures the next time he spoke. He didn’t seem to notice what he was doing. “I thought—I thought that you were my mother,” he told Bayarma, then looked around. “But you aren’t. Where is she? Where am I?” His eyes returned to Qala. “And why are you dressed like that? Halloween was weeks ago.”

Only when he said that one word, “Halloween,” in English, did the boy become frightened.

Vilu began to breathe rapidly, his hands became fists, and he looked around, unsure what to do or say next. He squirmed and pushed against the broad shoulders of the Standor. She held him firmly.

“Boy, relax yourself,” Qala told him. “You’re onboard the pride of Galderkhaan—”

“I can’t, I—I want to be home! This… this is not a good place.”

“It’s a fine place, boy,” the Standor insisted. She stood him on the taut wicker floor of the gondola. “Youngster, you are behaving very strangely. We are going to go see the physician.”

Vilu stood there unsteadily on the gently swaying deck. He looked past the officer’s legs at the gangplank. “A doctor. My mother is a doctor,” he thought aloud. “I heard her talking about a place, about Galderkhaan.”

“You are there,” Qala said.

Vilu shook his head. “No. I am dreaming.”

“You are quite awake—”

“I can’t be here!” the boy shouted. “Something is supposed to happen.”

“A celebration,” Qala said.

Vilu looked around, as if trying to remember the something. “Why can I hear everything so clearly?” he asked.

“Perhaps you struck your head, but that is past,” Qala said.

“No, no!” Vilu insisted, his voice rising. “I can hear! How is that possible? Where are my hearing aids?”

Once again, the Standor did not know what the boy was talking about, did not even understand the words. She turned to Bayarma, hoping to get some insight. But the Aankhaan woman seemed equally confused. Around them, great fabric hoses were being uncoiled and carried to the top of the column, to replenish the air volume with the rising heat.

“We’re on an airship!” Bayarma marveled, looking up at the great envelope. “How did I get here?”

“You had a fit in the water courtyard, you came to help look after the boy,” Qala said.

“I remember none of it!” She looked around. “I’ve never been so high!”

“Are you frightened?” Qala asked.

“No—not of this ship. I always wondered what it would be like.”

“How did you come to Falkhaan?” Qala asked.

“I left my birth mother and birth daughter and came by river to Dijokhaan, then the rest of the way by foot.”

“And the reason for your journey?

“I was selected by my caste, by lot,” Bayarma said. “I was bringing tokens blessed by Aankhaan Priests and others along the route. I had just left the amulets with the Priest Avat. I was going to say words over one of my ancestors and meet others for the celebration when—I was here.”

Qala looked from Bayarma to Vilu. “Two curious cases,” she announced. “One bit of passing madness—that I’ve seen. It is the close timing and proximity of these two that has me concerned. The strange words and ideas. And the violence. Bayarma, you were fighting with Lasha, the water guardian.”

“Fighting? I have never fought with anyone, Standor!”

“That is why you are both going to see the physician,” Qala said. “Come.”

Hoisting the boy back on her shoulder, the Standor took Bayarma’s hand and started along the side of the enclosed cabin toward a door in the back. Despite the unexplained mental state of her two guests, Bayarma’s hand felt strong and right in her own. They separated when the space between the central cabin structure and the outer wall of the gondola grew somewhat narrow, so Bayarma had to walk slightly behind.

The large door panel was made of the same fabric as the envelope of the airbag, the skin of the shavula, in this case sun-dried and taut. The frame was made of knotted seaweed, also baked in the sun. Like the rest of the structural materials, the door was designed to be as strong but as lightweight as possible.

Qala pressed a palm to the door. It wasn’t bolted, meaning there were no patients and the physician was not meditating. The Standor entered. As they did, Vilu reached out and rapped the doorjamb, hard, then listened as if awaiting a response. When none came, his fingers clutched the Standor tighter.

The physician was sitting in a low-hanging mesh sling that hung from an overhead beam. Qala had to duck to avoid the beam; the roof was so low she could barely stand upright. The physician was reading a scroll and looked up.

“Standor, we need to take on more fish oil for the health of the children in Aankhaan,” the youthful-looking man said. He slapped the scroll with the back of one hand. “This ridiculous manifest is less than half of what I requested.”

“We needed room for the explosive dyes, Zell.”

“Did you hear what you just said, Standor?” Zell said. “Entertainment over medicine?”

“It wasn’t my decision,” Qala said. “The Great Council commanded.”

“Because the citizenry must have a colorful celebration,” the physician said, gesturing angrily with his free hand. “That is more important?”

“Take your complaint to the Council,” Qala said. “I have patients for you.”

With a deft shrug of his wide shoulders, the physician extricated himself from the confines of the sling. The short but powerfully built man wore a blue tunic and skirt with a white sash pulled tightly from left shoulder to right hip, identifying him as a physician. His shoulder-length blond hair hung freely, framing a round face with wide-set eyes. His flesh was ruddy from hours spent in the rigging of the airship, where there were pots that grew medicinal herbs. Behind him were racks of narrow clay containers, over forty in all, that were painted a variety of colors denoting their contents. They were held in place by leathery bands that protected them during turbulence.

The physician contemptuously tossed the scroll to the floor as his eyes focused on the boy and the civilian woman.

“What did you do to them, Standor?” Zell asked. “They look quite terrified.”

“This woman is named Bayarma,” Qala said. “She was in a physical struggle with the water guardian and has no memory of that or the time it took to walk from the town—”

“I had just left the company of a Priest and now I’m here!” she exclaimed.

“That will teach you to mingle with Priests,” the physician muttered.

“—and she was talking strangely the entire time,” Qala said.

“About?” Zell asked.

“Being from another time,” she said. “And she occasionally used very odd words.”

Zell seemed intrigued. “Did she speak of the past?”

Qala shook her head. “She told me she is from the future.”

That seemed to take the physician by surprise. “So it’s not Candescent Yearning,” he said.

“I don’t believe so,” Qala replied.

“What is that?” Bayarma asked.

“The conviction that one is an all-knowing god,” Zell said casually. He looked away from Bayarma and stepped up to the boy. “And what about you?”

The boy buried the lower half of his face in Qala’s shoulder. He did not speak.

“Vilu fainted shortly after Bayarma and the guardian fought,” Qala said. “And now the woman seems all right but the boy is speaking oddly. He claims he was unable to hear, and now he can.”

“I can,” the boy raised his mouth and pouted. “And… my name is not Vilu.”

“Oh?” said the physician. “What is it?”

“Jacob,” the boy said. “Jacob O’Hara.”

“Jay-cup-oh-ha-rayaah,” the Standor said thoughtfully. “Oh-ha-rayaah was part of the woman’s name as well.”

“A shared delusion or something you overheard?” Zell wondered. “What was the rest of the other name?”

“The first part of it was Caty-laahn? Cayta-laahn? That’s how it sounded.”

“Caitlin,” Jacob said easily. “Caitlin O’Hara.”

“Yes,” Qala said at once. “That’s exactly it. Very impressive, Vilu.”

“I am not Vilu. Caitlin O’Hara, Dr. Caitlin O’Hara—she’s my mother,” the boy replied, his eyes shifting to Bayarma.

“Dahk-tar?” Zell said.

“Doctor, like they say you are, but she helps people with mental illness,” the boy said.

“These occurrences were in the same location?” Zell asked.

“At a pool. But Lasha, the water guardian, was unaffected. So were others who gathered around. So was I, for that matter.”

“My mother was here,” the boy insisted. He pointed a slender finger at Bayarma. “She was her.”

“But she isn’t now,” Zell said.

The boy shook his head once.

“Are you from the future?” Zell asked the boy.

“I am from New York,” he replied. “Not from Galderkhaan. I was reading about Nemo and a ship like this… then I slept… I think I am still asleep.”

Zell regarded Bayarma. “And you are not his mother.”

“No. As I said, my allotted birth child, Bayarmii, is with her grandmother in Aankhaan.”

Zell motioned for Qala to put the boy down in a hammock that hung high in the middle of the room. The Standor obliged. Vilu fought for a moment then dropped of his own weight when the Standor bent. The boy quickly gathered himself in a ball in the center.

“Did you two happen to eat from the same barrel of fish, drink from the same cistern?” the physician asked.

“You sound like the water guardian Lasha,” Qala said.

“There is truth in folk wisdom,” the physician said. He raised his brows inquisitively. “Well, Bayarma?”

“I had fish and cake this morning, but how am I to know?” Bayarma said. “I never saw the boy before now.”

Zell ran the side of his thumb absently along his sash. “Boy, you say your name is Jay-cupo-oh-ha-rah-ah. I have never heard such a name, and I have been many places in Galderkhaan.”

“Have you been to New York?”

“I have not heard of such a place,” Zell admitted.

“He kept touching around his ears,” the Standor said. “Here.” She touched her temples to indicate the spot. “Could that account for the strange words?”

“I did that because I could hear!” the boy said, trying to sit up in the swaying hammock. “I couldn’t before. Are you people even listening to me?”

“Cayta-laahn had a similar streak of disrespect,” Qala observed.

The boy threw himself back down on the mesh in frustration. Zell selected a bottle from the shelf. He shook it, unscrewed the top, and stepped over to the hammock. He moved the coral plug back and forth under the boy’s nostrils.

“Oh!” the youngster said and immediately opened his eyes wide.

Zell bent over him and leaned close to his ear. “I would like to speak with the core voice.”

The boy hesitated. Zell gave him a second whiff of the contents of the jar. The boy’s brows shot up and he stared ahead. For a time, only the creaking of the gondola and the breathing of the two observers could be heard. Bayarma grabbed the Standor’s arm. That too felt good.

“Who are you?” Zell asked.

“Vilu of Falkhaan,” the boy replied.

“Who is with you, Vilu?”

“A… a spirit.”

Bayarma held Qala’s arm tighter; whatever had happened to the boy, was inside the boy, most likely had affected her as well.

“Who is this spirit?” Zell asked, moving his hands carefully to repeat what the boy had said. Just asking the question sent a chill through the cabin. The word Vilu had used was not mazh, an ascended soul. He had said jatma, a noncorporeal being. The term was derived from maat, a Candescent.

“I do not know him,” Vilu replied. “He scares me. He is confused.”

Zell walked back and selected another bottle. He ran the stopper under the boy’s nose. This time Vilu relaxed.

“I would like to talk to the jatma,” Zell said.

There was a long pause, the quiet broken only by shouts of the crew from outside the thick walls, and the groaning of the balloon overhead.

“I… am… here,” the boy finally said in a different voice. “I do not want to be.”

“How did you get here?”

“I do not know. I just went to sleep.”

“Where?”

“In my room, in my bed. I was drawing… a… comic.”

The boy’s small hands moved tentatively, trying to find counterparts in the Galderkhaani vernacular for what he was trying to say. Suddenly, Vilu’s body became agitated. The Standor started toward him but Zell held up a hand.

“What is happening?” Zell asked.

“Someone else—hello?”

“Is it your mother?”

“No,” the boy said. “Hello? Can you help me?”

The little body began to tremble as if it were cold. Zell pulled a blanket from a rack, threw it over him, shook his head at Qala when she tried to approach again.

“Describe what you’re seeing,” Zell said.

“A circle… of… light. A ring. There are things moving in it.” The boy began to wince. His eyes narrowed, fluttered. “Blinding—”

“What kinds of things are in the ring?”

“Things! Creatures! Get me away from here!” the boy yelled. “Please! Mother, please!”

“Why are you afraid of the things? Is your mother there?”

“I don’t know! Get me out of here! Get me someplace! I don’t know where I am… the way out! Please!”

“Zell, please—” Qala said.

“Boy, I must know if it is the ring or the… or being lost that frightens you?”

“Lost!” he cried.

Vilu started to sob.

“Stop this,” Qala said. “At once, Zell.”

Zell returned at once to the first bottle and brought Vilu out of the trancelike state. The boy blinked several times. A few lingering tears rolled from his eyes. He used the edge of the blanket to wipe them away.

“I can see now,” the boy said, blinking hard and looking around. “But I am still here… in Galderkhaan.”

“You are not Vilu, then?” Zell asked.

“I told you who I am!” the boy protested.

“So you did,” the physician said, smiling. “But you are safe now,” he said. He was still holding the vials so he touched the young boy’s cheek with his own, then stood facing Bayarma. He did not say anything. He just watched her.

“What is it?” Qala asked.

“Hold her,” Zell said.

The woman was just standing there, regarding Zell with a strange, vacant expression. She did not react when Qala put strong fingers around her upper arms.

“What is it?” the Standor asked Zell.

“The open vials,” Zell answered.

“You did this on purpose?”

“Of course. I did not want her to suspect.”

“Will she be all right?”

“She is not all right now,” Zell pointed out. “And we can’t help either of them without an examination.”

“But you’ll stop it if—”

“Yes, yes,” Zell said, mildly annoyed. “All I have to do is replace the stoppers and she’ll come back.”

“You’re sure.”

“Remove the flame and water ceases to boil,” Zell said. “Nature is constant.”

Qala knew Zell well enough to know that he liked to push his patients, but it was always with a goal of healing, and then learning how to heal others, so the Standor didn’t protest. Bayarma continued to look at him without seeing him. Then her brows lowered as if she were concentrating. Her breath came more quickly.

Zell came a little closer, leaned toward her ear. “What are you feeling?” he asked her.

“There… is something… still within my… my…” she said.

“Your what?” Zell said.

“My soul,” she replied.

“Zell, what’s happening?” the Standor asked.

“A miracle,” Zell told his superior. “These two unrelated Galder­khaani somehow have the same—it isn’t a delusion, Standor. They share some kind of alien energy, the same internal entanglement, though the power in Bayarma is extremely faint.” Zell switched the vials to one hand and put his other arm around Bayarma’s waist. “Take the boy, please, Standor.”

Carefully releasing Bayarma to Zell, Qala walked to the hammock and opened her arms to Vilu. The boy hesitated, then went willingly and held her tight. Zell led Bayarma to the hammock and lay her down. He took the second vial and moved it closer.

Almost at once, Bayarma tensed and a sense of unrest filled the room. It was nothing that Qala could isolate, no physical change in her ship, no sudden movement by the two visitors. But it was there.

“You feel it too?” Zell asked the Standor.

“It’s like a storm coming toward us,” Qala said softly.

“Exactly what I was thinking,” the physician remarked. “Out at sea and moving toward land, causing unrest in the air.”

“But there are no warning horns,” Qala said.

“Not as such, no,” Zell agreed.

Shouldering Vilu, the Standor went to the door and looked out, over the outer wall of the airship. She squinted toward the sea, past the great flutes suspended parallel to the bottom of the airbag, tubes that whistled loudly when storm winds blew through them. She did not see what she expected. Seabirds were clustering in a linear formation toward the vessel. Thyodularasi were breaking the surface in an increasingly synchronous movement from the shore toward the horizon. Farther out, the fish had stopped leaping.

When she looked back in the cabin, Qala saw Bayarma breathing more heavily and beginning to perspire. The physician was watching her.

“The jatma is not present in this one, not anymore,” Zell said. “Just a shadow, some kind of tenuous fiber triggered by the compounds.”

“I don’t understand,” Qala said.

“As we watch the alien energies, they are watching us.”

That sent a fresh chill through the Standor.

He used the first vial to restore Bayarma to equilibrium. At once, her breath came more naturally and she began to relax. Then he took both vials away and stood back.

“Are you all right?” Zell asked her.

The young woman blinked. “I think so… now,” she replied. He handed her a vial from the shelf and instructed her to drink it.

“What is it?” she asked.

“A sleep agent,” he said. “You have been through a small ordeal. You should recuperate.”

She obliged and lay back. He took the vial from her and walked over to Qala.

“The future,” he said in an almost reverent voice.

“What about it?” Qala asked.

Zell looked from Vilu to Bayarma. “Is it… possible? There is only one power that can erase time, and not all of us believe in it.”

“Standor Qala!”

Qala ducked her head back out the door. It was her second-in-command, Femora Loi. The man, whose calm demeanor was an anchor for the crew, seemed uncharacteristically agitated.

“Yes, Femora?” Qala said.

“Please come at once,” he said. “You have to see.”

Qala glanced back at the room. The physician nodded briskly and Qala left. She strode along the side of the ship, following the man toward the plank that led to the column. The hoses lay across the deck and were inflated, carrying hot air into the bags. But there were no rippling stretches of air to suggest a leak, no pockets of heat. That wasn’t what was creating the warmth.

The Standor saw what was happening even before she reached the plank. The top of the column was a few heads higher, but she could see a very faint nimbus around the rim. Her chest tightened.

Qala was not a deeply devotional soul. She had no interest in the squabbles between the Priests and Technologists as long as they remained philosophical debates. She had no strong opinion about the Candescents, the race of gods that were said to have created the Galderkhaani. She certainly did not believe that their spirits resided in the tiles that were a part of every grounded structure in Galderkhaan. Those tiles, ribboned with metals that somehow formed in veins underground, had strange magnetic properties, properties that captured and replayed images and sounds—but those were naturally explained, like the reflections in water or the reverberations of bells. As Zell had said, nature is constant.

But to Qala’s knowledge, the strange, powerful tiles had never done this.

