“Mother?”
At first, Caitlin wasn’t sure she’d heard the whispered voice speaking in English. She had been looking away from Vilu. Now she turned toward him and saw his eyes partly open. The boy was smiling thinly.
“Mother,” he repeated, not as question this time but as a statement.
Caitlin started, did not know how to respond verbally. She touched his forehead comfortingly and returned his smile. Despite her expression, she prayed she had misheard, that this was not Jacob.
Standor Qala heard the boy as well. “Did he say something?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” Caitlin lied.
The Standor turned to the boy just as the elevator scaffold reached the top of the column. She stepped onto the far side of a ledge below the large inverted V. The platform was nestled firmly against the side of the tower. There was a ramp that led from the center of this platform into a gated opening in the side of the gondola. The gate was open. The gangplank wobbled slightly as they stepped on it, and a moderate wind blew across them. Caitlin was glad for the handrails along the sides, and held them as she followed Qala. Vilu’s eyes were on her the entire time. The gangplank was about a dozen feet long. Halfway across, the boy stretched his arms over Qala’s shoulder, toward Caitlin. Qala twisted her head around slightly. Her eyes followed the small hands, saw the fingers wriggling playfully.
“What’s going on?” the commander demanded.
“It seems the boy is awake,” Caitlin said as matter-of-factly as possible.
“It is not like Vilu to be more interested in a stranger than an airship,” Qala remarked. “What is going on?”
Caitlin remained silent.
With a disapproving look, Qala turned her eyes ahead and strode forward, Vilu squirming to keep his eyes on Caitlin, his hands reaching for her. A guard at the open gate saluted by touching the fingers of his left hand flat against that side of his head. Qala bowed her head slightly in acknowledgment.
As soon as they were both on the open deck of the gondola, Qala turned to Caitlin. “I asked a question,” the Standor said.
“Let’s talk after we see the physician,” she suggested.
Qala hesitated. It was a look of a woman who was not accustomed to having her orders replied to with an alternate suggestion.
“The boy first,” Qala agreed. “Then you will share what you know.”
“Even what you might not believe?” Caitlin asked.
“Everything,” the Standor said, strongly emphasizing her words with a movement of her hands.
Caitlin nodded firmly.
Draped over Qala’s shoulder, looking at Caitlin, Vilu responded by signing at her. Caitlin’s heart began to rise in her chest: once again, the gestures were not Galderkhaani.
“This is not the Nautilus?” he said. “Am I dreaming?”
“You are awake, sweetheart,” Caitlin replied.
“I can hear,” the boy continued, in signed English. “I know it’s you—but why don’t you look like you?”
“It’s… complicated, baby,” Caitlin replied in English. She suddenly felt her grasp of the Galderkhaani language slipping, and not because she was communicating in English. The tingling had suddenly returned to the back of her neck.
“Kuvez ma tulo?” Qala asked, turning the boy’s face from Caitlin.
She looked at Qala sharply. “I… understand… not,” she said in broken Galderkhaani, her arms fumbling with gestures that had been so easy a moment before.
“Buz eija lot?”
“Christ God, no!” Caitlin responded in English, grabbing for Vilu.
But her fingers found no purchase, either falling short or else she had turned—she couldn’t be sure, for at the same time Caitlin’s vision grew misty, as if she were seeing through tears. And then she was seeing tears, weeping and screaming inside and out as the world swirled away and she fell to the floor of the airship gondola and found herself once more in blackness.
The last word she heard was “Mother!”
“Mother?”
Caitlin awoke looking into her mother’s eyes. They were framed in a familiar, worried face that was barely visible against a bright overhead light.
“Doctor!” Nancy O’Hara called.
Caitlin heard her mother, heard her own voice through the folds of a stiff pillow that was bunched up against her ears. There was something in her nose, something in her arm, something on a finger—
“Ja-Jacob,” Caitlin rasped. Her throat was raw, sore, not at all like it felt in Galderkhaan. The air was machine-blown, unnatural, unhealthy. Everything around her reeked of illness. Her shoulders ached as though her arms had been pulled at, hard. When she opened her eyes she had to blink several times to clear away a thin film of gunk that was on them. Her face smelled of rubbing alcohol, beneath which there was a hint of—ash? Smoke? In her hair?
Why was that there? she wondered. The last thing she had felt was clean air and tears. The last thing she had smelled was the strong smell of hemp. The last thing she had heard, and the last thing she had seen—
“Vilu…” she wept softly. “Jacob.”
Nancy O’Hara had turned away and didn’t hear her daughter. Caitlin heard her calling for someone. She tried to get up, felt—
That isn’t the handrail of a gangplank, she thought with horror that made her recoil. They were the aluminum bars of the hospital bed. Her eyes coming into focus now, she became aware of the equipment blinking and humming to her left. She saw her mother, but did not recognize the figure moving toward her through the open door.
A man in a lab coat bent over her, looked into her eyes. They still felt gummy; the tears she had felt had belonged to Bayarma, in Galderkhaan, not to her. The white light of an ophthalmoscope seemed to pin the back of her skull to the bed. She fell back as though she’d been shot. She tried to blink but two fingers firmly held one eye open, then the other. The man said something she couldn’t quite make out.
“…haf pen anywar?”
“S-sorry?” Caitlin said. “I don’t… don’t understand.”
“Do you have pain anywhere?”
“I—I don’t know… arm… IV?”
“Yes.”
“No… I’m numb. Shit, I’m back.”
“Just rest,” the man said as he killed the light. The hospital room came into clear focus. Caitlin saw an Asian man and her mother’s face.
“Jacob,” Caitlin said to Nancy O’Hara. “Where is he?”
“Honey, Jacob is home, with your father,” Nancy assured her.
“No!” Caitlin cried. “I mean—his soul. His spirit. Him. Where is he?”
“Where? Caitlin, I promise you, he’s home, he’s all right,” she insisted.
“No, please listen,” Caitlin said. She tried to rise again from her pillow, from the bed. “Something has happened to him!” she said, her fingers fumbling with the bedrail. “He needs me!”
There was talk, there was movement, there were hands on Caitlin’s shoulders and legs. Caitlin struggled against all of it.
“Let me go! Ben? Ben!”
“Calm down, Dr. O’Hara,” a male voice said soothingly. “You’ve inhaled a lot of smoke and were nonresponsive—”
“Dammit, I’m fine! Fine!” Caitlin yelled. “I am not suffering from disorientation, confusion, delirium, or any goddamn thing else!”
“… five milliliters,” she heard the doctor say over his shoulder.
“Mom, call Dad—ask him to check on my boy!”