Shuttered Sky ss-3

by Нил Шустерман

  They made their way down the snow-dusted path. One kilometer. Two. With each step, the overwhelming presence of Birkenau grew stronger, making his knees feel weak with burden. There was a veil of darkness surrounding Birkenau that went beyond a mere absence of light. Dillon could feel this palpable pall of oppression—he could see it when he closed his eyes, darker than pitch; a pigment of black that could not be manufactured anywhere else on earth. Birkenau Black. It robbed the color from the countryside, washing everything in shades of gray.

  “Like hell I’m going in there,” Winston said, but they both knew that he would walk through the gaping maw of the guardhouse arch right beside Dillon. A wind blew against them now, through the arch, and it was hard for Dillon to shake the feeling that the place was breathing.

  Places had personalities. Dark deeds and cruel intents lingered, soaking into the porous soil, leaching into the rocks, until the place became permeated with it. This, Dillon knew, was the most evil place on Earth, where even the blades of grass that grew in the spring had an unnameable malevolence about them. This place was indeed alive, not with any kind of life Dillon understood, but with a living shadow. Darkness that consumed light. A place not full of the souls that had died, but filled with the shadows cast when they were murdered.

  The living void.

  And as he neared that horrible guardhouse gate, Dillon finally knew. He understood why he and Winston had to come here. This was a place as close to the living void of the Vectors’ world as there could be on Earth.

  If they could face this then maybe—just maybe—they could face the Vectors! But what did facing Birkenau mean? Did they have to complete the task Tessic set before them? They would not be able to— it was too great. They would truly be swallowed if they tried. It had to be something else they needed to do here.

  The gates of Birkenau were swung open before them to reveal the ruins beyond. As he stood there beneath the entry arch, Dillon could feel himself pulling together the molecules, the atoms that once made up those who had died here. They were beginning to resonate with the powerful call of his own soul as if his body were an instrument— Gabriel’s trumpet—the horn of the ram blown long and loud, awak­ening the dead.

  He clenched his teeth as he and Winston stepped through the gate, twenty yards in, and no one followed. No one would cross that border into that horrible place now. Dillon closed his eyes, feeling the weight of death encroaching upon his soul, and the ground around them be­gan to change; the broken concrete healing, the crumbling bricks of the massive crematoria pulling themselves back into place. This place of horror would rise again. Its gas chambers and ovens would renew be­fore the dead could be brought back—and the thought of restoring Birkenau made him so sick to his stomach that he leaned over gripping his gut. He strained to rein in his power so that he didn’t lose every­thing that he was in this field of death. He felt he would shatter like a vessel in a vacuum, his soul exploding like a supernova once more, leaving only smithereens spreading out across these fields, giving the ti­niest hint of life to these million souls; their bodies never brought back from dust, their spirits held intact only long enough to be faintly aware of their own existence before fading. This time Dillon and Winston would fade with them, both lost in the blackness of Birkenau. If he let his power go. With his eyes still closed he heard a desperate whisper from Winston, who had doubled over on the ground.

  “Syntaxis,” he whispered. “Please, Dillon, please. Take my hand. Join with me.” Anything so he didn’t have to face this bitter place alone.

  “No,” Dillon said. Even as he lost control of his body, feeling his bladder release, saturating his pants, running down his leg. Even then he refused to touch Winston. For he knew if he did, there would be no containing themselves. They truly would shatter.

  “Contain yourself, Winston,” he said. For to give in to the need this place had for their life energy would surely mean death, and their only defense was to hold their power back, within themselves—some­thing they had never been able to do—but before now their lives had not depended on it.

  “Syntaxis will kill us—we have to face this place alone,” he told Winston. If they could contain themselves, they’d survive this place—and if they did, it would prime them to face those black creatures that would soon come spilling through the dying void. Dillon had to be­lieve that.

  Tessic was right about one thing—this foray into death would make them stronger, but it wasn’t their strength of resurrection that needed to be tempered and reinforced. It was their fortitude in facing the darkness.

  They both held on. They held on until they knew they had the strength to hold on as long as they had to. To hold on forever.

