A Dream of Ice

CHAPTER 18

Caitlin was done with caution.

She’d been careful after the incidents with Jacob. She’d been tentative but complicit about communing with Galderkhaan. She’d been taking advice from well-meaning but cautious, cerebral people who barely understood what she had experienced, who did not grasp what she felt she was capable of.

That time was over. It was time to treat these deep mysteries like she had treated the rest of her life before Maanik had entered it: with action.

Caitlin let Jacob sleep. She arranged him under his covers, and, without hesitation, stalked to her living room, grabbed her keys, and left her apartment, locking Jacob in. She pushed the door to the stairwell so hard it crashed against the wall. She’d take the bad-mother guilt if he drummed and she didn’t answer. What she had to attempt would only take a few minutes and either fail… or succeed. She could risk that. The presence of strange persons in spirit was bad enough. But this new intruder had somehow appeared in the flesh. Running up the steps two at a time, she jabbed a key at the final door and burst onto the roof of her building.

Planks were laid for a deck but the furniture had been pulled aside and tarped against the early onset of cold. It wasn’t quite a 360-degree view; a building loomed to block the north, another impeded half the view of the Hudson River. But to the east and south, it was all streetlights, the dark silhouettes of water towers, a few luridly colored LED spires.

Caitlin raised her arms as if to embrace the skies and all the time that had passed under them. Her soul felt primal, stripped of civilization and inhibition, ready to journey.

She couldn’t use the cazh. For one thing there was just one of her. From everything she had seen in Galderkhaan, the ritual required at least two or more. For another, she could not risk leaving here, spiritually. If Jacob did more than drum, if he woke and she wasn’t there or god forbid went into crisis… well, she had to be there.

Finally, and perhaps most frightening to her, Caitlin could not risk wanting to leave. She remembered how ecstatic she’d been in the UN that night as the mass of souls took her up with them. It was like the addicts she had treated: To a one, they knew what they were doing was unhealthy. But they liked the way it felt.

With purpose bordering on fanaticism, she planted her feet toward the southeast and looked across the city. The bay wasn’t visible but she knew where it was. She oriented toward “big water” just as the Galderkhaani had done so many millions of years ago, and extended her arms toward it. The connection was immediate. It was similar to what she had felt in the train coming back from the session with Odilon—total expansion of self in every direction. But now that she wasn’t resisting, it was exponentially more intense and more pervasive. The eastern mystics professed it and people made it a joke: “Make me one with everything.” But that’s exactly what it was.

This is real. I’m not imagining it.

Very slightly, she pointed the first two fingers of her right hand. The result was almost visible, it was so potent. A white—veil was the only word that came to mind—stretched from her body and began to coagulate, to writhe like smoke, moving, seeking through the city, probing and elongating. Caitlin felt her heart galloping as the serpent moved south and east, rising and hovering below the clouds and then suddenly striking down toward the earth. It stopped cold on Chinatown. There was the woman from the subway. Caitlin could feel her as if she were standing right next to her. She turned toward Caitlin in shock.

Come back here, Caitlin thought at her sharply. Now.

Her own voice was loud in her head and, apparently, outside of it; Caitlin heard several dogs barking before she dropped her hands and the conduit snapped shut. Arfa must have been freaking below her.

Her breathing and heartbeat became regular as she came back to where she was. She was proud that she had done it. And she had done it. Now all she had to do was go downstairs and wait.

Jacob continued to sleep peacefully. Arfa was nowhere to be seen. When she tired of waiting, she paced into the living room and, by force of habit, turned on the TV. The local station had breaking news about animal insanity across Manhattan. Now that Caitlin was paying attention, she realized that the dogs she’d heard barking hadn’t yet stopped.

Central Park Zoo got the most attention. Cell phone video showed monkeys that wouldn’t stop howling. The sea lions were screaming too, and some of the birds kept flying into the sides of their cages. On the phone, the keeper for the zoo’s rain forest habitat reported that the animals had grouped together, regardless of species, with their bellies flat on the ground and as much foliage for camouflage as they could find.

“The boa constrictor is apparently taking a nap,” the anchor reported. The video showed the reptile coiled in a corner, wrapped around itself seemingly at rest.

Caitlin thought back to the profound experience with the snake in Haiti.

“What are you doing?” Caitlin asked aloud, pondering the snake. “Observing? Waiting? Ignoring?”

Perhaps all or none of the above. Caitlin thought about other snakes that had fascinated her throughout her life, from the serpentine shape of her “spirit” headed toward Chinatown, to the snakes of Medusa and the Garden of Eden, to Cleopatra and the caduceus—the symbol of the medical profession. Her world.

“Why you?” she wondered, watching the big snake on TV. “Maybe the scientists are right,” she mused. It was all there in an airplane magazine article she read a year or so ago. Researchers believed that superstring structures bound all matter on a subatomic and supercosmic level. Perhaps they got the name wrong. It could be the strings were snakes.

The news report concluded with a late-breaking update that emergency room visits were up dramatically with victims of bites, mainly from dogs, cats, rodents, and what were being described as “kamikaze pigeons.”

Caitlin bolted from her seat and went searching for Arfa. She found him in her bedroom closet, having forced his way under the door. He was cowering and emitting the tiniest of mews. He hunched even more as she ventured closer. Unlike the other animals, he did not attack.

“I understand,” Caitlin said with a soft smile. “I’m kind of radioactive to you. Attacking will hurt you more than me.”

She returned to the living room, shut off the TV, and began to pace just as the intercom buzzed. Caitlin hurried to it. “Yes?”

“I am here,” said an unfamiliar voice. Her accent was odd enough that Caitlin couldn’t place it.

“Come up,” she said.

“There is one condition,” the woman said before Caitlin could hit the buzzer to release the door.

“What is it?” Caitlin asked.

“Do not access Galderkhaan while I am there. For both our sakes.”

“Fine,” Caitlin said grimly. “You answer my questions, I won’t push the boundaries.”

“And I won’t cause you harm,” the woman answered coldly.

Caitlin hesitated, then buzzed the woman in. Standing outside the door of her apartment, Caitlin watched as the woman approached. In person, she was much smaller than she loomed in Caitlin’s memory. And here, outside the rocking subway car, she moved with a grace that seemed utterly without effort. She did not meet Caitlin’s gaze and seemed to flinch almost imperceptivly as she moved past Caitlin inside.

The woman remained with her back toward her host.

“I’m a damn good psychiatrist,” Caitlin announced as she shut the door. “If you lie to me, there is a very good chance I’ll know it.”

“I trained with wild hawks and horses in Mongolia,” the woman said. “You don’t intimidate me.”

“Nor you, me,” Caitlin assured her. For a moment she just stared at the woman’s back, waiting for something to happen.

“It obviously took some kind of knowledge to show up in my living room like you did before.”

“Yes, some kind of knowledge,” the woman replied, looking around the apartment. “That is something we possess.”

“We?” Caitlin said. “Who?”

The woman turned and looked at her for the first time. “Descendants of the Priests of Galderkhaan.”

Caitlin wasn’t surprised or alarmed, yet she still felt a profound chill. It’s one thing to believe something in spirit, in theory. It’s another to look upon the very embodiment of those ideas.

The woman turned away and stared especially hard at the hallway that led to the bedrooms. Caitlin moved between the woman and the hall.

“What did you do to my son?” Caitlin demanded.

“I did nothing,” she insisted.

“I don’t believe you,” Caitlin spat.

“Dr. O’Hara, consider your words before you use them, or you will continue to grope.”

“Don’t lecture me, please,” Caitlin retorted. “I asked you here to get answers.”

The woman regarded at Caitlin before answering. “I didn’t access his mind. Location is accomplished via the entire spirit. I read yours in the subway, easily. To me, you glow like a beacon.”

“If you didn’t do anything to my son, who did?”

“An ascended soul, or souls,” the woman said. “Only the dead can do such a thing.”

Caitlin fought the sudden urge to drop into a chair.

“Does that mean—” she started, breathed, and then started again. “Does that mean Jacob is beginning to undergo the same process as the teenagers I’ve encountered?” Caitlin’s mind did not go to the two young women she’d helped but to the one she’d failed to save, the Iranian boy, Atash.

“Think,” the woman said. “You will not always have a guide.”

“As if you’re actually guiding me now?” Caitlin said.

“You must learn to see with different eyes, reason with a different mind,” the woman said. “That is as important as data.”

“No. It isn’t,” Caitlin replied. She had done enough thinking, with Ben, on her own, on the run. She did not want to think, she wanted to be told. But clearly answers were going to come on this woman’s terms.

Resigned, Caitlin exhaled and attempted to “think” aloud. “The… the ‘ascended,’ the dead, can reach anyone alive.”

The woman’s eyes opened slightly with encouragement.

Who had reached souls in the modern day? Caitlin asked herself. “Not just the dead,” she said. “The bonded dead. The souls who performed the ritual.”

Caitlin paused and looked to the woman for confirmation, received none, but at least she wasn’t told to “think.” So she was apparently on the right path.

“I freed Maanik and Gaelle,” Caitlin went on. “If that link could be broken, so can this.”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps?” Caitlin cried.

The woman’s look told her to think harder.

“Okay. All right.” She thought of the earlier cases. “I see. To free them, I had to go back. I had to break the cazh of those who were attacking them. You’re saying this a cazh?”

“I believe so, from some ancient moment of death,” the woman said, at least giving her that much.

“But we don’t know who.” It wasn’t a question Caitlin had uttered. It was a desperate statement of fact. She regarded the woman. “What’s your name?”

“Yokane,” the woman replied.

“How long have you been watching me… Yokane?”

“Since you first visited Galderkhaan,” she said. “You and the young girl created quite a ripple.”

“You felt it—where? How?”

“I am not prepared to tell you that, yet,” Yokane said. “May I see your boy?”

Caitlin winced inside at the overfamiliarity. “To do what?”

“Observe,” she replied. “Only that. It may help answer your questions.”

Caitlin wasn’t happy with the idea but she understood that it was probably necessary.

“Briefly,” Caitlin warned, making it clear that she would remain on the edge of active defense. “Lead the way,” she added. “I’m sure you know where he is.”

Yokane looked around. “I must leave something outside of his room,” she said.

The woman pulled a small package from inside her coat, wrapped in a beige material. Caitlin was instantly on alert, as any New Yorker would be, but realized that if the woman had wanted to harm her she’d have done so already.

Yokane walked to the dining room table but still, she hesitated to put down the package. “I haven’t parted with this in twenty years,” she said as she unwrapped a small, rectangular stone with embedded green crystals. Caitlin started.

“I saw that—in a vision!”

“When?”

“Today, earlier,” she said.

“This one in particular?” Yokane asked, holding it nearer.

Caitlin could sense that it was vibrating silently in the woman’s hands. She didn’t recognize the pattern but the general use of crescents she knew very well.

“No, not that one,” Caitlin replied. “The design was different. What is it?”

Yokane regarded her precious item. “It’s from the Source of Galderkhaan,” she announced. “The kavar. A preferred design of the Technologists.”

“I thought you said you were with the Priests,” Caitlin said.

“I am,” Yokane replied. “This was entrusted to my family by the Obsidian Priest.”

Caitlin waited but the woman did not continue. Pressing would only meet with resistance but she suspected, as with her patients, that this woman wanted to say more.

“The stone,” Yokane went on, “has been passed down through my ancestors for millennia. The oral tradition has lost many details, but there is active danger in this object and others like it.”

“How many are there?”

“That I do not know,” she admitted. “But if it is active, others are active.”

“When you say ‘active,’ what exactly do you mean?”

Yokane fixed her eyes on Caitlin. “It is screaming.”

“You don’t mean that literally—?”

“I do,” Yokane said.

She had to mean it was vibrating, like a magnet trying to reach another magnet. Caitlin let the specific wording pass.

“Why? Why now?” Caitlin asked.

“For reasons that have forced me from concealment,” Yokane said. “Before they became obsessed with the transpersonal plane and beyond, the Technologists helped us achieve greatness. They linked a network of stones, a series of mosaics, to the Source. Powered by the planet itself—the magma layer that would one day become the Source—the stones were a record, if you will, access to the achievements and intellect of our race.”

“So… a living library?”

Yokane said with deep respect, “A means of unwinding time would be closer to it.”

Caitlin was barely hanging on to the concept. She tried to dumb it down for herself. “You’re saying that through that stone you can see the past?”

“Not through one, no.” Yokane smiled sadly. “It is a lost shavula. Separated from the flock, all it can do is attempt to link to the others. It is not just the stone but the pattern of stones and access to the Source that give it vitality.”

“In and of itself, then, it has no intelligence.”

“No,” Yokane said. “But it has access to so much. So very much. Finding that access has been our goal for millennia.”

“A database of Galderkhaani minds,” Caitlin said, awed, as the idea took hold.

Yokane cradled the stone and then laid it gently upon the table with an almost ritualistic reverence. It reminded Caitlin of the respectful quiet of a Japanese tea ceremony. The woman then turned from the stone as though wrenching herself from her beloved and paced to the hall. Caitlin followed quickly, maternal instincts on guard. But when Yokane stopped outside Jacob’s door and looked for Caitlin’s permission before entering, her fears subsided somewhat. Given a nod, the woman collected herself with a deep breath and silently let herself into Jacob’s room. The two women stood just within the doorway.

Once again, the eerie sound of a nonexistent wind was accompanying Jacob’s deep sleep breathing. But Caitlin barely had time to register it before Yokane shocked her by laughing. The woman’s face and hands were raised up to the ceiling—as Caitlin had done, instinctively, on the roof.

