Shuttered Sky ss-3

by Нил Шустерман

  “That’s not Michael!” he said. “It’s not him! We got the wrong body, it’s not him!”

  “Shh.”

  Dillon put his hand on a broken thighbone, half of which was missing. The bone, a dead gray beneath the algae, began to blanch to an eggshell white. “Winston!”

  Winston shuttered his panic and reached out, touching the bone as well. Its jagged end began to stretch, marrow bubbling up from the hollow within, until it became enclosed within the smoothly curved end of the bone. The algae peeled away and slid to the table.

  The process picked up speed, the two of them matching each other’s rhythm. Dillon touched the skull, healing its many fractures. Winston moved the jaw into place, teeth growing to fill the empty sockets.

  “Yes, I see it now!” said Winston. “It is Michael!”

  They moved to the midsection. Crushed ribs rose into place, de­fining a chest cavity. From the decay that clung to the bones, Dillon was only able to re-integrate bloody fragments of organs—but with Winston’s touch, those fragments cultivated, cells dividing into com­plete structures, until Winston and Dillon both found themselves wrist-deep in it.

  They now moved at an accelerated pace, time dilating itself around them. To those behind them, their hands moved with the agility and grace of virtuosos: four hands at the same instrument, perfectly syn­chronized.

  All at once blood began to pulse, splattering the walls, a heart now beat at the center of an open circulatory system. Connective tissue sprouted like spider webs from joint to joint, and muscle mass thick­ened the legs and arms, rising like dough, encasing the bones beneath. Winston pressed his fingers on empty eye sockets, and when he pulled his fingers away, a pair of eyes filled the space, lids growing closed over them. The bleeding stopped and on the flayed, red figure before them, islands of translucent skin began to grow like clouds in an empty sky, growing denser, thicker, joining one another. A scalp grew back from the forehead, darkening with hair follicles. Skin stretched to cover the body, pushing the last of the algae away, until only the midriff remained open, like a gaping abdominal wound, but dermal tissue rushed in to fill the void until the gap became a crevice, became a crack, became a navel, leaving the fully realized body of Michael Lip­ranski, his chest rising and falling in slow, metered breaths.

  Then Tessic suddenly bolted, flying from the room with unchar­acteristic speed, but he was barely noticed as all eyes were on the body before them that had formed in less than a minute’s time.

  Covered with blood, Winston backed away, but Dillon did not, for there was still one thing left to do. Although Michael’s body was there, there was an emptiness within. Calling back the spirit of others had been an instantaneous and automatic result of bringing life to the flesh. But Michael was a Shard; a soul with such huge inertia that he had to be ignited like a furnace. Dillon pushed his thoughts forward, seeing Michael’s being in his mind. Into Michael’s flesh, into his cells, deeper still to the space between molecules, Dillon forced his own spark, and finally felt Michael ignite! A wave of intensity imprinted itself on every cell of his renewed body, aligning the life within into the service of a single consciousness.

  * * *

  Michael felt his own ignition.

  Void of thought or reason, knowing nothing but his own exis­tence, he was a bullet flying down the barrel, suddenly in motion, exploding forward into a body. He felt every bit of himself at the same instant, from the tips of his toes to the tips of his fingers. He felt his shape, settled into it, and seized control of a familiar mind, remem­bering who he was, accepting all that went with that knowledge.

  Michael opened his eyes, feeling as if he had just been hurled from a carnival ride. He didn’t know whether it was he who was spinning, or the room. Dillon stood over him, out of breath and flushed as if he had just climbed a long flight of stairs. Michael tried to speak, but only gasped at first, coughing until he hacked up a bitter, foul-smelling green wad that only slightly resembled mucous. In fact, he was lying in the stuff; green muck mixing with blood, like some bizarre birth caul. And he was naked.

  Reflexively, he rolled to his side, away from Dillon, floundering in the slippery mire.

  “Easy, Michael.” Dillon grabbed his shoulders to keep him from sliding off the table. Dillon took off his own shirt and handed it to Michael to cover himself. Then Michael heard Winston speak. Until he heard his voice, Michael hadn’t even known there was anyone else in the room.

