Shattered Sky

8. Abyss

Two thousand miles east of eureka, and eight hours after the offices of Eureka Dental were vandalized, Dillon Cole awoke to the shrill chirp of a clock radio. The device was crippled by an inability to pick up any radio stations, the cell being so completely insulated. All it could do was chirp its alarm, and hum like a theremin whenever Dillon got too near it. He had time for little more than a shower before the chair began sounding its own alarm, far more caustic than the chirping of the clock. It would continue to blare until its sensors registered Dillon’s body weight in the seat, and it clamped down around him like a fly trap.

Once he was secured in his chair, the outer door swung open, and his personal zeroid came in to wheel him out, with Bussard right be­hind.

It was as he crossed the threshold of his cell that the oppression began to fill him. He had been neither claustrophobic nor agoraphobic before arriving here, but each day of his imprisonment brought anxiety swimming up from some inaccessible trench in his mind. It was always the same, and it only hit him when he was outside of his cell, when he could pick up the hidden vibrations in the frequencies of life around him. He was prepared for another onslaught of the mental malaise that funneled down the open mouth of the cooling tower. But he was not prepared for this.

It hit all of his senses at once as he was wheeled into the open cylinder of the cooling tower, like a sound so loud it painted a flash of texture on the retina. His head jerked within his mask as if he had taken a deep whiff of smelling salts, and with no space to turn, his neck took the force of the action—straining against itself. He gasped in staccato, halting breaths, his chest muscles suddenly too tense to take in the air he needed. He was floating in space, and there was not enough oxygen in the world to fuel his brain to process the wave of sensation that flowed through him.

The sensation that something had been triggered.

Whatever chain of dominoes he had set in motion, the last one had tipped and was beginning a long, lonely fall.

It was the man in the leather chair.

It was the three figures on the diving platform.

The sensation of falling was unbearable, throbbing in his nerve endings. Dillon couldn’t be here anymore!

“I have to get out!” he wailed. “I’m meant to be out! OUT OUT OUT OUT!” But he knew his ranting sounded as deranged as the brimstone ravings of a street-corner prophet.

He could barely hear his own wails, but he could feel the pain as he convulsed within the unyielding bonds of his chair, his saliva bub­bling into a rabid foam spewing though the mouth hole of his face plate, until one of the Coats mercifully jabbed a hypodermic into his arm, plunging his consciousness into a sea of white noise.

9. Curved Space

Newport Harbor High School sat on prime real estate, and for years local developers had fought and lost many battles to relocate the school and build high-end tract homes in its place.

Even though the Colorado River Backwash was three hundred miles away, and had no connection to Newport Beach, security at the school still had to be beefed up. This was primarily because of all the in-depth news reports that tracked down the roots of Michael Lipranski—as if the source of Michael’s transformations of nature could somehow be found in the classrooms of Newport Harbor High. For months there had been waves of curiosity-seekers making pilgrimages to the school and other points of new-divinity interest, hoping perhaps to absorb some residue of the Shards’ passing. But it was Dillon whom most people were interested in, not Michael, so the tide of visitors to Michael’s stomping grounds soon ebbed, leaving only the occasional zealot wandering onto the school grounds.

And then there was the man by the fence.

At 4:30 on a Thursday afternoon, Drew Camden did a few warm-down laps with the rest of the track team, setting the pace. He had noticed the man just on the other side of the north fence about ten minutes before. He walked a rankled Chihuahua back and forth, weav­ing through the eucalyptus breakwind. It was by no means an odd occurrence—this was a dog-happy neighborhood, and the residents had no reservations about letting their dogs crap in the eucalyptus grove by the school. This man, however was different. Perhaps it was the way he tugged on the yapping dog with little care or sensitivity. Or perhaps it was the way he made brief eye contact with Drew each time he came around for another lap. His gaze made Drew pick up the pace.

“Hey, Drew, it’s a warm down,” one of his teammates reminded him. “Ease up!” but Drew didn’t slow down until the track curved away from the north fence.

There were several explanations for the man with the dog, and none of them were pleasant, but as team captain, he felt a responsibility to dispatch him. So when they reached the stands and the coach sent them off to the showers, Drew chose to take another lap alone.

Back in September, the Orange County Register had printed a nice-sized article on Drew, featuring a picture of him breaking through a finish line. When he had met the reporter for the interview, he was naive enough to think it was going to be an article highlighting his stand-out track performance. But the reporter was not from the sports desk. That should have been Drew’s first clue. The article turned out to be a feature entitled " ‘Out’ in Front,” and was a coming-out man­ifesto, likening Drew to Greg Louganis, as a local emblem of gay ath­letic pride. People were either appalled, or impressed. Some people would stare at him, their equilibrium thrown off by Drew’s complete lack of effeminate affectations. Some of his friendships were lost, while others grew stronger, and now the fact that he was captain of the track team—which hadn’t meant much to anyone before—was a political statement. Hell, if he went to take a piss now it was a political state­ment. But worse than any of that were the advances from strangers. Some were boys his own age, some were men much older—teens and trolls who idolized him for what they thought he represented. Honesty . . . bravery—which was ridiculous to Drew, because it wasn’t about being brave at all. In the wake of the Backwash, and Michael’s death, he simply found himself uninterested in maintaining his old facade.

And now there was this man with his yapping Chihuahua.

At about the time Drew began to smell the dog crap, the man called out to him from the other side of the fence. “Hey! You’re Drew Camden, aren’t you?”

Drew found himself particularly disgusted by this man’s approach, and was actually looking forward to telling him where he could go. Drew slowed his pace to a walk, and stopped a few feet away from the fence. “You could be arrested for what you’re doing,” Drew said to him.

“Walking my dog?”

“Soliciting a minor.”

For a moment the man appeared flustered. The dog just barked.

“That is why you’re here isn’t it? Or are you just here to look?”

The man adjusted the Angels cap he wore, and glanced down at his dog, giving a sharp tug on the leash which did not quiet the animal. Then he recovered his composure. “I’m sorry if it looks that way. Actually I just wanted to talk to you. I’m an old friend of the Lipranskis’—I understand you knew Michael.”

A breeze tore a flurry of eucalyptus leaves from the trees. Drew could feel his sweat chilling on his shirt, which clung uncomfortably to his back. He took a good look at the man, trying to see how much sincerity he could parse from the man’s face. Neither Michael nor his father had ever mentioned any old family friends—but then they never spoke much about their lives before moving to California.

“So, you’re a friend from when they lived in Vermont?” Drew asked.

“No—Long Island. I didn’t know they lived in Vermont.”

Drew grinned. “They didn’t.”

The man chuckled, acknowledging the test, and the fact that he had passed it. “The name’s Martin,” he said. “Martin Briscoe.”

Drew took a step closer, then realized the fence negated any need for a handshake. The dog growled at Drew, then growled at Briscoe, then went back into its yapping fit.

“So if you wanted to talk to me, Mr. Briscoe, why didn’t you just call?”

“Didn’t know where to find you—but the people I’m staying with gave me this,” He held up a copy of Drew’s fifteen minutes of fame, the newspaper already turning yellow at the edges. “I figured the best place to look would be the Newport Harbor track.”

“Why was it so important to find me?”

Briscoe didn’t answer. Instead he studied Drew for a moment— and in that moment, Drew thought he recognized something in his face. A sensation that bordered on deja vu.

“You were close to Michael, weren’t you? Like brothers, I mean. I always felt Michael needed a brother. He was always such a loner.”

“Not the Michael I knew.”

“I always felt that Michael was profoundly special. I just never realized how special. I wish I could have been there to see him part the skies.”

“So you believe all those stories?” said Drew.

“Why shouldn’t I believe them? They’re true aren’t they?”

Drew chose to neither confirm nor deny the things that Michael and the rest of the Shards were capable of. The less he spoke of Mi­chael, the less painful the memory of his last moments with him, and the more distant that image of Michael and Tory looking back at him from the dying dam. Even with all of their power, they had been powerless to save themselves.

The wind blew again, drawing gooseflesh beneath Drew’s sweaty shirt, and he longed for the relaxing release of a shower. Again a vague sense of this man’s familiarity set him on edge. Perhaps he had been in one of the pictures in Michael’s house. Regardless, it dragged him back to the reality that he was talking to a man he did not know through a chain link fence. Whether or not Briscoe found that awk­ward, Drew and the dog certainly did.

“Is there something I can do for you, Mr. Briscoe?”

“Jimmy moved,” Martin answered. “I showed up at his door, and the place was empty.”

“Jimmy?”

“Michael’s father. No one seems to know where he went.”

Drew had never heard anyone call James Lipranski “Jimmy.” But then, two years in Newport Beach was just a small fraction of the man’s life. “He’s renting a townhouse in Costa Mesa,” Drew told him. “215 Placentia. You need directions?”

“Thanks, but I think I can find it.”

“I’m sure he’ll be glad to see you. No one came to the funeral from back east. Not even Michael’s mother.”

“I doubt Jimmy even called her.” Briscoe lifted his baseball cap to reveal a thinning head of hair on a scaly scalp, that was irritated and red. Briscoe dug his nails in and scratched vigorously, dislodging flakes, and making the irritation worse. “Funny thing,” he said. “I stopped by the cemetery to pay my respects, but I couldn’t find Michael’s grave.”

“Ask his father.” Drew suggested. “Maybe he’ll take you there.”

Martin nodded a polite thank you, and Drew left to hit the showers.

He put Martin Briscoe out of his mind until much later that night, when the news chanced to report on a stolen Chihuahua found hang­ing by its leash in a eucalyptus grove.

The bible in the stolen Taurus said it was placed there by the Gideons. This was, of course, untrue. Not the fault of the bible, which had neither motive nor capacity to lie, but the fault of Martin Briscoe, whose scriptural void had been easily filled upon checking out of the Marriott.

Somewhere in his Gideon bible, toward the middle of Exodus, it said, “Thou shalt not steal.” But such moral ballast had no place in the ship he now sailed. He sailed higher waters now, and was, by divine appointment, above the law.

Still there was a vestige of ambivalence within him. A conflict that kept bringing his hand to his head to scratch his flaking scalp, giving himself over to the compulsion—as if his fingertips could reach right through his skull, and into the convolutions of his cortex, digging out all the brain-jam he imagined had collected in there; a gelatinous waste product of too much thinking, and feeling.

He wondered how the three Heavenly Hosts that had visited him felt about the mental bilge that clogged his brain, seeping into his every action. They certainly did have a window into his mind—he could feel that, too. There was a membrane in the midst of his thoughts, stretched thin as parchment and clear as glass, through which the hosts observed from a telescopic distance. He had spoken to them occasion­ally, after the grand satori of purpose they bestowed on him in the ruins of his dental office. He would call on them now and again, asking them for advice as to how to proceed, but they never answered. They stayed at the other end of their tunnel. “We must not deliver ourselves into your world,” they had told him. “Not until you have completed your task.” So for now they sat as silent voyeurs of his mind, and he could feel both their intimate presence, as well as their distance. It made him want to scratch his head all the more.

The oldies station he had tuned in played a queue of feel-good sixties standards. Marty sang along with the derivative voices of the Association, getting only about half the words of “Windy” right.

He continued unhurriedly down Pacific Coast Highway, relishing the clean-air innocence of the song. It was ten o’clock—still a bit too early to begin his evening’s work, so he drove back and forth through Corona del Mar—a Laguna Beach wannabe at the heel of Newport. On either side of him, the storefronts showed a string of coffee houses close together, uniformly bohemian. The only dim spot on the street was the Port movie theater, a dinosaur with boarded doors that had given up the ghost. Its unlit marquee read “Rosebud,” in mismatching letters.

After cruising back through Newport, and Corona one more time, he turned left, heading down narrow residential streets toward Corona Del Mar Memorial Park.

All considered, the day had gone well to this point. With the un­witting help of Drew Camden, he had located James Lipranski, and had gained access to his home with little difficulty. Long before actually finding him, Marty had decided it best to kill the man—and when he put the suggestion forth to the Heavenly Hosts, they predictably of­fered neither resistance, nor encouragement. Surely if “Thou shalt not kill” were a commandment they expected him to follow, they would have spoken up to prevent him from the act.

But when Lipranski opened the door, Marty found the man scarcely worthy of execution. The stench of bad scotch permeated the air around him, and he held a stance Marty himself had grown familiar with; a hand high on the door jam to keep one’s feet in place, and stop the world from spinning. Not at all what Marty had expected from the man who spawned Michael Lipranski, Perverter of Nature.

“Yeah, what do you want?” he had said to Marty, who could only gawk. He had worked out an elaborate scheme for getting in—some­thing involving the neighborhood newcomers club, and a new key to the association pool, but his words left him. So instead, he picked up a stone the good lord had provided in the flowerbed beside the front door, and smashed Lipranski over the head with it. It was inelegant, and in full view of the neighborhood, but no one was watching, and Lipranski’s reflexes were far too slow to fend off the unexpected blow. He fell backward into the house and ceased to be an inconvenience. Once the door was closed, Marty once more tried to impel himself to kill the man, but shied away at the last moment. He consoled himself by realizing that homicide was an acquired taste, and his palate was not quite ready for it.

Very few boxes had been unpacked in the house, although the man must have been living here for several weeks. An exuberant voice from the living room called out a hearty “good-bye,” making Marty jump, but it was only AOL timing its connection out. It seemed Lip­ranski had wearied of the real world, and was injecting himself into the Internet. Marty could extrapolate Lipranski’s life; chat rooms filled with anonymous pretenders. A virtual masquerade party, and side trips to higher voltage stimulation.

Marty found what he was looking for right there on the dining table, as if it had been set out as a buffet for him. Photo albums lay open amidst legal documents and other paperwork. Birth certificate, certificate of death, newspaper clippings . . . and those wonderful mor­tuary bills. It was as if Lipranski was putting together a lugubrious memory book of his son’s life and death. Near the computer, the edge of a newspaper article stuck out from beneath a scanner that was turned on. This wasn’t for a memory book, Marty realized, but for a website; an on-line shrine to Lipranski’s preternatural son. The thought so re­pulsed Marty that after collecting the mortuary papers, he gave the unconscious man a swift kick to the ribs. Then, as an afterthought, stole the computer and scanner, realizing that it would not only ruin Lipranski’s plans, but would veil the real motive of Marty’s visit be­neath the robbery. By the time Lipranski came to, he would be too busy dealing with the theft of the computer to notice the missing mortuary documents.

But this next part—this was the meat of his task, and although his hallowed taskmasters most certainly had their noses pressed to the pane of his mind, they remained silent, offering him no encouragement to ease his way into this indelicate duty.

He picked up the Gideon bible and randomly flipped it open, hoping to find some passage that might sandbag his will against the fear raging within him. Fear of what, he wondered? Dead was dead, and Michael Lipranski had been so long exposed to the elements that there would have been little left to bury. A shredded sack of bones. Nothing frightening there.

But what if he was more than a sack of bones? What if he was down there, lying in wait like a vampire? After all, he was a Star Shard—who knew what their flesh was capable of? What if, when he opened the casket, Michael’s eyes were open and aware?

His finger fell in Proverbs, chapter ten, verse eight: The wise in heart will receive commandments: but a prating fool shall fall. Humility not being one of his stronger points, Marty was certain on which side of the line he fell, and the knowledge motivated him to step from the stolen Taurus, taking the shovel from the back seat.

When he found the plot, as shown on Lipranski’s paperwork, Marty felt certain something must be wrong, because the unmarked grave showed no sign of being new. He began digging. The roots of the ivy turned out to be soft, and had done much of the job for him, having broken up the loosely compacted soil so that the first few feet was like digging through an earthen meringue. If nothing else the silent seraphim in his mind were stacking the odds in his favor. And so he hummed some golden oldies to pass the time as he dipped deeper and deeper into the grave, each shovel stroke another moment closer to exhumation, and the irrevocable destruction of Michael Lipranski’s remains.

Even from his grave, Michael was curving space around himself, pulling Drew Camden into an orbit that spiraled inexorably toward its center. As Drew climbed the cemetery fence, he could hear the bang of a shovel, which had hit wood, doubled by its echo from the mon­olithic mausoleum wall at the top of the hill, glowing a black-light sapphire in the moonlight. Briscoe had already reached the casket—but the fact that Drew could hear the shovel at all meant that he wasn’t too late.

Drew now knew where he had seen Briscoe before. It had come to him even before he found James Lipranski in his home, icing the blow to his head. Briscoe had been one of a thousand followers who had worshiped the Shards, from the grounds of Hearst Castle all the way to Black Canyon. He must have stood there at the rim as the dam burst, and the four hundred were taken under. Drew didn’t even want to guess at what had brought him to this.

Drew ran up the hill, keeping to the grass at the edge of the narrow cemetery aisles to silence his footfalls, until he could clearly see the double mound of grave tailings, between which Martin Briscoe’s head bobbed as he dug, grunting with each thrust of the shovel. Ten feet away, Drew pulled the gun from his jacket pocket, and didn’t speak until it was trained on Briscoe’s psoriatic head.

“Not exactly walking the dog, are you Mr. Briscoe?”

Briscoe gasped and stumbled, his feet bo-jangling a soft shoe on the casket until he regained his balance. Out of breath from digging, he said nothing, he just wheezed as he stared down the barrel of the pistol.

“I’m not sure Michael would appreciate you dancing on his grave,” Drew said.

“You’ll get out of here, if you know what’s good for you,” Briscoe said, then returned to digging, as if the gun meant nothing to him.

Drew took a few steps closer, never dropping his guard. Although the grave was dark, his eyes had adjusted to the light of the gibbous moon. Briscoe had unearthed the dark oak dome of the casket, and was working his way down to the latch.

“There aren’t many things that would get me to kill someone,” Drew said, “but robbing my best friend’s grave definitely makes the A list.”

Briscoe rested again, sweat showering from his forehead, his breath coming in rapid gusts. Good, thought Drew. Let the bastard have a heart attack and get this over with.

“You can’t kill me,” Briscoe said with such dismissal in his voice, it made Drew grip his pistol even harder. “I’m here on higher business than you could ever imagine, so get your queer ass out of here now, before you become a permanent resident of this cemetery.”

“You have to the count of three to drop the shovel, and climb out,” Drew said, but Briscoe completely ignored him.

“One . . .”

The shovel threw a splatter of dirt on his running shoes.

“Two . . .”

This was a poker game, Drew knew, from which he could not fold—and he realized with great alarm that he would be forced to show his cards.

“Three.”

He did not fire. Briscoe hesitated for a moment, to see exactly how Drew’s hand played out. And then Briscoe grinned.

“That’s a starter pistol isn’t it?”

Drew screamed in rage. If it had been a real gun, he would have used it, then used the man’s own shovel to bury him. Drew leapt into the grave, dropping the starter pistol, and prepared to tear the man apart with his bare hands if he had to. The grave was an uneven, constricting space, and there was little chance to dodge the punches Drew threw. Drew connected a powerful punch to Briscoe’s gut, then to his chin, then to his gut again, until they both lost their balance and they fell to wrestling on top of Michael’s coffin.

Drew slipped on the curved varnished dome of the coffin lid, giv­ing Briscoe the upper hand, and Briscoe pressed Drew against the earthen wall of the grave. Drew reeled at the smell of his rancid breath.

“Twice the fun,” said Briscoe. “I get to kill you, and destroy Mi­chael’s remains all in one day!” That motivated Drew to hurl him off, and swing a punch so strong it would have shattered Briscoe’s jaw if it had connected, but Briscoe pulled back at the last instant, the punch only grazed his chin, and the momentum torqued Drew too far around. His feet flew out from under him, and he came down hard, jarring loose a mudslide that covered his legs.

Briscoe stood above him and grabbed the shovel.

“The news article said you broke a collar bone last year. Fifty percent chance I break the same one.” He plunged the shovel down, and Drew raised his arm to block the blow. The shovel cut a deep gash in his forearm. He screamed as Briscoe drew the spade out. “I wonder how many blows it would take to slice off your head.”

As Briscoe raised the shovel, Drew freed one of his legs from the mud, and prayed that all of his running had left his muscles strong enough to do the job. He kicked out his leg, catching Briscoe’s ankles, and it knocked Briscoe down to his knees—but he didn’t let go of the shovel. Scrambling, Drew found the starter pistol in the dirt beside him. Briscoe pulled the shovel back, ready to swing it like a scythe, so Drew lunged up, jammed the starter pistol into Briscoe’s right eye, and pulled the trigger.

The blast, muffled by the flesh of Briscoe’s eye socket, sounded like little more than the crack of a child’s cap gun.