Yokane’s smile was broad and bright, her fingers spread widely, trembling not with dread but with a kind of euphoria. After a moment, the woman turned to exit without even looking at Caitlin. She only said, “I thought they all perished.”

“Who?”

“Those at the final cazh,” Yokane replied.

Yokane brushed past Caitlin on her way to the hallway. When Caitlin caught up to her and stopped her, Yokane was restoring the wrapped stone to her inner pocket.

“What did you see?”

“What your son saw,” Yokane replied. “A Galderkhaani woman.”

Caitlin waited for more. It didn’t come.

“See, this is the value of having a conversation,” Caitlin said. “I give you access to information, you give me your interpretation.”

“There is no more,” Yokane said, apologetic for the first time. “Not yet.”

Caitlin regarded her suspiciously. “But you expect more.”

“I do,” Yokane replied.

Caitlin was beginning to catch on.

“You didn’t visit me on the subway, in my living room, then come back because you were worried about Jacob,” Caitlin said. “Hell, you were MIA during the whole thing with Maanik—even though you were aware of it.”

“That is true.”

Now Caitlin was angry. The only thing that stopped her from running into the living room and threatening to toss the mosaic tile out the window was that the woman could probably drop her with a twitch of her index finger.

Caitlin forced herself to calm. “Then why are you here, if not to help me and my son?”

“A serious situation has arisen elsewhere. I had to make sure you and Jacob were not the cause. He is just receiving, not generating or channeling. Neither are you.”

Caitlin stiffened. “And if he had been?”

The woman was silent.

“You would have hurt him,” Caitlin said.

“No,” Yokane said. “I would have interceded, as you did with your patients. But it wasn’t necessary.”

“Necessary for what?”

“To save this city, for a start. And then the world.” Yokane pointed to the living room windows. “You are aware of the animals in peril out there? The stones, thousands of them just like mine, are coming to life.”

“How do you know this?”

“The stone,” she replied. “It has not stopped screaming since a few weeks ago.”

“You mean, it isn’t like that all the time?”

Yokane shook her head.

“Why now?” Caitlin asked.

“Galderkhaan is being freed from the ice.”

“You’re saying that climate change has found another way to destroy civilization?”

“You are perilously flip,” Yokane said, moving in on her. “I am not the only one who knows of the stones and their power. With Galderkhaan comes the Source. And there are those who would seek to use it.”

“How?”

“If I knew that, I could stop them,” Yokane said.

Caitlin backed off. She was silent, overwhelmed. She knew she could not fully trust this stranger, but she had always feared that the recent events had been larger, more encompassing, than the assault of souls on the living. From the madness in Kashmir to the rats in Washington Square Park, global discordance, unease, panic were afoot.

“So what now?” Caitlin asked. “Are we done here?”

“Here, yes,” Yokane said and turned her eyes toward Jacob’s room. “Whoever is in contact with your son has more to tell us.”

“And you know that how?”

“There are no self-inflicted wounds. This is not a forced cazh, a strong soul preying on the weak. I believe she is trying to communicate, not trying to ascend.”

“Communicate what?” Caitlin asked.

“I do not know,” the woman admitted. “But we must find out.”

“Then I repeat: what now?” Caitlin asked.

“I have established a connection with your son on my own,” she said. “What he sees and hears, I will see and hear.”

“Goddamn it!” Caitlin yelled suddenly. “You could at least have asked!”

The smaller woman looked up. “To help you protect this world? Would you have refused? Should we waste more time with debate?”

Caitlin moved away in disgust. She didn’t like being outmaneuvered and out-thought.

“You must not interfere,” Yokane said.

“You can’t ask that.”

“I don’t ask it, I insist,” Yokane replied. “Are you really prepared to feel around and across the planes of existence blindly, with your son?” she asked. “There are more powerful, elemental forces and greater minds at work than yours or mine. There is no room for trial and error like you had with your two clients.”

Caitlin could not find a reply.

Yokane settled into a more relaxed tone of voice. “Now that I know there is another presence near Jacob, I will make sure they are never alone.” Yokane’s dark eyes bore into Caitlin’s and once again, Caitlin believed her.

“So you’ll be a guardian,” Caitlin said. “You won’t ‘inhabit’ Jacob.”

Yokane nodded once. “I am not a vandal.”

There was no irritation or condescension in her tone. Caitlin relaxed a little more. Yokane turned and Caitlin followed her back toward the living room. There, showing the same reverence as before, the woman wrapped and pocketed her stone.

“In return for my help,” Yokane said, “you will do something for me, since we have limited time and I cannot pursue two goals at once.”

“There is another stone,” Caitlin said.

For the first time, Yokane seemed surprised.

“You’ve had that one for a while, and the animals have only been acting up for a couple of weeks,” Caitlin said. “Something else had to be the cause.”

“The stone has a companion,” Yokane acknowledged. “It is located in a mansion on Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street, home of the Global Explorers’ Club. It is comprised of people who know about Galderkhaan.”

“Know… what?” Caitlin asked.

“That is what you must find out,” Yokane told her. “Specifically, why have these artifacts suddenly become more active? Why is an ascended soul trying to contact Jacob?”

“Why can’t you go?”

“I have been too long around this stone,” she replied, patting her coat. “I vibrate with it; it knows me. If I were to get close to the other stone it would cause more havoc. Already, the two are forming lines of connection with their companions in the South Pole. Together, their impact would be exponential.”

Caitlin understood, then, just how powerful the Galderkhaani mosaics had to be. Yokane wasn’t subtle, but it was possible she wasn’t exaggerating, either. “What do I have to do?” Caitlin asked.

“Speak to the people in the mansion, determine if they are somehow using the other stones… or the Source. They will not want to talk to you,” she muttered as she walked to the front door. “You must make them.”

Realizing that Caitlin hadn’t followed her, she motioned urgently.

“I mean now,” Yokane said. “You must go now.”

“I’m not waking Jacob and bringing him to that place,” Caitlin said. “And no, you cannot babysit.”

Yokane brushed the air with her hand. “The Galderkhaani woman will not allow Jacob to be harmed.” She smiled a little for the first time. “Not physically.”

“Where was she when Jacob had a freakin’ seizure?”

“No doubt she caused that establishing contact,” Yokane said. “As you know, it is not a pleasant process nor a predictable science. If it helps, I am sure she watched over him when you went to the roof.”

“That was the roof; but you’re talking about sending me miles downtown,” Caitlin said. “The only way I’ll leave is to have someone stay with him. Sit there while I make a call.”

Yokane sat. So she could be reasonable.

But when Caitlin picked up her phone, she wasn’t sure who to ask. She was afraid to try to explain this to her parents, and besides, they lived too far away for “right now.” Ben? She was afraid of explaining it to him too, especially with his recent commendable but inconvenient protectiveness. What about Barbara or Anita? It would certainly open their eyes to see a descendant of the civilization they didn’t really believe had existed.

Christ. She didn’t want to call anyone.

But she remembered with horror her vision, Jacob’s terror, and called Ben with one hand while using the other to search through the kitchen for jasmine tea.

CHAPTER 19

A quarter hour later, assured that Benjamin Moss was on his way, Yokane departed. Then she walked to the nearest intersection and vomited into a trash can. She held the edge of the bin for a moment, her eyes closed, waiting to see if anything else was going to come up.

“Are you all right?” a man asked as he stepped from a taxi.

“Thank you, yes.” Yokane smiled. “Bad seafood, I think.”

“Would you like my cab?”

“No, thank you,” she said. “The air will help.”

The man turned and hurried on his way. Yokane pushed herself from the bin and stood more steadily than she had a right to.

This had happened frequently over the past few days—both food and images coming up. It began when her kavar suddenly and surprisingly linked to another power source, another stone, crafting something more potent. It had happened about two weeks ago on a street north of Washington Square Park, when she was walking home from one of her frequent late-night strolls. She had regained consciousness in the stairwell of the Group’s mansion. It was the claws that had woken her up, and the writhing, and the piercing squeaks of hundreds of rats on top of her, claws and tails scraping across her face, catching in her hair, burying her from sight. She’d frozen in a fetal position, in abject horror as the rats scrabbled in their mad panic.

It was over an hour before the rodents finally relaxed and wandered off, the ones that were still alive. Yokane, shaking, had stood among the lumpen piles of death and staggered away. No matter how many showers she took, eye rinses, teeth brushings, she didn’t feel clean for days afterward.

Now, having involuntarily relived the experience again in her open state, her stomach had rebuked her. She walked west toward the Hudson River, then south. She hoped that the view of the water, the river emptying into the bay, would steady her. It did, somewhat. But not nearly enough.

The situation was dangerous, more dangerous than she had let on to the psychiatrist. Someone was trying very hard to get through—someone who had cazhed with another. A woman and a man, both of them pushing toward any soul that could hear them.

They had found Caitlin O’Hara but Caitlin O’Hara refused to listen. So they sought her son.

Why? Yokane wondered. It had to have something to do with the two kavars’ being active. The timing was too proximate.

Yokane continued to walk. Whatever the cost, she could not give up. She wished she could go in Caitlin’s stead but that was not possible. She had gone back to the mansion one more time, only to feel the young scientist die. She was too afraid to go back again, so there was only the other path available to her.

Is she varrem? Yokane asked again and again as she walked. That was a crucial question. Is she ours? She seemed to be a person of strong spirit, but that did not mean she was descended from the Priests. Though the lineage had been carefully tracked, the chaos of the last day left potential loopholes. Galderkhaani may have slipped through, those who had put flight ahead of cazh.

Yokane had nursed a hope that Caitlin was varrem. But even there, she was torn. The doctor had fought to prevent Maanik from bonding with a desperate soul from Galderkhaan. And then there was the rainy, genocidal night when Caitlin had rent the sky with her force, and suddenly Yokane had felt soul after soul, her entire Priestly family, simply wink out of existence.

That sudden, overwhelming loneliness had paralyzed her for days. The Han woman renting a room in Chinatown to her had thought she was ill and kept trying to ply her with herbal teas. Yokane had only starved and wept and hated Caitlin.

When she regained rational thought Yokane knew that hatred was pointless and irrelevant. She knew she had to watch this woman, learn as much as she could about her. See what light and perspective the woman could provide on the hazy vision she herself had been experiencing.

Now she knew.

Yokane walked on through the lamp-lit night, her hands held at the center of her torso. She pointed the first two fingers of her left hand down, the first two of her right hand up.

Awareness flooded her inner and outer senses. The very spaces between the buildings of the city became as tangible as the buildings themselves. The millions of breathing bodies were knots of density across her field of sensation. Her emptied spirit filled with energy—

She stopped on a corner and leaned against a lamppost. But the energy was being drained.

“No… not again!”

Yokane was suddenly wrenched away, pulled back across fathoms of time and space, to a huge chamber with a domed ceiling, open to the sky. She had been here several times over the last few months but returned now with greater force and sharper awareness. She could not inform Caitlin O’Hara but it was the two souls central to the vision that filled her with dread.

In the heart of the chamber amid water and fire, a dozen people in robes had gathered. A woman at the very center was performing movements and gestures that Yokane recognized from her training. As the woman moved, the others followed her exactly, and Yokane could feel immense pulses of energy rushing in torrents from their hands, through the air, through the walls, and away. The movements were slow but the intention behind them was pure fire, controlled ferocity and rage and conviction. Yokane felt a strange blend of horror and elation, a flood of anger and triumph rising within her, until the door to the chamber slammed open and a voice shouted in Galderkhaani, “Rensat! Gather everyone, quickly!”

It came from a short, elderly man with wildly curling white hair, hurrying as fast as he could across the chamber. The woman at the center never faltered in her movements but spoke simultaneously.

“What is wrong?” the woman asked.

“Out there”—he pointed in the direction from which he’d come—“there are rumors that the Source is active!”

The woman stiffened. “It must be stopped,” she said.

“We cannot access it!” the man said.

“Then we must find those who operate it and stop them!”

“You will kill them?”

“If necessary, as Enzo’s sister tried to do.”

The man stood there, uncertain how to proceed. Suddenly his nose crinkled.

“The air!” the woman said, insisting. “Smell the air!”

The man inhaled as if he were already dismissing the notion, but the result caused confusion. “Sulfur,” he replied. “It’s true—”

The ground-shattering sound of an explosion rocked through the room. It came from outside. The Priests lost their sequence in the movements. Rensat looked up in panic. Visible through the latticed ceiling was smoke, huge, throttling clouds of smoke. The man rushed to the stairs by the wall and lurched up them. He approached the nearest window and looked out, looked east.

“Oh gods,” he breathed. “The khaan…”

The woman beseeched everyone to join hands with another, as many others as they could, and recite the cazh.

“Come to me, Pao!” Rensat cried. “Quickly, while there is time for us!”

“Oh gods!” Pao screamed as he grasped her outstretched fingers.

Then there was fire and torrent and Yokane’s body fell sideways, sliding down the lamppost. She breathed heavily, losing the little energy she had gathered.

“Oh gods,” she murmured, repeating Pao’s last words.

She pushed herself from the streetlight and began to walk. Walking had helped before and it worked now. Soon her head was clear again and the vision of Galderkhaan held only the weight of a memory and the message that had demanded tonight’s action.

She had not wanted to open herself to Caitlin, but she knew she needed help immediately. She knew that working through the boy would force Caitlin’s hand.

Yokane continued to walk but she remained closed to the city and the past. She wanted to avoid Fifth Avenue and Washington Square, continuing over to the east side and down toward her closet-sized room.

