A Vision of Fire

CHAPTER 25

Ben heard the soft buzz of his phone, reached for it, and grabbed air.

That potted plant wasn’t his night table and the smell in his nose wasn’t—

This wasn’t his bed. In the dark, he saw the contour of a woman’s bare shoulders and strands of hair.

He remembered… Caitlin… last night… as his phone buzzed again. Where the hell did I leave it…?

He sat up carefully to avoid waking her and looked around, then down. The back pocket of his trousers on the floor was pulsing blue-white. He leaned over for it, snuck his phone from the pocket with two fingers, and sat in the bed so as to shield Caitlin from the glow as he read two texts. The first was sent at 3:02 a.m.: Hangout asap.

The second came a minute later: Under fire now.

The sender was Ignacio de Viana, a friend of Ben’s from Uruguay—

a civilian who, for the last year, had been one of the hundred UN personnel in Jammu, India. “Hangout” did not mean “let’s hang out” and “under fire” was literal, no joke.

Ben texted back: 60 secs.

He pulled on his trousers and eased out of Caitlin’s room. Her apartment was chilly and dim, with the kind of hopeless illumination from streetlights through sheer curtains that made it seem like the night itself was drained, tired. Ben stumbled through the unfamiliar terrain, located his bag, and placed his tablet on the now-familiar dining table. Luckily he had only put the computer to sleep instead of shutting it down, so it was a quick jump to Google Hangouts. While signaling Ignacio for a video chat, Ben used the brief delay to turn on a program that would record the face-to-face call. He quickly pulled his earphones from his bag as well, to prevent sounds from traveling down the hall. Shivering, he threw a nearby afghan over his bare shoulders.

As the call connected, Ben jacked in. Machine-gun fire exploded in his ears and he jerked backward, his stomach in his throat. It took him a moment to realize that it was from the earphones, not the room.

Ignacio appeared on-screen but the camera angle was skewed, only showing part of his face and someone’s living room. Gray smoke was spreading across afternoon sunlight. Ignacio was shouting in Urdu over his shoulder, “Get away from the window!” Someone shouted something back that Ben didn’t quite catch. He would play it back later, enhance the sound.

When Ignacio finally brought the camera to his face, Ben saw that one lens of his glasses was gone and the other fractured. The young man’s typically well-groomed hair was wild and matted on one side with blood. There was a red sheen on his scalp that indicated the wound was fresh and still flowing.

“Jesus Christ,” Ben exclaimed. “Where—”

“Raghunath Bazaar,” Ignacio yelled over the pounding of intermittent gunfire. “I don’t know who showed up first, Indian soldiers or Pakistani, but they’re all freaking insane, Ben. They’re shooting civilians at random.”

There was a loud pop outside the room and Ignacio dropped from the bottom of the screen. Ben heard shouts from the left and right sides, different voices, angry voices. There were more pops, then silence. Were they hit? Or had they just taken cover?

Ben watched anxiously as pictures fell from the wall across the room. Then the shock of a grenade blew into his ears. He recoiled and his hands flew up to yank the headphones from his ears. After a second, catching his breath, he replaced them.

“Ignacio, are you safe?” he shouted.

After a troubling delay, Ignacio called, “Yes.” He repositioned himself on the screen. “I’m across the street from the fighting, up the stairs. It’s all across the street. Ben, you have to tell the assembly this is happening! It’s like we’re in bloody Afghanistan. No rule of law here. None.”

“Where are the rest of the peacekeepers?”

“The main body is about ten miles away. Ten of us were making a routine tour when a bomb went off.”

“Hold on,” Ben said.

“I’m not going anywhere, trust me.”

Ben texted Ambassador Pawar. Within a minute he had added the diplomat to the video chat. Ignacio’s camera angled steeply as he stood up, keeping it in his hand. There was a glimpse of the silks of a sari, a woman pulling at his arm.

“Ignacio, I’ve got Ambassador Ganak Pawar, can you see him?”

“Yes.” Ignacio coughed. “I’m told we have to go, the smoke in the room is getting thicker.”

“Mr. de Viana, can you get to a safe place?” said the ambassador.

“The woman who lives here says they are going out the back, to the main road, where people are forming caravans.”

Ignacio’s camera swerved again and Ben heard a woman shout in Urdu, “The floor, the floor!” The camera dipped; Ignacio must have kneeled for cover again. A window came into view, showing the pockmarked onion domes of temples and shattered rooftops. Then the lens dropped to the retail shacks in front of the temples and the wide street. They looked as though they’d been toppled by an earthquake—splintered, crushed by stone from an adjacent structure. Ben counted five bodies, wide, dark stains of their blood on the street, and others who were still crouched, wounded and screaming, in the doorway of a cinema. Six soldiers ran through the area, guns at their hips, ready to fire in an instant. One of them jerked to a stop, spun around, and shot his gun at second-floor windows above a shop.

“Pakistani and Indian soldiers both came in,” Ignacio said. “Now they’re shooting at each other.”

Ben glanced at the ambassador’s face in the corner of his screen; it was frozen with horror.

Out Ignacio’s window, a pedestrian suddenly broke and ran for an alley but shrank in terror halfway, cowering next to a food stand as a soldier’s gunfire shredded bowls of nuts and dried fruits just above his head. A bilious yellow cloud of spices flew into the air. Ben jolted as another bomb exploded in his ears. A section of a temple roof shattered before his eyes, blasting fragments and black smoke. The explosion had come from the inside. Terrorists, most likely—local instigators blowing up their own home so they could kill outsiders.

“My god,” Ganak breathed.

Ignacio flipped his tablet to face himself but before he could speak his hands wobbled and the camera swung wildly, hitting the floor. Ben gasped. Had he been shot? But the picture remained, showing Ignacio crawling away from the window. He reached a woman lying nearby, grabbed her under the arms, and, still on his knees, dragged her jerking body through an arch into the living room. The woman was screaming, her stomach heaving, blood gushing from her mouth onto her yellow sari. They could see the red stain spreading over one side of her chest. Ignacio crawled back into the room and then he was facing the camera, yelling: “Get the UN forces here now! I don’t have the authority—get the damned UN to order them to move!”

Then in the distance, another explosion. The picture dropped and the feed cut off.

Ben closed his eyes. He was perspiring, shaking as though he had a high fever. Globes of light were exploding behind his eyelids—physical memories of bombs at night high over Bangladesh in 2001. He heard his name from a distance, opened his eyes, and there was Ganak calling to him.

“Ben…?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m here.”

“I only recorded my portion—”

“I’ll send you the full recording.”

“Thank you. We must meet at once. Can you come to my office in half an hour?”

“Of course.”

The men ended the chat without courtesies. The ambassador would already be moving to contact military officers. Ben e-mailed the video, then sat and shook, wiping moisture from his brow and eyes. He wanted the whole goddamned thing over there to end, every madness humans inflicted on themselves to go away.

Back in the bedroom, Caitlin jolted awake.

She swung her legs out of bed and only then remembered that her old friend Ben had been in that bed all night.

She pulled on a bathrobe and padded down the hall, pausing outside Jacob’s room in case he was awake early. She heard nothing and continued to the living room, where she saw Ben sitting with his hands on the top of his head, huddled under her afghan in utter despair. Is he regretting last night? she thought, but then she noticed his tablet, his Google account open, and a blank video chat window.

“Ben,” she said, and placed one hand on his shoulder. His breathing was deep and ragged as he forced it into a rhythm, trying to control himself.

“Jammu,” he blurted. “Attack on a shopping center.”

“Oh no,” Caitlin said, sitting next to him.

“Sorry I woke you,” he said.

“You didn’t. Anything I can do?”

He shook his head and stood, dropping the blanket. “Another bump to the body count,” he said harshly, and shoved his tablet into his bag with sharp, angry movements. “I’ve got to meet the ambassador. This thing is beyond out of control.”

He hurried back to Caitlin’s bedroom, miserable and urgent.

She gave him his space. She knew this side of Ben—this side of the work they did. She picked up the afghan and wrapped it around herself, trying to focus on anything other than what Ben had just told her. She had not heard from Gaelle since she left Haiti. Whenever she called, she got the Anglade Charter voice mail. And Maanik—Caitlin was barely keeping a handhold on the cliff of that trauma. She almost envied Ben’s having a target to focus on: territorial carnivores fighting over land and ideology. What the hell was she battling? The session with Maanik had taunted rather than informed her. It was like she was searching for something cunning, cagey, that did not wish to be seen.

If I want to help these kids, if I want to sleep again, I need more information. Ben was dealing with his crisis by running toward it. She had to do the same.

There was another teenager Caitlin had not been able to contact yet. She brought up her phone’s browser and searched for Atash. It took some time but she discovered an article written the day before about self-immolation in Iran. It referred to the boy who set himself on fire in a library. He was, it said, in critical condition at a Tehran hospital.

Still alive, Caitlin thought with a rush of exhilaration.

Ben came charging into the living room.

“I’m sorry.” He glanced at her. “I’m sorry I’m handling this so—so crappy.”

“You’re not,” she replied. “It’s been a helluva few days.”

He agreed with a grunt as he grabbed his coat and thrust an arm into it.

She struggled with herself, knowing that if she said anything now it was probably going to be seen as wrong—but it had to be said before she lost him to this crisis. “Ben, I know the timing couldn’t be worse but I need your help.”

“With what?”

“I have to get to Iran as soon as possible.”

Ben’s hands dropped from the coat zipper he’d been trying to close. He looked sad but when he spoke he sounded ferocious. “What are you talking about?”

“The boy who burned himself—he’s alive.”

“Okay—and?”

“You saw last night what we’re up against. I have to see him.”

“I need you to be alive, not kidnapped and imprisoned and God knows what. I’ll find you a translator and you can call him.”

“There’s no guarantee the boy can talk. And, Ben, I can’t see a nonexistent breeze over the phone.”

“If he can’t speak, if he’s that badly burned, the likelihood of getting anything from him isn’t worth the risk.”

“You can’t know that. I can find a way to safely navigate Iran if I have UN help.”

“Not through me, Caitlin.” Then, as though the sun had risen early, understanding washed over his expression. He turned to face her. “And not from me, either.”

“Sorry?”

“You’re running away from me.”

She was surprised. “Ben, I swear to god, I’m not. I have to see this boy now. He may not live—”

“I said no,” he snapped, giving up on the zipper, not meeting her eye as he grabbed his bag.

“Ben, listen. Last night I understood—no, I felt what could be possible with you. I felt the ability to hold more with you, to be stronger because it’s more than just me now.”

“Not buying. You’re punching out like I’m an appointment.”

“Please listen—”

“No! I will not help you go to Iran, Caitlin.”

He left the room and headed through the foyer to the front door. She called after him, “I’m going, Ben. I’ll find another way.”

There was no reply but the sound of shoes on hardwood and the door shutting.

Caitlin strode to the dining table, picked up her cell phone, and called Director Qanooni of the World Health Organization.

CHAPTER 26

A couple hours later Qanooni called back from the Regional Office for Africa in Brazzaville, Congo. He was working through lunch at his desk. Caitlin told him there was a medical emergency in Iran and she needed to get there ASAP.

“The Country Office in the Islamic Republic of Iran has—how shall I put it? Insubstantial influence over the Ministry of Health.”

“I am aware of that, Mr. Director, but the condition of a patient there may have a great impact on patients here and in Haiti.”

“This must be serious,” he said thoughtfully. “You called me ‘Mr. Director.’”

“Sir—”

“And now ‘sir,’” he said.

“—this is urgent,” she pleaded. “I don’t have time to file a formal request. Is there any way you can get me in?”

“Based on something so vague? No. If you can write something that can, perhaps, expand upon what little you’ve told me?”

Expand? she thought. The minds of young people are being assaulted by a force that only animals and I can detect. Why don’t I just say that? Or hell, why not just stick out my right hand and think it at him?

Then a text from Ben arrived. It was just one word: Done.

Caitlin quickly talked her way off the call and phoned him.

“Ben—are you serious?”

“Very.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

“You can thank Mohammed Larijani, a translator at the Permanent Mission. He’s the one who’s making it happen. He’s telling the Iranian ambassador that an American doctor needs to consult with Iranian doctors. Very good propaganda for them. You don’t mind being used that way, do you?”

“Not at all.” She didn’t have time to work through the double meaning his tone implied.

“I hope it’s worth it,” he added.

“It will be,” she said as she went to her bedroom and began packing. “Ben, are you okay?”

“I’m fine. My friend in Jammu is alive, his girlfriend’s in the hospital.”

“That’s good. But I mean—”

“I know what you mean. Have a safe trip.”

“I will. Hey, Ben?”

“What?”

“A psychiatrist walks into an Iranian bar. She orders scotch with crow.”

Ben was silent.

“Not even a chuckle?” she asked.

“Not now. Not today.”

“I’m sorry you feel like that,” she said sincerely. “We’ll talk when I get back.”

“I’ll text the details of your trip. Mohammed thinks you can get on the two o’clock Aeroflot flight. I have to go now.”

She said thanks again and good-bye, ended the call, and did what she always did when there was a challenge: looked ahead. She called her father and asked if he could please come back to the city. He agreed, of course. He always did.

Caitlin felt terrible all over. It was partly the ever-ready generosity of her father, partly the aftershock of what Ben had said to her, but she couldn’t stop feelings of guilt from clouding her mind. Still, she had a job to do.

Jacob didn’t help her self-regard. She had never taken two trips so closely together. She kept him home from school so they could have a half day together but he was furious throughout, making a point of ignoring her with abrupt turns of his back at first and then acting as if she were invisible. Finally, as her time to leave approached, Jacob simply removed himself. He sat in his room with his eyes closed and without hearing aids. If he sensed her coming into his room to say good-bye—and she suspected he did—he did not acknowledge it.

