She strode into the room with a confidence Winston found unnerving. “You should know that Tessic has an intercom system that could pinpoint the location of a mosquito from its buzz.”
“Tessic’s been eavesdropping?” asked Drew.
“No. I’ve been eavesdropping.”
Winston wasn’t surprised. “Did Uncle Sam train you in surveillance?”
“I’m trained in a lot of things.” She flicked off the treadmill, the hum of the belt died, and the sequoia forest resolved to a flat, neutral gray. “As a matter of fact, I got straight As in BS detection. And you’re standing in one hell of a dung hill.”
“Dillon’s usually the one who detects BS,” Winston said. “But for some reason his antenna’s offline. Any idea why?”
“Dillon only sees what he wants to see. What he’s ready to see.”
“And so you’re an advocate of these blinders he’s got on?”
“I never said that—but I don’t think just ripping them off is going to help him. Dillon’s fragile right now.”
Winston laughed. “Fragile? Dillon could be at ground zero at Hiroshima, swallow the whole goddamned bomb, and walk away from it with mild indigestion. I can think of lots of words to describe Dillon—fragile isn’t one of them.”
“Then you don’t know him as well as you think.”
Drew pushed his way between them, putting his arms on their shoulders. “Can’t we all just get along?”
“Sure,” Winston said. “We’ll all put on a big purple Barney smile. I love you, you love me.” Winston shrugged out of Drew’s grip.
“I see why Winston needs you to travel with him,” Maddy told Drew. “Nice of you to be his referee.”
“Yeah, well, the pay sucks, but there’s a good medical plan.”
Winston threw an annoyed look at Drew, but said nothing, since anything he said would just make her point.
Maddy strode over to the wall, and turned off the intercom, then came back to Winston, speaking to him quietly, a little too close for his personal comfort. “There’s something you’re keeping from Dillon,” she said. “I want to know what it is.”
He only had one thing to say to that. “Go shave your legs.”
Drew laughed. “Can’t argue with that logic.” He reflexively scratched the itch of his own uneven beard stubble.
“You know, we don’t have to like each other,” Maddy told Winston, “but it would sure help if we could be civil. After all, I’m a part of this now, too.”
The suggestion made Winston bristle. “Getting a piece of Dillon doesn’t make you a part of anything.”
It must have stung, because she took a sizeable step into his airspace, balling her hand into a fist. For a moment he thought she might hit him, but in the end, she backed off. “You’re a real disappointment, Winston. The way Dillon always talked about you, I expected more than this. I thought you were supposed to be the wise one.”
She strode off with much more dignity than Winston felt at the moment. Once she was gone, Drew turned to Winston, wearing one of his best smirks.
“It didn’t take her long to find your secret ‘asshole’ button, did it,” Drew said.
“Ah, shut up.”
DILLON HAD NOT EXPECTED the others to warm too quickly to Tessic’s overtures of friendship. The events of their lives had inscribed for each of them the same boilerplate of distrust that Dillon carried. He had hoped, however, that when they saw Dillon at ease in Tessic’s company, they might soon relax their defenses, but they were far from disarmament.
Dinner that night was an exercise in strained civility. Dillon and Maddy sat on one side of the table, Drew and Michael on the other, with Winston and Tessic facing each other from either end, like opposing goalies.
“Have you ever flown on a private jet?” Dillon asked just after the main course was served.
Winston stared at Dillon as if he were speaking in tongues. “Excuse me?”
“We’re flying to Poland next week,” Dillon told him. “There’s room for everyone.”
“Cool,” said Michael, then gauged Winston’s eyes, and hedged. “Isn’t it?”
Winston crammed a large piece of steak into his mouth, and worked it, effectively dodging a response.
“You shall all be my guests,” Tessic said with a gesture of his fork. “Friendlier skies you will not find.”
“Well, Mr. Tessic,” Drew said. “I can’t speak for Winston, but after almost getting sucked out of a plane two weeks ago, air travel and I have ended our relationship.”