Briscoe screamed, and the shovel fell from his hands. Although it was too dark to see whether his eye was covered with blood or dirt, Drew could smell the singed flesh. There was no telling how much damage the starter blank had caused, but it was enough to rob Briscoe of his “higher purpose,” and send him scrambling out of the grave. He ran down the hill, wailing in agony, leaving behind his shovel and a backpack.

By the time Drew had pulled himself out from under the mud, Briscoe was scaling the cemetery fence. There was no chance of catch­ing him, and even if he did, Drew’s arm was hurting far too much to be able to apprehend Briscoe.

Drew heard a window slide open somewhere up above in the upscale neighborhood of Spyglass Hill, and a man poked his head out like a cuckoo clock, a minute too slow. “Get out of here you hood­lums, before I call the cops!” Then the cuckoo popped back into his hole, and the window slid shut.

Sitting back down in the grave, Drew took off his jacket and pressed it against his bleeding arm, until the sharp pain resolved into a slow, throbbing ache. Then, with his good hand, he began to brush the dirt off the coffin lid. Whatever Briscoe’s particular brand of lunacy, he would not be easily discouraged—and who knew how many more lunatics were out there with similar intent. Drew had to keep faith that Dillon, wherever he was, would show his face again, and call Michael back to the living. But that couldn’t happen if Michael’s body fell victim to vandals. It had to be protected. So Drew dug out enough of the coffin to free the hinges, and took a good long moment to prepare himself.

“Man, Michael—the things I do for you . . .” Then he closed his eyes and heaved open the lid.

10. Turning Tricks

Some time after midnight, Winston stood in a plush Bel Air bedroom. The aging actress watched him from across the room apprehensively.

“Is there anything special I should do?” she asked.

“No,” said Winston, flatly. “Just take off the leg.”

The woman sat down on the edge of the bed, pulled up the hem of her dress, and unstrapped her prosthesis. She gave Winston a reticent glance, then placed the leg on the bed.

“Okay,” said Winston. “Now close your eyes, and relax.”

She closed her eyes, taking a few deep breaths. Winston ap­proached and knelt before her, lifting her dress a bit higher, until he could get a full view of the stump of her left leg. His proximity to it was already bringing forth change, the scars beginning to stretch.

“It tingles,” the actress said.

Winston traced the line of scars with his fingertip, then began to massage the leg with both hands.

Winston hated that he had to do this. Not only did it expose his identity, but it demeaned him as well. If he had to use his talent, it should have been administered for free, but with no money left, he had little choice than to treat it as a commodity. Michael had done it when he was alive, Winston figured, so why couldn’t he?

For the past few weeks, Winston had been vamping. Every hour of every day since swimming from Lourdes’s ship had been an anxious, directionless stall. It was too dangerous to go home, and if he stayed in any one place for long, the conspicuous growth around him brought too much suspicion. So he wandered, watching the money dwindle, knowing he’d have to start turning these little tricks to get by.

Winston’s beeper went off and he flinched, not expecting it.

“Your next customer?” the actress asked.

“Shh,” he said. “Keep your eyes closed.” It was, in fact, the first time his beeper had ever gone off, since so few people had the number. He had bought it almost a year ago, so that one person could get in touch with him. Dillon.

He ran his hands down the woman’s new knee, deeply massaging her calf, and flexing her ankle. Her foot was still in the process of regenesis. He massaged the emergent tarsals, until the five nubs elon­gated into toes.

“All better now,” he said, standing up.

The woman looked down, and gasped. In a moment she was up, testing her new leg, walking on it, bursting into tears.

Winston quickly reached into his pocket, pulled out the pager, and read the alpha-numeric message.

Come ASAP 483 Mill Road, Lake Arrowhead.

And the message was signed “D. C.”

Dillon! Winston’s heart skipped a beat, and he began to calculate the fastest path from Bel Air to the mountain community of Lake Arrowhead, a two-hour journey, at least.

The woman was now absorbed in ballet moves, watching herself in a full-length mirror. “I don’t know how to thank you,” she said.

“I do.” Winston approached her, and handed her a slip of paper that contained a bank account number.

“Whatever you feel it was worth, deposit in this account,” he said. “And when people ask, don’t tell them anything.” Then Winston showed himself out.

At dawn, Winston drove past the Lake Arrowhead address three times before finding it. The deteriorating cabin just off the hillside road was hidden behind a gauntlet of overgrown pines, and appeared as unloved as a place could be, except for the fact that a shiny red SUV sat in the driveway.

It only took a moment for Winston to make the connection— something he should have considered from the moment he received the page—but he had so wanted it to be a message from Dillon, that he neglected to consider that the initials D.C. could belong to more than one person.

Winston knocked on a door painted a deep rustic blue, and peeling like eucalyptus bark. When he received no answer, he knocked again. This time a very tired voice beckoned from within. “Come in. The door’s open.”

Winston slowly pushed open the door to reveal a figure sitting in the gray shadows of the cabin. He couldn’t see the face, but he knew who it was. Drew Camden sat lazily in a rocking chair, his feet up on a coffee table, gently pushing himself back and forth.

“Welcome to my humble commode,” said Drew.

Winston stepped closer, his eyes beginning to adjust to the dawn yawning through the dusty windows. He tried a light switch, to no success.

“Don’t bother,” said Drew. “My parents haven’t paid the electric bill on this place for years. I think they’ve forgotten they own it.”

What Winston had first taken to be a coffee table in front of Drew was actually a foot-locker, strangely out of place in the faded country furnishing of the cottage.

“Three and a half hours,” said Drew. “Wherever you were, you made good time.”

The casual laziness to Drew’s voice was markedly off, and there was a bloody dressing encircling his left forearm.

“Twenty-three stitches. I told my parents I ran into a gate while jogging. The simplest lies are the best.”

On the edge of the foot-locker sat an orange vial of pills. Winston reached for it, but it was too dark to read the label.

“Vicodin,” volunteered Drew. “Takes away the pain and a whole lot more.”

“How many of these did you take, Drew?”

“Oh . . . more than I should have, but not enough to kill me.” He took a glance at the foot locker. “Can’t numb everything, though.”

Looking at Drew made his own arm hurt. Winston rolled his neck, and rubbed his eyes. The looming dawn was no friend to Winston today. Not when he hadn’t slept for almost two days.

“You paged me, Drew, and I came. Would you mind telling me why I’m here?”

Drew looked away for a moment, then angled his eyes toward Winston again. “I want to talk about my mother.”

Winston sighed. “I’m not your therapist.”

“My mother began packing things away in our house last week,” Drew said, ignoring him. “First it was just old clothes, but once she got started, it was like she couldn’t stop. She boxed clothes we still wore, kitchen utensils, plates, crystal. I come home from school, and half the house is neatly packed away in boxes. ‘What’s the matter, Ma,’ I say. ‘Are we moving?’ ‘No’ she says, sitting at the table, drinking coffee, ‘just getting our affairs in order.’ She doesn’t know why she’s getting her affairs in order. She just is. Like the way my father cleaned out a year’s worth of crap in his downstairs office. Getting his affairs in order.”

Winston sighed. This was nothing new. It was no more strange than the millions of other people sensing an end to the comfortable paved roads of their lives; a coming evil they dared not consider in their conscious life.

“What do you want me to tell you, Drew?”

“I want you to tell me what the hell is going on. Why is everyone suddenly acting like someone just canceled our lease on the planet? And what is Dillon doing about it? He’s the one who holds things together isn’t he? ‘The King of Cohesion.’ Isn’t that’s why he’s here? Isn’t that why you’re all here? Or are you just going to watch as every­thing turns to shit?”

“Hey, I’ve got my own troubles, so if you called just to bitch at me, you can take your attitude and shove it up your ass.”

Drew smiled a slow, sedated grin. “Looks like we’ve both earned bitching privileges these past few days.” Drew took a deep breath, pumping enough oxygen to his brain to sober him. “Sit down. There’s things we’ve got to talk about. Important things.”

Winston crossed his arms. “I’m listening.”

“Trust me,” said Drew. “You’re going to want to sit down.”

Reluctantly Winston pulled up a musty high-backed chair, and took a seat across from Drew. The cushion stank of mildew.

“Ever hear of someone named Vicki Sanders?”

Winston shook his head. “Should I have?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” Drew reached beside him, picked up a backpack, and tossed it to Winston. “Take a look.”

Winston peered into the pack before reaching inside, as if whatever it held might bite. Inside he found some paperwork from a funeral home, a plot plan of a grave yard, and a red bible with a gold Gideon stamp.

“Stealing a hotel bible, Drew? That’s low.”

“It’s not mine. Check the inside cover.”

Winston opened it to find that someone had used the watermark as a note pad, filling it with various phone numbers, and doodles. The only name on the page was that of Vicki Sanders, but there was no phone number beside the name.

“The blueprints are of Corona Del Mar Memorial Park.” Drew said. “The circled grave belongs to Michael. And this backpack be­longed to the man who tried to rob his grave.”

Winston snapped his eyes up from the backpack in surprise, but it quickly resolved into resignation.

“Reason enough for the bat signal?”

Winston flipped through the bible, but found no other marks be­yond the ones on the inside cover. “Who was he?”

“His name is Martin Briscoe, and he’s pretty damn self-important. Even more self-important than you. He said he was on some kind of mission. Now do you want to hear the creepy part?”

Winston wondered if there was any part of this story that wasn’t creepy. “Sure, why not.”

“He said he had to destroy Michael’s remains.”

The morning sun did nothing to carry away the chill of the news. Even in death could there be no rest for them?

“He jammed his shovel into my arm, and I shot him in the eye with a blank,” Drew said. “I’ll survive, but unfortunately so will he.”

Winston stood and began to pace the dusty floor. “Do you know where he came from? Was he from some cult?” If one person found Michael’s grave, Winston knew others would, too. There were cults and crazies out there, more now than ever before. He remembered stories of how people regularly pried open the crypts of every celebrity from Marilyn Monroe to Elvis until their bodies had to be moved to protect them from their own legend. And now there was a man out there hell bent on destroying Michael’s remains. In a world where logic was diffracting out of focus, why should Winston expect this man’s actions to make sense . . . except for the fact that they did. Be­cause destroying Michael’s remains was not the senseless act it seemed. It was a surgical strike against the Shards; there had to be a body for a resurrection. “Destroying Michael’s remains is the only way to make sure Dillon can never bring him back.”

Drew nodded. “Somebody big doesn’t like you guys a whole lot.”

Winston shuddered at the thought. Somebody big? How big? “If there’s someone who wants to make sure Dillon doesn’t bring Michael back . . . maybe there’s a reason why Dillon should bring him back.”

“Whatever else you might have been,” Drew said. “You guys were a truly fearsome fivesome.”

It was true. Even with their formidable powers, the shards had always been stronger when they were together. Even with Deanna gone, Winston, Dillon, Tory, Michael and Lourdes had been far greater together. “Whoever’s doing this wants to make sure that we’re never together again. Never whole—never complete.”

And all at once it occurred to Winston that this grave robber could be the man in the lavender chair, who invaded his dreams. The man who prepared the way for the faceless three. The more he considered it, the more certain he was. “Michael can’t be left there unprotected.”

“I’m way ahead of you,” Drew told him, as he rocked gently back and forth, his feet on the edge of the footlocker. “Michael’s safe,” Drew said. “He’s among friends . . .”

When it hit Winston just what Drew was saying, it hit him hard. He hadn’t eaten much over the past twenty four hours, but now his late night burger and fries came surging toward daylight.

Drew had robbed Michael’s grave to prevent someone else from doing it first, and now sat sentinel beside his friend’s body. Michael was in the footlocker. God! No wonder Drew had tried to numb himself senseless with painkillers.

Winston fell to his knees, turned away, and retched onto the floor.

Damn you Dillon, where are you? If ever there was a time Dillon needed to be here, now was that time.

“Don’t worry about cleaning up,” Drew said in that even, Vicodin-buffered voice. “The carpet’s history anyway.”

When Winston had recovered, he approached Drew, trying to keep the footlocker in his blind spot; then he gently touched Drew’s wounded arm. “I can’t heal it for you, but this should do something.”

Drew nodded. “I had lost some sensation in my fingertips. I just found it again. Thanks.”

“Nerve tissue regeneration,” said Winston. “No biggie.” Winston picked up the bible, and looked at the notes scribbled across the wa­termark.

“I’ve tried the phone numbers in a dozen different area codes.” Drew told him. “I got a dry-cleaner in San Diego, a nursing home in East LA, and that’s about it. Nothing that seems related.”

“And Vicki Sanders?”

“I’ve found about a dozen of them on the Internet.”

“Then we’ll track down every one, until we find the one who can tell us what’s going on.” Winston forced himself to look at the foot-locker resting ominously inert in the center of the room. Someone was fighting a guerilla war against them, but it was time to fight back. And if anyone were going to touch Michael’s body, they’d have to go through Winston to do it.

11. Part of two

Sharks. Maddy Haas could not stop thinking about sharks. How the big ones would lose their stability, listing drunkenly in the largest of tanks, not knowing up from down, until they finally died. Hammerheads, Great Whites, Tiger sharks—none of them could survive in captivity.

“Shoop. Tomatoshoop.”

Dillon’s stupor was drug-induced, but like those sharks, it was an awful thing to behold. A being of such awe and majesty so suppressed as to choke on his own senses.

“Howstheshoop. Schloop. Sloop John B . . .”

An octopus in a tank, Maddie recalled, could squeeze itself through a hole in the glass an eighth of an inch wide, and die on the floor rather than be held in an aquarium.

" ‘So hoisht up the John B’s shails, shee how the blah blah blah. Call fr the cap’n ashore n’lemme go home . . .’ "

She hated Bussard for doing this to Dillon, and hated the fact that she was also a party to it.

She tasted the soup, which was saltier than the Dead Sea. Appar­ently Dillon’s blood pressure was not of concern to Bussard. Maddy dipped in the spoon and blew on it to cool it down for Dillon, who sat before her, immobilized in his chair.

Maddie looked around Dillon’s cubical cell, as he continued to sing, his volume slipping in and out like a radio with a bad tuner, Bussard had told her there were only a handful of people with the security clearance to be in there, and she wondered what on earth made Bussard trust her enough to be one of those people. Then it occurred to her, it wasn’t how much he trusted her, it was how little he trusted everyone else.

In her three weeks of meals with Dillon—especially those days before they began to drug him, she had learned from Dillon firsthand what he had been through, and who he truly was. The man beneath the myth, more boy than man. He was not, as Bussard had suggested, secretive about himself, or his motives. It was the fact that he was so forthcoming that made Bussard suspicious, and he continued to scru­tinize the tapes of her meals with Dillon.

“Are you afraid of me, Maddy?” Dillon had asked her early on, when her hands still shook while feeding him. And since he could read the pattern of a lie, she had told him the truth. Yes, she was. When she had first arrived at the plant—and first came to know who they had trussed up in this place, she had been frightened of his eyes, in­vasive by nature. They seemed uncontained by the mask. His presence had been—still was—a tidal wave before her; a wall of looming force from which there was no hiding. No wonder he was worshiped. No wonder he was feared. Yet although the sensation of his power hadn’t diminished, it was a feeling she had come to enjoy. If he asked her now whether or not she feared him, she’d have to tell him that she wasn’t really sure.

" ‘Let me go home . . . I wanna go home . . . I feel so broke up I wanna go home.’ "

By the last line of the verse he was actually hitting some of the notes, and the slurred words were beginning to coalesce into English.

“My Dad always sung that to me.” Dillon said. “That was before I killed him.”

He was fishing for a word of comfort. He wanted Maddy to remind him what he well knew—that his parents had been accidental victims of Dillon’s emergent powers, before Dillon had understood the power he had. It was like this at the beginning of each meal now. In grand, sedated melodrama, he would make vague but sweeping claims of guilt, and she would assuage them. It was already an old dance, and this time she wasn’t getting on the floor.

“Feeling sorry for yourself again?” Maddy raised the spoonful of soup to the small mouth slit in his mask, “Feel sorry for me—I have to listen to you.” He slurped the soup in, and spat it right back out.

“MSG,” he said. “Stuff’ll kill ya.”

Maddy calmly blotted the spots of soup from her uniform, feeling a new blossom in her anger toward Bussard. Dillon picked up on her anger, but was still too loopy to seize its direction.

“I’m sorry for being horrible, Maddy. It’s those shots. They make me horrible.”

Maddy wiped the orange spittle dripping from the mouth hole in the mask. “Nonsense. You’re beautiful when you’re sedated.”

“You’re beautiful when I’m sedated, too.”

Maddy smiled. “I may have to eat your dessert for that one.”

Dillon snickered behind his mask, and took a few moments to take deep breaths. Good, thought Maddy, he’s working his way out of the fog. She took the time to eat some of her own meal, then began to cut Dillon’s meat for him. When he had eaten alone in his room, he had been free from his chair, and could eat with his own hands. Yet he didn’t complain about this new arrangement.

“The shots keep getting bigger every time they take me out,” he said. “Problem is I metabolize the stuff so fast, they gotta give me elephant doses. Can’t be healthy.”

Maddy speared a potato scallop, and lifted it toward his mask. “Open wide. I can’t see your mouth through the hole.”

She slipped it through the hole, and his tongue took it the rest of the way. “I feel like a slot machine.”

Maddy laughed. “If you were a slot machine, I might get some­thing back.”

“Naah,” Dillon said. “Suckers’ game.”

“Not with you around,” Maddy noted. “Everyone knows how you shut down Las Vegas.”

Although Dillon’s arms were banded to the chair, there was some range of motion to his hands. Now he clenched them until his knuckles turned white. The influence of his presence in Vegas had altered the odds of every game—it had taken months for simple randomness to return. Even now there were pockets where the laws of probability were still in remission. “Stale house zones,” the casinos called them, and moved their gaming tables far, far away.

“To hell with Las Vegas,” Dillon said. “The slot machines all come up triple sevens, and a million people think it’s something biblical.”

“Is it?” Maddy found herself truly interested in his response.

“How should I know? If the wheels had sixes instead of sevens, they would say I was the Antichrist.”

Maddie smiled. “Haven’t you heard? You are.”

Dillon sighed. “Yeah, I’ve heard that one, too. So how about some more red meat for Satan’s spawn?”

She swabbed a piece of meat in some A-1 and fed it to him. Maddy knew this would be a line of conversation Bussard would be interested in. She could almost feel him slithering like a snake in the wire that ran through her uniform. She could feel his eye in the tip of her buttonhole video camera. At first there had been a strong sense of betrayal each time she stepped in to dine with Dillon, but she suspected that he was aware of the camera, and that he understood her unwilling complicity with Bussard. His knowledge would make it alright—be­cause then it would be a game the two of them were playing against Bussard.

Their ice cream had melted by the time they got to it, but rather than forming a puddle in their bowls, it held the shape of the scoop. Just one more little reminder that Dillon’s sphere of influence was ever present. Even molten ice cream stood at attention for Dillon, refusing to give in to entropy.

It was now, after Dillon had completely regained his faculties, that his hands began to tremble in a subtle full-body shiver. Maddy knew it wasn’t from the ice cream.

“Something out there?” she asked.

“There’s always something out there,” he told her. He took a few deep breaths and kept his panic suppressed. “It’s not so bad while I’m in here—but it doesn’t go away completely until they seal that door.”

Maddy didn’t pretend to understand what Dillon was sensing. Whatever it was, it was bad enough to send him into convulsions every time they wheeled him out of the room. But rather than seeking the source of the seizures, Bussard had chosen to just shut them down, knocking Dillon out whenever they took him from his cell. Apparently consciousness was not a necessary factor in his “therapy sessions.”

Dillon took a deep breath and moved his fingers, pumping his fists open and closed.

“Make Bussard understand, Maddy. Make him understand that he can’t keep me here.” Any sluggishness had completely drained from his voice, the last of the tranquilizers already gone from his system. “You don’t know what will happen if I stay.”

“Death and destruction,” she said. “No one preaches doom better than you.”

“But you don’t know. I’ve seen hundreds of people whose bodies lived while their souls digested in the belly of a creature I’m still afraid to think about. Destruction doesn’t begin to describe it. . . and now I know there are worse things than death.”

Maddy suppressed her own shiver, and forced herself to look at the unexpressive mask that didn’t quite hide his intensity. “If things are as bad as you say out there, why do you want to be in the middle of it?”

“Even a losing battle has to be fought.”

“But you don’t even know what you’re fighting.”

“I will know. I’ll know once I’m out there.”

A moment of silence, and Maddy found herself looking away, shift­ing her attention to the vanilla simplicity of her ice cream. There was no sense even considering the thought of his freedom. She certainly couldn’t set him free, and suggesting as much to Bussard would be tantamount to suicide. And yet, as much as she wanted to see him free, she had to admit there was a side of her that wanted him trapped here. There was something incredibly heady about being Dillon Cole’s sole link to the outside world. There was a sense of significance that nothing in her life could match. The best way to ensure her position was to do her job, and continue to solicit Dillon’s trust. As long as her per­formance was exemplary, and Bussard had no reason to doubt her allegiance, her tenure was intact.

