A Dream of Ice Read online

  Reality was suddenly very, very difficult to know and impossible to quantify. Souls from an ancient civilization had been stretching through time, trying to bond with souls in the modern day to complete a ritual. Caitlin had interceded, used a self-induced trance to place herself between then and now, breaking the connection. But it wasn’t like an electric circuit where the lines were cut and the energy died. This was different. It had been like walking through a graveyard where the ghosts were visible, aggressive, and unhappy. Not even the great universities had literature to help her understand that. Caitlin was sure; she had checked.

  Caitlin sat up straight and forced herself to focus on the present, on what she knew was real. She dug deep into her pocket for her phone and scrolled through e-mails until she found the one from the school. The boy in trouble was an eighth grader, originally a child soldier in the Central African Republic. Deserting one night, Odilon had managed to walk a hundred miles to the capital from his rebel camp without being picked up by any other militia. At Bangui, he hid in a hospital for a week until he passed out from hunger. Doctors Without Borders got him out of the country and now, through a generous line of supporters, he was living in a hastily converted meeting space in the basement of a synagogue in Brooklyn. He had seemed responsive during the summer school that guided the refugees through assimilation into American life. Now, in late October, he was beginning to isolate and was refusing to speak in class or out of it. The school’s counselors suspected he was experiencing flashbacks but they couldn’t confirm.

  Caitlin looked up from her phone. A couple of college students had joined the car, both wired into music. She glimpsed several boisterous younger kids in an adjacent car, clearly skipping school. The rocking of the two cars made her aware of the reflections playing off the windows. Images collided with each other as the cars shifted or turned along gentle curves, layering the faces of passengers one upon the other. Her eyes traced the windows and their metal frames, the silvery poles and overhead handlebars, the yellow and orange plastic seats. The passengers and their reflections seemed to dance around the fixed structures as though they were figures around a maypole in some primitive ritual, complete with the transparent souls of the departed. She thought about the dead of Galderkhaan, the Priests trying to bond their souls together and ascend to a higher spiritual plane through the rite of cazh. The poles in the cars were like the columns of the Technologists, planted in earth, extending to the sky, connecting them both.

  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 he
r 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.

  Underground, she boarded a slightly more crowded train headed into Manhattan. She had a corner bench to herself and let the cacophony of the subway wash around her, observed the solid and translucent images without becoming unsettled. Now, she thought, was the time to go through Ben’s e-mails.

  Oh, Ben—he overexplained his thought process for each linguistic discovery, and second- and third-guessed himself for nearly every translated word. On the one hand, his linguistic mapping of Galderkhaan had confidently identified the two main groups: Priests and Technologists. The Technologists were largely scientists, though the words “faith” and “myth creation” appeared frequently in connection with both groups—a puzzle that suggested they came from the same root beliefs and had somehow diverged.

  Ben had other discoveries to share, but all of them had the proverbial asterisk since a diacritical hand gesture could skew the interpretation one way or the other. Maanik had made similar hand gestures when she was under the control of the Galderkhaani soul.

  Caitlin lifted her eyes from the phone as the train stopped at a station with a jolt. Several passengers entered the car, looking for places to sit. When they swung into seats, their eyes found hers.

  A fresh wash of ice cascaded down her spine. The departure bell sounded but the train stayed in the station. Caitlin looked around, shocked that the fear had found her again and determined not to let it get the better of her.

  She then did what she had done with Odilon: turned her right hand down and emptied herself, raised her left hand palm-up to receive, and let her fingers guide her mind. Away from herself, through the car, outward, farther—

  In the car ahead, Caitlin noticed a woman with black hair and a deep suntan. She was the reason for the train’s delay: her backpack was between the doors, preventing them from closing, and she was looking at Caitlin. Suddenly the woman, in a small gesture, wiped the air with her fingertips.

  Images flooded Caitlin’s mind. Unfamiliar faces, all bronzed, all frozen as if in snapshots—some laughing, some crying, some screaming. They came rapidly, one after the other, faster and faster until they seemed to move: one body with hundreds of expressive faces. Caitlin’s body felt overcome with turbulence, white-water rapids. She tried to raise a hand and couldn’t. Effectively blind, suddenly nauseated, and panicking, Caitlin struggled to shut her eyes, to shut out the images.

  And despite those unwanted images she realized she still had some control, her mind still worked, and she thought to herself: You are here, now, in the train, going home. When it starts again you will feel the car swaying, hear the wheels on the tracks. Picture it. Anticipate it.

  What was it she heard Jacob’s art instructor say once, the phrase that stuck with her? “If you can visualize it, you own it”?

  And suddenly, it worked. Caitlin felt as if the visual aura of a migraine had suddenly dissipated. When she opened her eyes again the doors were closed, the train was rolling forward, and the woman was gone.

  That’s what it was, she told herself. The onset of a migraine from the stress of what you did with Odilon. That’s all.