“Perhaps seeing another part of the world would lend you some perspective.” Tessic’s comment was directed specifically at Winston.
Winston swallowed his meat, and Dillon braced for the response. “If I need someone to loan me perspective, I’ll let you know.”
Tessic deflected it with a laugh, then threw a grin at Dillon, as if the two of them shared some secret, although Dillon wasn’t certain what that secret might be.
Winston excused himself just as dessert arrived. “I can’t remember the last time I ate so well,” Winston said, then chased the compliment with, “I can see how one could grow complacent with fine food like this.” Winston left, and his exit opened the door for Drew and Michael to follow.
After dinner, Dillon considered Winston’s departing barb. Had Dillon grown complacent? Well, perhaps—but Dillon had a hundred reasons why complacency was exactly what he needed in this place, in this moment. To be a body at rest was a luxury he could never afford, and as Tessic had predicted, Dillon had found clarity in his hiatus from anguish. He felt, for the first time in many years, simply human. Here, his power was neither feared nor worshipped. He need not concern himself with its effect on the world around him, or the world’s effect on him. Such contentment deserved to be prolonged, and so he told himself it was all part of some positive metamorphosis and he would emerge from this cocoon far better than he arrived. I’ll leave after we get back from Europe, Dillon told himself, or at least he’d consider the possibility of thinking about leaving.
Winston, however, had no such moratorium on desertion.
At nine in the evening, Dillon found Winston alone in the living room, punching combinations into the digital lock on the residence elevator.
“Going somewhere?”
Caught in the act, Winston did not try to hide what he was up to. “I thought you said Tessic had an open-door policy.”
“Maybe he got tired of the draft.” Dillon punched in the code, which Tessic had given him on his first day there, although he had never chosen to use it. The elevator door opened to a cherry wood interior, then closed again, empty. “I’m sure he would have told you the code himself, if you hadn’t skipped out during dinner.”
Winston looked around, making sure they were unobserved. Even so, he spoke in a whisper. “You can’t stay here, you’ve got to realize that.”
“I’ll leave when I feel it’s time,” Dillon told him. “And it’s not time.”
“Like hell it’s not! You, Michael, and I don’t get the cushy way out—there’s things we’ve got to do.”
“And you have no clue what those things are.”
“I know a lot more than you think,” Winston said. He hesitated, then took a breath. “I know who the three spirits are. And I know why they’re here.”
That caught Dillon completely off guard. He had been arrogant enough to think his was the clearest vision of all the shards. “Then why haven’t you told me?”
“Because we can’t talk about it here.”
Dillon turned at the creak of footsteps on the stairs. Drew and Michael. Drew carried their travel bags. Seeing Dillon there, Drew stopped short, looked to Winston, then completely misread the situation.
“Glad you decided to come with us,” Drew told Dillon.
“No one’s going anywhere,” Dillon said. “Especially not Michael. He’s not ready to leave here.”
“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” Winston said.
An
d suddenly Michael was the center of attention. He stood on the bottom step of the winding staircase, just as Dillon had that same morning when he first saw Winston.
“You’re staying, right, Michael?” Dillon said. “You know you need time to adjust.”
Michael offered Dillon a half-hearted shrug. “I figure it’s best to dive in before I really know what the hell is going on out there. Because once I know, I might be too scared to go. Like you.”
Dillon started to protest the suggestion that he was afraid, but was cut short by the sound of the elevator door sliding open. Winston had remembered the code.
“Could you just stop for a minute and think!” insisted Dillon.
“I already think too much.”
Drew and Michael pushed past them into the elevator. “Sorry, man,” Michael said. “Tell Tessic I like his place.”
Winston followed them in, and Dillon found himself stumbling over his words. “There’s no point in leaving—nothing makes sense out there; it’s full of images and noise for us now. What we feel out there is panic—the only sanity is here.”
