Except when the dream took her over, of course. Then she was animate, all right. Hoo boy. And last night, up on the roof terrace or was it this morning? Both, she guessed. It had gone on long enough to straddle the dawn. She just hadnt been able to stop crying. She hadnt even been asleep this time, and still it had found her. It. The dream. The memory .
A storm had moved through her, entirely impervious to her will, and the storm had been grief, unfathomable loss, and the full intensity of the remorse shed come to know so well.
With the fading of the stars and the break of day, Elizas storm had passed. Today she was the ravaged landscape it had left behind. Waters subsiding, and ruin. And revelation, or at least the cusp of it, the corner. This is what it felt like: detritus washed away, her mind a floodplain, clean and austere, and at her feet, just visible, a corner, protruding from the earth. It could be the corner of a trunkpirates treasure or Pandoras boxor it could be the corner of a rooftop. Of a buried temple. Of an entire city.
Of a world.
All she had to do was blow away the dust, and she would know, or begin to know, what else lay buried within herself. She could feel it there. Burgeoning, infinite, terrible and wondrous: the gift, the curse. Her heritage.
Stirring. Shed poured so much of herself into keeping it buried, sometimes it felt like any energy she might have had for joy or love or light went there instead. You only had so much to give.
So what if she just stopped fighting and surrendered to it?
Ay, theres the rub. Because Eliza wasnt the first to have the dream. The gift. She was only the latest prophet. Only the next in line for the asylum.
That way madness lies. She was feeling quite Shakespearean today. The tragedies, of course, not the comedies. It didnt escape her that when King Lear made that statement, he was already well on his way to crazy. And maybe she was, too.
Maybe she was losing her mind.
Or maybe
maybe she was finding it.
She was in possession of herself for now, at any rate. She was drinking cold mint tea up at the kasbahnot the hotel kasbah, but the beast-mass-grave kasbahand taking a break from the pit. Dr. Chaudhary wasnt very talkative today, and Eliza flushed to remember the awkwardness with which hed patted her on the arm last night, at a total loss in the face of her meltdown.
Damn it. There really werent all that many people whose opinions mattered deeply to her, but his did, and now this. Her mind was circling back to it yet againanother rotation on the shame carouselwhen she noticed a commotion rippling through the assembled workers.
There was a kind of makeshift refreshment station set up in front of the massive, ancient gates of the fortress: a truck serving tea and plates of food, a few plastic chairs to sit on. The kasbah itself was cordoned off; a team of forensic anthropologists was going over it with fine-tooth combs. Literally. They had found long azure hairs in one of the rooms, apparentlythe same room in which theyd found, scattered across the floor, a peculiar assortment of teeth that had led to speculation that the Girl on the Bridge and the Tooth Phantomthe silhouette caught on surveillance cam at Chicagos Field Museummight be one and the same.
The plot thickened.
And now, something else. Eliza didnt see where it began, the commotion, but she watched it move from one cluster of workers to the next by way of gesticulations and loud, fast chatter in Arabic. Someone pointed to the mountains. Up, into the sky above the peaksin the same direction that Dr. Amhali had pointed when hed said, wryly, They went that way.
They. The living beasts. Eliza drew a hard breath. Had they found them?
She made out the glint of aircraft moving in the distance, and then, at her right, a couple of men disengaged from the general mass of people whose function she couldnt determinethere were a lot of men here, and most of them didnt appear to be doing anythingand made for the helicopter that was at rest on a piece of flat terrain. She kept watching, her tea forgotten in her hand, as the rotors began to spin, picking up speed until billows of dirt were kicking their way toward her and the helicopter lifted up and flew. It was loud whumpwhumpwhump and her heart was pounding as she scanned the faces of the people around her. She felt handicapped by the language barrier, and very much an outsider here. Surely someone spoke English, though, and this was a small enough feat of courage to perform. With a deep breath, Eliza threw her paper cup in a bin and approached one of the few female workers on-site. It only took a couple of questions to ascertain the source of the commotion.
A fire in the sky, she was told.
Fire? More angels? she asked.
InshaAllah , the woman replied, gazing into the distance. Allah willing.
Eliza recalled Dr. Amhali saying, the day before, Its all very nice for Christians, yes? Angels in Rome, demons here. How neat, how tidy for the Western worldview, and how wrong. Muslims believed in angels, too, and Eliza gathered that they wouldnt mind getting some for themselves. For her own part, she had a presentiment that they were better off without them, and she had to wonderespecially in light of what she was beginning to believewhy the prospect of angels frightened her more than the prospect of beasts.