She wondered how much of this Dillon had figured out through the intonations of her voice, and her body language. The eye-slits in his mask had been made so narrow to keep him from perceiving any­thing in the people he had contact with. Although it slowed him down, he was still able to discern quite a lot through his little peep holes; a thousand things about her, that, in a moment, became a thousand and one.

“It’s your birthday!” he said, pulling the fact right out of thin air. “Why didn’t you tell me it was your birthday?”

She sighed. “And how did you know that?”

“Easy,” Dillon said. “The way you moved your spoon through the ice cream—like you were the reluctant center of the room’s attention. The way you noticed the wrinkles on your knuckles. The way your breath is just a few cubic centimeters deeper each time you cast your eyes down to the table, like some funky old body memory of blowing out candles when you were a kid.”

Maddy shook her head. Of all of Dillon’s gifts, she was most im­pressed by his ability to divine truths in the patterns of minutiae. “Birthdays don’t mean much to me,” she said.

“Still I’d like to give you a present.”

Maddy grinned, nervously. “The slot machine’s finally going to pay off?” She could see that hint of his eyes now; feel them reaching through the metallic squint of the mask, like an octopus willing itself through the breach of its tank. Maddy tried to resist that intrusive gaze, but found she could not. She had once commented to him that sitting before him was like playing a game of strip poker, where he held all the cards. But until now he had kept his hand to himself.

“I see a maze of mirrors when I look at you, Maddy. You’ve spent a lifetime raising the mirrors, confident that no one will get to the center. That no one will ever truly know you. You find lots of power in reflecting everyone away, don’t you?”

She tried to speak—to say anything to deflect his gaze, but he would not let her.

“Listen to me carefully Maddy,” he said . . .

“I know you. I know you down to the thoughts you tell no one.

I know you down to the dreams you can’t remember. I know you.”

She tried to speak, to make light of his words, but found she couldn’t. She could only slowly exhale, feeling the last vestments shielding her soul fall free.

“There. Happy Birthday, Maddy.”

She knew at once that he had begun some work in her, and she didn’t know how to accept that. He was uninvited, and yet welcome.

A few minutes later she wheeled the tray out and left him, trying to shield as best she could how deeply his words had touched her. But even Bussard was able to pick up on it.

“He’s getting to you, isn’t he?” Bussard asked when he next saw her, later that day.

“He’s a very powerful personality, sir.” Then she added, “All the more reason to keep him here.”

Appeased, Bussard congratulated her on what a fine job she was doing, and Maddy hoped to God he didn’t have a window to her soul the way Dillon did.

That night she went for her evening run to clear her mind, only to find that it was already clear—uncongested enough for her to ap­preciate all the sights and sounds of the run. All of her senses had been tuned to a more resonant idle.

“I know you,” Dillon had said. Three simple words—anyone else could have said them, and it would have meant absolutely nothing— but with no one else would it have been true. And until he spoke them, she had not realized how much she needed to be known.

Elon Tessic, however, was not yet prepared to be known. He was a complex man to be sure, but held no illusions about himself. Given enough time, he knew Dillon would decipher him as well. This is why Tessic made a point of making his visits to Dillon brief, and only moving into his line of sight when there was a specific point to it. In this way, Tessic held his own in Dillon’s poker game.

Bussard did not allow Tessic a moment alone with Dillon. This was alright, because although he didn’t have an ace to play against Dillon, he had several to play against Bussard.

A half mile from the plant’s outer gate, the bells above the door of Bobby’s Eat-N-Greet jangled their merry tune as Tessic entered. The waitress, who was jabbering with some locals in a far booth, didn’t notice, but Bobby did. He stiffened as he always did when he saw Tessic, but this time, he came practically bounding over the counter like a man half his age to greet him.

“Such enthusiasm,” Tessic said, “for the man who practically stole your prize recipe!”

“My granddaughter’s with her mother at Princeton, already look­ing for an apartment,” Bobby said. “I can’t tell you how much your generosity—"

Tessic put up his hand, cutting him off. “I was hardly generous. I payed you half of what I felt that recipe was worth to me, so there! You can now call me a stingy bastard.”

Bobby laughed. “If there’s ever anything I can do for you—any­thing at all . . .”

Tessic nodded, and put a hand on Bobby’s shoulder, leading him to the counter. “First a piece of pie,” he said. “Then we’ll talk about what you might do for me . . .”

Half an hour later, Tessic returned to the plant, his private summit meeting with the grateful restaurateur unobserved. Although Bussard had the guards keep track of Tessic’s comings and goings—his trips to the Eat-N-Greet never made the slightest blip on Bussard’s radar.

Maddy and Dillon had been talking about Lourdes, the only sur­viving Shard who was completely unaccounted for. “I don’t think things are right with her,” Dillon had told Maddy. “I can feel her out there, and it scares me.”

It was just the kind of thing Maddy would want to listen to—to help her understand the strange relationship Dillon had with these other powerful spirits, but she found her thoughts elsewhere. It had only been one day since her so-called birthday present. That night, for the first time in years, she had found her sleep untroubled, and woke with the enthusiasm of a child on her way to camp. The acuity of her thinking the night before had not been her imagination. Now her idle thoughts that had always seemed filtered and astigmatic had a clarity so pronounced she could almost hear herself think—and could almost see the images those thoughts evoked. She found herself hyper-focused to distraction. If this lucidity was Dillon’s gift to her, it would take some getting used to.

When Elon Tessic entered the room unannounced, it pulled her focus so completely the fork flew from her hand.

Although Dillon’s chair was facing the other way, he said, “That’s not Bussard.”

“Good afternoon.” Tessic sauntered in as if he owned the place, which wasn’t far from the truth.

“I’d smile for the camera,” Tessic said, “but unfortunately no one will see it. Some unforseen glitch in the system has left the control room picking up a local broadcast of I Love Lucy. That gives us several minutes of quality time until Bussard finds out and makes his way down here.”

Maddy looked down to the second button of her uniform, angling it up so she could see. It gave no indication that the camera hidden there was out, but then there was never any indication that it was on, either.

“I knew exactly where it was,” Dillon said. “Why Bussard needs a camera is beyond me; I don’t move.”

“He’d put a stone under surveillance if he thought it might crack,” she said. It occurred to Maddy that this was the first time— perhaps the only time—she’d be able to speak to Dillon out of Bussard’s sight . . . and with all her lucidity of mind, she had no idea what to say. So she just fed him another piece of pot roast.

Tessic came up behind Dillon, keeping out of his sight line.

“I’d invite you to join us, Elon, but there are no extra chairs,” Dillon said.

Maddy glanced at them both. “You’re on a first-name basis with the man who locked you in this chair?”

“I just built it, Lieutenant Haas, I didn’t apply it.” Tessic moved closer, putting a hand on the head of the metal monstrosity. “And besides, we are kindred spirits, Dillon and I. Oh, perhaps my voltage is not as high—but, like Dillon, I once believed I had a spark within me that could save the world—and now I find myself making weapons of war. Just like Dillon, I don’t know if my efforts will, in the end, destroy more than they will save.”

Maddy stood and strode to the threshold, glancing out into the containment dome. No one was coming. Good. No doubt the sharp­shooters were on their perches, but they had no authority to prevent Tessic from being here. The best they could do was report his presence to Bussard. “Do you plan to make something of this quality time, Mr. Tessic?” She asked. “Or is this just a social visit?”

Tessic only grinned, then ran his hand over the titanium ribs that curved across Dillon’s chest. “I’m really proud of this entire restraint system,” he said. “You see, given a minute or two Dillon can jiggle his way out of any lock, so I had to create a lock he could not break. It was quite a challenge—the first systems we developed proved useless. Then it came to me; it wasn’t a stronger lock we needed, but a key that was never the same twice!”

Tessic became animated as he explained his device, looking more and more like the wunderkind he had once been. “The electromag­netic lock on the chair is linked to the lock on the vault door, which in turn is controlled by a subcutaneous chip we’ve implanted behind Dillon’s ear. The chip changes the combination three times a second, based on randomized algorithms from Dillon’s own brain waves.” Tes­sic gave a broad smile. “It was the only way to create truly random numbers, because any normal randomizer would start spitting out chains of consecutive numbers in Dillon’s presence.”

Maddy glanced at Dillon, who said nothing. “Looks like you win the science fair,” she said.

“I always do.”

She wondered what Tessic cold possibly gain by further demor­alizing Dillon with the nuts and bolts of his cage. Then Tessic took a glance toward the open vault door, and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Of course the system’s not without its bugs—after all we never had a chance to test it, and daylight saving time never occurred to us.”

Now he had caught her interest, and although Dillon didn’t as much as flick a finger, she knew he had zeroed in on this as well. “Daylight saving?” Maddy said.

Tessic shook his head, and sighed. “Sadly, the locking mechanism has no protocol for dealing with the extra hour next Sunday. When its internal clock falls 60 minutes back, the vault door just stays stuck on that same electronic combination for the entire hour.” And then Tessic smiled. “You would think with all the money the government paid me, I wouldn’t make mistakes like that.”

Then came the sound of clattering on metal stairs, then the click of feet on concrete. “Bussard!” Maddy said, and took her seat across from Dillon.

Tessic leaned one arm on Dillon’s chair, and stood. “Yes, I’d rec­ognize that goose-step anywhere.”

Through all of this, Dillon hadn’t said a thing—but Maddy could see his eyes. They were full of hope, and focused on her.

Bussard hurried into the room, and double-took on Tessic. “What’s this all about?”

Tessic was so smooth, it assuaged the tension. “We were just dis­cussing television viewing habits.”

Bussard Looked from Tessic, to Dillon, and his gaze settled on Maddy for corroboration. “Lieutenant Haas?”

“It’s true, sir,” she told him, borrowing some of that semi-gloss that Tessic so smoothly painted on the situation. “Mr. Tessic wanted to know if there were any specific videos Dillon would like added to his library.”

“I asked for some Bond flicks,” Dillon added. “The Connery ones.”

Bussard judged the response, and accepted it with the same reluc­tance with which he accepted any unverified information. “I see. Lieu­tenant Haas, I’ll have to ask you to cut your meal short today. Elon, I need your help with a technical problem.”

Tessic was more than happy to comply. “Your problem is my problem, Dr. No.” He turned to Maddy. “Lieutenant, it’s been a pleas­ure, and Dillon, I look forward to our next encounter.”

As they made their way across the floor of the containment dome, Maddy considered what Tessic had said. To keep the information to herself would be an offense worthy of a court martial, or worse.

The sound of the slamming vault door peeled around the dome with the finality of a tomb. Having become so accustomed to Dillon’s presence, she could feel the absence of his powerful aura the moment the vault sealed. It was only a moment of void until her senses adjusted to a world without Dillon—but she found that void harder and harder to live with.

12. Dream lightning

The open clamshell of Dillon’s chair sat in the corner of his room. He always pushed it there after the vault door had closed, and the chair released him. Sometimes he threw a blanket over the chair, so that he didn’t have to look at it, but now he left it unveiled. He wanted to see it now, so that if his nerve began to fail him, he could look upon the chair’s waiting clamps, and know that death was a better alternative than lingering in this purgatory for one more day.

The TV played an old Bond film, delivered a week after it was requested. Goldfinger was being sucked through the shattered window of his private jet. Not a bad way to go, all else considered. Dillon watched the TV but was only passing time. It was midnight. Hesperia, Michigan had just rotated its way into Sunday, and in less than two hours, American time would hiccup itself back one hour. An end to daylight saving; the early tidings of winter.

Dillon lay on his bed, trying to focus his thoughts. He was no stranger to slim chances and narrow escapes, but now he had a sense that everything hinged on his actions over the next few hours. Not just his life, but the lives and futures of far more souls than he could ever hope to count. The many psychiatrists who had analyzed him would call him delusional, to think that his escape from this place was the fulcrum on which the world hinged. And he would agree with them; after all, a generic label of insanity made perfect logical sense. Except for the fact that it was wrong.

He tried to put his mind through a regimen of drills and contin­gencies for his escape. He was at a disadvantage, because he did not know the layout of the plant. All he knew was his cell, the cooling tower, and the corridors in between—none of which led to the out­side. Even what he did know was limited by the tunnel vision imposed on him by his chair’s unyielding face-plate.

He wondered if Elon Tessic truly believed he would escape, or was just curious. Perhaps the rich industrialist was taking wagers on Dillon’s escape.

As his thoughts often did in moments of stress, Dillon’s mind drifted to Deanna. She was the first of the other Shards he had met. They had been a duo, before they became part of a sextet.

Time had not made her death easier, and his love for her had not diminished in the two years since she died. He could still see her expressive Asian eyes. He could still see the sheen of her long black hair. Moonlight on water. He could still feel her dying in his arms. He had no pictures of her beyond these images he held in his mind.

They were fifteen, then—both too young and too damned screwed up to do anything but cling to one another, Dillon thriving on her intense fear of the world, and Deanna thriving on his anger and need for absolution. In the end she had purged herself of her serpent of terror, and had discovered her gift, even before Dillon discovered his.

Her gift had been faith. Nothing so tangible as Dillon’s gift of creation, or Lourdes’ gift of control. Nothing so utilitarian as Winston’s gift of growth, Tory’s cleansing aura or Michael’s control of nature. Deanna’s gift of faith was a simple bridge over fear, but she had died before she could cross that bridge and explore the ramifications.

“Lend me an ounce of your faith, Deanna,” Dillon would pray when fear and futility teamed to overwhelm him. “Just one ounce to get me through this.” He would pray with the intensity with which he had once prayed to God, before his fall from grace. And he prayed now that somehow he would find the faith to bridge the gap between his cell and the outside world.

The film ended. The TV timed itself off, and he was left in the dark to knit the seconds into the minutes for more than an hour, until 2:00 a.m. was finally upon him.

When his digital clock hit the hour, nothing seemed to change. The clock, of course, wouldn’t. Like most other clocks, it would need to be reset by hand. He reset the alarm clock back to 1:00, stalling. He listened, but there was nothing beyond the usual soundproofed silence of his cell, where any sound made was made by him. 1:02. He stood, flicked on the light by his bed, and stepped into the dead-end alcove, firmly plugged by the titanium vault door.

Hadn’t he broken into a vault once? One of many things he had done early on, when his powers of order and cohesion had first begun to emerge. It had been a game back then. But breaking into a vault was much different from breaking out of one—especially one as so­phisticated as this.

Tessic had said the combination changed three times a second, and with all of Dillon’s powers there was no hope of cracking a code that was in constant flux. But if Tessic was right, and the combination was now stuck in one place for a full hour, it leveled the playing field. Still, how could he access the locking mechanism from the inside?

He ran his fingers along the brushed metallic inside surface of the door. It was cold to the touch. He tapped on it with his fingers like a physician palpating a patient’s lungs. There was no echo at all, no resonance. This door was too solid to give anything back to him. He pressed his fingertips against the line of the door jamb that was so well sealed, there was barely a line at all. 1:16.

Damn it! What was he expecting himself to do? This wasn’t the physics of Hoover Dam, where he could zero in on a resonant fre­quency, and use it to rattle the thing apart. This alloy was too well tempered for that. By design it had no resonant frequency that could destabilize it.

Will this door be foiled by virtue of what I am . . . or by what I do?

He had an understanding of his power now—as much as a human mind could understand such things. His power was a dance between being and doing. His mere presence had a profound effect on the world around him, but he could also use his power like a tool, actually mold­ing it to his will. Opening a lock was a little bit of both. He could actively push his mind into the mechanism, and feel the pattern of movements that would open it, but more often than not, the lock would pop open even before he was finished, his presence greasing the mechanism into alignment. The military didn’t care about the things Dillon actively willed. His will was a variable. But his passive presence was a constant.

Combinations. Codes. Random numbers. A series of symbols.

Who knew how many numbers were in the combination? Even if he could focus his mind and divine each number in its proper order, what good would it do him on the inside?

1:28. He kicked the door in frustration, and succeeded only in stubbing his toe. He rubbed his toe through his sock, feeling the minutes tick away. In another half hour the combination would start changing again. Then what? More unconscious trips to the tower. More stilted, scrutinized meals with Maddy. He had seen in Maddy’s eyes that she wanted him to escape, even if she didn’t dare speak it. He didn’t want to see her eyes in the morning if he failed. He would be humiliated that he had not risen to Tessic’s challenge.

Random numbers . . . a string of random numbers . . .

But they weren’t really numbers at all, were they? Combination locks were mere mechanical devices; casters and bearings rolling within a preordained mechanical maze. The eye saw the numbers on the dial, but the lock saw only the movement of the maze as the dial turned. When Dillon picked such locks, he didn’t look at the numbers. He reached his mind into the mechanical maze, solving it from the inside out, and when the bolts sprung, he never looked to see what the combination had been.

This lock was very much the same—but the mechanical casters had been replaced by electronic ones; binary charges layered upon one another, negative and positive creating a digital encryption matrix. That meant that the solution could not be mechanical. No pushing or pulling, or stroking or tapping would bring the casters into position.

The solution has to be electrical.

When the answer came to him, he laughed aloud at its simplic­ity . . . but then why should simplicity surprise him? He had once cast a stone that begat an avalanche on the slopes of Lake Tahoe. He had whispered into a single ear, and detonated the sanity of an entire town. He had touched a spot of flesh, and seen the wave of healing spread out from a single point of contact. Perfect simplicity of action had always been the hallmark of his power; it only followed that his escape from an electronic prison could only begin with the simplest of elec­trical phenomena.

Dillon paced the room faster, moving his sock-feet along the dry carpet. Like much of the room, the carpet was plush for his comfort—a gilded cage for their golden boy.

He recalled how, when he was a child, his father had once amused him by rubbing a balloon against his shirt, and sticking it to the wall. His mother had a trick, too. She would take Dillon into the laundry room, and turn off the light, then pull the sheets from the dryer. They clung to one another, and as they pulled them apart, lightning would flash in the ripples of the linens. “Dream lightning,” his mother called it. “It fills the sheets and sparks your dreams.”

1:39. He shuffled his feet like a boxer, building the charge, then approached the vault door, slowly extending his index finger toward the jamb.

Open sesame.

Even before his finger touched the door, static sparked from his fingertip—a healthy shock—but he could feel that this was not a ran­dom static blast. It was controlled, and prolonged, as if the gap between his finger and the door was just another synapse, and the lock was simply another appendage to flex.

In that protracted instant he could actually feel the mechanism as a part of himself, the gears, the deadbolts—but more than that, he could feel the pattern of the digital combination within the shock pulsing through his fingertip. The sensation was automatic, but what he did with that sensation was an act of will. In the instant it took for the static to discharge from his finger, he shaped it to match the series of charges of the digital combination, and by the time his hand flinched back from the shock, the job had been done. The most sophisticated security system in the world had just been undone by a carpet shock.

The mechanism engaged, and the triplet of huge deadbolts began to pull back. An alarm sounded immediately, no doubt reaching to the far corners of the plant. In any normal plant, it would be the panic signal of a meltdown.

But the blare of the alarm was nothing compared to the blast of perception that flooded Dillon as the door began to swing its long arc to the open position. It was the same wave of awareness that sent him into convulsions when he had been confined to his chair. But now, instead of clogging his mind, it activated it—galvanizing him beyond a mere adrenaline rush, filling him with determination. If he could not have Deanna’s faith, he thought, at least he had the brute force of his will, and perhaps that would be enough. He peeled off his socks, and without even glancing back to say a final farewell to his cell, he squeezed through the widening slit of the opening door, and into the expanse of the containment dome.

With the alarm mounting into a ghastly echo in the great stone chamber, Dillon cut a jagged, serpentine path toward Corridor A— the only corridor he knew. His zigs and darts were perfectly choreo­graphed to defeat the efforts of the sharpshooters stationed on the cat­walks above. He heard the crack of one rifle, then another. Were they ordered to kill him, he wondered, or just to disable him? The bullets nicked the ground, setting off coughs of concrete dust just a few feet away. Then, as he lunged for the closed door of Corridor A, one of the shots hit the mark. It caught Dillon behind the right knee, and its exit blew his kneecap to shreds.

He collapsed in excruciating pain, and almost succumbed to it—but he told himself not to look, not to consider the damage, because the moment he did, it would be over. He could not give up—he would either escape, or die trying; there could be no in between. So he reached his hand up, and grabbed onto the knob of the locked door to Corridor A, hoping the sharpshooters would hesitate, seeing he was wounded. They would assess before firing again, and that moment of assessment would give Dillon the advantage.