  “The temperature’s dropped ten degrees in thirty seconds,” Win­ston said. “Yeah, Michael’s back alright.”

  Back? Back from where? Michael closed his eyes tightly, searching for a memory of the moment before, but there was none. He had no idea where he had just been, or how he got here. The past was piecing itself together now, bit by bit like the present. He remembered the dam collapsing around him and Tory. He remembered their terrified leap into the updraft which had carried them both into the sky. But Michael’s control of the wind had broken down. The updraft failed them, and gravity dragged them down through the thin, icy air. Al­though he had clung to Tory, the force of the wind had torn her away. The last half mile he had tumbled alone. Brief pain. A blackout. And now this. It seemed many hours had passed since his last memory.

  Shivering, he sat up, and turned around on the table, to see there were even more people present. Standing further away stood a woman Michael didn’t know, and Drew. Drew had an odd, lobotomized ex­pression on his face.

  “Hey,” said Drew.

  “Hey,” Michael answered.

  The woman beside Drew stood wide-eyed and rigid against the wall, staring at him. Michael suspected if the wall wasn’t there to hold her up, she’d be on the ground.

  Michael felt the temperature continue to drop as his uneasiness grew. “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Vegas anymore.”

  “You’re in Houston,” Dillon answered, with more deadpan seri­ousness than Michael cared for.

  “I survived the fall?”

  Dillon hesitated. “Not exactly.”

  Only now did his mind allow him to see that both Winston and Dillon were covered in blood. The sticky mess coated their arms to their elbows, and had splattered on their clothes.

  Alright, thought Michael, I can handle this. It was, after all, what he had hoped for. That Dillon would find his broken body in the Nevada desert, and bring him back.

  He shuddered in the cold, his breath now coming in puffs of steam. “So what’s this stuff I’m lying in? Some kind of ectoplasm?”

  “More like pond scum,” Winston answered.

  Across the room, the girl wouldn’t stop staring at him. Even with Dillon’s shirt clasped over himself, her stare was seriously unnerving.

  “What’s the matter? You’ve never seen a resurrected naked guy lying in green shit before?”

  “Sorry.” She turned her eyes away.

  “Hey, where are my clothes anyway?”

  Winston offered him an apologetic shrug. “Animals got ’em long before they buried you. Tough break.”

  “Buried? Holy shit, they buried me?”

  Dillon turned to the girl. “Where’s Tessic?” he asked. Michael was sure he didn’t hear him correctly.

  “Gone,” she answered. “I’m amazed he actually got his legs to move. I couldn’t.”

  Michael struggled to capture more of his bearings. He was on an X-ray table. Was this some sort of hospital? Dillon said they were in Houston—how did he get all the way here?

  “I must have been offline a few weeks, huh?” he asked.

  No immediate answer. Then as he regarded Winston and Dillon, it struck him how much different they both looked. A bit taller; a harder edge to their facial features. Suddenly he knew the gist of what they were about to tell him.

  “Oh crap . . . " Thunder rolled ominously outside. He wanted to deny it all. If only for a few moments, he wanted to believe that it was just a joke.

  “It’s been over a year, Michael,” Dillon said.

  He
didn’t even try to consider all the ramifications of it now. It was so overwhelming all he could do was ride it, like a wave. “Damn. Now my video rentals are really gonna be overdue.”

  Drew had scrounged up a hospital gown for him, and approached with it.

  “What happened at the dam?” Michael asked Dillon. “Did you hold back the water? What about Okoya?”

  “You’ll get cleaned up, and we’ll get you some clothes,” Dillon said, trying to wipe the blood from his own arms with a paper towel. “Then we’ll talk.”

  Dillon turned but Michael grabbed him before he could go. “How about Tory? Did you find her, too?”

  Dillon slid out of his grasp. “Like I said, we’ll talk later.”

  Dillon left with the girl. Winston caught the door before it closed.

  “Good to have you back, Michael,” Winston said, and left as well.

  Now it was just himself and Drew. Drew held out the hospital gown to him. “You know the drill; slip this on, open to the back.”