She had told Caitlin to contact her—by phone—after her visit to the Group’s headquarters. When that was done, when Yokane had rested, she would know better what had to be done in the past to protect the future.

Mustering her strength, the woman continued to walk. The night had been more exhausting than she had anticipated, and after a few minutes more she decided she had walked enough. It was time to rest. She hadn’t seen many cabs pass by so she hurried for the subway and took the D train to the West Village.

The respite was what she needed—though the buzzing in her pocket as the train passed below the Group’s mansion was noticeable not just to herself but to those nearest her. Most of the passengers probably assumed it was her cell phone, but their annoyed looks put Yokane on guard: she couldn’t afford a confrontation, especially if there was a police officer on board. She wished it were a pet thyodularasi whose smooth flesh she could stroke and calm, and it would calm her… at least, that was the legend. She had only seen the animal’s bones, held in secret and treasured by the generations who had come before her. She left the subway at Lafayette Street—well below the Group’s mansion.

Between her worried thoughts; her increasingly sad, wistful reflections; and the stone buzzing in her pocket, Yokane had very little attention to spare for her surroundings. She walked through Little Italy, then continued east. She only half-turned when approaching footsteps seemed uncommonly close.

Three fingers jabbed into the angle of her jaw and neck and Yokane’s body dropped. Her last thought was of Caitlin and the Group’s headquarters, and the silent scream her body was no longer able to make—

Casey Skett caught her so quickly that to a young woman walking on the other side of the street, she seemed only to wobble. With one arm Casey lifted Yokane just enough so that her feet would not drag on the pavement and walked her to the open passenger door of his Department of Sanitation van. He checked and no pedestrians were looking to see what had happened. He lifted Yokane into the seat, taking care to make it look friendly and romantic in case anyone was gazing from a nearby window. With the female belted into the passenger seat, he shut the door and moved around to get behind the wheel. He drove into the Group’s underground parking spot, parked, unfastened Yokane, and dragged her into the back of the van. There, he pulled the object from her pocket but did not pause to inspect the still-vibrating artifact. He’d known since Arni died what this descendant of the bloody Priestly suicide cult had been carrying. He put the stone in his own pocket, removed a leash hanging from the wall of the van, and strangled Yokane with it until her feet stopped their spasms.

Then he drove straight to the animal hospital to utilize their incinerator.

He would decide later if and when he would tell Flora about any of it… including his ties to the people she sought.

The Technologists of Galderkhaan.

CHAPTER 20

There was a sharp chill in the air and an intermittent wind coming Washington Square Park. Fallen leaves crackled as they skidded along the dimly lit sidewalk and scratched the sides of parked cars.

Caitlin was oblivious to all of it. Standing on the front steps of the Group’s mansion, she was prepared to try the word “Galderkhaan” as her admittance password. Since it was around ten o’clock at night she couldn’t pretend to be a tourist or a neighborhood outreach representative from the Church of the Ascension across the street—though the name was apt enough.

But excuses weren’t needed. The young woman who opened the door wearing green sparkly eyeshadow seemed a bit surprised at the sight of her, then immediately asked Caitlin to come in without another word. Flora had hired Erika as an assistant for many reasons, but the fact that she verged on having an eidetic memory was especially helpful. Erika did not say aloud that she remembered the visitor from a video she’d seen of a gathering in Jacmel, Haiti.

She showed Caitlin into Flora’s office. It was filled with a mishmash of antique furniture that showed a preference for Art Deco and long brown-and-blue velvet drapes that covered the windows.

Erika found Flora coming up the stairs from the basement and warned her who had arrived.

“She’s here?” Flora exclaimed. It was all the Group leader said in response. The words had the weight of continental drift, an acknowledgment that large things were in motion.

Donning a smile, she entered her office.

“I am Flora Davies.”

“Caitlin O’Hara,” her guest replied. “A mutual friend sent me in your direction. Yokane?”

“Oh, yes,” Flora said.

“You know her?” Caitlin asked.

“I know of her,” Flora replied. In fact she had never heard the name but she certainly wasn’t going to give the woman a reason to walk away. She didn’t say anything else, simply gazed at Caitlin.

“I’m a psychiatrist,” Caitlin continued.

The comment invited a response, but Flora offered none. The silence stretched out.

After years of talking with teenagers, Catlin recognized the recalcitrance tango—similar to the slow dance she had done with Odilon across the Ping-Pong table. Flora Davies’s demeanor was notably polite and polished, and Caitlin had no idea how long she would maintain her silence. It was likely that she had been presenting this pleasant facade for decades. So Caitlin just stared around the room at the antiquities, maps, and books. If Yokane were right about Davies’s having a Galderkhaani artifact somewhere in this mansion, then hiding everything would be much more natural for her than confiding. Caitlin might have to say something inspirational, irresistible, to break through that wall.

Yet Caitlin wasn’t sure what she could or should say. Mentioning Yokane had elicited little response and no flicker of familiarity, no smile of liking or flash of dislike. She was betting Davies had never heard of her. And an archaeology group that hadn’t publicized one of the greatest finds in the history of the field was probably not to be trusted. It went against academic tradition. You find something big, you announce it, then you go to radio silence while you study it and prepare to publish. That way, if someone else finds one, you still get bragging or naming rights.

Besides, Caitlin didn’t want to share her knowledge of Galderkhaan without getting something in return. Flora might take the information, thank Caitlin with practiced politeness, and kick her out the door. Caitlin needed information and her silence was the only bait she had.

There’s only one difference between us, Caitlin thought as her eyes scanned the heavy desk. Flora had obviously been here a while. She had time. Caitlin did not. Her experience with Galderkhaani told her that if there were one ancient soul attached to Jacob, there could be others not far off.

She was suddenly, sorely tempted to surprise Flora by taking a shortcut through an energy exchange, but Yokane’s trepidation about “accessing” while in the proximity of a Galderkhaan artifact seemed wise to heed. Forming such a conduit was also one of Caitlin’s hidden assets that she would not reveal until she had some sense of common purpose with this woman.

Or until you’ve got nothing else to work with.

Flora made a careful opening move, a bland statement of the obvious:

“What does a psychiatrist want with our Explorers’ Group?” Flora asked. “Yokane must have thought there was a good reason to send you.”

“I’ve been doing some exploring of my own,” Caitlin said mildly.

“Where?”

Caitlin decided to take this to the next level. “Everywhere. Through patients. They’ve had visions.”

“You used hypnosis?”

“Something along those lines,” Caitlin said mildly. “May I ask—what do you explore?”

“The rather more mundane physical world,” Flora replied apologetically. “Would you care to see?”

“I would,” Caitlin replied, trying to hide her surprise that Flora had offered.

Flora began the speech she reserved for senators and university presidents. The speech was accompanied by a tour through two floors of the mansion.

“Definitely not a museum,” Caitlin observed as she stepped—vaulted, in fact—over a leaning pile of spears obscuring a doorway.

Flora laughed politely and fluttered her hand at the jumble of objects in the room, which was actually slightly more organized than the others.

“This is a storage area for our explorers,” Flora said. “We offer categorization, authentication, and appraisal services. Many people like to donate old rocks and stones and such for tax benefits.”

“An old-school approach to collecting?” Caitlin said.

“Like medieval nobility,” Flora admitted. “Getting material is the thing, and discussing the rarities with each other over drinks.”

“But not with anyone else.”

“This is an old, very private sandbox, Dr. O’Hara,” Flora remarked. “Most of the donors and some of the archaeologists we fund have an inflated sense of the worth of their finds.”

Or deflated, Caitlin thought.

The mansion was a very convenient spot at which to purposely devalue and conceal goods. The eccentric non-filing system had a cultivated sloppiness to it that screamed “underfunding”—an excuse to raise donations or grants that went to other work. The real work, whatever that was. Caitlin had no doubt that Davies also functioned as a fence for unwanted items whenever the opportunity arose. The woman might even trade something of enormously high value to a collector or museum for something she particularly wanted.

Caitlin noticed that there were more weapons among the artifacts than any other functional item, yet nothing of Galderkhaan… until in a cramped, claustrophobic hallway they passed a closed door that gave Caitlin the faintest sense of vertigo. She experienced it for no more than half a pace, thankfully, so she covered it just as Flora glanced back at her.

“Mind your head,” Flora said, patting a low beam as they passed into another Crock-Pot of a room.

“You know what this place needs?” Caitlin said lightly. “A dog. An Irish wolfhound, negotiating Polynesian oars and the like. To complete the picture.”

Flora laughed. “I’ve thought about it,” she said. She hadn’t.

“Crazy what happened with the animals today,” Caitlin tossed out.

“Oh, I’m sure they’ll trace it back to some sort of emission,” Flora delivered smoothly. “Remember that maple syrup smell all over Manhattan in the mid-2000s? Turned out to be a fenugreek factory in Jersey. With all the communication waves that are floating around now”—she whirled her hand above her head—“who knows what kinds of bandwidth are affecting our brains.” She added as she returned them to her office, “Have you experienced anything like that? Disorientation?”

The question was quite unexpected.

“No. Why do you ask?”

“All this talk of hypnosis—and you seemed to stumble back there,” Flora said, taking her own seat and gesturing for Caitlin to do the same.

“Did I?” Caitlin replied weakly.

“A little.” She smiled thinly. “Was there anything specific this Yokeen said I could help you with?”

“Yokane.”

“Yes, of course. What did I say?”

Caitlin didn’t answer, nor did Flora wait for a response. It was a transparent but necessary game the woman was playing. Caitlin sat but decided that in the next five minutes she was going to get the hell out of this building. Davies had intentionally mispronounced Yokane’s name, lied about knowing her, and everything else she’d said was just too facile, too controlled. Caitlin had nothing to show for her investment of a half hour.

Damn it. Moving pawns on a board wasn’t going to cut it. Yokane had been clear that there was a spirit affecting Jacob, so whatever was happening here, whatever its consequences, was just a second priority for Caitlin.

“I’m sorry,” Caitlin began. “I think there’s been some kind of mistake.”

“What do you mean, doctor?”

“I mean, I don’t know why I’m here.”

Flora smiled. “Well, you are here,” she said. “Do you have any idea why your friend might have suggested you come?” Her eyes were still, like little cameras, her expression showing curiosity but not concern.

“I’m not certain,” Caitlin confessed. “Look, I’m—could I use your restroom actually?”

“Of course.” Flora did not stand up. “Back in the low hallway, second door on your left.”

Caitlin rose carefully to make sure she didn’t pass out.

After the psychiatrist had exited, Erika heard the tiny squeak of the door that drove her crazy every time Flora entered the basement. She poked her head into Flora’s office and, seeing her there, warned her where their guest had gone. Flora nodded. Once Erika had returned to her desk, Flora wrapped her hand around a heavy glass paperweight, placed it in her trouser pocket, and quietly followed Caitlin to the basement steps.

At the top of the narrow concrete stairs, Caitlin’s slight vertigo returned but quickly passed. But the fear beneath it stayed.

There’s no safe way out of this, she told herself. You’ve got to get as much information as you can.

She quickly but quietly descended the stairs and, at the bottom, caught a glimpse of a long corridor full of deep freezers. Her mind flooded with images so suddenly that she lost her balance and had to flop down on the last step. The flashing, strobing visions jumped from a young woman in a lab coat lugging several black panels down the hall, to Flora carrying a tray of objects going the other way, to a skinny man pacing down the hall, sticking his head through each doorway before he turned and walked up the steps through Caitlin. And then it made a giant leap—to a great airship, clouds, burning clouds, burning passengers—

Caitlin put her face in her hands but they couldn’t block out the images that kept coming, of Flora and a man who looked Spanish or Italian arguing on the steps; a tall blond man in a white shirt walking away while unbuttoning a lab coat—

Unwinding… time unwinding.

Something down here was spooling her through the recent history of the hallway. How was that possible and how could she stop it?

Unseen by Caitlin, who was blinded by time, Adrienne Dowman appeared at the end of the corridor. “Dr. Davies!” she cried.

At moment later, Flora paced down the stairs toward the unheeding guest, her right hand gripping the paperweight in her pocket. Adrienne was already there, leaning slightly over the woman but not reaching down to help. She caught Flora’s eye.

“Who is she?” Adrienne asked.

“Not now,” Flora said, indicating Caitlin with a nod. “What happened? Why did you call me?”

“It lit up.”

Flora stepped past Caitlin. “Dr. O’Hara,” she said over her shoulder, “it’s best if you sit quietly for a moment. Do not follow—”

But Caitlin grabbed her ankle. “That doesn’t work for me,” she said.

Flora turned, and spent a moment she did not have. “What are you talking about?”

“You have a mosaic tile in this building,” Caitlin said through her teeth. “It’s not very happy to be here.”

She saw triumph in Flora’s eyes. Caitlin had cracked first. Flora believed this was her game now.

“Stay here,” Flora said.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Caitlin replied letting go of the woman’s ankle.

“On the contrary. We have control of it,” Flora said evenly.

Caitlin decided not to mention the other tile, the masses of them in the South Pole. That, and the details about Yokane, was information she would trade if necessary.

Shooing Adrienne ahead, Flora turned and strode toward the room the younger woman had exited. Caitlin tried to stand but wavered immediately and had to sit back down. The reverse flow of events had dimmed but not stopped. She tried making the “cut off” gesture she had used on the subway but it didn’t work. She was weaker in this mansion than anywhere else. She huddled into herself, feeling enhanced and powerless at the same time.

