Shuttered Sky ss-3

by Нил Шустерман

  Dillon got close to the fire to find its blue glow gave off no warmth. Instead, what little warmth there was came through the furnace vents around the room. This cold could not be kept outside. Dillon glanced out of the window. The fog was cotton dense, and showed no sign of lifting. A mirror of Michael’s state of mind.

  “At first,” said Michael, “I thought Tessic was bringing us to lower Manhattan.” The fog outside grew a bit dense. “It scared me to think so big. But Tessic thought bigger.”

  Dillon couldn’t help but think that was also somewhere in Tessic’s plans. Where others saw sacred ground, Tessic saw opportunity.

  “At least Okoya will know where to look for us now,” Dillon said.

  “How can you be sure he’s even looking?” Tory asked.

  “I doubt that Okoya is biting his nails in Texas,” Dillon said. “And no matter how much of a media blackout Tessic tries to impose on this, Okoya will know where we are—and remember we’re closer to the Island of Thira than we were two days ago.”

  “You have a thousand reasons to stay, don’t you, Dillon?” Michael grumbled. “A thousand reasons why we should keep dragging up the dead.”

  “You say it like it’s something terrible. It’s not like we’re bringing back empty shells—these people are coming back complete, in perfect health, with their souls intact. What we’re doing is incredible! It’s important.”

  “It’s immoral!” Tory moved closer to the fire, “Hell, everything we do is immoral because we’re unnatural.”

  “No we’re not,” Dillon insisted. “We’re just a side of nature that’s rarely seen.” He watched Tory rub her arms for warmth, but now the flames had turned from blue to green and were actually drawing heat from the room. Dillon knew it was his presence. As his own power recovered, the logs were unburning, adding to Michael’s chill.

  Winston put down his mug with a shaky hand. “We’re outside of morality now.”

  “Careful Winston,” Tory warned. “We put ourselves above mo­rality before, and you know what happened.”

  “Not above morality,” he explained, “outside of the framework entirely. I mean, is bringing back people who should never have died an ultimate justice, or an ultimate wrong? Morality’s got no answer for the things we do. It’s got no answer for us.”

  Michael spat out a resigned laugh. “And you know what they did to the last person who brought back the dead.”

  Dillon shivered at the thought. There was a time a year ago that he might have felt up to the comparison, but not anymore. “I don’t want to be crucified or worshiped.”

  “Oh, I think we’re gonna catch ourselves a whole lotta both,” Winston said.

  “Yeah,” added Michael. “I’m sure a thousand years from now they’re going to have whole universities and seminaries devoted to studying every stupid little thing we did.”

  Tory paced to the nearest heat vent, giving up on the fire. “Can we not talk about a thousand years from now and just get through today?”

  “You have to understand how it is for Tory and me,” Michael said. “For both of us, the disaster at Hoover Dam is just a few days old. We never had time to recover from that, and now we’re in the middle of this. I don’t know about Tory, but we’re working my last thread of sanity here.”

  “I wouldn’t worry, Michael,” said Winston. “You gotta have a mind to lose it.”

  “Yeah, yeah, so I hear.”

  “I feel like everything’s resting on Okoya and I don’t like it,” Tory said. “’Is Okoya going to find us?’ ‘Is Okoya going to show us what we’re supposed to do?’ The more wired in he becomes, the more likely he’ll turn on us again, trying to use us like he did before.”

  “He already has,” Dillon told them. It was a wrinkle none of them wanted to hear, but still they turned to him, waiting uneasily for an explanation.

  “We need Deanna to defeat the Vectors,” Dillon told them, “but Okoya won’t bring Deanna back. Not unless we give him free rein to feed his appetite.”

  Winston put down his egg nog. “This is gonna be one helluva holiday season.”

  “I told him we would never agree to it,” Dillon said. “I told him I’d rather let Deanna stay where she is.”

  He expected them to be just as adamant as he, but Michael shook his head, and laughed bitterly. “With all that moral fiber, you’ll never need a laxative—the crap never stops flowing.”