The door to Corridor A had a simple mechanical lock. He focused his will, forcing it into the keyhole, jiggling the knob with his hand, with just the proper torque and rhythm to make the mechanism spring. Then his leg took a second shot; this one in his calf, just beneath his shattered knee. He screamed, but let the sound of his own pain fill him like a war cry. He turned the knob, and fell forward into the corridor, pulling himself along by his hands until he was out of the sharpshooters’ sights.

“Face down! Now!” a voice screamed right beside him. It was the Corridor A guard, who held his pistol at point-blank range, aimed at Dillon’s head. If the other guards were instructed to merely take Dillon down, this one was definitely planning on taking him out.

“I am face down,” said Dillon, pushing himself up on his hands.

“You know what I mean.”

He put his boot on Dillon’s back, pushing him into a prone po­sition, cheek against the concrete floor. Dillon took a deep breath. There was a trail of blood to the door behind him, but the blood had stopped flowing. The sharp pain of his wounds was already beginning to subside.

Dillon pushed himself up again, defying the guard’s direct order, then turned to him, catching his gaze. There was not enough time to unlock the guard’s mind and find the perfect thing to say that would make him lower the weapon, so Dillon played a dangerous angle.

“If you shoot me, the gun will backfire,” he told the guard with calculated calmness, “and the blast will blind you.”

“Don’t move!” shouted the guard. “I’m warning you!”

“A piece of shrapnel will wedge in your temporal lobe,” Dillon continued. “You’ll lose the ability to speak. To read. To communi­cate.”

The guard’s finger was still firm on the trigger, but his hand was shaking the slightest bit.

“Your misery will be so great that in three years you will take your own life,” Dillon told him. “If you pull that trigger—"

Dillon’s leg still ached, but he knew his ruse would only sustain him another moment, so he bolted upright, and ran down the corridor. His healing power that had done so much for so many, had already pulled enough of his bone and cartilage back together so that he could limp away, his pain still intense, but bearable—but if this guard shot, there would be no mending. Dillon knew a blast to the heart or brain would kill him before he had the chance to heal.

He didn’t look back to see what the guard would do, instead he just impelled himself forward. Only when he turned into a side cor­ridor did he know his ploy had worked. It was a bluff, of course. Nothing he had said to the guard was true, but it had the semblance of prophesy, and coming from Dillon Cole, even the most disciplined of soldiers would have paused for thought. For once, his celebrity had saved him.

The corridors he traveled through had no windows—no hint of any connection to a world beyond the plant, and the sound of the alarm kept him from hearing any approaching guards. His only advan­tage was the skeletal nature of Bussard’s crew. It had served the general well while Dillon was imprisoned, but had no contingency for the complete breakdown of the security system. It was a big plant, and as long as he kept out of the visual arc of the videocams mounted on the ceiling, they couldn’t pinpoint his position.

He burst through a double door, hoping it led to the outside, but instead found himself in the empty cafeteria. It was an open space, and open spaces weren’t good . . . but on the other hand, kitchens usually had service entrances. He leapt over the service counter, knocking several metal pans to the ground, and although he heard someone hanging through the cafeteria doors behind him, he didn’t wait to see who, or how many of them there were. A cold draft flowed past his ankles, and, following the direction of the draft, he located the kitchen’s back door. He pushed his way through it, and found himself standing on a loading dock, in freezing rain.

He took an instant to get his bearings, and see the best route of escape. The entire plant was flooded in spotlights, and everything be­yond those bright lights was darkness. He heard a crack of lightning, then realized it wasn’t lightning at all—because he felt a sudden pain in his gut, and warm blood began to pulse from his abdomen. He turned as the second shot pierced him, higher this time. The right side of his chest. Unable to bear the pain, his legs gave out, and he crumbled to the wet ground. It’s Bussard, thought Dillon. It has to be Bussard. But as he looked up, it was a far more familiar figure standing over him with a smoking weapon. Dillon felt betrayed. And for a moment his despair almost overwhelmed the pain.

Lieutenant Madeline Haas had spent a restless night, waiting for the alarms to go off. She knew they would. She didn’t know what she would do, but she knew it would be something decisive: Either some­thing that would mark her for promotion, or mark her for disgrace, but she wasn’t sure which it would be.

She left her room even before the alarms went off, not willing to wait, and stood by the entrance to the sleeping quarters, beneath an overhang that protected her from the downpour. When the alarms went off, she was the first one out, circling the plant, eying the exits. There were six exits from the main building of the plant. Three of them led to underground utility accessways that didn’t connect to the containment corridors at all, so Dillon would not come out of those doors. Two exits were in the main office wing, where Bussard’s office and quarters were. It was one of the best patrolled areas of the plant, so if Dillon went in that direction, he would be brought down in an instant. That left the loading dock as the only true chance of escape Dillon had.

She rounded the path to the dock, and stood behind a Dumpster, waiting, hearing others approaching. That’s when Dillon burst through onto the dock, slipping on the wet ground. The loading dock was like a shooting gallery. Even in the blinding rain he was an easy target beneath the floodlights.

What Maddy did next was a split-second decision, that might never have come to her had Dillon not already cleared her mind and brought her thoughts into fine focus. With other officers approaching behind her she raised her gun and fired, then fired again. Her aim was precise, as she knew it would be, and Dillon collapsed to the ground.

She ran to him. Blood was everywhere, pulsing into the flooded pavement, mixing with the rain, and spilling over the edge of the loading dock. Dillon tried to speak, but Maddy leaned down to him, holding her weapon to his face.

“Quiet!” she demanded.

He gasped his breaths, but Maddy ignored him. Her duty here was clear, and her purpose justified. She could not be sidetracked.

“I’ve shot your right lung, and your left kidney,” she told him. “Maybe your spleen and liver, too. Most people would die from it, but you’re not most people. Do you understand?”

He moved his jaw, but no sound came out.

“How badly do you want to get out of here?”

Still no words, but this time Dillon nodded. Do whatever is necessary, it communicated. Do what it takes. And so she did. Before anyone else reached the loading dock, she put the gun against his cheek, pulled the trigger, and blew apart Dillon’s face.

Bussard’s career flashed before his eyes. The moment he was jarred awake by the alarm, and made aware of the nature of the emer­gency, he knew it was either him, or Dillon. If Dillon escaped, Bussard had enough enemies in the Pentagon to send his career down in flames. After thirty years of eating shit to get where he was, he was not going to let himself get shot down. His superiors feared Dillon—and that was an asset in this situation. They saw Dillon as an armed warhead— too useful to destroy, but dangerous to maintain. Dillon’s death would be unfortunate, but his escape would be catastrophic. The Pentagon would rather see him dead than on the loose, and there might even be a collective sigh of relief on word of Dillon’s death.

With his own gun drawn he fired orders left and right, making it brutally clear that if they could not catch Dillon, then they must kill him. When word came that Dillon was in the cafeteria, Bussard led the way, and he followed the sound of gunfire through the kitchen to the loading dock.

Shielding his eyes from the spotlights and rain, he found Haas kneeling over a blood-drenched body. Dillon. She held her hand to Dillon’s neck, feeling for a pulse.

“He’s dead, sir,” Haas said.

Bussard tried to hide his own sigh of relief at the news. “Are you sure?”

“He turned as I shot, sir. He took the blast in the face, leaving a pretty big exit wound in the back of the head. Would you like to see?”

Bussard looked down at the pulp of Dillon’s face. His nose, and cheek had been shredded. Blood covered his chest and abdomen as well. Although Bussard was no stranger to gore, he had no burning desire to see Dillon Cole’s splattered brains either. Besides, he was already contemplating the report he would file.

Maddy kept a close eye on Bussard through all of this. She watched his eyes linger on Dillon’s inert form for a brief moment, but as soon as Bussard’s men began to arrive on the scene, Bussard began to del­egate duties, refusing to give even a moment of respect to the passing of Dillon Cole.

“Haslovich, get to the control room, and shut off that damn alarm. Haas and Burns, get the body to the infirmary. Johanson, clean this mess.” And the rest he sent back to their quarters. “Show’s over.”

The contingent of officers began to break up, but Bussard didn’t seem in a hurry to leave. “Shouldn’t you get on the line to General Harwood, sir?” Maddy prodded.

Bussard sighed. He took one more glance toward Dillon, then nodded to Maddy. “You did the right thing, Haas. He couldn’t be allowed to escape.” And then he added, “You’re twice the officer I expected you to be. When this fiasco is over, assuming we still have careers, I hope I’ll have the privilege of having you under my com­mand again.”

“Thank you sir.”

He pushed his way past Burns and Johanson, who were still tending to the body, and into the plant.

Once he was gone, Burns turned to Maddy. “Who was this guy anyway?”

Well, thought Maddy, if nothing else, Bussard had been successful at keeping the majority of his officers in the dark. “Nobody anymore,” she told him. “Tell you what—why don’t you two bring the gurney, and I’ll wait with the stiff.”

“Okay by me,” Johanson said and left with Burns, both probably happier to be out of the rain than away from the body.

As soon as they were through the door and out of earshot, Maddy got to work.

“Dillon? Dillon can you hear me?”

No response. She put her fingers to his neck. She had lied to Bus­sard, of course, about the pulse—she had felt a weak pulse a minute before, but she could not feel it now. Her own heart was pounding so furiously it defeated any attempt to feel Dillon’s. The blood had stopped flowing from his wounds. That either meant he was dead, or that he had begun his miraculous healing process. She had to believe he was still alive—and that the bullet had cut cleanly through his jaw and nasal cavity without splintering any bone back toward his brain. She had to believe it because she could not live with the alternative.

An Army-issue delivery truck was parked twenty yards away. It was the only port in the storm, and the closest thing to a plan she had at the moment. She hauled Dillon onto her shoulders and climbed down from the loading dock, splashing her way toward the truck.

The passenger door was locked, so she put Dillon down, and rammed her fist through the window. It hurt more than she expected it to. She undid the lock, pulled open the door, and when she turned to Dillon she was surprised to see him struggling to his feet, climbing into the truck under his own power. Seeing him alive lifted a huge weight from her. She even thought she could make out some features of his ruined face. He was already bringing order out of the chaos, undoing his wounds.

“Hey, Haas—what the hell?”

It was Burns. He and Johanson were out on the loading dock with the gurney. She thanked God that these officers were not too quick on the uptake, and tried to play on their dim awareness. “Change of plans,” she shouted back to them. “Bussard will explain it to you.”

But no sooner had she said it than Bussard came out onto the dock behind them, his bullshit detector finally kicking in. It only took an instant for him to size up the situation.

“Haas!”

She jumped in the passenger door, forcing her way over Dillon to the driver’s seat. How long would it take to hot-wire a truck? Too long—Bussard was already on his way, sprinting the distance from the loading dock, with Burns and Johanson close behind.

While she fiddled with wires beneath the steering column, it was Dillon who had the presence of mind to grab her weapon and fire, blowing off the ignition completely. With the ignition gone, all it would take was a screw driver to start it, but there was nothing in the glove box but maps and gum wrappers.

Bussard jumped up on the running board, grabbing Dillon through the window. “You son of a bitch!”

And then Dillon did something strange. He turned to Bussard, and spoke. His voice was a garbled mess, his lips barely able to form words, but from the instant he began to speak, Bussard was transfixed. It only took a moment for Dillon to say his piece, but for that moment even the raindrops seemed suspended in air.

“She was dead before the fire,” Dillon hissed at Bussard. “You suffocated her.” Then Dillon leaned closer to Bussard and delivered his final line with a guttural growl of enmity:

“You suffocated her . . . and they knew.”

Something snapped. Something detonated with such force, Maddy could feel the shockwave pass through her in a single migraine pulse that made her hair stand on end. And suddenly Bussard didn’t look right. His eyes were wrong—mismatched. One pupil was open and dilated, the other closed to a pin prick. He fell from the running board onto Burns and Johanson, screaming, flailing his arms, tearing at his own scalp. Dillon slumped down, completely spent. Maddy frantically searched the cab for anything flat that could fit into the open sore of the broken ignition, and, finding nothing, she tore the mirror down from the visor, broke it against the dashboard, and jammed the largest sliver into the ignition. She cut her thumb and forefinger as she turned the jagged shard of glass, but the engine started. With Bussard still wailing, she tugged the shift into gear, sideswiped Burns who was trying to block her, and took off toward the electrified gate, her wounded right hand already on the mend, tingling in its point-blank proximity to Dillon.

In the commotion only one guard had the wherewithal to find a jeep, and take off in pursuit of the truck that crashed its way through the electrified gate. He was able to keep the truck’s taillights in his sights, but a half mile past the gate, a pickup came barrelling through an intersection near Bobby’s Eat-N-Greet, sending the jeep spinning off the road into a muddy ditch. An old man stepped from the ruined pickup, gripping what was most certainly a broken arm, angrily spout­ing about stop signs, and damned crazy-ass military driving. Meanwhile the vehicle he was pursuing had quickly sped out of sight.

So dazed was the security officer that he never stopped to wonder what a seventy-year-old man was doing rolling across this particular intersection at this ungodly time of night.

It was almost too much for Dillon’s system to take.

The massive loss of blood, the violent rending of his sinus cavity. Maddy’s final bullet had entered through his left cheek, and exited through his right, shattering his teeth and jaw in between. The effect had been bloody, and destructive enough to make Bussard believe the bullet had entered his brain. But apparently Maddy knew her anatomy, and the only injury to Dillon’s brain was the concussion from the blast.

The bullet never came close. He understood now that there was no other course of action that would save him. No other place she could shoot would have fooled Bussard—but these awful wounds were not like any wounds he had ever suffered. His experience had been with gashes that zipped themselves closed in a matter of seconds and broken bones that set themselves in a matter of minutes. But the shock to his organs and nervous system was too great for even his reparative spirit to remedy. Healing would take hours, maybe days, if he could recon­struct his body at all.

Crumpled in the passenger seat of the delivery truck, he slipped in and out of consciousness, feeling every lane change, every bump in the road like a fresh wound. The rain pelted the windshield and he couldn’t tell the beat of his heart from the beat of the wiper blades. Were they being closely pursued, or had they left so much confusion in their wake that they were able to get a sizeable head start? He had no idea. The outside world was still screaming at him, as it had from the moment he stepped out of his cell, but his own dopamine release drugged him into not caring.

“You’ll be alright, won’t you?” he heard Maddy ask. “Your face is looking better already, isn’t it?” She sounded so uncertain. She wanted some corroboration from him that she hadn’t gone too far. It hurt too much to move his jaw, so he reached over and squeezed her hand. She did what she had to do, Dillon thought. Any more, he would have died on the spot, any less, and Bussard would not have been duped. A trapped animal would gnaw off its foot to escape from the jaws of a spring-trap. This is what Maddy had done for him, and sacrificed her career to do it.

Some time later, he was dimly aware of being moved through the rain from the truck to another car that Maddy must have hot-wired. Then, once they were moving again, Dillon allowed himself to let go of his shaky grip on consciousness, not knowing whether it was death or sleep that pulled him down.

What did he do to me what did he do to me what did he do to me what did he—

Bussard had heard the gate fall as Maddy crashed through it in the truck, and a moment later he had heard her break through the outer gate as well. But that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now, because of what Dillon had made him understand.

They knew.

He pushed his way past his men, hurling them off as they tried to calm him. It all seemed part of a different reality. A lost reality. Now everything moved in fractured frames. Out of sequence. Out of step.

He is four years old. He holds a pillow in his hands.

From the rain into the gray chambers of the power plant. The kitchen. The cafeteria.

While his parents are out, and the babysitter sleeps, he carries a pillow to his sister’s room.

Stumbling through the halls of the plant, barely able to remember his way.

He carries a pillow to his sister’s room. A white crib. Pastel rabbits on the wall. Sweet smell of baby lotion. He can’t do it from the floor. He must climb into the crib with the baby.

Corridor A. Blood pooling at the end of Corridor A. The guard turning to him, looking at him with frightened concern. “Sir? Are you alright?”

A pillow in his hand. She is asleep. It’s easier this way. The baby struggles weakly, like the goldfish did on the floor, until the pillow wins, and she goes away to the angels.

Raising his gun, silencing the guard with a single shot. More blood on the floor of Corridor A.

Gone to the angels, but his parents might know. They might smell it on his pillow. They might see it in the eyes of her stuffed animals. He must make it all go away. And he knows where Daddy keeps the matches.

Moving through the containment dome. His footsteps echoing in the huge space. Ahead of him the giant concrete cube, and a vault door. An open vault door.

He watches with the babysitter from the lawn as the house goes up in flames.

An empty vault, and an open vault door.

His parents tell him it’s okay. That everything will be okay . . . except for the fact that Dillon is right. His parents know. Why should that matter? It should no longer matter. But it does. It’s the only thing that matters. They know.

The vault door, and to the right, the door’s control panel.

They know when they send me off to school.

Reaching for the control panel.

They know on Christmas morning.

Beginning the closing sequence.

They know when they tuck me in.

Gears grinding, the door moving.

They know from their graves, beside hers these many years, and they will always know.

Solid titanium cutting a slow arc behind him. So I will kneel for forgiveness. Kneeling in the path of the closing door. I will bow my head.

Head hung low in the jamb, the door only inches away now. I will press this memory out from me.

The door becomes a vice; his skull engages; the pressure builds . . . I will smash this guilt away leaving my flesh as fractured as my mind. And the bone finally gives, Bussard’s last thought crushed from him by the sealing door, his blood greasing the shafts of the deadbolts.

13. Restoration

Dillon was dreaming.

He was dreaming the way he dreamt when they sedated him, for although the sedatives could control his body, they could not shut down his mind. Once again his mind was violated by images that had no business there. The bruise-colored recliner.

The man had long since left his recliner, and was out in the world, but his chair remained. The image wasn’t a dream unto itself—but instead infected whatever dream he was having. The chair would be there, sitting on the divider of a freeway, or out in an empty field, or at the bottom of the sea. Wherever his dreams took him, that chair would follow, and the conspicuous absence of its occupant disturbed Dillon more than anything else. There were times Dillon could see him in the distance, at the edge of the horizon, or the other side of a chasm that Dillon could not cross.

And then there was the diving platform, infecting his thoughts and his dreams with the same alarming frequency. Unlike the man who had left his chair, the three divers were still there, waiting on the platform. But he knew that sometime soon they would be gone, just as the man had left his chair.

Today he dreamed that the platform was in the sky. Oily wooden piles encrusted with barnacles sprouted from its base, holding it above roiling cumulus, like a pier in a sea of clouds. There was something new today; the three figures held fishing rods. They speared worms on the tips of their barbed hooks, and cast their lines into the clouds. He tried to see their faces, but they kept their backs to him.

“Why am I here?” he asked them. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Pray,” answered the smallest of the three. “Pray like a pigeon.”

Then the small one’s line went taut, and he jerked on it, pulling a bird from the clouds below. He ripped the pigeon from the hook, and dropped it, dead, to the floor. Only then did Dillon notice that the platform had turned a mottled grey. It was covered with the bodies of birds. Pigeons. Thousands of them, pressed flat beneath the march of thousands of feet. Suddenly the air was too thin, and Dillon had to gasp for breath. And as he fell to his knees he heard a new voice. An ominously familiar voice; neither male, nor female.

“You’re so pathetically limited,” the voice said. “You see everything, and yet you see nothing. You disgust me.”

Dillon rolled over onto his back, still unable to breath. This was a voice he hoped he would never hear again. “Okoya! No! Not Okoya!”

He began to scream, over and over, until the scream broke free from the dream, and took root in his throat, he could hear it now, and the sound of his own scream dragged him out of sleep. Hands pressed on his shoulders, holding him down.

“Easy, easy!”

He opened his eyes to see Maddy looming over him. Above her head hung a gathering of lobsters.

“You were dreaming,” Maddy told him.

He closed his eyes again. “I still am,” but when he opened his eyes, the crustacean menaces were still there. Large red claws—hundreds of them hung from above. They were nailed to the posts, they were crawling on peeling wallpaper. They were almost as unpleasant as the pigeons. “Where are we?”

“Somewhere between nowhere and nowhere else,” she said. “State Route 93. I forget which state. Arkansas, I think.”

Dillon sat up.

They were in a restaurant, or what was left of one. The place had been deserted for years. Lakes of rainwater had formed on the warped linoleum floor, beneath holes in a termite-tattered ceiling. The smell of mildew saturated the air with such intensity, Dillon could taste it like aspirin in the back of his throat. Although the rainstorm had ended, droplets still trickled through holes in the roof, plinking an irregular rhythm in the puddles below.

“Welcome to ‘The Crawfish Maw,’ " Maddy said. “The sign said ‘always open,’ so here we are.”