  Michael forced a grin. “So they left us to play doctor, did they? You gonna grab my balls and ask me to cough?”

  “Ooh,” Drew said. “That’s low, even for you.”

  Michael stood up, and let Drew help him into the gown. The moment was uncomfortable, but then, how could it be otherwise? Whatever else had been resolved between them, it didn’t change the fact that Drew, Michael’s closest friend, had wanted to be more than just friends. Michael hadn’t handled that well, and the year gone by hadn’t changed Michael’s discomfort. To him it had only been a few hours. The temperature in the room continued to fall, telegraphing Michael’s apprehension better than words or body language. He didn’t want to start his new life by treading on eggshells, so Michael chose to smash the shells with the bluntness that had always typified their friendship. “So what’s the deal with you?” Michael asked. “You still after me? And if so, would that be considered necrophilia?”

  Drew laughed, tying the strings to his hospital gown. “To tell you the truth, Mikey-boy, dragging around your moldering bones wasn’t exactly a turn-on. Sorry to disappoint you, dude, but couldn’t we just be friends?”

  Michael smiled. He had to remember that Drew had had a whole year to heal from old wounds. It suddenly struck Michael that Drew was a year older than him now. They all were.

  “Fine with me,” Michael said, then pointed to Drew’s short, un­evenly shorn hair. “But as your friend, I gotta tell you, I don’t like the do.”

  “Yeah, well, wait five minutes,” Drew answered.

  * * *

  Wrapped in a silk prayer shawl, Elon Tessic offered prayers to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Prayers that he could retain the courage of his convictions. Prayers that he might regain his composure. He had called for a minyan of ten from among his employees to pray with him, but could not wait for them to arrive, so he began alone, reciting the Sh’ma and the Amidah, two seminal prayers of his faith. Surely today would be a day to humble himself in prayer, for he had already been humbled by what he witnessed just a short time before.

  It was one thing to know the scope of Dillon’s and Winston’s powers, but another thing entirely to witness dust become flesh. It was nothing short of the creation. The way it must have been when God breathed life into man.

  His Judaica study, filled with artifacts from all eras in history, was a sanctuary within a sanctuary for him. But today the framed parch­ments and silver adornments that had always brought him comfort and connection to the past held only accusations. Condemnations. Who was he to take such miraculous beings into his own hands? But then, who was any man called upon to do the will of the Almighty?

  Maddy Haas, as perceptive as she was, had been wrong about one thing. Tessic had doubts. Not about Dillon’s purpose, but about his own ability to complete his role in it. And so Tessic had removed himself from the sight of the revived Michael Lipranski, retreating to his library, and cloaking himself in his talis. He had bought the ancient silk prayer shawl at an auction, authenticated to be more than seven hundred years old. Until Dillon arrived it had been kept in a climate-controlled case, but now the crumbling yellowed silk had a fresh, white sheen, renewed like everything else that fell into Dillon’s presence.

  The door opened behind him. He expected it to be members of the prayer minyan he had called for, and was surprised to see that it was Dillon. Tessic put his prayer book down and hid his hands beneath the prayer shawl so that Dillon could not see how they were shaking.

  “My jeans are a little long on Michael,” Dillon said, “but they’ll do until we can get him his own clothes.”

  “Yes. Good. We’ll take measurements and whip him up a ward­robe right away.”

  Dillon was bathed and clean, but he still smelled faintly of blood. He took a few steps closer. “Are you alright? You left the infirmary in a hurry.”

  Tessic couldn’t meet his eyes. “The job was done, I saw no reason to linger.”

  A gesture of his hand knocked the prayer book from the table. Dillon quickly bent over to pick it up. He handed it to Tessic, and Tessic brought the book to his lips, kissing the spine. “Customary,” Tessic said. “When something holy falls to the ground.”

  Dillon looked around at the artifacts and parchments on display around him. “These things mean a lot to you, don’t they?”

  Tessic looked to the artifacts he had been so proud to have amassed. “They are only things,” Tessic answered. “What matters are the hands that shaped them. Poor men, mostly. I expect when all this is over, I shall be a poor man as well. What then will I have but my faith?”