Caitlin had learned years ago that during these rare angry moments, any touch—tapping his hand or hugging his shoulders—would be akin to slapping him. It didn’t leave her with many choices. But she could, and did, sit across his desk from him for several minutes so that he knew she was present. She kept her hands placed near him, not touching, so he could smell her hand lotion. And she noticed that his ankle was in contact with the leg of the desk, which had a slight wobble, so she knew he felt it as she wrote a note on his Museum of Natural History dinosaur notepad, which would be waiting in his line of sight when he opened his eyes.

I love you, Jacob, it said. I’ll Skype you as soon as I get a connection and I’ll be right back. XOXO

Her father gave her a big hug before she headed out to the waiting car.

“Don’t worry about Jacob,” he said.

“Of course I’m going to worry about him,” she said, sighing.

“I mean it, Miss Caitlin O’Hara,” he said as if he were reprimanding her thirty years ago. “You have to save all your worrying for yourself on this trip. I want extra caution from you, hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“Zero risks. I don’t care who needs help, you find someone else to help them.”

“It’s just one boy in a hospital bed. No natural disasters to run from.” She tried to smile.

He kissed her forehead. “God, I hope so.”

Just before Caitlin sat in the waiting sedan, Ben called with good news: she would not have to swing by the United Nations to pick up her papers. Not only would the Iranian ambassador’s wife meet her at the airport, Caitlin was invited to ride with them and their staff on the state jet.

A smile spread across Caitlin’s face. She thanked him again. He told her not to mention it. And meant just that.

She reached JFK and was met by a member of the mission staff, who advised her to put her head scarf on before they boarded. Caitlin reached into her carry-on and tied on her scarf—a present from Ben on one of their trips. He’d grabbed it from a nearby bazaar after she’d forgotten hers at the hotel, and the laughter they shared over its cheesy print had always trumped her vanity. She was then taken to the gate and across the tarmac to the waiting aircraft. The wife of the permanent representative of Iran welcomed Caitlin to join her fortuitously timed trip home to greet a new baby niece. After a period of courteous chitchat Caitlin curled into a plush fold-down seat with an eye mask and instantly slept. Exhaustion had finally caught up with her, and the thirteen hours felt like a gift.

She slept through the flight, a continuous rest for the first time in weeks, until the same staff member who had met her at the airport woke her.

“We will be landing within the hour,” the young man told her.

With the hum of the jet engines sounding especially loud in ears still full of cottony sleep, and the kick of guilt already starting again in her gut, Caitlin navigated to the restroom with her carry-on bag. She changed into clothes she hadn’t worn in years: tight jeans; a crisp, white Pink-brand shirt; and a bright red Yves Saint Laurent knee-length coat with long sleeves. She chose black eyeliner and mascara and a heightened but natural shade of lipstick, then applied them all a bit more strongly than she ordinarily would have. Finally she added short black suede boots with high heels and tied a red-and-blue Hermès Liberty scarf over her hair, carefully winding the ends around her neck. Ben’s cheesy scarf would not be appropriate in Tehran. It did not escape her sense of irony that she was preening for a theocracy in a way she never had for any man.

When she reentered the cabin, the representative’s wife, chatting on her phone, smiled and nodded approvingly. It was a small thing, but it felt good to have done something right.

Tehran’s time was eleven thirty in the morning. Caitlin’s concern about getting to Atash as soon as possible had made its way from Ben to Mohammed to the representative. The ambassador’s wife informed Caitlin that her guide would meet them at Imam Khomeini International Airport and take her directly to the hospital. At their private gate she was introduced to a woman in a severe black and gold head scarf and designer sunglasses pushed back on her head. She introduced herself as Maryam, no last name, and spent little time coordinating with the representative’s wife before ushering Caitlin through customs to a black sedan.

The windows of the car were smoked to near-opacity and Caitlin wondered during their half-hour ride whether she was supposed to pretend she was not really there, or that the city was not there around her. Maryam, sharing the backseat with her, only gave Caitlin’s form a once-over before spending the rest of the ride on her phone in Farsi.

Caitlin glimpsed what she could through the windows and briefly mourned what she would not be able to do on this trip. Under any other circumstance she would have treasured the opportunity to see Tehran, a city she’d long hoped to explore. As it was, the driver used only expressways and the city didn’t seem that different from any other. There were wider avenues than in New York, shorter buildings but with more massive proportions, something broader about the windows, fewer glass fronts. But she didn’t have the time to move closer and really look.

The expressway passed near a boulevard that was crammed sidewalk to sidewalk with people. The color green was prominent in banners and she could hear the chanting roar from the gathering.

“A protest?” she asked, though Maryam was still on the phone.

“Yes,” Maryam said. “Economic. The women bus drivers have not been paid in a month.”

But to Caitlin’s ears, the protest had sounded much more aggressive than that. She wondered whether here, too, people were feeling the tensions of a world on edge.

They merged onto a slightly smaller highway and greenery increased between the buildings. A handful of men and women stood together in a small park, moving slowly through a Tai Chi sequence. Caitlin was mildly shocked to see this Chinese practice in Iran, and the sliding and angular arm motions instantly reminded her of Maanik and Gaelle’s movements.

A possible Mongolian connection right there, she thought as the sedan pulled in at the hospital. Connecting Mongolian to Chinese would certainly be a smaller step than tying Mongolian to Viking.

At the hospital, Maryam sat with her in reception while Caitlin quickly Skyped Jacob. Dressed in his pajamas and eating a Popsicle, the boy barely signed to her with one hand.

Finally she said, “Jacob, I want you to understand something. It’s very important. The young man I’m visiting—he might die. That’s why I had to come.”

Jacob didn’t say much, but he seemed to snap back to his usual, empathetic self and he blew her two kisses before ending the chat.

When the tablet closed, Maryam escorted Caitlin to Atash’s floor. Their entrance to Atash’s room was barred by a doctor who was not impressed with two female visitors—until Maryam held up a card that looked like an ID. The doctor did not miraculously develop a sense of courtesy, but he did walk away.

“I will also interpret for you,” Maryam said as they entered the hospital room.

Caitlin had not expected the sight that greeted them. She knew the young man had suffered third-degree burns over three-quarters of his body and would be fully swathed in bandages. She knew he was being kept alive by an array of vascular tubes and catheters. None of that surprised her. But Caitlin had not anticipated his trying to turn toward her, from the shoulders, when she entered the room.

“Does he know you?” Maryam asked.

“No… ,” Caitlin replied, a trace of hesitation in her voice, though she did not know why.

Caitlin did not approach the bed from the side but circled it, seeing if his movements would follow her. They did. Her heart ached for the boy and for his circumstances. She recognized the flowerless, impersonal feel of an unvisited room, an unloved person, an abandonment far worse than the burns that had immobilized him.

He was not only awake, he was murmuring. Maryam leaned over his head to listen.

After a moment she said, “This is not Farsi.”

“Do you recognize it?”

The young woman shook her head once, sharply.

A wave of fierce energy rushed through Caitlin—she knew what was coming next, why she had hesitated when asked if the boy knew her. She had been here before. Not in this room, not with him, but with Maanik and Gaelle.

Atash’s hands moved as much as the bolsters allowed him. His left arm trembled to the shoulder as the hand fought to point away from his body. His right hand moved up diagonally, just inches but enough for Caitlin to recognize one of Maanik’s superlatives.

She pulled out her cell phone and held it up to record the gestures.

“No!” Maryam snapped.

“Please, this may help him! Someone else has to see—”

“No, absolutely.” She was not demonstrative about her insistence, simply firm in a way that told Caitlin there was no point in arguing. She suspected this was a rule meant to benefit not the patient but the paranoia of a totalitarian regime.

She stowed her cell phone, leaned over Atash, and listened. There were the guttural consonants, the whirring of Asiatic “r”s.

“Ask him to speak in Farsi, please,” she said.

Maryam leaned forward but before she finished the question Atash changed. His hands fixed rigidly and his utterances shifted in tone. The higher language disappeared, replaced by prolonged and very quiet grunts.

Caitlin felt her hands tighten helplessly. She knew the young man was in agony. She could only think of one way to communicate that might work, but both his hands were bandaged. She reached out with her left hand—the madame in Haiti had directed her to use her left hand with the snake; Jacob had sensed the ocean with his left—and lightly touched one of the only bare areas of Atash’s skin, his throat.

Something exploded inside Caitlin’s head. It was fast and heavy and pressed the sides of her skull outward, like the throb of a headache frozen painfully in place. Then it pushed through and was outside her body—pressure rolling around her, forcing her eyelids shut. She could not open her mouth to scream but she felt the cry in her throat.

She forced herself to open her eyes. The white of the walls, of the bandages, had been transformed into dark rock and ice—jagged towers of it coming into focus far behind the dark, rectangular columns that were in front of her. And a man, a pale young man, was communicating with hands and arms and strange but familiar words—leaning forward with urgency, begging, almost bowing with his pleading.

Caitlin couldn’t understand. Her eardrums were throbbing from pressure that wrapped around her head, pressure that was closing her throat, blocking sound and breath.

The recent past, the present, her world and life were all out of focus. Wherever she was, whoever she was, whatever she was seeing, was rising before her with razor-edged clarity.

And suddenly the words became familiar. The columned structure, vast and high, was known to her. The buildings beyond, dark among patches of lavender and green foliage, were places she had seen. And farther away, those peaks that looked less like mountains than like explosions of ice—

She was looking through eyes that were not her own at a world that was not her own. The pale young man pleaded with her from the floor.

“Save my brother, save me! Please! Show us how!”

“I am no longer Guardian to him or to you,” she said in the voice of an old man, unable to control the words coming from her own throat. “You put your faith in things that have no true power. You have crafted your own fate.”

“We will repent, we will speak the cazh!”

“No,” she replied sadly. “You will die.”

The speaker turned away and the young man propelled himself up from the floor and ran away into the street. Her body hurried to join the other robed figures near the columns a dozen or so yards away, their arms raised toward the dark skies. Her sleeves heavy with oil, she lifted her hands to complete the prayer of cazh and let out a howling scream. Her hands were suddenly on fire, her fingers whirling to pieces in the air even as she signed a word, the only word she could manage, a superlative for “transform.”

There was another scream and suddenly Caitlin was on the floor. Not a stone floor but a hospital floor.

“Dr. O’Hara!”

Caitlin opened her eyes to see Maryam’s face hovering over her. Her head felt exceedingly light, her hands excessively warm, her brain extraordinarily confused. For a moment it was as if she had forgotten how to speak.

“You screamed,” Maryam said.

“I—no. No.”

There was no point in even attempting to explain. She wasn’t sure she could explain, since she didn’t entirely understand it herself. Caitlin pulled away from Maryam and shoved herself up from the floor, grabbing the railing of Atash’s bed. She was reeling.

“It was Atash,” Caitlin gasped.

“What are you saying?”

Caitlin fell silent. As with the snake in Haiti, she had been through something Atash was experiencing. She looked down at the young man. His fixed, red-rimmed eyes were staring at a corner of the ceiling. A tear was sliding down his cheek, and a line of blood trailed from his mouth down over his chin. She reached for his throat with her right hand, searching for a pulse…

“You’d better call for the doctor,” Caitlin said sadly.

“What is it?”

“He’s dead,” she replied.

CHAPTER 27

Caitlin sat in reception again, a spartan room with religious symbols on the walls. Maryam was on her cell phone, sitting under a brass scimitar suspended point-up. An overhead light effected a glow.

Her hands and forearms heavy, Caitlin opened her tablet but stared at the dark screen. She knew she should Skype her father or Barbara, even Ben, but what she had witnessed—no, what she had experienced—had knocked her numb.

A part of her didn’t want to stop the numbness. Atash’s pain had joined Maanik and Gaelle’s with a ferocious intensity and she felt guilty for not having come here days earlier when she might have been able to… do something. Maybe she could have worked with him in stages, used hypnosis, something to mediate between him and the vision. Now he was dead, and he had died in torment.

Then fear suffused the numbness. Did his death in the vision cause his death in body? If so, Maanik and Gaelle were in mortal danger. She began to shake.

A hand dropped on her shoulder but she did not respond. Then the hand turned her chin so that she was looking into Maryam’s hazel eyes. They were softer than she had seen them before now.

“Dr. O’Hara, you must focus.”

Caitlin nodded blankly.

“Doctor, I am not a woman who selects what she sees. I see everything. When your hand was on the young man I saw your head moving. Not like this.” She nodded her head back and forth, then gestured at Caitlin’s Hermès scarf. “Your head moved as if, beneath the scarf, your hair was alive.”

Her words to Ben—about Maanik’s hair justifying this trip—came back to her. So did a little bit of life. “Go on,” said Caitlin.

Maryam stared at her. “You do not seem surprised.”

“Strangely, no,” she admitted. “Please, what else did you see?”

Maryam regarded her skeptically.

“Please,” Caitlin pleaded. “It’s all helpful information.”

Maryam sat beside her. “When you fell backward, this came forward.” The young woman touched a strand of hair that had loosened from Caitlin’s scarf and was framing her face. “I watched it move as if a wind had caught it, but the windows were closed, there was no fan, no breeze. I am not an imaginative woman, doctor. I saw this.”

“I believe you,” Caitlin said. “There are things going on that I do not understand. That’s why I came here.”

“I know this now, so I am going to take you to see someone. We have enough time before your flight tonight.”

Caitlin’s mind cleared slightly. “Is this a polite way of saying that I am under arrest?”

Maryam smiled and discreetly looked around the room. “Doctor, if that were the case you would not have to ask.”

The young woman pressed her fingers on Caitlin’s palm. Caitlin noticed that the back of Maryam’s hand was grayish, very wrinkled, almost blistered in places. It was a hand that, some time ago, had been badly burned.

“I was a girl during the war with Iraq,” she said. “I was once a patient here.”