She was dressed in dark sweats—probably the same clothes she was wearing when she shot him and spirited him away from the Hesperia plant, but he had been too busy convalescing to notice what she wore. Having never seen her in anything but her uniform, it struck him how much younger she looked.

The humidity was thick enough to swim in, and his own clothes clung to him, pulling in the moisture from the air with the same vo­racity with which it had drunk the blood from his body. Now the blood had dried, and the holes in his shirt had woven themselves closed. There was no evidence on his body of the wounds. The pain in his knee and gut was gone, and the wound to his chest had closed, resolving into a faint ache when he breathed too deeply. But his face didn’t feel right. It felt as if a spider had woven its web across his nose.

Maddy touched his shirt, where the wound had been. “I’ve never seen anything so amazing,” she said. “The wounds closed themselves while you slept.”

“How long was I out?”

“About twelve hours. I didn’t know where you wanted to go, and until we got that straight, I thought it best to find a place to lay low, so Bussard won’t find us.”

Dillon stood up and looked out of a foggy window. Beyond some overgrown trees, he could see cars passing on the highway. “Bussard’s not a problem anymore.”

Maddy hesitated, but didn’t ask how Dillon could be so sure. She just accepted it. “Still, they’re not going to let you disappear.”

“I’m no stranger to being a fugitive.” Dillon threw her a grin, but found that one side of his mouth didn’t quite rise to the occasion. He reached up to touch his face, and felt a jagged network of troughs and crags in his skin.

“The scars will go away soon, too, won’t they?” Maddy asked.

Dillon didn’t answer her. “This place have a bathroom?”

She pointed him to a cramped little washroom that had long since lost its door. “I promise I won’t look,”

“Your loss,” he said, then immediately regretted it. He was not beyond blushing, and so left before she could see.

The toilet was dry and ringed in filthy strata. He relieved himself in the dry bowl, then turned to view himself in the mirror above the sink. He wasn’t quite ready for what he saw.

Deep canals cut across his face. The web of knotty scars that wove across his cheeks and nose was even worse than he had imagined. He hardly recognized himself, and had to take a few deep breaths to get over the shock of his new appearance. When he touched his face, there was no tenderness to the flesh, only stiffness, which meant there was no more healing going on there—whatever healing there would be had happened while he slept. He ran his tongue on the inside of his mouth and poked at his teeth. Several of his molars were missing. The raw holes had healed over, as if the teeth had been pulled long ago.

Maddy appeared behind him. “How long till they’re gone?” she asked. “The scars, I mean.”

He took a moment to consider how he should answer, then de­cided on the simple truth. “The scars won’t go away,” he told her.

She shook her head, not getting it. “But. . . you heal . . . "

“That’s different from regenerating. If you give me a broken glass, I can put it back together again without a crack, but if a piece of that glass is missing, the glass will have a hole where that piece would have gone.”

The color of her face took a turn toward green. “So you’re telling me that I left. . . part of you . . . back on the loading dock?”

“Couldn’t be helped, I guess.”

Her eyes turned away, suddenly looking everywhere, except at Dillon. “Listen, I think there’s some food in the store room,” she said. “Old cans of beans, tuna—you know, stuff that’ll survive the next ice age. I’ll check it out.” She couldn’t move away from him fast enough.

Maddy had watched Dillon as he slept, marveling at the power he had to undo the damage to his flesh. The wounds on his face sewed themselves closed at a speed just below her ability to see it—like shad­ows beneath a slowly arcing sun—but if she looked away for a few moments, his face would be different when she looked back. Seeing his miraculous healing made her believe he could do anything, and deep inside her, in a place that knew no reason, she was beginning to believe that Dillon was, indeed, a new incarnation of God, as so many in the world now believed.

But he could not be, because by his own admission, his scars would not heal. It was a relief to know that he was less than perfect, because it made him human, and yet a profound disappointment as well. But far more disturbing to Maddy was the strained, crooked smile her bullet had left him. She had singlehandedly maimed the closest thing to God on earth.

So she turned from him, unable to face him in that ridiculous, lobster-ridden wreck of a diner. When she reached the storeroom, she only wished the room had a door that would close behind her, but like most every other door, its hinge was broken, and the door sloped at a lazy angle to the floor. She tried to busy herself with the rusting cans of food. Jalapenos, tomato paste—whatever vagrants hadn’t al­ready scavenged. That was alright. She hadn’t come here for the food anyway. She fought back an unwanted barrage of tears by getting angry at herself for such an emotional display, but this time the anger was no barrier. She had always been aware of that vague sense of inadequacy that had been subtly instilled in her long before she could build a defense against it. She liked to think she had triumphed, finding in­adequacy to be one of the best motivators toward overachievement. Most of the time her bold, manifest accomplishments were more than enough to fill her cup.

Dillon sidled up cautiously on the other side of the door, peering in. She saw him through the corner of her eye, but wouldn’t turn to face him.

“Guess I was wrong,” she said, moving the cans purposelessly on the shelves in an aluminum shell game. “Nothing here but junk.”

Dillon looked at the unbalanced door; he hefted it a bit, and the broken hinge rehooked itself to the frame. Abracadabra. Then, when Maddy looked once more to the cans on the shelf, they were no longer rusty. “Guess you’re getting your strength back,” she said. Her hand was shaking now, and when she reached for the cans, she knocked several of them over; they fell onto her toes.

Dillon swung the door open all the way. It didn’t even squeak. “Maddy, don’t worry about my face. You didn’t know.”

“I disfigured you. I tried to save you and I permanently disfigured you.” She finally turned to him, knowing it was useless to hide the tears, because he saw through her anyway; it’s what he did—and no matter how deeply he had reached into her to change her, he couldn’t change how she felt in his shadow. Now she understood why men like Bussard had to chain him, lock him down, suppress him. They simply could not bear their own insignificance in his shadow.

“You did what you had to do,” he told her. “I understand.”

But it wasn’t just the scars. “I’m in over my head here,” she ad­mitted.

“Weren’t you trained to deal with extreme situations?”

“Not this extreme! Not with something like you!”

“Something?” She could feel his anger and his frustration, and al­though her own frustration felt normal and justified, she was not ex­pecting his. “I’m the same person I was when you spoon-fed me!”

“But I’m not. Back then I was taking orders—doing my job.”

“And now you’re a human being.”

He stared her down, and it took all of her strength to pull away from that gaze. Yes, she was now more human than she had ever been and that made her more vulnerable. She wondered if she’d even be here now if Dillon hadn’t violated her soul the way he had; seeing through her. Knowing her. “Damn you, Dillon, I didn’t need your little ‘birthday gift’! I enjoyed being clouded just fine.”

Dillon gave her his new crooked grin. “Looks like you’re still partly cloudy.”

“Go to hell.”

She stormed past him, but he grabbed her wrist.

“Let go.”

“Let me show you something.” His voice was no longer angry. What frustration he felt had dissipated—brought back into order, like everything else. Still holding her wrist, he reached up his other hand, gently touching her cheek with his index finger. When he pulled his index finger away, one of her tear drops pooled on his nail.

“What about it?”

“Shh. Watch.”

His hushed tone made her feel like a child watching a butterfly break from its cocoon. So she watched, as crystals formed in the tear droplet, settling into his cuticle. Then he tilted his finger. The drop coursed across to the other side, leaving the tiny crystals of salt behind. Then he brought his finger to her lips. Almost reflexively she took the very tip of his finger in her mouth, tasting her own tear. Sweet. Not the slightest hint of salt. “There,” he said, smiling gently. “I’ve taken the bitterness from your tears.” Now that they were this close, Maddy couldn’t help but see that in spite of the scars, his eyes were unchanged. His was the soul of a star, and indeed, she could see a universe when she gazed inside. A person could get lost in there.

“Do you know what it’s like for people around you, Dillon? Do you know what it’s like to feel so powerless and insignificant?”

“No,” he answered. “I wish that I could.”

She couldn’t turn away from him now, and didn’t know whether this locked gaze was his doing, or her own. All she knew was that in this single moment, the insignificance he engendered in her was now more a comfort than a threat.

Time seemed to skip a beat, and she found herself kissing him, not remembering the kiss beginning, and not knowing who had instigated it. If this was another attempt to clarify her thoughts, it did the op­posite, fogging her in, leaving her thoughts in a holding pattern, wait­ing for a place to land.

Dillon seemed even more flustered than she. Clearly, this had not been part of his plan. Even if this was a moment he could foresee, it was obviously something he was unprepared for. And she found to her unexpected delight, that the great Dillon Cole, in spite of his luminous spirit, was blushing.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was stupid. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she told him gently. “Feel as stupid as you want.” In spite of all the darkness he had lived through—all the destruction he had willingly, and unwillingly, been a party to, there was still an in­nocence about him that rose above any guilt. The fact that she could offer him anything made her feel elevated. Ennobled. She brought her hand up, her fingertips tracing the pattern of the pale scars in his red­dening face.

For Dillon, who had experienced a great many things in his sev­enteen years of life, this was a first. He had to admit he had considered this moment, but in a distant, disconnected way. The rigors of his past travels were more than adequate to suppress any appetites, and Tessic’s chair, well, it was quite a chastity belt to say the least.

Maddy ran her fingers along the new ridges in his face, and he found it curiously erotic—and now he found his own hands moving to places—touching places he had never been close to before.

“I have to warn you that I have no idea what I’m doing,” he told her.

“I think I’d be disappointed if you did.”

He was awkward as he guided her to an oversized booth, the table scraping on the floor as his shoulders bumped it aside. He chuckled nervously. Then moved his hand through her hair. Although her hair was short, it had a thick, rich texture. With the caress of his fingers, her hair renewed, taking on a smooth, dark sheen.

Just like Deanna’s.

But that was a thought he banished to a distant corner.

Maddy sensed the moment his kisses crossed from respectful to passionate, and it struck her that Dillon did know her. It was the first time since her first time that she let a man be the aggressor—and here, this young man moved from awkwardness to grace in a single breath. With his touch, she could feel herself changed by his spirit of creation, of rejuvenation. He undid the most soiled knots of her life with his body, and with each wave of sensation she could feel those old bonds tear free.

The sweaty, drunken face of the neighbor man, who had defiled her at thirteen.

The high school teacher she had chosen to seduce.

The scores of boys, then men she had conquered, and dismissed, taking from them, so they could never take anything from her. All her patterns, all her painful connections were smoothed by Dillon’s em­brace.

They shared a sanctuary from all of their troubles in each others arms, then as their tension released, Maddy saw that the dilapidated restaurant around them had been restored to the spotless moment it had been built. And she realized that, within her heart, the place where it truly mattered, she was a virgin once again.

14. Return of a thief

Hundreds of miles from The Crawfish Maw diner, at a train station in Atlanta, a small-time pickpocket was having a truly lousy day.

His moves had always been stealthy, and even when caught in the act, he was usually able to slither away with finesse, dissolving into the rush-hour crowds of the Atlanta train station. Those crowds, despite Atlanta’s southern belle reputation, were every bit as frenetic these days as crowds in any Yankee burg, and the molecular hustle of bodies always provided ample cover for a quick escape.

The train station was a fine locale for petty larceny. Better than New York, or PA, since there was less competition. He would usually slip past his marks just before they entered their respective trains, re­lieving them of their wallets and billfolds, and by the time they realized that they had been robbed, their train would already be barreling away from the city.

But today he had gotten greedy. His mark—a waddling, varicose-legged woman, clearly an old-money patrician, complained to the red­cap loading her luggage onto the train, as if the red-cap cared. And there it was: her Gucci clutch, protruding from an oversized coat pocket. It grabbed his focus and reeled him in. He simply had to have it.

Unfortunately this woman was no imbecile. She had learned the trick of wrapping her pocket accessories with a rubber band, and as he pulled on the edge of the clutch, it snagged on the pocket lining, instantly alerting the woman to his presence.

Some of his marks were gaspers, some were screamers. The wad­dling woman was definitely a screamer. She let loose with an ear-splitting camel call the moment she felt his hand in her pocket. He flinched, and hesitated, which he never normally did, then pushed her away, wrenching the clutch from her pocket.

He tried to slip into the crowd, but found his reflexes had slipped a beat behind the moment, and rather than cutting through the crowds, he crashed into them, each body becoming an obstacle impeding his progress toward the stairs.

“Stop him!” the woman screamed with such aristocratic command that he knew it would galvanize the crowd into that mad mob of outraged citizens that was known to beat and dismember poor inno­cent criminals like himself.

He kneed a business man who tried to stop him, and used his crumbling body as a vault onto the steps, taking them three at a time until he was up in the station.

But the open space of the station provided him with no cover either. Two police officers raced toward him, apparently more inter­ested in apprehending him than they were in the Krispy Kreme donut concession.

The pickpocket quickly calculated his most likely vector of escape, and took off. Unfortunately the direction he ran took him deeper into the building, rather than toward an exit. He used the woman’s clutch as a countermeasure, hurling it behind him, but the officers ignored it, continuing their pursuit, already pulling out their weapons, probably hoping he had one of his own, so they could plead self-defense when they blew him away.

No, this was not one of his better days.

There were two doors in front of him now. One was unmarked, except for a poster plastered across it advertizing a local revival of Cats. The other was the ladies’ room.

The lady or the tiger, the thought. He chose the lady.

Hurling himself through the restroom door, he pulled from his pocket a wooden doorstop that he kept for occasions such as this, and shoved it beneath the door as it closed, kicking it over and over, until it was wedged in deep. The officers were already on the other side of the door, pounding on it, trying to force their way in, so for good measure the pickpocket kicked the doorknob repeatedly until it tore free, and clattered to the ground like a Christmas ornament. He heard the knob fall on the other side of the door as well.

“Damnit!” he heard from beyond the door. The door bowed in­ward as the officers threw their weight against it, but it didn’t give.

There was a strange taste in his mouth—the ferric tang of blood, and he realized that he had bitten his lip while running from the police. Small injury, all considered. The pickpocket sized up his surroundings.

He was alone in the restroom, and although there were no other doors, there was a window above the furthest stall. It was a small, clouded-glass pane, its edges caked in the grime of thirty years of union cleaning. It would be a tight squeeze, but he could make it, hopefully before the boys in blue took down the door.

But as he made his way toward the window there was something in the bathroom mirror that caught his attention. His reflection wasn’t right—but it wasn’t his reflection, it was the mirror itself. Its surface rippled like a pool of mercury, turning his reflection into a shifting fun-house image.

Then all at once a hand thrust out of the mirror, reaching for him like a cheap gag in a 3-D matinee.

He was a gasper, not a screamer, and so he gasped, throwing himself away from the hand, hitting the tile wall behind him.

The mirror had not broken, for it was no longer rigid—it was now more membrane than glass. There was a vertical tear in the surface, only about six inches wide, now stretching wider, creating fleshy folds of silver as a second hand pushed itself through, and a groan came from beyond the breach. He could see a mass of dark stringy hair forcing its way through, stretching this hole in the world even wider.

Now he screamed, instinctively knowing that it was more than his life lying in the balance now, and suddenly the police outside the door became the lesser of two evils. He returned to the door, only to find that he had successfully sealed himself in the room—he couldn’t kick the doorstop free, and even if he could have, the doorknob was too damaged to fit back into place.

So he raced toward the window, once more passing the creature that was pushing its way through the mirror. Its head was out now, and one shoulder. Long black hair dangled over a tortured face. It made eye contact with him. It was human, but its eyes were wild— almost mad, and those mad eyes held his gaze before returning to its task of birthing itself into this world.

He bolted into the stall, and pounded on the small window until it shattered, then pulled himself up into it, ignoring the cuts across his palms left by the jagged lip of glass. He could hear the thing grunting and groaning behind him. The pickpocket stuck his head out into the dim alley. He reached his hands through, pulled his shoulders through one at a time, praying he could be born into the alley before that thing was born into the restroom.

He had gotten to his hips and was almost free, when he felt the ghoul grab his ankles, and pull him back inside.

“No!”

As he fell, his head struck the pipe that fed the toilet, and although the pain was sharp, he barely noticed it, because his other senses were too overwhelmed to care. The thing grabbing at him was only mar­ginally human. Most of its face was hidden beneath the caul of dark, sodden hair, and its body was covered with mottled, leopard-like bruises. It was naked, and reeked of a fetid, guttery stench, but worst of all was what he saw between its legs. Whatever this creature was, it was neither male, nor female, but both. The pickpocket wailed like a child.

“Give me your clothes,” it hissed.

The creature was by no means strong—in fact it was spent from its ordeal coming through the breach. Still the pickpocket could not resist the force behind its deep-set eyes.

“Give me your clothes,” it repeated, “and I’ll spare your flesh.”

He didn’t pretend to know what the thing was talking about, but that didn’t matter. If he had to give his own clothes to cover this abomination, hiding its groin from his sight, it was a small price to pay. He tore his shirt off, sending buttons flying, and pulled off his pants over his shoes. Leaving him only in his underwear. Quickly the crea­ture slipped on the clothes, but as the pickpocket tried to scramble away from it, it reached for him again, flipping him around. Grabbing him painfully by his chest hairs, it pulled him face to face with it.

“Please . . .” he begged. “Please just let me go . . .”

“In a moment,” it said, staring at him.

There was something in the creature’s eyes. A spot of light deep within the pitch of its dilated pupils. The spot of light grew, becoming red, and pushing forward from its eyes, like tongues stretching for the pickpocket, probing the pores of his face.

“No . . . please.”

“Be still,” it said.

The tongues of light reached through his flesh—he could feel them like surges of electricity—twangs of pain shooting through his joints and organs. Then deep inside himself, in his gut, in his heart, in his mind, he felt something vital disconnect, as if the marrow were being drained from his bones. But it wasn’t marrow; it was something else. He felt himself tugged loose, his soul discorporating from his body.

And although he could feel his body was still alive, he also knew that he was no longer in it. Instead he was in the grasp of those red tendrils of light that pulled him into the gaping maw of a creature hiding within the flesh of the hermaphrodite: a creature of living light, and living shadow. In a moment he was so far from his own thoughts that he could not recall his own name, he could not think, for his spirit no longer had access to a brain. All he could do now was feel. Feel himself pulled deeper by the tendrils; feel himself sliding down its gullet, and finally feel the lonely agony of his consciousness particulating as his soul slowly digested within the belly of the beast.

The two officers hurled their bodies against the door until the door frame finally splintered, and the door crashed in. Regaining their bal­ance, they raised their weapons, half expecting to be fired on. They were not prepared for what they saw. It was odd, even by public restroom standards.

The perpetrator was there, in a fetal position on the floor, in his underwear, weeping. Above him stood a woman, half dressed. Or was it a man? Whatever it was, it had an unsettling, undead look about it, like an addict one trip shy of the morgue.

“What the hell is this?” the younger officer asked.

“I don’t want to know,” said his older partner.

The perp looked up at them. “He did something to me,” the perp wailed. “He did something.”

“Whatever it was, you damn well deserved it.”

They pulled him off the ground, and he offered no resistance. The older officer had seen his share of petty criminals, and few gave in with such ease. It was as if he had been sapped of his will to fight—but it was more than that. The older officer caught sight of the perp’s eyes. There was a discomfiting vacancy there; a desolate void, as if this pick­pocket wasn’t a man, but just a shell; a walking, breathing shell of a man, with nothing living inside. Not even hard timers got the death-look that bad.

“What do we do about the other one?” asked the younger cop.

The abject, straggle-haired specimen looked at them like a vulture waiting for roadkill.

“One freak at a time.”

But the younger cop was playing by the book. “You got a name?” he asked.

“Okoya,” it said. “My name is Okoya.”

“We’ll want your statement.”

“Give it a rest,” said the older cop, wanting more than anything to be free of that restroom. “Let’s read this one his rights, and get him out of here.”

The doleful pickpocket was still whimpering, “He robbed me . . . he robbed me.”

But the older officer was wise enough not to consider what might have been stolen, and as they pulled their suspect out of the restroom, he made sure to keep his gaze away from the vacant eyes of the pick­pocket, and the charged eyes of the freak.

Meanwhile, far away, in the rejuvenated ruins of an old diner, Dillon, dozing with his arm around Maddy, was startled awake by a strange sensation somewhere in his head, like an unexpected popping of his ears. But the sensation quickly passed, so he closed his eyes, and thought no more about it.

15. Gainer

“I’m beyond myself now.”

Dillon gripped the steering wheel with both hands as he spoke to Maddy, worried that some unseen force might jerk the wheel out of his hands. Nothing was to be taken for granted anymore. It was his third day free from the oppression of his cage—but that cage had offered him containment. There was nothing to contain him out here on the back roads of the rural south, and Tessic had been right—his will was not powerful enough to do it. “My body is too small a vessel to hold me,” he said.

