“Show me.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to see what you saw.”
With a cringe, Caitlin sat in Jacob’s chair. She mimed the dropping of the glass, then re-created the two fists in the air, the arc of them downward. “That’s when he hit the table,” she said. “It seemed to jar him out of the episode.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t see anger there, Cai. What I see is frustration, pure and simple.” He read her doubting face, motioned for her to stand. He sat in her place and re-created the sequence. “Which way do you see it, now that it isn’t Jacob?”
She half-turned, nodded, then released a huge breath. “Okay, not anger. Not wrath. Something more like… disappointment? Resignation about something? I… I don’t know but he was affected by something.”
“Regardless, not worth risking your mind or life for. Not yet.”
She gazed at him mutely and at last shook her head no. “But I have to do something, this is Jacob! So what the hell am I going to do, Ben?”
“I don’t know yet but you can’t go about it like this,” he said.
“I know, but I am so angry,” she told him as she flopped onto the sofa. “And my apartment’s already clean, so housework therapy is out.”
“Well, my apartment’s not.”
She smacked him in the arm.
“Not bad.”
“What?”
“If my UN stress counselor were here, he’d tell you to throw a couple punches at a pillow.”
She made a face. “Bad Psychiatry 101.”
“Mommy?”
Caitlin’s head snapped toward the hallway. Jacob was standing there, smiling, with Arfa prancing toward him. He waved at his mother.
“Hey,” she said, forcing a smile as she signed. “What happened to your nap?”
“It’s done,” he said, brushing his hands against each other.
“Did you have any dreams?”
“Yes,” he gestured excitedly. “I was flying.”
“Sounds fun,” Caitlin said, still pretending to be calm.
“Tawazh!” he spoke aloud as he ran forward.
Ben and Caitlin exchanged quick looks. Ben was visibly surprised to actually hear the Galderkhaani word, to know that the boy wasn’t saying “towers.” She hugged him and he hugged her back in a long “normal” embrace.
“He said it,” Ben whispered. “You didn’t imagine it.”
Caitlin nodded over Jacob’s shoulder. “Thank you.”
“And it didn’t come from me or from you.”
She shook her head.
Ben stayed where he was, studying Caitlin. He noticed that her eyes were wet, and that not all of her tears were from relief.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 12
Mikel flung himself back against the lava tube, trying to keep distance between himself and the red-orange flame. A lone tendril of fire reached along the stone ceiling and for a moment dipped toward his boots, then it vanished and the echoes of the cracking boom faded to silence.
Hyperventilating, he forced out a big exhale, and it emerged as a horrible, choked shadow of a laugh.
“Christ almighty,” he said aloud, as much to check his hearing after the blast as to vent some of the lingering terror. His ears were fine, though the subsequent quiet was far more discomfiting. His vision had temporarily blanked after the glare but was already returning. He fought a desperate urge to strip off some of his layers of clothing. The suffocating heat was going to dissipate rapidly and then the cold would lunge back at any exposed skin.
He took a deep inhale now and realized two things: that there was no odor associated with the blast, which seemed impossible, and that he was breathing far more air than he should have been after an explosion had just gorged itself on the oxygen in this cramped space.
Quickly taking advantage of the residual warmth, he tugged down his balaclava, pulled off a glove, licked his fingers, and held them to the air to determine the breeze’s point of origin. It was in the same direction as the fireball.
Mikel ignored his brain warning him that another fireball could explode at any moment. It could easily have been a solitary incident, right? Or one that occurred, what, every year or two, at the most? Every decade? Every century? There was no way to tell, judging by the lack of old charring under the fresh scars on the walls.
Maybe old Vol had a point, he thought. Nothing is ever learned or discovered by caution. My very presence here is evidence of that.
Mikel pulled on his glove, his hand already starting to feel the chill, and wriggled into a crawling position facing the source of the breeze. One hand nearly landed on the olivine-studded rock and he jerked away from it.
If I’d stayed with the projection, or whatever it was, what would have happened to me? What happened to them?
“Projection,” “hologram,” “vision”—they all seemed too mundane for what had just occurred. And the fire he’d experienced had been no vision. The dripping sounds that reached his ears were evidence that the heat had been very real. Eyeing the basaltic rock anchoring the olivine mosaic stone, he assured himself he’d come back to reengage if necessary.
I know where you live, Vol!
Mikel moved cautiously through the tunnel, though his hands bumped and brushed other half-buried objects, Mikel did not experience any unusual sensations.
The mosaic tiles. The artifact I brought to the Group. All one. But one what? Phosphorous needed oxygen to glow, and that luminosity was definitely coming from inside the stone. No oxygen there. It was not porous.
The crawl was ludicrously short, only about fifteen feet. There at the end of it was something that looked like the top of a chimney, with a generally circular shape that extended down at least twenty-five feet, with a hole at the top four feet across. This structure too was of basaltic rock but it was not continuous with the lava tube. Where the tube had fractured into hexagons while in contact with ice, this projection was as smooth as the walls, shelves, and furniture Mikel had seen in his vision. Inclined at a forty-five-degree angle to the tube, it looked like the lava had hit it, broken it, surrounded it, and then locked it in place as the flow cooled and solidified.
Mikel stopped short. As he shone his lamp ahead into the angled structure he saw stairs.
Not a chimney, he thought. I’m at the top of a tower. A hollow column of some kind.
He bared just a wrist to test the air and felt a stronger breeze coming from within the tower. Had wind from this tower extinguished the fireball? Or had the fireball issued from it?
He crept forward a little. Narrow spiral stairs bubbled from the inside of the tower going down. A direction his gut told him not to go.
A tingling sensation filled him, not from without but from within. Fear. Now that he had stopped, now that he was undistracted by physical stimuli, terror had purchase in his atavistic core. It wasn’t the geographic isolation; he had been in caves before, in tombs.
No, the fear came from his sharp awareness that he was not alone. There were no hidden lions or snakes here, as in the African veldt or the deserts of Egypt. Nothing that might spring at him. This was worse. It was something enormous and eternal, possibly good, possibly not. And he was stumbling through it like a child. The destruction of his body he could live with—so to speak. But a tormented immortality?