Caitlin met her gaze and thought of the fortitude it must have taken for this woman to accompany her, whether by order or voluntarily, to return to this place of pain, sadness, and fear. Caitlin squeezed her hand gently. “Go on.”

“There is more you should see while you are here.”

Maryam rose and Caitlin followed her to the waiting sedan.

Forty-five minutes later they pulled up in front of a low, concrete apartment building. Caitlin followed Maryam into one of the apartments and was seated in a living room with sparse furniture and a flowered bedsheet for a curtain. She heard gentle clinks from what must have been the kitchen and became vaguely aware that Maryam was not beside her. Opposite Caitlin on the pale green wall was an elaborate design rising from the floor and flowering in red over the expanse—dots, starbursts, wheels like eyes, flourishing feathers. It was like a mehndi design, an adornment painted in henna on Hindu women’s hands before a wedding.

And jasmine—she was suddenly aware of the strikingly familiar smell of jasmine tea as it wafted up to her. A cup and saucer had been placed on the low table. The aroma loosened the tension that had built behind her eyes, and unexpectedly, tears began flowing down her face.

“A cup of tears,” said a soft male voice beside her after she gasped several long sobs. “In some cultures, there are sacred vessels that permit us to mourn.”

Caitlin wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands and took a deep, shuddering breath.

“Is it always jasmine?” Caitlin asked as she composed herself.

“It is whatever it needs to be,” he answered.

Beside her stood a small Indian man with graying hair, somewhere in his sixties. He had remarkably lopsided ears and a gentleness in his eyes that made him seem instantly friendly.

“I am Vahin,” he said with a smile that warmed and comforted her.

“I’m Caitlin,” she replied. She looked around. “Where is Maryam?”

“She is outside,” he said, taking a seat in a shabby armchair opposite her. “The dear lady and I have very different business in this city but she… crossed lines, shall we say? She thought you and I should speak.”

“I’m grateful to you both. What do you do, Vahin?”

“I am something like a clergyman to the Hindu community.”

“Forgive me, but are you allowed to do that here?”

“We have a small community in and around the city,” he said. “Iran allows us our religious freedom and India allows her resident Shia Muslims to visit Iran. It is a mutually beneficial relationship.”

“If you like living at the stress point between two vastly different cultures,” she said.

“Some of us have that calling.” He smiled mysteriously. “But now, to your situation. Tell me what your tears told the cup. Omit nothing.”

While Vahin sipped his tea Caitlin told him everything, not just about Atash but about Maanik and Gaelle, the Norse and Mongolian connections, Jack London’s reactions, and her own glimpses of impossible visions. Vahin sat quietly throughout, nodding now and then, and occasionally dipping his head to one side.

“So,” said Caitlin upon finishing, “how crazy does that all sound to you?”

“Not at all,” Vahin replied. “You seem to feel that because you cannot rationalize what you have experienced it is therefore irrational. That is not the case. We do not blame words for being insufficient to express new ideas. We simply find better words. Do you know who put forth that idea?”

Caitlin shook her head.

“The Norse,” he told her.

“Vikings,” she said, starting slightly.

“Yes. They understood that the energy that binds us, one to the other, was manifest in each of us as thought… and thought as language. But it was what you would call a two-way street. If you changed the words you could change the way you thought about the energy.” He rose and carried their cups into the kitchen, and Caitlin heard again the sounds of making tea. She decided to follow, and as she entered the room he smiled and continued. “In 1984, I traveled to Bhopal just after the Union Carbide tragedy. Do you remember that?”

“I do,” she said. “The factory that accidentally released the poisonous gas.”

“The factory was making a pesticide. The gas spread through the slums surrounding the factory and thousands upon thousands of people died. It was most ghastly. I was part of the local clergy asked to help relocate the orphans of this disaster. I kept track of my orphans and visited them when I could over the years.” He placed another cup of tea in Caitlin’s hands. “A fresh cup.” He smiled. “No tears.”

“Thank you.” Caitlin smiled back as she followed him back into the living room. This time he joined her on the couch.

“As to why Maryam brought you here. We have a mutual friend, one of the children in my care who was in the hospital with her. For many decades after the Bhopal tragedy, he spoke in tongues. It was involuntary, in no way linked with any religious ceremony. And she has heard me tell of another child, a young girl, whose arms would sometimes flare in a rash that looked like a chemical burn. The girl called it a motu-cazh.”

His words caused Caitlin to start again. This time he noticed.

“You’ve heard that?” Vahin asked.

“The second part sounded familiar,” she said.

“Well, I disagreed with a psychologist who was part of my group. He argued that it resembled stigmata, a physiological expression of psychological distress. I thought it was much more.”

Caitlin drank her tea and waited patiently. Vahin seemed to be searching for the words to express his thoughts precisely. Finally, he leaned forward and set his tea on the table.

“Let me first tell you something that is clear to me,” he continued. “The left-hand, right-hand activity you mentioned. With your left hand you collected enormous force from the snake, with the right hand you pushed a girl against a wall without touching her. That is the natural flow of things.”

“To become superhuman?”

“No,” he said patiently. “To be a conduit for the energy of the universe. The left hand receives energy, the right hand emits it. This is very old knowledge from Tantric Buddhism. It is similar to chi energy among the Shaolin monks in China.”

He cupped his hands around an invisible sphere and pushed it toward Caitlin. A subtle sensation of warmth washed over her throat.

“I—I felt that,” she marveled.

He continued. “Buddhism, Hinduism, the Vedas, Chinese Taoism, Tai Chi, the paganism that fathered the Viking faiths—the seeds of our minds were not planted in straight rows with walls between them. Every culture has discovered this same phenomenon of energy, both inside of us and surrounding us, all the while connecting us.”

“You mentioned Tai Chi,” Caitlin said, remembering the men and women from the park.

“Tai Chi is an example of great strength used to empower, not to destroy.” He moved his hands in a way that reminded Caitlin of Maanik’s gestures. “Movement stirs the energy inside our bodies and it also opens us to energy from the outside. When those two energies merge we are enlightened, uplifted.”

“Are you talking about life energy or—the soul?” she asked, not entirely comfortable using the latter term.

“Both.”

“Something that survives death.”

He nodded once and pointed to the tea on the table. “When the leaves are gone, the scent remains in the air… and in the mind. It is rekindled, the memory is refreshed, when new tea is brewed. So it is with the soul. With death, the soul hovers until it finds a new body.”

“Hovers how? Where?” Caitlin challenged. “Limbo? Heaven?”

“I prefer to call it the transpersonal plane,” he replied. “As to where?” He paused and gestured simply “out there.”

Caitlin sighed. “I have problems with that idea.”

“Much of the world, throughout history, has embraced some form of that concept.”

“I mean no disrespect, but there are still flat-earthers too,” she said.

He smiled benignly. “Tell me why you reject it.”

She collected her thoughts. “I don’t believe in a cosmic scorekeeper. That seems to be the general conception of God, with heaven as a reward for subjective behavior that changes from culture to culture. I also don’t believe that a soul is a kind of immaterial flash drive where things get stored and then dumped into—”

She stopped herself.

“Yes?” Vahin smiled. “A waiting body? A body weakened by injury or trauma, a body hungry for strong, healing energy?”

Caitlin shook her head. “No. I don’t accept it. That isn’t what’s happening.”

“Self-immolation. A father almost assassinated. A stepmother’s near-drowning. The loss of parents in a horrible mass poisoning.”

“That’s trauma and natural human empathy,” Caitlin said. “I see it all the time. Obviously, I’m feeling it, yet I haven’t suffered a trauma.”

“Haven’t you? Haven’t you shared the traumas of these children?”

“As I said, empathy. That’s not the same as experiencing it firsthand.”

“In fact, your experience could in some ways be worse,” he suggested. “You are collecting these experiences and internalizing them. They may be massing exponentially.”

Okay, she thought. He could be right about that. Caitlin had always kept a strong emotional connection out of the doctor-patient equation. These kids had broken through that.

“But you are missing the point,” Vahin went on. “You are trying to explain away before I can explain.”

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly, “I truly am. I’m being—well, I’m doing what I always do. Forgive me. Please enlighten me.”

Vahin took a moment to consider his approach. “I believe that the common link between these children you have met is trauma, but not just their own trauma.”

“What are you saying?” Caitlin asked. “That there is something else that links them?”

He nodded.

“Your transpersonal plane? The place that’s all around us?” she guessed, still unconvinced.

“You doubt,” Vahin said. “But accept, for a moment, the truth of what I say. Think of the bond those three children’s souls would instantly share. Then multiply that by the countless souls you have not personally met. What else could cause them to experience that level of anguish?”

The suffering implicit in the nightmarish math of that prospect gave her a chill. “All right,” Caitlin said. “Let’s say for the sake of argument that there are traumatized souls somewhere else—let’s call it your transpersonal plane. The assaults I’ve witnessed would suggest that these ‘countless’ souls are opportunistically seeking souls inside the bodies of traumatized youths.”

“Correct.”

“So assuming all of that to be true, why are these loud, aggressive souls getting stronger now?”

“That I cannot say.”

Caitlin sat back hopelessly.

“But as you seek understanding,” Vahin went on, “keep this in mind. These ‘aggressive souls,’ as you call them, may be from one event, souls that are already powerfully linked.”

“One event? But where?”

“The transpersonal plane is boundless. Do not seek them somewhere else. Look for them somewhen else.”

CHAPTER 28

Maanik and her mother stood bundled in their winter coats, watching the morning sun from the penthouse balcony. As the golden rays warmed their faces, the young woman said, “It feels almost like summer.”

Hansa, shivering, hugged her daughter close, happy that she was feeling anything. This was an unexpected blessing after the difficulties of the last two days. Her husband had barely been home since the attack at Jammu. This morning when Hansa woke, he had already left again. Maanik had awakened early as well. Hansa found her lying on her side, absently stroking Jack London, and she had readily agreed to come outside.

“What do you think?” Hansa asked, looking across the long balcony, wanting to savor the time with her. “We could do some homeschooling out here, catch up on some of your homework.”

Her daughter seemed to be smiling, her head tilted toward the sun, her eyes shut.

“Maanik?”

“Yes?”

“What do you think about that?”

Maanik moved slowly in her natural spotlight. “I’m sorry?”

“Homeschooling, out here.”

“I like it,” she replied.

Hansa gave her a little squeeze and began to rearrange the chairs, pulling a couple of large potted plants out of the way. She was startled to see how weak she had become and resolved to start her walking routine again.

“Maanik, how do you think I would do on your father’s NordicTrack?”

Maanik laughed.

“Do you think that’s funny?” her mother asked, smiling. “Maybe when you’re feeling better, you can teach me.”

“It makes me tired.”

“That machine? You can outrun your father.”

“I’m going back to bed,” Maanik said.

“Don’t you want to stay out here a little longer? You look so happy here.”

“I want to lie down.” Suddenly, she sounded frail.

Hansa walked toward her. “Let me help—”

“I can do it.”

The woman watched as Maanik disappeared behind the shining glass of the terrace door. Then she continued rearranging the furniture, in case Maanik missed the fresh air and chose to return.

From inside, Jack London howled. Hansa dropped the chair she was moving and ran toward Maanik’s bedroom. The girl was still in the hallway, blocked by the barking dog, who, facing the open bedroom door, was making short, tentative bounds forward, then skittering backward as if trying both to attack the entry and avoid it.

“Jack London, quiet!” Hansa yelled.

He partly obeyed, his yelps becoming low growls. Hansa turned toward her daughter.

“No!” she cried.

Maanik’s left arm had stiffened and her right hand had extended.

“Maanik, stay with me,” she implored.

The dog began to bark again.

“Quiet!” Hansa yelled.

Kamala arrived, roused by the commotion.

“Take him away!” Hansa snapped.

Kamala edged around them, reaching for the beagle. Maanik made a swift, sweeping motion with her right hand in the air and without being touched, Jack London flew across the floor and hit the wall to their right. His howling turned into tiny frightened yips and he cowered low by the wall where he’d been thrown.

“Maanik!” Hansa grabbed at her daughter’s left shoulder and spun her around.

Maanik’s eyes were shut, her expression relaxed. She slipped from her mother’s grip, heading toward the bedroom door.

“Don’t go in there!” Hansa shrieked, and tried to pull her back, tried to turn her to face away from the bedroom. Maanik stiffened and shook her off. Hansa gasped as blood dripped down her daughter’s wrists and along her fingers, even though her arms were still bandaged under her coat. Maanik’s eyes opened and she began walking backward, lifting her hands and rubbing her forearms as she gazed stonily at her mother. Hansa followed her into the bedroom, reaching toward her child’s ear, but Maanik jerked away.

“Stop!” Hansa cried, and again reached for Maanik’s ear.

“You cannot take me back,” Maanik said.

“From where? Please talk to me!”

“When she burns, I burn,” Maanik said. “I have to go so it will stop.”

“Go where?” Hansa pleaded. She was trying to think like Dr. O’Hara, trying to get information.

“Up,” Maanik said. “That is the only escape.”

“Up where?” Hansa asked, trembling as they moved farther into the foul air of the bedroom.

“Beyond… fera-cazh.”

“Where… what is ‘fera-cazh’?”

Maanik’s answer was a full-throated scream followed by the ritual clawing at her arms. Hansa tried to hug her but once again Maanik twisted out of reach, backing against the bed. Making a concerted effort to reach her ear, Hansa practically yanked her daughter’s arm to her side—and was thrown back. Staggering, she saw a plume of smoke rising from the bed. Hansa circled, frantic, and only then saw that it was coming not from the bed but from the bottom of Maanik’s nightdress, under her coat. With a hiss, another plume rose from near one of the girl’s pockets. Maanik’s hair was lifting into the air, rising not unlike the smoke trails—and Hansa realized she smelled burning hair. She violently slapped her daughter’s hands aside, plunged her fingers toward Maanik’s ear, and shouted, “Blackberries!”

