Shuttered Sky ss-3

by Нил Шустерман

  “Why,” mumbled Michael, “couldn’t I just be left at the bottom of Lake Arrowhead?”

  And although no one expected an answer, Okoya said, “Winston knows why.”

  Dillon and Michael turned to Winston, who had said very little during Okoya’s revelation. “What else is there, Winston?” Dillon asked. “What other secrets have you been keeping?”

  Winston couldn’t look up at them. He kept his eyes lowered to the ground. “It’s no secret. It’s something Drew and I came to un­derstand.”

  “Enlighten us, o wise one,” said Michael.

  Winston took his time before he spoke. Finally he said, “For years we’ve wanted to know the reason behind our lives. Why did the Scorpion Star explode? Why did we inherit its fractured soul? Why have our powers been growing? What are we?” Winston looked to Dillon, then to Michael, then back to Dillon again. “How ready are you for the answer?”

  Suddenly Dillon found himself no longer wanting to know.

  “Okoya talks about his universe being a living thing,” said Win­ston, “but what if ours is alive as well? Not a living void, but a lifeform of matter and energy stretching across space—a single organism, thirty billion light-years wide?”

  Michael threw up his hands in exasperation. “Oh, gee, that’s just wonderful. So what does that make us? Universal sperm?”

  Winston ignored him. “If we see the universe as a complex or­ganism, how do you think it might protect itself from invasion—from infection?”

  Dillon fought his own resistance, and let the idea begin to sink in. When he finally spoke, he found his own voice cold and hollow. “You’re saying we’re some sort of defense? A kind of metaphysical immune system?”

  “Dillon gets a gold star,” Okoya said.

  Dillon considered it. The idea was too large to grasp, and yet simple at the same time. He found himself looking at his hands—which he had always seen as an interface for his powers. Healing hands; hands held up to hold back a flood, or to release one. Instruments of creation and destruction. If Winston’s conjecture were true, it would reify what was always just a vague sense of purpose. It would explain why the Shards were so attuned to each other, and to rifts in the “skin” of space. All the questions he posed now had obvious answers when factored through this new equation.

  “If this is all true, then why would you help us?” Dillon asked Okoya. “What could you possibly have to gain?”

  “My kind views me as a hated fugitive,” he answered, far too casually for Dillon’s comfort. “If their plan succeeds, what do you think will happen to me?”

  “You would sacrifice your entire species for your own survival?”

  The question gave Okoya pause. His demeanor clouded bitter and resentful, as if the question were an insult. “Loyalty is as foreign a concept to us as compassion.”

  Dillon held his astringent gaze, more comfortable with Okoya’s hostility than with his congeniality.

  Winston leaned closer to Dillon. “Okoya agreed to give up his appetites, in return for a kind of political asylum.”

  Michael let loose a cackling laugh. “Asylum?” he said. “I agree. Let’s all find an asylum. We can tell people how we’re actually T-cells in disguise, and they can tell us how they’re really Queen Victoria, and Alexander the Frigging Great.”

  Dillon thought to say something to shut him up, but noticed that the frost around Michael’s chair had melted. In spite of Michael’s de­rision, the truth was setting him free. Dillon turned his attention back to Okoya.

  “So if we face this ‘infection’ the moment it happens . . . you think we’ll be able to stop it?”

  Okoya raised his eyebrows, and shifted in his seat. “Sometimes an immune response succeeds, sometimes it fails.”

  “Where will it happen, and when?” Dillon asked.

  “Yes, are you ever going to tell us that?” said Winston. “Or don’t you know?”

  “I suspect they will tear their way through a very large, very old scar, in the last moments of their universe,” Okoya said. “My best guess is the Greek island of Thira, on the seventh of December, 7:53 AM.”

  Winston gasped. “Pearl Harbor! The same date and time as the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

  “And the Mongol invasion,” said Okoya, “and the siege of Troy, and the fall of Jericho. Even before your calendar, and the measure of hours, all these events took place on the same date, at the same time.”