Flora, on the other hand, was fueled by purpose. She entered the chamber as if it were a shrine and cautiously approached the Serpent. Its former resting place, the room with the ruined floor, was locked away from sight with a mat rolled up outside the base of its door to disguise the damage to the cement. Here, in the new chamber, Adrienne had restored the acoustic levitation and once more the symbols on the stone were face-up. As Adrienne had indicated, the symbols were indeed glowing an ivory white. The luminescence wasn’t very strong and nearly disappeared by the time it hit the black soundboard looming above it. The light was leisurely flickering through the symbols in some kind of sequence and the stone was still vibrating faintly.

“Any indication that it’s going to flip again, or alter its position in the node in any way?” Flora asked.

“None,” Adrienne said, “and no changes to the environment.”

They both involuntarily glanced at the floor: it was smooth and normal.

“Video?” Flora asked.

Adrienne pointed at a camera she’d set up on a tripod in a corner, behind a wall of bulletproof glass in case of an explosion.

“Get yourself a chair,” Flora said, gazing adoringly at the object. “I don’t want you to take your eyes off this thing.”

“Not in here,” Adrienne started. “We can hook the camera into—”

“Sit in the doorway then, Adrienne.” Flora snapped as she walked away. “I won’t have data slipping through the pixels.”

As she arrived at the stairs, without asking, Flora reached down, put a hand under Caitlin’s elbow, and hauled her to her feet. She walked the psychiatrist down the hall to the room she still thought of as Arni’s lab and plopped her on a stool.

Caitlin looked up. Her visual feed immediately reset itself to the present time. She was able to focus on Flora’s eyes now.

Flora noticed her gaze. “I recognized you,” she said.

“From where?”

“I saw you in a video and I wondered if you were just a Vodou voyeur.” Flora smiled with a mean twist to her mouth. “Yet here you are with all sorts of knowledge. Tell me what you know.”

“About what?” Caitlin asked. She was not being coy.

“Start with Galderkhaan. What have you to do with it?”

It was still strange to hear someone other than Ben say that word. Beaten mentally, psychologically, and now physically, Caitlin opened up—selectively. First she explained her history with the Galderkhaani Priests who had failed in their cazh, taking care not to mention the names or locations of the teenagers who had been affected. Flora pressed for details but did not fight her when Caitlin resisted.

Caitlin talked about the dead souls’ possession of the living, admitted it had happened but said she didn’t understand how or to what extent. She skipped her travels back in time but mentioned that she’d had help translating some of the Galderkhaani language.

“Who helped?” Flora demanded. “And what did you find?”

“Not now,” Caitlin said, thinking the deciphered words could be an additional bargaining chip in the future.

Suddenly, Caitlin gasped. She felt something hit her, a connection, hard but fleeting. She saw Yokane’s face, heard her cry out, felt the stone she had carried, saw a final glimpse of a skinny man moving her dead body—all of it directed into her brain with spearlike precision. Though the impression was fleeting, the damage was not. Caitlin’s mind remained open and here, in this room, she saw the skinny man once again, bundling the corpse of a tall, blond man into a bag, then a Mediterranean man looking on while Flora probed the dead man’s skull.

Flora arched her eyebrows. “What is it, Dr. O’Hara?”

“The dead man in this room. Others.”

“What others?”

Caitlin ignored her. She sat there, still, as though she’d seen Medusa. The hit from Yokane’s stone had connected her to the tile that had been in this room. Caitlin felt terrified and out of control, yet at the same time she had never experienced such energy coursing through her. It was as if she had become Arfa, Jack London, all the unsettled animals in New York. But she had to keep it contained.

Flora saw her inward look. “Talk to me,” she ordered.

“It’s radioactive, the stone you have, with the carvings of crescents in a triangle.”

Flora’s body jerked as if she’d lost balance on the stool. “How do you know about the carvings?”

“I’m looking at the stone. No, into it. It… it’s showing me the history of this room.”

For the first time, Flora seemed unnerved. Caitlin’s eyes snapped back to her. “Your dead man studied it and it was radioactive.”

“Nonsense,” Flora sputtered. “We checked it for radioactivity.”

“That Geiger counter was ticking hard right before it killed him,” Caitlin said evenly. Finally she felt she was back on an equal level with Davies.

Flora grabbed Caitlin’s forearm. “Before what killed him? The stone?”

“I don’t know if it was intentional or just a consequence. But it did.”

Flora’s phone went off and she cursed. She wrenched it out of her pocket as if she were going to throw it across the room but out of habit checked the screen.

“I must take this,” she said, then stood, turned her back on Caitlin, and walked into the hall.

CHAPTER 21

Pao and Rensat shrieked after Mikel as he raced away from them. He was surprised that they did not pursue him. Perhaps they were bound to the room by some mechanism he did not understand.

The wind in the tunnel will not be much help to spirits, he thought.

Their echoing cries were a combination of pent-up rage and hopeless frustration.

Mikel tore through the huge room, but not blindly. It was lit with the fires of hell.

It was the opening to one of the pits that serviced the Source—a hot-tub-sized vent that had apparently been designed to release the steam pressure lest it rupture the pipes. There were small openings above that must have led through the tunnel to the surface to give the steam some way out; perhaps they had originally been used to melt the oncoming ice, to keep the glaciers at bay. There were also tiles along one wall: Mikel could only surmise that Rensat had been in here earlier looking for clues to the identity of whoever turned the damned thing on. Or trying to find Enzo or who knew what else.

The chamber was a well of unfathomable energy, power so compact and deep it seemed to have mass. That pressure was softened somewhat by the life-sustaining mask; even so, his body was vibrating, oscillating at a cellular level from the energies that surrounded him.

And that was just the beginning, he realized. The force traveling through the Source would be unimaginable. Not just the part that was manifest here, but throughout the world: for all he knew, the Galderkhaani had probed deep, sent their tiles or some other construct far into the crust, the mantle, perhaps beyond.

Mikel had only those few seconds of total awareness to himself. Then he saw, in his mind, Rensat touching the tiles on her side of the room—activating a sequence of some kind. And then Pao was there, with her, also in his mind.

There was no reason to pursue me, Mikel realized. The tiles are projecting their thoughts along an arc, to other tiles throughout the ruins. It was the same way that pure energy had gotten into the minds of animals caught along lines between New York and Antarctica.

As Mikel feared, Pao was not about to let him leave without an agreement to help.

“I will not permit it!” he heard.

The immaterial Galderkhaani attacked the only way they could—by forcing Mikel’s mind to open itself to images stored in the ancient library and to Pao’s own warnings.

He cannot harm me, Mikel thought… hoped. If it were possible, Pao would have done so already. But he had not reckoned on the ingenuity of the Galderkhaani. The safeguards were clearly designed to cause intruders to make their own mistakes, make them unable to distinguish between the real and the unreal.

The first visual assault were the fangs of a leopard seal. As the enormous head of the animal lunged at him. Mikel felt the horror though not the pain or disfigurement of the animal biting at his throat. His heart beat hard and fast despite the structure imposed by the mask’s skin. Every instinct he had screamed at him to turn back, to seek Pao’s room with a promise to submit, behave.

But he had never listened to his saner angels and refused to do so now. Mikel ground his teeth together.

It’s not real! he thought hard.

Mikel stepped uncertainly forward, head bowed against the pressure being released by the vent—a cyclonic wind that was dissipated, he now noticed, into a series of funnels above. There had to be a doorway of some kind to the tunnel and the airstream beyond, he thought, so he continued into the maelstrom. The leopard seal retreated; Mikel could see it swimming in a long-vanished well, a pool, a short distance away, staring at him. It did not attack again, not physically. It lurked. Mikel’s will had rolled the vision back.

Better than having my brain melt, he thought.

“You will not get away!” he heard Pao shriek after him.

I will…, Mikel thought.

“Your efforts will fail!”

They must not…

“I will join with your soul and trap you among the bones of Galderkhaan for all time!”

You are not real! Mikel screamed inside.

“Listen to your words,” Pao sneered. “They are uttered in a dead tongue that you have never learned. This is very real!”

And then, through the stones, Pao’s entire mind dissolved into Mikel’s brain like salt in water. Pieces of living Galderkhaan poured in—towers and villas, airships with nets strung between them, the odors of the sea and jasmine, the laughter and tears and chatter of citizens.

Mikel wrenched his brain into focus. The stones, he thought, I have to get away from them.

But then there was something else. Something whispering and beguiling under it all like the serpent in Eden or the Sirens.

“Seek that which I seek,” Pao commanded. “Be what I am. The joys of all-knowing await.”

But Pao misjudged his subject. Mikel was not so far enamored of their eternal power as he was of the power to be gained of its knowledge in his real world. Fighting the temptation was seductive but easy. What would life or ascension or whatever awaited be like if he had to endure the guilt of its deadly course of action?

Galderkhaan is already gone, he told himself. You are fighting to save everything and everyone you know!

Mikel’s desire to resist created a slight but tangible split that gave him a foothold in his own identity. In that moment he both felt and understood the spirit’s driving obsession: to find the woman Mikel knew from the video taken in Haiti, the one person they believed could actually go back and prevent what Pao was calling the ulvor—traitor—from destroying Galderkhaan. That singular desire was lodged in his brain, in Galderkhaani, now that he was away from the stones in the library.

As Mikel continued to make his way into the tunnel, its walls lit with phosphors, he was forced to live through images and episodes of Pao’s life, the life of his body. It felt as if Pao were trying to meld their lives somehow, draw Mikel’s soul into the past through emotional and physical experiences, shove it aside and insert his own soul in the young man’s body.

The images were disjointed and out of chronological sequence. He saw and felt Pao’s joy at holding a newborn daughter. He felt the anguish and ecstasy of his flaming death clutching Rensat. He sang to Vol in jubilation just after he finished writing the first chant of the cazh. Pao made love with ferocity. There were glimpses of many lovers, many places, many emotions. As a small boy, he pressed his hands against the great hortatur skin of a grounded balloon and marveled at the technology of Galderkhaan.

Then he stood on the side of a mountain, Pao as a much older man, weeping at the loss of Vol when Pao decided to join the Technologists. Then he was with more women, many more, and saw other lives that were too dim to discern clearly. Mikel sensed profound energy slither through his body as the earliest Priests began to decipher the gestures and movements derived from Candescent grymat—blood writing. He saw gory designs on the wall, bloodshed, violence…

Through Pao’s eyes, from a place of concealment, Mikel watched Priests commit suicide as experiments, use their blood as paint. He cried out his feeling of tragedy and betrayal when two huge gangs of Priests and Technologists both ripped to fragments the banner that was supposed to hold the city together. Back on the mountainside, he felt the urge to raise his arms to the banished red-haired woman in her airship, and suppressed it. He felt guilt for half-believing her but never defending her. He had implored her for a name, to tell him who was planning a grievous assault on Galderkhaan, but she had refused to participate in the insanity. She only wished to get away. Pao had spoken to her sister, Enzo. She left too.

Then the dial of his life whipped madly once more. As a much younger man, Pao felt one glorious moment of ascension, just short of transcending, when the Priests first realized it might be possible to become Candescent. He felt the weight of a dead daughter in his arms, fatally burned in an accident with the Technologists’ fire, an event that began the irreparable rift. Over and over and over, he felt Pao’s heart shatter as his friends, his city, died one way and another in the fire and liquid rock. He relived the spirits’ attempting to bond in dying Galderkhaan, their shrieking agony as flame ate them, flame commanded by her, by the woman in the void…

And yet strongest of all, Mikel felt Pao’s yearning for Vol. He felt Vol disappear from Pao’s life and then from the periphery of his life. He felt the loss of that connection after Pao ascended. Though Vol was also dead, the ascended could not communicate without having transcended as Pao and Rensat had done.

There was much more, out of order, out of joint, often moving so fast as to be incomprehensible. As Mikel fought to hold on to who he himself was, other memories fought back, threatened his physical and mental balance. The leopard seal was back in his mind. Mikel was becoming squeezed by images, sensations, emotions, terror… he was a very narrow entity in the middle. He tried with all his might to resist—

Back! he ordered himself. Come back! Stay in the physical!

Slowly, one at a time, Mikel picked up his feet and prayed that when he set each down, it would find the floor. He wasn’t sure how long he had been walking through the cavernous tunnel toward the airstream but he knew he was much nearer to the point of its generation. And his shaking skin, organs, and bones warned him that, the mask notwithstanding, this attempt could surely be fatal.

Through it all, Pao was still present. Pao was reaching in and stretching out, trying to thin and control what little of Mikel remained.

The tiles, activated by Pao, added to his woes. Fresh images flooded in, of elegantly appointed row houses in a Scandinavian city, then a staggering fjord—a chasm of lesser gods.

Then a sudden leap to vast grasslands and people hunting with hawks. They looked Asiatic, perhaps Mongolian. These were things he knew. Mikel’s own knowledge was now part of the ancient database.

Next, Mikel’s personal memories were front and center. He was back in Antarctica, scanning the American bases, the planes landing for the summer season, the large supply ships toiling slowly toward the continent. Pao was now merging with Mikel’s memories, making them one.

Christ, is this what the stones did to Arni? Mikel thought fearfully.

He felt the increasing pressure on his ears, on his skull, vibrating through sinew and blood and bone.

And then a jolt, a shock, a mental kick that Mikel had not anticipated. The Galderkhaani hooked into the thought of Flora, and suddenly Mikel’s vision filled with the Group’s mansion on Fifth Avenue. It gave him a flash of confidence, an anchor. But the location quickly became unpegged in time. Mikel swung from Arni’s first interview there and his synesthetic reaction to Flora’s office, to a lab where Flora was comparing the first two artifacts Mikel had obtained, to Flora’s new assistant opening packages to reveal black soundboards.