“Maybe I should drive,” suggested Maddy.

Dillon turned his attention to the lush oak forest on either side, arcing over the road around them. “You see how the trees move in the wind? I can feel them move. I can feel the currents of breezes in the forest. There must be a lake nearby, because I can feel rippling on its surface.” He tried to shake the feeling away, but it persisted, tugging at his attention. This was the first time he had taken the wheel of yet another stolen car since their escape. He found the simple task of driv­ing kept his focus tethered, but it was still an exhausting battle to keep his concentration narrow in the face of such overstimulation. “I’m beyond myself,” he said again. “I don’t know where I end, and the world begins.”

“Like a newborn,” Maddy offered.

“What?”

“A newborn can’t differentiate itself from the world around it. Maybe you’re a newborn, too. The beginning of something we’ve never seen.”

“There you go again, calling me a ‘thing.’ I’m human, Maddy. I can bleed. I can die.”

Maddy didn’t appear convinced. “Maybe, but Tessic was right about one thing. People like you don’t just get spit out on a regular basis.”

“Tessic.” Dillon gripped the wheel white-knuckle tight. Yes, Tes­sic had believed in Dillon’s ‘purpose,’ but Dillon had no such faith anymore. All he could feel was a blind drive to do something, but with no clear objective. If anything, he could sense futility and failure, and the laughter of the three faceless divers, reveling in his defeat.

“If I need to do something, wouldn’t it help to know what it is?” All he knew for sure was that his own influence was swelling further beyond his control. “And if it was intentional for me to be this pow­erful, wouldn’t I be able to control it? You can’t imagine how far my reach goes now. Fifty miles away, there are grains of sand slowly gath­ering into pebbles, and shattered leaves piecing themselves together again, all because of me. The further away, the slower the process gets—but I can still feel it happening, maybe a hundred miles away.”

They passed a sign announcing their entrance into Alabama. The road lightened, and took on a rougher texture. Maddy gently touched his arm.

“Forget about what you feel a hundred miles away. Feel the wheel. Feel the road. Focus on finding Winston.”

Her voice was both compelling and comforting enough to ease the maddening static hum in his mind. Find Winston. Finding him wouldn’t be the solution, but it was a positive step toward something. “I wish my mind could be as clear as yours,” he told her.

She smiled. “You forget that you made it that way.”

Maddy kept her hand on his arm, gently stroking it. Since he had first touched her two nights ago in the derelict diner, she found herself taking every opportunity to touch him again. There were no words to express the way Dillon had changed her. Bitterness had always been the fuel propelling her. Her wounds had become comfortable friends, but Dillon had exposed them for what they were, took her into his arms and excised them. In one intimate moment, her entire past was healed. The clarity he had brought her weeks ago was just a prelude, for far beyond the clarity was a grand sense of connection. She un­derstood what Dillon had meant when he talked about being beyond himself, for she now felt a shadow of his connection to the world around him, and in his moments of self-doubt Maddy took the initia­tive, moving them toward their goal of finding Winston.

“Nothing’s ever easy for us,” Dillon griped, and chastised himself once more for having a mind that could decipher every pattern and code in the world, but couldn’t remember something simple like Win­ston’s pager number.

“Now I have to rely on my senses, but I don’t get much of a feeling from Winston, or Lourdes,” Dillon told her, as they passed on a tangent to Birmingham. “There’s too much interference, too much static out there. I mean there are moments that a sense of one of them comes to me, kind of like a scent on the wind, but it passes too quickly for me to get a fix on the direction.”

Maddy felt the car accelerate, and wondered if Dillon even realized that his foot had become heavy. Although Maddy trusted Dillon’s instincts implicitly, she did have her reservations about his choice of destination. Winston’s home town was an hour south of Birmingham. Dillon figured that if he wasn’t there, his mother and brother would be. Perhaps they might know where he was.

“But, as you’re public enemy number one, that’s the first place they’ll look for you,” Maddy had been quick to remind him even before they left the old diner the day before.

“Maybe not,” Dillon had said. “They’ll think I’m too smart to head there.”

She wondered whether his naivete would save him or destroy him. “The military has no illusions about human intelligence. It thrives on the assumption that the world is full of imbeciles, so everything the military does is filled with redundancies and contingencies. You can bet the entire town where Winston lived is under twenty-four-hour surveillance by multiple teams, in case one or more screw up.”

“What do you want me to do,” Dillon had answered, his frustration building. “Sit around and wait for something to happen? I might as well be back in my cell at the plant.”

And so, a day and a half later, just around noon, they barreled past Birmingham and into a fresh danger zone.

She reached over and touched his leg. “Slow down,” she said. “We don’t want to be pulled over.”

She left her hand gently on his thigh, feeling that sense of connec­tion again. She had grown used to the sensation of simply being beside him, her cells infused with his aura, neither aging nor decaying. It was a sense of being at the peak of her own existence. But touching him closed a circuit, making her not just a recipient, but a participant.

“We’re not exactly Bonnie and Clyde,” he told her. “You’re not obligated to come with me.”

“Three days ago, I made the choice to give up everything to set you free,” she reminded him. “Do you really think I’d stay with you now just because I felt obligated?”

“Then why are you with me?”

She took her hand away, the question stinging. “Aren’t you the one who told me you knew me? If you can see into my soul, why do you have to ask?”

He turned to look at her, but his gaze wasn’t penetrating as it so often was. Instead it was a gentle caress. For an instant she felt schoolgirl bashful. She was both irritated and appreciative of the feeling. “Shouldn’t you be watching the road?”

He immediately turned his eyes forward, but she knew that his attentions still remained on her.

Twenty minutes later, they pulled into an old filling station with pumps decades shy of automation, that still clanged bells as gears spun up the price. That and the attached general store was all that survived of a crumbling hotel which, by the looks of its remains, must have been an old plantation home. Maddy figured they had better get out of there fast, before the building succumbed to Dillon’s presence, and the South rose again.

“I don’t like this place,” Dillon said as they stepped from the car. “I feel . . . unsettled here.”

While Dillon pumped, she went in to pay and pick up sandwiches and drinks. The woman at the register was obviously a fixture of the place. She had pallid, liver-spotted skin that almost camouflaged her with the faded, whitewashed wall behind her.

“Will that be all for ya’?” she drawled.

Maddy’s attention had been snagged by the last newspaper on the counter, and the photo smack in the center. Her own face stared up at her from beneath the headline. Next to her picture was a photo of Bussard.

She snatched up the paper, angling it so the cashier couldn’t see the front page. “This, too.”

Maddy watched the woman’s rheumy eyes, which already seemed far less rheumy than they had only moments ago. Their fog had faded with her liver spots in less time than it took Dillon to fill up. The woman studied the items and the register, giving no indication that she recognized Maddy from the newspaper photo. “Cash or charge?”

Maddy paid in cash, and left with all godspeed. She couldn’t resist taking a closer look at the paper the moment she was out. The mili­tary’s official story came right out in the headline. According to them, she had murdered Bussard after an affair gone bad. She didn’t know whether she was more infuriated or disgusted. There was, of course, no mention of Dillon at all—which meant that she had gotten it wrong. She was public enemy number one, not Dillon. They could never admit they had Dillon, admit his escape, so instead the military spin-doctors had made her the enemy.

Dillon was not at the car. She quickly surveyed the area to find him slipping through a hole in the chain-link fence that surrounded the dilapidated hotel. Damn! If anything, he was consistent in his dis­tractions, like a hound in search of a lost scent.

She ran to the fence and found that the hole had healed as soon as Dillon passed through, so she climbed it, following a path of flattened weeds until coming into a clearing behind the building. The tall grass behind the condemned hotel was filled with the rotting remnants of wooden lounge chairs surrounding the concrete shell of a pool built in a time they truly made them deep. Dry brown leaves clogged the drain.

Dillon was nowhere to be seen. She tried the back porch, peered in the dark windows. It was as if he had vanished—but there was evidence that he was here, right on the peeling wood of the building. The spots of paint that hadn’t peeled now had a freshly painted look. I can’t put back what’s no longer there, Dillon had told her. Where the paint was gone, it was gone, but the exposed wood looked brand new, leaving an effect of strangely mottled rejuvenation.

The sound of footsteps on metal made her look up. Above the deep end of the empty pool, there was a high-diving platform. Dillon stood at the edge of the platform, silhouetted against the sun. This was strange, even for him, and she had no idea what business he had in mind. It wasn’t until she moved, and the sun was out of her eyes, that she saw a second figure standing behind him. She raced toward the ladder.

Unsettled.

There were so many things out there agitating Dillon, he hadn’t known why this place should stand out. Maybe it was that they were only thirty miles from Winston’s home, and he had absolutely no sense of his presence there. Then he had seen the diving platform through the trees, and it had given him a sudden flashback to the vague visions and dreams that had been plaguing him.

Now he stood on the end of the platform, the tips of his sneakers an inch over the edge. He could see the old hotel, the gas station, Birmingham in the distance. He grew more unsettled by the moment, but there was nothing here.

He held his hands out to balance himself on the edge, and closed his eyes, trying to recall details from the visions. He heard Maddy climb the ladder, and in a moment could hear her breathing behind him.

“I’ve seen a place like this, in my dreams” he said, hands still held out, eyes still closed. “There are three people. They’re important. They’re dangerous. I see them standing side by side on the edge and the pool below them is full of flowers. I can almost smell them.”

Then a voice behind him spoke, but it wasn’t Maddy.

“If you intend to dive, I must warn you there’s no lifeguard on duty.”

Dillon knew the voice instantly, and that moment between hearing the voice, and turning to see his face was a moment as awful as it had been waiting for the flood waters of Lake Mead to sweep him under with the soulless four hundred. If there truly was an embodiment of evil in the universe it stood behind him now. He turned to see the leering, sexless face of Okoya, the manipulator of Gods, thief of souls, and would-be destroyer of worlds.

“Hello, Dillon.”

Dillon gaped, paralyzed by fear.

“You’re speechless!” said Okoya. “I knew you would be.”

This was what Dillon had sensed in this place. He wondered how long Okoya had stalked him before getting this close. Dillon mustered his courage as quickly as he could and studied him from across the platform. Okoya was not the sleek, muscular specimen he had been before. His muscles had atrophied, and his rich Native American skin had taken on a muddy, ashen pallor. His long, luxuriant hair with the raven shine, so feminine the way if flowed over his shoulders was now a straggly snarl. Okoya was a wraith; broken, beaten, but still alive.

“If you’ve come here looking for revenge,” Dillon said, “you’ve made a mistake. I’m much stronger than I was a year ago, when I first defeated you.”

Okoya’s face clenched in a venomous expression of hatred. “Yes. I never got to thank you for that last trick you pulled.”

Dillon recalled that final look of horror and desperation on Okoya’s face, the moment Dillon had unleashed the two beasts on him. The parasite of destruction, and the parasite of fear. “So, did you take care of my pets?” Dillon asked. Those ravenous beasts had leached onto Okoya, as Dillon knew they would—and Okoya, racked with an urge to destroy, and an insurmountable fear brought on by the parasites, had leapt out of this universe, and back into his own, taking the two beasts with him. It had been the perfect plan. But if it was so perfect, why was Okoya back?

“Your ‘pets,’ " said Okoya, controlling the rancor in his voice, “lingered within me only until they found better quarry.”

“Better than you?” mocked Dillon.

Okoya didn’t answer; instead he turned to see Maddy as she climbed up to the platform.

“Dillon what’s going on? Who is this?”

“My old ‘spiritual advisor,’ " said Dillon. “Back to devour more souls.” He had told her everything about Okoya, and for the first time since he had known her, Maddy was truly terrified. “I thought you said he was dead.”

“I said he was worse than dead.”

Okoya looked Maddy over, sizing her up. “Well, Dillon, I see you’ve found yourself a bitch. Good for you!”

Apparently Maddy’s terror was short lived. She advanced on him.

“Maddy, no!”

She high-kicked Okoya in the chin, and to Dillon’s surprise he went down. In an instant she had her foot wedged tightly against his Adam’s apple, pressing him down against the concrete platform. Okoya made no effort to fight back. Instead he laughed, and rasped with a larynx half closed. “And she’s a personal assassin as well. You really have done well for yourself!”

In response Maddy turned her ankle closing off more of his wind. “Give me the word Dillon, and I’ll snap his neck right now.”

“Yes,” Okoya said. “Give the word. And once this body dies, it will free me to inhabit another.” Although he couldn’t move his head, his eyes turned up to Maddy. “In fact, she’d make a tasty host for me.”

Dillon almost involuntarily found his foot swinging at full force, connecting with Okoya’s ribs. Okoya groaned, and Maddy turned to Dillon, surprised by his uncharacteristic brutality. But a creature as vile as this one didn’t deserve the smallest measure of sympathy or dignity.

“I’m not your enemy!” Okoya gasped. “I thought you would have realized that by now!”

Dillon regarded him there on the ground. Okoya seemed so weak now. But that didn’t mean anything. He was a master of deception.

“Let him up,” Dillon told Maddy, then watched with caution as Okoya slowly rolled over, pushed himself up on all fours, and labored to his feet.

“I came here to make a deal with you.”

“Not a chance.”

“Then you’ll never know the things I can tell you,” Okoya said. “And that tragic end to this world you keep prophesying will come to pass just as you expected, and you’ll have no idea how to stop it.”

Dillon hesitated. Okoya was a liar through and through, serving no one’s needs but his own. Dillon had to be careful.

“What kind of deal?”

Okoya took a step closer. “I can tell you what’s coming, and what you need to know to stop it. I can even tell you where to find Winston. You won’t find him without me—you’re not even in the right time zone!”

“In return for what?”

Okoya smiled. “Your blessing,” he said. “Permission to live freely in this world under your protection.”

Dillon began to fume, thinking back to the hundreds of souls Okoya had consumed, leaving behind walking, breathing bodies of flesh with nothing living inside. Death that mimicked life—the very negation of life itself. How could he even think of making such a deal with this thing?

“How many souls have you gorged on since you’ve been back?”

“My doings here are insignificant!” he shouted. “Whether it’s one, or a hundred, it means nothing.”

Wrong answer. It meant quite a lot to Dillon. He lunged forward and grabbed Okoya by the shirt with both fists. “If you stay here among humans, I swear I will chain you up in a place where no one will ever find you, and you’ll never be free to walk the Earth.”

“I was told that once before. But mountains crumble, and shackles break.”

Dillon gripped him tighter. “Not the shackles I’ll give you.”

Maddy watched, knowing better than to get caught in the battle zone between them, wishing she could help Dillon, but knowing she could not. Incapacitating Okoya was one thing, but truly battling him? From what Dillon had told her of Okoya, only another Star Shard could help Dillon now, and that was something she could never be.

A siren drew nearer and Maddy turned to see a police cruiser pull­ing up by the gas pumps where the cashier pointed the officer right toward them, as they stood there in clear view on the high platform. The woman had recognized Maddy after all.

“Dillon, they’ve found us.”

Okoya took that as a cue, and suddenly burst free from Dillon, took two bounds to the end of the platform, and launched himself off in a clumsy gainer to the distant scream of the cashier.

A sickening thud, and they looked over the edge. Okoya lay flat on his back on the concrete pool bottom, skull crushed, blood running down toward the drain now clogged with bright green leaves.

Maddy grabbed Dillon, pulling him toward the ladder. A second squad car pulled into the gas station. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

They climbed down the de-rusted ladder, leaping the last few feet to a patio where the cracks had healed, crushing out the weeds growing between them. But these weren’t the only things that had repaired themselves in the short time Dillon was there. Something was moving in the shell of the pool. It was Okoya, who ran to the shallow end of the pool, and climbed out.

Dillon almost bolted after him, but Maddy stopped him. “No. There’ll be another time.” Together they raced off into the woods before the police got there, and just kept on running.

Dillon knew Okoya had used him again. When he had dived off that platform, he had know that Dillon’s own healing power would mend his broken body in seconds, before they could climb to the bottom of the ladder. He had used Dillon’s own restorative powers to escape, and it was one more weight on Dillon’s head. Maddy said there would be another time, but there was no guarantee of that, and in the meantime, Okoya would be out there, feeding. Yet he had said he wasn’t the enemy. How could that be true?

A half mile away, they came upon a dirt road and a small house in the woods. Now that the authorities knew their whereabouts, federal agents would be called in—it was only a matter of time until the entire area was secured. They had to get out now.

For once luck was with them: the battered jeep beside the house had a set of keys lying with the mail on the passenger seat. Maddy took the wheel.

If nothing else, Okoya had left them with one kernel of informa­tion. He had told them that Winston was in a different time zone. Assuming he had stayed in the country, that meant he was somewhere to the west. The dirt road opened to a rural highway that led them to the interstate, and they disappeared into the flow of nondescript ve­hicles headed west.

16. Blind-speed

The flashpoint of human flesh, Winston recalled, was 415 degrees Fahrenheit, just like that of most other organic matter.

With both the front and rear iron doors closed, the chamber was lightless, and Winston couldn’t fight the urge to turn on his flashlight. The claustrophobic space in which he and Drew now crouched was the most uninviting place Winston had ever had the misfortune to visit. Oversized gas nozzles spaced at precise intervals on the side walls and on the low coffered ceiling were an ever-present reminder of the chamber’s purpose. The soot charred bricks of the crematorium walls still retained residual warmth from earlier that day.

Commercial mortuary crematoria, Winston recalled, reached 1500 de­grees Fahrenheit, reducing balsa wood caskets and their occupants to cinders in under three hours.

Winston turned off his flashlight, deciding that darkness was better than the view.

“Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” delivered Drew, in an impressively accurate Oliver Hardy.

“Quiet—you’ll give us away” Winston’s nerves were frayed, and it annoyed him that Drew could keep calm. The room was dusty and dry, but quickly growing humid from their sweat. It was all he could do not to cough and give away their presence to the funeral director, who loitered just outside the closed furnace door. They had heard him on the phone, then flipping papers, opening and closing drawers, tak­ing care of odds and ends in his lucrative business of morbidity. Al­though they hadn’t heard him for at least ten minutes, that didn’t mean that he wasn’t still lurking after hours.

The average funeral home, Winston recalled, processed about four earthly departures a day. The ashes of a human body weighed approximately two pounds.

Winston’s mind, as always, was a traffic jam of salient facts, none of which helped matters. So he tried to reinitialize his mind, reminding himself of what had brought them here in the first place.

Their path to this hiding place had been a circuitous one, beginning with an investigation into the scant clues left behind by the would-be grave robber. Winston, with his vast supply of knowledge, was not a puzzler like Dillon, who could pull patterns and solutions out of chaos. And although Drew was insightful, he was no investigator either.

They had first submerged the footlocker in Lake Arrowhead, be­hind Drew’s cabin. No grave site, no way for Briscoe or any other lunatic to find Michael’s resting place. Then the two had returned from Lake Arrowhead to Drew’s Newport Beach home to begin their search.

Drew’s parents were awkward and stand-offish around Winston, not knowing his relationship with Drew and not wanting to ask. Aside from complaining to Drew that the lawn needed mowing (which un­beknownst to them, was twice daily, now that Winston was around), his parents left them alone.

Their investigative efforts led them to the hotel from which Briscoe had taken the Gideon bible, and they tried unsuccessfully to ferret out the room from which it had been stolen before being evicted by se­curity. Then, they spent the better part of two days sifting through the Internet in search of Vicki Sanders—the single name scribbled on the bible’s inside cover. Vicki Sanders of Des Moines was a retired school teacher who enjoyed quilting and Harleys. Vicki Sanders of Liverpool was a frustrated factory worker who haunted sex chat rooms while her husband worked the night shift. Vicki Sanders of Minneapolis was actually Victor Sanders, and was damned pissed off at whatever half-assed computer had proliferated an electronic sex change. And Vicki Sanders of rural Tennessee was an SWF looking for a long-term re­lationship, and currently doing five-to-twenty for armed robbery.

“It’s pointless,” Winston had complained to Drew. “Even if we found the right one, how would we know? We don’t even know what connection she has to Briscoe, if any.”

Then, toward the end of the second day, Winston tripped a land mine within his own thoughts. Something that had been there, un­derfoot, all along, that he should have considered earlier.

He asked Drew for his initial notes on the phone numbers also scrawled on the bible’s watermark. Drew had tested each phone num­ber in more than a dozen different area codes, and the combinations that actually yielded connections had no obvious relevance.

The only number that was the slightest bit troubling was that of a funeral home in the California desert town of Barstow. Barstow, aside from being home to the world’s largest McDonald’s, had been in na­tional news a year ago. With the morgues and mortuaries of Las Vegas as overbooked as the hotels in the grim aftermath of the Backwash, a good number of the dead had been diverted to Barstow.