  But though normalcy had reasserted itself, something of the assault remained: an unsettled, bordering-on-urgent feeling deep inside her that was somehow familiar. It had all the earmarks of mild anxiety but with a difference:

  Caitlin felt the woman’s eyes still upon her, still very near, invisible, somehow watching her.

  CHAPTER 3

  Senator Cooper, we don’t have to represent it that way to your constituents.”

  Flora Davies forced her voice to stay pleasant and charming on the phone as she pried the Control key from her laptop with a fingernail. An aggravated Flora always meant damage to the nearest object in her office.

  “But,” the senator started in his infantilized lilt, “what if the other side finds out about my support for the increased funding you’ve requested and starts spreading rumors that I now believe in global warming or climate change—or whatever they’re calling it now?”

  Flora calmly countered, “Then our colleagues, who are numerous and well connected, will simply answer back in the media that the funds you want to study the Antarctic ice melt have nothing to do with the environment. It doesn’t have to do with dying polar bears or rising sea levels. It has to do with your fear, the Group’s fear, that the Russians or the Chinese can expand their presence there and pose a threat to our nation from this new and wide-open platform.”

  “I see,” he said. “I like it.”

  “Everything is a public relations battle these days,” she said.

  The senator sighed. “It is a muddle,” he agreed. “I liked it better when we either did or did not support abortion, without all the debate about this month, that trimester, or which state you are physically in. When we supported human rights across the board, not this for gays or that for women or something else for some other group.”

  “You are a true humanitarian.”

  “Thank you,” the senator said.

  “Which is why it’s important to let your colleagues and constituents know that supporting and supervising the expenditures for our work will allow you to make sure less money is spent on faux science, like whale massage and meditation for schizophrenics.”

  “Faux science,” he said. “Yes, I like that phrase. It sounds like ‘foe,’ as in ‘enemy.’ ”

  “Yes, Senator,” Flora said, rolling her eyes. She popped the Control key.

  This, thankfully, would be the last phone call she’d have to make this morning. Well, early afternoon—she surmised the time when she heard mail drop through the slot in the front door of the Group’s mansion on Fifth Avenue. Three new senators supporting her publicly acknowledged Antarctic research. Every dollar helped. That was quite an accomplishment, almost as impressive as getting her Berkeley colleague and Group member, Peter, to send her a new science associate even after telling him about the dicey experiment now taking place
below her in the mansion’s heavily secured basement.

  With Senator Cooper happily burbling away about press releases and news spots, she let her mind wander back to that experiment until it was necessary to answer a question.

  “Say, Dr. Davies,” said the senator, “does this mean I can get a trip to Antarctica? My daughter would love to see penguins.”

  “Yes,” Flora said, “the Group Science Foundation will be thrilled to give you a junket in Antarctica.” She did not mention that half the continent’s penguins had left due to the ice event that only her aide had witnessed.

  They ended the call convivially. Flora used both hands to massage her face out of its scowl, then headed downstairs to the basement corridor, now crammed full of destroyed deep freezers. She really had to figure out a way to dump those unobtrusively. Opening the door to the smallest lab, she encountered the glare of what had turned out to be the best and worst part of the bargain with Berkeley: Adrienne Dowman, a reportedly brilliant if contrary young scientist, newly arrived the day before, who refused to exhibit even a veneer of social grace, from manners to lip balm to deodorant. She looked as if her lips bled every night.

  “How’s it coming?” Flora asked as pleasantly as she could.

  “It’s not going to work,” Adrienne barked.

  “Well, Peter sent me quite the optimist, didn’t he?” Flora whipped back.

  “You asked for my opinion.”

  “I did not,” Flora replied. “I asked for a progress report. Let’s be clear. While you’re working with me, which will be for the rest of your career, you have an ‘on’ button but not an ‘opinion’ button. Got it?”

  “It’s never been done at this scale,” Adrienne said, undeterred. “That’s informational, not an opinion.”

  Flora gave up, for now. “When are we starting?”

  “In a few minutes.”

  Adrienne turned back to work on the room, which had been emptied and its soundproofing tripled in the last forty-eight hours. Flora had made it clear to Peter that the scientist doing this favor for the Group would be hers permanently in order to keep a lock on the Group’s “proprietary information.” Peter had leaped at the chance to offload his least-favorite associate. On the plus side, Adrienne was a profoundly gifted physicist and tech. She had installed eight black panels in the room: two large ones fixed on floor-to-ceiling columns and six smaller but still sizable panels on rotary devices by the walls. A viper’s nest of wires led outside the room to the Group’s private generator and to a control box that looked like the kit of a DJ. On the platform fixed to the floor sat the last stone Mikel Jasso, one of the Group’s field agents, had brought back from the Southern Ocean. Flora had privately dubbed it “the Serpent” because there had been no trouble at all in her garden of relics and finds until this one showed up. Since its arrival there had been a succession of ruptured, melted deep freezers and her researcher Arni Haugan had been found dead on the lab floor, his gray matter liquefied and pouring from his ears. This experiment had to work or Flora would have to seriously consider throwing the artifact back in the ocean. Success here would be preferable.