A Dream of Ice

EPILOGUE

There was nothing to hold on to.

Caitlin tried again and again. Her strongest memory of Jacob in their shared history was not moving her. She tried reaching for Ben. She even attempted to invoke the night they spent together, when they’d expanded so far beyond themselves that reality was eclipsed by total joy. Though the memory warmed her slightly, Ben wasn’t there.

In fact, she could not feel a path away from this place. Nothingness surrounded her.

“Azha?” she called tentatively.

Nothing.

A cold death seemed to have taken over the tiles, too. She felt nothing from them, not the ones in the South Pole, not the two just to the north.

It’s not possible to feel nothing, she told herself. Not unless—

But she wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be. She still had conscious thought. Then those thoughts turned to the dead of Galderkhaan—all those she’d been speaking to. They were dead. They had conscious thought.

Frightened now, Caitlin argued with herself. She was fairly sure that Rensat and Pao were gone, truly gone, so she took comfort in that. Perhaps the void left by their departure was responsible for what she was feeling—some kind of psychic aftershock, a spiritual coma. Maybe she would come out of it if she was patient.

But that wasn’t happening. Nothing was. That was the operative word right now for all sensation: nothing.

Self-doubt began to fill her, along with exhaustion and the urge to give up.

“No!” she said aloud. “I have a son and I’m getting back to him, goddamn it!”

Her voice didn’t even echo. It didn’t have a sound. It was only in her head. What was this?

I’m breathing, she suddenly realized. I must be in shock.

Deciding to assume that she wasn’t dead and still had a body, Caitlin chose to remember the moment when she was most thoroughly inhabiting it, when she had been almost completely consumed by her body, all other consciousness blanked out. That wasn’t a time with Ben or any other man. It was the overwhelming pain of giving birth to Jacob. She remembered the joyous agony, felt it, reached through it—

Still, there was no hook. There was no connection.

Caitlin wanted to weep but moaned instead. She tightened her hands into fists.

Wait—you did that!

She felt her hands, balled tight. A surge of excitement swept through her. She flexed her fingers. She couldn’t have done that if she were dead or injured.

Toes—she tested her toes. She felt them, too.

Relax, she told herself. You’re alive—just let this happen now.

She went back to thoughts, to images.

My god, she told herself, almost giddy with the thrill of it: these images were unfamiliar but they felt exactly like dreams, nothing like any of the visions she’d experienced over the last few weeks. No emotions were associated with them, either her own or anyone else’s. She was simply watching a huge sheet of ice move, creeping a millimeter forward. Then, in the kind of non sequitur of a normal dream, suddenly she was watching eels twist and plunge through the ice, which of course was impossible. Fish—strange fish, but maybe not strange for South Polar waters—leaped for the sky, a sky of vivid blue, with clouds and… nets? Huge cigar-shaped balloons?

Well, this is a dream… a lucid dream… allowing me to editorialize on the strangeness of it.

And then she was awake, with the normal if pronounced feeling of early-in-the-morning laziness.

The sun was shining on her eyelids. Had she lain in the damn park all night? Was she in a hospital room? She breathed in, stretching out her arms, and smelled faint traces of sulfur and jasmine. Then she spread her fingertips into the sunlight for warmth, and the sensation was hers but the hand was not.

Nor was the world of strange buildings and airships that surrounded her.