Maanik wobbled on her feet but did not stop screaming or slapping at her arms. “Let—me—burn!” she choked out, before the seeming anguish of physical pain took over her voice again and she wailed.

Smoke rose from Maanik’s left hand as a black spot spread across her skin. Hansa was trying to reach for it when suddenly Maanik spun and ran for the tall bedroom window. She slammed up the latch, flung open the sash, and with her bare hands struck and clawed at the screen beyond in an effort to shred it. Hansa shouted at her, grabbed at her, and struggled to keep a hold on her, but she didn’t stop. Maanik punctured the black mesh and pulled at the ragged hole with both hands, making a large opening. Hansa screamed for Kamala’s help as five black patches opened on the back of Maanik’s coat, smoke coiling toward the ceiling. Then just as suddenly, Maanik thrust her hand onto the upper frame of the window and, searching with her foot for the lower frame, hoisted herself up.

Hansa felt a surge of power and adrenaline unlike anything she had ever experienced. Vaulting forward, she grabbed Maanik around the waist and wrenched her from the open window. They tumbled to the floor. She quickly pulled the lower edge of Maanik’s coat up over her daughter’s back and head and yanked it down so that her head and arms were encased. Hugging Maanik firmly, she dragged her across the bedroom to the doorway. Maanik struggled and kicked and Hansa could hear her screaming—once more in the language she did not understand. The woman wanted to vomit from fear but the noxious odor from her daughter’s hair and the impossible heat of her body kept her focused. Kamala finally arrived in the room with scratches evident from a struggle with the dog. Together they manhandled Maanik down the hall to the small bathroom with a stand-up shower. Dragging the young woman into the tiny cubicle, Hansa slammed her hand on the water lever and cold water flooded down on them. While Kamala peeled the girl’s clothes from her struggling body, Hansa maneuvered a hand into the mêlée, pinched the girl’s ear, and shouted, “Blackberries!”

Maanik went limp.

CHAPTER 29

Maryam walked Caitlin to her Iran Air departure gate. It was a surprisingly emotional parting, given how little time the women had spent together, but what they had witnessed had altered them both.

Caitlin stepped into the queue for boarding. Almost immediately she got a text from Ben: M deteriorating. Fire a real hazard.

The person behind her clucked her tongue; the queue had moved but she had not. Caitlin stepped to the side.

Juggling her phone, ticket, passport, and a letter from the Iranian ambassador providing clearance to go home, she typed back: I have new info. I’ll come straight from airport.

She waited; no response. She considered calling Ben but knew the explanations would not make a short conversation. Final boarding was called. Caitlin, last in line, hurriedly presented her ticket and was waved in.

Iran Air, it turned out, did not allow its passengers to use their cell phones or access the Internet during flights. That was frustrating; Caitlin knew that for thirteen hours she would wonder what Ben meant by “real hazard.” Had Maanik tried to set herself on fire like Atash? Negotiations be damned: if Maanik had harmed herself beyond scraping her forearms, Mrs. Pawar wouldn’t have waited. The girl would already be in the hospital—she would at this moment be drugged into an overmedicated automaton, and that would be the end of the exploration into what was truly happening to her.

Hold on, Caitlin urged Maanik in her head. Hold on till I’m back.

Of course she didn’t believe Maanik would hear that, and yet the impulse did not seem so crazy after all she had experienced.

What if Vahin is right? If Maanik’s mind was open to this “transpersonal plane,” and Caitlin herself had some access to it as well, wasn’t it conceivable that a message could pass from her to Maanik? Vahin had speculated that Caitlin may have acquired access because she had placed herself in such close psychic proximity to the affected young adults.

“Vibrations,” he had said to her, pressing pamphlets and booklets into her hands before she left. “Each of us is like a tuning fork that does not stop. Like the tea, the soul vibrates and survives outside the body, outside of time. In life, we change pitch and resonate with each other, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in groups. Why should the soul be different?” He added in parting, “There are those of us who believe it is the purpose of all life to achieve a complete resonance—all of us as one.”

“Make me one with everything.” Caitlin found herself muttering the oft-mocked phrase of Eastern mystics.

“New-agey” was the expression that came to mind. Yet everything she had seen, the gestures and words, the shared symbol, the reactions of the animals, was exactly that: new-agey, mystical, quasireligious, fantastic. Choose the outré word that fit. But she could not disavow any of it, from the floating hair and fabric to the shock waves to the visions. Those were a part of that strange reality Vahin advocated. What made his explanation less valid than any other?

Caitlin mentally reviewed the signs along the road to this point.

The shared symbol drawn by both Gaelle and Maanik seemed a good place to begin. If Atash had been able to use his hands, might he have drawn it too? Caitlin still found the triangles made of crescents to be inexplicable. They were slightly Celtic yet not. They vaguely resembled a radioactive symbol—but that could be a time-biased comparison, looking back from the present instead of looking toward the present. If this symbol were really as old as a habitable Antarctica, perhaps it had been the unconscious inspiration for the modern symbol?

Habitable Antarctica. The thought had occurred to her so easily. She remembered the apparent map Maanik had drawn. When they reviewed its shape and topography, it linked closely to a map of Antarctica as though surveyed from the air. Could people have flown that long ago? Caitlin had seen ice in the vision with Atash—was that also Antarctica? Perhaps an ancient someone had traveled above it by balloon? She thought back to one of Jacob’s science experiments. All that would have required were thermal currents somehow directed into a big sheath of—what? Pelts? Leather?

Too heavy.

Animal tissue? In the past, whales had been harvested for nearly every part of their body. Thin tissue, sinew, skin—was that possible?

The word “fantastic” came back to her. Maybe she was making leaps—but nothing else came close to making sense.

Antarctica. A different time, a different climate. With people? Humans? A society, a civilization? What else could it be? There was a sophisticated language of words and gestures. She thought of all the stories and fables she had heard in her life, from Noah and the flood to the Greek myth of Icarus. Even scholars had always said there was probably a foundation to our most exotic tales.

The first thing she would do when she had Internet again would be to search for any cataclysms that had occurred at the South Pole over the millennia, right back to Pangaea if necessary. The patients had mentioned fire from the sky and something about a wave. There had to be some connection. Her mind might be arguing against it, but that’s what minds did. Her gut was telling her this was the right direction.

The plane banked left and Caitlin watched through her window as the Caspian Sea tilted back into view, sparkling in the late afternoon sun. She closed her eyes and recalled her conversation with Ben in the park in Turtle Bay. Her breath fluttered at the thought of him. She decided to talk to him, to ask to start over when the immediate crises subsided.

If they subsided.

She thought of poor Maanik wobbling through the hallways of a psych ward, drugged to oblivion. She contemplated the larger populace struggling thirty thousand feet below, constantly at war or at the mercy of an unstable climate and formidable geology. What if Vahin was correct? What if some ancient race was correct: that the vibration of souls, their continuation out of the body, was the way to truly survive? What if, in some ancient theology, there lay the common, long-lost origins of Valhalla and the Elysian Fields and Heaven?

The transpersonal plane.

Caitlin focused again. More than anything else, she wanted to communicate with Maanik, tell her I’m still with you, distance be damned. Vahin said they were connected. Could she send a thought to Maanik? How? What kind of wave could she make that would touch the girl?

She tried to relax her thoughts. She recalled the park, with Ben. Sunshine, unbuttoning their coats. Ben exuberantly describing the words he had deciphered from Maanik’s gibberish. “Fire,” of course, and “sky,” but also “water.”

Big water.

And then, suddenly, Caitlin had it. Atash had tried to form the superlative when she entered his hospital room—left hand angling away from the body, right hand crossing up the body on a diagonal. She didn’t remember the spoken word that went with it but she didn’t need to. The gesture had to be enough.

She closed her eyes and calmed herself as completely as if she were about to guide a client into hypnosis. She thought of Jack London first, the beagle barometer, remembered him sleeping and snoring. Then she thought of Maanik. She sifted through their moments together, remembered when Maanik had made a face for her, when she had seemed most like her normal teenage self. When she saw the girl clearly, when she felt the laugh they’d shared, Caitlin gently angled her left hand away from her torso and crossed her right hand up toward her left shoulder. Unexpectedly her lungs took a deep inhale and then exhaled—it felt as though she had pushed a physical weight away from her sternum, off her left shoulder. She kept her mind on Maanik and thought to her:

Ocean… big water… you and me together… hold on…

Suddenly Caitlin heard Maanik in her head, heard the girl say: “I will.”

Caitlin opened her eyes, shocked. She hadn’t imagined that voice. That had been real.

She looked around, at the quiet passengers in the plane, at the empty aisle seat beside her. Everything was normal—but not. She felt closer to Maanik here, now, than she did to the window beside her. In that moment, the familiar sights and sounds of life were no longer a reliable foundation. Like the sea far below, they were just the surface of something greater. Perhaps that was the comprehensive explanation.

Caitlin was startled to feel the effects of that realization in her body. It was as though she were energized from her feet all the way up. Her torso felt bright, almost radiant; her mind was clear as the tone of a tuning fork; and she was ravenous. She rang for the hostess and asked for the menu.

Something had clicked into place, though Caitlin didn’t know what.

Over dinner, she devoured the materials Vahin had given her. She read about the combined power of souls, of prayer. Connected in the transpersonal plane, souls could form a powerful group spirit capable of ascending even higher, outside the reach of time, space… and death.

A cataclysm, she thought. Fire, ice, floods. A city or civilization beset by a volcano, an earthquake, a tsunami, encroaching ice. Caitlin remembered Maanik crying in their first session over an arm that had been ripped off and her dead pet that was not Jack London. Maybe that had happened to Maanik’s counterpart in some ancient place—before that counterpart had died, burned to pieces by volcanic fire or an inferno caused by tremors.

But Maanik had said that she also became pieces first and then burned. What pieces? And how?

Okay, we’ll come back to that, Caitlin thought, forcing herself to stay focused despite the mental lull caused by her full stomach.

She thought about Atash’s vision. Other residents of the city seemed not only prepared for the cataclysm but eager for it. Instead of running away from an erupting volcano, these people in robes gathered in a courtyard of columns, apparently waiting to die. Eager to die? Robes that were soaked in oil; a reference to cazh; a word and gesture meaning what? Some kind of transformation.

Those residents—Caitlin had seen them. They had a ritual they were determined to complete. Whether that rite was done to thwart the volcano or honor it in the hope of pacifying it, she wasn’t sure. But if Vahin was correct, perhaps the ritual had transported their souls to the transpersonal plane, whatever it was. Their souls left as their physical bodies burned to fine ash. Maanik’s consciousness split into fragments and lifted up as her physical body burned.

Presumably then, the souls that reached the transpersonal plane were ensured not a life after death, but life beyond the reach of death.

But why have Maanik and Gaelle and Atash connected with that? Shared trauma here and now cannot be the only reason.

Those prayerful residents in robes had denied help to Atash’s counterpart. Why had they excluded him? They had accused him of placing faith in “things without true power” and said that he had crafted his own fate. She thought of people she had seen in war zones, those who had tried to leave and those who had gathered in a place of worship and perished—difficult choices made under duress, but with the same goal.

Escape.

Then there was her father and the Norse-style longboat. Caitlin remembered Maanik talking about a dragon, perhaps a carved dragon head on a ship? Some residents may have taken to the sea, trying desperately to sail away as fire fell on an ocean already lashing them with steep waves. Atash’s counterpart may have quailed at that choice. So he had begged the robed man to save his brother through cazh instead, turning to religion as a last resort. Rebuffed by the priest, Atash’s counterpart had done the ritual without the help or sanction of the priests—and it seemed to have worked. Thousands of years later, with Antarctica long buried under ice, he had found Atash’s soul, exposed by the trauma of his brother’s execution, and somehow made his way in.

But why would that cause Atash to set himself alight? Had the soul given him the wrong message? Or—and the thought made Caitlin choke up—had that soul been trapped in that traumatic moment like some prehistoric insect preserved in amber, all this time.

Too many broad strokes, she thought, but a start. A place to go with Maanik.

Caitlin leaned back, shut her exhausted eyes, and tried not to think of Atash locked in a burning body for millennia. She thought of the animals instead. What was their role in this? Jack London had to be aware of the presence of something unseen. What about his avoiding his mistress’s right hand? One of Vahin’s booklets said that energy from the world around us entered through the left hand, the heart hand. Then, filtered by the body and soul, negative, unwanted energy exited through the right hand. Maanik’s left hand on Jack London would have safely received his loving energy. But her right hand would have been emitting all the suffering her counterpart felt in the transpersonal plane. No wonder the dog had avoided it.

As animals had avoided Washington Square—Caitlin suddenly remembered the news reports just after the rats stampeded. A resident of the area had been briefly interviewed about how her black Lab would no longer enter the dog run in Washington Square Park, and neither would anyone else’s dogs. Yet there had been no mention of the dogs avoiding their owners, only the location, and the behavior of the rats certainly didn’t resemble Jack London’s reactions. If there was a connection here, it was not apparent.

Some possible answers—more seemingly impossible questions. But at the very least, they all seemed to be pointing in the same direction. Her mind didn’t tell her this in isolation, the way it usually did—her whole self told her. She felt again the bright radiance in her sternum.

Her meal finished and cleared, Caitlin turned off her light, lifted her window shade, and leaned her head against the seat. Her eyes rested on the clouds, the deepening dusk.

Shared souls, shared trauma, she thought. If this is happening to other young people around the world, that might explain why Kashmir is rippling through those of us who don’t even know where it is. But is Kashmir causing this?

That didn’t seem likely. Yet a connection was possible. Kashmir: a locus of frustration and pain touching all the ends of the earth. The transpersonal plane: a locus of ancient pain touching all the ends of the earth.

It no longer seemed possible to her to accept one and deny the other.