Winston wedged his foot against the open elevator door to keep it from closing. “Has it ever occurred to you that sanity is our worst enemy? That maybe we need a little insanity, or we’ll never be pushed to do what we need to do?”
“And what might that be?”
Winston responded by handing him a slip of paper with an address. “This is where we’ll be. Meet us there later tonight, and I’ll tell you everything I know.”
“I’m not leaving here!”
“I’m not asking you to. Just slip away for a couple of hours.”
Dillon looked at the piece of paper. A three-digit address and a cross street.
“You want us to come back, that will be your last chance to convince us,” Winston said. “Promise me you’ll be there.”
“I can’t promise anything.”
Winston nodded and back-stepped into the elevator with the others. He said nothing more as the elevator door slid quietly closed.
Dillon closed his eyes. The sensation of being robbed of Michael and Winston’s presence as they dipped out of Tessic’s insulated domain almost made him physically ill. He waited for his own sense of self and autonomy to return, but it was slow in coming. Their exit was sudden, unexpected, but Dillon knew he should have expected it. He should have sensed the pattern leading up to this. It was after all, his talent. It troubled him how easily he could unconsciously snuff his own intuition and he wondered what else he might be preventing himself from seeing.
When he finally turned from the elevator, Tessic was coming up the stairs from his workshop.
“Did you give them the code, or did Maddy?” Tessic asked.
“You heard them leave?”
“I didn’t have to. Security informs me when there’s unauthorized use of the express elevator. My door may be open, but no one leaves without my knowledge, one way or another.” Dillon expected him to be furious, but he wasn’t.
“You could have stopped them in the lobby,” Dillon said.
“What kind of host would I be then? I told the officer on duty to open the door for them, with my regrets that I couldn’t see them off personally.”
Tessic went over to the wet bar, stocked with Amaretto, Crème de Menthe, and a dozen other sweet liqueurs, crystal-lined decanters glistening in every color from orange to violet. Tessic once told him he couldn’t abide alcohol without a healthy dose of sugar to go with it. But Dillon suspected there was no sugar in the world sweet enough to make this medicine go down.
“I’m sorry,” Dillon said. “I showed Winston the code. I thought by showing them they could leave, they’d no longer feel they had to.”
Tessic poured himself an amber liqueur, then poured a second snifter. “Would I be contributing to the delinquency of a minor if I asked you to drink with me?”
“Probably.”
Nevertheless Tessic brought the second glass to Dillon. “It’s called Benedictine. I’ve been to the monastery in France were it is distilled.”
Dillon took the glass, and sipped it; the sweetness overwhelmed his taste buds, the sharpness burned his lips. The smallest sip left a whole series of subtle aftertastes.
“The recipe is five hundred years old, and is flavored with twenty-seven different botanicals that you would never expect to find together. Cinnamon and saffron, lemon and myrrh. Whenever I feel troubled by circumstance, I have a glass of Benedictine to remind me that the greatest things are forged from the most disparate of elements.” He swirled the snifter, watching the way the Benedictine coated the glass. “Life is much the same. Events both serendipitous and unfortunate combine together in the end.”
“There’s always a chance they’ll come back,” Dillon offered.
“Of course they’ll come back.” Tessic appeared so unconcerned, Dillon wondered whether or not it was a facade. Although he did sense turmoil in the man, it didn’t seem to be about this particular point.
“How can you be so sure?”
“Their presence is required, and therefore I trust it will be provided.”
“Required for what?”
Tessic smiled. “For the greatest of works, Dillon. The greatest of works.”
A heavy downpour began to pelt the living room windows. Now that Michael was out in the world unprotected and unconstrained, the skies over Houston resonated his turbulent state of mind.
Tessic held up his glass. “To the return of old friends,” he said, and touched his glass to Dillon’s. Behind them, a silent flash of lightning lit the room, chased quickly by a slow roll of thunder filled with as many haunting flavors as the Benedictine.