  The door creaked open, and a gaggle of businessmen entered, awk­wardly pulling folded yarmulkes from their suit pockets. Tessic sighed. “What is the value of a minyan when they come at my beck and call? It should be a gathering of devotion, not a gathering to please one’s employer.”

  The men respectfully greeted Tessic. And went to retrieve a set of prayer books across the room. Dillon became uncomfortable, clearly troubled that he might somehow be recognized. Tessitech’s employees were not the trustworthy cadre that typified Tessic’s personal staff. Before the men returned with their books, Tessic gently led Dillon to the door, and spoke so that the others could not hear. “You must convince Winston to join us in Poland.”

  “Winston goes nowhere Winston doesn’t want to go.”

  “I trust in your ability to persuade him.” Tessic gently closed the door, and returned to the nine other men that had gathered in the center of the room. He could already feel his composure returning.

  26. Inertia

  Winston: No one expected what happened when the dam collapsed.

  Dillon: I thought it would all end right there. I was wrong.

  Michael listened. He didn’t judge, he didn’t think, he didn’t try to make an emotional connection to the things Winston and Dillon told him. He had only “arrived” an hour ago, was quickly stuffed into some of Dillon’s ill-fitting clothes, and now sat shell-shocked in the suddenly overgrown roof garden of industrial icon Elon Tessic. He found it all too surreal for comment. As he sat there, Winston and Dillon spouted the year-in-review in matching couplets.

  Dillon: I could have held the water of Lake Mead back, but I didn’t.

  Winston: He let it flow, hoping it would become a disaster that would heal more than it destroyed.

  The way they explained it, sending a flood sweeping down the lower Colorado River was the only way to stop the world from seeing the five of them as gods. Dillon’s death would paint him in ignominy, and the scope of the disaster would shock the world back into stride, like a broken bone being set. Thousands would die, but civilization would go on, back on its steady track, as it had been before. The only thing that would collapse would be the dam.

  Dillon: But I didn’t die, and the flood waters never reached Laughlin.

  Winston: Instead, Dillon’s presence reversed the river’s entropy. The flood slowed, and began to flow backwards.

  A
pparently, in the wake of the Backwash, the Shards were feared, revered, and worshiped on a global scale. The world believed them to be dead, which elevated them into martyrdom. In the face of that, everything rational and reasonable fell into decline. It was, in effect, the shattering of civilization, just as Dillon had feared from the begin­ning. The Shards had been the agents of the shattering—not the so­lution.

  Dillon: I was imprisoned and used by the government for almost a year.

  Winston: I lived like a fugitive, hiding my face, afraid I’d be rec­ognized.

  In a way, Michael was grateful for his hiatus, having never had to witness all this with his own eyes. They told him how Lourdes had abandoned them, taking refuge in her own bitterness, setting sail on a hedonistic voyage of excess. Michael could hardly blame her. Had he been alive, he might have done the same, isolating himself on some island in the calm eye of a perpetual hurricane.

  Winston: There are three spirits out there now. Their arrival is the beginning of the end.

  Dillon: But we’re safe from them here.

  Michael caught the look Winston threw Dillon, belying some un­spoken tension. Even before he was told of the three spirits, Michael had sensed something. Even now, within the supposedly shielded con­fines of the penthouse, Michael knew there were three—but he didn’t sense them so much as spirits. They were more like living coordinates. Markers of dimension; the axis of a three-dimensional grid. He might have shared his take on these creatures with Dillon and Winston, but they began to tell him about Tory, and how her ashes were dumped out over the skies of Dallas.

  It was this news of Tory that finally reached him. Sorrow mush­roomed within the numbness, a cumulus threatening rain. Acoustics in the garden dampened as the air pressure lightened in a sympathetic response. Although the sky over the rest of Houston remained clear, a single cloud now lingered above the Tessitech building. Apparently Tessic’s shielding had a unique effect on Michael’s power, focusing his mood into a narrow beam, sending it skyward, like a search light. In the rooftop garden, and nowhere else, it began to drizzle.