“C’mon, Winston, you can deal with it,” said Tory. “Make the stretch.”
“I ain’t no bungee cord, okay? I don’t stretch that way.” Winston shut his eyes even tighter, and Tory could hear him grinding the last nubs of his teeth in frustration.
The soul of a star, thought Tory. How big—how powerful was the soul of a star? Even one sixth of it must have been brighter than any other on Earth. “We must be the most powerful human beings in the world!” she told her friends.
“Then why are we dying?” Winston looked at her coldly and left the silo. Since no one had an answer, they silently followed him out.
Why were they dying? thought Tory. Not just dying—but suffering hideous afflictions. Why would the brightest lights on earth be so consumed by darkness? This answer she had found was only half an answer, and it made her furious.
Outside the silo, the ground was covered by a thick fog that swirled around their ankles, and the air smelled rich with the decaying remains of an early harvest. A hint of blue on the eastern horizon told of the coming dawn, and although they had not slept, they were too tightly wound to sleep now.
“Yesterday when I closed my eyes,” said Michael, “I could almost see the faces of the others . . . but now they feel further away.” And then he dared to voice something they were all too afraid to admit might be true. “I don’t think they’re coming,” he said. “Something’s gone wrong.”
“We have to go to Nebraska,” said Tory. “To Omaha. I’m telling you some astronomer at some school there predicted the explosion of the star; he has to know something that can help us.”
They did have a sense that they had to move northwest, and although Omaha didn’t leap out at them as a must-see town, it wasn’t out of their way, either—and it was the closest thing to a lead that they had, so Tory got her way. Omaha it was.
By now Lourdes had squeezed her way out of the stone entrance to the silo and joined them. Winston, however, was standing by himself, pondering the glow of the nova, which was quickly being overcome by the light of dawn. Tory reached out to touch Winston gently on the shoulder, but Winston quickly pulled away.
“Don’t!” His sleeves fell over his hands, and he had to fight to stick his arms through them again. The jacket seemed much larger on him than it had yesterday, and his boyish voice seemed a little bit higher. “Just don’t touch me, okay?”
“Winston . . .”
“I like being one person, okay? I don’t want to be one sixth of something, or even one fourth of something.”
“But, Winston, if what I’ve said is right, it could mean so many things—look at the possibilities!”
Winston’s face hardened into the expression of a stubborn old man or a very small boy. “I don’t care to,” he said. Winston’s hand began to twitch at his side, and he turned away from Tory, but Tory still watched. He brought his hand up a little, then forced it back down, as if fighting some inner battle—but it was a battle he lost. Tory could only stare in growing dread as Winston Pell, the incredible shrinking boy, brought up his hand, slipped his thumb into his mouth, and kept it there for a long, long time.
THAT AFTERNOON, AT ANOTHER farm hundreds of miles away in Torrington, Wyoming, Dillon Cole tore through a wheat field, putting distance between himself and the farmhouse behind him. He would not look back; he would not think back, and what he left behind in that house would be put completely out of his mind.
He felt the wrecking-hunger curl up and go to sleep well fed, and when the hunger was fed, Dillon felt strong—stronger than anyone alive. What would I be without the wrecking-hunger? he thought. The hunger answered like a rumbling from his stomach: he would be nothing. Sometimes he felt as if the hunger were a living thing; a weed that had coiled around his soul and he couldn’t tell where it ended and where he began. He didn’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.
But whatever it was, those four Others wanted to take it away, didn’t they? Even now they were drawn toward him, across the miles, and if they found him, they would weaken him; maybe even destroy him. They would drive a wedge between him and Deanna, and Dillon could not allow that. So they had to keep moving until . . .
Until what?
Until the hunger no longer needed to be fed.
He raced across the wheat field to the place where he had left Deanna, but when he got there, she was gone.