  Winston nodded in an understanding Dillon had yet to grasp. “Each fraction of creation is a reflection of the whole,” Winston said.

  Okoya nodded. “But you’ll need more than a fraction of a response to stop it. The three of you alone will fail; all six of you must come together again.”

  Winston looked at him in surprise. “You never told me that!”

  “Until you had Dillon, there was no point in discussing it.”

  Winston shook his head. “Impossible. Even if we somehow won Lourdes back, there’s Deanna . . .”

  Okoya smiled. “Leave Deanna to me.”

  The suggestion sent a surge of adrenaline through Dillon’s body, warming his chilled extremities.

  “And how about Tory?” Winston said. “You know what they did to her. There’s no way.”

  Okoya seemed more sure of himself than Winston did. “The Vec­tors have made a critical error in underestimating you, just as I did a year ago,” Okoya said. “Don’t make the same mistake, and underes­timate yourselves.”

  “Winston—what did you mean by ‘win Lourdes back,’ " Dillon asked. “Don’t you think she’ll help us once she knows?”

  Winston looked to Okoya, then back to Dillon. “We believe the Vectors have turned her to their side.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Don’t you get the news up there in Tessic’s tower?”

  “Of course I do—I’ve been keeping track of everything.”

  “Well then, you should already know what happened in Daytona.”

  But Dillon hadn’t heard a thing, so Winston explained.

  “Ten days ago, a few hundred people in Daytona Beach, Florida, suddenly left their beach blankets and drowned themselves.” Winston said. “As if an irresistible force took them over, and they had no control over their bodies—how could you not have heard about this?”

  “I don’t know.” The truth was, with the hours he spent scanning the news, he should have known. He could only assume that some events—events that might pull him away from Tessic’s comfortable sanctuary—were screened out. “There’s no question it’s Lourdes, but what the hell is she doing?”

  “I would guess she’s flexing her muscles,” Okoya said. “Preparing herself.”

  “For what?” Dillon wondered, but Okoya didn’t answer.

  * * *

  By the time they left the warehouse a few minutes later, the sleet had turned to rain and Dillon had to ask Michael how their little summit could possibly have affected his mood for the better.

  “If I have to be hit by a train, I’d rather see it coming,” was all Michael said of it.

  They piled in the Durango, waking Drew, who slept across the front seat. Dillon wondered how much of the picture Drew knew, and concluded that he was smart to ration his own awareness.

  “Still want us to drop you off at Tessitech?” Winston asked.

  Dillon searched for the Houston skyline, but it was obscured be­hind the clouds. A gilded cage waited for him high in those clouds. He could imagine himself sneaking back in, sliding into bed with Maddy, forcing himself to ignore everything he had learned tonight. Then morning would come, Tessic would greet them for breakfast, and life would be as sweet, and as intoxicating, as Tessic’s liqueurs. It would be easy to give in to that temptation. So easy that he knew he could not return, not even to say good-bye to Maddy. If they suc­ceeded, she would come to understand why he had left. And if they failed, well, it wouldn’t matter anyway.

  “If we leave now, we’ll reach Dallas by nine,” Dillon sai
d, and slid into the front passenger seat. As they drove off, Dillon closed his eyes, and warded off his regrets by counting the metronome beats of the wiper blades, until they were far out of Houston.

  * * *

  The following morning, five thousand miles away on the island of Bermuda, an accountant and his wife were escaping from it all. These were unpalatable times, and it didn’t take a number cruncher to see the unlucky numerology of the days. As he lay there poolside, beside the cellulitic form of his wife, who burned a mottled pink be­neath the ultraviolet rays of a midday sun, he ogled the more shapely figures on the beach, longing for his slimmer youth. He dreamed of himself surrounded by a harem of such beautiful women—not so far­fetched a thought, he concluded. These were, in fact, strange days. The unusual had become commonplace; inexplicable mischief and miracles were rules rather than the exceptions. Take that bizarre mass suicide in Daytona Beach. Five hundred people, without forethought, without reason, suddenly plunged themselves into the ocean. The Coast Guard was still fishing out the bodies. The accountant had laughed and his wife had been angry.

