Her phone fell from her hand and bounced on the floor at her feet, apparently unharmed. She picked it up, squeezed her eyes shut, and shook her head out of its reverie.
Damn it, Caitlin, she thought.
There was a kid who needed her several stops away; she had to be ready. He wasn’t another Maanik. He wasn’t another Atash. This was a child, forced to be a man, who was having a perfectly logical reaction to the horror he had experienced.
She reached inside and drew on whatever latent strength she could find. Opening her eyes, she looked up at the ceiling, then out the window. The familiar world was all around her, the tracks carrying her along a station platform, the horizontal tiles of the walls, black and white signs between the columns. This was reality.
Yet almost as swiftly as it arrived the feeling of confidence dissipated. Down the back of her neck, along the backs of her arms, anxiety spread like a frost. It was an old, familiar, unwanted guest and she knew what it meant.
She was being watched.
Pulling into the station, the train came to a complete stop. She looked around. No one who joined her car was paying her even the slightest attention. A tall girl, probably a model, got on and folded into a seat, sliding a piece of gum into her mouth and opening a book. A teenager boarded with his bicycle. The train pulled away and Caitlin leaned forward to peer through the windows into the jostling cars ahead and behind. No one was looking at her.
She sat up straight again and pulled her shoulders back, but logic and posture weren’t antidotes. There was absolutely nothing she could do to duck the fear, the feeling that eyes were upon her. There was no psychological foundation: she had never been prone to feelings of persecution or exaggerated self-importance. If someone, somewhere, were watching her, she could not fix that. And why should she? People looked at people all the time. Shoving the problem aside, she focused instead on her e-mails, which provided plenty of distractions to choose from.
Most of them, she discovered, were from Ben Moss. He had been combing through the videos of the Galderkhaani language in an attempt to construct a rudimentary dictionary. Linguistic databases—ethnic dialects—Glogharasor; her eyes skipped over sentence after sentence without letting any of the information stick. Then she landed on one she couldn’t ignore: I’m visiting my parents in Cornwall but I’ll be back Tuesday. Would love to see you and celebrate your birthday.
Tuesday was tomorrow.
She had reached her stop. Caitlin put her phone away and dug her hands into her gloves. She would deal with tomorrow, tomorrow.
Downtown Brooklyn was all thoroughfares and blocky buildings with few cafés or public indoor spaces to hang out in where she could take Odilon. But Caitlin knew that Brooklyn International had a Ping-Pong table. It was located in a dim corner of the cramped gym and even though one half of the table was an inch higher than the other and the net sagged, fifteen or twenty minutes of play could create enough of a bond before they moved somewhere else in the school to chat.
Odilon was short for his age and carried himself with the familiar sway-shouldered arrogance of many of the child soldiers she had met before. Handing him a paddle, Caitlin was prepared for him to shrug or sneer or refuse to play, but he did not. He gripped the handle as though it were the hilt of a machete and watched silently as she demonstrated the basics. He nodded to begin and then played without frustration or combativeness.
Forty-five minutes later he still hadn’t spoken a word, laughed, or given her any glimpse inside. Caitlin was feeling exasperated, not with him but with the situation, though she was careful not to show it. She’d been reading him as he played. His gaze was uninvolved; his hand was studying the movement of the ball, muscle memory responding to something coming toward him, gauging how hard or how gently to strike. He did surprisingly well for a first-timer and did not become aggressive when the ball hit the net or missed the table. His mind and his heart were elsewhere. His dark eyes were steady, a good sign. It suggested memories shielded by time and distance rather than restless, current flashbacks. His soul was locked out, not in. She wondered how old he’d been when he’d first killed someone. Was it at gunpoint? At what distance? Had he cut a throat?
She realized she was impatient and that frustrated her. It was the tangible residue of Maanik and Gaelle and Atash. Those sessions had yielded quick results. How long would it take this boy to feel safe enough to actually play the game instead of working at it? Then add a few weeks to that before he would start talking to her. In the meantime, a thousand dangerous psychological and emotional wires could be tripped. Poor grades were a given since he wasn’t talking in class, he could lose his makeshift bedroom in the synagogue, even a random altercation in the street—anything could seal him shut.
Caitlin wanted a shortcut with this boy too, as unrealistic as that was. She had five minutes left in the session and all they’d done was hit a little plastic ball while she affected cheerful encouragement. How could she give him a feeling of safety and continuity that would last until she came back next week?
Caitlin placed her paddle on the table and Odilon instantly tensed. The ball clacked past him. His eyes were on the woman as she walked slowly around the table until she was standing beside the net.
Caitlin’s mind went to Maanik and Gaelle, the young women who had been in the thrall of the Galderkhaani souls. She remembered the contact she had made with them, and how, through movement specific motions with her hands, she was connected with heaven and earth.
Unsmiling, Caitlin held out her right hand, palm down a foot above the table. Then she motioned for Odilon to do the same. He looked at her quizzically and then tentatively reached out his hand as though it were a Ping-Pong ritual he did not understand. She then flipped over her left hand, palm up, the fingers not quite rigid, as though they held an offering. She kept her eyes on his. He returned her stare, not defiantly but warily, in this moment more boy than soldier.
Sliding her open left hand four inches below his right hand, Caitlin instantly felt something leap within her palm, as if a stone had dropped into water and flung drops in the air. They both gasped. An immense cascade washed down her spine to her feet. She knew that this energy, strong and negative, was from Odilon. Instinctively she pushed her left foot hard into the floor to anchor herself, as she had in the conference room of the United Nations. The energy continued to pour through her.
Odilon broke their gaze and stared at their hands in disbelief. He then took an enormous inhale and suddenly backed away. He leaned forward, put both hands on his knees, and braced himself. She could hear him, see him taking long breaths in and letting long breaths out. Caitlin lowered her hands, turning her right hand down in the process, and she could feel the energy discharging through her. Her own spirit lightened. When Odilon straightened there was moisture in his eyes and, after a moment, he smiled faintly with relief. Holding his right hand before his tearful eyes, marveling and uncomprehending, he turned it toward her.
Caitlin stepped toward him and, this time, very lightly, she gave him a high-five.
The session had lasted an hour. The final part of it had taken less than thirty seconds. It had bonded and impacted them both.
And for Caitlin, it lasted. She felt jubilant as she walked from the high school onto the noisy sidewalk. The traffic was louder than when she had arrived, the fall air suddenly warm, her shoulders no longer compacted. Whatever portal she had opened, she wedged herself firmly into it, not wanting the joyful freedom to close. She laughed, grateful to be reconnected with this place, this time. She hadn’t felt so content in weeks.