  Something deep within Dillon changed, and for the first time, Dillon miraculously felt his field pulling back! Finally, after all these years his powers obeyed his will, drawing into his flesh, instead of radiating outward!

  Winston curled into the fetal position, and Dillon stood there, arms by his side, fists clenched. He held within him now the wellspring of his luminous soul, and the sensation was different from anything he had ever felt—as if his senses and emotions were charged to a new high, and he could at last sense the boundary between himself and the world. He still felt the horror of this place, but now he was aware of something bright beyond the darkness, something eternal, that fueled in him a compassion for those who died here as immense as his power. But rather than stir them with the depth of his compassion, he would hold it.

  When he opened his eyes he saw that the buildings had ceased their renewal. Nothing had renewed to the point of making a differ­ence in the bleakness of the death camp, but the difference was in him. Something wonderful would be taken from this horrible place, and he marveled that the souls he had intended to bestow the gift of life upon had given him a gift instead. They had given him the ability to contain himself, and a knowledge that there was something beyond the dark places.

  It took Winston a few moments longer, then the look of pain and fear dissolved from his face as well. He took a few deep breaths and struggled to stand. He, too, had triumphed. Mind over matter. Will over wonder. He, like Dillon, was finally contained.

  “Are we there yet?” Winston asked.

  Dillon nodded. “I think we are.”

  * * *

  The air of this place was getting to Tessic as it had every time he made a pilgrimage here to mourn for his people, and for his family that could have been. Today the hope, the fear, the expectation and the desperation roiled in him, churning up unexplored places within his mind. Had he been Michael, he thought, his storm would rage all over Europe.

  Tessic waited outside the gate with growing dread. Then, not five minutes after walking in, Dillon and Winston came back, and they brought no one out with them. The look on Dillon’s and Winston’s faces was unreadable and something felt different about them, too. It took a few moments before Tessic knew what it was.

  It’s that my hair isn’t growing, Tessic thought. It’s that my bones are once again subject to the slow decay of age. Dillon and Winston have shut down their own powers. Tessic found this more frightening, more dis­tressing than anything he had seen or felt before.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “We’re leaving now,” Dillon told him.

  Tessic found himself stammering as he had several days before when his lion first defied the whip.

  “You will go in there,” Tessic demanded. “You will wake them.”

  “They’re not asleep,” Dillon reminded him. “They’re dead. They’ve been dead a very long time.”

  “Why should that matter to you? To you death means nothing!”

  Dillon’s calm stood in harsh relief against Tessic’s growing agita­tion. “I won’t invalidate their suffering. Let them rest.”

  Tessic grabbed him by the shirt, practically lifting him off the ground. He’s just a boy, Tessic thought. A scrawny child, stupidly naive. “Do you think they want to rest he
re in this place?” Tessic screamed. “Is there justice in that?”

  And then Winston spoke, his voice as calm as Dillon’s. “The ev­idence of injustice is sometimes as important as justice.”

  Tessic let Dillon go, pushing him away. “Rhetorical garbage,” he sneered. “You two will be the criminals if you leave this place un­touched. Hitler’s accomplices.” Tessic wanted to hit them, to hurt them, to smash into their brains the importance of this. The necessity of it. How could they question the validity of his cause—of his calling, and of their own place in this glorious undertaking? How could they do this to him?

  “I will lock you in your chair,” Tessic yelled, a froth of spittle building in the corner of his mouth. “I will lock you in your chair and force you.”

  “No you won’t,” said Dillon with such unexpected empathy in his voice, it derailed Tessic, sending his thoughts flying for cover from his own anger. He stomped the ground like a child, he threw his hands up. He screamed to the colorless sky. Tessic’s entire life had been for this moment. Building up to it only to have the prize torn from him just inches from his grasp.

