The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. What if she tried to go back there and only caused things to deteriorate further?
You left me without a bloody guidebook! she screamed at everyone who had brought her to this moment—herself above all. She wished she could take a week off and pick the brains of Vahin, the Hindu cleric she’d met in Iran, and Madame Langlois, whose Haitian Vodou world was as vivid as it was foreign. They had provided such strong insight with Maanik’s case.
But this was Jacob. She couldn’t leave him and she couldn’t take him with her. She didn’t even know if she could get back into Tehran now.
She paced to the hall and listened for anything from Jacob’s room, but all was silent. For a second she sank onto her heels and put her forehead in her hands. Almost instantly she stood again, unable to be still. Staying there by the hallway, she closed her eyes and ground her left heel into the floor. She stretched her left hand toward the chair Jacob had been sitting in and extended her right hand toward the floor, willing herself back, back, back, to Galderkhaan, to any place that wasn’t here—
Nothing happened.
Damn it!
She opened her eyes, shook out the stance, then looked at the nearest piece of curved metal, her coffeepot on the table. Again, she willed herself into the alternate mind stream or whatever the hell it was—and again, nothing happened. She cupped her right hand under her left palm, not touching, but she didn’t even feel the centering that had been occurring regularly for weeks.
Whatever power she’d discovered had died in her. She was dead.
Why? How?
She had shut it down in the subway. Had she willed that to happen again?
Anger and fear cascaded over her again. The ignorance and uncommon stupidity in her skull made her want to tear at her hair.
Then the apartment intercom buzzed. She grunted with frustration, paced to the screen, and saw that Ben was outside the apartment building. She punched the “talk” button.
“Not a good time, Ben.”
His face turned to the fish-eye camera. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Ben—” she said, resisting.
“Let me up, Cai. Just let. Me. Up,” he insisted.
She hesitated. She wanted to say no but realized that this could after all be what she needed. Not Ben but whatever gifts Ben bore. She buzzed him in.
A minute later he was walking in the door, having taken the stairs two at a time. He looked drawn and pale and was speaking before she had a chance to.
“I felt you,” he said.
“What?”
“I felt something snap—wrong,” he explained. “I don’t know how, whether we’re still entangled on some level or something from the United Nations, but it was stronger than just an intuition, something I couldn’t ignore.”
He reached out to pull her in but she backed away. She had noticed that Arfa was sniffing Ben’s ankle—the same way the beagle, Jack London, had done in the Pawars’ apartment.
“Cai?” Ben said.
She shook her head several times. Not here. Not the same situation. Not in my home.
“Cai!” Ben said more insistently.
She motioned him in, shut the door, and launched into a description of Jacob’s episode, speaking so quickly even the UN interpreter could barely follow. Finally, he interrupted her.
“What were the words he said?”
Caitlin thought back. “En. Dovi. I think they were two words. He struggled a few times to get them out.”
“Probably just fragments,” Ben said. “He didn’t get to finish.”
“Right. I should have let him just scream it all out.”
“I didn’t say that,” Ben said soothingly. “Where is he now, can I see him?”
“Why?”
“If I knew, I’d tell you,” he said. “More information, he may say something else—I don’t know.”
Reluctantly, she walked him down the hall. When she opened the bedroom door, Jacob was visible in the bed, his stuffed whale cast to one side, his fingers no longer in his mouth. For a moment there was only the sound of his deep sleep breathing.
No, it wasn’t just his breathing. There was a sound like… wind? Breakers on a beach? It was distant and indistinct but it was not his breath.
She tugged the sleeve of Ben’s jacket and they backed into the hall. Caitlin shut the door and waited until she was back in the living room to speak again.
“It’s Galderkhaan,” she said. “I have to go back and I haven’t been able to. But with you here maybe I can try using the cazh.”
“Whoa,” Ben said, cutting her off. “The chant you went into at the UN? The ritual that talked about you going ‘Hundreds of feet in the air, I want to rise with the sea, with the wind’?”
“Yes.”
He looked at her with surprise and she started when she realized why. He had quoted it in Galderkhaani and she had understood him. The sound of those very elements seemed to creep in around them. Behind them the cat was curled under a chair. Its fur rippled faintly.
“Holy shit,” Ben said.
“Yeah. There is something going on,” she said. “Do you disagree?”
He shook his head.
“All right, then. At the very least, going back will help me to establish whether the souls are somehow still in this goddamn spin cycle, whether they’re still trying to use that final cazh.”
“I’ll be damned if you’ll do that, Cai,” Ben said. “Wherever it took you, it’s a dangerous tool.”
“No, this is perfect, Ben. You’ve seen the process, you’ll know if you need to stop it. And you’re familiar with everything Maanik went through so if Jacob wakes up, if he—” She stopped herself. “If he needs anything, you’ll be here to give it to him.”
“And you? What happens to Jacob if you get lost in Galderkhaan or inside your head somewhere?”
“Inside… my head?” Caitlin’s fury flared out of her. “You’re still not convinced any of this is happening, are you?”
“Something is going on, I just don’t know what!”
“Didn’t you just say you got a ‘ping’ from me, miles away!”
“Maybe it’s ESP, or a strong sixth-sense animal instinct, absolutely worth exploring with controls… but not something to jump headlong into. And I have to say it: why are you convinced this stuff is absolutely, no-question, for real? You’re the psychiatrist, the scientist! We had the language, Maanik’s fits, the power of suggestion they created—”
“No,” she said. “Ben Moss, don’t you dare do this to me.”
“Do what, exactly? Caution you? Think, Cai! You used that chant as a last resort to save a life. Maanik was literally generating fire in her body.”
“Another strong indicator that this is real, wouldn’t you say?”
“Pyrokinesis, spontaneous combustion, I don’t know,” he said. “Please listen. Jacob is down the hall, asleep. For right now, he’s perfectly okay. And from what you described, whatever he experienced bore no resemblance to any of the other kids’ experiences. Besides, you can’t know for sure that going back won’t exacerbate the problem. Tell me one reason you should go jumping into some self-induced hypnotic state that may not have an exit strategy!”
“Because Jacob wasn’t here, Ben. For a couple seconds it wasn’t him. That happened with Maanik too, you saw it. And let’s not forget yesterday, at the school, he went away somehow.”
“But what he did was totally different.”
“No.” She pointed at the almond milk still covering the table. “It was violent and angry.”