Shuttered Sky ss-3

by Нил Шустерман

  Of course modern science knows that the volcanic mountain that once stood where Thira’s bay is blew stratosphere-high in an explosive eruption; a somewhat rare thing, but not so rare when you take into account the grand sweep of time. One might think the evidence of this explosion would litter the floor of the Aegean Sea; massive chunks of volcanic rock blown from Thira. But no such mountain fragments exist. Perhaps because the center of Thira didn’t blow up. It was sur­gically removed from the world. It had plunged through a tear in the foundation of the universe, and now had the distinction of being the only mountain on the endless red plain of that lonely place that existed between the walls of worlds.

  There was a palace on that displaced mountain, and in that palace were the dusty remains of twelve Star Shards born to the Greek isles three thousand years ago, who had grown too arrogant to be allowed to live. And also in that castle rested another Star Shard, her remains not quite as well seasoned, but her untimely death just as unpleasant. Her name was Deanna Chang, and her death, by the unwitting hand of her love, was a valiant one. For in her final days, the fear that had enveloped so much of her life had given way to a faith so over­powering, it had to be taken with her when she died. A faith that all things would run their proper course, and that time would balance the tide of unhappy circumstance to her brief life, and to the world.

  * * *

  Okoya had not devoured a single human soul, as he had promised.

  He had instead suffered through hideous airplane food in a ridic­ulously cramped seat between fat businessmen, whose throats he would have slit on a better day. It disgusted him how in this absurd world of matter, the small-minded inhabitants were forced to burn the distilled remains of previous inhabitants just to power unshapely, cumbersome objects that carried them uncomfortably from point A to point B. Ridiculous. Had his own survival not been in question he would have thought nothing of someone obliterating this world with a well-placed comet.

  His first flight ended in Amsterdam—as far as the money Drew gave him could get. He found however, that a hermaphrodite could earn money in various ways in the back streets of the debauched city. By the end of the second night he had earned enough for first-class travel to Athens and then on to Thira. He found himself both satisfied and yet disappointed that he got there using human guile alone, and didn’t have to kill anyone to do it.

  Once there, he knew he need not do anything but wait. He was in the epicenter now; the focal point of all things to come. So he took himself a hotel room overlooking the stark white hillside buildings and sat out on a terrace, looking out over the near-bottomless bay, and waited for the Vectors and the Shards to converge.

  * * *

  On December fifth, while Dillon and Winston faced Birkenau, a wave of influence swept slowly across the Greek Island of Crete. It began on the northwest shore, then penetrated deep into the hills and mountains, saturating the cities, towns and farms. It was a call to action that refused to be ignored, and took all prisoners.

  Believing in the autonomy of their own free will, people stepped from their homes and workplaces, all the while believing that it was their choice to do so. Cars, bicycles, and buses made their way north. Boats sped around the coast. Those who could not squeeze into a vehicle walked, greeting friends on the way, as if this dawn were any other moment in time. What a nice day for a walk; a run; a drive, they would say. Doors were left open and livestock left unattended as the population of Crete impelled toward the northern shore.

  By the time rural dwellers reached the north shore town of Hania, they knew that their hearts and minds had been seized by something they could neither explain nor fight. Here, so close to the source, the force of this gravity that pulled them from their lives was so strong, they could feel it like a tone in their ears—a frequency oscillating just above their hearing, creating unbearable pressure deep in their limbic systems; a place that knew only instinct and impulse. On the rare occasion that a man, woman, or child was willful enough to buck the spirit that controlled them, they found that their arms and legs still obeyed the marching orders, their bodies following the silent tune of this pied piper that sucked them all from home and hearth.

  Why are we here? they asked. Where are we going? And they laughed at the incomprehensibility of their own answers as they grabbed their loved ones so they were not lost in the raging mob moving toward the shore.

  We’re here for the ferry! Which ferry? Any ferry—and in Crete there were many to choose from. Come, all! Today all ferries are free, and when the ferries are packed to an inch of sinking, there are fishing boats and sailboats and barges. Today everyone is welcome.

  They could not know that their bodies and their wills were under siege by one girl who had forced a powerful syntaxis upon her two comrades in chains. It was this link between the three of them that allowed her to create this moving wall of leverage, every bit as dev­astating as the tidal wave that had wiped out the Minoans. Although the skies above churned with resistance, it made no difference. Not even the heavens could escape.

  When every last ferry, boat and barge had set sail, leaving thousands still on the shore, those thousands now pushed eastward along the shoreline like a swarm of locusts, plundering every town in their path for anything that would float so they could join the growing fleet that swept east across the coastline.

  By the time the call came to the city of Rethimno that evening, Hania was empty save for the stray dogs wandering in and out of abandoned restaurants. By midnight, when the call reached further east, to Heraklion, Rethimno was burning, with no one left to put out the fire. And by the next morning, when the odd armada was complete, and sailed due north across the Aegean from Heraklion, it contained more than half the population of Crete. Nearly three hun­dred thousand were jammed into every floating vessel the island had.

