A Vision of Fire

He drew a sharp breath as the carvings began to pulse, not with his synesthetic lights but with an internal luminescence, ivory-white. The symbols were lighting up in a nonlinear order, each carving showing a soft visual pulse with every corresponding sound. The tones themselves were fractionally louder now. They reminded Arni of language tapes, native pronunciation slowed for the novice, but he immediately squashed that thought. The human propensity for personification meant that any unidentified sound resembling vocalization would automatically be interpreted as words and language. That was wishful, not scientific. He felt in his pocket for his phone. He had to record this—

His phone was in his locker. He reached over and rebooted his tablet. There was an audio recorder built in.

While it turned back on, Arni picked up the meteorite and turned it over, trying to see if there was a point of origin for the hum. He discovered that the stone was vibrating, but not in a way that could be producing the tone. The buzz was more like a mild electric current than a cell phone. It was not unpleasant to the touch; it was soothing, in fact. It made him want to hold it. The current seemed to magnify inside his body, as though triggering his own energy centers—the top of his skull, his forehead, his throat, his heart—

His thoughts suddenly felt muddy and something began throbbing behind his eyes, forcing itself forward. Something moving, something wholly other. Rust-red and swirling in a cyclonic cone, as if seen from the top, it was becoming thinner as he descended. Now, a landscape. A manufactured landscape of domes and spires incorporated among what seemed to be natural elements, long curves and slopes. The natural parts were enormous, making the artificial components seem like part of a train set or Christmas nativity—small. Very small. And nearly everything was white, as if the entire image was backlit or bottom-lit, somehow, as if light rays were extending up to create the image, yet no rays were visible.

Is this you or me? he asked the artifact.

Again Arni heard the voices. His orientation with the image changed. It tilted suddenly, in an uncanny lockstep with the sounds, so that Arni was looking up: specifically at a stone pillar about three stories high. It was tipped with something glinting green that made him think of the olivine crystals inside the meteorite. He looked around and saw that similar stone pillars circled the city…

And then the sky seemed to burst red again across its huge expanse. The landscape shifted, revealing a street, a route, at the end of which was white and blue in a riot of motion. This was not him, not his synesthetic response. The colors, the images, the sounds—they were all coming from the rock.

What are you? Arni demanded.

But he never got the answer, never saw what was at the end of the route. Suddenly his right brain and left brain ceased functioning together. His right brain continued to view the image. His left brain died, and he could no longer think to himself about what he was seeing. The right side of his body crumpled so quickly that he fell to the floor. Colors from all over the spectrum flooded his vision but he could not summon the ability to scream. Then just as suddenly, all the colors stopped, every sensation stopped, and he no longer felt his body touching the floor, no longer felt his body at all.

Arni experienced an overpowering urge to sleep. His eyes were shut but he still saw—for another moment. Then his medulla melted, and his corpus callosum, his thalamus, and his pons, and he stopped breathing even as his heart rate exploded.

Moments later he was dead, a trickle of blood and liquid brain dripping from his nose onto the collar of his new white shirt.

PART THREE

CHAPTER 25

Ben heard the soft buzz of his phone, reached for it, and grabbed air.

That potted plant wasn’t his night table and the smell in his nose wasn’t—

This wasn’t his bed. In the dark, he saw the contour of a woman’s bare shoulders and strands of hair.

He remembered… Caitlin… last night… as his phone buzzed again. Where the hell did I leave it…?

He sat up carefully to avoid waking her and looked around, then down. The back pocket of his trousers on the floor was pulsing blue-white. He leaned over for it, snuck his phone from the pocket with two fingers, and sat in the bed so as to shield Caitlin from the glow as he read two texts. The first was sent at 3:02 a.m.: Hangout asap.

The second came a minute later: Under fire now.

The sender was Ignacio de Viana, a friend of Ben’s from Uruguay—

a civilian who, for the last year, had been one of the hundred UN personnel in Jammu, India. “Hangout” did not mean “let’s hang out” and “under fire” was literal, no joke.

Ben texted back: 60 secs.