A Dream of Ice (2 page)

The balloon shuddered again and this time, it did not fully reinflate.

Dovit stepped behind Azha and embraced her. “Hope,” he said, “has an enemy in unfavorable wind currents.”

Azha looked at him, trying to smile at his soft candor. “Thank you, Dovit, for being here. I'm sorry I yelled at you.”

Enzo regarded them. “Sister,” she said. “Now that we are away from the state—tell me, who wishes to activate the Source?”

Azha turned to look at her. “Why? Why does that still matter to you?”

“Like Dovit, I chose to join you in exile,” Enzo said. “I have given up everything. I want to know why . . . for whom.”

Azha shook her head. “I will not say. I do not want this to color our lives in any way.”

“It is a Priest?” Enzo said.

Azha regarded her suspiciously. “Why do you ask?”

Enzo looked back at the glimmering towers of Galderkhaan, the setting sun darting through the sharp spires. “Please tell me!”

Dovit and Azha both regarded the young woman.

“I will not!” Azha said. “Enzo, what is wrong?”

“What Dovit said about the subterranean tunnels,” she said. “It will be a catastrophe. The Priests must stop this.” Enzo's eyes were wide, helpless. “Please! Tell me the name!”

A shudder ran through Azha; it was not caused by the failing airship but by a sudden realization.

“Enzo, you came to
spy
on me? But—how would you have gotten the information back to Galderkhaan? You could not survive the journey on foot or make it in time!”

“I would not need to,” Enzo replied. The woman smiled sadly as she regarded her sister. “Azha, I love you, even beyond death.”

Azha heard the strange finality in Enzo's voice, the distant look
in her eyes . . . a look that fastened on the fading, distant towers of their home.

Just then a loud flapping sound drew their attention up. Above, they saw yet another ripple in the skin of the dirigible, larger than before. Once again, the tube-shaped balloon failed to pop back into its correct structure. There was a lurch, and the airship began to drop, slowly at first. But they all realized it would pick up speed as it fell.

As Azha grasped the side of the gondola for support, she failed to see Enzo reach into her pocket and pull out a small, clear vessel filled with a yellow liquid.

“
Fera-cazh
 . . . ,” Enzo began.

Azha spun toward her sister with alarm. “What are you doing!?” she screamed. “Enzo, no!” Azha lunged at her sister, reaching for the vial and Enzo's throat at the same time. “
Glogharasor!
” she shrieked. “You doom us all! I'll throw you over before you set fire to my ship!”

But the ship heaved as huge repeating ripples made the balloon look like it was full of water. The three grabbed handholds as the gondola tilted and the shuddering, tipping airship fell faster from the sky. In no time at all they were seeing the sharp details of the rapidly approaching ice field below.

Enzo opened her vial and emptied the oil over herself. “Tell me the name of the one who betrays our people!” she shouted at her sister.

“
Don't do this!
” Azha implored.

Enzo dropped the bottle and regarded her sister. “Please—tell me!”

“Why? We're not—we
cannot
—turn back!”

“There is no need! I will remember it after—”

“After you
die
?” Azha raged. “You are too far from the stones—you won't be able to
tell
anyone!”

“Azha,” yelled Dovit, “take my hands.”

“No!”

“For once,
trust
!” Dovit pleaded. “Repeat the
cazh
with me! Believe that even if you believe in nothing else!”

Azha realized it was too late to save the airship or themselves and reluctantly called out the name. Despite the wind screeching all around them, Enzo heard it and began to chant.

Aytah fera-cazh grymat ny-haydonai pantar, pantar ida
 . . .
Aytah fera-cazh grymat ny-haydonai pantar, pantar ida.

Dovit did likewise, firmly holding both of Azha's hands. Reluctantly, she joined him.

The ship lurched again and jolted until it was nose-down, plunging like a comet toward a gigantic crevasse.

And then the ice field seemed to suck the great airship into itself, bashing the gondola against the walls of the crevasse, shredding the deflated balloon. Screaming and barely holding on, Azha sought Dovit's eyes.

Enzo, bellowing her chant, exploded in flame.

And then they hit water, salt water, and plummeted down and down into its abyss. Enzo continued to burn within the sea. Azha refused to let go of Dovit and tried to kick herself up but the descending ship created a vortex she could not overpower. She fought with all her strength but soon she had to take a breath where there was no breath to take.

She was the last to drown but not the last to die.

•  •  •

Electrical engineer Jina Park drove her shovel down hard on the ice covering the miniature windmill that was supposed to help power this remote GPS station. She paused and looked up to see Fergal MacIan, who, having uncovered the solar panel that did the other half of the work, had tired of waiting for her to finish. He had mounted his snowmobile and was driving in circles around the vast white landscape like
a teenager. Jina laughed and shook her head at the familiar sight. Three weeks into their posting, she had become the rational “sibling” of the duo and remained so throughout the Antarctic winter.

She lowered her head to the task at hand and felt a tiny pop in her nose. Tucking a gloved finger beneath her balaclava, she knew what to expect. The hyper-dry air had done it again: blood.

Then she smelled something. Not blood; burning plastic? Or sulfur? She looked down to see a bright yellow flame jump from the ice and engulf the left leg of her supposedly fireproof salopette. The other leg caught fire a second later.

“Fergal, help!
Help me!
”

Jina threw herself to the snow and rolled but the flames would not smother; in an instant she was consumed. She screamed and wailed as the pain tore through her, her clothes melting into her flesh as it bubbled and flaked.