MADDY SHAVED HER LEGS in the shower, disgusted by the effect Winston had had on her body, and the effect Michael had had on her mood. There was no way to tell how much emotional tension was her own, and how much was projected upon her by Michael. Even in isolation, she felt she could not be alone, irradiated—violated—by their strange incandescence.
When she stepped out of the shower, the sound of thunder caught her by surprise. Wrapped in a plush robe thick as a parka, she stepped into the bedroom suite. The room had grown warmer than it had been all day, while outside, rain sheeted down the glass wall, obscuring the lights of the Houston night.
“They’re gone.”
The sound of Dillon’s voice made her jump. She turned to see him in bed, sitting up against the pillows, halfway beneath the covers. “You must be disappointed.”
“Are you coming to bed?” he asked.
“I have to dry my hair.”
She retreated to the bathroom and set the blower on low. All day she could get by with attributing her mounting sense of discomfort to events outside of herself. First there was the shock of witnessing Michael’s resurrection, and then there was the pervasiveness of Michael’s emotional presence. But now Michael was gone, outside of their shielded world. Her emotions were now her own, and she didn’t like what she felt.
When she stepped out of the bathroom again, she found the lights off. Dillon was a flow of satin contours lit only by flashes of distant lightning. She hoped he’d be asleep, but knew he was not.
She slipped on a nightgown, and slid beneath the covers of her side of the bed. Dillon’s hands were on her instantly, stroking her shoulders and back, urgently importuning. His hands were colder than usual. His caresses mechanical and forced. When she didn’t respond, he became more insistent. Maddy knew that tonight this was not about love. It wasn’t even about passion.
She rolled toward him, but grabbed his wrist, moving his hand away from her.
“What is it?” he asked.
He sounded so young when he said it, it made the four-year gap of their ages seem like a canyon. Yet even as she considered it, she knew that wasn’t the reason for her discomfort. It was her “orbit,” as Drew so incisively put it, which so dismayed her. The expanse was unbridgeable. They could be together, holding one another, and still she would be in
a distant orbit. Maddy would never truly be with him, and that knowledge was getting harder to bear each time she felt Dillon’s body against hers.
“Do you think of her when you’re with me?” She found the words were out of her mouth before she knew she would say them.
“Who?” Dillon asked.
“Who do you think?” There was something she had heard over the intercom earlier in the day. Drew and Winston talking about how Dillon and Deanna “completed” each other. Maddy knew she did not complete him in this way, for even in their most fulfilling moments, she sensed a depth of longing in him that her spirit was not large enough to fill. “Well, do you?” she asked again.
He reached over again to touch her, gently stroking her hair, which had grown longer in Winston’s presence. “Only sometimes.”
She spat out a laugh at his response, hating him for the answer, yet loving him for being incapable of a lover’s lie.
“Please, Maddy,” he said. “It’s been awful today. I need you to be there. Nobody else is.”
A flash of lightning lit his eyes, pupils wide, pleading. It was consolation he wanted. She was nothing more than his consolation prize. And she did want him, but now she knew what it was she truly wanted. Stifling her own tears, she reached up to his face, gently tracing the curves of his cheek and nose. She kissed his lips, for the first time feeling his kiss free from the scars she had given him.
“All right,” she said in a whisper. “But you have to do something first.”
“What?”
“Tell me that I complete you,” she said. “Tell me, and make me believe it.”
She knew how Dillon could find words to heal hearts and minds. Surely he could cut through the truth, and make her believe a lie. Please, Dillon, she prayed. Lie just this once, and shatter the truth. The truth that I can never be the companion you need.
But Dillon said nothing. And in time, he took his hands from her. She rolled over, facing away from him, and let her tears soak silently into the pillow. For the first time, she found herself truly wishing they were back in the Hesperia lockdown. Back then she could be exactly what he needed. A human contact. The hand that fed him; the source of his survival. In those days they could cling to the wonderful illusion that titanium and steel were the only obstacles keeping them apart. Maddy would have done anything to have that illusion back.
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