Reaching the top of the ramp, followed by Loi and the eyes of those working on the hoses, Qala saw a misty glow just within the top of the column. It reminded her of the kind of halo that formed around the sun before a rainstorm—diaphanous, elusive, slightly prismatic. She came closer, looked at the tiles on the opposite side of the column. Through the haze she could see they were dull but uniformly lit.

“A reflection of fires from below?” Loi speculated.

“The illumination is too consistent,” Qala said. “Double the loading crew, Femora. I want to be away from here as soon as possible.”

“Are you afraid for the column, Standor?” Loi asked with concern. “I have lovers and children here—”

“No,” she replied with a reassuring smile. “I want to see if this is happening in other columns along the route.”

CHAPTER 12

It was a small library, unassuming as libraries went in Galderkhaan. There were a few more olivine tiles, but not so many that anyone would suspect their true nature.

These tiles, built in the Technologist complex beside the motu-varkas, were designed to control the winds that were not only generated by the magma deep below Galderkhaan: forced through tunnels constructed by the Technologists, the same winds held the magma down and back, one elemental force controlling the other. The heat of the lava actually strengthened the ferocity and power of the winds that contained it.

The Source was corrupt. The Source drew on energies that caused mountains to rumble and flame. It caused the ground to split and consume villages whole. It created great waves that smashed the coastline, killing the creatures of the sea and the citizens who lived there. Freed, it would not allow Galderkhaani to contain it.

The Council did not want to hear that. The Council was comprised of aged men and women who were eager to achieve immortality. There was evidence for an existence after this one, and they wanted to access it now. If the Technologists were wrong, then there was still time to support the approach of the Priests, the cazh. They did not understand why both methods should not be explored.

“The Candescents found merit in the fires beneath the land,” the Chief Councilor had said, reciting the decision of her fellow members. “Why should we, then, shun these forces?”

Most of the seven Councilors were Azha’s lovers. The Source hearings that preceded and followed the trial of Femora Azha lacked the objectivity of that grim matter. It was incomprehensible that the social issue of “violence” should receive a fairer, saner hearing than the potentially catastrophic matter of tapping and unleashing the flames and heat from below. Even the ice engineers, who cleared swaths of terrain for settlement, were afraid to use heat from the towers. The risen pools of magma were used solely to warm water through careful release of heat, great stone doors and vents, operated by pulleys, being employed to control the wind.

The monstrosity beyond the library? It had been expanded and enlarged without sufficient study. Models suggested this and drawings suggested that. Nothing had been proven. Technologists thought the olivine tiles would allow them to control the various mechanisms they were constructing.

That was not only dangerous, it was lunatic.

Which was why Vol had made love to a clutch of Technologists, one of whom had allowed him to come to this chamber just “to see” the refurbished motu-varkas. The Priest had no interest in the man who had given him access or the détente he said interested him.

The Priest felt extremely guilty having used love and lovemaking, and his sacred poetry, to seduce his way into the library. He felt far worse about that than he did about the necessary deaths that were liable to result from this.

Vol was consumed with just one idea, an idea that Femora Azha had gotten right. Before the networks were connected, Vol wanted to turn on the Source at its very core. He was willing to sacrifice himself and the others in the tower to prove that such containment was not possible.

He had already shut the library tiles so his actions would not be recorded; it was an easy matter to clandestinely replace his own tile for one of those crafted by the Technologists. He had simply gone to one wall, replaced a Technologist tile with one to which he had transferred his own thoughts and plans, and no one would notice that a massive trapdoor would not shut until it was too late. The magma would be agitated by the opening of other lava tubes and the motu-varkas would spit death into the immediate vicinity.

Vol did not want this to reflect badly on any fellow Priests, like his beloved Rensat, or even the moderate Pao. What happened here would look like an accident. The power to destroy Galderkhaan—by accident or, more dangerously, by power-hungry Technologists—would be eliminated. And the true course of Ascension, Transcendence, and Candescence would be pursued by the Priests.

Already, the attention of the Technologists in the library was drawn to odd stirrings from below the ground. They would check the olivine tiles inside the tower first. That would take them quite some time. They would not find his tile in the library, they would fail to remove it in time; it was outwardly benign and too well integrated into the system. If necessary, he would prevent them from doing so by releasing its latent energy.

Vol had full control of a system that, once tripped, had no other way of being shut down. Henceforth, the Night of Miracles would be remembered for much more than the folklorish creation of the Galderkhaani. By tonight, the Source and its Technologist acolytes would be a memory. And instead of being slaves of the towers, the olivine tiles would finally be turned over for study by those who wanted to release, not control, their ancient, dormant energies—the Priests of Galderkhaan.

CHAPTER 13

For Caitlin, the vision had the character of a sharp, sudden relapse.

She was medically sedated and yet she was very conscious in her dreamless state. She was floating again, as she’d been in Washington Square Park. She was rootless, drifting, no point of orientation, only darkness. The image was in her mind, not in her eyes, but Caitlin knew that she was not dreaming. She was not hallucinating from whatever drug was pulsing through her veins because there was a solid realism to what she did see.

It was a ring of light. It didn’t grow, it simply appeared, like a lightning bolt that erupted but did not fade. Yet the more she looked at it, she could see that it was not simply a ring: it was more like an ouroboros, a tail-devouring snake. Present in countless cultures, interpreted and reinterpreted in classic psychotherapy, a true human archetype.

Why is it here, in my mind?

She tried to ask it, but the serpentine form did not want to be accessed. The circle just floated in its own soupy white light, set against the blackness, unable to be addressed or touched… yet obviously willing to be seen.

Willing, Caitlin thought suddenly. She felt—she knew—that the serpent had consciousness.

The light snake seemed solid so it surprised her, the more she stared, to see components within its brilliant glow. They were difficult to see, darting within the light like microbes on a slide.

The snake was similar in size to the serpent she had seen in the vision in Haiti, though that had been a darker creature in every sense of the word: black, choking, destructive. She had touched that one and was knocked back by a powerful force.

What about this one? Can I touch it?

Caitlin thought about extending a hand and suddenly she possessed one. It was hers, slightly luminous in the dark, aglow with… life? There was no bracelet on the wrist; the skin wasn’t sun-bronzed. Her fingers stretched toward the light—

No!

She froze inside. It occurred to her that this might be a near-death experience and to go toward the light might mean the end of her life. But there was no retreat either. She could not turn about. And then her options lessened even further—

She was moving toward the ring, as though she were on ice and possessed frictionless, effortless motion with no way to stop. The facets within the form of the ring itself were more visible now, each comprised of writhing lines of light, with more and more lines within those. There were so many elongated particles of luminescence that she found herself becoming overwhelmed, frightened. She was afraid of being consumed, of vanishing, of being subsumed by something that lacked physicality but somehow had gravity.

Caitlin was jerked toward it and her eyes snapped open.

She was breathing heavily and staring at the ceiling of the hospital room. She felt warm but was not perspiring. Her breathing immediately began to slow, and her racing heart rate returned to normal. She moved her fingers and toes, could feel them all.

The experience had had every quality of a panic attack. An unconscious state panic attack. The idea was something she had never even encountered in the literature.

Caitlin heard the instruments humming around her, adjusted to the strangely unexpected presence of substance, of weight, of material things. She looked to the right, over the rails alongside the bed. The door was shut. The chair was empty. Her mother was probably in the commissary or else on the phone. Perhaps she was taking a nap somewhere. No doubt she had been told that her daughter would sleep for hours more.

Caitlin looked at her arm. The IV drip in her hand was giving infusion therapy, probably a cocktail that included a sedative. She had to stop the flow. She hesitated; there was an occlusion alarm.

Just get the damn thing out, she told herself.

She removed the tape from just below the knuckles of her left hand, jerked out the needle, and jabbed it in her pillow so the formula would continue to flow. The alarm barely had time to chirp. There was no immediate response from the staff. She did not want to sleep or be examined. No nurse, no doctor could find what was wrong with her.

No doctor… in this era, she thought suddenly, strangely.

And they would miss what was very right with her: that she was somehow, miraculously, present again in the real world after having spent waking time in Galderkhaan.

Caitlin looked around. There was no window, no clock; she had no idea what time it was. What about her clothes, her belongings? When she had gone down in Washington Square Park she only had what she was wearing and her phone. She looked at the nightstand, didn’t see her phone, saw a small closet. That was to be her first destination.

She snickered—at herself, at the irony of the metaphysical world in which she had been spending so much time. She could travel millennia by pointing two fingers at the ground. She could go God knows where in an unconscious vision. Could she cover two yards in a hospital room without falling?

Caitlin tried to sit by sliding up a little on the bed. She used her elbows for propulsion, moved just a careful few inches and her head responded with a swirl of dark light and a painful jolt. She stopped. She put her tongue against the roof of her mouth to prevent herself from hyperventilating and breathed deeply. She closed her eyes.

Do it slowly, dammit.

This time she placed her palms on the bars and moved back tentatively. Her head swam, but only a little. She waited a moment, moved back a little more. She managed to get herself into an upright sitting position. She waited there, then felt for the latch to release “the cage.” She found it, pressed, and lowered the aluminum side so it wouldn’t clang on the mattress frame. She just now noticed that she was wearing her own pajamas.

Mom, she thought sweetly.

Caitlin allowed herself another moment. She felt like Jacob must feel when he played games on his bed, especially with the lights out, hoping she didn’t hear. As she thought of him a smile briefly turned her mouth; it was followed by a choke. If any boy on the planet could get his footing in Galderkhaan, it was little Captain Nemo himself. Still, she had to get to him and pushed, again, on the sturdy mattress.

As Caitlin slowly swung her legs over the side of the bed, the door opened and a visibly tired Nancy O’Hara shuffled in carrying a plastic tray from the commissary. The woman froze when she saw her daughter. Caitlin was just beginning to pull off the pajamas Nancy had brought.

“What are you doing?” the older woman demanded.

“I’ve got to get out of here.”

Nancy turned to look down the hall. “I’m calling the doctor.”

“Mother, no—don’t!” Caitlin said.

“You’re only half-awake, you don’t know what you’re doing!”

“I do know, just—please. Listen to me.”

Nancy half turned back into the room. She scowled. “You took the IV out of your hand!” she said, just noticing. “Caitlin, I’m getting him now.”

“I did do that, but you have to listen!” Caitlin said. “I truly know what I’m doing.”

“How can you?” Nancy asked. “You’ve been drugged! Before that, you were unconscious in a park.”

“Mom, just come in, shut the door, and let’s talk.”

“Why? So you can convince me to let you do something you shouldn’t be doing? I won’t allow it.”

“Okay, fine,” Caitlin said, holding up her hands. She pulled back on her pajama top. “I don’t want to stress you. I appreciate you being here. I assume Dad is with Jacob?”

Nancy nodded, calming slightly. “Your friend Anita is there too, resting.”

“Thank you,” Caitlin said. “I don’t know where my clothes are, anyway.”

Nancy softened further. “On a tray under the bed and they’re a disaster,” she said.

Caitlin sat there looking at her mother. “You know, you wouldn’t believe from me, from my clothes, that the last few weeks have actually been pretty astonishing. How is Jacob?”

“All right,” Nancy said. “He’s resting too.”

“What time is it? What day is it?”

“Tomorrow for you, about four o’clock.” She added, “In the afternoon.” Her expression continued to lose its edge as she came forward. “Caitlin, what happened? Did you have some kind of seizure?”

“Is that what the doctors said?”

“They don’t know what to think, exactly.”

“I’m not surprised. It was more like a hypnotic episode—it’s a long story but there’s nothing wrong with me. Nothing physical. Nothing I need to be here for.”

“Ohhhh… I know what you’re doing, Caitlin.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I wouldn’t let you out angry so you’re trying to smooch me up. It won’t work. You’re going to let Dr. Yang decide what should be done, and that includes when you leave.”

“He doesn’t know me and I don’t know him,” Caitlin protested.

“You don’t know everything,” Nancy said.

“Excuse me?”

“Dr. Yang actually knows about your work,” Nancy said with a hint of pride. “He says he’s read the articles you wrote in the Journal of Pediatric Health Care about children and the trauma of tribal warfare.”

Caitlin’s defiance, which had been threatening to resurface, deflated just a little. “Mother, I’m flattered and touched and I’m not trying to be difficult, I’m truly not. But you have to trust me to handle my own trauma.”

“You take too many chances, Caitlin.”

“Honestly, Mom? I’ve already taken them. Right now I’m only trying to clean up the loose ends.”

“Does this have to do with all those trips you took recently?” Nancy asked. “To Haiti, to Iran of all places…?”

“They’re part of it. Couldn’t be helped.”

Nancy shook her head. “You’re so impatient. Impatient to know and to know now. You always have been.”

“Not like my steady, ready sister.”

“I’m not comparing you,” Nancy insisted.

“Sure you are. You just ticked off the two big things that Abby is not.”

“Abby has her flaws,” Nancy said. “You have a very open mind. She’s Ms. Know-it-All.”

Nancy was right about that. Caitlin kept her mouth shut and looked down. She began moving her fingers a little, extending them down, then out, trying to find the tile or the point in the past from which she had departed. It was gone. All of it.

Nancy did not notice what her daughter was doing. She moved toward Caitlin and began to sob a little as she approached.

“I did speak with Abby on the way in,” Nancy said.

“Ah.”

“She told me not to let you do exactly what you’re doing—take charge of your own health care. She meant it with love and concern.”

“I’m sure that’s how she meant it,” Caitlin replied. She looked up. Her mother seemed very, very tired. Caitlin felt guilty about that, but also grateful. Whether it was running off to disasters around the globe or being a single mother, she did challenge her mother’s traditional beliefs over and over, especially compared to her very traditional younger sister, a surgeon who was married with two children and living in Santa Monica.

Nancy nodded and wiped her eyes with a finger. “I’m sorry, but we were asleep and got a call from your friend Ben that something had happened to you—he didn’t say what, only that you were in the hospital. It wasn’t until we got here that I was able to talk to someone who would understand.”

“I’m so sorry for that,” Caitlin said quietly.

“Forgive me if I’m trying to keep you with us, safe. Not just for your father and me but for your son.”

“I know.”

“What—what were you doing in the park at that hour? Had you gone to see a patient? Were you on a date?”

Caitlin couldn’t help but smile at that. Her mother had actually sounded hopeful. “Not exactly.”

“I remember that boy—man, I mean. Ben. He was with you last night—”

“Ships passing,” Caitlin said.

“Just last night, you mean?”

“I don’t know,” Caitlin answered honestly. “Listen, we can talk about this later, Mom, okay? I don’t mean to take charge, but my brain is starting to function clearly again and there are a few things I have to know. I’m at Lenox Hill, right?”

Nancy nodded once.

“Okay—you said Jacob is sleeping. Do you know for how long?”

“Since early this morning, according to Anita,” Nancy admitted, sniffling briefly but stopping herself. “Is he involved in whatever is going on?”

“He is, which, frankly, is why I have to get out of here.”

Nancy tried, and failed, to stifle a little gasp.

“Mom, just hear me out. The trance that hit me in the park? He got caught by some of it as well—”

“How is that possible? What were you doing?”

“Helping patients, and I succeeded. Please—let me ask the questions? They’re really important.”

“All right.”

“You said Dad’s with him. And Anita. What about Ben? My… my friend.”

“No. But he’s been checking in all day, with both of us.”

Caitlin quietly thanked Anita, her father, Ben, and God, in that order. The last—coming from an agnostic—indicated to Caitlin just how far her spirituality had evolved in a very short time.

“Did Anita say anything about Jacob’s condition?” Caitlin asked.

“She said that his vitals were fine and we agreed, ultimately, that you wouldn’t want him to go to the hospital. Your father wasn’t happy with that, but she said that she’s a doctor and had seen this before.”

“She’s absolutely right.” She saw it with Caitlin, in fact.

“Your father was doing what he thought was best—”

“I know. I’m just saying that Anita knows the situation, made the right call. And I’m very grateful Dad went along with her. Okay,” Caitlin went on, quickly prioritizing. “I want to talk to Anita but first you have to do me a favor.”

Nancy hesitated. “What?”

“Text Barbara Melchior. My therapist. Her number’s on my phone.”

Nancy looked toward the closet then back to Caitlin. “You’ll stay where you are?”

Caitlin crossed her heart. “I will not push you in and lock the door like when I was ten.”

“I don’t believe you. Get into bed and lift up the rail.”

“Jesus, Mom—”

“In the bed and lift it.”

Caitlin knew the tone of voice: Nancy O’Hara wasn’t moving until Caitlin did as she asked. Caitlin acquiesced. It was either that or bum-rushing her to get the phone. She sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed, away from the damp pillow. She pulled up the rail. The bars locked upright with finality. Nancy hesitated, her eyes ranging along the IV tube. She gasped when she saw where it ended.

“In the pillow?” Nancy exclaimed.

“I’m not putting that back in, so don’t even ask,” Caitlin said. “I need my wits.”

Nancy shook her head. “What am I even doing here?”

“Helping me,” Caitlin said. “Mom, I’m always out on a ledge, I know it. That’s why I need you.”

Nancy’s shoulders had tensed. They relaxed. Exhaling loudly, she went to the closet and retrieved her daughter’s phone from the top shelf. She looked at it.

“I have no idea how to work this,” she said, stepping forward and thrusting the smartphone at her daughter. Nancy was the very image, then, of when Jacob was younger, broke a toy, and handed it to his mother to fix.