CHAPTER 30

When the call came in from Mikel, Flora Davies was sound asleep on the chair in her office. Weary in mind, body, and soul, she had surrendered herself to the black leather.

Still jet-lagged despite a long rest, Mikel had wandered back to the club at four in the morning to take another look at the new artifact. He found Arni’s body in a pool of unsightly fluid and immediately called upstairs for Flora. They had at least three hours to erase the problem before any other Group members or staff came in for the day, and before anyone was likely to report Arni to Missing Persons. Friends and family knew that he was inclined to work late, especially when there was a problem to be solved.

The Group had never dealt with a dead body at the club. Not human bodies at least. Unusual creatures had occasionally found their way into the lab for study, all deceased and partial specimens hauled from the south polar waters—part of a giant squid, a ten-thousand-year-old coelacanth perfectly preserved in frozen mud, the body of a baby megalodon locked in ancient ice. They were rare, but Flora stayed in contact with a man equipped to deal with their remains. She located the contact on her phone and within minutes Casey Skett was literally running over from his walk-up in the East Village.

After hanging up, Flora went back downstairs and paced near Arni’s head while Mikel looked for clues about his death. She was cursing the Group through the disposable medical mask she had put on, angry that they did not have the equipment or personnel suitable to perform a fast autopsy.

“And look at that—Arni wasn’t even wearing his lab coat,” she railed. “God only knows what contaminants his body is adding to the environment.”

“You mean apart from liquefied brain tissue?” Mikel asked. He was also masked and kneeling beside the corpse.

She stopped pacing. “Is that what you think that is?”

“Judging by the color and small lumps of solid mass, I’d say so.”

“Lovely,” Flora said. “Nothing else unusual?”

“Not that I can see. Only the brain is where it shouldn’t be.”

She snatched latex gloves from a box on a shelf and began pawing over Arni’s table—an insufferable mess—until she found a glass stirring rod. Then, squatting beside the corpse’s head, she inserted the end of the rod into his left nostril.

“It looks like he was about to be mummified,” Mikel muttered. “Brain out, organs next.”

“His other organs still appear to be inside,” she observed.

“Maybe I scared off whoever was doing this.”

“This liquid has a film forming on top,” she said, referring to the pool that spread like a halo from Arni’s head. “He’s been this way for a while.”

“But you didn’t hear anything?”

“Soundproofing,” she said, while paying acute attention to the shape of Arni’s nasal cavity. Flora twisted and turned the glass rod until all but the half inch she was holding had disappeared up his nose into his skull.

“My god,” she said, marveling, “there’s no sinus wall, no sphenoid bone. Mikel, there is nothing up there.”

“Are you saying everything in his skull came out of his nose?” he said in a tone of total disbelief.

“Would you like to feel it?” She motioned with the end of the glass rod.

“No,” he said, wincing slightly. “What would do that to some of his cranial bones but not the whole skull?”

“Perhaps we haven’t seen it all,” Flora replied, setting the rod on the table. She touched Arni’s head with the toe of her boot, half-expecting it to cave under the pressure. It did not. “Damn it,” she said. “I hate a mystery without enough time to solve it.”

As if on cue, Casey Skett arrived, still as skinny and slack-eyed as he had been a decade earlier when Flora first found him. Mikel went upstairs to admit him and they rode down in the elevator. Casey worked for the Department of Sanitation, “DAR” division—dead animal removal. He was good at his job, but Flora also appreciated his discretion and his connection to the shelters—specifically, the ones with incinerators. He lifted Arni’s body into a refrigerator on wheels with its contents and shelves removed. If anyone happened to notice Casey wandering around the shelter before dawn, he would say he was cleaning up more of the dead, decaying rats that had been in the news—did they want to take a look inside?

Flora and Mikel then spent forty-five minutes triple-washing the floor and two agonizing hours scrutinizing every inch of the laboratory and the locker room for anything that might catch the eye of a police officer. Then Flora went ahead and scuffed and dirtied things up, so the lab didn’t look too scrubbed.

When they were done, Mikel went about seeking a potential cause. He’d noticed hours ago that his carved meteorite was sitting on the table and the Geiger counter was out. He approached the object cautiously and waved the wand over it for several minutes but nothing happened. Finally, he picked it up, wrapped it in cloth, and strode to the safe to stow it.

“Not there,” Flora said. “We’re putting all the relics in the deep freezer.”

“For what?”

“As a precaution,” she replied.

“Don’t you think you’re overreacting?” Mikel asked.

“As my great-uncle Commander Hunt said during the Blitz, ‘One cannot overreact to this.’ Anyway, it’s my prerogative.”

“But we don’t know that this or any of them had anything to do with Arni’s death.”

“We don’t know they didn’t.”

“That argument is ridiculous,” he said. “We have to try and reconstruct what he was doing—”

“And we will, after we’ve had a pause and a good think. I’ve read your report about the trip. There isn’t a damned thing in this building that we know as little about.”

His impatience evident, he held up his find. “Which is why we need this here, now. This has more writing than any of them. We can learn from it.”

“We will,” she said. “Please, Mikel—consider all that’s happened already, the rats in Washington Square, the birds around your plane. Those phenomena all have artifact proximity and they began after this thing started its journey.” She shook her head ruefully. “Arni was a synesthete. These objects may be connecting with animal and possibly human consciousness on some level. Perhaps there was something emitted by this rock at an inaudible frequency, triggered by a certain kind of light or sound, perhaps, for example, the electrical output of an airplane or a Geiger counter.”

“The rats weren’t anywhere near my artifact.”

“They were not,” she agreed. “But they came running here, to the collection. Which is why I want all the objects stowed and stabilized until we’ve examined this more thoroughly.”

Mikel shook his head. “That’s the reason we have to keep studying them now, Flora, while they are being influenced. And I mean, why freeze it? Why not superheat it?”

Flora snatched it from his hand.

“You’re being a little extreme here,” he said.

“Arni is dead!” she said, showing the first real sign of emotion.

“I’m sorry too but we have a bigger picture here,” Mikel insisted, “a force we don’t understand and that we haven’t understood for a long damn time. Being able to read some of the symbols is one thing. We’re getting pretty good at that. Understanding the mechanics of these objects is bigger.”

“You don’t think I know that?”

“Of course you do. Look, this thing has obviously been through tremendous heat before and survived. Arni didn’t heat it—no burner. No cigarette lighter. I don’t think we’re going to know the full extent of its functionality until we start ruling things out.”

Flora turned away. “It goes in the deep freezer with the rest, since we know that all of these artifacts have survived low temperatures for thousands of years without killing anyone, and that’s final.”

“How do you know that?”

She half-turned. “What?”

“That they haven’t killed anyone before?”

She hesitated for the briefest moment. “You’re right. I don’t know. All the more reason for caution.” Then, without another word, she went to the locker, loaded all the objects onto a tray, and navigated to a room down the hall. She packed each item in a plastic bag and put them away. When she returned, Mikel was leaning on the wall outside the lab, pouting. She flicked off the light, slammed the door shut, and followed him up the stairs.

“Go home,” she said. “Get some rest.”

“I’m rested. I want to work.”

“Then go to the library and read. Finish watching the videos Erika collected.”

“Why are you being like this?”

“Like what?” she asked. “Thinking?”

Mikel said nothing as they neared the landing. The old stairs creaked as they ascended in the near-darkness. Upstairs the phone was already ringing. Mikel fielded the first call from the police. Arni had been reported missing at seven a.m. by a friend he was supposed to meet the night before, and the floodgates opened. Flora was glad she had put the artifacts away: only now it occurred to her that they may have been seized as evidence.

The rest of that day was filled with exhaustive questioning by an ill-tempered detective and with open and measurable concern for Arni while police inspected every corner of the laboratory space and locker room. Flora’s mind was on the deep freezer but they only checked it and did not violate its contents.

Finally, at midnight she summoned Mikel from home and ordered him back to the Falklands.

“For what?” he asked, not displeased but surprised.

“I’ve thought,” she announced. “Do whatever you have to do to get access to the crew of the Captain Fallow. Find out where they located your artifact. Where there was one, there may be more.”

“We’ve been down that road before with other artifacts,” he said.

“That’s true,” she agreed. “But as far as we know, they never caused any brains to melt. I think your artifact is too small to generate power on its own. So a theoretical external power source, the cause of this phenomenon, would likely be on the other end, where the artifact is from. It may still be connected with that source, if there is one, still charged somehow.”

He agreed with her decision. Favors were called in, arrangements made. Thankfully, Flora’s sleepless night and her genuine tears the following morning had convinced the detective on his second visit that she was worried sick about Arni.

And now here she was, alone with a cup of tea… and, literally, for now, at a cold, dead end to their quest. She lifted her teacup and hurled it at the wall, her mind burning with frustration and rage.

Goddamn it. Enough! she said to the mysterious race she had spent half her life pursuing. If you have anything to say to me, say it bloody faster.

CHAPTER 31

It was midnight. Outside Caitlin’s cab the cloudy sky reflected orange from the lights of the city—a sight that had always struck her as ominous. It seemed more so now: danger felt imminent. The rattling of the taxi’s undercarriage was like the world itself, barely holding itself together as it hurtled onward.

Or this could just be jet lag, she told herself.

She’d called her father while she waded through customs, but Jacob was asleep and she didn’t want to wake him. As she waited in line at the curb, chilly and impatient, she read two texts Ben had sent while she was in the air. The first was sent at 7:41 p.m.: Found possible Viking Mongolian connection.

And then at 11:11 p.m.: Am with Maanik. Stopped them from medicating her.

She called and he picked up on the first ring. Whatever tension there was between them when she left for Iran was gone, at least from his voice.

“Tell me you’re back—”

“I’m back,” she said. “What happened?”

He hesitated.

“Ben, if anyone’s listening—we’re beyond that.”

“Right. She lost it,” Ben said. “She just went wild and tried to throw herself from the window. Mrs. Pawar said she started to burn. They put her in the shower. She slept for a while and then it was more talk and gesturing, your blackberries cue, sleep—and then the same all over again. The ambassador stepped out of negotiations again to be with her; I basically invented meetings to keep the delegates in the building. I just got here at ten. They’re keeping her out of her bedroom and that seems to be calming her.”

“Have you been in there?”

“I’m at the apartment—”

“No, the bedroom.”

Another hesitation. “Yeah. Cai, it’s strange.”

“What is?”

“The room is dead,” he said. “When I’m in there I don’t hear the pipes in the ceiling, air traffic outside the window. The air is motionless, thin.”

“Where’s the dog?”

“In the hall outside the bedroom.” Ben said. “Facing the door.”

“Is he quiet?”

“Yes, but he’s definitely on alert,” Ben said. “What do you know?”

“I think that room has connected, through Maanik, to another time and place. They’re sharing a space like twins sharing a womb, and the older one is feeding on the younger. The room is mirroring what’s happening to Maanik’s mind, almost like a portal.”

“Caitlin, that’s—”

“A leap, I know. But I’m going to work on that assumption until someone comes up with a better explanation.”

“Do you know why these locations are… colliding?”

“Not yet,” she admitted. “Don’t let the Pawars give Maanik anything except water, if she’ll take it.”

“I’ll try but Mrs. Pawar is pretty desperate. Cai, there’s one more thing.” He hesitated again.

“Just blurt it out.”

“Okay. Maanik seems to be emitting… something.”

“Something?”

“It’s thermal, I guess, but it seems to have substance too. A constant, steady flow from her right hand. Cold, like mist. Please don’t tell me it’s her soul or something.”

“I don’t think it’s her soul,” Caitlin said. She did not add, But I don’t know what it might be. She looked out the window. “We’re on the expressway now, traffic’s not so bad. I’ll be there in about forty-five minutes.” She hesitated. “Are you okay? What’s happening in Kashmir?”

She noticed the cab driver’s face tweak, turn slightly toward her. She looked at the name on his license, Shri Kapoor. Their eyes met for a moment in the rearview mirror.

“The UN sent a small force over there but not in the way we hoped,” Ben said. “We wanted a protectorate but this is playing out like martial law. The allied countries are starting to grandstand big-time, like the Allies after World War II. Everyone is jockeying for post-crisis influence even though we’re not past the crisis yet. Russia was first, on behalf of India. China guaranteed loans for Pakistan. That’s all I can say but it feels like we’re flinging farther away from any kind of sane, predictable political process.” He paused. “Like us,” he said tiredly. “I mean, flinging farther away from each other. Not the politics.”

She smiled, then promised, “We’re going to fix that.”

“There’s the old college Cai with the old college try,” he said.

“Rah,” she said. “But first crisis first. Tell me about the Vikings.”

“A story in runes,” he joked. There was a flash of the old Ben as he dove in, the enthusiastic kid scholar. It made her laugh, and she could imagine his answering grin. “In the ninth century, the trade route between the Baltic Sea and the Caspian Sea was essentially conquered and controlled for two hundred years by people called the Rus.”

“Rus as in Russian?”

“Exactly, but that came later, after they intermingled with the Slavs to the point of absorption.” He was racing, as if he was trying to get it all on the table before she reached him in the cab. “In the early days they were specifically the Varangian Rus—‘Varangian’ is from an Old Norse word—and they came down from Scandinavia. They mostly stuck to the trade-and-raid routes, shopping in Baghdad, periodically attacking Constantinople, as pretty much everyone did for thousands of years—”

“Three Vikings walk into a bar in Constantinople… ,” she said slowly.

Ben chuckled and sucked down a breath. He realized he was rushing.

“Okay,” he continued, more slowly. “The Varangian Rus also traveled east beyond Constantinople, to the city of Bolghar on the Volga. The Silk Road was fully active—”

“But that trade route connecting the West to the East was much more recent than an ice-free Antarctica. What’s this got to do with us?”