DILLON HAD LEFT DEANNA in the wheat field with little warning. They had just left a farmhouse where a family had been kind enough to give them lunch—they were crossing a field, when suddenly Dillon had told her to wait, and then doubled back over the hill toward the house again.
He had gone to feed the hunger—Deanna knew that—she could see in his face how he had been suffering—strangling—but why did he have to leave her alone? He knew what happened to her when she was alone.
A wind swept across the rolling hills of wheat. The ground beneath her seemed to move, and fear gripped her. She felt one of her waking nightmares coming on again, and although she knew it could not be real, it terrified her all the same. Was there something there under the ground? Something coming for her? Yes! She could see it burrowing beneath the wheat. Why had Dillon left her here?
She began to run, but the fear ran with her. Finally she stumbled into a field that had already been harvested, where thick black mud swallowed her to her ankles. Something was reaching for her. She could feel it. She screamed in terror.
She fell to the mud, and the ground seemed to swallow her. Was the ground alive? Was it climbing up around her, dragging her down into darkness? She couldn’t see now—the mud was in her eyes, in her mouth. She swore she could feel a beast coming out of the mud wrapping around her like a snake, and she screamed again to chase the terror-mare away, but her screaming didn’t help.
Then something grabbed her by the wrists. At first she thought it was the ground itself reaching up to pull her even deeper, but then there was a voice. A familiar voice.
“Deanna, it’s all right!” She could barely hear Dillon through her own screams. “Look at me,” he said. “See me. Make it go away.”
Deanna, her sight still blurry, fixed on his dark eyes, pushing the foul vision of fear away.
When the terror-mare had ended, it was like coming out of a seizure, which is exactly how Dillon treated it. He held her tightly, as if she had been in the throes of convulsions. Deanna was exhausted and let all her muscles go slack, feeling the steady pressure of Dillon as he held her.
“You left me,” she said weakly.
“I’m sorry. I was wrong to—I won’t do it again.” Dillon picked her up and carried her to a place where the wheat was tall and the ground was dry, then he lay her down, and tenderly wiped away the mud that had caked on her arms. Dillon was calm and relaxed. Deanna knew what that meant.
“What happened at the farmhouse?” she asked. “How bad was it?”
“I didn’t touch a thing,” said Dillon. “I just sort of planted a seed. That’s all.”
“What did you do?”
Dillon stared at her, considering her question. “I’ll tell you, if you want to know.”
But the truth was, she didn’t want to know, so she didn’t press the issue. Instead she just lay there staring up at the sky, feeling her fear curl up inside her and go to sleep as she listened to far-off birds crying somewhere over the hill. Their voices sounded like screams in the distance.
“We need to keep moving,” said Dillon, helping Deanna up.
“Do we know where we’re going yet?” she asked.
“We’re not ‘going’ anywhere,” Dillon answered. “We’re getting away from The Others.”
Dillon had been saying that since they left Nebraska—but it wasn’t entirely true, was it? Dillon knows where he’s going, thought Deanna. He just doesn’t know he knows. It was clear to Deanna that he was doing what he did best—tracing a pattern—but this pattern was so complex and intricate not even he could see its end.
Deanna ke
pt her faith in Dillon, knowing that wherever this journey was leading, she and Dillon would be together. She held onto that thought as they headed west out of Torrington, leaving behind the farmhouse and the screaming birds.
8. DR. BRAINLESS AND THE SIX OF SWORDS
* * *
IT WAS A SMALL OBSERVATORY IN A SMALL UNIVERSITY, where a man of small recognition worked feverishly to get his telescope up and running.
Winston was doubtful about the entire thing—but then he was doubtful of everything since Tory came up with that crazy stuff about the Scorpion Star. Winston feared he’d never be able to stretch himself around that one—but the others had, and now Tory was in the lead wherever they went.