  Dillon looked to Winston, then Tory. Neither of them would meet his eyes. “So you think we should give him our blessing and let him devour as many souls as he wants?”

  “No,” Michael said. “I think we should give him our blessing and then renege the moment Deanna is back.”

  “Cheat the devil and the devil gets mad,” Tory warned.

  Michael stood and paced to the window, watching the fog as it thinned ever so slightly. “What’s he gonna do? Hurl us into some bloody abyss? We’ve already been there today. Sorry, but this devil doesn’t scare me anymore.”

  “Tessic scares me more than Okoya,” Tory said.

  Dillon waved the thought away. “Tessic’s a good man.”

  “So was Oppenheimer before he built the bomb,” Michael said. “Just because what we’re doing here is good, that doesn’t mean it’s right. We’ve got a power that’s raging out of control—and just because he’s got money and an idea doesn’t mean he’s got all the answers.” The window rattled with a sudden gust, punctuating his point.

  “Actually,” Tory said, “Oppenheimer was a creep.”

  “No,” Winston corrected, “he was a romantic. A man in love with the beauty of his own power. Just like Tessic.”

  Tory joined Michael at the window, apparently finding in him the warmth that the room failed to give. “It’s our power, not his.”

  “It’s his,” said Michael, “as long as we give it to him.”

  Tory looked around to the corners of the room. “For all we know, he’s got bugs and cameras everywhere, listening to everything we’re saying, laughing at us.”

  Tory lowered her voice. “Why does he want to do this, anyway? Yes, we can bring these people back to life, but we can’t give them the lives that they had. We can’t undo the aftermath of the Holocaust. We can’t take away the pain of those who survived it.”

  Then Dillon saw an expression crossing Winston’s face; something so unsettling, he could almost see it like a shadow.

  “What if we succeed,” Winston said. “What if we succeed in bringing them all back . . . and we undo the effect the Holocaust had on the world?”

  It was something Dillon, and most certainly Tessic, had never con­sidered. If they bring back the dead, will the world eventually forget it ever happened? What if that’s more devastating than the Holocaust itself, because without the pain of that memory, the next time it might take a billion lives?

  “In the end which is more important,” posed Winston, “the mil­lions of lives lost, or the memory of the atrocity?”

  The question lingered and no one even attempted an answer.

  “I don’t want to sit here discussing this like we’re in some high-school debate class,” Tory finally said. “We’re neck deep in something real, in case everyone’s forgotten where we were today.”

  Michael pulled away from her. “You know what? I’m not big enough to face what we did today, so yeah, maybe we should play high school for a while—I just want to pretend that I’m a normal guy, and that the whole universe doesn’t rest on my bad decisions.”

  “What decisions?” said Winston. “We’re not makin’ any.”

  And that, Dillon knew, was the trouble.

  Winston directed his words right at Dillon. “All this time we’ve been afraid to, so we let everyone else go makin’ our decisions for us. First Okoya, now Tessic.”

  “Tessic’s got us trapped!” insisted Dillon.

  “Keep telling yourself that, Dillon, and you’ll never have to make a decision.”

  Michael sat back down, holding his temp
les between his hands as if they were the only things keeping his head together. “All I know is that if we were meant to revive the victims of the Holocaust, then we wouldn’t be coming out of it feeling so drained.”

  Dillon sat beside him, all but melting into the plush sofa. Drained was not the word. Poured out, spent—but drained? That was too mild. Tessic believed it would make them stronger, but what did Tessic know, really?

  Winston gently put down his mug with a shaky hand. “We’re being used up. You know that, don’t you?”

  It was a simple statement with a bitter ring of truth. Could they be “used up”? Dillon wondered if there was some conservation of energy when it came to their powers. Nothing came from nothing— how much more life and limb would the Shards renew until their power was drained? Or was it a bottomless wellspring, fed from some infinite source, with no reckoning ever due? Dillon suspected that Winston was right. Someday very soon, they might turn up completely empty. And then what would become of their “great purpose”?