  And then Dillon reached out and put his hand on Tessic’s shoulder, speaking again in that tone of understanding so deep, Dillon’s voice could have been the voice of God himself. “Listen to me, Elon: it was never your responsibility to bring back the lost. You truly were meant to be a maker of weapons; defensive weapons, that would protect. To­day you’ve made your great work in me, and in Winston. We were never meant to be tools for the undoing of this Holocaust,” Dillon told him. “We’re weapons to defend the world against a coming one.” And then he leaned forward and whispered gently to Tessic, like a kiss upon the ear.

  “Their weight is off your shoulders.”

  Those were the words that healed him. He had always known of Dillon’s power to do this. To find the key to someone with simple, whispered words. But knowing and experiencing it were two different things. Tessic felt his completion come to him like the final number of a combination turning into place. It was as if the shell of his own restraining chair had popped open, leaving him in a naked state of release. He felt a weightless joy that stood out in such stark contrast to the bleakness of Birkenau. And he cried. He cried for the joy that came with the completion that Dillon had given him and he cried with sorrow for every life here that would neither be avenged nor restored.

  “Go,” he told them without looking up at them. “Take anything you need. Do whatever it was you are meant to do. Just go.”

  And then he turned from them, looking out over the ruins before him. “Yitgadal v’yitkadach sh’ mei raba.” Alone he recited the mourners’ kaddish, for all those here, and the millions of others whose bones and ashes were spread across the fields of Europe. The millions whose lives were sacrificed so the world could know the meaning of injustice.

  * * *

  Maddy had known even before Tessic did that their little endeavor ended here. She had been within Dillon’s field enough to know the instant his influence ceased. She had feared, at first, that he had died. But then he came out of that gate with Winston, wearing that beatific grin—an expression both leaden and weightless. Moses descending Sinai. One look at his face, and she understood. Whatever he was on this earth to do, whatever his so-called “purpose,” he had finally been primed. His will had triumphed over his power, and he had finally reined himself in. She found herself unexpectedly angered, but not for the same reason Tessic was. Maddy had always known that Dillon had a spark of something divine—but to see that spark kindle and her not be caught up in the flame—to be just another outsider like the rest of Tessic’s revival crew—it was too much to bear. The only thing that kept her from running AWOL right there was Tessic. Damn Tessic, crying at the gate of the camp after Dillon had denied him his final victory. Someone had to tend to the man.

  Maddy had prepared Dillon’s way at Majdanek, then here, going before him like John the Baptist, preparing the way for the lord. And in doing so, it connected her again, making her more a fulcrum than a gear in Tessic’s grand machine of revival. It was heady and glorious. . . but in the end it wasn’t meant to be.

  As she watched Dillon walk away from Tessic, away from her, she suppressed her own emotions, and filled her mind with the reality that it was over. It was all over.

  I will not be a victim of this.

  She had to find the opportunity here.

  My life will not rise and fall with the coming and going of Dillon Cole.

  Tessic would need someone to clean up this mess. He would need someone to dismantle his machine and assess losses. She had to look out for herself now. Her strength had always been in crisis control. Intui­tive improvisation in dire circumstance. Her only future now would be in Tessic’s organization, and if she succeeded in damage control and got Tessic out of this mess unscathed, surely she’d be set for life. Dillon be damned—she was tired of the big picture. Life larger than life left her depleted. It was time to enjoy the pleasures of being small, selfish and petty. Yet imagining herself as Tessic’s right hand in the world of arms manufacture only added to the chill of this horrible place.

  They all followed in Dillon’s and Winston’s wake back through Auschwitz I, to the parking lot, and the waiting gauntlet of helicopters. Dillon and Winston went to one of the helicopters—not the lead one that had brought them here—that was for Tessic’s personal use. Instead they approached one of the support helicopters, but Ari, Tessic’s per­sonal pilot, began beckoning them back to the lead copter like a side­show barker.

  “Come,” she heard him say, over the confusion that now rose in Tessic’s ranks. “Come, I take you where you want to go. Come.”

  There was something markedly off about his overtures. Before this moment it seemed all Ari had wanted to do was fly Tessic around and get into Maddy’s pants. Hearing him now—feeling the way he pulled Dillon’s attention filled her with an unsettling vertigo. It was sensation strong enough to send her to intercept.