In the two days the quartet had been together, Winston had felt his disease, or whatever it was, start to accelerate. A day ago he had chewed a sandwich on his seven-year molars. But when he ran his tongue through his mouth today, those molars were gone, receding back into his head. His front teeth were starting to get smaller and smaller. Soon all his adult teeth would be gone, and he would have no teeth at all, because his baby teeth had long since been exchanged for quarters beneath his pillow.
The others were no better off: Lourdes’s blouse looked like a patch quilt because they kept having to sew scraps of material into it to make it larger. Tory had begun complaining that her joints ached something fierce, which meant that whatever was devouring her skin was beginning to move deeper into her body, and Michael . . . well, sometimes he looked like a madman on the verge of turning into a werewolf. He complained his girl-crazies were getting worse and that his heart beat so fast, he was afraid it might blow up in his chest.
They had all hoped that coming together would slow down their deterioration, but it hadn’t—in fact, things were progressing faster, and they all could be dead in a matter of days. Winston didn’t know how an astronomer could help, but he was desperate enough to try anything now.
Finding the man was not very difficult. A simple Web search uncovered several articles on the eccentric astronomer. Dr. Bayless was his name, but his crueler colleagues were more fond of calling him Dr. Brainless.
Winston fought to stay ahead of Michael and Lourdes and right behind Tory as they crossed the small college campus toward the physics building. Tory still shuffled through printouts of the articles they had found, trying to read in the late twilight.
“Listen to this—it says here that Bayless’s mother was a carnival psychic, and she gyped rich people out of thousands of dollars!”
“So?” scoffed Winston.
“So, the scientific community thinks Bayless is a quack as well and gives him the cold shoulder.”
“But he predicted the explosion of Mentarsus-H,” chimed in Lourdes, in her deep whale-belly voice. “So who’s quacking now?”
Winston turned to Michael, who seemed distracted and bothered as if the air itself was pricking his whole body with needles as he walked.
“What do you think?” asked Winston.
“He probably won’t help us unless we bring him the broomstick of the Wicked Witch,” said Michael.
BEHIND THE PHYSICS BUILDING stood the observatory—a small domed structure painted a peeling institutional green. It was no more an emerald city than their path had been a yellow-brick road.
As they pushed their way through the squeaky doors of the observatory, they were met by the smell of old floor varnish and a twelve-foot telescope with pieces missing. It was an unimpressive observatory, consisting of little more than the crippled telescope, a desk in a far corner, and an arrow on the floor pointing north—in case anyone couldn’t figure that out by themselves.
Across the room, a thin man, with thinner hair, fought with workers—trying to keep them working on the telescope, even though it was way past five o’clock. He was tall, with a slight roundness to his back from too many years making calculations at a desk. The four kids approached the ranting astronomer solemnly like a small minion of misery, and when he saw them, he waved them off.
“No classes today. Go home.” His voice had a hostile, unfriendly tone that could only come from many years of bitter disappointment.
Tory cleared her throat and stepped forward. “Dr. Bayless, we’ve come a long way—we have to talk to you.”
Bayless turned to take a better look at them, then, with a disgust he didn’t even try to hide, said, “My God! What happened to you?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” said Winston.
Around them the workers were starting and moving toward the doors, whispering to each other about the freaks that had just walked in.
“Go on,” Bayless shouted to the workers. “Get out—see if I care.” They were more than happy to oblige. “The cosmic event of a lifetime, and the telescope had to break down this month.”
He took a moment to look at the four of them again, shook his head—shuddering with revulsion—and let loose a bitter laugh. “Life’s misfortunes just fall at my doorstep, don’t they? If it’s not a ruined telescope, it’s the wretched of the earth. Well, how can I help you?”
“What can you tell us about supernovas?” asked Tory.
“What can’t I tell you?” he replied, slipping into professor-speak. “Supernovas are the reason we’re all here. Oxygen, carbon, silicon—all the heavier elements are created in the explosions. Without novas, the whole universe would be little more than hydrogen gas . . .” He paused and looked at them again, shuddering, but this time not laughing. “But you didn’t come here for an astronomy lecture, did you?”