“The fact that it happened,” he said. “This all occurred between the ninth and eleventh centuries. It was written about, mapped, charted. But it could have happened before, any number of times, and if no one wrote about it, or we haven’t found the writings—”

“Or we haven’t deciphered the writings—”

“Exactly. And how do we know that in your ‘other time’ things were even written? We’ve witnessed these words and gestures. Maybe there were people who just memorized things, like human computers.”

And communicated those thoughts en masse, at death, to another brain? Caitlin wondered. Was that also part of the transpersonal plane? She was getting ahead of herself.

“Ben, we’re coming to the Triborough Bridge and I need a minute to just absorb—”

“Of course. I’ll see you in a few.”

“Wait. Do you have your equipment?”

“After all these years, do you really have to ask?”

“Thank you, Ben, so much.”

“You’re welcome.”

She ended the call, sat back, and took a deep breath.

Under the portentous skies, her mind returned to the task at hand, to Maanik. She had to figure out how to approach her; this could well be her last chance. Without really thinking about it, she reached out with her left hand and touched the frame of the taxi just above her window. At first she felt only the rumble of the road through the steel, but after a second she felt something deeper. She could feel a path extending far beyond the shape of the cab, the traffic outside, even beyond the towers of the city and the angry sky.

It reminded her of her first day in Central Park, decades ago, when she had walked toward scattered elm trees, then among them—and suddenly the trees aligned in long, straight rows. The feeling of alignment had been almost as audible as a click. Now, here in the cab, her perspective had shifted and extended again. The expansion was clear and energetic and familiar. She had felt this on the airplane in that moment of full physical acceptance of truth. Again she felt radiance in her sternum, and took a long inhale and exhale. She continued to breathe steadily and kept her eyes open, pinging from one visual cue to another: streetlamp to car to fire hydrant to pedestrian.

Arriving at the Pawars’ apartment, passing through their door, the atmosphere was so heavy it threatened to unbalance her. All was quiet and dead around her, yet there was also turmoil.

Gales of madness, she thought, flashing back to the experiences with Atash and Gaelle. Is that what Jack London feels?

“Dr. O’Hara,” the ambassador said with a formal nod.

“Ambassador Pawar,” she replied. She did not want to get into a conversation with him. Maanik was stretched out on a sofa, covered in a quilt, her mother by her head, stroking her hair. Caitlin took one look at the girl’s drained face and turned to Ben, standing well to the side.

“Please set up the camera in Maanik’s bedroom.”

Ben reached for his bag but hesitated, waiting for the Pawars’ approval.

“No, not there!” Hansa blurted. “She is much worse in her room!”

“That’s why we have to be there.”

“But she nearly jumped from the—”

“I know. We will not let her anywhere near the window. Please, both of you, I know your daughter is still fighting this and I also know that medicine isn’t the answer and that institutionalizing her will do no good. This is our last chance. We can’t possibly succeed with a diluted version of the experience. It has to be vivid and I have to be in there with her.”

“What do you mean, ‘in there’?” the ambassador asked.

“I am going to hypnotize us together. I’m not going to listen and analyze like before, I’m going to experience everything that she is experiencing.” She looked at Hansa. “Mrs. Pawar, please put Jack London somewhere else. On the other side of the apartment.”

“I’ll get him,” Ambassador Pawar said. “He has not been inclined to leave that spot.”

Caitlin knelt beside Maanik. Left hand, heart hand, spiritual intake, she thought. Right hand, spiritual provider.

Placing her left hand on her own chest, settling herself, Caitlin placed her right hand in Maanik’s left. Something softened behind the girl’s closed eyes and Caitlin felt a small squeeze of her hand.

“It’s time now, Maanik,” she said quietly. “Can you come with me?”

The girl struggled a moment, then nodded. Hansa made way as her daughter rose with an almost ethereal delicacy, as if she were weightless. Caitlin waited while Mr. Pawar slipped by with Jack London. The dog struggled but the ambassador held him tightly against his chest.

Caitlin led the girl down the hall. As they walked, she felt Maanik begin to stiffen.

“The room is safe,” Caitlin said.

“No—”

“We are not going back to the moment of crisis. We are going to a time an hour or two earlier.”

“Sho,” she said.

Caitlin glanced at Ben, who was filming from the other side of the doorway. She didn’t know what the word meant but Ben must have encountered it before because he held up a finger, meaning “one.” One hour before the crisis. Maanik was already on her way back, if indeed she had ever left.

Maanik took a step into the bedroom and Caitlin felt her try to withdraw. She put the girl’s left hand to her own chest. She could feel her heart throbbing through the fabric of her coat, through Maanik’s hand. She took a deep breath. Maanik took one as well. They stepped into the room together and moved slowly until they reached the center. Then Caitlin took up the girl’s right hand.

The polarity of Caitlin and Maanik vanished in a swirl. A different place appeared before Caitlin’s eyes, the bedroom a dim backdrop fading with every beat of her heart. She was staring at a low building made of the same dark blocks with curved edges that she had seen in the courtyard. There were trees by a wooden door and Maanik—no, it was no longer Maanik—was moving to sit on a doorstep of stone. Caitlin remembered Maanik had described these trees before as part of her home. The girl held her chin in one hand and petted a white and gray seal by her feet with the other as the animal rubbed its whiskers back and forth along her calf. The girl seemed to be staring at Caitlin while engaging in conversation with an older woman who sat on the step beside her. Both were dressed in thick coats made of a kind of fur. The older woman was addressing the girl, shaking her head.

“You must not be distressed.”

“But when it comes, anything could go wrong,” the young girl replied.

“That is why we must leave before it begins,” the old woman continued. “The power the Technologists are unleashing is potentially deadly.”

“And the Priests?” asked a third voice, a young man’s voice. Caitlin recognized it as her own, but not her own at the same time—and not the same voice she had spoken with in Atash’s vision. The girl looked at Caitlin, as did the old woman, but they were seeing him.

The old woman hesitated. “I was once a Believer, but I’m not sure anymore,” she finally said. “In any case, I would rather live now than ascend. Please save seats for us on your ship.”

“You will leave early though? Otherwise, there may not be time.”

“You anticipate panic,” the old woman said.

“When the time comes? I do. Ascent through the cazh requires faith,” the young man replied. “Strong faith. Most people will suddenly discover they want our strong hulls instead. I’ll keep seats for you as long as I can.”

The old woman looked up, gazed at a full moon brightening in a sky nearing sunset. Caitlin thought perhaps the woman would have made a different decision if it were just herself, without her granddaughter to consider.

The grandmother rose slowly to her feet and turned to go into the house behind them but kept her eyes on Caitlin’s young man for a second—and suddenly Caitlin felt she was looking at her. “I know you care for her as I do,” she said. “That is where I must put my trust.”

Unnerved, Caitlin broke the gaze and glanced at the girl, who was flashing a smile, then coyly turning her face to look down at her seal.

Caitlin felt the young man start to move toward the girl. She felt a gust of cool air, only now realizing how pleasantly warm the evening had been. The boy took the girl’s hands and Caitlin felt their connection. She realized then, with certainty, that Maanik and this girl had been merged ever since the visions started. And if this girl’s soul, or transpersonal identity, or whatever it was, was connected to Maanik, then the girl was not going to leave with the boy on his ship. Something else had happened.

Caitlin let go and the boy let go and suddenly she was back in Maanik’s bedroom, with Maanik staring at her. Caitlin quickly took both of the girl’s hands, not to reconnect but to make sure she didn’t get away.

“Maanik?”

The girl seemed confused. She tried to let go of Caitlin’s hands but Caitlin held hers tightly.

“No. Stay with me.”

“I have to go,” the girl said frantically. “I don’t belong here.”

“Where?”

“Alive.”

Horrified, Caitlin almost let go of her. This wasn’t Maanik. This was the merged identity, some strange hybrid—part Maanik, part the other. It was not a split personality, not post-traumatic stress as anyone understood it, not even “possession.” It was something else, something new. More importantly, she suddenly understood why they were merged.

“Listen to me,” Caitlin said. The girl tried to withdraw her left hand. Caitlin gripped it and focused. “Listen. I know you’re trying to complete the ritual, and I know you’re trying to join the others and transcend. But something goes wrong each time your people—”

Suddenly her grip broke and cold wind blew against the back of Caitlin’s head. She felt her hair rising, heard shouts and screams from every side. She saw a sky turning red with fire that was shot from the earth to heights she could not imagine.

The girl before her was heaving sobs. Her hands were trying to lift into the air, not in the gestures of the strange language but with drooping wrists, with the awful helplessness of a child crying inconsolably. Caitlin was crying too now, feeling the girl’s gasping, choking cries in her own body.

The young man was not present. The grandmother was not present. There was just the girl in the midst of chaos. Clearly the crisis had come early. People had not been prepared. The well-planned exodus the young man had spoken of had not taken place.

But this was not Caitlin’s concern. It was not something she could repair. She had only one objective.

“Maanik!” Caitlin called, hoping to reach her. “What you see around you is not happening. It already happened. You are not there.”

The girl shook her head as embers fell and scorched her bare arms. “I… am. I must… transcend.”

“No, you must not!”

“It is already being done,” she said through tears.

This wasn’t working; Caitlin would have to go through this girl to get to Maanik. “Tell me your name.”

“Bayarmii,” the girl wept.

“Bayarmii, you must listen. The ritual is not going to work. I know you want to join with the others, but something is going wrong.”

“Why?” she wailed.

“I don’t know yet. But I do know that this isn’t working. You have to stop taking Maanik back with you.”

“No, I need her.”

“But you’re killing her!”

“Yes,” the girl said, rubbing at her face, trying to see through her tears. “If she dies, we will go together. That is what we were told.”

“You’ve been told a lie,” Caitlin said. “Bayarmii, you will ascend through your own private prayer. This ritual—what you’re doing now, the cazh—it’s something else. Please, let go.”

The girl looked around. “I can’t!” Her face was twisted, tortured, terrified.

Then there was silence. Maanik’s bedroom began to waver back into Caitlin’s vision.

“Bayarmii?” There was no response. Then, hopefully, Caitlin looked at the girl standing before her and said, “Maanik?”

“Yes,” Maanik said, trembling.

Caitlin knew that something was still terribly wrong—the bedroom would not steady around them. The other place was still flashing in and through it.

“Maanik, do you understand what Bayarmii said?”

“Yes.” Maanik was shaking hard. Caitlin took her hands again. “She’s not letting go of me, though,” Maanik said. “She’s so scared. She wants to come with me.”

“You must tell her no.”

“But… she says she’ll die if she remains. She says she has to come with me!”

She is already dead, Caitlin wanted to tell her. “Maanik, Bayarmii is very frightened and very confused but that’s not your responsibility. It’s not your job.” Caitlin held her hands tightly as words spilled out of her. “Just like it wasn’t your job to save your father. That was up to the bodyguard and he did it, he protected your papa.” Maanik was weeping again. “You did what you were supposed to do. You kept yourself safe and that’s exactly what you have to do here. You have to tell her no. Helping her is my job, and I will do it. But you have to come back to me first.”

Maanik shuddered, sobbing.

“Listen to me. Your parents love you. Stay here for them and stay here for you.”

“I can’t,” she choked out, trying to pull her hands away.

Caitlin held fast. “You can. Listen to my voice. Follow it.”

“I’m lost—”

“You’re here, with me, with your family, your mother and your father who love you dearly.”

“Papa…”

“That’s it,” Caitlin encouraged her.

“Papa… papa… papa!”

CHAPTER 32

Maanik’s final cry seemed to empty her. She collapsed and then they were both on the floor. The bedroom stabilized around them and the other place disappeared. Caitlin put her arms around Maanik and held on to her tightly as the girl wept into her neck. Caitlin could see the Pawars standing behind Ben, tears coursing down their faces. Caitlin beckoned them with a nod and then moved aside so the family could fall into each other’s arms.

“Is she…?” the ambassador asked.

“For the moment,” Caitlin told him. “But we’re not done. You must keep her here.”

“Of course.”

“No, I mean here in this time and place,” Caitlin said. “I’m sorry, I don’t have time to explain more fully.”

She instructed the ambassador to help his daughter to stand, then led the family back to the living room and had Maanik lie down on the couch again. She placed the ambassador’s right hand on his daughter’s left. “Don’t let go of this hand. Talk to her—about anything, it doesn’t matter. Send good energy through your right hand and she’ll absorb it through her left. Hopefully she’ll keep shifting any bad energy out through her right.”

The ambassador was confused but he didn’t move his hand, and Caitlin quickly walked over to Ben. “I have to find a way to make this permanent.”

“How?”

But Caitlin was already hurrying away. “Mrs. Pawar, please get Jack London and keep him with Maanik, close. I believe that will help. And would you mind if I borrowed something from your kitchen?”

Mrs. Pawar nodded and Caitlin searched through the kitchen cabinets until she found what she was looking for: jasmine tea.

“Ben, can you come with me?” Caitlin asked. “I need your help.”

“Of course,” he said, moving to her side.

As they returned to the living room Ambassador Pawar asked, “Where are you going, Dr. O’Hara?”

“Not too far,” Caitlin said evasively. “Does Maanik’s bedroom door lock?”

“Not from the outside.”

“All right, can you please figure out how to obstruct the door, maybe with furniture or duct tape, or both? But make sure someone is always holding Maanik’s left hand.”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “And if the flames start again?”

“If it comes to that, do what your wife did last time and put her in the shower. But Maanik should sleep now and hopefully I’ll be back soon.”

The ambassador nodded wearily but with a grateful look in his eyes.

As Caitlin and Ben walked briskly to the door, Caitlin asked, “Do you feel it, smell it?”

“Faintly,” he replied. “I mean, there was a fire—”

“No,” Caitlin shook her head. “Death.”

“Jesus—no, Cai.”

Caitlin did not bother to elaborate. She and the other place were still joined, somehow; the dead and dying were not far away.

