Caitlin couldn’t say anything for a moment. She was wiping tears from her eyes.
“How are you?” Maanik asked, her voice full of concern. “You experienced these things with me, right?”
“Fine,” Caitlin lied. “I absorb a little something from all my patients. I’m used to it. Lots of lead shielding.”
“My father has that too,” Maanik said. “I hope to be like you both.”
“I do hope you’ll keep in touch sometimes,” Caitlin said, sad to let her go.
“Absolutely. Okay, I have to go now—”
“Quickly, Maanik,” Caitlin said, “how is Jack London?”
“Oh.” Maanik was silent for a long moment. “Well…”
Caitlin’s stomach dropped through the floor. She remembered Maanik’s mother threatening to put him down.
“He was a little crazy last week,” Maanik continued.
Caitlin was about to ask what kind of crazy, but Maanik kept going.
“We decided to put him through obedience school again,” the young woman said. “He had his first class yesterday and he was a superstar, so we think that will do the trick.”
“That’s good,” Caitlin exhaled.
“And now I have to go,” Maanik said. “But thank you, Dr. O’Hara. Thank you so much.”
They said good-bye and ended the call, and Caitlin sat there for a few minutes holding her phone like a warm mug of tea. The words had been comforting but the reconnection, even through the phone, had been unsettling. She was trying to understand why.
Unbidden, a thought occurred to her.
The cazh got the Priests’ minds out of the way. Without it, they were no better at focusing than the rest of us.
And Maanik’s phone call had gotten Caitlin’s mind out of the way. Distraction as she well knew, could be a useful psychological process, helpful for finding answers. Just stop thinking and it will come…
She and Ben had spent hours talking and thinking. Time to stop.
Caitlin put the phone down and uncurled herself on the couch, feet flat on the floor. She was going to begin with what she knew the gesture she’d learned from Atash on his hospital deathbed. Caitlin crooked her right arm over her torso with her right fingers pointing toward her left shoulder. Then she angled her left hand to point away from her knees toward the floor, and immediately she felt something lift away from her left shoulder in a wave. The Galderkhaani gesture for “big water”—“ocean”—had worked. All of her intense emotions washed from her head down her spine and seemed to fly away from the base of her back. For the first time since she had helped Odilon, she felt in perfect balance.
She looked up and her eyes fell inexorably on her green globe. As if the orb felt her eyes upon it, the glass responded. The white web of lines inside elongated past the curve of the sphere into the air. It looked like the fin of a sailfish, glowing in light that wasn’t really there, now that the living room had darkened into full night. It was so beautiful Caitlin wanted to infiltrate it, be part of it. The lines extended forth, growing through the room until they filled half of it, with some of their tips touching Caitlin’s throat. This was different from before. There was no other person present, just… joy? She found herself singing in her mind. She and the orb were in tune with each other.
The music of the spheres, she thought. The harmonics of the universe. She didn’t feel safe but she felt comforted, somehow. Not with a spirit but not alone.
Maybe you’ve been cazhed with someone without knowing it! she thought, not entirely in jest.
In Iran, Vahin had suggested that the psychiatrist’s closeness to patients who had been traumatized essentially bonded her to them, and through them to past events—the trauma of Galderkhaan.
Caitlin returned her focus to the living room. In memory, not vision, she saw Vahin drinking jasmine tea across from his red-patterned wall in Iran—but inexplicably, an image of Madame Langlois followed with even more intensity. Cigar smoke wafted between her and Caitlin.
This is not of Vodou, the priestess had said toward the end of Caitlin’s time in Jacmel.
And that, Caitlin thought now, is why I need you here, someone here who understands. I need an anchor.
Holding the madame’s gaze through the smoke in her mind, Caitlin closed her eyes. Unbidden, she still felt the fingerlike span of light from the orb. Relenting, giving in to their touch, she gathered her deepest sense of self and slowly spun it forward, merging with the orb, while drawing on the energy of those she had met and bonded with over the last week—
And then the energy of another person was back, the newest bond, the dying woman falling from the clouds, fire all around. But in that fire was something else. Something green appeared in her mind’s eye. Not a bottle green. Paler, more yellow in it, tessellated and glowing with its own light.
The object was oblong, a tile of some kind pulsing with incredible power, like a magnet whose arcs of energy were visible. It blazed through the dying woman, all but obliterated that image, and dominated Caitlin’s mind with other images.
Beckoning. Somehow, the object was pulling her toward it.
Caitlin suddenly felt an enormous pressure on her eardrums followed by rapidly increasing pain. The pain was not in the vision: it was real. The green object, too, seemed to have substance, presence, power.
Break the connection, she told herself.
With a physical jerk that nearly sent her sprawling from the sofa, she found herself back in the living room. She was disoriented, frightened and even more so when she realized she was looking at a woman—a woman with short black hair, the woman who had shoved her backpack in the door of Caitlin’s subway train and then had wiped the air, flooding Caitlin’s mind.
And here she was in Caitlin’s apartment, down the hall from where Jacob lay sleeping. Caitlin pushed herself up from the couch. As she came to standing, the woman wiped the air before her, propelling Caitlin backward as if she’d been punched in the gut.
And then she was gone.
CHAPTER 15
Mikel’s brain was a suddenly empty vessel.
The two souls from Galderkhaan gazed into the eyes of the living man who had invaded the ruins of their city.
Rensat spoke first with some disbelief. “You are alive.”
“Yes,” Mikel said. “So far.” He added, “I think. How—how are we communicating?”
“The stones in the corridor,” she said with pleasure. “You physically activated them. They have connected us.”
Pao circled the intruder as if he were a specimen in a jar. Perhaps he was. “You have a stone of your own?”
Mikel followed where he was pointing. “That—that’s a radio,” he said. “I use it to communicate with fellow men but only on the surface.”
“Why did you enter this room?” the Galderkhaani man asked.
“Something was out there,” Mikel said. “A presence of some kind.” He shook his head. “Forgive me, but—how am I understanding you? I do not speak Galderkhaani.”
“The stones in this library have the wisdom of language,” Pao said.
“But my language did not exist when you did, when they were… made,” Mikel said.
“Then someone who spoke your tongue has ascended near this place,” Pao told him. “What the living knew, the stones now know.”