“I suspect that Tama’s love of storytelling around the fire is the least important thing you took from that experience. But fine. What would you like to know?”
Julian shook his head. “Nope, no Socratic method this time. You tell me a real story, and I will sit and listen.”
“He went missing on the September equinox,” Devi said. “Four years and eight equinoxes later, I went into the Q’an Doh cave to find him. I was willing to give up everything for a chance to make different choices that might lead to a different result. My mother begged me not to go. She said the breach in my life was his death, and by that time it would be too late to do anything to stop it. But I was obstinate, foolhardy, broken by grief. Sound familiar? A snowslide had formed a gravity current, carrying massive forces at astonishing speeds. Ice, rocks, trees compressed as if down a funnel. But despite the destruction, when I arrived in Karmadon, the villagers swore they’d seen my son alive near the gorge. And why shouldn’t I have believed them? I kept seeing him myself. Why are you back, I kept repeating to him. I thought you were shooting through October? I stayed for two years, searching for him. He was so real, I refused to believe he was dead.”
“Like Ava with Mia,” Julian said.
“Not just Ava with Mia.”
Julian hung his head.
“The mystery of my son’s death,” Devi said, “is contained in the millions of cubic yards of stone and ice. He vanished without a trace, except for the trace he left in me.”
“Did you ever stop seeing him?” Julian had not stopped seeing Mia. He still dreamed of her walking in the wet sunshine.
“No.” Devi made a sound with his mouth, a cross between a click and a groan. “I should’ve listened to my mother—a good lesson for us all. She warned me there was nowhere for my soul to go except into his death. He was brand new. There was no past, no other body, no possibilities. But I went in anyway. Because I thought I knew best. Like you, I was arrogant enough to believe that my love could save him. I was convinced he wasn’t dead. He keeps appearing to me alive, I told my mother. Why would he do that if he weren’t?”
Julian, Devi, and Ava all shared one grief.
“I told myself that as long as the portal opened, I stood a chance,” Devi continued. “A portal to where, my mother said. You better pray it doesn’t open, she said, because it will either kill you or show you things that will make you wish you were dead. But I didn’t care. I didn’t know then that there’s another reason no one goes into the meridian caves in September. Because that’s when the bats return to hibernate for the winter. Ten million of them, twenty million. I don’t know. Infinite million.”
“I don’t like bats,” Julian said.
“You know my answer to that,” Devi said. “Don’t go. I nearly died from a nasty fungal infection I got as a result of touching bat guano, unavoidable really at that time of year. I had a heart attack. They had to revive me.” He sighed.
“The bats and the precipice nearly killed me, and past the moongate there was nothing but ice. Ice under my feet. Ice in the walls. Ice above me. I was forever in that cave.” Devi sunk inward. “I’m still there.”
Julian well remembered the Mount of Terror that formed into a frozen river that led him down and away from the black ditch atop Crag Hill in York, to the Hinewai in the Southern Ocean.
“The cave didn’t take me across time,” Devi said. “But it did take me across space, all the way to Asia, to the Kolka Mountain. The cave of Red Faith didn’t let me save him or see him alive,” Devi said. “But it did let me find him. After a long time of meandering through the frozen tunnels, I looked up, and there he was. He hung above me suspended in the glacier cave ceiling. Frozen below the collapsed mountain, in a block of ice four hundred feet deep. You asked me what I see. That is what. Every day of my life, I see my son’s floating body, a dragonfly in crystal, trapped for eternity in the icy depths above my head.”
Staring at their crippled hands, the two men sat, their heads low. “How did you