Waiting for the elevator, Caitlin pushed the tin of tea into Ben’s hands. “If I start to disappear or burn or god knows what, and you want to bring me back, open this and hold it under my nose.”

“Mystic smelling salts?” he asked, sincerely confused.

“It’s a little more aggressive than that,” she said. “This is my ‘blackberries,’ a connection to a place that made a strong impression in the present.”

“I see,” he said, but didn’t.

The elevator arrived and they stepped inside. Both were silent until Ben reached for her. She started to respond but stopped herself, kept her distance.

“Sorry,” Ben said. “I only—”

“I know, it’s just—whatever happens, don’t touch me and don’t let me touch you.”

“Am I that irresistible?” he joked.

She smiled. “It’s not that. There’s just an energy balancing act going on inside me and I don’t want to upset it.”

“Can you explain?”

“Then and now. There and here. I’m holding them both. I don’t want any outside energy to distract me.”

He looked at her. “Was that meant to clarify?”

The door opened at the lobby and they hurried toward the street.

“It’s like hypnagogia,” she told him. “Half-wakefulness. Like when you’re wrenched from a nightmare but you still feel partly trapped in it.”

Ben held open the front door for her. “You don’t seem half-asleep to me, Cai—girl with rivets—”

“Right, like the big strong ocean liner that ran into an iceberg,” she said.

“But you’re alert.”

“Guarded,” she corrected him. Under the entrance canopy she hesitated, peering around at the soft rain. “It’s back,” she said. “The feeling I had here before.”

“Of being watched?”

“Yes.” She closed her eyes, shutting out the glistening blackness of the street, seeing the high columns of that strange other place, the black pillars covered with misty sea spray.

“So where are we going?” Ben asked.

She snapped her eyes open. “I need to go to the United Nations.”

“Okay. You want a cab?”

She shook her head and quickly started walking the few blocks to the Secretariat Building, silent the entire way, Ben’s fingers hovering near Caitlin’s elbow. She felt his energy, his care.

The rain intensified. The asphalt of the streets shone more and more like polished black stone and it was difficult to stay present here, now. Caitlin focused on the white lights of the thirty-nine-story oblong United Nations tower; they read like lines of Braille through the darkness. She did not speak until Ben had flashed his ID to the guard and brought her to the elevators.

“My office?” he asked.

“No. I want to go to the room where the Kashmir negotiations are taking place.”

Ben froze. “The guard will want to know why,” he said, anxiety in his face. “So do I.”

“Trauma.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You saw how Maanik’s room was a magnet, a nexus?”

“You lost me. I thought she’s the conduit, not the place.”

“She is, but once that horror was out, it stayed. Jack London sensed it. I’m not a direct conduit the way Maanik is, so I can’t go back without something that will act like a bellows, fanning the fire. I need more trauma, pain and fear.”

“You know how that sounds?” Ben asked.

“Yeah. Sad, masochistic—and necessary.”

“Rewind. You said ‘go back.’ To do what, exactly?”

“To work with them,” she said, “the entities from Antarctica millions of years ago.”

“Are you loopy? Assuming you can get there, this goes beyond racial memory, Cai, beyond Jung. I mean, way beyond.”

“I know. Crazy as it sounds, I believe their souls were in the middle of something that locked them there, in that state, before some force from inside the earth vaporized their physical bodies.”

“And they’ve been doing what in limbo for all these millennia? Trying to get back?”

“It’s the transpersonal plane, not limbo, and yes, I think so. Maybe some of them have succeeded, cases that have been misdiagnosed as everything from demonic possession to severe schizophrenia.”

“You got all this from a vision that may not be real, that may never have been real.”

“That and a Hindu cleric.”

“Oh, that makes it all right,” Ben said.

“Damn it, Ben. Maanik catching fire was very real. We have to discuss this later, we’re wasting time.”

“No. You want in, you’re going to have to tell me what you’re planning,” Ben said. “I’m worried about you too.”

Caitlin sighed. She would have done the same thing if the roles were reversed. “What I think I saw were the souls of many individuals melding into one. They want to be joined in the transpersonal plane, in their afterlife, for some reason. And they can only do that as they are in the process of transitioning.”

“You mean, the ultimate group hug before death? Or else your soul flies solo?”

“That’s my general understanding,” Caitlin said. “If they go individually, like the ancient girl struggling to take Maanik, it’ll derail the purpose of the ceremony. I bought us some time by bargaining with that girl, Bayarmii, on her own. That weakens the ancient ritual but it’s not going to hold. They’ll pull Bayarmii back in and she will try and get to Maanik again. That’s what’s been happening, over and over. I think I have to encounter all the individuals while they’re in the process of transitioning into their group soul, and try to stop the transformation.”

“How?”

“I’m not entirely sure, but I’m going to try doing what people do at séances: turn on the light, break the spell. I can self-hypnotize but to go back and interact with them I need power, Ben, and trauma seems to be a key. Right now, the most traumatic event taking place near me is the struggle over Kashmir.” The locus of frustration and pain touching all the ends of the earth.

“Cai… I hear you, but this is crazy talk.”

“I prefer to call it a big leap of faith.” She smiled a little. “Two agnostics walk into a bar…”

He couldn’t even manage a nervous laugh. He stared at her a long moment, saw the resolve in her eyes. And punched button 38 on the elevator bank.

When they reached the floor Ben showed the guard his ID, introduced Caitlin as a special consultant from Geneva—she showed her WHO credentials—and they were escorted down the hall and admitted to an empty conference room. The guard returned to his post at the end of the long corridor.

Caitlin stopped Ben from turning on the lights of the room. She could already feel the buzzing of energy in the air. She felt high emotion in her lungs, her belly, the small of her back. She removed her coat and scarf, began to walk through the room, moving with a flow she couldn’t see, only feel. Ben followed protectively, but at a distance.

Ambient light from the city glowed through a wall of exterior windows at the far end of the room. Caitlin bumped into the first of a couple dozen wide, golden leather chairs. There was only room for one person to comfortably walk around the table at a time, and nowhere to shove the chairs other than into their stations at the table. She considered standing on the table so there would be room to move if she needed it, but diffuser panels were slung low beneath the lights. She was sure her head would come too close to them for comfort. Navigating to the end of the table, she found she had about four feet of space to the windows. It would have to be enough.

“What can I do to help?” Ben asked softly.

She shook her head slightly, gazed outside. “How strong are those windows?”

“Very. The recent renovations replaced all five thousand windows with the latest blast-proof panes. In a hurricane, this is one of the safest places you could be.”

“What about a volcano?” she asked.

He didn’t know if she was kidding. He didn’t answer.

The city seemed small compared to the immensity of the time and distance she was beginning to feel. Caitlin was scared. She stopped moving and placed a hand on a conference room chair to steady herself.

Immediately she saw a vision of a human body on fire. The vision was slightly unclear, juddering back and forth as if seen with a handheld camera. She realized that was exactly what was happening. This was the video of the woman who had self-immolated over her dead son, the few seconds of footage Caitlin had seen on her tablet. She heard voices shouting across the table, all around her, and then the people shouting…

… were there, in the courtyard, just beyond her fingertips. Suddenly she was one of many. Many voices, some chanting the cazh, some crying, some screaming. A few were just beginning to express the wonder of transcendence. Their bodies moved like reeds in a pond in their white and yellow robes. Then, as though the air and energy left them in a rush, their bodies dropped to the paving stones of the courtyard, across the huge crescents carved into the flat, black rocks.

Above their heads a pulsing force drew Caitlin’s attention. She could not see it but she could feel it, and the presence grew as the bodies fell to the ground.

Ben watched every tendril of Caitlin’s hair lift in a breeze he didn’t feel. She opened her mouth and exhaled, but it was not the sigh of a single soul. It was the combined sound of multitudes.

Ben stepped back, reached for the tin of tea he had placed on the table. He stopped himself.

Not yet. But he was ready.

Now Caitlin was breathing heavily. Her arms were moving. Ben heard words, identified a few, combined them with the gestures to understand the superlatives. It was too late to set up his camera but he took out his cell phone and began recording.

“The fire!” she said. “So much death. The end is here!”

All around her, Caitlin could see the destruction of a civilization, and she was part of it, part of this place—Galderkhaan. She knew its name now, only as it was dying. Standing here by the temple, the Hall of the Priests, she could see the volcano to the east, blowing the center of the earth into the sky.

A towering, sulfurous wave of glaring orange and gold lava spewed from the volcano’s mouth, knocking down the first of a long line of tall, glowing columns that led from the volcano to the sea. Connecting yin and yang, the left hand to the right hand, Caitlin thought with sudden realization. The Technologists had built the array, which gathered energy and passed it from column to column, like tuning forks growing exponentially more powerful. Was this some kind of technological response to the cazh? If so, something had gone wrong with this process as well. One by one, the pillars collapsed beneath the juggernaut of lava rolling toward the city. Clouds of red and black, fire and cinders, fell on the courtyard and buildings. Heaps of hot ash piled onto white and yellow robes that once held souls and were now just incendiary masses of flesh.

The wave of lava would overwhelm the courtyard soon. Caitlin had to find Bayarmii. She followed the sightline of tall columns away from the courtyard to the west, where the columns pierced the sea, shining green from their capstones. A full moon was gasping for breath between breaks in the clouds, strobing its blue-white light across the roiling ocean. The sea was flinging itself at the sky, hunching its back in titanic waves and bucking and kicking at the columns and the shore…

And at ships. Ships with long, graceful dragon’s heads, each carved with a symbol of crescents entwined, the symbol that appeared on the capstones of the columns and in the paving stones of the courtyard—the sole remnant of a time before the rise of conflicting factions, chaos that helped bring a civilization to this precipice.

Focus, Caitlin, remember why you’re here, she told herself. She remembered a young man, a granddaughter, a seal, and felt her mind suddenly fuse with the grandmother’s. She was holding Bayarmii’s hand—

Then the earth shifted as a huge sea wave struck hard, and she fell. When she clambered upright Bayarmii was gone. Caitlin looked back, peering through smoke and mist, ash and flame. She saw that Bayarmii had run back to the white and gray seal, who was mad with fear inside the house. The trees burned outside the front door. It was too late. Too late to join the boy on the boat.

“The cazh!” screamed the grandmother. “It’s our last chance to ascend together!”

The girl obeyed. One of the burning trees fell against the door, trapping the girl and seal inside. A flaming branch cracked on impact, slashed toward her, simultaneously shearing and cauterizing her arm. The words of the prayer became more powerful and immediate and the spirit of the girl rose…

Caitlin could only hope that Maanik was not experiencing this, that Bayarmii was subsumed in the moment. But her hope was overwhelmed by the grandmother’s willpower. She would not abandon her granddaughter. She, too, knew the words. She had been a devotee of the Priests in her youth. She spoke the cazh; she focused on the pulsing energy gathered above the dead and dying in the temple courtyard. Even as waves ran toward her and hot ash sizzled on her bare neck and arms, she spoke…

Ben saw Caitlin smile. Her expression was almost euphoric. She spoke with gestures: “Hundreds of feet in the air! I want to rise with the sea, with the wind, in a great swell! I want to look down at the white ice cliffs and the black columns…”

The conference room was vibrating as though a subway train were passing underneath, but it wasn’t moving. Ben glanced outside. Through the driving rain and wind he thought he saw the East River rising in fifteen-foot waves. It had to be a trick of the thick glass, the rain, the mist.

He turned back to Caitlin. Her head was upraised, her arms in a pose he had seen when Maanik was at her most distressed, just before they used the blackberries cue. Caitlin’s left fingers were spreading and reaching farther, seeking or pointing, he couldn’t tell. There was a rippling above her, like rising heat.

“It’s everywhere!” Caitlin cried out in English.

Where is the guard? Ben thought. Isn’t he hearing any of this?

He could feel something building in the room, but it was ephemeral, invisible. A hot wind coiled around him. Was he experiencing what Caitlin felt with Maanik, a spillover of some ancient energy, hovering unseen like the air itself?

“What is everywhere?” he called.

“The transpersonal plane!” she cried. “Souls are rising! My god, it is powerful! I am ascendant! But there’s more… I can’t see…”

Other minds brushed past her, transcending spirits interlacing with each other as they departed one realm and entered another, unified in a churning mass soul. Yet everywhere, too, bodies were perishing before the ritual could be completed, before they could link with the group soul. Those souls were rising alone.

She could still question, she could still think: Is that the key? But how can I stop so many from completing the cazh at once?

But she threw the questions away, wanting only to be here and now, with them. One spirit turned from the group and looked into Caitlin’s eyes.

Not you, the grandmother told her. You are not one of us.

Though Caitlin longed to complete the transcendence with them, see what was out there, she obeyed.

I am still Caitlin, she told herself.

She held back, then withdrew. She focused on the conference room floor beneath her feet, heard the pounding rain on the windows.

I must remain myself.

She thought of the people in the park in Tehran, the men and women doing Tai Chi, moving with sublime balance. She pressed her left foot hard against the conference room floor, like a sprinter pushing her foot into a starting block. This reality, coming in through her left, would hold her here a little longer.

I am still me.

She felt stabilized, literally with one foot in each world. But she still had to stop the mass soul that was forming around her, above her, in Galderkhaan. The souls that were seeking other traumatized souls in Caitlin’s present.

Ben saw Caitlin’s smile vanish. He noticed the change in her position. She was speaking again but he was finding it harder to hear her. He realized suddenly that it wasn’t her voice that was changing; there was a pressure increasing in his head, and his eardrums were throbbing, as though he were in an airplane that had depressurized. He opened his mouth wide, worked his jaw, swallowed; it succeeded for an instant and then the pressure returned. With one eye on Caitlin he moved to the windows, trying to locate the source of the pressure. A vent… an ill-fitting window… a gap in the ceiling…?

There was nothing. The wind threw rain at the windows like stones.