The names of those who had died had filled news reports for weeks. The more famous names took the spotlight, of course. The former senator from Wisconsin; the prominent architect; the notorious celeb­rity attorney. But the names of common people were washed into obscurity just as quickly as their bodies had been taken under the waters.

It didn’t take much searching to discover one Vicki Sanders among the dead.

“I don’t get it,” Drew had said. “What would this guy want with some woman who died in the Backwash?”

The answer came to Winston in a slow and sickening revelation.

And so now they hunched in a Barstow crematorium chamber.

It had been hard enough to slip into the establishment unnoticed before closing, and although climbing into the chamber had seemed the only way to hide from an approaching staff member, the idea had quickly fallen out of favor, for the funeral director didn’t leave the anteroom for more than forty-five minutes. Winston couldn’t help but worry whether these devices were set to some cleaning cycle after hours.

Twenty-eight people, Winston recalled, suffered accidental deaths each year in funeral homes.

When all had been quiet for twenty minutes, Winston slowly pushed open the heavy furnace door, and they climbed into a dark room that seemed bright when compared to the chamber. There were no windows, but someone had left a light on in an adjacent closet, and a perimeter of light escaped around its closed door. The coolness of the antechamber was a welcome relief.

“I saw the main office when we came in,” Drew said. “It should be this way.”

They passed through a large medicinal-smelling room with a stain­less steel table, and instruments that were mercifully obscured in the darkness; then they opened a door into the business office. Winston turned on his flashlight to reveal a room that could have been part of any business establishment. A secretary’s desk decorated with family pictures around a computer; a copy and fax machine in the corner; and against the far wall, a row of black filing cabinets. Those cabinets suddenly were more ominous to Winston than the crematorium.

Please, let me be wrong . . . let me be completely wrong.

He had told Drew of his suspicions, but Drew reserved judgment, not wanting to extrapolate until all the facts were in. Now, neither would speak of it, as if speaking it aloud would baptize their hunch into reality.

I’m wrong, Winston told himself as they approached the filing cab­inets. I have to be wrong.

Winston found the drawer labeled “SA-SN” and tugged it open. The files smelled of age—apparently these folders went back for many years, and since the dead rarely returned to audit their own records, no one had bothered to input them into computers.

“There it is,” Drew said.

“I see it.”

Vicki Sanders’s file was a new manila folder, sandwiched between the aging ones. Winston pulled it out, but didn’t look at it just yet. He took a deep breath, and then another, feeling lightheaded from the stench of embalming fluid that had followed them in from the mor­tician’s station.

“You want me to read it?” Drew asked

“I’ll do it.” Winston clenched his jaw. There was some knowledge that came easily, and other knowledge that came with great pain. Ei­ther way, he couldn’t wait anymore. He flipped open the file, spread it across the open drawer, and shone his light at it. It was minimal—just a few pages. Information forms, medical examiner’s report, death certificate, liability releases, and finally a signed order to cremate.

“Tell me,” said Drew, who, despite the calm he had showed ear­lier, wouldn’t bring himself to look at the pages.

“Vicki Sanders,” began Winston. “Body found on the bank of the Colorado River, last October 21st. Cause of death: acute physical trauma consistent with fall. Sixteen years old.”

“Oh, Jesus . . .”

Winston blinked then blinked again, the information leaping off the page making his eyes sting. “Her mother came all the way from Florida to claim the body.” He took a deep breath before imparting the news. “Her mother’s name was Sharon Smythe.”

Drew pounded his fist on the filing cabinet, the sound tolling through the moribund silence of the funeral home.

“Vicki Sanders—Victoria Sanders—went by her mother’s last name,” said Winston. “It’s Tory.”

Martin Briscoe couldn’t be bothered with the taxi’s seatbelt. No matter how bad the Miami cabby drove, Martin knew there could be no accident. His mission put him above such things. He was protected against such inconsequential concerns.

“The law says I gotta take you where you want to go,” the cabby told Martin. “But that don’t mean I gotta like it.”

The cabby shrugged his shoulder uncomfortably, revealing the edge of a nicotine patch on his neck. It was obviously not doing the job, because the cab reeked of stale smoke, and the open mouth of the ashtray bulged with twisted Marlboro butts.

The cabbie glanced at Martin in the rearview mirror. “Detached retina?” he asked, taking notice of the bandage over his right eye. “My son had a detached retina—hit in the face with a goddamn hockey stick.”

Martin took a deep breath. A thousand cabbies in Miami, and he had to get the one who spoke English. He answered by not answering, hoping the cabby got the hint.

“Yeah, eye trouble is the worst,” blathered the cabby. “Can’t set it like a bone, can’t lance it like a boil.”

“How much further?”

“Almost there.”

Martin smoothed out a ruffle in his eye dressing. Although he had pared down the gauze and tape to a bare minimum, there was no way to hide the wound. The eye Drew Camden had blinded with a starter pistol still ached and oozed, having been untreated for more than a week, or at least untreated by anyone but him. Emergency rooms were out of the question—he was wanted in Eureka, and surely that damn kid had set the Newport Beach police on his tail as well. Self-treatment was the word of the day, but dentistry was a far cry from ocular triage. After six days, he suspected that his sight wasn’t coming back, and infection had taken hold.

Pain is good, he told himself. It reminded him of his failure in the graveyard—which made him determined not to fail again.

Martin unzipped the travel bag beside him to check that the lid hadn’t come off the urn he carried. Once he was satisfied it was secure, he glanced with his good eye at the address on a crumbled slip of paper and looked at the neighborhood around him. It was a neighborhood that decayed more with each block they drove, looking even worse painted in the half-tones and shadows of a failing twilight. “Exactly what part of Miami are we going to?” he asked.

The cabby spat out a rueful chuckle. “Haven’t been here before, have you?”

Martin shook his head.

“You’re going right to the middle of ‘The Miami Miasma.’ "

Martin sank back in the worn seat. “Sounds wonderful.”

“It got voted ‘Best place to drop the bomb,’ three times in a row.” The cabby told him, “Of course that was back during the cold war, when the bomb still meant something.”

They crossed an intersection, and the bottom seemed to drop out of whatever fabric held the neighborhood together. They had entered an overpopulated slum; a human sump that caught the dregs of every cultural group; the bitter bottom of the melting pot.

The cabby hit his lock button, even though all the locks were already down. “Keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times,” he said. “The animals bite.”

The streets were infused with a sense of despair that permeated the souls around them: pushers and prostitutes competing for clients; angry youth with carnivorous glares. Bleak alley-shadows crouching in card­board dwellings. Even the decaying, graffiti-tagged walls seemed to breathe hopelessness in the oppressive Floridian humidity.

Martin had known his mission would take him to the edge of hell, but he had assumed it would only be figurative. “How much further?”

“Just a few more blocks.”

They turned a corner where children played in and around an abandoned rust-bucket Buick straddling the sidewalk. A brick frag­ment was lobbed like a grenade across the hood of the taxi.

“Son of a bitch,” grumbled the cabby, but just drove on.

Martin reached into his bag, nervously rubbing the side of the funeral urn he had brought as if it were a genie’s lamp. When he looked at its polished surface, he could see a faint reflection of his own face, oblate and distorted by the curvature of the brass. Were the angels watching him now, he wondered? The sense of intangible paranoia told him that they were still there. Observing. Judging. Perhaps the loss of his eye was a judgment as well. Perhaps bliss could only be achieved through pain. Or maybe they were just screwing with him.

“A loved one?” the cabby asked.

“Excuse me?”

“That’s an urn in your bag isn’t it?”

Martin toyed with the various indignant remarks he could respond with, and the various ways in which the cabby might be silenced both temporarily and permanently, but in the end decided none of it was worth the trouble. “I’m a funeral director,” he said, trying the lie on for size.

The cabby raised an eyebrow, “I didn’t know you guys made house calls.”

“Would you like my card?”

The cabby shrugged his neck uncomfortably again, glanced at the ashtray, and scratched his nicotine patch. “No. No, that’s okay.”

Martin grinned smugly. Yes, he was sufficiently funereal to pull off his current charade. He cleared a smudge from the urn, then glanced out of the window again.

To his surprise, the neighborhood had changed.

Gone were the graffiti-burdened walls and boarded windows. The gutters that had been filled with debris were clean, and the stench of misery was replaced by the smell of wet paint.

Just up ahead a barrier blocked the sidewalk, and narrowed the road to a single lane. It had the semblance of a civilian barricade: chairs, tables—anything that could be piled upon, had been wedged into the blockade, and smaller household objects became the mortar in the gaps. Through the barricade, Martin caught the blue flickering of an arc welder.

“What’s going on here?”

“Urban renewal,” the cabby told him.

They pulled over near a clean black and white sign that said “Par­don our dust during beautification.”

“This is as far as I go,” Cabby said. “They don’t let taxis into the Miasma. Nowadays it’s what you might call a ‘gated community.’ "

Martin turned to look out the back window, where several blocks away he could still see the crumbling streets. “I thought we just passed through the Miasma.”

“Naah,” the cabby said. “That was the shit around the pearl.”

“I thought you said it was a horrible place.”

“That was then,” explained the cabby. “This is now. The Miasma cleaned up real good . . . if you call that clean.”

Martin almost asked how such a thing could happen to such a localized area in such a short period of time . . . but he answered his own question. “Tory Smythe . . .” he mumbled under his breath, but this cabby missed nothing, and threw him a knowing grin.

“She used to live here. That’s the rumor, anyway. Kind of makes you wonder.”

Martin opened the door, but didn’t pull out his wallet. “You’ll wait for me,” Martin instructed. “I won’t be long—keep the meter running.”

The cabby threw him a disgusted look. “Yeah, yeah.” He threw the cab into park. “Why did I know you were going to say that.” He rolled down his window and lit a cigarette.

As Martin approached the gap in the barricade, a guard with a clipboard came out to greet him, Cuban-dark and as clean-cut as Ward Cleaver.

“I need your name and destination,” the guard said.

“Marcus D’Angelo,” said Martin, giving his alias of the day. “I’m going to 414 Las Estacas, apartment 3-C.”

The guard glanced up at him at the mention of the address, then back down to his clipboard and curtly said “I’m sorry—you’re not on my guest list.”

Martin tipped the clipboard so he could see it, and quickly found his name. There were only a handful of names on the list—and no way the guard could have missed it.

“Funny, I could see it just fine with one eye.”

“You have business with Sharon Smythe?”

“My business is no business of yours.”

The guard stared at him, mad-dogging him a moment more, then backed down. “Two blocks down, then make a left. If she’s not home, you might try the church across the street.” The guard’s eyes turned to Martin’s suit coat. He picked a shred of lint from Martin’s jacket, rolled it into a ball in his fingers, then glanced down at Martin’s rum­pled slacks. “We have a dress code here,” he said. “Maybe next time you’ll remember to get those pressed.” Then he stepped aside.

Martin crossed between the banks of the barricade, to find that the Miasma had been transmuted into an inner-city Mayberry.

Just inside the barricade, a welder worked to erect a wrought iron fence that would soon take the place of the barricade. Painters coated the gate with primer.

The buildings were of the same construction as those beyond the barricade, but here, the brick had been sandblasted clean. The hydrants were painted a cheery orange, and there was not as much as a single candy wrapper in the gutter. A man in front of an appliance store swept dust from the sidewalk. An elderly couple holding hands strolled lei­surely down the street and teens hanging out on a street corner greeted the couple with a smile, tipping their caps like boy scouts. A block down, children played in a park that had probably been a syringe-mined vacant lot before Tory’s cleansing presence had mutated every­thing caught within her sphere of influence. In a sense, a bomb had been dropped on the Miasma; a cleansing salvo that had sanitized the streets, the hearts and the souls of those who lived here.

As Martin crossed another spotless intersection, he could see, on either side about a half mile away, other barricades keeping out the rest of the impure world. This place was an oasis in the midst of squalor. An abnormal, unnatural place. It reminded Martin why he was there, and what he had to do.

People nodded him a polite greeting as he passed, but their stares lingered on his bandaged eye a moment too long, and he could read an aftertaste of suspicion. They made it very clear that he was an out­sider, unclean in some fundamental way. It wasn’t just his eye, or his rumpled clothes, he realized—it was the fact that he wasn’t one of them. He didn’t possess their peculiar brand of purity. He was half tempted to go take a piss in some corner, just out of spite—but he didn’t need to draw further attention to himself. Not now, when he was so close.

No one answered at Sharon Smythe’s apartment, and so, following the guard’s advice, he crossed the street to a church, climbing a set of wide stone steps, and entering through a partially open door.

It was a high-ceilinged cathedral. Stained glass pictorials of the life of Christ painted the sanctuary in a colorful mosaic of light, slowly fading as the sun slipped off the horizon.

A man near the entrance was on hands and knees with a scrub brush and bucket, polishing the tile floor in little circles.

“Shoes off!” he demanded as Martin stepped in. “Shoes off!” It took a moment for Martin to realize from the man’s vestments that he was the priest. Martin removed his shoes and left them in a rear pew, then strode slowly down the center aisle.

There was only one congregant in the empty church—a blonde woman of forty, hair beginning to grey at the temples. She sat in the second pew from the front, as if being in the front pew would put her too deep under God’s scrutiny.

“Ms. Smythe?”

The woman didn’t look up. She stayed in her kneeling position, finishing whatever prayer she silently recited. Martin had little patience for it. “I don’t mean to disturb you . . . " he said, loudly enough to make it clear that he did mean to disturb her.

Finally she looked up at him. If she was put off by his bandaged eye, she didn’t show it. “I suppose you’re Mr. D’Angelo.”

Far in the back, the priest grumbled upon finding his shoes in the rear pew, and took them to the entrance mat.

“Don’t mind Father Martinez,” said Sharon Smythe. “He doesn’t have much to do these days. Oh, for a while the place was packed with repentant souls and daily sermons. Now nobody comes to con­fession anymore. I imagine they’ve all convinced themselves they’re free of sin.”

Martin didn’t care to make small talk, or linger longer than he had to within this sterile field.

“Perhaps we should go back to your apartment, Ms. Smythe—so we can make the exchange.”

She looked at the object bulging in his leather carrying case.

“Are you certain that those are my daughter’s ashes?”

“Absolutely.”

She eyed the carrying case a moment more, then she reached be­neath her pew. “I have it right here.” From beneath the pew, she pulled out a box, and from inside the box she pulled out an urn. It was a white ceramic vessel, much more appealing than the one Martin had brought.

“Her life was riddled with bad luck,” Sharon Smythe said. “I sup­pose it shouldn’t surprise me that it wouldn’t end with her death.”

Martin opened his carrying case, and removed his urn, making a point to handle it with more care than he really had. “It was a horrible time. So many had died when the dam burst.”

“I suppose your business was good.”

“We earn our money relieving people’s misery, not creating it.” He held the brass urn out to her, but she didn’t take it.

“I should be heartened to find a funeral home so honest it corrects errors that no one would know about. You didn’t have to tell me I had the wrong ashes—I would never have known.”

He couldn’t pull his eyes from her urn, and wondered if there might be some unholy magic yet in those ashes. “Some funeral homes have more integrity than others. But I give you my personal assurance that Tory has been respectfully cared for, and I regret any further suffering this mix-up may have caused.” He waited for her to accept the exchange, but she still held firmly onto the ceramic urn.

“So where are the papers?” she asked.

“Which papers?”

“The ones I have to sign—the ones that state I won’t sue for gross negligence.”

Martin released a quick impatient breath, then regretted it. He tried to regain a sullen semblance of empathy. “You don’t have to sign anything, Ms. Smythe.”

“Why not?” She looked up from her urn to face him again. There was more than grief in her eyes now—more than bitterness. He could sense distrust coming into focus.

“I was only instructed to bring you your daughter’s ashes. If you have any legal issues, you’ll have to take them up with my employer.”

“I thought you told me over the phone that you were a partner, not an employee.”

“Ms. Smythe, do you want your daughter’s ashes or not?”

She responded by putting her ceramic urn back down into the box, and pushing it under her seat. “It’s funny, Mr. D’Angelo, but at my daughter’s cremation, I didn’t see you there.”

Martin could feel his lies begin to fold in on one another, and he struggled to maintain the facade. “We’re a large mortuary.”

“Another funny thing was how her body was identified,” she con­tinued. “Her bracelet. Her father gave it to her when she was very little—when she still went by his name. The bracelet said ‘Vicki Sanders.’ With so many bodies turning up along the banks of the river, no one gave her name a second thought—and when they contacted me, I wasn’t about to tell them who she really was—not with the way her name was plastered all over the news. But you just called her Tory, Mr. D’Angelo. You knew who she was.”

“Perhaps I should just keep your daughter’s remains, and leave you with a stranger’s,” he said, clinging to his story one final time.

“Do you think I’m stupid, Mr. D’Angelo? You’re a reporter, aren’t you? Either that or just one more nut.”

Martin smiled and took a long look at this woman. He admired smart women. He had married one. And this smart woman’s daughter had been an accomplice in his wife’s murder.

“Are there even ashes in your urn,” she asked in disgust, “or did you just fill it with sand?”

Well, thought Martin, there were times for diplomacy, and times for action. “Coffee grounds actually.” He stood without warning and swung the brass urn, connecting with the woman’s cheek. She grunted with the blow, and took a breath about to scream. He swung it again as her scream let loose, rattling the stained glass windows in the cav­ernous space. The second blow caught her forehead and knocked her to the ground. The lid flew off, sending a spray of earthen-smelling coffee grounds in the air. He came down on top of her as she struggled, pinning her. “This is a house of God, Ms. Smythe,” he reminded her, shouting above her screams. “And I am his messenger.” Then he brought the dented urn high above his head. “When you don’t kill the messenger, sometimes the messenger kills you.” He brought the edge of the urn down upon her head again in a final killing blow. Then he reached under the pew, and pulled out the white ceramic urn, slipping it into his carrying case. When he stood, there was some­one behind him.

“My God! What have you done?”

The priest stood in the aisle behind him, mouth agape, and drip­ping scrub brush still in hand. Martin found himself laughing at the absurdity of the question. “The Lord’s work,” he answered. “Isn’t it obvious?” He pushed his way past, and strode down the aisle. At the back of the church, he rinsed the blood from his hands in a marble bowl of holy water, then grabbed his shoes at the door.

17. Caution To The Wind

Drew had always known that Tory was dead. He had been there—he had been the only witness close enough to see her and Michael huddling together in the doorway on the face of the dam as it crumbled around them. There wasn’t a day when Drew didn’t think about it—didn’t dream about it. He would relive it, trying desperately to change the outcome, but it never changed. They died, he survived. Even with a broken collar bone, he had made it to safety, but was unable to help Michael and Tory in their final moments.

Survivor’s guilt—isn’t that what they called it? It became the fuel of all his track victories, personal successes, and personal failures. So, yes, he knew that they were dead, but there was a strange solace in the fact that their bodies had not been found—as if they had been raptured away from a mere mortal demise.

But then they found Michael, or what remained of him after so many months, mysteriously deposited in the desert miles away from the disaster. And now, to find out that Tory was never missing at all—that she was just one of the dead, cremated and sent home a year ago . . . To Drew there was something ignoble about it. Obscene. Such an ordinary end to her extraordinary life.

There was no direct flight from Barstow to Miami. There was no direct flight from Barstow to anywhere. They managed to take a puddle-jumper to Phoenix, as Winston refused to have anything to do with the closer city of Las Vegas. From Phoenix, they got seats on an American flight to Miami, by way of Dallas.

“So what do we do when we get there?” Drew asked Winston as they waited to board in Phoenix.

“How the hell should I know?” was Winston’s response.

“Well, you’re always the one with all the answers.”

“This isn’t Jeopardy!”

“Naah,” said Drew. “They already have the answers. Can’t win Jeopardy unless you know the questions.”

“I’m working on that, too.”

Before boarding, Drew took out his cell phone and made the dreaded call home. “I’m taking off for a few days,” he told his parents. “Drug run to Columbia,” he joked. “I’ll be back by Tuesday. Wednes­day tops.” But when his mother pressed him as to what was really going on, he told her he had to take care of “old business.”

He could practically hear his mother’s knuckles pop as she wrung her hands. They both knew that “old business” meant something to do with the Shards—and his five unnatural friends were not discussed in their home.

When he had returned home last October, crushed shoulder and all, it had taken his parents months to be convinced that he hadn’t been brainwashed by a cult. His parents were among the few, the proud, the rational, who refused to accept the bludgeoning of magic the Shards had inflicted on the fragile world. What made it even harder for them to wrap their minds around was that their son was an integral part of it. After all, he still went to school, still wise-cracked, still had bed-hair in the morning—he was still their son. How could someone who cavorted with gods still be their son? To his parents, denying the Shards was the only way they could keep him. So he never discussed with them his weeks at Hearst castle, the cyclone, his death, his res­urrection, the theft and recovery of his soul.