Caitlin took the phone and texted Barbara. The exchange was brief. Caitlin did not explain why she was in the hospital, only that she needed her psychiatrist… and friend. Barbara promised to come over at five thirty, after her last appointment. Caitlin thanked her then called Anita.

“Honey, it is good to hear your voice!” Anita exclaimed.

“Sorry to wake you, if I did.”

“You didn’t,” Anita said. “Who can sleep? Besides you, I mean.”

Caitlin laughed. Nancy seemed surprised. It felt good.

“First, a huge thank-you,” Caitlin said.

“You’re welcome. I never take sick days, was overdue. More important, how are you?”

“I truly do not know how to answer that,” Caitlin said. “Physically, fine. But tell me about Jacob.”

“Relying on just the medical evidence, he’s manifesting a form of hyper-sopor. I would have taken him to the emergency room except that there are no obviously actionable symptoms, he did not have any trauma, and the only food he had was what he hadn’t finished yesterday. His tendon reflexes are normal, there’s no fever, resting heartbeat and respiration are consistent with clinical lethargy, it’s not drug-­induced, obviously, and I wanted to talk to you first. Anyway, a relative would have had to sign off on further evaluation.”

“That is absolutely what I would have done,” Caitlin told her. “Has he moved, said anything?”

“Moved—he was half-awake, rapping on the wall, then back asleep. That was about—dawn, I guess. Since then, very little. Opened his mouth slowly as if he was cracking his jaw. Eye movement. Not like REM, only sporadic and definitely deliberate.”

“Like lucid dreaming?”

After considering that for a moment Anita said, “Yes, that’s actually what it’s like. As if he’s awake and consciously, purposefully looking at something. But with his eyes closed.”

“Bless you again for not moving him,” Caitlin said. “It’s a form of trance, like the one I experienced.”

“I figured, but hold on, Caitlin—there’s more,” Anita said. “You had visitors.”

“Who?”

Anita said quietly so Caitlin’s father wouldn’t hear, “From Haiti. A Vodou priestess and her son.”

Caitlin felt a sudden boiling in her gut. “Go on.”

Anita told her about Madame Langlois and the snake, both of which surprised Caitlin but also comforted her in a strange way: the Galderkhaani Priest Yokane was dead and the transcended spirit of the Galderkhaani Azha was gone. Caitlin was glad to have someone around who understood. And there was another snake: a physical manifestation, unlike the others. That was information, even if she did not yet know what to make of it.

“Did Madame Langlois say anything about the serpent?” Caitlin asked.

Nancy frowned, deeply. Caitlin waved her hand as if the question were irrelevant.

“Nothing that made it any less creepy,” Anita said. “A conjurer’s trick, I suppose, though she kept referring to the snake with a plural pronoun—‘they.’”

Then she told her how the Vodou-summoned snake was made up of smaller parts, just like the snake in her own recent vision. That too was fascinating… but elusive.

“I don’t assume they are still there,” Caitlin said. “I can’t see my father allowing that.”

“No,” Anita said. “Ben found somewhere to put the madame and her son, though he didn’t tell me where.”

Caitlin quickly scrolled through her e-mails, saw nothing from Ben. He was probably afraid someone else might look at it. She worked hard to remain calm. She had to fight the pressing urge to be with Jacob, to see the Haitians, to get back to Flora Davies, to find out why all the stones on the planet seemed to have gone quiet, to return to Galderkhaan somehow. Instead, she took an uncharacteristically small, single step:

“Ben is at work?” Caitlin asked.

“Yes. He called here at least a half-dozen times asking if I’d heard from you, making sure Jacob was still the same.”

Just talking about him brought a sudden, welcome equilibrium, as if she’d downloaded all the cautions and safeguards and different points of view that were lodged in his sane British brain. Her mother was a mother, loving and concerned with a strong vein of I know better, but Ben had been a comrade in all this… in so many things going back to their university years.

Caitlin heard dripping then, saw that her pillow was getting soggy and had started to overflow. Caitlin hadn’t expected to be here still, and reluctantly shut the flow. A few moments later a nurse entered.

“I gotta go,” Caitlin said to Anita and ended the call after thanking her again.

The young nurse frowned when he too heard the dripping and looked at the bed.

“Dr. O’Hara—”

“It—came out,” Caitlin told him.

“Did it?”

“Well… clearly.”

“I see.”

“And as you can also see, I’m okay now,” Caitlin went on. “Except that I need a fresh pillow.”

The nurse scowled. He summoned an orderly and a fresh pillow was brought in. Dr. Yang followed briskly with a look that was half-concern, half-disapproval.

The physician made quick work of his patient, finding nothing in her eyes, blood pressure, or chest to alarm him. He agreed not to replace the IV if Caitlin promised to stay in bed. Nancy O’Hara assured him that she would.

“If we weren’t understaffed—” he began.

“I’d help, if you’d let me,” Caitlin said. She was serious.

“Thanks, no. Management prefers when their doctors aren’t also patients.”

“Phuket and the Philippines weren’t so picky,” Caitlin muttered to his back. Sometimes, American health care—and liability—just got to her.

The physician left, along with the nurse, the orderly, and Caitlin’s considerably medicated pillow.

Nancy sat heavily and gratefully in the chair. “This is your life, isn’t it? Urgent, urgent, urgent.”

“ ’Fraid so.”

“I’m too tired to keep up,” Nancy said. “I only slept for three hours last night. I’m going to shut my eyes.” She fixed those eyes on her daughter. “You will stay there?”

“I will,” Caitlin said. She wiggled her smartphone. “Barbara will be here in an hour or so. I’m just going to send e-mails while there’s still life in the battery.”

Her mother nodded agreeably, folded her hands on her waist, and settled back. Caitlin looked at her a moment longer. She understood the woman’s concerns for her daughter because Caitlin shared them for her own child. She could not let on how concerned she was. If Jacob were in Galderkhaan—spiritually, at least—she only hoped Standor Qala had believed what she told her, and that the commander’s physician was a man of curiosity and caution who would do nothing rash or extreme. Caitlin prayed—to a dead man in a dead civilization—to try to understand rather than undo what had occurred. Restoring Vilu by some dramatic, potentially traumatic means could cost Jacob his soul.

Once again, Caitlin had to prioritize as she did in Phuket and other devastated regions around the globe. Jacob had slipped into the past while she was there—possibly drawn by her through some spiritual mechanism she did not understand. There had been a few moments of overlap, of transition. Perhaps it was a variation of what had happened with Maanik, some version of the cazh, their powerful bond pulling his spirit to where she was.

But there was a problem, Caitlin thought. With Maanik, Gaelle, and Atash, the souls from the past tried to drag them into the past. Had Caitlin’s longing to be with Jacob been strong enough to unwittingly create a cazh? Had it failed after a moment or two because it had been subconscious, without the ritual that helped the souls to focus? Had Madame Langlois or her snake done something that prevented them from bonding?

You’re just spitballing, Caitlin told herself. Not that there was anything wrong with that, if she had the time. She did not. Hopefully Barbara could get some answers through hypnosis.

In the meantime, she had to contact Ben and find out what he may have learned from the Haitian mother and son. After the serpentine vision she had experienced in Haiti, and again in her dream, she was particularly interested in the snake Anita had mentioned. That was now too prevalent to be a coincidence.

Jung believed in synchronicity and so do I, she thought.

In this case, she had to.

Jacob’s safety might well depend on it.

She wrote to Ben: I’m awake. Thanks for all. Barbara coming for hypnosis. Anything?

It took several battery-sapping minutes for Ben to text back: I arranged for Technologists to take Haitians to CT HQ. Don’t ask. Plus new twist. Halley VI reports there was massive fireball yesterday. Vibrations under ice, suspected drilling. Brit ambassador told Security Council that Royal Navy and RAF sending assets south. Suspect Russia of military ops out of Vostok Station.

Caitlin wrote back: What will UK do?

Ben answered: Land troops. Investigate.

Caitlin wrote: Flora has a man there.

Ben texted back: Will tell US reps. Gotta go. Love you.

Oddly, the last comment didn’t bother her like it used to. Maybe she wanted it—or maybe she was troubled by this new development and desperately needed a partner. She actually felt violated by all the attention from London, as though her private world were about to be invaded.

Which it was.

The tiles might be active down there, energy that was being picked up at Halley or by satellite but wasn’t giving her “juice.” That was worrisome enough. But the thought that the military, any military, might obtain the power of the Source was more frightening still.

Sneaking out of bed to get her lunch tray, Caitlin ate—something she hadn’t done for too long. Then she lay back on her fresh pillow, tried to clear her head, and awaited Barbara Melchior’s arrival.

CHAPTER 14

Lowered by the growling winch of the truck, showered by chips of ice and dead bugs that were being cut from the lip over which he’d been suspended, Mikel Jasso descended slowly into the pit. His goggles were around his chin, his eyes struggling to adjust to the darkness. As the rope-sling was lowered into the pit, twisting slightly from side to side, the archaeologist had time to think. And as he thought, one phrase kept running through his tired, overworked brain:

One day, Dr. Jasso, your rope will fray. One day the hastily crafted sling or raft or ladder will fail you.

Mikel was one of those who believed it was better to die in the saddle than on the sidelines, but that came with an acute awareness that the thick of things was never the safest place to be.

From his early childhood in Pamplona, through his years in Harvard and his adventures with the Group, Mikel had relished any and all physical challenges, especially those that logic told him were beyond his means. Going underground, into the ruins of Galderkhaan… soaring through a wind tunnel on a sled made of millennia-old animal hide… that was madness. Communing with the souls of the dead was not exactly reckless, but believing in them lacked the kind of empirical science in which he was schooled. But in every instance, the rewards had been vast. There was rarely a middle ground when it came to risk-taking in his field: either you squandered years or risked your life, but that was how you located King Tut. Or Amelia Earhart’s airplane.

Or Galderkhaan.

But now he was sitting in this makeshift support, descending into a dark pit that had been newly cut by a flaming—what? An eternally burning soul, a soul that might still be down there, angry as hell and looking for lost Galderkhaani souls?—doing all this with a broken wrist; that was new, even for Mikel.

Fortunately, he thought, curiosity still slightly—very slightly—trumped fear. He wanted to know more about the phenomenon, and also what Casey Skett had planned.

When light from the outer world no longer reached him, Mikel pulled a flashlight from the shoulder bag slung over his bad arm. He threw a cone of white light against the wall to his right. Here and there midges still clung to the stone walls, walls that revealed dark stone beneath serpentine, fast-frozen mounds of ice. Dr. Cummins had reported that the remainder of the insects, those which hadn’t frozen where they last stood, had wandered aimlessly from the truck, a strange column of brownish black crawling along the ice as if they were disoriented, no longer stuck between the two powerful tiles. Like the other animals Mikel had witnessed or been told about, some herding quality in their brain—an atavistic version of cazh?—had been revved by the tiles.

Which is probably why the Technologists thought the tiles were all that was required to join souls, Mikel thought with sudden clarity.

Physically, the pit itself was a chimeric thing. On closer inspection, not only ice but what looked like shale had been flash-molten and quickly hardened, like melted ice cream. Here and there were large stone bubbles where air had been released then quickly trapped by fast-hardened rock. Ice, melted from above, was frozen in sheets across large areas. They reminded him of a Japanese waterfall by Hokusai, thick rivulets of water stiff at the end of the floes, slender and reaching. He angled the flashlight down. Below was flat, silent darkness, save for what appeared to be a large, inexplicable bulb of opalescent white that sat at some distance below. It reminded him of a pearl seen through seawater. It rested in the center of the darkness, with fuzzy edges that blended slowly into the blackness. The deeper Mikel went, the pit became wider and less light fell on the surrounding walls. Yet the milky hue remained constant, glowing, growing slightly in diameter but not luminosity as he descended.

The cooing that Mikel and Dr. Cummins heard had ceased as soon as he began his descent. He still didn’t know what it had been. The only constant sounds were the distant drone and squeak of the winch, the jostling of the shoulder bag he carried, and the wind that rose and fell in volume as it swept across the opening or rushed down at him with sudden, brief enthusiasm. Those sounds and Mikel’s heartbeat and breath created quite a strange symphony. His cold-weather gear kept that sound close to his body, the drumming in his ears in tune with the physical sensation of blood pumping to his extremities. He would occasionally report what he was seeing to Skett, though the man on the other end made no comment and asked no questions. Mikel was certain he was there, however: there was a very dull, low hum from the phone, just as there had been when they spoke back at Halley VI. No doubt Skett was focused on the experiment, not on communication. Now and then Mikel would also check in with Dr. Cummins over the radio that was hooked to the cable just above his head. When she spoke—letting him know how far he had descended—she had to shout, since the winch was complaining, loudly, as it fought the icy cold.

For a place that was alive with surreal imagery and borrowed sound, the pit itself was not like a living cave with active water dripping or flowing and a feeling of flora, fauna, and biota all about. The place seemed—it was—quite still and dead. There did not even seem to be any Galderkhaani spirits in residence: Pao, Rensat, Enzo, and Jina had all had a palpable presence, a spiritual substance that registered as chill or warmth or low pressure or flame. They were immaterial but the ripples they created were real.

Not here.

And yet Mikel felt certain he was not alone. At first he suspected it was the natural fear of the unknown, where imagined dangers caused people to hallucinate spirits or predators, to self-generate hysteria. Then he began to suspect that the pit could be like the lava tube he had entered before, with an adjacent channel or tunnel that contained something alive. For all he knew, there could be tiles below him or somewhere else nearby.

Mikel got his answer after about five minutes of the slow unraveling of the cable. The ivory-like glow below him was no longer just a globe: there was a shape, a mass below it. Perhaps it had always been there, just not visible from so high up. At first glance it reminded him of Michelangelo’s Pietà but seen from above, the covered head of Mary rising from her shoulders. But the shroud was not fabric: as he neared he saw that it was long hair hanging in graceful waves over the figure’s shoulders.

At about one hundred and fifty feet down, the glow of the flashlight finally illuminated a solid floor below him with what looked to be opposing cave mouths on the eastern and western sides of the pit. They looked exactly like the Galderkhaani tunnels he had navigated previously. And then he heard it: the tunnels beyond the two mouths were filled with fierce winds, Aeolian fury like that which had dashed him against a rock wall, heat-generated fury that the Galderkhaani rode as a sort of rapid-transit system. This network consisted of ancient lava tubes that had been enlarged and expanded by the Galderkhaani. No doubt the earliest Galderkhaani towns and cities arose around the caldera of some ancient volcano, around hot springs, located in clearings carved by natural forces from the ancient ice sheets. Mikel believed that these natural channels were later connected by the Technologists, expanded as the civilization grew. Smokestack-like columns had been constructed throughout the ancient civilization, no doubt to allow the heat to vent, to prevent a cataclysm like Vesuvius or Krakatoa.

Mikel was nearly at the bottom of the pit when he saw that the figure in white was in a sitting position just above the ground. He could see that it was a woman and she was looking north. He wondered if this were another spirit or a recording of some kind, projected by the olivine tiles. There was a tranquility about the figure, something that didn’t fit with the others he had met. Thinking back to his first reaction—a pearl underwater—he realized it reminded him of classical views of mermaids: their long hair floating around them, their skin pale and fair, their attention on the sea and not those who would intrude from above.

Another archetype with roots in Galderkhaan? he wondered.

Whatever it was, the being did not acknowledge his presence, even when he rapped his flashlight on the utility bag. He thought he saw the chest moving slowly beneath what looked like a toga. The clothing was after the style of Rensat’s. It had to be an ascended spirit.

Mikel instructed Dr. Cummins to stop the winch. The rope-sling jerked to a twisting stop in the darkness, just a few yards above the figure. Now all that Mikel heard were his own breathing and heartbeat. He felt the condensation of his breath on the thick fabric of his muffler. He pulled it down, smelled his own musk rising from it.

Mikel reported everything he saw to Skett. There was a long silence before Skett’s voice cut through the hum of the phone.

“Can you see anything else? Anything around her?” he demanded.

“Nothing. But—the light isn’t radiant. It looks as if she’s pasted on the darkness, within a faint nimbus.”

“Where are her hands?”

Mikel had to lean out to see over his hanging legs. “Her arms are straight at her sides. It’s difficult to tell—there aren’t really any shadows, just contours. Also, though I can’t see through her, there doesn’t appear to be any substance.”

“That is perfect,” Skett said, almost gleefully. “There will be.”

His tone alarmed Mikel more than the apparition did. He tried to imagine what could possibly be exciting the Technologist so much. The figure was not frozen in stasis; it was moving, slightly, like a sunbather.

And then it occurred to him: this figure was different because it wasn’t actually there, now. Pao had been there. Rensat, Enzo… those ancient souls had been there. This figure: it was still back in Galderkhaan!

“Skett, you’re hooked into time, aren’t you? Into the past?”

“Nicely done,” Skett said. “Yes, I am, through Flora’s lab assistant. The tile did just what the Technologists said it would: it bonded the two people—not souls, people—through time.”

“You’re going to pull this one forward?”

“That would be quite an achievement, wouldn’t it?” Skett said.

“Is this real?” Dr. Cummins said, listening in through the radio.

“Very,” Mikel replied.

“All right, Mikel,” Skett said. “I’m going to loosen the hold of the acoustic levitation waves on this end. Please record and describe everything that happens down there.”

