Shuttered Sky ss-3

by Нил Шустерман

  “They’ll make it easy for you,” Lourdes told them. “They will make you feel fulfilled. Complete. It will be the most wonderful mo­ment of your life.”

  “And then they’ll kill us,” said Tory, unable to reconcile the thought with the visions of happiness the Vectors put into her head.

  “You’re Shards,” Lourdes said, “so they can’t devour you like they devour others. Your souls will go . . . wherever the souls of Shards go. Where you went before, the first time you died.”

  But they had no memory of where that might have been.

  The Vectors came closer. They were at the entrance to the gazebo now.

  “Come,” Michael heard them say deep within his mind in that gentle voice of his fantasy mother. “Come and I’ll rock you to sleep. Come, and I’ll make you believe once and forever that I loved you.”

  “Come,” they said to Tory. “Come play in the field the way you used to. This is your heaven.” So innocent and so compelling were the youth­ful images they put forth, that the blade they each held in their sweet little hands hardly seemed to matter at all. “Just let me bring this across your neck and you can stay here forever.”

  Both Tory and Michael wanted to, so overwhelming was the lure—but a lure was all it was. Tantalizing, enticing—irresistible. But a lie.

  “Hold on to me, Michael,” Tory said. In an instant she felt Mi­chael’s hand around her, linking her to him. Then Tory reached out toward Lourdes.

  “You should feel this,” Tory said, “before we die.” Then she grabbed Lourdes by the shoulder.

  Syntaxis was sudden and powerful. At last their mismatched fields fell into place. This was a new variation for Michael and Tory—a different harmonic than syntaxis with Winston and Dillon, but every bit as satisfying.

  For Lourdes, who had not experienced this before, she found her mind had no way to interpret the feeling. Time seemed to cease as all the darkness within her nurtured by the Vectors soaked in this new light. She could feel her own field multiplied by theirs. She could feel at once the beating of every heart within her sphere of influence. Not just in Taormina, but miles beyond, to the countryside; to the north shore; to the distant slopes of Etna. Her influence stretched halfway across the Island of Sicily. Finally when she could stand no more, she broke free to see Cerilla taking Tory into her arms then turning her around, bringing the knife to Tory’s neck.

  “Wait!” Lourdes shouted.

  The woman looked at her as if she might turn her blade on Lourdes instead.

  “These two can help us!”

  “They’d much rather die,” said Carlos. “And I’d much rather kill them.”

  “Kill them and you’ll never gather enough hosts,” Lourdes told them. That stopped them and got them to listen.

  “When I connect with them I can seize the wills and bodies of a thousand times what I can on my own.” Then Lourdes smiled. “Take them with us, and we can use them to gather the three hundred thou­sand you need.”

  The pity Michael had shown before transformed into disbelief and horror. Good, thought Lourdes. That was an expression she could live with.

  Free of the Vector’s spell, Tory and Michael tried to run, but Lourdes turned a dozen people at the marina against them. They were tackled and tied with such unceremonious ease, she almost wished the Vectors had killed them. At least in that, there would have been some dignity.

  * * *

  The fleet of ninety-three boats—everything from sailboats to speed boats, fishing boats to yachts—set out from Taormina. After more than a year of unbridled luxury, Lourdes took a curious liking to a well-seasoned fishing boat. The fact that it was named La Fuerza del Destino, after the Verdi opera, clinched it for her. She wasn’t much for opera, but how could she not sail on The Force of Destiny?

  With more than eight hundred bodies and souls trained into her gravity, they sailed east from Sicily to the southern shore of Italy, the sole of Italy’s boot. As the fleet grazed the shoreline, Lourdes let her influence drag along the fishing communities they passed like a rake pulling up leaves. In each town a dozen new boats were added to their number as their owners were impelled to join them. However, as they set off across the Gulf of Taranto, trouble set in—not with the power of Lourdes’s control, but with the boats themselves. The Gulf of Taranto was ninety miles wide and many of the boats simply didn’t have enough fuel to cross it. Engines stopped; dozens were set hopelessly adrift in the water—and the fact that Michael kept the winds raging against them didn’t help. By the time Lourdes reached the far side of the gulf, all but the largest boats were running on fumes, and they had lost more than half their number.