He set his cell phone on the table and ventured closer to Caitlin, staggering against the pressure in his head. Caitlin’s hair was still floating. Her eyes were shut, her mouth was moving, her arms helping to fashion unfamiliar words. He fought against his brutal headache, to make his feet move toward the tin of tea.

“What do I do?” he whispered, half-praying for an answer.

Caitlin did not hear. Everywhere she looked, she could see the dead or dying. Beyond the trees she could see the same young man from Atash’s vision, performing the cazh. Across the water she watched as a boat smashed into one of the largest pillars, coming to pieces, its inhabitants clawing at the waves, or raising their hands in supplication even as they drowned. Gaelle, Caitlin thought helplessly. There was nothing she could do to save them from their deaths. She had to press on, had to stop the rising group soul and protect others in the present…

Ben saw smoke rising from her flesh.

“Caitlin!”

“Don’t… touch… me!”

There was a decanter of water on the conference table. He would use it if he had to. He did not understand very much but he knew this: they might never have this chance again. He had to let it play out.

Caitlin had no time left to think and not much of a rational mind to think with. Instead, she felt herself rise from the temple, rise from the conference room, beyond the ash and beyond the rain, into a cloud that was thunder and darkness, that was the coldness of the grave multiplied by eternity. Despite the grandmother’s warning, Caitlin allowed herself to ascend, carried by the older woman’s soul. Caitlin’s grip on her own living body grew weaker.

Two worlds were merging violently. The storm seemed to roil above Manhattan as Galderkhaan was pulled into the sea with the roaring hiss of dying flames. The innumerable souls of the ascended were everywhere.

Caitlin clung single-mindedly to one thought, one objective: the group soul trying to form and cross the barrier of time. She thought of the young people she knew and did not know in her own world, others like Maanik and Gaelle and Atash who were made vulnerable by trauma and were probably being assaulted, their own souls being dragged painfully upward along with those of these ancient beings, for reasons still unknown. She had to stop them.

Below her, she saw the entire city, the roads and streets, the line of columns that ran from the volcano to the sea, glowing green with their strange energy—but also, in the capstone of the tallest column in the sea, a symbol. A triangle made of crescents within crescents. It was the same symbol she had seen Gaelle draw. The same one Maanik had drawn.

Caitlin glanced at the powerful, rising group soul, and then she knew what she had to do. She turned and plunged across the sky toward the largest column. There was no sense of weight or weightlessness, no sense of motion, only a sensation of sudden, lightning-like extension—point to point to point. Arms outstretched, she grabbed at the energy around the column as if it were tangible.

And it was. She felt it writhe in her embrace, become one with her, like the power she’d received from the snake but exponentially more. She wrenched her body around and with a long sweep of her arms, she cast the power toward the courtyard. It flew through and away from her, as in Haiti when, out of control, Caitlin had thrown Gaelle against a wall.

But this time she directed it.

The tsunami of lava was perilously close to the city as the energy reached the courtyard and infused it. The paving stones erupted in light from beneath, a brilliant glow that blazed through the huge triangle carved into them, the crescents within crescents.

Those who were still standing and chanting the cazh, those shocked Galderkhaani, screamed as the fusion of earth, fire, water, and light swept over them. Their movements changed from swaying to lurching tremors as their souls were yanked one from the other from the other, unlinked. Abruptly, their mortal screams stopped as their right and left brains ceased to function together. Their mouths remained frozen for a moment; an instant later the right sides of their bodies crumpled. They fell heavily to the stones where they died. Thick, bloody liquid flowed from their noses and mouths onto their burning white and yellow robes.

And Caitlin saw that once more their souls rose, invisible yet somehow tangible. But with this death, a death without the cazh, they were ascending as individuals. The group soul was no more. Whatever its purpose had been, that goal was unrealized. Whatever power had allowed the bonded souls to reach through time, that was gone.

The mammoth wave of lava broke over the city and destroyed it. There was nothing epic or prolonged about its demise: one moment Galderkhaan struggled, then it was gone. Caitlin felt the ecstasy of the energy depart from her; no longer immaterial, she plummeted into the sea…

And dropped to the floor of the conference room. Ben broke her fall.

There was a quiet hiss as the smoke rising from her body was suddenly doused. Ben stroked her hair back. Her eyes were closed, her mouth relaxed.

“Cai?”

There was no response. He flipped the top from the tin, brought the jasmine tea to her nose, and held her tightly with his free arm. After a moment he heard her very quietly inhale.

“Cai? Are you… here?”

She opened her eyes, struggled to focus. Then, finding his face, she smiled.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m here.”

CHAPTER 33

Caitlin woke the next morning to see Jacob, fully dressed, leaning over her, smoothing her hair from her face. Caitlin blinked at the light shining from the hall through the open door, the tall figure of her father in the frame. Weak sunlight was filtering around the corners of her curtains.

“I’m going to school with Grandpa,” Jacob signed, then pasted himself to her for a hug and a kiss. Smiling, she watched the bedroom door shut quietly behind them.

Her eyes closed and she suddenly felt achingly alone, lonelier than she’d ever felt in her life. She had been bonded in a group the night before, in a still-unimaginable way, and now that was gone. She ran a hand through her hair; it felt too fine and unfamiliar.

Knowing it was four a.m. in Santa Monica, she phoned her sister anyway. Abby sounded wide awake.

“Whoa… I was just thinking about you.”

Caitlin was silent, staring at the ceiling. There was no way to tell her about any of it.

“Cai? Are you there? Did you butt-dial me?”

“Abby, do you think souls are real?”

“That’s… unexpected.”

“I know, I’m just—I don’t know. You’ve been around death. I mean, person-to-person. Much more than I have.”

“Too much of it,” Abby said. “Too much of it young, sudden, needless. Drugs, drinking, texting while driving, hit by cars, shot in malls.”

“And?”

“And, yeah, I do. This may sound nutty but sometimes when people die—only for an instant, the kind of moment that’s so fast you wonder if it happened—I can feel them. Not always, but briefly, after the life signs are gone, it’s very clear to me that I’m not the only person in the room. The feeling is stronger if I’m holding their hand.” Abby waited a moment. “Why are you asking?”

Caitlin had expected the question; there was no easy answer. “Just soul searching,” she joked.

“Cute,” Abby groaned. “Dad says you’ve been traveling.”

“Oh yeah,” Caitlin said. “That I have. Call you later?”

“Sure. I’ve got to go anyway.”

“Wait—you were just thinking about me? What are you doing up at this hour?”

“Got an early surgery,” Abby said.

“Ah. Good luck.”

“Thanks. Burn victim.”

When Abby said “burn victim,” Caitlin felt herself tense. She wondered if that would always happen, going forward.

Their call ended and she lay back. Her eyes closed, her mind closed, and she was asleep again.

Three hours later, when Caitlin was fully awake and caffeinated, the tabby Arfa draped across her lap, she opened her computer and her e-mail. At the top of the list was one from Ben, subject line: 2.5M hits in 4 hrs. Caitlin clicked on the attached video—and she was watching brightly painted trucks full of men and lumber driving into something like a shopping center in India, but a wrecked, distressed shopping center. It looked as if it had been through a hurricane. The men piled out of the trucks and hurried to greet the few people who were edging cautiously toward them from nearby houses. Then the video jumped to show construction—men repairing domed roofs—and people setting up long tables with lunch.

Caitlin called Ben and he picked up immediately.

“What am I watching?” she said, smiling as she saw little kids helping to drag planks toward a blasted shop front.

“The solution to all our problems,” he said. “This video was posted at around noon Jammu time and it went viral faster than any video in history. This shopping center saw a showdown between armed forces with guns, bombs, you name it. That’s what I was watching the night after we—after I stayed over. Apparently, truckloads of Pakistanis and Indians just converged on the city and now they’re rebuilding everything, the temple, the stores, the cinema. When the video went viral there was an international outcry calling for reconciliation. Both delegations showed up this morning to make a deal. It was—actually, it was very strange, like they’d all woken from a fever or something.”

“That’s amazing,” Caitlin said. “It’s too…”

“Impossible?” Ben asked. “Nevertheless, that was all it took. Supposed enemies treating each other as people, with dignity. Cooperation. Kindness.”

“And the governments listened,” she mused.

“Listened? This was just the face-saving grassroots stuff they were praying for.”

“What does that mean for Kashmir?”

“We’re not sure,” Ben said. “Both governments agreed to pull their troops from the region. It’ll take some effort before they actually do it, but the ambassador and his counterpart are hard at work on that now. He has a second wind, I’ll tell you that.” Ben chuckled. “Actually, I guess I don’t have to tell you that.”

“How is Maanik?”

“The ambassador said she’s herself again.”

“Specifics?”

“She has her energy back, her joy, her enthusiasm, and she’s been on the phone with her friends nonstop.”

“Does she remember anything?”

“Honestly, Cai, nobody wants to ask her. She was told she had a very bad lung infection and she didn’t question it.”

“What about the dog?”

“He’s fine too,” Ben said. “That was the third thing I asked: how’s the world, how’s Maanik, how’s Jack London.”

“He’s a part of this somehow,” Caitlin said. “Like the snake in Haiti, possibly even those rats that massed downtown.”

“Odd grouping, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would.”

“Any idea how they’re connected?”

“None,” she admitted. But the claw tips of the crescent symbol flashed through her brain.

“Speaking of which, you and the snake showed up in a YouTube video,” Ben said.

“What?”

“Yeah. I’ll send you the link. Don’t worry. Only a couple hundred hits. You haven’t gone viral.”

“Am I identified?” she asked.

“Not by name,” he replied. “Now I have one more question before I head back into the conference room. How are you?”

She chuckled mirthlessly. “Honestly? I have no idea. My brain is present and accounted for but… there’s been a shift of some kind.” She extended a hand toward the little sliver of Hudson River she could see outside the window. “There’s something… different. I can’t explain it.”

“You self-hypnotized into quite a state,” Ben said. “I’m not surprised you’re a little disoriented.”

“Disoriented but connected.”

“To what?”

“I don’t know that either.” She let her hand drop. “To something.”

There was more to say, a lot more, but Caitlin let it go. Everything she’d experienced would require a great deal more reflection and investigation.

“Can I assume that whatever it was, whatever they were, they’re gone now?” Ben asked.

“I’m not sure. I’m not sure they were ever here.”

“If by ‘here’ you mean ‘on earth,’ the linguistic evidence certainly supports their existence,” Ben said. “You and Maanik didn’t make that up.”

“No,” Caitlin agreed. “But a civilization that may have existed before we began recording history… a civilization that still seems to have active moving parts, probably did make it up.”

“And—group hug—a civilization you and I seem to have discovered,” he added proudly.

“That too. It’s a very big idea to process.”

“One which I’m thrilled to investigate,” he said. “I was looking at the data from yesterday. There are a lot of new words and two of them kept repeating, something about ‘those of spirit’ and ‘those of mechanism.’”

“Priests and Technologists,” Caitlin said.

“Yes, that’s about right.” He hesitated. “You want to talk about it?”

“I’m still unclear about what the Technologists were doing. The Priests were attempting to escape their physical bodies and ascend, but they were also trying to unite.”

“You mean join hands, like that kid’s game, Ring Around the Rosie?”

“No, more like what I said before, a séance. A ritual where the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. A joining that was very powerful and getting stronger, that was fishing for souls here, now. That’s why I did what I did. I felt that if I could interfere with their ceremony, they would be unable to rise as a group.”

“What was the point of their joining?”

“I don’t know.”

Ben was silent.

“Go ahead,” Caitlin said. “Say it.”

“Cai, do you actually believe any of that? Especially the part about going into the past? Not physically, obviously, but out-of-body?”

“I must have,” she said. “I mean, reverse-engineer it, Ben. Maanik is okay.”

“Yes…”

“The things I just described fit with the words you translated.”

“Also true,” Ben agreed.

“So how else do you explain it?”

Ben was quiet again.

Caitlin fell silent too, sifted through scraps of memory. “Ben, did anything happen with my hair?”

“Why do you ask?”

“It’s acting… unruly today.”

“Yes,” he said, and she heard reluctance. “It was standing on end.”

“Moving as if in a wind or water?”

“No, standing as if it got zapped with static electricity,” Ben answered thoughtfully. “A charge built up by the storm, I figured.”

“A charge I felt through those blast-proof windows? That you didn’t feel?”

Again, Ben was silent.

“Well, one puzzle at a time,” she said. “Something changed Maanik after the assassination attempt, and something yesterday changed her back. The world is a little saner today. Maybe that’s enough for now.”

“Not for me,” Ben admitted. “I’m still stuck on the simple, non-metaphysical question of how Galderkhaan could have existed at all.”

She started at that. “You know its name?”

“Yeah, you said it last night.”

“Galderkhaan,” she repeated.

Ben continued. “And it fits the rest of the language, vaguely Mongolian. How could modern humans—they were modern, weren’t they?”

“They appeared to be,” she answered. “Shorter, maybe? A golden tinge, though that may have been the play of light and smoke.”

“Okay, but not Neanderthal or an early hominid,” Ben said. “How could they have thrived when our species was supposedly still lemurs in the trees?”

“I don’t know.” She was silent for a moment. “There is one thing I do know, though.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve got to get going. A psychiatrist walks into her office—”

“Okay, go,” Ben said.

They ended the call and Caitlin gazed at the bright world outside, petted the purring cat. She noticed she was petting with her right hand. She switched to petting with her left hand and felt a flow of something roll up through her fingers to her heart, settling her, calming her. Arfa purred louder.

“What do you have to do with this?” she asked the cat. She gazed at pigeons on the ledge. “All of you?”

But even as Caitlin felt herself calm, a part of her stood back, apart, wondering what life was going to be like now.

She sighed and set the cat aside, returned to common ground between the old self and the new—her e-mail. She noticed near the top a message from Gaelle Anglade. There was something in the subject line that never would have been there just a few days before.

A smiley face.