“I’m above her,” Mikel said. “Do you want me to go lower, to be facing her?” He was suddenly excited by the prospect of being the first person to be face-to-face with a living, ancient Galderkhaani.

“Absolutely not. I don’t want you harmed.”

“Harmed how?”

“We have no precedent for this, do we? We don’t know what will happen.”

Mikel didn’t think Skett was worried about him: he wanted Mikel’s report and video. The archaeologist turned the phone toward the figure below.

“Are you receiving?” Mikel asked, his voice echoing throughout the pit.

“No,” Skett said. “In fact, I can barely hear you now. You’ll have to shout, please, when you describe what is happening.”

Skett said something to Flora then told Mikel that they were beginning. Then Mikel used the radio to inform Dr. Cummins to have the winch ready to haul him out.

“Why?” she asked. “Is something happening?”

“Nothing yet,” he said. “You heard everything. Just be ready.”

“I heard, but I didn’t understand,” Dr. Cummins said. “What exactly is being done?”

“The olivine tile that corralled those bugs is being ramped up with a slightly different target,” he said. “The forty-thousand-year-old figure on the floor of the pit.”

“Then I did hear correctly,” she marveled.

“Yes.”

“But the figure is not in a pit then,” Dr. Cummins said.

“No. It could be sitting on a seashore, in a field—I don’t know. Only the figures are linked, in New York and in Galderkhaan.”

As they spoke, the figure below began to change. Though she didn’t move, the apparition took on hints of color. The hair darkened toward black, the skin grew slightly ruddy, the folds of a blue toga began to appear on the previously colorless fabric that draped the torso.

“What’s happening?” Skett asked.

“She’s starting to show detail—hair, skin, clothes!” Mikel yelled into the phone. “I can’t say for sure whether it’s substance, but it’s definitely looking more like a Galderkhaani woman.”

Skett said something else to Flora that Mikel couldn’t hear. Moments later, the figure took on even more detail. Her legs were bare, her skin smooth, and she appeared to be in her twenties; he couldn’t be sure from this angle.

Suddenly, the folds of her clothes and her hair seemed to come alive, raised and lofted as if by a breeze. Then her hair and garment was whipped to her right as if hit with a blast of wind. The howling increased, reverberating up the stone walls of the pit.

“Skett, she’s reacting to something coming at her from the west!” Mikel yelled.

He heard indistinct but agitated conversation on the other end.

“Skett!” Mikel shouted into the phone. “What’s going on?”

If the man replied, Mikel couldn’t hear him. The roar of the wind was almost painful now. Yet the wind itself did not rise: it was blowing from tunnel to tunnel below him.

The woman’s toga and hair moved like seaweed in a tidal pool, horizontally beside her, the ends whipping around as the wind increased—wind Mikel himself could not feel. The air in the pit remained cold, static.

“Skett?” Mikel repeated.

“Giving… tile… more… freedom,” he heard Skett enunciate carefully, over protests from Flora, her cautioning tone clear even if her words were not.

“Skett, slow down!” Mikel shouted back. “This is getting very real very fast!”

“Dr. Jasso?” Dr. Cummins yelled.

“I’m all right!” he shouted into the radio.

Mikel looked down. He blinked hard, not convinced that he was seeing correctly. In front of the woman the blackness seemed to glow with a blue blush. The color took on more prominence and then Mikel saw what looked like white streaks, black streaks—

White caps, sea creatures, he suddenly realized. The woman is sitting at the edge of the ocean. The cooing is—sea creatures.

Just then, Mikel was distracted by something new: smoke, rising from the toga’s folds. Licks of red began to appear through the fabric along the shoulders, the waist, down the spine. The same thing must be happening on Skett’s end, which was probably why Flora was agitated.

“Skett, she’s starting to burn!” Mikel shouted. “The tile is killing her!”

“In the past!” Skett screamed with almost giddy triumph.

“Did you hear me? You’re killing someone there!”

“She’s already dead!” Skett yelled. “The Technologists are right—you can transcend with the tiles! You don’t need prayer!”

Mikel realized that the rising smoke was not real. Like the apparition, it belonged to another time. But something else was real: a band of glowing rock at the base of the pit. There was a golden hue to the band: tiles buried beneath the once-molten rock. The tile in New York and the tiles buried here had bonded through time to open a portal and connect to a woman in this time. There was a tower below this pit.

“Dr. Cummins, pull me up. There are tiles down here and they’re becoming active!”

“Hang on!” she said.

The winch began to groan and the rope jerked up.

“Skett, is the same thing happening to Adrienne up there?” Mikel shouted as loud as he could. He waited a moment, until he was higher, then repeated the question.

“Of course! The two women are transcending together!”

“Skett—”

“I’m freeing them, damn you! The tile wasn’t going to release them—I didn’t do this. You did, you brought the tile back!”

“No, Skett. We could have found another way!”

“We have transcended time! We can do it again! You used to be a scientist, Jasso! Understanding power like this is worth a life!”

“I’m going back to the truck, Skett—”

“No! Keep recording, damn you!”

“I am,” Mikel said. “But you haven’t proved Transcendence at all. All you’ve done is reached back in time to burn a woman to death.”

“She’s been dead for forty millennia,” Skett replied.

“Something that you caused, Skett.”

Mikel watched as smoke rolled back from the folds of the toga and insubstantial flames began to consume the fabric, blackened the fringes of her hair, caused her arms to rise from their prayerful position and extend outward. Fire began to chew at the flesh of her upper arms, formed an ugly orange ruff around her throat, turned red skin to a brown, then black sheet of chapped flesh. Blood turned to steam and pieces of skin drifted off, ugly particles of ash riding the smoke.

Finally, the youthful face turned upward. The mouth was pulled wide in a high scream as her cheekbones broke through charred flesh. Her eyes burst and poured from their sockets like runny eggs. Her teeth seemed to grow and grimace as her lips and mouth burned away. The cry of pain ended as fire turned her saliva to burning vapor and made speech impossible.

That was when Mikel realized that all the shrieks were not just coming from below. Some were rising from the phone.

“Goddamn you,” Mikel said, snarling into the phone. “Damn you to hell!”

Mikel looked away as the figure below him turned to ash and fell in on itself. He heard Flora’s voice over the phone, then screaming as Skett shouted and probably threatened her—or worse, because after that everything was quiet. Below, the circle of tiles dulled and the winds diminished. Perhaps Skett had finally turned the tile “off” in New York.

Mikel took a moment to calm himself. His flesh was chilled from cooling perspiration. The sling had pinched under his thighs and his upper legs were numb. He adjusted his position to encourage circulation. Then he bent back toward the phone.

“Skett,” Mikel said, his voice loud in the sudden quiet. There was no answer. Mikel turned his face toward the radio. “Did you hear any of that?” he asked Dr. Cummins.

“I heard all of it, Dr. Jasso,” she replied. “I can’t believe it.”

“It happened,” Mikel replied.

“But—how? There couldn’t really have been someone down there with you.”

Mikel was too emotionally exhausted to answer.

“It could be a leaking pocket of ethylene gas… a hallucination. That would also explain what you thought you saw previously, what some of us thought we heard coming from the pillar of fire.”

“It could be but it isn’t,” Mikel insisted. “I have video.”

“We’ll have to review that data,” she said. “I saw nothing burning up here. Not like last time.”

“It wasn’t the same,” Mikel said. “This happened forty thousand years ago.”

“But triggered now.”

“That’s right.”

The archaeologist was still looking down when something abruptly changed below.

With a unity that he had not yet seen in his interactions with Galderkhaan, the tiles below reclaimed some of the luster they had had a few moments before.

“Christ, what now?” Mikel asked. “Skett, are you doing something with the tile?”

There was no answer.

“Dr. Jasso?” the glaciologist asked.

“Get me out of here,” Mikel said. “We have an emergency!”

CHAPTER 15

Barbara Melchior arrived at the hospital at five forty-five, which was fortunate: even though Caitlin kept herself busy, lying in bed nearly caused the psychiatrist to lose her mind. Her phone was nearly dead, but she used the charge she had left to read about Antarctic geography. She was looking for reconstructions of the continent as it would have looked some forty thousand years ago. If she were able to go back, even briefly, she wanted to have some idea about where she was and where she needed to be. Anything with ice cover could be ruled out.

Barbara swept into the room with more than her usual panache: it was the satisfaction of a New Yorker having beaten the system.

“The travel gods were with me,” the psychiatrist said as she entered. “A cab was discharging at my doorstep in rush hour and the traffic was actually moving.”

She hung her coat on a hanger behind the door as she noticed Nancy O’Hara, who had been drowsing in the armchair.

“Oh—sorry if I woke you,” Barbara said, grimacing.

“It’s all right,” Nancy said. She put her hands on the armrests and pushed off slowly. “I should leave you two alone anyway.”

“It was good to see you again,” Barbara said.

“And you,” Nancy said. “I wish you both luck. I’ll be in the waiting area.”

“You can go home if you like, Mom,” Caitlin said. “Get some actual rest in a real bed. I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll wait to hear that from Dr. Yang,” Nancy said, shutting the door behind her.

Barbara looked at her patient. “Peter Yang?”

“The same,” Caitlin said. “You know him?”

“Read his full-throated defense of atypical antipsychotics and the treatment of schizophrenia,” she said. “I don’t like it when GPs play in my sandbox.” Barbara came forward. She continued to regard Caitlin. “You look like you’ve been in a war zone.”

“That bad? I haven’t looked.”

“Yeah,” Barbara said. “You want a brush?”

“No thanks. But you do have an iPhone 6, right?”

“Yeah—”

“You happen to have your power cord?” Caitlin asked, holding out her hand. “My phone is kaput.”

Barbara fetched the cable from her shoulder bag and plugged Caitlin’s phone into a wall socket.

“There needs to be a study about this,” Barbara said.

“About what?”

“Why I always feel physically healthier when my dead phone starts to charge.”

“There have been lots of studies about it,” Caitlin said. “It’s called dependent personality disorder.”

“It’s more than that,” Barbara said. “I mean, why should energy in a device make us feel physically charged?”

Caitlin did not answer that. She could have.

“So,” Barbara said looking down at her friend. “Small talk duties—check. Why am I really here?”

“Regression,” Caitlin said. “I have to go back. I think Jacob is stuck in the past and there’s military activity brewing in the South Pole.”

“And that’s your problem how?”

“If they find or destroy or start messing with the relics under the ice, my conduit there may be damaged,” Caitlin said. “I have to try and connect, somehow. Regression may jump-start me. Nothing else is working.”

Barbara had pulled over Nancy’s chair and sat in it. “Caitlin…”

“Barbara, it’s not in my head and it’s not a dream,” Caitlin told her. “I was there. Now Jacob is stuck there while his body is semicatatonic in the apartment.”

“In the apartment? Caitlin!”

“Don’t,” Caitlin said. “Anita Carter is with him. Doctors cannot help. I can.”

“Honey, I cannot go along with that.”

“Do you think I’d risk his life if I weren’t sure?” Caitlin asked. Their voices were rising; Caitlin brought it down. “Barbara, tell me—what would his pediatrician do? You know the drill: blood tests, check his thyroid, see if he hit his head.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to begin that process, Caitlin.”

“But none of that is what’s wrong with him! His spirit may be stuck forty freakin’ millennia from here! How is Synthroid going to help that? I want him as quiet and “the same” as is possible, not drugged, not away from his bed. At least now I know generally where he is and how he is.”

Barbara considered that. The psychiatrist was always a voice of caution and devil’s advocacy, but she respected her colleague/patient and was not an entirely hard sell. Caitlin knew Barbara was open to the idea of an astral “pool” of experiences, the possibility of tapping into the energies of those who came before us. If she weren’t sold, at least the door was open. But Barbara also was not one to humor her patients’ delusions. To her, this straddled both those possibilities.

“Barbara?” Caitlin said, reaching for her hand. “I know what I’m doing. It worked for my other patients in similar circumstances. But I need your help.”

Barbara threw up her free hand and shook her head. “I’ve said my piece. He’s not my patient, you are.”

“Thank you.”

“And since you are, I want to go on record as saying that regression is a tool to give me information as your therapist—not for you to jump to convenient conclusions.”

“The two are not mutually exclusive.”

“They are not. But that is for me to decide,” Barbara said.

“With an open mind,” Caitlin pointed out.

Barbara’s mouth twisted. “Are you done last-wording me, Dr. O’Hara?”

Caitlin nodded.

“All right, then.” Barbara fixed her dark eyes on Caitlin. “So. Your usual self-hypnosis technique… did not work?”

Caitlin made a face. The way she said “technique” made it sound like “trick.” “It helped me to blow up Washington Square Park.”

The dark eyes opened wider. “You’re saying that was you?”

“It was, full of the same kind of power I had the first time I went back,” Caitlin told her. “But since then, something is blocking me from accessing the past. Either the host body back then is closed or dead, or it could be that the tiles are shut down. I don’t know. I had a dream—or a vision, something—about a snake or snakes in a ringlike shape. I have no context for that either, except that it’s similar to what I saw during a trance in Haiti.”

“Symbol of trouble? Phallus? Death?”

“No idea,” Caitlin said. “None. That’s why I need help. Consider the alternative.”

“What’s that?”

Caitlin whipped her hands to her sides, over the railings. “I’m gonna keep throwing my two fingers out, trying to plug into the ether, until they dislocate.”

Caitlin stopped suddenly, her left hand fully extended.

“What is it?” Barbara asked.

“I thought—I thought there was something there,” she said. Caitlin wriggled her extended fingers. “It’s weak but… there’s something, some energy.”

“You still want to do this?” Barbara asked.

Caitlin hesitated a moment longer then lowered her arms. “Yes. I do.”

Deciding there was no point in debating further, Barbara told Caitlin to lie back comfortably.

“Thank you,” Caitlin said as she snuggled back into the crisp polyurethane.

“You want me to record the session?”

“Yes, please.”

Barbara pushed the record button on her phone and placed it on the nightstand. She shut the light off, then lifted the chair and moved in even closer, so she could bend nearer to Caitlin’s ear. Her smooth, low voice would be Caitlin’s only connection to this world. That would leave her free to give up all other tethers, to float in her subconscious. The only light came from the monitors at Caitlin’s bedside and a sliver that slashed across the floor beneath the door.

Caitlin shut her eyes and forced herself to relax.

“All right, Caitlin. You’re going to answer each question with the first thing that comes to your mind,” Barbara said. “Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Where are you?”

“In a hospital room.”

“In your mind’s eye, look up,” Barbara instructed. “What do you see?”

“The ceiling.”

“What do you see beyond it?”

“A room above me.”

“Who’s in the room?”

“A… a very sick… woman.”

“What’s her name?”

“Jessica.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Car accident.”

“Where?”

“FDR.”

“What is she thinking?”

Caitlin’s voice caught, choked. “How… how good her life has been.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s had love.”

“Whose?”

“Her husband’s. Her children’s.”

“What does she see in her head?”

“Her family. Her parents. And…” Caitlin smiled. “Summer camp.”

“What is there that makes her happy?”

Caitlin continued to smile. “First love. First kiss.”

“Where are they in the camp?”

“At a dark lake.”

“What’s the lake called?”

“Garbage… beach.”

“Why?”

“Counselors… drink… there… make out…”

Caitlin’s monotone and hesitation showed that she was beginning to disassociate from her own life. Barbara wanted to push her further; that was where control lay and guidance could be achieved.

“Do you see them?”

Caitlin smiled. “No… I hear them. Sex. Smell them… toking…”

“Are you contact-high?”

The smile broadened. “A little.” She giggled. “A lot. Whoo! Haven’t… been… high… since… since…”

“I want you to go back further,” Barbara gently coaxed her. “You’re floating now, in your life.”

“Gee, Abby… is… so… pretty.”

“Your sister.”

“Baby. Baby… sister.”

“Go back further.”

Caitlin had been smiling lightly. The smile left. “Stupid… pogo… stick…”

“Further. You’re no longer Caitlin.”

Caitlin seemed to sink into the bed; it was really a long, slow exhale. Her arms rose in unison then dropped.

“What just happened?” Barbara asked.

“China… chi gong exercise… village…”

“Go back again and keep going. Don’t stop until you are with Jacob.”

“Polar bears… Northern Lights… an iron forge… wooden boats… warriors…”

Caitlin’s expression brightened, then tensed. This was followed by a slight side-to-side motion of her head.

“I am here… but I cannot find my son,” she said, her voice rising. “I cannot see Jacob!”

“Stay calm,” Barbara said.

“He should… be here… I should… feel him.”

“Be patient,” Barbara said gently.

“No!”

“What is it?”

“Galderkhaan… fading!”

Barbara laid her fingers on Caitlin’s wrist. Her pulse was speeding. “Caitlin, you must stay calm. If you panic, you’ll break the trance.”

Barbara left her fingers where they were. After a long moment she heard a moan. It came from Caitlin but did not belong to her. It was much, much deeper than her normal voice. At the same time, Caitlin’s pulse steadied. Then it slowed. Barbara jumped. Caitlin was staring at the ceiling.

“Caitlin, can you hear me?”

The woman continued to stare. Barbara tapped her wrist. She was striking an acupressure point designed to stimulate the blood flow without removing her from the trance.

“Caitlin?”