  He yawned, and tried to roll over to sun his back, but found that gravity had shifted. No, it wasn’t gravity; it was him. He was no longer lying on the lounge chair, instead he was standing in front on it. He did not remember getting up. When he turned, he found his wife standing as well. In fact, everyone around the pool was beginning to stand like a reluctant ovation.

  At first he found this merely curious, not threatening, for his life experience gave him no way to distill a threat from this aberrant oc­currence. He didn’t realize he was walking until his third step, because he had not told his feet to do so—yet they were impelled to move. Soon he was jostled by the bodies around him—a mob as surprised by their sudden migration as he. He tried to crane his neck to see his wife, but he couldn’t move his neck at all; the most he could gain control of was his eyeballs and they darted back and forth with growing con­cern. He smashed his shin on a chaise lounge and tumbled over, hitting his head on the concrete. He couldn’t even scream from the pain, for his vocal chords were locked as tight as his jaw.

  The man moved from the pool and down a set of stepping stones to the beach, where he realized it was more than just those lounging at his hotel caught in this wave of motion. They were coming from all directions—from all the Bermudan resorts within his line of sight. They ran from restaurants and lobbies, they abandoned their cars, and now in this moment of absolute helplessness, the terror and panic truly set in, for he was on the beach now, marching with thousands of others toward the surf.

  And he was in the front line.

  Now he understood the terror of the mob in Daytona—under­stood how their limbs could be torn from their control—how their bodies could rebel and drown them, leaving no survivors to tell how it had been. His feet sank into the wet sand at the edge of the surf, but he kept on moving, the mob pushing behind him. The water rolled across his toes, churning a cloud of foam and sand. He knew the bot­tom dropped off suddenly a few feet out and although he could swim, he knew his body would continue walking even as his lungs filled with water. He would die and no one would understand.

  But then his feet stopped as quickly as they had begun moving, and he stood at attention with the water lapping at his toes, and there he stayed. The sun beat down on his bald head for more than half an hour that way. He felt the sunburn on his forehead, nose and shoulders. He felt it would burn him through, but still he could not move. And then came a different kind of radiance; a type of magnetism tugging at his being. He knew, even before she moved into his line of sight, that she was the one who had seized control of his body and the thousands of other bodies lining the beach, as far as the eye could see. She strode before him, ankle deep in the surf surveying the crowd. Not as if looking for someone, but rather taking it in as a whole. Like a general, he thought. A general appraising his troops.

  She was a young woman, attractive and formidable in both stature and presence. She caught his gaze for an instant and in that instant he could feel her heartbeat. It was his own heartbeat. He could feel the pace of her breath; it was his own. And he knew this powerful girl could end his life; shut down his heart with a single errant thought. But in an instant her eyes moved on, and he knew he was nothing to her—not even worth the thought it would take to kill him. He didn’t know which was worse—the pain of his will usurped, or the pain of his insignificance.

  Ten minutes more and he was released. The entire beach was re­leased. People fell to their knees, crying, whimpering, but still alive. She had brought them to the edge of the surf and had stopped them, then released them. For what reason he didn’t know.

  Could she have been one of the—but he cut the thought short. No. That freakish gaggle of teens all died when Hoover Dam fell. But now he wasn’t so certain, for he could still feel a hint of the girl’s presence like static in the air.

  He went to find his wife, so they could tend to each other’s sun­burns, and they did not speak of it. Not even that afternoon, when they chanced to see a cruise ship heading east across the Atlantic, and felt the girl’s pervasive aura fade as the ship fell off the horizon.

  28. The Memory Of Dust

  The empty fields five miles north of Dallas/Fort Worth airport had browned and died more than a month ago. Al­though the weather was clear, the temperature stayed a brisk thirty-five. At one o’clock in the afternoon, a red Durango turned off a sparsely traveled two-lane road, churning up dust. Then it stopped at no place in particular, letting out its five occupants. Three of them walked further out into the field, the dead brush beneath them turning green and growing denser beneath their feet. Wild mustard bloomed yellow around sudden pockets of bluebonnet and red cosmos.