  Of course, the Vectors were furious. For all the acuity of their grand spirits, there were some simple things they could not grasp about this world of matter.

  “The boats need fuel,” Lourdes explained to them.

  “So get them fuel,” they insisted.

  But the town of Gallipoli, where they had landed, did not have enough fuel for a fleet the size of hers, and even if it did, the logistics of bringing in each boat for fueling would take half a day. What then when her fleet grew to be thousands? How would she move them to the Aegean sea? When connected to Tory and Michael she could pull an army of three hundred thousand and more, but she could not make them fly. Ultimately, they were all bound by the limitations of terres­trial mechanics.

  “If we use sailboats. . .” Carlos suggested.

  “I can’t direct the wind,” she replied.

  And in fact, Cerilla’s hair was a wispy mess from the capricious winds blowing up from the Ionian Sea. “He can direct the wind,” Cerilla said pointing down to the aft cabins of the fishing boat. There was so much animosity in her voice, it could have doused the sun.

  “Michael won’t do it.”

  “You’ll make him do it,” insisted Carlos.

  “I can’t make him do anything,” she had to admit to them, and to herself. Then she added, “And if you kill him for not obeying you, you’ll cut the number of your army in half.”

  The two older Vectors turned away from her, casting their frus­trations over the side.

  Memo approached her. “We will get them there if they have to swim.” Unlike the others, there was no vitriol in his words. It was simply a statement of intention, but intention or not, no human being could cross the five hundred miles from Italy to the Island of Thira. Such an attempt would only make her death count multiply again. But she didn’t tell him this.

  “I’ll work on it,” she said. She left the boat and paced the dock, returning all her focus to the fractionated control it took to move her masses into fueling for the next leg of the trip across the strait to Corfu and the western shores of Greece.

  The gas was already running out, as she knew it would, but those under her control had their wills so completely supplanted by her own, that they continued to pump from empty tanks in a bizarre collective compulsive consciousness. It was getting dark when she returned to her fishing boat. The Vectors were nowhere to be found and that was just as well with her.

  Every inch of the boat, from top to bottom, smelled of sea salt, diesel and fish, but the rancid odor that used to permeate the corners had vanished the moment Tory had arrived. This would all be sparkling new if Dillon were here, she thought. It was the first time she could ever remember thinking of Dillon in anything but the most negative terms.

  Then, as she stepped onto the boat, she heard Carlos scream. It was a horrid sound that went on and on, then ended with sudden silence. Lourdes went down below into the narrow, dimly lit hallway of the worn fishing boat.

  Carlos wasn’t in his cabin, only Memo was there sitting by himself. Blood had splattered on the walls, and lay in pools on the floor. When he saw her, he ran into her arms and cried.

  “Abuelo is dead,” he cried. “Abuelo is dead.”

  Lourdes caught sight of Cerilla, who peered at her ferally from a dark corner.

  “Abuelo is dead,” wailed the boy-thi
ng. She pulled him away to see that his hands had left red prints on her blouse. The boy’s palms were covered in the old man’s blood. As for Carlos, his body was nowhere to be seen, but there was a small open porthole. Lourdes shivered. “You killed him! You killed the host.”

  “He was weak,” Memo said, wiping away the tears, as the Leading Vector forced control over the host-child’s emotions. “Abuelo was too weak to hold the Temporal Vector.”

  “So you killed the old man, and found a better host?”

  But the Vector refused to answer; instead, he shielded again behind the child’s distress, allowing the host-body to bawl. It was an effective tactic, because Lourdes comforted him in spite of herself. This is not a child, she tried to convince herself. This is a monster that murders without hesitation or remorse. But then, how did that differ from herself now?