Mikel rejected the image, fought back to the fast-narrowing window that was himself in the present. As he proceeded he heard the sound and feel of the air change and hoped that this was the start of the airstream. He could not afford to hesitate, to think. He had to find the way out.

The force of the wind grew stronger and he knew he was close. Then the rippling haze of the heat from the vent began to flow beside him, then behind him. He was closer. Then the howling of the wind returned, faintly at first, and he saw an opening ahead. There was no door and he realized that this room was inside a cave like the one where he’d found the sled. The Technologists had been ambitious but practical: they used existing geology wherever it was feasible. The wind tunnel would provide the added benefit of a primitive form of ventilation, providing a cooling aspect to the room.

Mikel wrapped his arms protectively around his head, and with a guttural cry jumped forward into the stream. The air lifted him as before and smashed him into the wall. Mikel shrieked in pain—his right wrist was surely broken. He took several more hard knocks to his shoulder and arms but not hard enough to break them, or him. And then he was in the sweet spot—rolling over and over helplessly but managing to stay in the center, without a sled. According to what he recalled of the map he was flying away from the city toward the sea. His broken wrist was numb but as long as he remained relaxed he could keep from spinning out of control.

But he was not out of Pao’s reach entirely. The tiles were still all around him. The clarity of the images faded even as the pace of Pao’s search increased, frenetic with determination.

Get out of my head! Mikel screamed inside, but to no avail.

Pao knew he could not count on Mikel but he was probing, desperate. Mikel saw Fifth Avenue, his own apartment. He saw places he had been in Manhattan that he had forgotten.

And then Mikel felt his own mind unsqueeze and return. Countless hours after it had all begun, it all swiftly faded. Every feed from Pao simply dribbled away. Distance must have become a deciding factor.

Mikel’s first complete thought without Pao there to interfere—or help—was an immediate, very practical concern: he had no idea how to locate his entry point to the tunnel—the entry point on which his life depended. If he missed it, was there another route to the surface? Even if there were, he would be too far from the base to survive.

Mikel mentally manipulated his way along the network he had seen on the map. After many long minutes of re-creating them carefully, Mikel saw something ahead that he had seen before: a mosaic where the tiles were silent. Their darkness practically shouted to him from the expanse of wall, where gleaming tiles were as regular as subway stops. Perhaps this one was missing pieces, the circuits broken. All he knew was that they were unique among the mosaics he had seen since descending the dormant lava tube and it was the only hope he had.

But how to get out of the airstream? Mikel shifted his body, and was immediately thrust up to the ceiling, lost his breath, but then rolled to his right and dropped. And suddenly, he was at the base of the broken tower, skidding forward painfully. He let his body do all the work, turned his will over to muscle memory, and surrendered control to his body and to the mask.

A minute later he felt for the panel. He found it and stopped moving.

There was no time to do a status assessment. His head was like a bag of cement powder, opaque and thick and lacking the porosity even for thought. He hobbled as fast as he could on his sprained ankles up the twisted, overturned spiral stairway, hauling himself up with his left arm, his right arm stabbing him with pain.

There was just one word in his head:

Safe.

He pulled himself from the tower and collapsed on the surface of the lava tube. With trembling fingers he pulled the mask from his skin so he could breathe the air firsthand.

Safe.

And suddenly, he was looking into the eyes of Siem der Graaf.

“My god,” Siem said, crawling between two pink flares toward Mikel’s stricken, ravaged face.

“You’re still here!”

“Something happened. Something we could not explain. They agreed to let me come back—”

Mikel fumbled for his belt. “I must… call New York,” he gasped, pressing the mask into Siem’s hand. “My… I have to tell her.”

“Wait until we are out of here,” Siem implored.

“No time!” Mikel said. His arm shaking, he retrieved the radio and called Flora. Though he was nearer to the surface, the static was thick, communication difficult.

“Where are you?” Flora answered abruptly.

“I’m near a tunnel under the ice—I found it!” he blurted. “I found Galderkhaan!”

“Oh my good lord,” Flora said.

“Listen. I have been with two Galderkhaani souls—you must find that woman… the one in the Haiti video.”

“Caitlin O’Hara?”

“I don’t know her name, just…”

“She is here with me now,” Flora said.

“Protect her from the souls!” he said as interference broke up their communication. “Damn it!” He tried to fuss with the buttons, but it was no use.

“Please, let me get you out of here,” Siem said.

Mikel was panting, looking around.

Siem put the mask into a pocket and reached for Mikel’s right arm. Mikel groaned in pain. Siem tried the left arm, gave his support to the man, and the two of them staggered toward the crevasse on their knees. “The base move is delayed so our radios are back on. You’ve been through hell it looks like—I’ll have them lower a harness.”

“Quickly!” Mikel urged. “If he finds her, if he finds the ulvor—”

“What did you just say?” Siem asked, his eyes suddenly fearful.

Mikel reacted to Siem’s look. “Why? What’s happened?”

Siem held Mikel’s hand to keep him from grabbing at his face. “Mikel,” he said sharply, needing to get through to him. “I heard that word before. We all did. And others. They were something like ‘Enzo, pato, Vol.’”

“How did you hear that?” Mikel demanded. “Siem, where?”

“Something happened earlier—a vision, fire, a voice!”

“What kind of fire?”

“It was like something alive… a face.”

“The flame that was pursuing me,” Mikel said, more to himself than to Siem. “It had to be, it could only be. A soul afire, locked in that state by the tiles—like Pao and Rensat. But that soul was only ascended, unable to communicate with them.”

“Mikel, what are you saying?”

Mikel ignored him. Enzo. Pato. Vol. He didn’t know what pato meant, but he inferred, almost at once, what Pao and Rensat must never have suspected of their beloved friend Vol: that it was he who initiated the Source. Yet it made sense that he would have wanted to sabotage it, or turn it on to show that it wouldn’t work. How horribly surprised he must have been.

“All right,” Mikel went on, “someone, some soul, possesses this information. But Pao doesn’t have that information, and even if he did he couldn’t get back to stop him. He doesn’t know—”

There was a punch inside Mikel’s skull. His mouth swung slack as he stared into Siem’s eyes. All in a rush, Pao was fully back in his mind. There was a cry of unutterable anguish as Pao realized the truth about his lover and friend.

Suddenly Mikel knew that he had been used, that Pao had pulled a ruse, only pretending to fade out with distance. The power of the tiles, controlled by Rensat, had allowed Pao to remain with him. And Mikel also realized with horror that now Pao had both names: Vol, from Siem… and Caitlin O’Hara, from Flora, from his own gullible stupidity.

“I gave it all to him!” Mikel cried. I told him that it was a radio… to communicate with. And he knew I would use it for just that! All he had to do was wait a little longer.

Now Pao departed, for real. Mikel’s vision cleared though his head swam. His mind was his own again.

But in exchange for that freedom, he may unwittingly have given Pao the world.

And then, held tight in Siem’s arms, he passed out.

Mikel clawed to wakefulness.

He was in a truck, lumping across the Antarctic terrain. Crushed between Bundy, who was driving, and Siem, who was half-leaning against the passenger-side door, Mikel was still in the harness that had been used to haul him up; the retreat from wherever to wherever had obviously been hasty.

“Thank you,” Mikel said, his mouth dry.

Siem looked over at him. “You’re welcome.”

“I—I know you won’t understand, but what I said before—we have to warn the Group. Warn the woman.”

“We will,” Siem said. “Hold on… let me get you some water.” He reached into the mesh pocket hanging low on the door, by his feet.

“Not important,” he said. “She’s in terrible danger. I must call. Stop so I can get out and find a damn signal!”

“Wait until we reach—”

“Damn it, I must get it,” they heard Mikel moan. “Please.”

“We can’t stop the truck!” Siem told him.

“Why not?”

“Some scientist you are, you bloody dope!” Bundy said. “This fast on the ice—the momentum will crash the module into us, so just…”

“Dear god, what’s wrong with you both?” Mikel said. “You have no idea what’s happening here!”

Mikel struggled to reach across Siem and grab the door handle.

“What are you doing?” Siem cried, grabbing his wrist.

But Mikel had enough of a head start to get his gloved fingers around it and tug up. The door opened and with a momentary sense of weightlessness, he and Siem flew into space, hit the ground, and the truck and its module swerved dangerously as Bundy tried to brake, but collision was inevitable.

When it came, the module hit the truck hard, sending it forward with a jolt, the two coming to a stop at jagged angles in front of the two former occupants.

“You’ve killed us!” Siem roared. “If that truck is damaged—”

“It won’t matter,” Mikel said, painfully climbing to his knees and reaching under the harness to where his radio was belted to his waist. His face frozen, lips numb, he tried to steady his trembling fingers to punch in the group’s radio-phone link.

Before he could do so, he felt the ground heave. Ahead, miles away, he saw flame shoot through the ice, a burning pillar that was as incongruous as it was biblical. Raising himself on one aching hand, Mikel watched as it reached for the sky like the straight, superhot issue of a burning oil well.

Beside him, Siem also watched as he raised his bloodied face from the ice. He was dazed but his eyes found the fire and stayed.

“Now… what?”

Behind them, Bundy had left the cab and run over. He crouched behind them, watching as the fire spread into a familiar shape.

“It’s the same thing we saw before,” Bundy said as a face appeared within it.

“No,” Mikel said.

“How do you know?” the man asked—and then his question was answered.

The fire suddenly spread like a fan, dissipating as it expanded.

“What is it?” Bundy asked.

“That, I believe,” Mikel said weakly, “is what a soul looks like when it is sent back to hell.”

“But it’s going—up!” Siem said in a rasping voice.

“Hell is where you make it,” Mikel replied.

Bundy put his overwhelming disgust for Mikel into one powerful, “What the hell are you talking about, you lunatic?”

“Salvation,” Mikel replied quietly. “At least, I hope that’s what it is. I’m going to try to find out.”

Bundy snorted. “Good for all of us. You may have wrecked our module.”

Ignoring the pain and the risk of frostbite, Mikel resumed his dialing. “I am very, very sorry,” he said. “I am calling some people who will buy you a new one.”

CHAPTER 22

Flora stalked back into the room, stowing her phone in her pocket.

“No more shallow pickings,” the woman said. “I need to know everything you know, Dr. O’Hara.”

Caitlin looked at the woman sideways. “Who was that?”

“Someone who informed me, Dr. O’Hara, that you are far, far more connected to Galderkhaan than you’re letting on. Possibly more than you know.”

“Oh, I know how connected I am,” Caitlin admitted, looking up at her and feeling rage for the first time since coming here. “And that makes me powerful in ways I don’t think you understand. It’s time you talked to me, Madame Director. Respectfully, and now.”

“Or else?”

“How about a simple, mundane fact, for starters,” Caitlin said. “Your employee’s body was not removed by any authority approaching the word ‘proper’ and I guarantee there’s surveillance video.”

“You’re being irrational now.”

“You bet,” Caitlin said. “Talk to me, Flora.”

Flora weighed the request but briefly. “That call was from my colleague in Antarctica.”

“Antarctica,” Caitlin breathed. “I see. So you’re fairly well connected too.”

“Our reach is global,” Flora replied. “He’s just as worried as you are, so I strongly suggest we start treating each other as resources and not as enemies. He knows who you are.”

“He does? How?”

“He also saw the video from Haiti,” Flora admitted. “He is concerned for your well-being.”

“That’s refreshing,” Caitlin said.

“He’s a good, good man,” Flora admitted. “We are not voyeurs or spies or blackmailers, I assure you.”

“All right,” Caitlin said, not sure she believed any of that. “Who is this associate?”

“His name is Mikel. Why?”

“Mediterranean?”

“Basque,” Flora said.

Caitlin touched her head. “I’ve seen him. Here, in this room. Why is he concerned?”

Flora paused, marginally impressed. “He found a tunnel and ruins and spoke with the dead of Galderkhaan. You’ll never guess what they’re looking for.”

Caitlin took her at her word and didn’t try.

“They are looking for you, Dr. Caitlin O’Hara. They are very specifically looking for you. Mikel told me to protect you.”

Caitlin shrunk in horror, not just to the news that she was being targeted by some ancient force, but the fact that they got Jacob in the bargain. She had to make it stop, to separate them both from whatever the Galderkhaani wanted.

“You look unwell,” Flora said with the slimmest hint of compassion. “Perhaps we should continue this in my office?”

Caitlin forced herself to stand. “No. I have to go.”

Everything else be damned, Caitlin had to make sure he was okay, serve herself up if necessary.

“That’s not a good idea,” Flora said.

“This is not a discussion,” Caitlin said, literally pushing past her.

“You should not face this alone!” Flora said, grabbing her.

Caitlin wrested her arm free and pinned Flora with a glare. “Forgive me, but I believe that I am safer watching my own back. Please don’t try to stop me.”

Caitlin’s fury propelled her to the top of the basement stairs where she stopped in her tracks from sudden indecision.

Goddamn it, she thought.

She had an increasing, hideous sense that whatever she did next, someone would suffer. The lodestone of her life had always been helping and protecting the innocent, and obviously, right now she needed to get to Jacob. But she could not forget that last time dogs howling, the news reports of suffering animals, and similar events had heralded the crises of Maanik, Gaelle, Atash, and who knew how many other young people.

This is different, of course, Caitlin reminded herself. It’s worse.

