A Dream of Ice Read Online Free Page B

toward the Brooklyn International School, which offered eighth to twelfth grade for English-language learners. A large number of students were not just immigrants but refugees, many of them suffering from a wide range of traumas. Caitlin usually visited the school one afternoon a week to conduct individual therapy sessions but with all her recent trips, she hadn’t been able to find any free afternoons. Earlier in the week she’d received an e-mail asking her to please come on an off day. One student in particular was proving especially difficult to reach.
    Caitlin leaned her head back on the glass window of the train and stared at ads for a ministorage chain. Ordinarily, she’d have been rereading the e-mail from the school and thinking about the student, but she couldn’t keep her mind off of Arfa and the presence they had both felt in the room. Most of the time his behavior could be passed off as random feline weirdness but the inexplicably rippling furgnawed at her. The experience had blindsided her and filled her with a thought that stubbornly refused to go away:
    Did I bring something back with me from Galderkhaan? Or, like an animal, has something sniffed me out?
    Or was it neither of the above? Reason argued against those. But reason had too many enemies now.
    Reality was suddenly very, very difficult to know and impossible to quantify. Souls from an ancient civilization had been stretching through time, trying to bond with souls in the modern day to complete a ritual. Caitlin had interceded, used a self-induced trance to place herself between then and now, breaking the connection. But it wasn’t like an electric circuit where the lines were cut and the energy died. This was different. It had been like walking through a graveyard where the ghosts were visible, aggressive, and unhappy. Not even the great universities had literature to help her understand that. Caitlin was sure; she had checked.
    Caitlin sat up straight and forced herself to focus on the present, on what she knew was real. She dug deep into her pocket for her phone and scrolled through e-mails until she found the one from the school. The boy in trouble was an eighth grader, originally a child soldier in the Central African Republic. Deserting one night, Odilon had managed to walk a hundred miles to the capital from his rebel camp without being picked up by any other militia. At Bangui, he hid in a hospital for a week until he passed out from hunger. Doctors Without Borders got him out of the country and now, through a generous line of supporters, he was living in a hastily converted meeting space in the basement of a synagogue in Brooklyn. He had seemed responsive during the summer school that guided the refugees through assimilation into American life. Now, in late October, he was beginning to isolate and was refusing to speak in class or out of it. The school’s counselors suspected he was experiencing flashbacks but they couldn’t confirm.
    Caitlin looked up from her phone. A couple of college studentshad joined the car, both wired into music. She glimpsed several boisterous younger kids in an adjacent car, clearly skipping school. The rocking of the two cars made her aware of the reflections playing off the windows. Images collided with each other as the cars shifted or turned along gentle curves, layering the faces of passengers one upon the other. Her eyes traced the windows and their metal frames, the silvery poles and overhead handlebars, the yellow and orange plastic seats. The passengers and their reflections seemed to dance around the fixed structures as though they were figures around a maypole in some primitive ritual, complete with the transparent souls of the departed. She thought about the dead of Galderkhaan, the Priests trying to bond their souls together and ascend to a higher spiritual plane through the rite of cazh . The poles in the cars were like the columns of the Technologists, planted in earth,