  “Michael’s right,” Tory said, coming back to his side, sitting beside him, rubbing his back. “Whether it’s right or wrong to resurrect the dead here, we’re meant to do something else, and we’ve been afraid to take responsibility for it.” Then she added. “If we really wanted to get away from Tessic, we could. But what do we really want?”

  Dillon paced across the room, knowing it all came down to him. He was the fulcrum on which they all turned. But abandoning Tessic’s dream? The man was so certain about it, and it was so easy for Dillon to use Tessic’s faith as his own anchor—but was it an anchor keeping him grounded, or one that dragged him down? “Tessic feels he’s on a mission from God. He feels it so strongly, it makes me wonder myself. How do we know he’s not?”

  And then Tory asked. “Do you believe in God, Dillon?”

  Dillon found himself stumbling over the question. “Since I found out about my own powers the question scares me too much to answer. I believe we have a purpose. I believe it’s unique in the history of mankind.” Then he turned to Michael—an easy target to cast the question off of himself. “How about you, Michael? What do you be­lieve?”

  Michael kept his head in his hands, and didn’t look up. “I believe it’s time to go to bed.”

  Tory shook her head. “You’ll never get a straight answer out of him.”

  “Because he doesn’t believe in anything,” scoffed Winston.

  But Michael looked up and surprised them all. “That’s not entirely true,” he said. “Three years ago if you told me we’d have proof of human souls, I would have laughed, but now I know there are souls and that they can be robbed from us. So maybe I believe in a lot more than I used to. Or at least I don’t disbelieve.”

  It was sobering to hear Michael voice something other than sar­casm. Perhaps too sobering.

  “Our faith in our decisions has to be as strong as Tessic’s,” Tory said, “if we’re going to defeat the Vectors.”

  The Vectors. Dillon had tried so hard put them far from his mind. That was the reason he went along with Tessic, wasn’t it? Anything so that he didn’t have to consider those dark, inscrutable spirits. “Faith was Deanna’s gift,” Dillon reminded. “Not mine.”

  “And that’s where we’re lacking.” Winston stood up, gathering himself some energy for the first time all evening. “We’ve got every­thing but Deanna’s faith, and so we’re clinging to everyone else’s. If Deanna were here . . . "

  “But she’s not,” Michael was happy to remind him.

  “But if she was, that faith of hers would leave us with no question of what it is we’re meant to do. We’d have the conviction to carry it out and everybody around us would trust enough to let us.”

  Winston was right. This is what had been missing all along—this was why everything they did misfired, blowing up in their faces. One element was missing. In this new light, there was no question in Dil­lon’s mind the direction their actions had to take. “Then we have to get Deanna back at all costs.”

  “Yes,” the others agreed, “at all costs.”

  So, if it meant bargaining with Okoya—if it meant deceiving him into cooperating—it had to be done. It wasn’t the right thing, but it was the necessary thing, and if their integrity had to be a casualty of this war, then so be it.

  “What about Lourdes?” asked Tory.

  “We’ll get to her, somehow,” Dillon said, finally finding a sense of self-determination that he hadn’t felt for a very long time. “I’ll make sure of it.” Now he didn’t care if Tessic was listening. No matter what Tessic heard, it would not change things now. “We have five days to get to Thira,” Dillon said decisively. “I’ll come up with a plan to get us there.”

  “Better get cracking, Entropy Boy,” Michael said. “Open us a magic door, because we sure as hell can’t find our own way out of this fun house.”

  * * *

  Tessic was awake before dawn. He was a man who required little sleep, his mind so busy, even his dreams were productive. That night he dreamt himself at the right hand of God. The Almighty’s most beloved.

  He had awoken from barely three hours of sleep feeling as invig­orated as a child. His office in his dacha was identical to his offices in his various other residences, down to the paperwork on the table. There was an assistant whose job it was to make sure that, wherever Tessic went, his desktop went with him. For a man who worked and traveled as much as he did, he deemed that if his office could be consistent, everything else could be transitory.