If Yokane was correct, something was coming loose in the South Pole—something big and old and ferocious. And there was every reason to believe she was right, especially since Flora’s man Mikel had corroborated enough of her story.

Caitlin was increasingly convinced that something bigger was happening than what even Yokane had known, and that Azha and Dovit were trying to tell her what it was. This was part of what was impacting the stones and was not likely to stop of its own accord. Whether she wanted to or not, she had to intervene—or, at least, try to find out what was happening.

Caitlin turned to go down the stairs but Flora Davies was standing just behind her.

“I thought you might reconsider,” Flora said with a self-satisfied smile.

“You’ve got it wrong,” Caitlin said. “There’s something I have to do.”

“You promised to share.”

“There isn’t time.”

“Make time,” Flora said, blocking her way.

Without thought, Caitlin pointed the two forefingers of her right hand directly at Davies’s neck. The connection was immediate. She saw the woman’s irises widen and, again on instinct, Caitlin moved her hand to the right in the “shut down” gesture. The conduit closed and Flora staggered and slumped against the wall. Caitlin leaned close and checked that the woman was breathing normally; she was.

“Dr. Davies!” Caitlin said, and snapped her fingers. Flora’s eyes tracked over to them. Then she looked up at Caitlin. It was enough to satisfy Caitlin that she hadn’t harmed the woman. “That’s how connected I am to Galderkhaan,” Caitlin said. “From now on, you will not interfere with me.”

Caitlin resumed her descent and on reaching the hallway, turned toward the room at the far end. The younger woman was perched on a stool just outside its doorway. As Caitlin came closer the stone shot visions of the past through her brain. Adrienne rose to her feet as Caitlin approached with wobbling steps.

But Flora, still slumped at the bottom of the stairs, gestured to Adrienne to let the woman go. So Adrienne remained on her feet but did not prevent Caitlin from looking into the room at the glowing, levitating stone.

The power of the artifact hit Caitlin so hard she quickly repeated the “shut down” gesture. It didn’t cancel out the overwhelming presence of the stone, but it did take the edge off. The present shimmered like a mirage, showing the stone only vibrating, without the sequence of lights.

Caitlin speared Adrienne with a look. “What’s holding it up, magnets?”

“Acoustic waves.”

“Is it safe to go in?”

“That depends on what you’re going to do and how long you’ll be in there.”

Caitlin started to take a step into the room. Adrienne put a hand on her arm.

“I don’t recommend it,” she said. Her grip wasn’t a restraint but a gesture of concern.

Caitlin thanked her with a nod and stayed in the doorway. And suddenly, the past vision came to a rest. Before the stone was brought here the room apparently had been used for storage. Nothing was moving in it anymore.

Caitlin inhaled what felt like her first full breath since she’d entered the mansion. Then, before she could pay attention to her lingering fears, she did what she always did: put one proverbial foot in front of the other.

She had to challenge, expand, and master the new abilities she possessed. She had to obtain a bigger, clearer picture of everything that was happening.

Caitlin saw nothing in the room to hook into visually so she took a different approach: she used sense memory, the sound of Jacob’s fingers drumming on the wall that separated their rooms at home. First she remembered just the small sound—then she remembered the awful, pounding amplification of it that she’d heard in that terrible opaque nowhere space—

And then, she was there, pinioned in the massive whiteness as before, with just a faint blur of turquoise behind the ice. Caitlin tried to scream to relieve the terror but her face felt partly paralyzed.

With extraordinary effort, Caitlin spoke to Adrienne, not knowing whether she was communicating out loud or only mentally. Her lips misshaped the words: “Did… anything… happen… when I approached the room?”

“The stone just went dark,” Adrienne said with what sounded like awe.

Inwardly Caitlin smiled. Had she made that happen? If so, how?

Thinking back, she realized what it had to be. Until now, Caitlin had been regarding this stone as a problem, a danger. She had been giving it the wary, scheming respect due a menacing stranger. But this stone—or at least a stone, perhaps Yokane’s piece, maybe the two of them together, some damn segment of the Source in some combination—was not a stranger to her. Standing in the United Nations conference room, floating in the sky above dying Galderkhaan, Caitlin had reached into the energy generated by an artifact like this and flung it at the ancient city.

She looked at the semidormant stone before her.

You can connect to it, she told herself. You can work with it. The vibrations, the energy, something about it synced with you.

She had quieted it somewhat. But she still didn’t know how, still didn’t understand the mechanism. Of more immediate concern: she didn’t know how long the truce would last. Would the stone somehow reach back to the rest of the Source in the present day, get more power, and come back more vigorous than before?

“Dr. O’Hara?” Adrienne asked. “Can you give me data—?”

“Quiet, please.”

Caitlin had to learn more. This was a standoff. She had made a fist without realizing it and flexed her fingers. And then she was jolted by an unexpected connection.

The superlatives, she thought with a burst of emotion. The hand gestures. Weeping inside, she suddenly grasped the profound intent of the physical arm, hand, and finger movements used in the Galderkhaani language. They weren’t merely accents. They were a subliminal, subsonic, energy-based form of expression that added untold depth to the words.

Come back, she admonished herself. Concentrate on the ice from the vision with Ben… something neutral—

It came back to her, instantly and easily. Reaching to and through the whiteness, she found only tiny sparks of energy. It quieted the stone entirely.

I am the conduit that connected the stone with its home, she realized. The energy of the Source was not restricted by place or time. Her own energy was a link between then and now, just as it had been at the United Nations when she linked between the ancient cazh and the victimized kids in her own time.

That’s why the acoustic levitation worked to contain the stone, she realized. Sound was energy too. The stone was stilled by a powerful cushion of it, its vibrations calmed.

Now she had to work on amping the stone up or down, to see the degree to which she could bond with it and control it. As Yokane had done to her, as Caitlin had just done to Flora Davies, so she must do to the stone. If there was another assault like the one that impacted the animals, she might be able to contain it. If ancient souls were using the tiles to reach children, including Jacob, she might be able to break that connection as well.

But which way? She considered pointing up at first, which was what the Technologists had intended. But some instinct made her slowly, barely, point down instead, reaching through her fingertips and far beyond them, searching for the way to connect.

There.

Her hand seemed to come alive—with an internal humming, a buzzing, a vibration that she automatically compared to the trembling of the stone in its acoustic aerie. The buzzing intensified until she felt the pounding in her palm. She directed her fingertips toward the stone.

Suddenly, the pounding in her hand was drawn powerfully toward and then onto the stone. Fearful, Caitlin almost pulled her hand away to cut the energetic bond.

But that would mean starting over. This had to be done. She calmed her knee-jerk reaction. The goal was engagement. She had to learn to use the mental-physical throttle. She began to twist the energy, turning it like a spoon in coffee, and slowly she began to sense something responding from the stone. The stone was expressing something inside her. The feeling was pure joy—similar to what she and Ben had experienced, drifting up and out into the cosmos, themselves, and each other. The core of this artifact was no core at all, but an opening. She hovered there, uncertain—

A new image flashed onto her visual field. There was no longer ice, just eyes—hazel eyes, eyes that crinkled in recognition and then in triumph, eyes in an old face with a white beard. Caitlin didn’t wait around to see what the triumph was for. Her instinct told her to get out before this other presence could take control. With one movement she spiraled the pounding energy into the stone and pulled herself out of the sound stream.

The eyes were jerked away from her, leaving only the room with the levitating stone. She put her hands on her knees, dropped her head, and just breathed for a few moments. When she looked up again, she saw that the stone was still not lit, was not even buzzing. She wondered whether Yokane’s stone had stopped buzzing too.

Peripherally, she saw that Flora had joined Adrienne. Both were staring at her.

“Please,” Flora said. “Talk to me.”

“Not now.”

“But what should we do?” Flora said, pressing her.

“Be quiet.” Then she added, “Please.” To Adrienne she said, “Don’t touch me and definitely do not touch it.” She indicated the stone.

Caitlin sensed Flora’s struggle, Adrienne’s compliance, but then quickly forgot them both as she stood upright and ground her left heel into the floor for a strong sense of balance. With the stone in repose, she could attempt to take care of her other priority, although the Source and its dead inhabitant could not be underestimated.

Her main concern was how Jacob was affected by her connection with the stone, with ascended souls, with the past. Without leaving this place, without surrendering these connections, she had to know what was happening at home.

Caitlin reached out as she had when seeking Yokane from the roof. With the ensuing wave of energy she reached toward her home and found it almost immediately, not by sight but by feel. The visual feed wasn’t there but she could sense that no one was in the living room and heard water running in the kitchen. She extended herself like fingers, searching for something she had a good chance of sensing—and yes, Ben had left his phone on the living room table. It had the same aura of life as hers, his clinging presence, an emotional hook that she could grab on to.

Once more she had the sensation of swinging herself toward the destination—grabbing for it across space, but hopefully not across time. Then the visual came in, as clearly as if she were standing in the room. The sound of water turned off and to her surprise Caitlin’s friend Anita Carter walked out of the kitchen into the dining room.

“Anita?”

The psychiatrist turned, looked around. “Caitlin?”

“Yes.”

Anita went to the front door, looked out the peephole. No one was there. She looked around for a phone.

“What are you doing there?” Caitlin asked.

“Me? What are you—where is that coming from? Laptop? You Skyping?”

“That’s not important now. Why are you there?”

“I called, couldn’t reach you, came over. Ben said you were gone. I figured I’d stay.”

“Why?”

“Ben was with Jacob,” Anita said. “He was talking in his sleep. Doves, ashes, flying—”

“Dovit? Azha?”

“I’m not sure,” Anita said. She was still looking around as if suddenly Caitlin would reveal her hiding place. “Caitlin, seriously—what is this? Where are you calling from?”

“I’ll tell you later, I promise,” Caitlin said. “Is he all right, Jacob?”

“Yes, he’s fast asleep and snoring.”

“Can you stay Anita?”

“Of course, but . . .”

“Tell Ben, Global Explorers’ Club, Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street, now—no, never mind. I’ll tell him”

“All right, fine. Caitlin—”

That was all Caitlin heard. She sought and found Jacob asleep and snoring in his room. He seemed calm. She felt only one other presence near him and it was Ben. A surge of mortal need rolled through her. More than anything else she wanted to hear Ben’s voice, hug him, but she couldn’t indulge right now. Still, she wanted him with her for support. He was the only one she trusted.

And then, like a dying fireplace, the apartment vanished, lost all its warmth.

Caitlin dropped her hands. She took a moment to feel her gratitude to Anita for going with a hunch that something was wrong and being clairaudient and fearless enough to hear her. Then, as Caitlin fully returned to her body, she pulled out her cell phone. While speaking to Flora she simultaneously texted Ben the address followed by the same information she was announcing.

“A man’s coming,” Caitlin said. “The man who translated what I know of the Galderkhaani language. He’s going to watch over the stone while I’m otherwise occupied.”

“I do not allow—” Flora started.

“In return,” Caitlin continued, “he will share what he knows about the language. It’s a fair bargain. Some trust, some distrust, in the end win-win.”

She hit “send” and stowed the cell phone.

Flora approached. Caitlin pinned her in place with a look.

“Doctor,” Flora began very carefully, “you must tell me how you—”

“When I’m ready. I’m not even close to being done here.”

Flora braced herself defiantly, then shrank as quickly.

Suddenly Caitlin was vaulted from the room. It was similar to what she’d experienced in Haiti, when an unseen force had whipped her around like a dog on a leash.

For a moment she was simply in darkness. Then a face appeared. Not Yokane. Not hazel eyes. A woman with flaming red hair.

I am Azha, she said without moving her lips.

The woman was speaking Galderkhaani but Caitlin understood more words than Ben had already translated. “I am—” Caitlin began to respond.

I know, the woman said with quiet authority.

Fear cascaded through Caitlin’s entire being, but before she could grapple with it, she was jerked away again.

Then she was somewhere—a place that was blue upon blue upon blue, and moving. She opened her mouth to speak and tasted salt. She was in the ocean, beneath it, but she was still breathing. Or perhaps she was beyond the need for breath.

She was suddenly afraid of something new—not of drowning but being stranded here and unable to get back to Jacob.

Azha? she called.

Not far away, the red-haired woman floated facedown in the sea. It was just a small section of water, an opening that had apparently been punched through the ice by whatever wreckage was around her and by the flames that still licked at it.

Caitlin felt sympathy and horror all at once. Whatever tragedy had befallen this woman, she had to prevent Jacob from experiencing her agony… her death.

You’re the soul who’s been haunting my child, Caitlin said to the woman. What do you need from me?

We must stop my sister, Enzo, she replied. She seeks to help her mentor.

Who is her mentor?

A Priest named Rensat, Azha informed her. But Rensat cannot communicate with Enzo. They are not bonded through cazh.

So they’re trying to contact her—to do what?

Rensat is ascended, with a Priest named Pao. With the help of Enzo, Rensat seeks to undo the destruction of Galderkhaan.

How is that even possible, winding back time? Caitlin asked. Even as she said it, she knew the answer. She had changed the past before, when she’d gone back to Galderkhaan to protect Maanik. They will compel me to go back.

Yes. To stop a Galderkhaani named Vol from activating the Source. Just before my airship crashed, I revealed the treachery of Vol to Enzo, Azha said. I told her of his plan to activate the Source prematurely. When she died, Enzo was trying to cazh by fire, to possess someone living in Galderkhaan, to pass this information to others. She failed.

I have seen others try to do that, Caitlin said.

Enzo is trying, still, to communicate that information.