  Bit by bit as the fleet sailed north, the impulse lifted from the land, leaving thousands left behind to mourn—not for the loss of so many sons and daughters of Crete, but for themselves, and the fact that they had been too crippled, too infirm or just too slow to be a part of this great rapture that was surely headed for some kind of glory somewhere across the Aegean, at a place just off the edge of the horizon.

  * * *

  Winston wondered why his life suddenly seemed to revolve around airports—and each time he found himself in one, he couldn’t help but notice how much worse things were. These terminals had become a yardstick for him to measure the state of the world.

  Athens-Ben Epps Airport was in a state of complete disarray.

  “Things will fall apart,” Dillon had promised. Here, as in the airports in the United States, squatters had taken up residence in the hallways. The stench of urine permeated every corner of every gate. Travelers who still had enough sanity and sense of direction only kept it by turn­ing a blind eye to the chaos around them, pretending that it was nor­mal, or that it didn’t exist. That it was somebody else’s problem.

  When they had landed, Winston had caught sight of a burned out wreck of a plane abandoned on a taxiway. No one had bothered to remove it. The edge of the tarmac was crowded with derelict planes— so many it was almost impossible to maneuver. Airlines that had shut down; jets without enough fuel to go anywhere else. This great Eu­ropean hub had become an airplane graveyard. A flood of arrivals, but fewer and fewer departures. “The planes just keep coming in, but there’s not enough jet fuel left to get them out,” Dillon explained. “Airports in this part of the world are seeing more arrivals than they ever did, because of what’s going to happen here.”

  “Because of what’s going to happen here?” Winston asked. “How the hell does anyone know what’s going to happen here?”

  “Foreshocks,” said Dillon. “Intuition. People feel their attention drawn to a place and they don’t know why. Pretty soon people start to feel the need to come. To see the ruins, they think. To walk on the Acropolis, but that’s just their mind trying to make sense of a feeling they can’t understand.”

/>   The Athens airport, notorious for slipshod security, for some mys­tical reason had chosen this, the twilight of time, to detain all suspicious-looking persons. Of course, these days everybody was suspicious looking so they had a wealth to choose from. On the morn­ing of Tuesday, December sixth they chose Winston and Dillon. Had Winston any sense of humor about it, he might have laughed. To think they had survived and triumphed over all they had, only to be harassed by yet another cast of rent-a-cops. The fact was, Athens Airport had become a hot spot of activity, intrigue and violence over the past few months, and so, naturally, two teens arriving in a corporate jet was bound to catch someone’s attention. Security collared them immedi­ately, shunting them to a 10 X 10 windowless room with bad fluores­cent lighting that flickered like a disco strobe.

  The walls were peeling institutional green that clashed with the faded maroon linoleum floor that peeled up in the corners. Two guards stood by the door like fixtures, theoretically waiting for someone to come and interrogate Winston and Dillon. The one to the left had given Dillon a black eye, smashing Dillon as soon as they got here. He claimed that Dillon had resisted arrest, but the truth was he hit him because he was American.

  “Winston watched the floor for a few minutes waiting for it to renew like everything always did in Dillon’s presence. It took him a moment to realize that Dillon’s field was so well contained that the room remained unchanged. Containing themselves was, Winston re­alized, like holding one’s breath. Saving his own powers for a better purpose was both exhausting and invigorating at once, and just when he thought he couldn’t hold it in anymore there always came that second wind, like a burst of adrenaline giving him the strength to pull back, suck in and keep his own skin the boundary between himself and the world.

  “You’re so calm,” Winston commented. “Like you expected this.”

  “I didn’t expect it,” he said, “but I understand the pattern. It doesn’t surprise me, that’s all.”

  “You have a plan for getting us out?”

  “My plan is to watch and listen,” Dillon said.

  The two guards in the room with them didn’t speak English. As Greek was one of Winston’s many languages, he thought that by con­versing with them in their native tongue it might make things go more smoothly. But a black kid who was an American, and flew in on a private jet of Israeli registry, became even more suspect when he started spouting perfect Greek.

  Finally, the security chief who had been so good as to put them in this comfortable, well-appointed cubicle came back in, smoking a cig­arette, which he held turned in, in a European way. He was gray with thinning hair. His lips were pursed in a perpetual smirk, earned through years of interrogation and professional disbelief.

  “Don’t worry,” Dillon whispered to Winston. “Interrogation rooms are my specialty.”

  Their interrogator dispensed quickly with any niceties.

  “So your plane is owned by Tessitech, as you said.”

  “Took you long enough to find out,” Winston said.

  Dillon said nothing.

  “Your pilot tells us you were coming from Poland.” His smirk broadened. “You must be rock stars on a world tour.” Winston so wanted to punch that smirk away.

  “We’re meeting our parents here,” Dillon said. “For a vacation.”

  “In a Tessitech jet?”

  “My father,” Dillon said patiently, “is Vice-President of Interna­tional Relations for Tessitech.” He nodded toward Winston. “And his mother heads the Greek office.” Then Dillon imitated the man’s smirk. “And they’re going to make sure you lose your job.”