The woman did not respond. She continued to stare, unblinking. Her breathing was slow and deep. Then she began to shiver. Barbara continued tapping her wrist with two fingers.

“I’m going to bring you out,” Barbara said. “Close your eyes.”

Barbara reached out to shut her patient’s eyes but hesitated; it was as if she was going to close the eyes of a dead person. Instead, she held a finger in front of her eyes.

“Caitlin, it’s time for you to come back. I want you to look at my finger.”

Suddenly, Caitlin’s arms rose slowly from her sides as if they were weightless. Barbara quickly withdrew her finger, not wanting to interfere with the ideomotor reflex. It was action independent of the hypnotist, often the key to deeply buried conflicts. Barbara watched as her companion’s arms formed a circle above her torso and just hovered there.

“They’re here,” Caitlin said in a low monotone. “I am with them.”

“Who?” Barbara asked.

“The luminous circle… the gold snake.”

“Is this the same snake you saw before? In your vision?”

Caitlin nodded. “They… they are real,” she said. “They want me to… come.”

“You will not go,” Barbara said.

“I must. They… want to endure.”

“You are to stay here,” Barbara said more insistently.

Caitlin was suddenly not herself. It happened in a series of subtle ways as her arms formed the circle: her voice flattened, eyes deadened, respiration grew low.

Barbara grabbed her cell phone and shined the flashlight briefly in Caitlin’s eyes. Her pupils were fully dilated yet they barely responded.

“Caitlin, where is the circle?” Barbara asked.

“In awful darkness!” she said. “This is not… death! It is absolute destruction! But—my god, it’s not the end!”

“Yes, it is,” Barbara said. She pushed Caitlin’s arms down, thrust her finger back in front of her eyes. “Look at me!” Barbara shouted. “I’m going to count to three and you will come back with me to the hospital room.”

“Can… can…”

“Yes, you can!” Barbara agreed.

The psychiatrist began to count. When she was finished, Caitlin exhaled loudly then relaxed. She was still staring, though her eyes were not as wide, her pupils no longer fully dilated.

“Where are you, Caitlin?” Barbara demanded.

The woman blinked at her. “I’m here. I’m with you,” she replied.

“So you see me?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Did you see the light I shined in your eyes?”

Caitlin hesitated. Barbara turned the light back on. This time Caitlin winced when it struck her pupils.

“You didn’t react when I did that half a minute ago,” Barbara said as she turned off the record button.

“What was happening? What was I saying?” Caitlin asked.

“I’ll play it back for you in a minute,” Barbara said. She herself needed a moment to try and figure out what had just transpired. “You just lie there. Don’t even think about trying to get up.”

Caitlin did as she was told. “I don’t understand where I ended up,” Caitlin said. “I was in Galderkhaan, then it was gone. Not destroyed, just… gone. I can’t remember how it happened.”

“You were retreating,” Barbara said. “You went back very fast, very far.”

“I didn’t see Jacob when I passed through Galderkhaan,” Caitlin said. Tears began to form in her eyes. “I know that much. I couldn’t even feel him.”

“Do you know why?” Barbara asked. “It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Caitlin. Jacob is here. He’s in New York, in your apartment.”

Caitlin wiped the tears. She was confused, she was angry, and she had no idea what to do next. Maybe Anita and Barbara were right. Maybe everything she did going forward would just muck things up even more.

“Whatever you just experienced, Caitlin, we both know you didn’t leave the room. We’ve had this discussion. Real or not, everything you think you experienced was in your head, where it is subject to personalization, corruption, subjectivity, a host of unreliable markers. Even with racial memories—which are bona fide genetic triggers, quantifiable biological imprinting—those ancient codes inside us may still be using the mind to tell a story.”

Caitlin shook her head slowly. “I don’t believe that. Just because we can’t understand it, that doesn’t mean what’s in my head is false. After the incident in the park I was in Galderkhaan!”

“And after the tornado, Dorothy was in Oz,” Barbara said.

Caitlin grew angry. “I know the difference, dammit!”

“Do you? Because there’s also a rational explanation for everything you said when you were under, and you know what it is.”

“What? Delusion? Grandiose delusion?”

“It fits, doesn’t it? Inflated sense of self, relationship with a deity—called to the side of God. You just said as much in the session. How many point-to-point correlations do you need?” Barbara moved closer. “You know I believe in energies that exist apart from the body. But Caitlin—you’ve used that idea, that belief, to concoct a psychodrama.”

Caitlin looked at Barbara with an expression that was profoundly sad and something else Barbara had not seen, ever: fear.

“That’s not what’s happening,” Caitlin said. “Anita has seen things… Ben.”

“They saw shadows, they heard your words, your—what, acting out?”

“I cured those kids, Barbara!”

“By getting into their psychoses,” she said. “It was a masterful job of psychiatry. And then it was done.”

“You’re wrong.”

“We all want to support you, Caitlin. You say you destroyed the park. The FDNY says it was underground water and gas lines.”

“Which I broke.”

Barbara sat back. “I’m not going to continue arguing this with you. There’s no point. What you do in the hospital is between you and Dr. Yang. But as much as I find this topic personally fascinating, this approach is not doing you or Jacob any good.”

“Uh huh. And your recommendation?”

“Rest, girl. Those kids a few weeks ago—the situation between India and Pakistan boiling around you? That took a toll.”

Caitlin pouted. It was the only way she could stop herself from screaming.

“How about I do this?” she said, rising. “I’ll send you the recording of the session. Listen to it. Have Ben come over and listen with you. If there’s somewhere, some way, you’re convinced I’ve whiffed, call me. In the meantime, just do me one favor. Please reconsider what you’re doing with your son.”

“Sure.”

“I mean that, Caitlin.”

“I know. And I’ll think about it. I will.” She looked at her friend. “I may not agree with you, but you know how much I respect you.” Caitlin managed a half-smile. “And that’s the last word.”

Barbara gave her a squeeze on the shoulder. Collecting her phone cable, she sent the audio file then left with a little smile and a small wave.

Alone in the hospital room, Caitlin O’Hara knew then that her life would never be the same: to her, Standor Qala, Vilu, Bayarma, Yokane, and Azha seemed more real to her than anyone in her life, other than her son.

Which meant that either she was truly delusional… or two worlds were on the verge of colliding.

CHAPTER 16

Flora Davies gazed at the spot where Adrienne Dowman had been sitting.

All that remained of the young woman was a diploma on the wall and a stiff, blackened corpse on the floor. Strips of burned flesh hung from her bones with red, raw muscle peeking out from beneath. The odor was sinful.

Throughout the experiment, the laboratory associate had sat supernaturally still even as flames started to appear under her clothes. Then, in a flash, a ferocious blaze erupted, consuming her body from sole to scalp. As though entranced, she had not moved, had not cried out, had not even twitched. She just sat there as her flesh bubbled away, as her hair flew off in short-lived flamelets, as her eyes and the insides of her nostrils liquefied and ran down the white bones of her face—the entire process concealed more and more by noxious, oily smoke. It only took seconds for the ruddy fire to finish its job before dissipating.

The laboratory sprinklers had come on as the young scholar burned. The water not only doused the flames, it caused her body to collapse with a soggy crunch by its added weight. The shower also short-circuited the electronics.

The acoustic levitation hookup died. The olivine tile fell to the platform with a thunk.

As water rained down, Skett cried out an oath over and over, louder and louder. Flora forced herself not to think about Adrienne. It was the stone that had connected her with a Galderkhaani. There was no way to break the connection other than by learning to control the tile.

But Skett hadn’t expected an inferno, Flora thought. The Technologists never had sufficient respect for the tiles.

Almost at once, smoke detectors throughout the Fifth Avenue mansion went wild. An automated call went out to the New York Fire Department. Flora did not concern herself with that. Her three-­person office staff was used to crises; this was one more. The ungoverned tile was her immediate concern.

She jumped from the seat where Skett had placed her and slapped on a large industrial-size fan whose location she knew by feel. Choking in the ash-filled air, she pulled a towel from a rack by the industrial-size lab sink, wet it in the spray from the overhead nozzles, and wrapped it around her mouth and nose. She shut the sprinklers from a panel above the sink then approached Casey Skett. He was coughing and leaning over heavily by a laptop on the lab table, pinned there by the opaque smoke.

Simultaneously, Flora’s wall-mounted landline beeped. It was her personal aide, Erika. The Group director picked up, after nearly slipping on the water-slickened floor.

“Ms. Davies, are you all right?”

“Yes,” Flora told her aide. “Shut the alarms and call the neighbors. Apologize for the incident, but assure them there’s no danger. Then call the fire department—tell them it was a smoke condition, nothing more.”

“I’ll call the FDNY first,” she said.

“I would hold off on that one,” Skett said, coughing hard as he turned toward her.

“Wait, Erika.” Flora regarded Skett with open contempt. “Why?”

“Let them come, you’re going to need them,” he said. “And tell her to leave the building. Quickly.”

Flora told Erika to hold off on calling the fire department and just to go outside. She could alert neighbors in person.

“If I need anything, I’ll call your cell,” Flora said. Hanging up, her eyes continued to burn into Skett. “Explain yourself. What else have you done?”

“Me? Nothing. We’ve both done this, Flora.”

“We’ve done what? And no lectures, please.”

“This tile,” he cocked his head toward the olivine stone. “It’s going to rip this place to sawdust.”

“It didn’t do that before we had the acoustic control,” she said. “Why should it now?”

Skett wiped his face with his sleeve. “Figure it out, dammit.”

“No, you’re going to talk,” she said.

“What’s your leverage?” he asked. He wiggled the phone. “This is drenched and dead. Jasso’s cut off.”

“The computer is, and has been, recording everything that has taken place in this room. The recording is being stored offsite. If this place comes down, if I die, that data will automatically be reviewed.”

He looked over at the laptop. “That’s soaked too.”

“It’s waterproof.”

Skett’s eyes narrowed in challenge. “You’re bluffing.”

“Not my style,” Flora assured him. “The Technologists really don’t know much about technology, do they? Everything in here is custom-built. Did you really think I submitted to you because of a knife? I let you run this because how else was I to find out who you really are, who you work for, and what you and your Technologist employers know?”

“Paranoia will always trump planning,” Skett said. He pushed back his wet hair and happened to glance at the charred body that, just moments before, had been a living woman. “And I always thought I was low on compassion!”

“Spare the psych profile,” Flora said. “She was beyond help before we started this. We’re wasting time. The fire department is only a few blocks away. What else do you know that you’re not telling me?”

He looked over at the tile. It was still vibrating and beginning to glow again. “That stone is now fully reconnected to the tiles in the South Pole, and it is probably getting a bump from the one in the freezer,” Skett told her.

“That one is dormant.”

“Is it?” he said.

“They don’t function in subzero. That’s why Galderkhaan was quiet for forty thousand years, until the ice began to melt.”

“You’re wrong, Flora,” Skett said. “They were quiet until Jasso found the other tile and Arni turned it on! Now none of the tiles are sleeping. You linked them all—or someone did.”

That revelation hit Flora with a shock so hard she actually wobbled. Caitlin O’Hara did that. The Group director did not like where this was headed.

“Your dead assistant here was linked with someone in the past,” Skett went on. “We knew that. But instead of being able to communicate with that person through her, which is what I was trying to do, instead of waking them both up, the tile here went ballistic and those two transcended against their will.”

Flora nodded. “And that connection between the tiles is still open,” she said, catching up to Skett.

“Very much so,” Skett said, regarding the tile with growing concern. “Open and growing, only now the power won’t be a simple, ‘Hi, how are you?’ connection as when Arni turned it on. It won’t be rats massing or intestinal bugs eating a mail carrier from the inside out or insects gathering at the South Pole. Mikel Jasso is standing beside a still-open doorway to Galderkhaan. I thought we could control that through this woman and her partner—”

“But the tiles are working on their own now,” Flora said. “Fueled by the Source?”

“I don’t know,” Skett admitted. “I sincerely pray they are not. There isn’t an acoustic monitor this side of the universe that can contain that.”

Flora eyed Adrienne’s body. Sirens blaring sounded closer. There would be an investigation; that was unavoidable now.

“I’m going to get a cooler,” Flora said. “Without the tiles, this will be a forensics nightmare.”

She saw Skett shaking his head.

“What, dammit?” Flora asked, approaching him through the thinning tester of smoke. “Why not?”

“A cooler is not going to work,” he said. “Not anymore.” He cocked a thumb toward the hallway, toward the storage room. “Listen.”

Flora reluctantly obliged him. There was a deep hum, like a long, low note on a bass cello.

“The other tile,” Flora said.

“Already active and getting livelier,” Skett said.

“It shouldn’t be!” Flora said.

“It’s drawing more and more power from this one and, I suspect, breaking its icy bonds. The freezer won’t contain it much longer, and a frigid little container certainly won’t stop this one.” He indicated the tile in the laboratory.

“There has to be a point of equilibrium,” she said. “Dammit, the tiles didn’t go chewing up Galderkhaan every time somebody used one!”

“No, but they were all—synched somehow. Honestly, Flora? I don’t know what the tiles can do. Until I held this specimen, I’d never seen one. But we had better continue this from a distance.”

Then the Group director looked around. “No. I’m staying.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Stop this.” Flora began typing on the computer.

The tile was beginning to shake harder, creating a high-pitched sound that was beginning to pierce her skull. Several yards away, Skett too was beginning to wince. He edged into the hall.

“What are you trying to do?” he yelled at her.

“No one should control a power this monstrous,” she said.

Covering his ears, Skett returned to the laboratory. He looked over Flora’s shoulder, saw that she had opened a program that accessed Mikel’s phone.

“No!” he said. “We have worked too hard to reach this point! All of us have!”

“So did Galderkhaan,” Flora said, “and look where it got them.”

Skett reached for the woman and pulled her from the laptop. The woman pulled herself from his one-armed grab, turned toward a drawer in the lab table, and yanked it open. She withdrew a scalpel and spun back toward her unwanted guest.

“Get out!” she said, just as Skett drove his own blade hard into her chest, plunging the silver blade to the hilt, through her heart.

“Mikel, destroy the tiles!” she cried out as she slid off the knife and hit the floor, dead.

“Flora?” a voice shouted thinly on the other end. “Flora!”

Skett swore. He didn’t know if Jasso would figure out what had happened, couldn’t stay here to find out, and Skett wasn’t sure what he’d tell the archaeologist in any case. Jasso probably wasn’t carrying explosives on the vehicle and he would have a hell of a time obtaining them if he went back to the outpost.

What do you need them for? Bundy or one of the others would ask.

To destroy an archaeological find, Jasso would reply.

It would never happen.

Confidently slipping the blade back into its sheath and stealing a quick glance at the wildly shaking tile, he killed the connection to Mikel, closed Flora’s laptop, and tucked it under his arm. He glanced back at her.

“Sorry,” he said. “I no longer need you—just this to access your offsite storage.”

Then he turned and hurried back into the hallway. The olivine stone in the laboratory was a lost cause, already too active. Yokane probably kept it near her for that reason: it would immediately become alert if another stone were in close proximity. He’d collect the other. With luck, his exit should time out perfectly.

Behind him, the tools in the table drawer began to shake loudly and then the lab table began to hop around; a moment later the walls themselves began to undulate like sails in a typhoon. Below them, the remains of Flora Davies began to liquefy. First the brain and other internal organs; then, as the unchecked vibration of the stone increased, the rest of her cellular structure came apart. Within moments, the woman was a pool of biological material spilled across the laboratory floor. There was no longer a knife wound, or anything to point to homicide. The floor itself was quaking, spreading the material thin and wide.

Skett followed the steady pulse of the original tile. He went down a flight of stairs to a sub-basement where the Group maintained a row of subzero freezers. He had been down here before: this was where the door to the alley was located, the alley through which he’d transported Arni’s body as well as other biological mishaps over the years.

Skett waited anxiously. He stood there, his skin vibrating as the air around him began to quiver. The old beams in the mansion shook and screamed and the structural matter of the century-old building also began to tremble faster and faster and then groan, loudly. He heard crashing above and then a pop that wasn’t so much a loud noise as a dull punch in his ears. It was followed by a massive shockwave that slapped him from above and behind him—the location of the laboratory.

Hopefully, that was the tile reaching some kind of critical mass, releasing its energy before going quiet—

The tile in the freezer instantly calmed once its link to the southern tiles had gone silent. As the building above him fell to dust, Skett grabbed the tile and ran for the door. Behind him, large stone and wood pieces disintegrated as they dropped, the ceiling vanished completely, and millions of tiny pieces of laboratory fell into the ­sub-basement, the upper floors crashing on top of that, all of them creating a pile that rose nearly half a story above a shocked Fifth Avenue.

Observers wondered aloud if it had been weakened by the flooding and fires from the night before. The fire department arrived and pushed back everyone who was recording the event on cell phones. The police department sealed the block, in the event it was a crime scene.

Within that rubble, the olivine tile was quiet now. The collapse of the edifice had caused the orientation to be lost. It would take a boost to raise its energy sufficiently to find the others, to reestablish a connection with the collective. Until then, the now-subdued energy within resumed its waiting patiently, as it had done for an eternity. As it would do for an eternity more if it had to.

The power inside the tile wasn’t conscious but it was sentient. It wasn’t artificial but it wasn’t alive. It was a result. A result that was invulnerable to time, impervious to destruction, merely waiting as it had always waited.

