Caitlin resumed her descent and on reaching the hallway, turned toward the room at the far end. The younger woman was perched on a stool just outside its doorway. As Caitlin came closer the stone shot visions of the past through her brain. Adrienne rose to her feet as Caitlin approached with wobbling steps.
But Flora, still slumped at the bottom of the stairs, gestured to Adrienne to let the woman go. So Adrienne remained on her feet but did not prevent Caitlin from looking into the room at the glowing, levitating stone.
The power of the artifact hit Caitlin so hard she quickly repeated the “shut down” gesture. It didn’t cancel out the overwhelming presence of the stone, but it did take the edge off. The present shimmered like a mirage, showing the stone only vibrating, without the sequence of lights.
Caitlin speared Adrienne with a look. “What’s holding it up, magnets?”
“Acoustic waves.”
“Is it safe to go in?”
“That depends on what you’re going to do and how long you’ll be in there.”
Caitlin started to take a step into the room. Adrienne put a hand on her arm.
“I don’t recommend it,” she said. Her grip wasn’t a restraint but a gesture of concern.
Caitlin thanked her with a nod and stayed in the doorway. And suddenly, the past vision came to a rest. Before the stone was brought here the room apparently had been used for storage. Nothing was moving in it anymore.
Caitlin inhaled what felt like her first full breath since she’d entered the mansion. Then, before she could pay attention to her lingering fears, she did what she always did: put one proverbial foot in front of the other.
She had to challenge, expand, and master the new abilities she possessed. She had to obtain a bigger, clearer picture of everything that was happening.
Caitlin saw nothing in the room to hook into visually so she took a different approach: she used sense memory, the sound of Jacob’s fingers drumming on the wall that separated their rooms at home. First she remembered just the small sound—then she remembered the awful, pounding amplification of it that she’d heard in that terrible opaque nowhere space—
And then, she was there, pinioned in the massive whiteness as before, with just a faint blur of turquoise behind the ice. Caitlin tried to scream to relieve the terror but her face felt partly paralyzed.
With extraordinary effort, Caitlin spoke to Adrienne, not knowing whether she was communicating out loud or only mentally. Her lips misshaped the words: “Did… anything… happen… when I approached the room?”
“The stone just went dark,” Adrienne said with what sounded like awe.
Inwardly Caitlin smiled. Had she made that happen? If so, how?
Thinking back, she realized what it had to be. Until now, Caitlin had been regarding this stone as a problem, a danger. She had been giving it the wary, scheming respect due a menacing stranger. But this stone—or at least a stone, perhaps Yokane’s piece, maybe the two of them together, some damn segment of the Source in some combination—was not a stranger to her. Standing in the United Nations conference room, floating in the sky above dying Galderkhaan, Caitlin had reached into the energy generated by an artifact like this and flung it at the ancient city.
She looked at the semidormant stone before her.
You can connect to it, she told herself. You can work with it. The vibrations, the energy, something about it synced with you.
She had quieted it somewhat. But she still didn’t know how, still didn’t understand the mechanism. Of more immediate concern: she didn’t know how long the truce would last. Would the stone somehow reach back to the rest of the Source in the present day, get more power, and come back more vigorous than before?
“Dr. O’Hara?” Adrienne asked. “Can you give me data—?”
“Quiet, please.”
Caitlin had to learn more. This was a standoff. She had made a fist without realizing it and flexed her fingers. And then she was jolted by an unexpected connection.
The superlatives, she thought with a burst of emotion. The hand gestures. Weeping inside, she suddenly grasped the profound intent of the physical arm, hand, and finger movements used in the Galderkhaani language. They weren’t merely accents. They were a subliminal, subsonic, energy-based form of expression that added untold depth to the words.
Come back, she admonished herself. Concentrate on the ice from the vision with Ben… something neutral—
It came back to her, instantly and easily. Reaching to and through the whiteness, she found only tiny sparks of energy. It quieted the stone entirely.
I am the conduit that connected the stone with its home, she realized. The energy of the Source was not restricted by place or time. Her own energy was a link between then and now, just as it had been at the United Nations when she linked between the ancient cazh and the victimized kids in her own time.
That’s why the acoustic levitation worked to contain the stone, she realized. Sound was energy too. The stone was stilled by a powerful cushion of it, its vibrations calmed.
Now she had to work on amping the stone up or down, to see the degree to which she could bond with it and control it. As Yokane had done to her, as Caitlin had just done to Flora Davies, so she must do to the stone. If there was another assault like the one that impacted the animals, she might be able to contain it. If ancient souls were using the tiles to reach children, including Jacob, she might be able to break that connection as well.
But which way? She considered pointing up at first, which was what the Technologists had intended. But some instinct made her slowly, barely, point down instead, reaching through her fingertips and far beyond them, searching for the way to connect.
There.
Her hand seemed to come alive—with an internal humming, a buzzing, a vibration that she automatically compared to the trembling of the stone in its acoustic aerie. The buzzing intensified until she felt the pounding in her palm. She directed her fingertips toward the stone.
Suddenly, the pounding in her hand was drawn powerfully toward and then onto the stone. Fearful, Caitlin almost pulled her hand away to cut the energetic bond.
But that would mean starting over. This had to be done. She calmed her knee-jerk reaction. The goal was engagement. She had to learn to use the mental-physical throttle. She began to twist the energy, turning it like a spoon in coffee, and slowly she began to sense something responding from the stone. The stone was expressing something inside her. The feeling was pure joy—similar to what she and Ben had experienced, drifting up and out into the cosmos, themselves, and each other. The core of this artifact was no core at all, but an opening. She hovered there, uncertain—
A new image flashed onto her visual field. There was no longer ice, just eyes—hazel eyes, eyes that crinkled in recognition and then in triumph, eyes in an old face with a white beard. Caitlin didn’t wait around to see what the triumph was for. Her instinct told her to get out before this other presence could take control. With one movement she spiraled the pounding energy into the stone and pulled herself out of the sound stream.
The eyes were jerked away from her, leaving only the room with the levitating stone. She put her hands on her knees, dropped her head, and just breathed for a few moments. When she looked up again, she saw that the stone was still not lit, was not even buzzing. She wondered whether Yokane’s stone had stopped buzzing too.