Enzo was attempting to do what the dying of Galderkhaan had done with Maanik, Gaelle, and Atash: to enter their bodies and bond with their souls. After millennia of trying, Caitlin couldn’t begin to imagine how mad this Enzo must have been.

What am I supposed to do?

You must stop them. Pao seeks your intervention to restore Galderkhaan, but Rensat wishes to do that… and then destroy it.

Destroy it again? After they save it?

Yes. I have watched her when she is alone, seen her collecting ancient names, assembling an army. I believe she wishes to build the Priest class to unprecedented numbers and then in one stroke she and Enzo and their myriad followers will cause mass death—as many souls as it takes to reach the cosmic plane. There, they will become Candescent. But at a price.

Azha didn’t have to spell it out. Caitlin could do the math: ancient Galderkhaan would die and the course of history would shift. It had become apparent through Ben’s research that survivors of Galderkhaan had spread throughout the world. But if there were no survivors—or very few—the world Caitlin knew would be vastly changed. It was genocide of an existing race, and preemptive genocide of billions of others who would never be born.

You must not be taken, Azha said. Yet they must be stopped.

What can you do to help? Caitlin asked.

Like Rensat and Pao, I and Dovit are ascended but without power. This that I have conveyed is all I can do. You must succeed on your own.

And with that she was gone

Caitlin swore loudly. She was not certain if any of that was really imminent or truly possible. The one thing she did know: Azha had access to Jacob. Yokane had gotten to him. Now that the other Galderkhaani knew who she was, they could probably find him as well—if not through agents like Yokane, then through his dreams.

She had to end this now.

CHAPTER 23

Caitlin left the mansion with barely a word to Ben.

“Caitlin?” He turned after her.

“Later, okay?” she said as she hurried down the steps. “Everything you need to know is in the text,” she told him over her shoulder.

“All right,” Ben said. “Be safe.”

Ben had seen this side of Caitlin enough to trust that “need to know” was sufficient right now. Caitlin on the other hand felt far less prepared than when she faced the previous Galderkhaan crisis. And there was so much more at stake. If only Yokane were there to help.

Caitlin had an unknown span of time before Davies’s stone regained awareness. That could work for her or against her: she might be able to use its powers, or it might try to take her over to connect with other stones. She had to use her time prudently.

First, she had to find a place to use time prudently.

Turning down Fifth Avenue, she walked at apace partly to focus herself. Three souls, two of them bonded. Together, they had an agenda. The agenda had a focal point: Antarctica. Specifically, a place with active mosaics. If she could find that in her mind, she could use it the way she had used the courtyard tiles when she disrupted the cazh in ancient Galderkhaan.

That effort was going to require a powerful access point. Orienting toward the ocean had worked for a small bit of outreach like locating Yokane. But this?

For a much larger move through space and time Caitlin needed a big boost, something akin to what the trauma-soaked United Nations had provided the last time she accessed Galderkhaan. Preferably nearby since time mattered and preferably powerful. She was dealing with professional Priests. Priests who were also apparently resourceful psychopaths.

Briefly, she considered going downtown to the memorial park that was now stamped upon the former World Trade Center site, but something deep within her recoiled at the thought. Caitlin realized that if she relived any moment from that day and the weeks following, tapped the living terror of so many souls, she might run too hard in the opposite direction. She could take off so high and far into the transpersonal plane that she wouldn’t come back, not even for Jacob.

Unconsciously she had been walking south and now she was facing the mercifully rat-free arch of Washington Square Park.

She looked to the east, where the Brown Building, the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, still stood. A hundred and forty-six people had died there in 1911, having burned, suffocated, or jumped to their deaths. She was drawn toward it, across the park, open to the horrible energy… then stopped.

There was also power below her feet.

Of course. Washington Square Park itself had been built upon a former potter’s field. Tens of thousands of bodies, mostly dead from yellow fever, still lay below its diagonal paths and shrouding trees.

There was pain here, the agony of the forgotten dead. It clung like smoke. And there was running water here as well, not just in the central fountain but also Minetta Brook, which flowed through a series of culverts beneath the park and regularly flooded the basement of NYU’s law school library. Though it wasn’t big water, she had a fond association with the brook: it was the subject of one of the first little stories Ben had told her the day he spilled coffee in her lap and they became friends.

“ ‘Minetta,’” he’d explained, “is a corruption of a Lenape word, ‘Manetta,’ which means ‘dangerous spirit’ or”—Caitlin shuddered suddenly, remembering the other meaning—“ ‘snake water.’”

She looked around, suddenly frightened by the place… and by the task, which wasn’t clearly defined. She was going to power up with the ascended souls of this place, hope that the boost was strong enough, and hopefully ride that wave to a vague destination.

This is not very wise, she told herself. But as her father often lamented, there was no one else in the batter’s box.

Was there anything else she hadn’t considered? The lateness of the hour was a concern; the last thing she needed was to be interrupted by a well-meaning police officer. Caitlin would have to remain standing upright and hope that the gestures she used would just look like Tai Chi to an outsider.

She chose the southeast corner, which seemed less populated than other sections of the park. A thicket of trees, a small patch of evergreens, and a blessedly burned-out park lamp provided some measure of privacy. Caitlin squeezed between the trees and oriented herself toward the unseen harbor. There weren’t many cars traveling around the park, especially at night, which was good because the headlights would be a distraction even through the tree branches. Caitlin had decided that while she was concealed she needed to layer images, if she could, to keep an eye on the park. Yokane’s unexplained death demanded extra precaution.

She raised her hands. Before they were halfway elevated, a soul was there—but not outside her as Azha had been. He was within her. The figure was bearded, his flesh lined with age, but the eyes and mouth were vital… sinister.

Ny! she told him. No!

He did not reply. Perhaps he did not understand.

“You don’t have permission to be inside my head!” she said aloud.

I do not require it, he replied. In English.

You speak my language.

There is no need to use very much of it, he replied. I am Pao. You destroyed a great cazh. You will atone by helping me.

You will get out of my head and stand before me, she replied.

A second image materialized, that of a woman. Rensat. Caitlin wanted to surprise the Galderkhaani woman, acknowledge her by name, but that would inform the woman that she was prepared at least a little.

Rensat spoke next. I see a sleeping boy and I see a woman not far from him, she said. You will obey.

I see two dead Galderkhaani who can do no physical damage to anyone, Caitlin replied, finding courage in indignation.

The boy dreams of flight, of our great airships, the woman said. I can burn his mind.

Caitlin felt her resistance drain with her courage. The thought of her sweet little man having his inquisitive, creative mind assaulted was as great a violation as she could conceive. She knew she would not allow his innocence to be brutalized that way. She had one secret, just one, but it was not time to bring it out.

Caitlin forced herself to put fear aside and concentrate as she never had in her life, bringing to bear what she had experienced in Galderkhaan, on the subway, with Odilon, in her visions, and most recently with the stone. She needed that Galderkhaani artifact.

Caitlin extended a hand to the north, to the Group’s headquarters… to the slumbering stone. She was going to try to harness its energy and blast these souls out of their immaterial existence.

In an instant, the power she felt was stronger than ever before. She had plugged into two stones, Caitlin realized too late… the one belonging to the Group and the one belonging to Yokane. They were together, somehow, in the same place. There was no time to consider how or why they were together: it was all Caitlin could do to manage the power flowing into her left arm. She needed to balance that and extended her right arm—

A burst seemed to explode Caitlin’s hand, her arm, her body. The trail of energy continued inward and slammed into Caitlin’s soul. She began to shake so hard she was sure she would collapse—but there was no body to fall. She was suddenly outside of it, pulled free by stones somewhere else in the world… or time, she couldn’t be sure. Her right hand rose as the power continued to course through her, seeking the other tiles in the south. It found them, nearly wrenching Caitlin’s immaterial arms from their sockets; the stress pulled at her soul, causing it to cry out.

For one instant, Caitlin saw Ben’s face.

Ben saw her too and his expression flashed a look of madness.

“Cai!” he cried.

Then his face disappeared, lost in the electric conflagration that followed. Caitlin saw walls of olivine tiles flare to blinding life, burning out her vision but only for a moment—

They were hovering in a well wider and deeper than any she had ever seen; it was almost the size of a small lake. Caitlin’s arms were in a different position now. They were extended up, toward a ring of tiles that lined the high roof of the well. The tiles glowed lime green and pulsed in time with her heartbeat. She felt their energy coursing through her arms, throbbing in her chest. She no longer felt the stones at the Group mansion; it was as if they didn’t exist.

The psychiatrist in Caitlin saw this as the archetypical well in which so many hypnotherapy patients said they were trapped. But Caitlin’s increasing understanding of Galderkhaan told her something different: this was part of the Source. The well was the inside of one of the great columns she had seen when she stopped the cazh. She surmised that they were in the past, inside the hollow column, almost certainly before the Source was activated. They seemed to be vents for the magma that flowed underground, throughout the ancient state.

Pao and Rensat stood across from her, near but at what she judged to be a respectful distance. It was almost as if they were in awe of her… or of her power. At least, they didn’t charge her. She understood, then, that they hadn’t pulled her here: she had brought them. She and the powerful arc she had created between the stones in New York… and here.

“The tower of the motu-varkas,” Pao said. “The most powerful tiles… and we are in time. It is not yet destroyed.” His features took on an angry, hawkish cast. “You will stop the bloody Galderkhaani traitor who killed us all!”

Without turning from them, Caitlin saw a sea of seething red ooze below, flames dancing across its surface, rock walls flickering from red to brown shadow to red again. All along the granite, reaching up to the tiles, were carved figures that moved and danced as the light changed. She understood, in a moment of epiphany, that these figures, like the carvings on the stones she had seen in New York, were not just representations of the arm and hand motions during the cazh; they were the entire ceremony but without the verbal component. The Technologists meant for the Source to do the heavy lifting; all the Galderkhaani had to do was gather around.

You bloody idiots, she thought angrily. The Priests and the Technologists believed the same damn thing, used the same basic idea of bonding. Only the Priests did it through what amounted to prayer and the Technologists’ method was, in effect, automated and impersonal.

But it is the same!

Smoke rose in hundreds of hellish plumes, twining like vines and reaching up into whiteness beyond the glowing stones. Caitlin wasn’t sure what to do next. She continued to watch her opponents, waiting for them to attack.

Instead, they were very still. “We are here,” Rensat said in triumph.

Caitlin understood, then, that she had done exactly what Pao and Rensat wanted. She had used the power of the stones to go back, just as she had done by tapping into them at the UN.

“You will save us,” Rensat continued. “You must.” The Galderkhaani specter moved a hand. The smoke moved sinuously and began to form a face.

Jacob’s face. His sleeping face.

It quickly gained clarity, texture, personality. Caitlin felt pain in her soul. Even if she could throw all the energy in her body at these two, Rensat still had a grip on her boy.

Another face formed, this one brought forth by Pao. It was a middle-aged man, his features rugged but tired looking, almost drawn.

“You will find Vol,” Rensat said. “You will stop him from activating this column.”

“If I do that,” Caitlin said, “my son will die. My world will no longer exist.”

“You will cease to exist with it,” Pao assured her. “There will be no sorrow.”

The casual, almost dismissive quality of his voice caused Caitlin to tremble. She had intended to continue trying to reason with them, to reveal what Azha had told her—but anger possessed her.

Caitlin swept her arms up, bringing heat from the magma to tear through the image Pao had created. The smoke flew apart and almost at once Caitlin brought her arms back down. The tester of smoke swept down, hot and thick, and the souls of the two Galderkhaani were caught in it. The draft pulled them down, dull shapes of light that were thrust into the boiling mud—

But only for a moment. The lava bulged and surged as the burning liquid filled the souls of Pao and Rensat, like molds, creating distorted demons in red with fiery eyes and gaping mouths. Then, very slowly, the lava fell away and the radiant spirits glowed even more brightly as they returned to their previous positions… hovering, drifting closer.

Rensat came nearer and shrieked at Caitlin, a cry of pain that had been building for millennia. The scream knocked Caitlin back, drove her into the stone. She did not feel the concussion but she could not move from the inside of the column.

“You will do this!” Rensat cried. “You will do this or you will never leave here!”

Caitlin was no longer thinking. She cut off her vision, allowed her mind to go free, blank, and was suddenly floating outside the column, hovering in the night, a strange world below her. But there was no time to get her bearings. Pao and Rensat came out almost immediately, charged through the column, the constituent stones glowing orange from the heat that came with them. Caitlin raised her arms again and cried out her own suppressed rage—not as ancient but no less feral… and protective.

“You will not have him!” she roared, pushing the heat back at her attackers. She closed her eyes again and powered herself through the ether, until she was once more inside the column, the two devilish souls beside her.

Pao tried to grab Caitlin. His mouth was rabid, fingers clawing helplessly.

He has to know it’s useless, Caitlin thought.

But it wasn’t useless: it was a distraction, Caitlin realized.

As Pao lashed out, Rensat rose, working to draw the flames with her, directing them to the hovering cloud of smoke where there were still vestiges of the face of a small boy… all the while uttering words that were becoming too familiar.

Aytah fera-cazh grymat—

That will be the instrument of death! Caitlin realized. They would burn Jacob by the cazh. He would not be bonded to them… he would simply die, his soul ascended and alone.

Caitlin screamed, flung one arm up, and threw the woman up through the smoke. With the other arm, Caitlin quieted the rising flames.

“You cannot do this forever!” Pao said as he repeated the same process Rensat had begun.

Caitlin released Rensat and turned on Pao.