  “Where is he?” Lourdes asked. “The . . . Temporal Vector?”

  “He seeks his new host on the shore,” Cerilla answered. “He’ll return once he’s found the best one.”

  “Tell him not to hurry back.”

  She left them to their blood bath, lingered at her own cabin door momentarily, then passed it by and went into Michael’s—who was kept on the opposite end of the boat from Tory. He knelt in the center of the room, but then, all he could do was kneel; his hands were handcuffed above his head to a hook in the ceiling. The ceiling was too low for him to stand, but the chain of the cuffs did not allow him the comfort of sitting, so he was forced to find this compromising position in between. The Vectors had done this to him.

  No, thought Lourdes, I was the one who bound him at their request.

  “Where are we now?” he asked weakly.

  “Southern Italy,” she told him. “A small town called Gallipoli.”

  “Gallipoli,” said Michael. “There was a massacre there in World War I. The British kept sending waves of soldiers into enemy gunfire. Another low point in human history.”

  “Now you’re starting to sound like Winston,” Lourdes said. “A walking encyclopedia. Or should I say kneeling.”

  “Nope,” said Michael. “Can’t accuse me of knowing anything. I just saw it in a movie once.” And then he hesitated. “So is history repeating itself today?”

  She didn’t answer him. She didn’t know. “I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry things turned out this way.”

  “But not for anything you’ve done?”

  Lourdes shook her head. “I swore to myself I’d never live to regret the things I do.”

  Michael offered her an ironic smile. “You probably won’t.” Then his expression became serious. “You never answered my question.”

  Lourdes turned from his gaze. “Which one?” although she knew precisely which one he meant.

  “Why do you accept their bleak view of the universe? That every­thing’s pointless; that everything’s hostile?”

  “What happened, Michael?” she snapped. “Did you die and find God? You were never one to believe in anything.”

  “I believe in keeping my options open.” Then with uncharacter­istic patience, he waited to hear what Lourdes had to say. For a long bloated moment Lourdes said nothing. The sense of the boat rocking on the water, and the sound of it shouldering against the dock, filled the gap between them until Lourdes could no longer stand the silence.

  “I’ve seen the Vectors pose as angels,” she said. “I’ve felt that glow of glory they put off before swooping in for the kill, dozens of times.” Lourdes felt her cheeks redden from anger as she thought about it. “I’ve seen them take people into their arms, making them believe they were raptured to heaven, and then suck their souls right out of the marrow of their bones.”

  She realized she did hate these creatures for being what they were, but she hated human beings more, for believing these monsters were something divine. Lourdes thought to her childhood. All those years under her parents’ wing—church every Sunday, Midnight Mass at Christmas and Easter. She had once felt the residue of holiness. She had believed in miracles back then, and knew in her heart that the blood and body of Christ fed her when she took communion. But now these shadowy creatures made her believe it was a lie.

  Then Michael said: “If everything they do is built on lies . . . how do you know they’re not lying to you now?”

  The very suggestion took the wind out of her. It unlocked a door that had always been right in front of her, but hiding in her blind spot. “What?”

  “They’ve told you that faith is a sham—that it’s a tool they’ve invented with their visitations for thousands of years. But how do you know it’s not just another lure—something to lure you into their serv­ice?”

  Lourdes found she couldn’t answer. Could it be true? They were false light. Deception was their art by their own admission.

  “And even if what they say is true,” Michael went on. “Even if every ‘divine intervention’ in the history of the human race has been them trying to consume our souls . . . How do you know that they are all there is? How do you know there’s not something out there greater than them? Something beyond them that they hide with their darkness?

  Lourdes found herself stumbling over her own thoughts, wanting to close her mind to Michael’s voice but unable to.

  “They want your faith to be in hopelessness,” he said, “because you’d never surrender to them unless you had no hope.”