But before it went entirely quiet again, the olivine tile briefly experienced a flash of power, someone reaching for it from nearby… someone whose energy it recognized from the night before…

Someone who would certainly seek it again, for she had been hungry.

CHAPTER 17

As a child, Qala had lived in the deep, lush valley of western Codurazh. There, a river carried jasmine to and from the processing farm operated by her several guardians. With soil rich in nutrients from ancient volcanism and long periods of shelter from icy winds provided by the surrounding mountains, it was there that the tea leaves and jasmine plants, along with other medicinal herbs, were born. Floated to the airships in Falkhaan, they were taken aloft to be nourished by the moisture in the clouds, to grow healthy and large in the pure, plentiful, even brazen sunshine. Like the airship personnel themselves, they thrived beyond the smoke of the magma towers, beyond the foggy dampness of coastal mornings. When they were ripe, the leaves were returned to Codurazhkhaan to be blended into tea or bottled for therapeutic and aromatic uses. From there, the river carried the finished product everywhere along its route, from the western coast to the eastern ice boundaries.

Because she grew up surrounded by high peaks—including the majestic Zetora, legendary home of the first Galderkhaani—it had always been Qala’s ambition to soar above them. She occasionally saw the largest of the airships pass high overhead, and when the flier recruitment boat came along the river, this girl still shy of womanhood implored Femora Ninma to allow her to apply. The old commander later told Qala that what he saw in her then was not just desire and poise. It was awe. He believed that one who flew on an airship should never lose a feeling of wonder for the skies—and whatever lay beyond.

“What does lie beyond, do you think?” the youthful Qala had once asked during training.

Ninma had answered, “Some say it is the true home of the Candescents, but I don’t know. And there is some beauty in not knowing.”

“How do you mean?” Qala asked.

Ninma had smiled warmly. “Your young thoughts are as valid as my old ones, possibly even more so. Ideas should always remain fresh. And,” he began, then stopped.

“Yes, Femora?”

He had looked at Qala then and said, “And I hope we never find out. That would make someone right and someone wrong.”

“Isn’t knowledge worth that?” Qala had asked.

“Questions are always more valuable than answers,” Ninma had replied. “I suppose if answers encourage new questions, they are valid. But this one? I do not think any of the major participants would receive the truth kindly, or willingly.”

By “major participants” Ninma meant the Priests and Technologists. Even as a child, Qala recognized the rising dislike and mistrust between the two groups that supposedly served the general well-­being of Galderkhaan.

The importance of questions was one of the most valuable lessons Qala had ever learned: always to seek, to ask, to look, and then to look beyond—if possible through different eyes, younger eyes, older eyes. In that way, Qala had always maintained her balance. To stop and “gloat” about being correct was the stagnating act of a future imbecile.

Sitting with the physician as he spoke with Vilu, Qala could not help but remember dear Ninma and her own years apprenticing on larger and larger airships. Because she spent so much time on the ground in Falkhaan, Qala had formed a special bond with Vilu and had always understood and even encouraged the boy’s enthusiasm for flight. He was only slightly younger than she had been when she left the valley, and every bit as obsessed. In the many coastal cities she had visited, Qala discovered that those Galderkhaani who plied the seas felt a similar respect and love for that vastness: What was below, they wondered? What was beyond? It used to perplex Qala that a sailor or flier could feel the same humble love for two very different mysteries, two different places, above and below. Yet a Priest had once asked her, during a long, moody night flight: “How strange is it that among people we can have many loves, each special and deep in its own way? Yet for fliers and sailors, affection can only be for one or the other, the sea or the air?”

Qala had no answer for that. She felt, though, that those two worlds were in many ways the same: the mysteries of one reflected the mysteries of the other. Answers to one showed the way to answers in the other. The Galderkhaani called this concept Raque, and it was one of the oldest concepts in the civilization: the idea that there was a sublime and perfect balance in the differences of all things, one-to-one and many-to-many.

It was not known whether it was the ancient concept of Raque that gave rise to the legends of the Candescents, or the other way around. The Anata-Raque, who later became the Priests, believed that if there was life in the sea, there must be life in the skies, beyond the highest clouds, beyond the hovering phosphorescence. The future Technologists, the Eija-Raque, felt that because all things come from above, including the waters that made the seas, a great power they named Tawazh had to have been the primal cause.

The great debate had begun, but there was one thing the early Galderkhaani believed. Before they had mastered flight, the thunder that occasionally rose from Zetora convinced them that the Candescents actually dwelt there. The mountain that glowed, the peak that rumbled with life from time to time, the cliffs that gave Galderkhaan their first Yua, the olivine tiles that spoke to those who were the first Technologists—there was no other conceivable cause. The Anata-Raque and the Eija-Raque agreed on that, and that only. No one then, or now, addressed the mammoth flaw in the split between the groups: believing that all things came from above, the Technologists nonetheless tapped power from inside the world to create the Source. While the Priests, believing in balance, embraced the idea that there was a hierarchy to Candescence.

Qala was not a devoted student of such matters, certainly not like the Priests and their followers, who believed in deeply reflective prayer as a means to understand the Candescents; or the Technologists and their acolytes, who believed in the Yua as the medium for direct communication.

Torn by conflicts, no longer asking questions of each other, neither group had proved anything. The zembo, the nighttime lights far above even the highest airship, were still as mysterious as ever. The world after death was still unknown. And the bottom of the sea was stubbornly elusive.

Qala herself did believe that there is life above, even though those who had tried to reach it failed. Their balloons ripped or exploded and the fliers perished, just like those who attempted to use weighted, airtight conveyances to journey deep below the waters. She believed it because the spots of light hovered and watched with a friendly familiarity, in the way sand or stone, fire or molten rock, did not. Something must be behind them. Sometimes the lights flashed by, like leaves dropping from trees. Perhaps they too became extinguished.

Because the zembo could not be seized, like fish, Qala held that the lives and secrets of the Candescents were meant to be contemplated, not examined. One could surmise a great deal from the remains of sea creatures. Not the lights. Not even the largest one, the zembo-jutan, gave up its secrets—other than its sex, for its shape changed like that of a woman with child as it birthed and rebirthed the zembo every time darkness arrived.

The lights were meant to be considered in solitude or talked about in a group but, in the end, the majesty of their abodes was probably unknowable.

And yet, the things this boy was saying, like the sentiments Bayarma had spoken, were unlike anything Qala had ever heard. Raque described a realm where there was “above” and “below.” It did not address a time that was “now” and “then.”

Yet if balance is universal and constant… such contrasting worlds should exist, Qala thought. She wished Ninma had spent more time addressing the frustrating aspect of questions, as well as their merits.

Qala had returned to the physician’s cabin after witnessing the discomfort of the sky. By the time Zell was finished talking with the boy, Qala had been informed that the airship was nearly ready to depart. The physician joined Qala outside the cabin while Bayarma remained inside, the boy curling beside her in the hammock.

Pressed by the galdani, Qala told him everything Bayarma had said to her as they walked toward the column.

“I do not know what to make of him, or her, or them,” the physician admitted.

“I don’t believe that,” Qala said. “You always have an idea, or at least an opinion.”

Zell shook his head. “I always have a sense of the truth behind something, whether the ailment is mental or physical. Not here. I cannot say whether this is something profound, a fabrication worked out by these two, or a mad shared fantasy.”

“Your instincts are—” Qala pressed.

“Failing me,” Zell admitted with a shrug of his bony shoulders. “What have these two to gain by such a tale? Yet how could they share a delusion? Which leaves only the one option, that this is a miracle for the Night of Miracles.” He leaned closer so none of the crew would hear. “But that would compel me to believe in beings I am not convinced exist!”

“I was thinking that too,” Qala said. “Yet there is also the timing, the way one appeared as the other left.”

“What about it?”

Qala answered carefully, thoughtfully, because she knew that her explanation brought her in line with the doubts Zell had just expressed.

“It is as though the winds of Raque were blowing, informing us that our view of balance is too narrow,” she said.

Zell fired her a look. “That’s not what I would expect from my Standor, whose cabin is full of maps and more maps because, as we know, the ground is fickle, unbalanced, uneven, and unstable—as strong an argument against Raque as one can find.”

“I know,” Qala agreed. “But if what Bayarma said is true, that someone from the future was speaking through her, then her sudden departure as this other boy arrived means that that balance was being preserved through time, from future to past, past to future.”

That idea caused Zell to sigh. He leaned forward on the smooth wooden rail. “I had that thought too,” the galdani admitted. “It is the cleanest, simplest explanation. So why do I find it the most difficult to accept?”

“Because it makes sense and it opens a frightening, humbling possibility,” Qala replied. “Several, in fact.”

“Balance is a reality and an absolute,” Zell said.

“Correct. If true, it means that the past is known so the future must be knowable. It also means that since there is life in the sea, there must be life in the skies.”

“And the reverse, though, must also be true,” Zell said. He gestured above with a wave of his hand. “Beings in the skies? We have never seen life on high, other than birds—and they eventually come to ground, alive or dead,” Zell continued, returning to a favorite argument against celestial beings. “Hypothetical beings would perish and fall, as creatures of the deep sea perish and rise. We would see them. We must.”

“Only if balance applies to things of substance,” Qala said. “The past is no longer real, but we know it exists.”

“Ah, the old Priestly argument,” Zell replied.

“Yes, but there is logic that would not turn the head of a Technologist in disgust: What if, because there is physical life in the water, the Raque must be insubstantial life in the air?”

Zell grinned. “And I am supposed to be the esoteric one, Qala, sniffing potions and smoke to see what is inside the minds of others.” The physician looked out across the landscape. It possessed a dark and brooding quality that had come on suddenly. “It is a strange day,” he remarked.

“Very.”

“I notice the tower is putting out more heat and light than usual,” Zell said.

“I want to get above it as soon as possible, try to determine the levels of molten rock, the status of the tiles,” Qala said. She peered toward the mountainous horizon. “I also want to see if this is unique. There appears to be light beyond the peaks.”

Zell nodded. “Celebrations for the Night of Miracles, no doubt.”

“Perhaps.”

The physician sighed again. “We know so little—about the molten rock, about the tiles. Yet we use them as if we own them.”

“Didn’t the Drudaya teach that we should welcome all strangers, for how else would we get to know them?” Zell asked.

“Strangers don’t spit flaming rock at villages from time to time,” Qala said.

“True enough. And a consortium of Priests and Technologists don’t band together to try and resolve differences based on Raque,” Zell said. “Maybe the Drudaya were wrong, after all. It has been said that Priests dream the way and Technologists figure out how to get there. Balance does not always mean cooperation. Sometimes it arises from rivalry.”

Qala nodded. “Fortunately, I just fly an airship. The only ones who ask what I think are crew members and the occasional child who is infatuated with flight.”

Femora Loi approached quickly. “We are ready to depart, Standor.”

“Thank you,” Qala said. “Hold a moment.” The Standor regarded Zell. “A last chance: What do we do with our guests? They will be your responsibility.”

“The boy cannot be returned and the woman wishes to go to Aankhaan,” the physician said. “What else is there to do but take them?”

Qala turned back to Loi. “Give word to the tower agent that the boy, Vilu, accompanies us for medical reasons,” the Standor said. “Have them send a messenger to the water guardian Lasha. Tell him to let the custodians of the boy’s home know that he is in the personal care of Galdani Zell.”

“At once.”

“I also want to circle the tower to have a look at the pool inside, see if we can see some reason for the rising heat. You have wing command, Femora.”

Loi’s quick, delighted smile said he was surprised by the last part of the order. “All will be done,” Loi said smartly, then departed.

The physician was studying Qala with interest. “So. Finally.”

“You’re referring to Loi?”

“You know very well that I’m not,” Zell said. “He is well trained and perfectly suited to handle this run.”

Qala grinned.

Zell continued to gaze at Qala. “You realize what this means?”

“I do,” Qala said. “And that’s all right. Children are more of a nuisance than thyodularasi. But this boy has something.”

“Something you recognize. And are prepared to nurture. Because you cannot give him back. That would crush him.”

“I understand, and I am not just doing this for the boy but for the future of the fleet.”

“There is no truth in what you just said,” Zell remarked. “None.”

“I am not interested in bearing or parenting,” Qala insisted.

“Yet if he doesn’t recover his wits, you may find him your responsibility regardless,” Zell pointed out.

“I know,” Qala replied. “But we get ahead of ourselves. First, you must heal him so we know if we have Vilu, or whatever he called himself.”

“Jay-cupo-oh-ha-rayaah,” Zell said. “Which is another puzzle. To suffer from mental illness, yet have such a precise, repeatable name… the two of them.” The physician gripped the rail as the airship lurched from its moorings. “Which is what we came out here to discuss, before philosophy got in the way—again,” Zell told her. “I do not want to use herbs to try and shock away whatever illness has come over Vilu.”

“Why?”

“The presence—whatever it is, whether real or imagined—must not be subjugated, it must be removed.”

“All right. Why?”

“Because you said yourself, a foreign soul was present in Bayarma, even though the normal Galderkhaani woman is ‘here’ now. She could seem normal for a time and then that other personality may return. In both of them it must be found, isolated, and removed.”

“How?” Qala asked.

Zell leaned on the chest-high railing and looked out at the city. In the distance, they heard the plank stowed on the deck, the ropes around and below the bag groaning as the inflated envelope bore the entire weight of the gondola.

“I’ll tell you in a moment,” Zell said. “I want to make sure I understand—you did nothing to the woman to cause Bayarma to revert from or to her present state?”

“Nothing,” Qala assured him. “We were talking and it suddenly happened after we walked on a Path of Ancestors,” she said, glancing in the direction of the roadway. “Perhaps that had some effect?”

“Old bones and sinew? I doubt it, unless the ascended souls were still present, which I also doubt.” He shook his head. “I’ve walked that road many times and never felt anything there.”

“We don’t have to explore that now,” Qala said. “It affects those who wish to be affected.”

“Who imagine too much,” Zell said. “But yes, for another time. Right now, we have two, possibly four, lost and conflated beings.”

Both felt the sudden, gentle shift aloft and toward the stern as the airship fully surrendered itself to the sky and its winds. The gondola rocked gently from side to side as the ropes that held it to the bag settled with taut familiarity that was controlled by the personnel of the wing commander. There was a familiar rustling sound as the proud wings unfurled to catch the wind. Qala had not experienced departure from the side of the carriage since she was a young usa-femora. Typically she was in the forward cabin. Watching the landscape shift sideways, instead of flying into it, made her smile. As soon as the flight settled, she would go aft to look down into the tower.

“You were saying, Zell?” Qala said.

“Eh?”

“About the boy,” Qala coaxed. “What will you try to reach this other—person?”

“I want to attempt nuat, Standor.”

Disapproval clouded Qala’s open features. “Even the Technologists disapprove of that and they invented it.”

“Discovered,” Zell gently corrected his superior.

“The distinction won’t matter to one whose mind… melts!”

“The result of over-exuberance, not careful application.”

“No, Zell. Not the boy.”

“It can be moderated,” Zell insisted.

“The stones cannot be controlled outside a ring, you know that,” Qala replied. “They seek, they reach out with… with fists, not fingers. And if one is in the way—”

“That is Priestly fear-mongering,” Zell said dismissively. “If properly applied, it is said it can chase bad humors from any mind.”

“You’ve done it?”

“No.”

“Then that is my answer.”

“I see,” Zell said. “Is it more dangerous than having someone else’s spirit inhabit your body?”

“I don’t know,” Qala admitted. “It’s possible we all do, I suppose.”

“Yes, of course. You’re referring to that woman Ula who had her own small airship and flew from town to town displaying the seven or eight voices in her head?” Zell shook his head angrily. “I saw her when I was a boy. It was an act.”

“Others say it was not.”

“They’re wrong,” Zell said.

“Even so, ‘One charlatan does not a theory discredit,’” Qala said.

“That must be one of Vol’s sayings. He’s a poet, a naysayer for anything that has actual evidence to support it. He conveniently moves on whenever anyone proves him to be a fabulist.”

“‘The Priests dream,’” Qala mused. “And it’s not just Vol’s idea, that a form of cazh can link living and ascended. Perhaps certain stimuli are the triggers.” She cocked her head toward the physician’s cabin. “I say again, those two were in the same courtyard. I can’t shake the feeling that something there might have done it. Lasha blamed it on bad fish.”

“That’s stupid.”

“I agree, but there could be some other medium. They may have interacted with the same thyodularasi who actually pulled me to where the boy had fallen.”

“So its mind merged with theirs?” Zell said mockingly.

“I don’t know. It may have brought something from the sea, a new scent, something that confused their minds,” Qala said.

“Indeed it could have,” Zell said. “The sea is always throwing out surprises. But—and I’m sorry to repeat myself—”

“No, you’re not sorry. You like hearing yourself speak.”

“I am orating,” Zell insisted with a knowing smirk. “But the only way to learn more is from the only material we have at hand. That means our two subjects.”

Qala exhaled slowly. She looked out at Galderkhaan. The vista was both shrinking and expanding: the smaller Falkhaan became, the greater their view of the surrounding lands. There were icy foothills and then the distant peaks of Qala’s native valley. One could no longer make out the features of the people but the underbellies of the clouds became more detailed, their movements subtler, swifter in their detail. Qala saw the shadow of her vessel shifting and diminishing over the landscape the higher they went.

