A Vision of Fire

Caitlin gathered up the drawings and put the file folder away, trying to stop her mind from chewing on the problem. When she turned back to Ben, his focus had changed. He was sitting there looking at her, not at her analytical avatar, and he was sitting very still. She reached out with her right hand and picked up his left hand. Instantly she felt a waterfall surge through her body, vaguely channeled through her right hand. It brought a feeling of such immense relief, she laughed. Ben smiled and inhaled deeply, as if he had just downed a liter of water and was catching his breath.

“Jacob said he wasn’t big enough to help hold it,” Caitlin said.

“Huh?”

“The ocean.”

“What made you think of that?”

“Nothing,” she lied.

Ben was silent, choosing his words carefully. Then he said, “I have a lot of empty space. To hold things.”

Caitlin stared at him, seeing all the countless moments he had been alone in his life. “You’ve got room for my slosh-over, you mean?”

He didn’t have to answer.

She shook her head. “That worries me. Relying on someone, emotionally.”

“Why? People help each other, Cai. It’s what we do.”

“Well, people do a lot of other things too, and some of them are pretty rotten.”

Ben chuckled. “And you think I’ve got a problem with commitment.”

“I never said that.”

“Not with words,” he said, smiling.

“Maybe we have complementary problems,” Caitlin said slowly as she stepped to him, gently pushing his shoulders back and draping a leg over his lap to straddle him. Her back was to the table edge, her body molded into his.

“Even a crazy fit is a fit,” Ben whispered.

She held her lips to his and they breathed together, deeply, as he laid his hands on her lower back and pulled her in tight. Ben was right: it was a crazy fit. But at the moment, it was a fit.

CHAPTER 24

The nocturnal world outside the Global Explorers’ Club mansion was uncommonly still.

Earlier that day, pigeons had avoided the area just north of Washington Square Park. Dogs had not seemed eager to walk on lower Fifth Avenue; they hit the broad street and stopped, refusing to go farther. Cats that normally sat in the windows of buildings across the street avoided their perches altogether.

Arni Haugan had not noticed any of that. He had been working in the basement of his chaotic chemistry lab for fourteen hours straight, since just before dawn, when Mikel had arrived with the artifact. The Group’s leading field agent had been delayed in Montevideo due to something about an albatross rookery and problems with the electronics of the private jet.

“You’re getting as sensitive as people,” the Caltech wunderkind muttered at his tablet as he waited for the results of a capillary electrophoresis test. Arni loved his tools; he just didn’t always appreciate their temperament.

Like now. The computer insisted there was a problem with the current being carried by the borate ions, and the homogeneous electric field was unstable. Which meant there was a problem with the electrophoresis setup, the software, or both.

He grunted. It was time to stop. He would start fresh in the morning.

Arni shut the tablet and pushed back from the table with his usual cocktail of relief and frustration. Work was never done but it felt good to lay it aside for a while. He needed to plug back into the real world. The air in the Group’s basement was rigorously filtered and purified as part of Flora Davies’s war on dust—the “silent, corrosive killer of relics,” as she described it—leaving the atmosphere with an almost electric perfume.

Arni was a synesthete, having always experienced one sense accompanied by another, especially colors with odors and sounds. The kids in elementary school used to call him “Nutso” because he used his Crayolas to illustrate what he smelled, heard, and tasted. This produced rhapsodic little works of art that no one understood but everyone responded to. His mother had always said that he should become an artist. She was one of the few parents, he suspected, who had ever regretted that her son elected, instead, to become a PhD.

Flora had found his synesthesia fascinating and potentially useful. He was convinced that this, not his strong but less-than-brilliant postgrad record, had scored him this job.

That, plus the fact that she needed someone willing to work in the opposite of an ivory tower, he thought. A scientific wine cellar.

The smell down here registered in his peripheral vision as straight, metallic, bright yellow lines. They didn’t impede his work and didn’t bother him until he’d put in over eight hours. Then they became constricting, like neon prison bars.