“You will not get my son,” Caitlin vowed. Yet even as she spoke, Caitlin knew that her grip on the past was growing tenuous, that she had to finish this now if she were to save Jacob. If she left, he would be defenseless.

She had to use the only weapon that remained, one that would require conviction—strength of a very different sort than she had been using. As a psychiatrist, she could not be sure how this would play out. It could backfire, join Pao more closely to Rensat. But there was no other play.

Caitlin turned to Rensat. “You cannot have my boy any more than you can have Pao,” Caitlin charged. This was the time to hit her, not with energy—but with truth. “Does he know your plan to betray him?”

Caitlin felt Rensat shudder. She also saw Pao’s expression change slightly, subtly.

Pao did not turn to his companion but asked, “What is she talking about?”

Rensat did not answer him; she could not. No words could possibly submerge the rage that was building inside of her. In that moment, Caitlin reached up with her right hand, beyond the tiles, beyond the cone, sending her fingers outward as she had done when they were still in the park, stretching, seeking a familiar sensation—

“Rensat, what is this woman saying?” Pao demanded.

“It is a lie to protect her son!” Rensat replied.

“There is no reason to lie when the truth will stop you,” Caitlin assured him. “Pao, hear me. Rensat is working with an acolyte named Enzo. They have their own plan.”

Pao was dismissive. “This is a lie.”

“It is not,” Caitlin said. “Rensat knows the truth. Enzo’s spirit survives. It has been trying to communicate with you!”

“That is not possible,” Pao said. “The ascended have no voice.”

“She has cazhed with one in my time to transcend, to try and reach you,” Caitlin said, challenging him. “As soon as you save Galderkhaan, Rensat and Enzo intend to destroy it.”

“Another lie!” Rensat shrieked, and hurled a ball of heat so intense that Caitlin felt herself nearly torn apart. Screaming from the effort, Caitlin gathered every ounce of energy left in her and focused on her son, on saving him, and allowed the burn to pass through her.

As soon as it passed, before Rensat could try again, she said, “Pao, if I were to save Galderkhaan, Rensat will gather as many souls as she could, get them to speak the cazh, and burn them all, perhaps tens of thousands of souls! She will kill them, either willingly or unwillingly, so they can all rise to the cosmic plane!”

The specificity of her allegation caused Pao to hesitate. He turned to Rensat.

“Is this so?” he asked, in shock, deep hurt, but also belief. He knew Rensat’s passion for her faith.

“There is no reason to exist without Candescence!” Rensat cried.

“But… Galderkhaan would still end, it would die with its citizens. That is not the goal we have worked toward.”

Pao seemed utterly lost but Rensat’s gaze was pure in its hate. Caitlin hoped that Rensat would continue to hate, for just a few moments longer. As long as she was directing rage at Caitlin, she could not turn it on Jacob. Caitlin’s fingers continued to roam—

And then she found it. A section of mosaics above her, the heart of the construction, a sequence of stones that carried her like a living bolt of lightning from tile to tile, from mosaic to mosaic, from chamber to chamber throughout Galderkhaan. The charge that raced through Caitlin was greater than the one she had experienced at the United Nations or in the park. Unlike the ruins in modern Antarctica, this network of olivine stones was complete in ancient Galderkhaan. Complete and powered by forces that were like nothing on this planet.

There were visions, images, whiteness so pure it hurt, pain so deep it defied description, glory so great it could not be fathomed—all of that in a moment, a moment that Caitlin could not sustain.

Harvesting power greater than her mind or body could bear, Caitlin released it with a primal, nuclear flash. But it was not a destructive force, it was a cleansing wave, like the proverbial power of prayer raised exponentially. It wiped away the anomalies in time, rid the universe of those who did not belong there. Pao and Rensat contorted into something that resembled the drawing of a young child, stiff and ungainly and out of proportion. Then something else rose from below—a flaming face, bubbling up and rising through the center of the column, a soul being ripped from its fiery shell.

Enzo, Caitlin realized.

Dimly, through the omnipotent power of the tiles, Caitlin heard the echoing screams of two transcended souls being torn from the earth. The cries grew fainter by the moment, leaving a void that quickly filled with the heat and unrest of the magma. And then she felt the souls of Pao and Rensat vanish, just as she had felt the souls of the dying of Galderkhaan vanish. As soon as they were gone she saw the flaming remains of Enzo shoot skyward, dragging another face with it, a woman, not Galderkhaani but one whom she did not recognize. The woman fell away, dissipated, as the lost soul of Enzo continued to rise, to ascend to the lowest of the realms.

All of this effort, the eternity of flame, of waiting, and she did not even transcend. The tragedy was profound and weighed on Caitlin despite all they had done.

But when Caitlin tried to go she found that she herself could not break free.

The power she had plugged into was holding her. Caitlin had released it but it had not released her. Without knowing how much time she had—it could have been a moment or it could have been eternity—Caitlin fought hard to see Jacob in the smoke. And then she saw him for a flashing instant before his face vanished.

“I love you!” she cried.

And then the tower itself was gone, along with all sight, hearing, and touch and every other sensation…

In Flora’s basement, moments after the tile fought its acoustic confinement and came fiercely to life, Ben’s eyes rolled blank and his legs failed. Though he was still breathing, he slumped down the wall to a heap on the floor. Flora and Adrienne stared at him. Adrienne rose from her stool.

“No!” Flora snapped. “That wasn’t a faint. It was like an epileptic seizure, without the tremors.”

“So shouldn’t we—”

“We’re not touching a damned thing,” Flora said, watching his ears and nose for a sign of liquefied brain.

Adrienne sat back down. The eyes of both women turned back to the tile. It remained in suspension but it was like a green sun, outwardly quiescent.

“Almost like it’s alive,” Flora said.

“It’s a stone,” Adrienne told her.

“It is a stone with secrets,” Flora said, correcting her. “Secrets I believe Dr. Caitlin O’Hara has just begun to unlock.”

As she spoke, Ben came to. He looked around, momentarily confused.

“What happened?” he asked.

“You appeared to have a seizure of some kind,” Flora told him. “Can I get you anything?”

“How long have I been out?”

“A little more than a minute, I’d say.”

Ben struggled to stand. “Caitlin’s doing that,” he said referring to the stone.

“Very likely,” Flora said.

“She shouldn’t be.”

“Also true.”

On unsteady feet, he made his way as quickly as he could from the room. He tried calling Caitlin as he left but all he got was voice mail. He searched for a text. Nothing new had come through.

With sickness rising in his throat, he limped into a night that suddenly seemed very much darker than before.

CHAPTER 24

In Washington Square Park, the water of the central fountain exploded in flame.

The few people who were in the park saw it and screamed. A second later they were pulling out their phones.

Minutes later, two fire trucks shrieked down Fifth Avenue and firefighters poured through the arch, running toward the fountain. Spraying water on the twenty-foot-high flames proved its inadequacy. They switched to using fire-retardant foam and that had some effect. One captain shouted into his radio, ordering as much foam as the firehouses in that quadrant of Manhattan possessed. Several firefighters ran toward the NYU buildings to collect fire extinguishers.

No one saw a figure in the southeast corner with her arms outstretched, as though she were worshipping the moon.

No one saw that figure topple to the ground.

And no one saw Minetta Brook begin to burn in its culvert underground.

Lying beneath the trees, Caitlin could only glimpse a sky that was the wrong shade of orange, coming from her right. She climbed to her hands and knees, then knelt upright, noticing that her clothes were smoking but not on fire. She craned her neck out from the thicket and saw flashing lights from fire trucks, then the fire shooting up from the water fountain.

She rose unsteadily and looked around. At the southwest corner of the park, flames were blowing out of the windows of the NYU law school library. There was the boom of another explosion and the flames shot tens of feet in the air. Bystanders were screaming; some firefighters were shouting while others aimed white jets of foam at the building. All the nearby trees were festooned in white foam and yet as the foam fell on the flames, the fire seemed to find apertures and surge through, still alive.

Then another blast, this time from a building on the west side of the park, flames coursing through the windows and more sirens in the distance.

Caitlin tried to move from her spot, but her legs wouldn’t have it. They slipped from under her, and once again, she was on her back.

Shutting her eyes, too spent to keep them open, she saw shadows of black and amber play on her closed lids. The colors formed the hint of a face, like one of those afterimages of Abraham Lincoln she used to stare at in the encyclopedia.

You are not finished, a voice said to her. It was a familiar voice. The ascended Yokane?

Caitlin thought, Screw you. I did what you asked.

The face faded, along with all traces of light. But before it went, it said:

It is not I who asks.

And then everything was gone.

Ben had been walking blind; he knew that. He called Caitlin’s phone repeatedly and got only voice mail. But with Caitlin’s history it was a fair bet to head toward the action, and Washington Square Park was certainly that.

He heard the trouble before he saw it or smelled it.

Red lights were flashing everywhere, and fires crackled with long shadows in all directions. The bloops of sirens sounded as smaller emergency vehicles sped down side streets to join the fire trucks. The sky was a seething orange and smoke was blowing every which way.

Ben approached a cop at the north entrance to the park. “Please,” he said, “I need to get in. I think my friend is in there.”

“No one is allowed at this time,” she replied.

Ben pulled out his ID. “I’m from the United Nations. I’m really worried about her.”

“Sir, I cannot let you in. Injured persons are being transported to the Lenox Hill emergency room on Twelfth and Seventh.”

Frustrated, Ben glanced west, where the fire trucks had clumped together.

“Are they having trouble putting out the fire?” he asked.

“It’s under control,” the cop said, but Ben noticed her hesitation and the surprise in her eyes. He walked away before she could think twice.

The west side of the park was obviously going to be impassable so Ben headed around the quieter east side instead. All the park entrances were blocked by police but there was one ambulance over on the east side, and EMTs were carrying someone on a gurney toward it.

Ben’s feet sped up before his mind caught on. He was running by the time he realized the patient was Caitlin. He got to the vehicle just as they were lifting the gurney into the back. His stomach lurched as he saw her face, her closed eyes.

“Let me through!” he shouted at the small knot of bystanders and paramedics, pushing at them. “I know her. I have to go with her.”

“Sir, you can’t—”

“I’m her boyfriend,” Ben snapped at the EMT, and climbed into the ambulance. “How bad is it?”

“She’s unconscious,” said the paramedic sitting beside her.

“How unconscious?”

The paramedic flashed him a look. Ben noticed that the man was sinking his thumbnail into the nail bed of Caitlin’s right pinky finger. Then he let go of her hand.

“No reaction,” he said as the door clunked shut behind them.

Ben felt his heart stop for a second. He picked up Caitlin’s hand and held it as the ambulance peeled away from the park.

Shortly after Ben had left, Flora rose from her stool.

The stone seemed to have calmed and stabilized, and she wanted to try to reconnect with Mikel.

Ambling down the basement corridor, Flora reached into her pocket for her phone to check messages and alerts. As she climbed the stairs to the first floor, her phone rang in her hand. It was Mikel calling via the radio.

“Caitlin O’Hara is in danger!” he called over static.

“What do you mean?”

“The Galderkhaani… I spoke with them. They want her to go back and change everything!”

“Dear Lord.”

“Is she still there?”

Before Flora could answer, she felt a hand grip her chin and a sharp point press against her throat. In a mirror across the room, she saw that Casey Skett was holding one of their ancient knives to her neck. With his foot he closed the door of the office behind them.

“Flora?” Mikel shouted urgently over the static. “Flora!”

“Hang up,” Casey whispered.

Flora ended the call.

“I’m going to sit you down now, Flora,” Casey said. He put one of his knees behind one of hers and nudged until she took a step. “But even when I let you go, remember that I can still kill you before you can scream.”

He nudged her again.

“What are you doing Casey—” she started.

“It’s time you understood our point of view,” Casey said, and walked her across her office.

In the basement, the stone had flickered brilliant green, just once, after Flora left. Adrienne was not asleep—not exactly. Her eyes were still open and suddenly she was swimming joyfully in the sea, entirely in touch with her senses in a way she had never experienced.

She was frolicking with penguins, hundreds of swimming penguins, but taking her time, not yet ready to return to shore. There was so much information to take in. Every part of her body seemed to be tuned, monitoring the changing swell of deep water all around her. A map was forming for her, a village she was remembering as if she were someone else. Then she was back on shore, locating masses of ice and whales swimming hundreds of feet away in the same direction as the penguins. They were all heading toward a long cliff of ice, the ocean running beneath it. She heard the call of home just as they did, and her will and her consciousness and her body were wholly one.

My god, she thought. I can feel everything.

Jacob O’Hara drummed on the wall. There was no answer.

“Mommy?” he said and signed, eyes still closed.

“She’s not here right now, Jacob,” a sweet voice told him.

The boy rubbed the sleep off and looked up to see a vaguely familiar face. His eyebrows reflected his confusion.

“Remember me?” Anita tried to sign. “From your mother’s office?”

“Your signing is bad,” Jacob said mildly, reaching for the box with his hearing aids.

“I am pretty terrible,” she admitted. “So maybe you will show me how to do it better?”

The intercom buzzed down the hall. Anita motioned that she’d come back, then headed to the white box on the wall and peered at its screen. In the predawn light the camera showed a very thin black woman with high cheekbones, a kerchief over her hair and a blue bag in her arms. Behind her stood a younger black man wearing sunglasses.

Anita hit the “talk” button. “Yes?”

“I am a friend to Dr. O’Hara,” said Madame Langlois. “She is in the coils of the great serpent. Let me come in.”