“I’m going to have to think about this while I have a look at the tower,” Qala said. “Until I do, my answer stands. Give me other options.”

“Well, I can use my compounds to try and communicate with these beings, but language might be an impediment if, as we’ve seen, the other souls do not speak Galderkhaani. But, Standor, I don’t know what risks we face there either. If the boy goes away again, he may not return. That is why I return to the more radical—”

“No.”

“Qala, unlike the route we fly, the route we take with those two is uncharted—”

“Which is why we move with caution,” the Standor said. She regarded Zell. “Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Zell grumped.

“Thank you.” Qala smiled a little as she shook her head at the persistent physician, then went to take readings of the molten rock and tile luminescence, which were measured using an optical gauge. Filters fashioned from different colors recorded changes from the last readings.

Zell watched her go then turned with sudden urgency toward his cabin.

Qala was right but she was also wrong. And the galdani had very little time to decide which it was.

CHAPTER 18

Ben was already on his way to the hospital when he phoned Nancy O’Hara. He didn’t know if Caitlin was napping or sedated again, and not wanting to disturb her, he felt it best to communicate through her mother. He told the woman he would be there in minutes and asked her if Caitlin was awake.

“She is,” her mother said. “But she is in her room meeting with Barbara—”

“I see,” Ben said. “When you can, please tell Cai that I just got an emergency notification from NYC on my phone. Tell her that the Group mansion has apparently imploded.”

“The who?”

“Just tell her to check the news. It’ll probably be on local TV,” Ben said.

“All right,” Nancy said. “As long as it won’t upset her.”

“She needs to know,” Ben assured her and hung up. He didn’t want to get into any explanations. It was the reason he was hurrying. This could be sabotage, part of a larger struggle, or it could be something they were monkeying with in the laboratory. Or both. One thing he had learned working at the United Nations is that crises rarely had one underlying cause.

Ben arrived at Lenox Hill within minutes. He went right to Caitlin’s floor where he was met by Dr. Yang.

“Doctor, I hear our patient is up,” Ben said, offering his hand.

“I just saw Mrs. O’Hara who told me you were coming,” the physician said. “Dr. Melchior just left. Why does Dr. O’Hara now require a linguist?”

“No, it’s not that—I’m her closest friend,” Ben replied.

“And that is the capacity in which you’re here?” Dr. Yang asked.

“Yes. Yes, why else?”

“I am not entirely sure,” the doctor confessed.

Dr. Yang wasn’t happy with so many nonfamily visitors turning the room into a convention center. But he respected Caitlin O’Hara and while escorting Ben to her bedside, Caitlin assured him there were larger safety issues than her own in play.

“But you cannot elaborate,” Dr. Yang said. “Confidentiality.”

“Yes.”

“Which does not extend to this young man.”

“It does,” Caitlin said. “I need his support.”

Dr. Yang looked at Nancy O’Hara, who didn’t seem sure whether she should stay or go. Then he regarded her daughter.

“This is a professional courtesy,” he informed Caitlin before giving them a half-hour with Ben. “Please do not take advantage of that, unless you wish to go back to sleep, Dr. O’Hara.”

“I understand,” Caitlin had assured him. “If we run over, though—”

“Half an hour,” he repeated firmly. “I have other patients and no time to monitor this. Are we clear?”

“We are,” Caitlin said. “Thank you.”

The bed had been raised and Caitlin was sitting up. Ben looked over at Nancy, who was standing beside the night table. She seemed to be using her body to block the TV remote.

“Did you watch?” Ben asked.

“She did not,” Nancy said.

“Watch what?” Caitlin asked.

“Wow. This is important,” Ben insisted. “Didn’t you tell her?”

“I did not.”

“Tell me what?” Caitlin said. “What are you both talking about?”

Over Nancy’s harsh stare, Ben took out his phone and read the alert: “Subject: Notify NYC—NYU vicinity explosion. The New York City Departments of Fire and Police have jointly issued an advisory that the quarantined area around Washington Square Park has been expanded three blocks north along Fifth Avenue due to the unexplained collapse of a structure, in its entirety, at the corner of Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. The area five blocks north between Sixth Avenue and Broadway have also been closed to vehicular traffic to allow emergency vehicles to access the site. Con Edison is also on-site checking for gas leaks. No time has been set for a lifting of these restrictions. For more information or to view this message in American Sign Language… etc.”

“Christ,” Caitlin said.

“Yeah,” Ben replied.

“Nothing about casualties?” Caitlin asked.

Ben shook his head.

“I don’t think we should concern ourselves with this,” Nancy said to Caitlin. “As we were just discussing, you have decisions to make regarding your situation and that of your son.”

“What decisions?” Ben asked as he eased into the empty chair.

“Family decisions,” Nancy said.

“Ben is family,” Caitlin said sharply. “Would you give us a few minutes, please, mother? Please?”

Nancy left without a word, without looking at either her daughter or Ben.

“Jeez, I’m really, really sorry,” Ben said.

“Don’t be. You and I have to talk. I’m… shit, I don’t know what I am! I was starting to doubt myself, but the situation at the Group mansion changes things.”

“You were doubting yourself?” Ben said with genuine surprise.

“It happens, yeah. Especially because people I love and respect are telling me what I’m doing with Jacob is wrong.”

“Back up,” Ben said. “How’d you get to that point?”

“Barbara did a regression, but… it wasn’t like anything else I’ve experienced. I didn’t settle anywhere, not in past life experiences or in Galderkhaan. I felt like a goddamn stone skipping across a pond. When I finally did stop I was in—you ready for it?”

“Big old thing or scary new one?”

“New,” she said, “which is why I’m questioning my perceptions. Being in another body, back then… that’s something I can get my arms around.”

“Yeah, I’m still not there yet, Cai.”

“I know,” she said with a hint of impatience, “and let’s table that. This other journey—was new, different. I was in this golden, talking light. At least, that’s what it seemed to be.”

“Talking… how?”

“Not with words but with—this is going to sound crazy—with silence.”

“You’re right. That’s obviously not possible.”

“True, true. Except that—you know the way that black is the absorption of all color? This seemed to be the absorption of all sound, collected in a place and in a way I couldn’t access it. I felt that something was out there.”

Ben nodded. “I see. Sort of like—” he stopped.

“What?”

“I was going to say it’s the same way you had to ease into communication with ascended and transcended souls,” Ben said. “You had to learn to understand them, change your way of listening. The last ones, they had to reach you through Jacob.”

Inside, Caitlin blessed him for his academic detachment and absence of judgment. He began to restore her faith in herself.

“All that is true, though this was beyond anything I’ve experienced since we started, which is why I need more information—to know I’m not making this up, acting out on a subconscious level.”

“You know, of course, what you’re describing.”

“I do, but people who ‘head toward the light’ in near-death experiences don’t get there by regressing, by missing their train stop—in this case Galderkhaan, where I was trying to go. I saw it, tried to find Jacob, and it was gone before I could stop myself.”

Ben huddled closer to her. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, placing a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Apart from compliment you on your lovely PJs?”

Caitlin didn’t smile. That’s how he knew this was very, very serious. She looked into his eyes.

“More than anyone, except for my son—who I think knew it before any of us, now that I think back on it—you are willing to allow that what’s happening may be real,” Caitlin said. “Or at least, I think, you’re closer to believing it. I need to find a way to get to Jacob. Anita told me about the snake.”

“What about it?”

“It seemed to seek him out,” Caitlin said.

“Maybe,” Ben said. “Big maybe. I have no explanation for that beyond ‘conjurer’s trick,’” Ben said.

“Oh, come on—”

“Egyptian magicians created similar images thousands of years ago. ”

“Is that what you really think that was?”

“Honestly, Cai, I was with a Vodou priestess from Haiti—”

“Which, given the history of that region, should give her added credibility.”

“Well, it didn’t… maybe because she was so damned recalcitrant. She and her statue of a son. I’m not saying it isn’t possible,” he added to forestall debate, “and she did feel your energy on the roof… she said.”

“Did she say where she felt it, or how?”

Ben thought for a moment. “She pointed toward the East Village area. With a cigar.”

Caitlin made a fist and shook it. “That’s exactly where I sent it,” she said. “How would she know if it wasn’t real, if she weren’t legit?”

“As I said, I have no answer, Cai. Just a sort of open mind about her.”

“All right, let’s put her aside for a moment,” Caitlin said. “There’s something else. Even before I knew about the Group mansion, the tiles went dormant. To me, anyway.”

“Suggesting what?”

“I was controlling the lines of power between here and there,” she said. “Between the two stones here and the tiles that are in Antarctica. Something happened to change the arc, to cut me out of the loop.”

“Something at the mansion?”

“Has to be,” Caitlin said. “Flora had one tile in cold storage, I felt that, and the other in some kind of acoustic levitation setup. Remove me from the middle and they would have hooked directly into each other. If they were strong enough to whip me back to Galderkhaan and strand me there—if they could tear a hole in time—imagine what they could do to an old mansion.”

Ben sat back. “That is a very, very big leap.”

“Give me some alternative—” And then Caitlin stiffened, like a dog hearing a car approaching. She turned to the door, a glazed look in her eyes.

“Cai?” Ben said.

“It’s out there,” she answered.

“What is?”

“Yokane’s stone,” Caitlin replied. The first two fingers of her right hand rose, circled, pointed. “I felt it before, when Barbara was here. I’m feeling it again. It’s out there.”

“Where?” Ben asked.

Caitlin let her fingers drift; like a divining rod, Ben thought.

“North,” she said. “It’s stable, just as it was with Yokane. It’s no longer communicating with any other stones.”

“So the other one was destroyed?” Ben asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t see how. It survived the pressure on the bottom of the ocean.” Caitlin lowered the bars of her bed. “I’m getting out of here,” she announced.

Ben leaned toward her, arms extended. “Cai, hold on—”

She brushed them aside and swung her legs from the bed. “A patient has the right to self-determination and autonomy,” she said. “I’m leaving. I have to follow that stone. It’s the only way back to Jacob. I would love your help, but I’ll do this alone if I have to.”

“I said hold on!” Ben snapped.

“Why?”

“Because this may not be necessary,” Ben said. “Rushing I mean.”

Caitlin regarded him. He had a there’s something I didn’t tell you tone in his voice. “What is it?” she asked.

“Let me make a call,” he said.

“To?”

He braced himself. “The Technologist I met outside your apartment this morning.”

Caitlin’s rising frustration came to a sudden, icy stop. “How was that not your lead item, Ben? Freakin’ how?”

“In the General Assembly they call that a battering ram,” he answered. “You don’t use it unless all else fails. It can cause collateral splintering.”

“Such as?”

“The Technologists and the Priests are apparently still at war and the Group was caught in the crossfire,” Ben said. “Both have obviously been watching you. If you go blundering into—”

“Make your call,” Caitlin interrupted. “Now. I have to get to that stone, connect with the others in the South, and save my son.”

“A few minutes ago you weren’t certain that was the way to go.”

“Technologists at my threshold just made me certain,” she said. “Damn you, Ben. You should have told me!”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s been a long effin’ night and day and journey for me too.”

Caitlin did not reply. She didn’t seem to have any words left in her. She looked at Ben. After a moment she touched his cheek in apology, then climbed from the bed and pulled her battle-scarred wardrobe from the tray under the bed.

After a long, unhappy breath Ben called Eilifir Benediktsson.

CHAPTER 19

Mikel Jasso pulled the muffler from over his mouth. He didn’t bother with the radio.

“I need fuel!” he yelled at Dr. Cummins.

She rolled down the window. “I don’t understand.”

“I need petrol—gas—all that we can spare.”

The glaciologist looked down at him as he neared the driver’s side of the truck. “To do what? We may need those reserves to go farther or go back.”

“This is more important,” Mikel said, breathless as he reached the cab.

“Than getting back?”

“We can radio for help if it comes to that,” he panted. He jerked a thumb toward the pit. “We have to melt the ice around that, flood the hole, and let it freeze.”

Dr. Cummins’s eyes reflected shock. “You want to cover up the very thing we came out here to study?”

“I do,” Mikel replied. “Quickly.”

“Why?” she asked. “Is it deteriorating or are you afraid of something else?”

“The latter,” Mikel said. “Something happened in New York, something that may set these things loose. As far as I know, cold is the only thing that can stop them.”

“Dr. Jasso, you’ve quite lost me. ‘Loose’?”

Mikel motioned for her to follow as he started toward the back of the truck. She thumped down onto the ice.

“I’m not sure what I mean myself,” he admitted. “These stones obliterate time and distance. I’ve only experienced their ability to create or re-create images, but not to destroy, as I just saw.”

“I’m not even sure what you saw,” Dr. Cummins said, perplexed.

“A forty-thousand-year-old girl and a woman in New York burned to death simultaneously,” he said. “The linked tiles appear to be the cause. We opened a portal. My superior there was screaming for me to shut them down and she is not a screamer. We have to dial this back, quickly.”

Mikel had already begun hauling the spare cans of gas from the back. Dr. Cummins joined him. Her movements were mechanical. She was still trying hard to understand what he was saying.

“You didn’t anticipate any of this?” Dr. Cummins asked.

“I didn’t know about any of this,” he said. “Look, we’ll do this, then take stock of where we are. We can always remove the ice to get back in there.”

“I have to notify Halley,” she said as Mikel began waddling ahead with two of the heavy cans. “They may not approve of you setting fire to the ice.”

“No, this has got to be done,” he said over his shoulder. “Quickly. We are not in a good place if those tiles become active. For all I know the entire ice shelf may be in danger, to Halley and beyond.”

The woman took two cans and looked over at the pit as she followed Mikel. She shook her head. “I don’t see anything that—”

There was a rumble that caused the fuel in the cans to slosh audibly. Dr. Cummins stopped suddenly. So did Mikel.

“You felt that, right?” he asked.

The ground continued to vibrate slightly, as if a subwoofer were turned on nearby.

“That could just be recracking caused by our truck, our activities here,” the glaciologist said.

A low hum rose up through the ice. The piled, windblown shavings jiggled like metal filings on a snare drum.

“That could be an echo from somewhere else,” she said. “Those can move every which way for several minutes.”

“It’s coming from the pit,” Mikel said as he hurried ahead, half walking, half stumbling. He stopped about ten yards from the edge. The ice particles and dead bugs continued to vibrate and move in response to the hum.

Mikel unscrewed the cap of one of the two containers. He pushed it on its side then opened the second one and did the same. The overhang of ice was the greatest here, on the western side.

“Mikel, wait!” Dr. Cummins said as she reached his side. “Shouldn’t we wait a few minutes, just to see?”

“I’m afraid to,” he admitted. “Very afraid.” He ran back to get the last two cans.

His urgency was enough to spur Dr. Cummins on. “Where do you want these?” she asked.

“Make it about twenty yards to the north, half as close,” Mikel said, shouting back after watching the way the petrol flowed. “We’ve got a downward slope of about five degrees here… it’s straighter there.”

Dr. Cummins acknowledged with a big nod then hurried off. She did her work quickly as the ground continued to vibrate. They could both see little ripples in the slightly yellowish fuel that pooled on the ice.

Mikel poured gas on the south side. When they were finished, they carried the containers back to the truck and Mikel got a flare pistol and cartridge from the equipment locker in the rear.

“Back the Toyota away,” Mikel told her. “We don’t want to risk igniting the gas in the truck.”

“Way ahead of you,” she said, getting back into the cab. “You watch yourself—stay low, the heat will rise as it rolls out.”

Even as she spoke, the ground began to shake more violently. It wasn’t sound. Mikel couldn’t be sure what it was, whether it was the tiles themselves, the fracturing result of the tiles, or both. As she backed the truck up, he crouched with a knee on the ground well away from the gas and to the west. The wind was blowing east so there wouldn’t be any superheated fumes.

The gun was a single-shot twelve-gauge pistol. Mikel loaded it and, checking that the Toyota was a safe distance off, he fired at the edge of the nearest pool. The gas went up with a soft whoosh, the six-foot-high flames following the flow of the gas and bending immediately in the direction of the wind. After just a few seconds the surface of the ice began to pock and large chunks began to crack, sink, and melt, pouring streams of water and gas toward the pit. The heat and hot water melted more ice and soon large slabs of ice were snapping and sliding toward the edge and over the side, sending a spray of water and flaming fuel into the air. They came back down like the hail of Jehovah.

Mikel rose and backed away, toward the truck. He was surprised to find the vibration continuing to increase, actually shaking loose more and more of the weakened ice.

“Dr. Jasso, hurry!” Dr. Cummins cried, leaning out the door of the truck.

He nodded and ran toward her. The smell of the burning gas was strong, despite the wind blowing away from him. Within moments steam was rising from the pit as water met fire. The heat caused ice on all sides to break away, and he could hear the ice splitting and popping inside, cracking like rifle shots, a symphony of destruction. The long flutes fell with eerie whistling sounds until they knifed into the slush at the bottom.

Or are those ascended spirits, Mikel could not help but wonder, the dead somehow trapped in the tiles?

Suddenly, the vibration stopped. Mikel wasn’t expecting that to happen until the water froze. Had the water itself quieted the tiles?

He stopped a few steps shy of the truck and turned, waited, looked across the smoking, malodorous expanse.