  She reached Ari before Dillon and Winston did.

  “You’re Tessic’s pilot,” she reminded. “You need to get him out of here. Don’t go volunteering your services without his permission.” Then he smiled at her—a grin that crossed well over the line from mischievous to lascivious. If the time were different she might have put him in the hospital for such a demeaning, objectifying look.

  Dillon called from somewhere behind her, and she didn’t turn to look. “One of the other pilots will do fine,” he told Ari. “You take care of Tessic.”

  Again that grin from Ari. He didn’t meet Dillon’s eyes—he ap­peared to turn his face away intentionally, but then maybe it was just the wind. Instead he kept his gaze fixed on Maddy. “I fly you then,” he said. “Fly you to the moon, like the song. This I will enjoy.”

  “Get in there, start it up, and wait for Tessic,” she told him, dis­gusted.

  He broke his discomfiting gaze. “Of course,” he said. “I was only trying to do the good thing.” He sauntered off toward his helicopter calmly, as if they weren’t standing at the mouth of Auschwitz in the middle of three hundred empty, idling buses.

  When she turned, she bumped into Dillon, who had decided to offer her a single shining moment of his time before disappearing into the blue.

  “What will you do now?” he asked.

  “Same as you,” she answered. “We’ll all get the hell out of here. You don’t linger at a failed mission.”

  “And then?”

  “Sorry, that’s as far into the future as I’m willing to think right now.”

  Dillon glanced back at a helicopter where Winston was already giving instructions to another pilot. Tessic had arrived and was nodding his approval. With Tessic’s carte blanche, the two of them really could have hitched a rocket to the moon if they wanted. But apparently they had another destination in mind.

  “Winston and I have a date in Greece,” he told her.

  Greece, she thought. Do I want to know what this i
s about? She decided that she didn’t.

  “For someone who’s supposed to bring order, you left a hell of a mess.”

  He kissed her. It was tender, it was sincere, and she hated him for it, because they both knew it was a kiss good-bye. She was now a part of his past, and there was no chair she could lock him in to change that.

  “Go,” she said. “I’ll clean up.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. She didn’t know which of the hundred things both large and small he was sorry for, but it didn’t matter. He was what he was. As Drew had said, he was a star. Stars burn, stars blind. Stars trap lesser bodies in perpetual orbit. This was the way with Dillon. Space curved around his luminescence, keeping him forever at the center of her longings, and still a million miles away.

  She watched as his helicopter ascended and the sound of its beating blades dissolved into the wind.

  When she turned, she saw Ari still lingering, watching her. Tessic was already in the helicopter, but Ari didn’t seem to care. He took his time in the turmoil building around him smoking a cigarette.

  “Do your job!” she told him. “Get Tessic out of here.”

  He flicked his cigarette to the ground, tossing her another un­seemly grin, then got in the helicopter.

  There’s something wrong about him, she thought in the back of her mind, but brushed the thought aside. After all, everything here was wrong, twisted, and schizophrenic. Isn’t that what was happening to the world? Minds and emotions were disconnecting everywhere—why should Tessic’s pilot be different?

  Much later, she would regret that she hadn’t taken this bit of in­tuition more seriously.

  PART VI -THE SHATTERED SKY

  34. The Shell Of Atlantis

  Ninety nautical miles due north of Crete, the island of Santorini fought a losing battle to return to its traditional name of Thira. The crescent form of the island and its huge circular bay came by no ordinary means. Had the Minoans survived to tell it, there might be more records of the rumored isle where wondrous things oc­curred—where the god Zeus and his compatriots spent their summer through the harvest, because its beauty rivaled Mount Olympus. Had the Minoans survived they might have told of the day the earth ripped open and tore the heart of Thira from the world along with the gods themselves. They might have told, but so great was the cataclysm on Thira, that a wall of water a thousand feet high washed halfway across Crete, killing every last Minoan and leaving little more than broken pots, tumbled walls and the legend that was stretched and chewed like a piece of gum until truth, rumor, and miscommunication molded it into a legend now called “Atlantis.”