  Her cheeks red from anger and confusion, her head pounding, she latched onto her anger, the only companion that was stalwart and consistent, and spat her words at him. “When you died, Michael, did you see the face of God? Did you get lifted up to heaven or dragged down to hell?”

  Michael looked away. “I don’t know.”

  “HOW COULD YOU NOT KNOW?!”

  Michael took his time in answering. “Maybe memory is something stored in our flesh. We don’t take our memory with us when we die, and nothing comes back with us when we return.”

  “Wishful thinking!” she shouted. “You remember nothing, be­cause there is nothing.”

  “I didn’t bring anything back from death,” Michael finally admit­ted, “except for this: I’m not afraid to die anymore. Maybe that’s because my soul knows something my memory doesn’t.”

  She tried to dismiss the thought, but found that Michael’s words lingered. Lourdes was no stranger to death. She was, in fact, its jaded comrade now. But she recalled her first unhappy introduction to it. It was when her grandmother died. Lourdes was all of seven. Her mother had put her to bed that night, and told her how Grandma was in a better place. Reunited with Grandpa. Lourdes had pictured them there together running through the clouds; the old woman free of her crip­pling arthritis, still the same person she had been, only somewhat more transparent.

  Then, when Lourdes had become fat, pitied, and hated, she had dismissed heaven out of hand. People dressed in white, playing harps in the clouds. Ridiculous! A Bugs Bunny cartoon without a punch line. That’s all folks. With heaven gone, God wasn’t far behind. It was harder to dispense with hell, however. That idea lingered until she decided her own life fit the description.

  The thought was so hideous it forced something out of Lourdes— something she had no idea she would say. “You were the only damned thing I ever really wanted. Why couldn’t you have just loved me?”

  “Because we don’t connect to each other, Lourdes,” Michael told her with far too little passion one way or the other. “You connect to Dillon, and to Tory, but you don’t connect to me.”

  In defiance of his words she reached out to him. She intended to grab his neck in her hand, but found herself cupping his cheek gently in her palm. And although she felt some connection between them it was only an echo of what she wanted to feel.

  * * *

  When Lourdes went back on deck night had fallen. The moon was a full blue beacon overhead. She could see the hills painted in subtle indigo tones, and in the harbor, her minions continued to hope­lessly pump invisible gas from empty tanks. Lourdes closed her
eyes, took a deep breath, then released it . . . . . . and let go.

  It took every ounce of her own will to do it.

  It was harder letting go than it was grabbing these people and holding them.

  She watched in the moonlight as the disoriented masses found their bodies and spirits under their own control once more. For a minute, there was quiet confusion, and then the fear that should have gripped them in the beginning, gripped them now. They ran from the docks; they leapt from the boats. Anything to get away from Lourdes Hidalgo.

  “What are you doing?” Memo’s voice was so commanding it was hard to imagine it came from the body of an eight-year-old boy.

  She turned to him. In this dim light, she could imagine him for what he was. An ancient spirit that moved in a singular, relentless, trajectory. Self-serving, manipulative, but never changing course. It was this she so admired in the Vectors. And hated in them as well.

  “We can’t bring these people to Thira,” she told him. “It’s too far away. We’ll travel south to Crete, and I’ll collect your army on the shores there. From Crete’s north coast it’s only eighty miles to Thira.”

  And for the first time Memo deferred to her judgment. She won­dered if he noticed that this was also the first time she called the army his, and not her own.

  33. Birkenau Black

  Auschwitz was no longer run by the Third Reich. Now it was administered by the Polish Ministry of Parks.

  It was preserved as a museum; hundreds of barracks, the execution wall, Mengele’s chamber of death. But Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau, was a different story. The heart of darkness where more than a million and a half people were murdered was left exactly the way it was found, untouched—untouchable. Crumbling barracks stretched further than the eye wanted to see, behind the remains of the three massive crematoria and gas chambers, now no more than skeletal fac­tories of death. Although the SS tried to blow the crematoria up before the liberation, they were not entirely successful. The twisted rubble that remained still testified to the atrocity.