  Drew and Okoya stood beside one another back at the Durango watching the greening of the field—and although Drew swore he’d never allow himself to be left alone with Okoya again, neither did he want to be out in the field with Dillon, Winston and Michael. Getting here had been an undertaking in and of itself. While the storm over southeastern Texas had ended, so many roads were washed out be­tween Houston and Dallas, that a four-hour drive had stretched into eight.

  Up above, a United jet screamed its way heavenward against the pull of gravity. When Drew looked back from the ascending jet, the field before him was almost entirely green.

  Dillon was quite aware of the field renewing around him. He also knew there would be no disguising it from anyone who cared to no­tice, so he didn’t worry himself with it. Like smash-and-grab robbers, they would accomplish this deed by brute force, rather than subtle scheming. There was no time for anything else.

  Dillon looked around, realizing that he was in between Winston and Michael, a pace ahead of them. As had been the case so many times before, they were following him.

  Winston realized this as well, and knew he could have taken the lead. A part of him wanted to, but there was something very natural about being a wing to Dillon’s center. Winston had long since learned that whatever came naturally to the Shards was not to be fought.

  Michael, on the other hand did not care who took the lead. He had no time for such thoughts, because his task had already begun. He knew what he had to do, and kept telling himself that he was up for it, bolstering his confidence, and thereby bringing clarity to the skies. Compared to Winston and Dillon he felt like a novice, for their skills were so exact and precise; fine brush strokes to Michael’s sloppy finger-painting. Every few moments a doubt would invade his confidence, reminding him that what they were about to attempt was like seeking a single grain of sand in a hundred miles of beach. Such negative thinking was a formidable enemy for him now, because everything depended on his ability to manipulate his own emotions on cue, like an actor.

  Dillon stopped about two hundred yards away from the car. “This is as good a place as any.”

  “So what do we do now?” Winston asked. “How do we begin this?”

  “It has to start with Michael,�
�� Dillon said.

  “No pressure.” Michael closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “How far away do you want it to start?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dillon. “Fifty miles? Can you do that?”

  “Let’s find out.” He took off his jacket and held his hands out wide as if to receive an embrace, but kept his eyes closed. In the cold, it was easy for him to feel the fine hairs on his arms and legs rise, tightening into gooseflesh. He concentrated on the feeling, bringing his attention to his extremities. Then he began to generate turbulence. He thought of bad times and brutal fights from his past; arguments at home; acts of violence directed at him, and acts he directed out at the world. Some were memories, others fabrications, but they had the desired effect. He could feel his finger tips and toes begin to tremble with anxiety, and slowly, slowly he let the anxiety sweep inward.

  Two hundred yards away, Drew and Okoya watched and waited. Drew couldn’t feel the slightest change in the breeze. All he felt was . . . unsettled. “Nothing’s happening.”

  “It would seem that way,” Okoya agreed.

  After fifteen minutes, Drew saw Michael put his hands down, too tired to hold them up any more. Now he just stood there, with Win­ston and Dillon pacing behind him through an ever-increasing tangle of brush. At twenty minutes Drew was close to panic. “It’s not work­ing,” he said. “He’s not ready, it’s too soon!”

  “It’s his anxiety you’re feeling, not your own,” Okoya reminded him. “Which means it is working. Why don’t you turn on the radio.”

  Desperate for any diversion, Drew powered up the Durango, and turned on the radio.

  “Now find a local news station.”

  Drew searched the AM band until finding one. The big news of the hour was a weather advisory. A wind storm. Gale force gusts had already swept west through Dallas, east through Fort Worth, and ap­peared to be zeroing in on the airport in between. Callers from the north and south reported the winds as well, again moving in converg­ing directions. The winds and accompanying dust storm had shredded signs, torn down traffic lights, and brought the twin metropolitan areas to a standstill. Drew turned to see Okoya smile.