And then the ice field seemed to suck the great airship into itself, bashing the gondola against the walls of the crevasse, shredding the deflated balloon. Screaming and barely holding on, Azha sought Dovit’s eyes.
Enzo, bellowing her chant, exploded in flame.
And then they hit water, salt water, and plummeted down and down into its abyss. Enzo continued to burn within the sea. Azha refused to let go of Dovit and tried to kick herself up but the descending ship created a vortex she could not overpower. She fought with all her strength but soon she had to take a breath where there was no breath to take.
She was the last to drown but not the last to die.
Electrical engineer Jina Park drove her shovel down hard on the ice covering the miniature windmill that was supposed to help power this remote GPS station. She paused and looked up to see Fergal MacIan, who, having uncovered the solar panel that did the other half of the work, had tired of waiting for her to finish. He had mounted his snowmobile and was driving in circles around the vast white landscape like a teenager. Jina laughed and shook her head at the familiar sight. Three weeks into their posting, she had become the rational “sibling” of the duo and remained so throughout the Antarctic winter.
She lowered her head to the task at hand and felt a tiny pop in her nose. Tucking a gloved finger beneath her balaclava, she knew what to expect. The hyper-dry air had done it again: blood.
Then she smelled something. Not blood; burning plastic? Or sulfur? She looked down to see a bright yellow flame jump from the ice and engulf the left leg of her supposedly fireproof salopette. The other leg caught fire a second later.
“Fergal, help! Help me!”
Jina threw herself to the snow and rolled but the flames would not smother; in an instant she was consumed. She screamed and wailed as the pain tore through her, her clothes melting into her flesh as it bubbled and flaked.
Fergal, caught up in his manic figure eights, heard nothing over the roar of his engine until something caught the corner of his eye. Over his shoulder he saw a black and gold tower that seemed to dance in the polar wind, then topple over. He jerked the snowmobile around for a better view and, misjudging the arc, flipped the vehicle hard. With the full weight of it pinning him to the ice, he skidded for what must have been a hundred feet. Finally, with the engine humming helplessly, he and the mangled machine came to a full stop. With the last ounce of strength he could muster before losing consciousness, Fergal turned his eyes toward the diminishing flames and screamed, “Jina!”
But Jina was beyond hearing. She was beyond pain. She was deep within herself, observing her body as it burned away. In the distance she saw Fergal turn his head toward her. She imagined stretching a blazing hand toward him, touching his broken body, but he did not move.
Then Jina heard a voice…
“Varrem,” it whispered.
She turned her attention skyward and knew that something was looming above her. It was vast, unfamiliar, and overpowering. As it bore down she screamed from the depths of her soul. The Antarctic wind picked up, skipping with her ashes across the surface of the snow as everything grew very dark, very still, and very, very quiet.
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
Caitlin O’Hara was lying in bed with her hands folded across her ribs. It was just after five a.m. and a weak, dark gray light was leaching into the black room through a crack in the curtains.
Predawn has always been undervalued as a witching hour, she thought. Midnight, in prose and poem, had gotten all the glory. At this hour, though, people had to gather their lonely, enervated willpower and make the first choices of the day. For that you needed raw courage. Or crayons, she thought with a smile.
Occasionally, when she was sitting in her office surrounded by diplomas, international accolades, and personal photographs from a life of world travel, Caitlin sharpened crayons. It was more than just mindless activity; her teenage clients frequently needed more than words to describe what they were feeling. Though new clients were often puzzled when she brought out the sketch pad and a sixty-four-pack of Crayolas from her desk, they quickly succumbed to the freedom of nonverbal expression, to the idea of reverting to childhood, to the comforting smell of the open box.
Right now, Caitlin was contemplating what she would draw if asked. Reluctantly, she stopped thinking and just imagined—a freedom she had been loath to give herself since the occurrences of a week ago because Maanik’s trances, her own seemingly out-of-body experiences, the still-inexplicable visions, pained her. But for the first time since the night at the United Nations, like a child pushing off from the edge of the pool, she let her imagination roam.
She would draw herself in cerulean blue, turned to her right, and leaning into a small garden, smelling flowers. To her left, curving toward and over her, would be—nothing. A massive emptiness. There was no way to draw the muscular void she was imagining; she’d actually have to cut the paper into that curve.
Nearly half a lifetime ago, in her early twenties, she’d perceived a vacuum of any kind as an enemy. Blanks were a waste of time and elicited a deep unrest in her. Life seemed too short. Then, when she was pregnant, Caitlin had been expecting a tidal wave of hormonal upheaval, so she began working with a new therapist, Barbara Melchior. What she received when she left those sessions was internal silence, the deepest yet, and it scared her. There was too much information to process, too many threads to connect. Her brain, albeit NYU-trained, shut down.
Thankfully, Barbara had helped her see that silence didn’t mean a void or failure. Silence was a symbol of something not yet understood, a placeholder until one’s mind caught up to and embraced the new information.
When Caitlin’s son, Jacob, was born deaf, Barbara had tentatively probed her about whether she felt a sense of irony.
“Absolutely not,” Caitlin had said. “Irony is cheap. The universe—” She had hesitated, not sure where she was going with the idea. “The universe doesn’t editorialize.”
At the time, she wasn’t even sure what she meant by that. It just came out. But it applied to her life now. Witnessing the strangely possessed teenagers in Haiti, in Iran, here in New York… her visions of the civilization of Galderkhaan… the universe had given those experiences to her without footnotes or context. They had just happened.
With Jacob, time allowed her to see his beauty, just as it did with each of her patients, one-on-one.
But this? she wondered, returning to the emptiness she was imagining. A world of strange sights, strange beings, and stranger philosophies. Where could she even begin to look for the connective tissue between the “real world” and this strange place called Galderkhaan? Her brain certainly wasn’t providing answers.
So… crayons of the mind.
She lay still and breathed, feeling her joints and limbs slowly waking up. Her mind drifted to the imaginary crayon outline of herself within the chaos of flowers and color. It was as if her body was the garden…
A gentle tap-tap-tapping came at her door. When Jacob didn’t immediately come in, she knew he was already wearing his hearing aid.
“I’m up, honey,” she said.
He opened the door and scooched to her side, said, “Wakey, wakey,” and put a finger in her ear. She jerked and squealed. This was a long-standing routine she wished would end but whenever she considered telling him she didn’t like it, she realized that in the long run she’d miss it. It would end soon enough.