Gillian Anderson - The Sound of Seas

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.”

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.

“Who can explain this?” Dr. Cummins asked as she texted Bundy, letting him know they were fine and headed back.

“My grandmother,” he said.

“Dr. Jasso, for a man who was so loquacious for the last few hours you are annoyingly elusive.”

“Sorry,” he said distractedly. “I’m processing. It’s… it’s in a line she used to quote from Second John.”

“Which was?” she asked.

Mikel replied with quiet awe, “This can be explained by ‘the lady chosen by God…’”

The phone call was not unexpected.

It came three days after Caitlin had returned from Connecticut. Her parents had gone home, the Langloises had boarded a plane to Haiti, Ben and Anita had gone back to work, Jacob had gone back to school, and Caitlin had accepted a leave of absence that was “recommended” to her by her supervisor at Roosevelt Hospital. Police and the FBI from Norwalk had come by to interview her the day after she returned, but she told them she could not shed any light on what caused the explosion—or implosion, as they were calling it, since the mansion seemed to have been pulled in, just like the Group mansion on Fifth Avenue.

“I assure you, I am not the common denominator,” she half lied. “Ben Moss and I went up there to collect our house guests from Haiti.”

“And at Washington Square Park?” Field Agent Arthur Richardson had asked. “You were seen coming from that mansion too.”

“I was in the neighborhood, checking on a patient there,” Caitlin said. “Adrienne Dowman. Has the bureau found her or Flora Davies yet?”

“We have not, nor the people who lived in the house in Norwalk,” Agent Richardson replied crossly.

Caitlin couldn’t tell them anything more. They wouldn’t have believed her. Going forward, she realized she had to be careful what she said, and to whom. This was no longer something she could share with Barbara. Certainly Ben, possibly Anita. Jacob, of course. He was his old self again; content to be back in his body with his hearing aids, but signing with a facility that surpassed what he had been able to do before. He remembered everything that had happened in Galderkhaan, and though the language had been forgotten the superlative use of his hands had not.

And there was one other person she could confide in, draw on, learn from. The man she had walked a few blocks to meet outside the American Museum of Natural History.

“There’s nothing here of that ancient world to interest you,” she said when he approached her at the large front steps beside the statue of Teddy Roosevelt.

“How did you know it was me?” he asked.

Caitlin smiled as they shook hands under the warming sun. “You walk like you’re still treading on ice.” She looked at his arm. “Plus you have a busted wing in a sling that I could swear was made of thyodularasi skin.”