Fergal, caught up in his manic figure eights, heard nothing over the roar of his engine until something caught the corner of his eye. Over his shoulder he saw a black and gold tower that seemed to dance in the polar wind, then topple over. He jerked the snowmobile around for a better view and, misjudging the arc, flipped the vehicle hard. With the full weight of it pinning him to the ice, he skidded for what must have been a hundred feet. Finally, with the engine humming helplessly, he and the mangled machine came to a full stop. With the last ounce of strength he could muster before losing consciousness, Fergal turned his eyes toward the diminishing flames and screamed, “Jina!”

But Jina was beyond hearing. She was beyond pain. She was deep within herself, observing her body as it burned away. In the distance she saw Fergal turn his head toward her. She imagined stretching a blazing hand toward him, touching his broken body, but he did not move.

Then Jina heard a voice . . .

“
Varrem
,” it whispered.

She turned her attention skyward and knew that something was looming above her. It was vast, unfamiliar, and overpowering. As it bore down she screamed from the depths of her soul. The Antarctic wind picked up, skipping with her ashes across the surface of the snow as everything grew very dark, very still, and very, very quiet.

C
aitlin O'Hara was lying in bed with her hands folded across her ribs. It was just after five a.m. and a weak, dark gray light was leaching into the black room through a crack in the curtains.

Predawn has always been undervalued as a witching hour
, she thought. Midnight, in prose and poem, had gotten all the glory. At this hour, though, people had to gather their lonely, enervated willpower and make the first choices of the day. For that you needed raw courage.
Or crayons
, she thought with a smile.

Occasionally, when she was sitting in her office surrounded by diplomas, international accolades, and personal photographs from a life of world travel, Caitlin sharpened crayons. It was more than just mindless activity; her teenage clients frequently needed more than words to describe what they were feeling. Though new clients were often puzzled when she brought out the sketch pad and a sixty-four-pack of Crayolas from her desk, they quickly succumbed to the freedom of nonverbal expression, to the idea of reverting to childhood, to the comforting smell of the open box.

Right now, Caitlin was contemplating what she would draw if asked. Reluctantly, she stopped thinking and just imagined—a freedom
she had been loath to give herself since the occurrences of a week ago because Maanik's trances, her own seemingly out-of-body experiences, the still-inexplicable visions, pained her. But for the first time since the night at the United Nations, like a child pushing off from the edge of the pool, she let her imagination roam.

She would draw herself in cerulean blue, turned to her right, and leaning into a small garden, smelling flowers. To her left, curving toward and over her, would be—nothing. A massive emptiness. There was no way to draw the muscular void she was imagining; she'd actually have to cut the paper into that curve.

Nearly half a lifetime ago, in her early twenties, she'd perceived a vacuum of any kind as an enemy. Blanks were a waste of time and elicited a deep unrest in her. Life seemed too short. Then, when she was pregnant, Caitlin had been expecting a tidal wave of hormonal upheaval, so she began working with a new therapist, Barbara Melchior. What she received when she left those sessions was internal silence, the deepest yet, and it scared her. There was too much information to process, too many threads to connect. Her brain, albeit NYU-trained, shut down.

Thankfully, Barbara had helped her see that silence didn't mean a void or failure. Silence was a symbol of something not yet understood, a placeholder until one's mind caught up to and embraced the new information.

When Caitlin's son, Jacob, was born deaf, Barbara had tentatively probed her about whether she felt a sense of irony.

“Absolutely not,” Caitlin had said. “Irony is cheap. The universe—” She had hesitated, not sure where she was going with the idea. “The universe doesn't editorialize.”

At the time, she wasn't even sure what she meant by that. It just came out. But it applied to her life now. Witnessing the strangely possessed teenagers in Haiti, in Iran, here in New York . . . her visions of the civilization of Galderkhaan . . . the universe had given those experiences to her without footnotes or context. They had just happened.

With Jacob, time allowed her to see his beauty, just as it did with each of her patients, one-on-one.

But this?
she wondered, returning to the emptiness she was imagining. A world of strange sights, strange beings, and stranger philosophies. Where could she even begin to look for the connective tissue between the “real world” and this strange place called Galderkhaan? Her brain certainly wasn't providing answers.

So . . . crayons of the mind.

She lay still and breathed, feeling her joints and limbs slowly waking up. Her mind drifted to the imaginary crayon outline of herself within the chaos of flowers and color. It was as if her body
was
the garden . . .

A gentle tap-tap-tapping came at her door. When Jacob didn't immediately come in, she knew he was already wearing his hearing aid.

“I'm up, honey,” she said.

He opened the door and scooched to her side, said, “Wakey, wakey,” and put a finger in her ear. She jerked and squealed. This was a long-standing routine she wished would end but whenever she considered telling him she didn't like it, she realized that in the long run she'd miss it. It would end soon enough.

He placed a hand on her eyelids and said, “Don't look, Mommy, I'm going to walk you to the living room.”

“Okay, not looking,” she said as Jacob put his hands on her shoulders and tugged her upright out of bed. Grinning nervously and keeping her eyes closed, she allowed him to push at her back to direct her out of her bedroom. Caitlin immediately walked into the edge of the open door.

“Oof!”

“Sorry, Mommy. Okay, we're in the hall, go right.”

“I know where the living room is,” she said, laughing, and then suddenly stopped. One bare foot had landed in something slimy.

“Ew!”

Her eyelids barely fluttered open before Jacob ran his hands over them again. “Don't look!”

“There's something gross—”

“Don't look! Arfa threw up.”

“Is that the surprise?”

“No! Don't move. I'll get paper towels.”