“You predicted the explosion of Mentarsus-H,” said Tory. “We think our condition’s got something to do with that.”
Now Bayless’s look turned from revulsion to suspicious interest. He studied them intensely and began to pick at his ragged yellow fingernails.
“My prediction was luck,” he said. “At least that’s what my colleagues say.”
“Don’t go playing games with us, all right?” said Winston, pulling his thumb from his mouth. “If you know something, tell us.”
“You got a big mouth for a little kid,” said Bayless.
“I’m fifteen,” growled Winston.
Bayless sighed and nodded reluctantly. “All right, come on and sit down.”
Bayless led them to a corner of the observatory that had been set up as his office. Winston noticed that Michael kept his distance, breathing in gasps, like someone suffering from asthma, and shifting his weight from one foot to another like a caged animal. He’s got it bad today, thought Winston.
“The Scorpion Star,” said Lourdes to Bayless. “Tell us how you knew.”
Bayless leaned back in his desk chair, took a sip of cold coffee, and focused on his uneven fingernails, picking at them with an unpleasant click-click-click. Finally he spoke.
“It’s a curious talent,” said Bayless, “to look at the universe and know what it’s thinking. To sense that countless galaxies would be discovered in dark space. To feel that the universe is even older than most scientists think it is. To glance at a star chart and see one star missing in the tail of the Scorpion, only to see it reappear when you blink.”
“Intuition?” suggested Tory.
“My mother had it,” said Bayless. “She chose to use it to separate fools from their money and turned herself into a sideshow freak. I chose to use it for more noble purposes. Biology . . . astrophysics.” Then he angrily flicked a fingernail in an arc over their heads. It landed on the dark floor, where it lay like a crescent moon. “Unfortunately science has no room for intuition. Scientists find a million ways to spell ‘coincidence,’ and so I’ve become a sideshow freak after all.” Then he smiled grimly, and added, “. . . like the four of you.”
His smile made them all squirm. Everyone but Tory.
“The star blew up sixteen years ago,” said Tory. “We’ve figured out the exact date.”
“Students of astrophysics, are you?” said Bayless, beginning on a new fingernail.
“No,” said
Tory. “That was the day each of us was conceived.”
Bayless raised his attention from his marred fingertips to the four of them. “Remarkable,” he said, studying their faces, and movements. “Remarkable. Perhaps these exploding stars have more to do with us than I’ve dared to imagine.” He pulled out a digital recorder from his desk and hit the record button. “Do you mind if I record all this?”
“We’d rather you didn’t,” said Lourdes.
He put his recorder in his desk, but Winston couldn’t tell if he turned it off.
“Tell me everything,” he said. “Everything to the last detail . . .”
THEY TOOK A GOOD hour to go through their stories, and Bayless listened, attentive to every word. When they were done, the astronomer was practically drooling with excitement.
“Shards!” he exclaimed, laughing with glee. “Shards of a shattered star!” He peered at them as if they were subjects he planned to study. The slight hunch of his back made him resemble a vulture.
“I’ve written about this sort of thing,” he said, pacing a short, sharp path, “but never dared to publish it—but now I can present you as proof!” He looked at them with such awe, it made Winston roll his eyes. “Do you have any idea how special—how luminous you are? Why, the rest of us are mere smithereens compared to you!”
“Yeah?” said Michael. “So if we got these fantastic kick-ass souls, how come we’re so screwed up?”
His words stopped Bayless in mid-pace. “I don’t know,” he said. “By my estimation you should be living lives like no others—glorious lives with—”
“Shut up,” shouted Winston. Hearing what his life should have been made it all seem even worse. He started to stomp around like a small child, and Tory put her hand on his head to calm him down. It only made him angrier.
“We don’t need ought-a-be’s,” said Tory. “We need some why-not’s.”
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