“Hello, Mr. O’Hara? It’s Ben,” Caitlin heard her friend say. “Is Jacob awake?”
Caitlin watched Ben carefully as she adjusted to being back in a body after the Candescent limbo, back in her body after being in Galderkhaan. Oddly, she could still feel the kiss of Standor Qala on her lips.
“He is,” Ben said, smiling. “Organizing the drawings into a comic book.”
Caitlin exhaled and stifled a choke of sheer joy. They had both returned. She faced Antoa now. He had moved. He was standing beside Casey Skett, who had retrieved and closed the box. Both men had positioned themselves between Caitlin and the foyer.
“The tile,” Caitlin said.
“It remains with us,” Antoa informed her. “Then, after you tell us what you witnessed, you and the others may go.”
Caitlin walked toward the men. “The tile belongs to another,” she said. “I will hold it for him.”
“Eilifir?” said Antoa.
The man removed a .38 from the pocket of his leather jacket. He leveled it at Caitlin.
“Jesus!” Ben cried. “Eilifir—what are you doing?”
“Stay where you are,” Eilifir warned him without taking his eyes off Caitlin.
“I posed a question and I require an answer,” Antoa said. “What did you see when you screamed?”
“It was not what I saw but what I was unable to hold on to,” she said. “I think I know how Lucifer felt after the fall. I know I feel like Lucifer now. My higher angels—they’re not present at the moment.” She held out her hand. “The box, Antoa.”
He shook his head.
Caitlin extended two fingers of each hand as she approached. The box shook at once, light pushing thinly from beneath the lid and slashing through the room.
“I came back with a message,” Caitlin said. “Listen to me. It is not through a tile that Candescence will be achieved. You Technologists fought the Priests instead of joining them. Together, you could have achieved Candescence. Not just words, not just the tiles, but a combination of both. Instead, you carved out your fiefdoms and because of that Galderkhaan died. There will be no more death. The tile, Antoa.”
“This stone was crafted by my ancestors, not yours,” he said. “It remains with me.”
In her mind, Caitlin saw those ancestors and had to focus to bring her mind back to the present. “The tile will go to the owner to be returned to its home. That is what they wish.”
“They? Who?” Antoa asked.
Caitlin replied, “The Candescents.”
“And how do you know their wishes?”
“They revealed their journey to me,” Caitlin said. “They are ready to leave this vessel and return to the cosmos.”
“Why would they share that with you?” Antoa asked.
Caitlin grinned. “I was there. Now I suggest you surrender the box and let us go because the Candescents are going to be leaving.”
Antoa stood his ground and indicated for Skett and Eilifir to do the same. It was the last command he gave. The box opened with a flash that dropped Skett and the Technologist leader to their knees. The box fell, the glow punched through the room, and as Eilifir fell Caitlin threw herself at Ben and pushed him toward the exit.
“Get the Langloises out!” Caitlin cried. “There has to be a back door!”
Even as she spoke, the Technologist and his associates burned and screamed and died, their brains pouring forth, the floor beneath them trembling. Enok was already at his mother’s side, not helping her up but scooping her up and running off with Ben and Caitlin.
“That way!” Ben yelled, pointing toward the kitchen. Enok hesitated before rushing in that direction, taking a moment to pull his cradled mother closer to his chest. Caitlin followed them, her arms in front of her as she tried desperately not to be pulled back into the cataclysm.
The four emerged in a pool area dimly lit by patio lights. They ran wide around the quaking waters as the pool itself cracked along the sides and bottom, dumping water into the earth. They did not look behind them as they ran toward a stone wall that stood between the grounds and the Long Island Sound. Like Lot and his family, they continued forward as the unfettered power of the Candescents burst skyward, illuminating the trees and stony beach as it tore the house from its foundation. A rolling cloud of dust overtook them and they continued to run along the beach until the air was clearer and the ground solid.
Only then did Caitlin and the others look back.
The estate was a pile of debris less than a story high. Nothing recognizable remained: the wood was a mass of splinters among stone that had been crushed to pebbles. The light was gone and so too was the energy that had been pulling at Caitlin.
Breathing heavily, Enok set his mother on a large boulder. Ben assisted him. The Haitian youth thanked him.
Madame Langlois still had her lit cigar.
“They gone,” she said around a puff of smoke. She waved a hand at the wreckage and winked at Caitlin. “Yet not.”
CHAPTER 26
As one, the towers gave up their light.
The glowing columns and the brilliant domes from which they had arisen did not simply snap off; they drifted like mist, leaving only a memory that was difficult to recall, exactly.
The warmth left too. Standing near the pit, Mikel immediately felt the cold. But he didn’t hurry to return to the truck. The surface of the ice was still watery and slick and the vision of the light had changed the way he saw the world around him.
Because there wasn’t just light. There were images, views that were cosmic in scale, unthinkably small, and then—somehow—both. There was age and wisdom and power but also the warmth he had felt on the outside—expanded exponentially. He had felt enfolded, nurtured through a journey that crossed eternity and back.
“Dr. Jasso!” Dr. Cummins yelled to him. She had been standing next to the Toyota and was now skate-walking toward him. “Are you all right?”
“Define ‘all right,’” he said, as if surprised by more than his own voice but by his very capacity to speak.
“As all right as the truck?” she said. “It just came back on. We can go.”
“That’s probably a good idea,” he said.
She regarded him closely as she walked him back to the truck. The archaeologist was clearly distracted, not paying attention to where he walked, or how.
“Dr. Jasso, what did you see in there?”
He looked at her and smiled. “Death. Birth. Death again. An apotheosis.”
“Of Galderkhaan?”
He shook his head.
“Who rose from the dead?” Dr. Cummins asked. “You? Did you—do you think you died in there?”
Mikel glanced back at the pit. Clouds of ice were already blowing across the frozen surface as they had for millennia.
“No,” he said. “I did not die. But I was reborn.”
Dr. Cummins stopped by the passenger’s side of the truck and helped him up. The radio and phone were alive with voices and the beeps of text messages.
“You’re not making a lot of sense, Dr. Jasso, but then so little of this has,” she said. “Maybe Bundy and his people can help us figure out what happened.”
Mikel laughed. “I don’t think so,” he said. “But I know someone who can.”
“Who?”
“I was the beneficiary of someone else who came into the light,” he replied. “Someone who was connected to the tile I found from the bottom of the sea.”
The glaciologist went around the truck and got behind the wheel. The heat was on and it felt wonderful.