  The security chiefs expression took a turn toward sour. He pulled out the fake ID he had confiscated from Winston. “You should know better than to fly without a passport, Mr. Stone,” he said, and turned to Dillon. “And you without any ID whatsoever.”

  “Listen,” said Winston. “Our parents are waiting for us on Thira. Let us go and we won’t cause any trouble.”

  “Thira,” said the officer. “A popular vacation spot these days. I’m glad to hear you call it by its traditional name. Most just call it Santorini.”

  “What is it you want?” Dillon asked.

  And the officer dropped something on the table. “What I want,” he said, “is for you to explain this.” It was a plastic bag containing a sizable amount of white powder. Dillon saw it and snickered. Winston just let his jaw drop. “We found this in your jacket,” the officer said to Winston. “The inside pocket.”

  “What kind of bullshit is this?”

  “The most severe kind,” the officer said. His smirk narrowing into a frown. “Do you know what the penalty is for bringing drugs into this country?” he asked. “It starts with twenty years in prison and goes up from there.”

  And still Dillon snickered, but Winston was in no mood to laugh. “You planted that! What, did you see it in some old TV movie? What kind of morons are you?”

  The officer snatched up the bag. “You two boys have yourself a problem. I suggest you think of how it might be resolved.” And he left the room, closing the door, leaving with them the mute, Greek guards.

  When the door had shut and the silent guards resumed their Green Giant positions, Winston turned to Dillon. “Any more of this and I’m going to start siding with the Vectors,” he said.

  To which Dillon responded, “We’ll call our parents; they’ll bail us out.”

  Winston looked at him about as dumbfounded as he had been when the bag of white powder had been dropped on the table before them.

  “Run that one past me again?”

  This time, Dillon stepped on Winston’s foot. Firm pressure on his toes—a signal—and spoke deliberately. “I said, our parents will bail us out.”

  Winston looked at the silent guards; they didn’t appear to speak English, but that didn’t matter, did it? The room could have been wired. Hell, there was probably a hidden camera. They were left there to stew and give information.

  “Our parents,” said Winston. “Yes, my mom will get us out of this. She’ll get us out easy,” and then he added, “I don’t know which is worse though, a Greek prison or facing your dad.”

  Dillon laughed, a fake laugh, but real enough to anyone who might have been listening.

  Winston laughed, too. “You do know what you’re doing?”

  Dillon nodded, but Winston noticed that he wasn’t laughing any­more.

  A few minutes later, their grand inquisitor came back in, conven­iently porting a cellular phone. “It’s an American custom to grant you one phone call, is it not?” he asked. “I think we can do that for you.”

  “And what if we wanted to call the American Embassy?” Winston taunted.

  “Very busy time of day there,” he answered suavely. “Best if you made a call of a more personal nature.”

  Winston wondered if this corruption had always been here or whether this was nouveau sleaze brought on by these crumbling times. Things will fall apart.

  Dillon took the phone and dialed something totally random. Then he turned and smiled at the big cop that had given him the black eye. Winston watched as Dillon released the tiniest fraction of his immense power, which he had so successfully contained within himself since Birkenau. The puffiness around Dillon’s eye shrank and the motling faded until it was gone completely, all the while he was smiling at the green giant who suddenly didn’t seem so smug. Dillon then turned to the security chief.

  “By the way,” Dillon said, “see that guard over there?”

  “He wouldn’t have hit you if you didn’t resist arrest,” the inquisitor said, defensively.

  “It’s not what he did to me that I’m worried about,” Dillon said, “it’s what he’s doing to you.” And Dillon leaned forward to the in­quisitor, cutting the distance between them in half—and although they were still about two feet apart Winston could swear that in some way Dillon was closer; pressed against his face, deeper still, into the man’s brain.

  “He’s been
sticking it to your wife when you’ve been working late,” Dillon said casually.

  His eyes were locked on Dillon’s now. He couldn’t move if he wanted to.

  Dillon continued. “And you know what,” Dillon said, “she does things with him that she would never do with you.”

  The man’s cheek twitched. A strange whine came from the back of his throat like the death cry of a small animal. When he broke Dillon’s gaze Winston could see how the pupil of one eye had spread, voiding out the iris completely, and how the other pupil had collapsed to a pinpoint. All at once the light above stopped flickering and shone bright. The walls became a brighter green and the scuffed floor re­newed. Then Dillon pulled his field back into himself once more, and he and Winston watched as the shattered security chief reached with a shaking hand for the gun beneath his jacket coat and turned to the green giant guard, who spoke no English and had no idea what was about to happen to him.

  * * *

  In two minutes Dillon and Winston were hustling down the ter­minal building. The melee that had followed Dillon’s surgical strike had left not one, but two guards dead and their grand inquisitor putting the barrel of the gun in his own mouth pulling the trigger over and over and over again, refusing to believe that he hadn’t left a single bullet for himself.