“Skett?” Mikel repeated.
“Giving… tile… more… freedom,” he heard Skett enunciate carefully, over protests from Flora, her cautioning tone clear even if her words were not.
“Skett, slow down!” Mikel shouted back. “This is getting very real very fast!”
“Dr. Jasso?” Dr. Cummins yelled.
“I’m all right!” he shouted into the radio.
Mikel looked down. He blinked hard, not convinced that he was seeing correctly. In front of the woman the blackness seemed to glow with a blue blush. The color took on more prominence and then Mikel saw what looked like white streaks, black streaks—
White caps, sea creatures, he suddenly realized. The woman is sitting at the edge of the ocean. The cooing is—sea creatures.
Just then, Mikel was distracted by something new: smoke, rising from the toga’s folds. Licks of red began to appear through the fabric along the shoulders, the waist, down the spine. The same thing must be happening on Skett’s end, which was probably why Flora was agitated.
“Skett, she’s starting to burn!” Mikel shouted. “The tile is killing her!”
“In the past!” Skett screamed with almost giddy triumph.
“Did you hear me? You’re killing someone there!”
“She’s already dead!” Skett yelled. “The Technologists are right—you can transcend with the tiles! You don’t need prayer!”
Mikel realized that the rising smoke was not real. Like the apparition, it belonged to another time. But something else was reaclass="underline" a band of glowing rock at the base of the pit. There was a golden hue to the band: tiles buried beneath the once-molten rock. The tile in New York and the tiles buried here had bonded through time to open a portal and connect to a woman in this time. There was a tower below this pit.
“Dr. Cummins, pull me up. There are tiles down here and they’re becoming active!”
“Hang on!” she said.
The winch began to groan and the rope jerked up.
“Skett, is the same thing happening to Adrienne up there?” Mikel shouted as loud as he could. He waited a moment, until he was higher, then repeated the question.
“Of course! The two women are transcending together!”
“Skett—”
“I’m freeing them, damn you! The tile wasn’t going to release them—I didn’t do this. You did, you brought the tile back!”
“No, Skett. We could have found another way!”
“We have transcended time! We can do it again! You used to be a scientist, Jasso! Understanding power like this is worth a life!”
“I’m going back to the truck, Skett—”
“No! Keep recording, damn you!”
“I am,” Mikel said. “But you haven’t proved Transcendence at all. All you’ve done is reached back in time to burn a woman to death.”
“She’s been dead for forty millennia,” Skett replied.
“Something that you caused, Skett.”
Mikel watched as smoke rolled back from the folds of the toga and insubstantial flames began to consume the fabric, blackened the fringes of her hair, caused her arms to rise from their prayerful position and extend outward. Fire began to chew at the flesh of her upper arms, formed an ugly orange ruff around her throat, turned red skin to a brown, then black sheet of chapped flesh. Blood turned to steam and pieces of skin drifted off, ugly particles of ash riding the smoke.
Finally, the youthful face turned upward. The mouth was pulled wide in a high scream as her cheekbones broke through charred flesh. Her eyes burst and poured from their sockets like runny eggs. Her teeth seemed to grow and grimace as her lips and mouth burned away. The cry of pain ended as fire turned her saliva to burning vapor and made speech impossible.
That was when Mikel realized that all the shrieks were not just coming from below. Some were rising from the phone.
“Goddamn you,” Mikel said, snarling into the phone. “Damn you to hell!”
Mikel looked away as the figure below him turned to ash and fell in on itself. He heard Flora’s voice over the phone, then screaming as Skett shouted and probably threatened her—or worse, because after that everything was quiet. Below, the circle of tiles dulled and the winds diminished. Perhaps Skett had finally turned the tile “off” in New York.
Mikel took a moment to calm himself. His flesh was chilled from cooling perspiration. The sling had pinched under his thighs and his upper legs were numb. He adjusted his position to encourage circulation. Then he bent back toward the phone.
“Skett,” Mikel said, his voice loud in the sudden quiet. There was no answer. Mikel turned his face toward the radio. “Did you hear any of that?” he asked Dr. Cummins.
“I heard all of it, Dr. Jasso,” she replied. “I can’t believe it.”
“It happened,” Mikel replied.
“But—how? There couldn’t really have been someone down there with you.”
Mikel was too emotionally exhausted to answer.
“It could be a leaking pocket of ethylene gas… a hallucination. That would also explain what you thought you saw previously, what some of us thought we heard coming from the pillar of fire.”
“It could be but it isn’t,” Mikel insisted. “I have video.”
“We’ll have to review that data,” she said. “I saw nothing burning up here. Not like last time.”
“It wasn’t the same,” Mikel said. “This happened forty thousand years ago.”
“But triggered now.”
“That’s right.”
The archaeologist was still looking down when something abruptly changed below.
With a unity that he had not yet seen in his interactions with Galderkhaan, the tiles below reclaimed some of the luster they had had a few moments before.
“Christ, what now?” Mikel asked. “Skett, are you doing something with the tile?”
There was no answer.
“Dr. Jasso?” the glaciologist asked.
“Get me out of here,” Mikel said. “We have an emergency!”
CHAPTER 15
Barbara Melchior arrived at the hospital at five forty-five, which was fortunate: even though Caitlin kept herself busy, lying in bed nearly caused the psychiatrist to lose her mind. Her phone was nearly dead, but she used the charge she had left to read about Antarctic geography. She was looking for reconstructions of the continent as it would have looked some forty thousand years ago. If she were able to go back, even briefly, she wanted to have some idea about where she was and where she needed to be. Anything with ice cover could be ruled out.
Barbara swept into the room with more than her usual panache: it was the satisfaction of a New Yorker having beaten the system.
“The travel gods were with me,” the psychiatrist said as she entered. “A cab was discharging at my doorstep in rush hour and the traffic was actually moving.”
She hung her coat on a hanger behind the door as she noticed Nancy O’Hara, who had been drowsing in the armchair.
“Oh—sorry if I woke you,” Barbara said, grimacing.
“It’s all right,” Nancy said. She put her hands on the armrests and pushed off slowly. “I should leave you two alone anyway.”
“It was good to see you again,” Barbara said.
“And you,” Nancy said. “I wish you both luck. I’ll be in the waiting area.”
“You can go home if you like, Mom,” Caitlin said. “Get some actual rest in a real bed. I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll wait to hear that from Dr. Yang,” Nancy said, shutting the door behind her.