“There is no one else with us,” the man said. “You will not be accosted.”
“All right,” Ben said. “You have my attention. Who are you and how do you know who I am?”
“My name is Eilifir,” the man said softly, “and I followed you from the Group mansion, saw you speaking briefly with Dr. O’Hara.”
“Followed?”
“I have a car. Actually, the driver followed you. I was busy watching.”
“But you just said—”
“That there is no one with us, and there isn’t,” the man said. “We are alone. From the mansion I came here, replaced one of my people. I’ve been waiting to speak with Caitlin—or you.”
“I see. You mentioned the Group. How do you know those people?” Ben asked.
“We—their sponsors and my people—once lived together.”
“On Fifth Avenue?”
“No, Mr. Moss,” the man replied with a little chuckle. His unshaved cheeks parted as he smiled for the first time. “Our ancestors lived together. In Galderkhaan.”
Ben was a little rocked by that—not just the fact that someone else knew about the place, but obviously knew more than he did. Then his mind returned to what he had just been thinking about, what he knew of the postapocalyptic trek of the Galderkhaani up through Asia to points north, including Scandinavia.
“You say you ‘once’ lived together,” Ben remarked. “That, plus the fact that you didn’t go up to the mansion and knock on the door tells me that you are no longer very sociable.”
“Their ideas are different from mine.”
“Are you some kind of rogue scholar?” he asked.
“Not exactly,” the man replied.
“‘Not exactly?’ That’s all I get?”
“For now.”
“Uh huh,” Ben said, and moved to go around the man. “Sorry, Eilifir. I have a lot to—”
“Not yet,” the man said with a hint of menace now. He moved closer.
Ben hesitated. He had been around enough diplomats to know when polite insistence was about to shade into a threat.
“Do the doctors know what is wrong with Dr. O’Hara?” Eilifir asked.
“How do you know anything’s wrong with her?”
“I have a man outside the hospital,” the man replied. “You departed. She did not. Must we do this dance, Mr. Moss?”
“Caitlin is unconscious but it isn’t a coma,” Ben answered. “They don’t know what it is. You probably know that, if you’ve been watching her.”
“No, I only suspected,” the man said. “We make it a policy not to crowd people. The others—they do that. Empathetic souls like Dr. O’Hara pick up on it.” He turned his face toward the brownstone. “The man and woman who are upstairs, why are they here?”
“I don’t know that either,” Ben said. “How do you know about them?”
“Someone was here, watching, until I could relieve her.”
“That’s at least three people,” Ben said. “You have a curious definition of ‘alone.’”
“As you know, words have nuance.”
“Right, but I don’t have time for subtleties. So that there are no more surprises—how many helpers do you have here?”
“Too few,” Eilifir replied. “Do you know Casey Skett?”
Hell, couldn’t the man answer a question directly? “No,” Ben said to move this along. “Who is he? Or is it a waste of breath to ask?”
“I guess you would call him our general,” the man said. “He and I are the leaders of a handful of other field personnel who want to help you save Dr. O’Hara.”
“From?”
“Becoming lost in the past,” the man said.
“How do you know… what do you know?” Ben asked.
“That any form of cazh or the lesser mergings is tricky, dangerous, as I’m sure you well know.”
“Is that what happened here?” Ben asked with alarm.
“I’m honestly not sure,” Eilifir replied. “That’s what we’re trying to determine. If it has, then she is in great danger.”
Ben did not tell the man that it was the second time that morning he’d heard that sentiment.
Eilifir drew his hand from his pocket, handed Ben a card. “Call me when you learn anything, when you need something.”
“You seem certain that I will.”
“No one can face these forces alone,” he said, “the more so when he or she doesn’t know what they are.”
“Do you?”
The man was quiet for a moment—contemplative. “Not entirely, no. But we have tools you lack, tools you may need. And before you ask what they are, I can only say this: Caitlin O’Hara has forged an energetic relationship with just two Galderkhaani tiles. That was enough to send her soul through time and wreak havoc across several acres of New York.” He moved closer to Ben until they were inches apart. There was a new, more ominous quality in his voice. “There are thousands of tiles buried beneath the South Polar ice. If Dr. O’Hara taps into them, wakens them in an effort to get home, the forces she will release would be exponentially more destructive than what we saw last night. And not in the past, Mr. Moss. She would pull that fury with her, into the present. It would travel through her. You can imagine, I think, what would be left of her after that.”
It was as fantastic and sobering a monologue as any Ben had ever heard—and, in the United Nations, he had translated many of those.
“Where will you be?” Ben asked.
“Right here,” Eilifir said, backing away.
Though the air was warming slightly, Ben felt cold inside. Without another word, he turned and went into the apartment.
CHAPTER 2
Mikel Jasso was very tired and extremely frustrated.
The Basque native lay in the cot that had been assigned to him until such time as he could be evacuated from the Halley VI research station. That would take weeks, but he had been ordered to stay out of the way of the thirty-nine scientists, medics, maintenance workers, and other personnel at the base. He was to remain inside the eight modules—which were connected caterpillar-style, like a train—not venturing outside, not observing experiments or research, simply doing nothing.
Doing nothing had kept him awake since his adventure under the Antarctic ice. He desperately needed sleep. But there was something he needed more desperately. He had been among the long-frozen ruins. He had interacted with tiles of staggering power.
He had communicated with the dead.
Mikel Jasso needed answers, not imprisonment.
And I need someone above ground to talk to about it all, someone to listen to me, he thought. There was a vast amount of knowledge out there. The technology alone could occupy him for years. Not just the olivine tiles but treated skins that were still fresh, the breathing apparatus that seemed to employ the mechanism of sea creatures to filter air from a maelstrom; all of that was extremely sophisticated. And he couldn’t get to it, having made himself a pariah by causing the crash of a truck, the denting of a module it was pulling, and endangering the life of an expedition member who had elected to rescue him from an underground cavern.
Mikel also had a broken wrist, which made it difficult to do anything.
And so he lay there, his tablet at the ready, staring at the white ceiling, replaying the last two days for anything he may have missed.
The archaeologist had to laugh, at least inside. He was in a human habitation brought south, and to this spot, with enormous effort. Administered by the British Antarctic Survey, the Halley VI modules had just been successfully towed from a fragile section of terrain on the Brunt Ice Shelf to a more stable region twelve kilometers inland from the Weddell Sea. The accommodation building and garage had come with greater difficulty: not having been erected on skis, they had to be dragged across the ice by trucks and bulldozers struggling against unfavorable winds and cold. Yet nearby, an entire civilization had flourished in this miserable, hostile environment. Even allowing for climatic change, Antarctica was still quite harsh at the dawn of the Ice Age, at the height of Galderkhaani civilization. From what he had gleaned in the caverns, lava had been used to melt and control ice via a network of tunnels. Towers of basalt and other materials had been built. The air had been conquered by ships that spanned the vast continent, and perhaps beyond. Science and religion had struggled with an ambitious, deeply conflicted cultural project, the conquest of the afterlife… incredibly, with some success.