A Vision of Fire

“Many political experts already feel that I am not the best chance for a peaceful and long-term resolution in these negotiations—I am the only chance. That is why radicals on both sides want me out of the way, by any means possible.”

“Does your daughter know this?”

“She has made a point of studying the situation,” Ganak said with a hint of pride. “You see, I am descended from the Pawar Rajputs, princes of Kashmir, so we are respected in India. But my family owns land in Gurdaspur near Jammu and Kashmir. It remains highly contested territory for the strategic importance of its road and railway. Because my family has never denied anyone access, the Pakistanis do not entirely mistrust me. So I have become the agent of all voices. There must be no blemishes on my perceived ability to engage fully. Please do not think I would risk my daughter’s well-being—”

“I don’t,” Caitlin replied. “Maanik’s symptoms may not recur and this could just be a posthypnotic echo, but we have to be prepared either way.”

Ganak sighed. It was not relief exactly but cautious optimism. Tendering further apologies for interrupting her evening, the ambassador said good night.

Caitlin hung up and tapped a pen on the desk as she stared at her tablet. The fate of the region was on the shoulders of a sixteen-year-old. Perhaps Maanik knew that too.

After answering work-related e-mails—over two dozen in all—Caitlin was surprised to see that it was nearly midnight. It was past her bedtime but she was halfway through a weekly newsletter summarizing reports of adolescent schizophrenia episodes from around the world and she wanted to finish. There seemed to be an uptick in the number of references to an “apocalypse” by teenage patients, but Caitlin was wary of seeing trends where there were none. She decided she was just tired and overwrought.

“Enough!” she said, and closed her tablet. She brushed her teeth, washed her face, and got into bed.

As she lingered between wakefulness and sleep, she had dreamlike visions of smoky waves of red and blue rolling in from the distance, a nightmarish surf, creeping toward her on shapeless fingers, finally oozing and sputtering, throwing off ugly clouds of suffocating dust.

“Dad…”

She was looking for him—for someone—but the waves were everywhere, undulating and crashing, rising and engulfing her—

Caitlin gasped herself awake, surprised to find that two hours had passed. She blinked away the nightmare, looked around at the dark familiarity of her bedroom. She let her head sink back, breathing regularly, easily.

“Night terrors,” she told herself. Everything was normal and right again, the room inside and the sounds outside. Everything—except one thing.

She was still afraid.

CHAPTER 5

^{The University of Tehran}

^{Central Library and Documentation Center}

Atash Gulshan sat alone at a long wooden table looking over the first draft of his paper on the tariff protests that shook Tehran in 1905. He had been staring at the printout for some time without reading the words.

He blinked twice, three times, and refocused. Eyes were upon him, furtively, accusingly—he had an acute sense of them, forced himself to ignore them. The population did not want to repay the Russian czar for lending money to the Persian king for his personal use.

A wave of nausea engulfed him, pushing from his mouth to his belly. Looking up, his gaze was misty.

Rashid, he thought miserably. Brother…

The nausea came a second time and he leaned forward on his forearms, shut his eyes. Atash saw the crane from which they hanged him, his brother’s frightened but unrepentant expression as the stool was knocked away and the rope tugged his mouth and face horribly, unnaturally to one side.

Unnatural. That was what they had called Rashid for being a homosexual. Atash had been questioned mercilessly after his brother was found with another man. Queried, pushed, slapped. He wanted to tell them he must be a homosexual too, for after all, he loved his brother…

When he opened his eyes, a featureless wave rolled at him from a pinpoint in the distance. It was not an object so much as a billowing movement. It reminded him of his mother shaking out one of the quilts she made—a bulky mass moving thickly and in slow motion. The wave was a low, glowing red growing brighter with each moment. As it moved it shook off charcoal-colored clouds that seemed almost like black cats leaping as a rug was pulled from under them. Atash stared, transfixed, as the wave writhed toward him, filling more and more of his view. His head suddenly began to throb above both eyes. He winced but remained very still. A part of the young man’s mind remembered that there were strict rules in the library. Quiet. Respect. No electronics. If he moved now he was afraid he might stumble…

“Ulzii,” he whispered.