  There was much work to be done this morning. Pages and pages of reports to pore over from the various teams. Polish police had pulled over several of the buses, but each bus had its own private slush fund for such unfortunate occurrences. Polish police were not entirely un­familiar with bribes, and even if it only kept them quiet for a day, the money will have served its purpose. By the time the serious questions would start being asked, they would be further along in this great revival and Tessic would have a dozen other smoke screens to throw at them, keeping the authorities as confused and divided as the Nazis had kept the Jews.

  His four special guests needed at least one more day to recuperate. That was unfortunate. He would have to repace the operation. He could only hope their recovery time would be quicker with each suc­cessive reveille his four musicians played.

  He was surprised to see Dillon at his office door, soon after sunrise. Tessic quietly motioned for him to come in. Dillon sat down across from him and Tessic showed him what he was looking at.

  “These pictures are from our next endeavor,” Tessic said, fanning out the photos before Dillon. They were pictures of a road; an old one, no longer used. It had almost disappeared in the undergrowth and towering oaks. “A service road that leads to Treblinka,” Tessic explained. “Portions of it were built using the ashes of the dead.”

  Dillon raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything.

  “I have workers crushing the road into gravel for you,” Tessic told him.

  Dillon put the pictures down and shook his head. “Pointless. I’ll end up pulling the road back together before I pull anyone out of it.”

  Tessic took a moment to process what Dillon had said. “Yes, of course.” He was surprised. Not at what Dillon had said, but by the fact that he hadn’t recognized this himself. “I’ll have them stop the demolition at once.”

  “It can wait, we have something more important to discuss.”

  Tessic smiled. “More important than what you and I are doing here in Poland?”

  “Something that’s important, because it’s crucial to our success.”

  Tessic leaned back in his chair, feeling its springs comfortably buffer him. “I can’t wait to hear.”

  Dillon put down the photos. “I know something that can maxi­mize our efficiency and increase our output.”

  “Go on.”

  “I know a way to turn the five thousand we revived today into fifty thousand tomorrow.”

  “Go on.”


  Dillon leaned back in his chair almost mirroring Tessic’s relaxed demeanor. “Her name is Lourdes,” he said. “Lourdes Hidalgo.”

  Tessic found his balance failing and leaned forward putting both hands on the desk. “Hardly plausible at this moment in time.”

  “But worth the effort?”

  Tessic stood and moved to the window—fading back, hoping not to be read too quickly by Dillon on this matter.

  “Something wrong?” Dillon asked. “Why would Lourdes make you uneasy?”

  He turned back to Dillon, but kept his distance. “Yesterday, the Italian Navy sank a cruise ship just off of Sicily. The Blue Horizon.”

  Dillon did not react as Tessic had expected. He greeted this news with a wicked grin. “I didn’t know Italy still had a navy.”

  “She went down quickly. None of my sources talk of survivors.”

  Still Dillon was unperturbed. “So you’ve known about Lourdes’s whereabouts all along?”

  “I knew she was on a ship. I suspected it was the Blue Horizon. I sent three operatives to find it. None of them came back.”

  Dillon picked a candy from the dish on his desk, and slowly un­wrapped it, popping it into his mouth. “She’s not dead,” he said.

  “You’re so sure?”

  “If she were dead, I would know. We all would. We’d feel as if part of ourselves had died with her.”

  “Then I’ll send a team to find her.” Tessic was already eying the telephone. “A team professionally trained for—" But Dillon put his hand over the phone, keeping Tessic from lifting the receiver.

  “No,” Dillon said. “You’ll send us. All four of us.”

  “Out of the question.”

  “This isn’t a negotiation,” Dillon said. “We’re asking you as a courtesy.”

  As a man whose marching orders were rarely challenged, Tessic found his anger taking hold. “I released you from your security chair,” he said, “because I thought you had become reasonable. Perhaps, I was premature.”

  And then Dillon did something.

  Tessic wasn’t sure if it was in his gaze or in his voice. Maybe it was just in his focus; the lens of his spirit brought to a burning convergence on Tessic.