No, he thought with a chill that managed to run up his spine even in this cold. The vibration hasn’t stopped. It’s just gotten lower and more stable.

Something caught his eye to his right, far away, an area free of smoke, on the western horizon where blue sky met the ice. He raised his goggles and peered toward it where he saw a faint glow. Just then he noticed—through the smoke and flame—that the pit he had just inundated was also domed with a hazy yellow light.

“Dr. Jasso?” Dr. Cummins was leaning from the truck.

Mikel was looking at the distant glow. The light here and the light there appeared to be the same color.

Christ, he thought with awful horror. Is this column talking to another buried column?

“Dr. Jasso!” he heard Dr. Cummins yell.

He turned around, toward her, saw her pointing with agitation to the area behind the truck, to the east. There was another dim light on the horizon. This one was in the direction where he had seen the airship crack free of the ice before sinking just days ago.

Mikel started back toward the cab. “It has to be,” he muttered.

“What?” she asked.

“The towers of the ancient Source network are waking,” he said. “They’re… talking to one another.”

“Because of the fire?”

“I—I don’t think so,” he said. “This has to be what Flora was afraid of! We appear to be too late.”

“I’ve got Halley on the radio; they aren’t reading anything, no geologic activity except the thermal signature you created.”

“It isn’t seismic and I don’t think it’s the magma,” Mikel replied as he reached the cab. “Hell, it may not even be just now.”

“What?”

“I opened a path to the past,” he said. “But I’m sure it’s the olivine tiles. They’re awake, they’re linked, and they’re communicating.”

“How is that possible? Magnetically? Electronically? How else would stones ‘talk’?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “When I was below, they were sharing information. Maybe they share the same data pool or—”

He stopped.

“What is it?” Dr. Cummins asked.

“Not a pool,” he said. “Living images.”

“Again?”

“I assumed that what I saw were images. What if they weren’t… aren’t. These tiles may not be storage systems—they could be windows!”

“Powered by what?” she asked.

“We’re at the pole—magnetism?”

She checked her analog compass, saw no deviations, went to check the digital device, and the Toyota fell instantly, ominously quiet.

“Did you do that?” Mikel asked.

“No. I did not.”

There was a palpable feeling of something dreadful in the vast ice fields around them. It was more than the vibration, more than the faint glow. It was a sense of something enormous.

“Big drop in air pressure,” Dr. Cummins said.

“Yeah. Like something drained it away.”

The winds died and there was only the cricketing sound of the surface ice snapping.

“Dr. Jasso, talk to me,” the woman said. “Spitball. Give me something to think about.” Dr. Cummins’s voice was without fear or reproach. But there was concern in her movements as she tried to restart the vehicle, then went from button to button trying to activate something… anything. “Nothing,” she said. “This vehicle is dead.”

Mikel turned back to the pit. The melted ice was still dripping down. There was no steam now, so no heat. The radiance was definitely something other than dying flame. He looked across the horizon. The silence seemed almost to have weight. It was as if someone—something—were approaching. It was not something moldy and gray and dead like the spirits he’d seen below, nor a flaming demon like Enzo. This was—

An explosion of life was all that came to mind. Something was rolling across the Antarctic expanse, possibly across time itself, filling the empty spaces with something tangible yet still elusive.

“Dr. Jasso?” Dr. Cummins said quietly.

He looked back at her, saw her pointing ahead, near the pit. He turned wordlessly.

Something was moving. It was something hazy and indistinct, like sea spray, but moving along a very narrow path, as if it were inside a tunnel. It unrolled toward them; at least, it was coming in their direction. Mikel could not be sure that they or the truck was a destination.

Nonetheless, Dr. Cummins popped the door and got out. “I don’t like this,” she said.

“I don’t either, but it’s here,” he replied.

He watched as the misty droplets that comprised the shape darkened.

“Smoke from the pit?” Dr. Cummins asked, stepping to one side. “Is the fire still burning?”

The object seemed to widen, to expand, to include her new position. She did not bother to move again.

“I don’t think it’s smoke,” Mikel said, stepping toward it.

“Dr. Jasso, what are you doing?”

“It’s going to reach us eventually,” he said, and sniffed. “I don’t smell anything. If it were from magma or a fire, there should be some kind of noxious content.”

“And if it’s not? You talked about something burning below.”

“She didn’t smoke,” he said.

Mikel was about forty yards from the pit with the forward end of the mist about half that distance away. He stopped and studied the new phenomenon. As the shape moved, he saw that the ice softened beneath it: a slick gloss covered the surface wherever it moved.

“There’s something sentient in that, isn’t there?” Dr. Cummins asked.

“Why do you say that?”

“Didn’t you see it move when I did?”

“Any number of things could cause that,” Mikel said. “My guess is it’s moving toward the distant light. You happened to block it.”

“What makes you think that?” Dr. Cummins asked.

“Because there’s another one forming on the other side of the pit,” Mikel replied.

Dr. Cummins spun her head in that direction. “They’re both heading toward the distant glows.”

“And I’m willing to bet there are clouds heading from there to meet them.”

“Christ, what have we opened here?” Dr. Cummins asked. It was the first time she had lost her scientific detachment.

“Not us,” he said. “We were just the witnesses.”

Dr. Cummins got back in the cab of the truck and tried the engine, then the radio, then the computer. Everything stayed dead. The mist was still moving forward, a slowly surging, narrow wave. About five feet in diameter the shape was becoming round, like a pipe, yet it undulated forward almost like a worm. It continued to darken but the sunlight played against it oddly: amid the charcoal gray that comprised it were pinpoint facets of light, rippling like sun on the ocean.

Mikel resumed his slow walk toward the shape. He heard his boots crunch, then he did not. He looked down and noticed that the ice was now liquefying ahead of the object. Maybe that was just residual heat from the fire he’d set… or, he wondered, could those tiny facets of light be producing their own heat?

The front of the “smoke” was now ten feet away. Despite what Mikel had said to Dr. Cummins, he too had the sense that there was something conscious inside, something doing more than just blindly, instinctively seeking something.

“Dr. Jasso!”

The woman had cracked the door and was leaning out. Mikel turned at the glaciologist’s cry. It was far more alarmed than before. He turned, squinted, thrust his goggles back in front of his eyes.

And then, finally, he was afraid.

Each trail of smoke suddenly exploded with light, as though skin had been shed and a radiance released. The glittering facets remained, diamonds amid the golden glow, causing even more melting across the surface of the ice.

His legs weak, his boots failing to find traction, Mikel half walked, half slid across the ice back to the truck. However, he did not hurry. There was no reason and there was no need. Fear was replaced by fascination, which was replaced by certainty.

Mikel Jasso knew he was meant to see this.

CHAPTER 20

Zell was a difficult, quarrelsome man.

He knew it. His lovers had always said so, even when he was young and just starting out on his chosen path. His first had been a woman who made adornments from bird feathers and sold them in the market. Though he was fascinated with the dyes Palu created, he didn’t understand why anyone would wear such things.

“They are lively,” she said.

“They are dead,” Zell had pointed out. “And who wants an ascended bird, if such there is, to come pecking at them?”

His last had been Atak, a man who made charts of the designs in the olivine tiles, claiming that the serpentine patterns had prophetic meaning. He expounded on those in scroll after scroll. Zell didn’t understand how Atak could only study the surface when the bulk of the design was within.

“For the same reason vessels remain on the surface of the sea,” he had replied. “It is what we were meant to see.”

“Meant? By whom?” Zell had asked.

“By the Candescents,” Atak had affirmed.

“Why would they want to keep us stupid?” Zell had queried with attitude.

Lovers and friends and birth partners made no sense, so Zell had given up having them. Minerals and leaves, oils and waters, blood and lava—these behaved rationally, predictably, even when combined. Their uses could be understood, repeated, and the results were enlightening. The natural world made sense to him, and Zell had no reservations about saying so.

His patients frequently resented his brusqueness, his incessant probing, and his argumentative nature, which is why he moved to a situation where there was no choice in the selection of a galdani. Even Standor Qala occasionally had to walk away from him when he grew “insistent,” which was her diplomatic way of saying “stubborn as a flendro.” Zell had always considered that a ridiculous analogy, since he was physically quite different from the burly mountain bulls that were harnessed to liberate fresh lands from beneath ancient ice.

But whatever else could be said about him, Zell was undeniably a master of empathetic energy. He believed that this talent was really what put people off: he tore easily through what they themselves knew—or had to suspect—was weak, merely comfortable reasoning. That was why they got so angry at him.

From his early childhood, he was able to care for sick lake birds in Bulcaz, not far from the eastern perimeter of the habitable lands. Zell dwelt with a small community of ice monitors, who studied the expansion and retreat of the great sheets that covered the continent; there wasn’t much for a young boy to do other than slide down ice sheets or otherwise amuse himself. Zell selected birds, since he envied their ability to leave the region, which they did with some regularity. The youth wasn’t able to join with the birds mentally; his skill was not the equivalent of some proto-cazh that made two souls one, a Priestly idea he heard about from the airship crews that supplied the region.

Through the birds, however, Zell got a strong sense of what was wrong with them, where their bodies were hurting. He later understood that it was what the Priests called ilkhmelz: the capacity to feel another’s pain so acutely that it could be isolated. There was no dancing and waving of hands as in the ancient days. It was a quiet process, almost prayerful. Leaving Bulcaz on an airship, he was introduced to others who followed the profession of galdani.

Yet even they had limitations, relying solely on a mind-spirit connection. Zell used his own mixtures of cold-weather leaves and minerals, some heated, some chilled, some lotions, some ingested. He refined these by endless experimentation and a great many bird deaths, until he was finally able to heal more creatures than he killed. And soon he was healing all of them, even the aged.

There was a contradiction in that, of course, for as soon as the birds were well one of the humans in Bulcaz would kill and roast them or put them in a soup. But sometimes, Zell was able to sneak one away, to give it at least a chance for life.

A chance for life, he thought as he returned to the cabin after the unsatisfactory chat with Standor Qala. That was all most galdani, most physicians, could offer. When he settled down to study healing arts in Aankhaan, he found he had the same skill with humans that he possessed with birds. The big difference was that humans were less cooperative, since those in pain could not have their wings pinned. Where birds surrendered, humans fought. After earning a reputation for belligerence in Aankhaan—and healing one of Standor Qala’s essential crew members of persistent airsickness—Zell took to the skies.

Except to collect ingredients for his cures, the physician never left the ship. Qala once suggested that perhaps Zell had meshed too well with the birds; perhaps there was some truth in that. Zell was always happiest when he was aloft.

Yet of all the patients he had treated in his career, the galdani had never met anyone as perplexing as this boy in his care. There was no explanation Zell could think of to account for how, clearly, two beings inhabited one body. The explanation had to be found, not just for Vilu but also for Zell: where there were two, there would likely be more. Qala’s concerns and reservations could not be permitted to interfere.

Bayarma had fallen asleep quickly and deeply in his hammock. Vilu was just lying by her side, clutching her toga. Zell drew shut a curtain made of tightly woven vines to give that little corner of his cabin privacy and darkness. The curtain was only drawn during emergency work: in case anyone entered, they would know to leave quietly.

Zell bent in a corner where he kept raw minerals in crates. Beneath these were blankets made of heavy flendro hide. The covers were used for patients with chills and also helped to buffer the more fragile stones during turbulent flight.

Within the covers, its hum muted by the thick skins, was an olivine tile that had been given to him by Palu. It had been gifted before private ownership of the stones had been banned by a rare, joint act of the Priests and Technologists. Any outstanding tiles were supposed to have been turned in.

Zell had retained this one because, unlike Atak, he was not content to misunderstand its qualities. He studied it when he was alone, tried to bond with it, understood that there was great power within… power that he did not understand. Once, however, he had used it to examine the mind of a patient who had been struck by a whipping sail. With it, he was able to see the man’s thoughts. This arcane process, known to the Priests as nuat, had been deemed illegal because of the danger it presented to the patient—minds had liquefied, it was said—and the temptation toward corruption it offered the user. The Drudaya, a group of rogue Priests and Technologists who made a habit of this practice, had been banned.

Zell had no use for fear, he had no tolerance for rules, and he was a healer with two sick patients who defied standard treatment. Nuat offered them “a chance for life.”

The tile seemed to be vibrating with more than its usual quiet hum.

“Responding to my patients?” Zell asked the stone, turning quickly to see if there was any reaction from the boy.

There was, and it was not the kind of mildly curious response he had been expecting. Vilu was crawling toward him across the hammock. Crawling purposefully, not like a boy child but like a predatory animal. The boy was moving awkwardly but only because he was only using one arm. The other arm, the left, was pointed directly at Zell, the first two fingers rigid in his direction.

Bayarma was still asleep, under the influence of the sedative.

“What is it, Vilu?” Zell asked, moving forward.

The boy didn’t answer. Zell realized that the youngster was not looking at him or pointing at him: the tile was the object of Vilu’s attention. Zell stopped. He noticed that the tile was vibrating strangely now, not only causing a mild tremor in his hand but also getting heavier. Zell bent with it.

The boy swung from the hammock, dropped to his knees, and crept forward, the two fingers never wavering. Zell realized, then, that the tile wasn’t getting heavier. It was moving toward the ground, the way some of his heavy stones pulled at each other when placed nearby.

“Vilu, talk to me,” Zell instructed. He was now kneeling as well, facing the boy. The two were just an arm’s length away. “What are you feeling?”

“Fire,” Vilu said.

“Inside you?” Zell asked.

“No,” he replied. He looked at Zell for the first time. “Inside the stone. Inside you.”

The galdani was startled by that, but almost at once he realized the boy was right. The olivine tile was vibrating so rapidly that it was beginning to generate heat, warmth that ran up his arm, into his shoulder, and up his neck. It moved so quickly that it felt like flowing water.

Zell released the tile but the respite was only momentary: it was glowing now and the heat became radiant. The dome of yellow light enveloped him, forcing him back on his palms.

On the other side of the light, Vilu had stopped moving but was still pointing his fingers. He did not seem to feel any heat: rather, he appeared to be undergoing some kind of rapture. His breathing was quickened, his eyes were wide, his mouth was pulled back in an expression that was somewhere between pain and euphoria.

Nuat should not be working so quickly, so decisively, the physician thought. Something has happened to the tile.

As perspiration pushed through the pores of his face and neck, Zell recalled what Qala had said about the tower and the rising heat.

It’s not the fiery rock that’s causing it, Zell realized. It’s the tiles within. Something has caused them to become very active.

The reason probably wasn’t Vilu or Bayarma. The tower was warming up before they arrived. But they might be part of whatever phenomenon was causing this.

The physician grabbed the covers from behind him and threw it on the tile. The glow was dampened but only briefly. The hide began to crackle as the underside was dried, baked.

Zell rose and quickly jumped over it, scooping Vilu in his arms. He pushed through the curtain and out the door, setting the boy on the gondola.

“Remain here,” Zell said.

Vilu began to extend his fingers back toward the tile.

“No!” Zell shouted, slapping his arm down. “Do not point!”

The incident drew the attention of Standor Qala, who was standing forward of the cabin as the airship gained lift over the sea and turned to pass above the simu-varkas.

“Zell, what happened?” Qala asked, rushing forward.

Instead of answering, the physician ran back into the cabin and pushed through the vine curtain. The area around the hammock was filled with a nearly transparent white luminescence, not blinding but hot and causing Bayarma to gasp for breath as she slept. Zell reached her and bundled her to his chest, turning his back to the tile to protect her from its heat.

Qala met him at the door, where Zell pushed the woman into her arms.

“The tiles, something is affecting them!” Zell said before jumping back inside. “These two must have felt it first!”

While Qala processed that information—ignoring the obvious fact that the physician had disobeyed her orders—Zell tore at the curtain, ripping it from its woven hangers. He dropped it on the bundle of covers that was already atop the tile. Then he swept all of them, including the olivine tile, into his arms.

He shrieked like the wind from the mountains as invisible fire ripped through his eye sockets into his brain. Zell managed to turn and fling himself at the door, moving past Qala with such ferocious determination that the Standor wasn’t able to stop him. Along with several crew members who had run over to care for Vilu and Bayarma, Qala watched with horror as the physician hit the rail with such force that it cracked and spilled him over the side. Qala bolted after him, too late to do more than watch as Zell, the hides, and the tile tumbled through the crisp morning sky toward the distant waters.

The stone tile was burning fiercely. It did not melt, it simply flamed. And as it fell something inexplicable occurred: while Galdani Zell plunged beneath the waves, the olivine tile changed direction and was pulled on a course parallel to the ground, toward the tower. It hit near the bottom with force that created a thunderclap that could be heard on the airship.

Qala knelt beside Vilu and Bayarma, who were unconscious. Then she turned to Usa-Femora Inai, who had dropped from the rigging directly above.

“Tell Femora Loi to disregard previous instructions,” the Standor said. “I want height, as much as he can give me without leaving this spot.”

“At once, Standor.”

Qala rose and called over two crew members to bring their guests to the sleeping cabin. Then she strode forward to look at the tower. The glow was more pronounced now, as was the heat.

Zell had not been prone to random ideas and indiscriminate theory. He had pinned the blame for this, his dying words, on the tiles.

The elusive storm Qala had been sensing was here. And the only ones who could possibly explain it were two souls inhabiting bodies that were not their own.