And so on the rare occasions that Drew invoked the “old business” clause, his parents gave him a wide berth, as a matter of self-preservation.

On the line, he could hear his mother talking to his father in hushed tones. “Does he have enough money?” he heard his father say—quite a change from his father’s standard threat to shut down his credit card. But even if he did, it didn’t matter. He was eighteen now, presider over, if not master of, his own choices, with enough money of his own to do as he pleased.

They didn’t press, they didn’t try to talk him out of going. He was both relieved and disappointed.

“Do something for me, Ma,” he asked before he got off the phone. “Unpack, will ya’?” He could imagine his mother still sitting there amidst the storage boxes, still seeking and believing a sensible expla­nation as to why she was so compelled to box and order her life. She agreed noncommittally, and Drew hung up, pondering the phone long after the connection had severed.

Drew found the American terminal in Dallas to be like one of those nightmares where you keep running but never get anywhere. Three massive semicircles boasting more than 80 gates, all of which were equally inaccessible, regardless of which gate you were connecting from. Their connection to Miami was at gate A-19. They had arrived at gate C-23, and naturally, the shuttle train was on the blink.

Moving through the terminal became a study in petit Armageddon. Sky-caps drove golf carts at breakneck speeds with less regard than usual for human life, and gate agents had long since abandoned their facades of officious geniality. The crowds around them were larger and more fractious than the normal airport hordes. There were distraught clusters of waylaid travelers caught in the growing number of flight cancellations and delays that epitomized the times. And there was also a large contingent of vagrants who had taken up residence within the terminal buildings. Sometimes it was hard to tell which was which.

“Airports are high-maintenance facilities,” Winston explained as they power-walked through the terminal. “As things start to go bad, places like this get hit first.”

" ‘Go bad’—you make it sound like the world is a container of milk that’s been left out too long.”

They passed a small gaggle of self-proclaimed Colists—one of countless disconnected and misinformed groups that had sprung up like crabgrass in public places, claiming to be followers of Dillon. This particular group had a Santeria flavor, and evoked blood-curses on the beleaguered security guard that tried to roust them. It seemed airport security, which had peaked at the turn of the millennium, had now sunk to an all time low.

“Eventually,” said Winston, “as things slip further and further into chaos, there won’t be enough employees to keep a place like this running. The airlines will begin to shut down.”

Drew had read just a few weeks ago how United had dropped service to a dozen smaller cities. Apparently it was a sign of things to come. It boggled him to the point that he felt like burying his head in the sand, the way so many others did. “How could the Backwash be responsible for all of this?”

They had reached a moving sidewalk between terminals B and C, and they paused to let Winston catch his breath.

“Great events flow like ripples through civilization,” Winston ex­plained. “Assassinations, bombings. Acts of war. But Dillon—even un­intentionally—is far too good at both creation and destruction. What he did to that dam, and that river, was the precise event, in the precise place, at the precise time to hit a pressure point of civilization with such power, it sent out a series of fractures, rather than ripples.”

Drew tried to consider it. He supposed everyone had psychological pressure points—events that can define you, or destroy you . . . but the human race was not a single personality; it was a collection of six billion disparate identities. To consider some cabalistic interconnectedness of the body human didn’t sit well with Drew. There were simply too many people he did not want to be connected to.

“I don’t know,” Drew said. “It’s all too Jedi for me.”

“It’s not just mysticism,” said Winston. “There’s a logic to it. Everything is a series of actions and reactions. Dillon’s very presence brings order to it—lining things up in a series of chain reactions. What Dillon did—what we all did—not only defies rational explanation, it kills the very concept of rationality. Civilization began with rational thought. Take away that cornerstone and everything crumbles.”

As if to prove Winston’s point, they found their flight canceled when they reached the gate, adding to the collective misery of the airport hordes.

“Flight crew shortages, and too many travelers,” the gate attendant told them. “It’s like that with all the beach cities; all of a sudden every­one’s going on vacation.”

And so their night was spent in the airport on a goose chase to every gate that promised a flight to Miami. But with so much com­petition, getting on stand-by was like winning the lottery. They watched three flights arrive, watched them all leave, and were no closer to getting a seat.

At 7:00 a.m. they sat in uncomfortable airport chairs on a long stand-by list for the fourth time.

“Why does it even matter if we find Briscoe?” Drew grumbled, wishing he could be home in a comfortable bed. “I mean, yeah, it’d be great if Dillon could take Tory’s ashes and bring her back. But even if Briscoe does get her ashes, it’s not the end of the world.”

“Are you so sure of that?” Winston asked.

After a night with no sleep, Drew didn’t feel like tackling the big questions. “I don’t follow.”

“You told me yourself—he said he’s on some ‘divine mission.’ Maybe there’s something to that—although I don’t think it’s anything divine.”

“Or maybe he’s just a psycho.”

Winston considered it and shook his head. “I keep having this dream—more like a vision. There’s three figures standing on a ledge and they’re waiting for something. I believe Briscoe is in the dream, too—or at least he used to be. It’s him they’re waiting for.”

Drew rolled his neck. He always knew he wasn’t one of them, but neither did he appreciate being left in the dark. “You could have told me.”

Winston glanced around to make sure they were unobserved, then spoke quietly. “There were six Shards of the Scorpion Star, Drew. Two years ago, all six of us touched for an instant, and it was the most powerful thing I’ve ever felt. But now three of us are dead.” Winston leaned in closer, his voice growing more hushed. “What if they weren’t supposed to die? What if everything hinges on Dillon bringing them back, and the six of us coming together again?”

Drew uncomfortably shifted his shoulders, feeling the pull of the stitches on his arm, which wasn’t getting any better.

“The whole has always been greater than the sum of our parts,” Winston continued. “The more of us together, the more our powers multiply. With the way our powers are growing, can you imagine what might happen if the six of us came together now?”

“No, I can’t.” Drew said honestly. “I’m not sure I want to.”

Winston nodded. “Neither does Briscoe.”

The next inbound from Miami pulled up to the gate half an hour late. A short break for fueling, luggage, and mechanical band-aids, and it would head back to the land of gators and hurricanes. The crowds at the gate, however, made it doubtful that Drew and Winston would get seats.

They waited, eying the slow-moving check-in line, casually watching as passengers disembarked the jet in a panicked diaspora to catch whatever flight they were already late for.

So anxious was Drew to get on this flight that he almost missed the exiting passenger with a patch over his eye.

He saw it only for the briefest instant as he scanned the jetway exit, but once his brain registered what he had seen, he double-took to see the man’s back as he strode toward the higher gates.

A dozen denials shot through Drew’s mind. This could not be the same man. He looked taller; he looked leaner; what hair he had left seemed grayer at the temples. But Drew had only encountered him twice. How many men fitting that general description flew out of Miami on any given day? one hundred? two hundred? How many with a wounded right eye? Drew felt his cool, level demeanor began to splinter, and he shook Winston hard enough to rattle his chair.

“It’s him! It’s Briscoe—I’m sure of it!” His certainty swelled with his adrenaline.

“What?! Where?”

“There—just passing gate nine—do you see him?”

Their subject carried a leather shoulder bag that bulged like every­one else’s carry-on—but there was an unnerving definition to the bulge, as if whatever it was, was not meant to be jammed into luggage. He turned to enter a bathroom, and again Drew caught a brief glimpse of the bandage over his eye.

“Would you know him if you saw him close up?” Winston asked.

“No question about it. Oh, shit! What do we do?”

“What happened to the unshakeable Drew Camden I used to know?”

“I think he’s about to piss his pants.” Drew felt his emotions sling­shot back to the scuffle on top of Michael’s coffin, but Winston was there to pick up the slack, and pull both their minds into focus.

“Okay . . . okay, if it’s him, we have to be careful,” Winston said, as they headed toward the restroom.

“Do we storm the bathroom?”

“No—we’re not even sure it’s him yet. We’ll separate—I’ll go to the gift shop on this side of the restroom, you go the bar on the far side—since it looks like he was headed toward the upper gates. When he comes out he’ll pass one of us—hopefully you—and you’ll get a better look at him. If we’re lucky, he won’t spot us.”

“And then what? We can’t make a move on him here—there are too many exits—too many chances for him to get away.”

“We’ll have to get him alone. Trap him somewhere.”

Then something occurred to Drew. “There might be a way we can trap him,” he said. “Without having to get him alone.”

Martin Briscoe, who usually hated air travel, quickly discovered that airports were his friend. Where else could he vanish into a crowd so effectively? The fact that most people were on trajectories that took them hundreds of miles away made it even easier to be anonymous.

He could murder someone right there in the restroom, and by the time the body was found, any potential witnesses would be spread anywhere from Anchorage to Auckland. Not that he had any current intentions of homicide—but still, it was nice to know.

Locked in his stall, the toilet flushed as he stepped back. It was one of those automatic johns. The pinnacle of modern technology. He reached into his bag, pulled out the white urn, then opened the cap. His task was to spread Tory Smythe’s ashes to the corners of the earth. And so holding the urn cradled in his left arm, he dipped his right thumb and forefinger in, extracting a pinch of ash.

He turned his eyes upward. “For your glory,” he said aloud, in case the angels got off on praise—which he felt sure they did—al­though he also knew these were angels of action, not words. Long-winded psalms and the reciting of epistles would inspire impatience. He could sense that about them, so he pared his words of praise down to sound bytes.

Holding his fingertips close to the bowl, he rubbed them together, releasing the dusty ash, then stepped back. The bowl flushed auto­matically, and one more ration of Tory Smythe’s physical essence was fed back to the Earth. Deep in his mind, at that strange interface, he could feel the glow of the angels’ approval. But still they kept their distance, and he wondered what he had to do to bring them closer.

Perhaps when he was finished, they would come to him. Reward him.

As for Tory Smythe, she had a date with dissolution on a global scale. Even before laying waste to the offices of Eureka dental, Martin had pulled out all of his savings, and now he had used most of it to purchase air tickets. Dallas was his first stop, then Mexico City, then Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, Barcelona, Tel Aviv, New Delhi, Tok­yo, and a half dozen other ports of call in a massive globe-trotting itinerary. He fancied himself a Phineas Fogg of a new millennium; around the world in twenty-three days. And in each airport he would leave behind another dash of dust, until Tory Smythe had been dis­persed more effectively than anyone who had ever lived.

The corners of the Earth. What a cushy assignment! This would more than make up for his failure with Michael Lipranski.

And that wasn’t over, either. He would find that faggot friend of his, and julienne the truth out of him, exacting his revenge in pounds of flesh until he told Martin where Michael’s body was hidden.

But why embitter himself with that now? He had listened to enough motivational tapes in his life to know that negative energy never helped the situation. Best to focus on the task at hand. So he spent a moment tracing his hopscotch flight paths in his mind, until he could see that final destination, when he would stand on the rim of Black Canyon, where he had once stood and watched his wife and son die beneath the flood, and he would hurl the empty urn into the dry bed of the Colorado River.

When he left the restroom, he felt untouchable.

Mexico City was currently not a hot destination, and his flight was only half full. Although he would have preferred his excursion first class all the way, his funds kept him mostly in coach. When the door closed, he thought he might get both the window and aisle seat to himself—but after the plane left the gate, a black kid, who reeked of travel sweat, changed seats, dropping his ass right next to Martin. Lately Martin’s tolerance for minorities had declined, so he turned his one good eye out of the window as the plane taxied toward the runway, hoping that with any luck the black kid might find another empty seat more inviting. Perhaps it was just the thrill of his journey, but as the plane accelerated toward takeoff, he could feel his skin tingle. The hair on his arms, the skin of his scalp, his cuticles. It was a sensation that was familiar, although he couldn’t quite place where he had felt it before. Then, as the nose of the jet lifted off the runway, it occurred to him the time and place that went along with that sensation. It was a rose garden in the shadow of Hearst Castle, where one of several self-proclaimed gods held court. His flesh had crawled then as his body hair grew, and he watched roses explode from buds into full bloom in a matter of seconds.

Before the rear landing gear left the earth, he knew who was sitting next to him.

He turned his head, exaggerating the motion to give his left eye a clear sight of the passenger to his right. It was unmistakably Winston Pell, who smiled coldly at him and said, “You need a haircut.”

Martin could only stammer. “You’re dead! You’re supposed to be dead. Like Tory—like Michael and the others. Like Dillon!”

“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” he said. “Looks like your carry-on doesn’t quite fit under the seat in front of you. Mind telling me what’s inside?”

“Go to hell.”

And then a second face appeared looming over the seat back in front of him. “Well if it isn’t my buddy the one-eyed Chihuahua killer!” said Drew Camden.

“You both go to hell!” Martin blurted out.

“No,” said Drew, “I believe we’re going to Mexico City.”

By now several surrounding passengers had taken notice of their exchange, but as the plane was still on a steep ascent, no flight atten­dants stalked the aisle.

“You should get that eye looked at,” said Winston. “It’s infected, isn’t it. Those bacteria must be growing at an incredible rate right now.”

Sure enough, Martin could feel the flesh around his eye burn and his sinuses ache. Around him the gray cloud cover gave way to bright sunlight as they punched through the clouds. But there was another light now; a light deep in Martin’s mind. Light and pain and voices without words.

It was the angels.

They were furious. He was failing them. They wanted action, not praise, not excuses. They wanted his action, they demanded his action.

“Too bad Tory’s not alive,” said Winston. “Infections were her thing, she could have cleaned you up in a sec. Of course, in some ways, she’s still with us, isn’t she?”

“So why don’t you be a nice little psycho, and give us your bag.” said Drew. “Now.”

The pain in his eye grew unbearable, as did the voices, and the light. He unbuckled his seatbelt, pulled the bag out from the seat, and motioned as if to hand the bag over to Winston, but instead climbed on his seat, and leapt over its back to the seat behind him, landing on a very surprised woman. There were loud exclamations from the trav­elers around him, but he ignored them. He still had a mission, but now that mission had changed.

Drew and Winston came at him, but he evaded their grasp. Wrap­ping his bag’s strap around his arm, then gripping the bag to his chest, Martin flew down the steeply inclined aisle toward the back of the plane. There were few options left to him now. He might be able to handle the Camden kid, but he was no match for Winston Pell. The freakish boy could focus his power into a surge that would shoot his growing infection down the optic nerve, routing his brain. God knew what else he was capable of. So Martin bolted to put distance between them, even if that distance could only be a dozen yards.

The aft flight attendant had seen this coming.

She had heard the escalating argument, and knew that, whatever it was about, no good could come of it—and now they had all left their seats, heading for her. What’s more, the man with the carry-on had a desperate look about him that summoned her gooseflesh. She rose to intercept.

“You’ll all have to find a seat now!” she said, getting between the two teens and the riot-eyed man. “You’re disturbing the other pas­sengers, and are in severe violation of—"

The black teen pushed her out of the way to get at the man, who frantically eyed the hatch.

“This can all be over now!” The black teen told the man with the bag, but the man was surprisingly strong, hurling the kid away hard enough to deliver him across the galley, knocking loose the secured cart which flew out of its niche, and tumbled on the boy.

“I need help back here!” she shouted. By now other attendants were already running to join the melee.

The man held his pack high out of reach of the second teen—high enough for the other passengers to get a good look at the bulging, rigid shape inside.

“He’s got a bomb!” someone yelled. The cabin erupted in panic, to the point that the flight attendant wondered if it were true. She hesitated, and rather than deal with the man, decided to fend off his antagonists, because whatever the situation was, they were making it worse. She turned to the black kid, who had just freed himself from beneath the cart.

As Winston rose to his feet, he saw Briscoe swing his bag at Drew’s arm, the urn inside connecting with his injury. Drew wailed in pain. Winston tried to get back into the fight, but the stewardess inserted herself as an obstacle in the narrow galley. She shouted something ridiculous about placing him under FAA arrest, while behind her, Bris­coe was tugging mightily on the hatch’s release lever.

“Drew! Stop him!” But Drew was already being hauled up the aisle by a steward, and two other passengers who had had enough.

Winston saw the hatch lever engage, and self-preservation suddenly supplanted all else. He reached up, grabbed a hand rail, and clenched his fist around it as a blast of sudden wind exploded in his painfully popping ears.

It was Drew who had the clearest view.

Eyes still locked on Briscoe even as he was pulled away, Drew saw the handle go down, and the instant the lock disengaged, the door crashed open, and Briscoe was gone, sack and all. At only a mile high, decompression wasn’t explosive, but it was close enough. A wind sucked violently through the cabin, air masks dropped. Drew’s feet flew out from under him and he hooked an arm rest with his good arm. The flight attendant who had first tried to stop them grabbed futilely for purchase, then was ejected into the void. Pressure equalized, but the roar of wind and engines remained.

“Winston!”

But Drew couldn’t even hear his own voice. The jet vibrated as if it would rattle itself apart, and the screams around the cabin began to fade as passengers realized they were not going to die. The sound of the engines changed as the pilot took a new flight plan, slowing air­speed, angling them for descent and a quick airport return.

Winston, just aft of the open door, let go of the handrail, the chilling wind pummeling him, thundering in his ears. He slid to the ground, and put his head in his hands, already feeling the depth of what had been lost.

Tumbling in a cold freefall, Martin Briscoe fought to get control of his plunge. The brilliant blue sky had become a white fog as he hit the clouds, and he could no longer tell up from down. He had looped the strap of his bag twice around his arm before the door opened. But the force of being sucked into the thin atmosphere had torn the strap free from one side of his bag. Now it twisted on a tether. He fought to pull it to his chest, then gripped it tightly.

There was a sound now, even more furious, more demanding than the wind. It was the angels. “There is one deed left to do,” they told him, “the one act that will avenge your family’s death, and will make your life count for something.” He could hear them now so much closer than they had been before, no longer behind a window, but pressing urgently upon his mind. No faces, only voices, light, and shadow. “Do this one last thing, and we can enter this world unchallenged. Dillon will be damned,” they assured him, “and you will be elevated.”

The clouds gave way to clear air, and a flat brown landscape filled the view half a mile below. Still clutching the bag under his arm, he undid the clasp and reached in. Then he grabbed the lid of the urn, and tore it off.

Tory Smythe’s ashes became a funnel plume escaping the urn, like an unfurling parachute. Her dust billowed into the shredding currents of the wind, and when the urn was empty he released the pack, letting the wind take it as well.

The deed was done and he could sense the angels’ satisfaction as they prepared for a grand entrance into the world. With the ground less than a thousand feet away now, he gloated, and laughed, for the Shards were defeated, and the heavens appeased. Then he stretched his arms out wide to receive the earth, and his reward.

18. An Abundance Of Flesh

A thousand miles south of Dallas, a steel gate seven feet thick and weighing seven hundred tons slowly swung open, then slowly swung shut. Once sealed, the chamber was flooded. This water-step lifted even the greatest of ships more than thirty feet before the Pedromiguel Lock released them on their way toward the treacherous Gaillard Cut, Gatun Lake, and the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal.

At midday, ships bottlenecked in Lake Miraflores. Eight of them today—from the sleekest of cruise ships to the rankest rust-bucket freighters. All became equal as they waited for the locks to admit them, one by one.

The gate labored open. A freighter passed into the lock. The gate labored shut. The waters within the lock silently rose.

A small switchback path on the eastern bank of Lake Miraflores zig-zagged its way up the hill, lined with colorful flowers. Thousands of cruise passengers would see it as they passed, comment on how it resembled a great Zorro “Z” on the hillside, and then think themselves clever that they had thought of that.

The garden path, which connected a tiny weather-worn dock to a house further up the hill, was planted by Gabriela Ceballos, who died before she could enjoy it, and was now maintained religiously by her daughter.

Unobserved on that east side of the lake were three Canal Zone residents. The boy at the foot of the path, kicking his feet back and forth at the end of the small dock, the mother, who labored on the garden path, and the grandfather, who sat on the veranda at the head of the path, watching the snare of ships in the lake.

Carlos Ceballos was the patriarch of a family much smaller than it should have been. His fault, really, and his wife’s, for educating their children so well, that three out of four broke out of their familial orbit, leaving Panama completely. But Carlos could never leave home. Even his job as a canal pilot never took him far from home—just from one end of the canal to the other. Still, the glimpses of the world he saw aboard the ships he piloted made him feel like a world traveler. At fifty-five he was one of the most respected canal pilots, and boasted more than twenty thousand trips through the canal. Each time a virgin ship arrived for its first transcanal voyage, Carlos was given the honor of piloting her.

But today was Sunday, his day off, and so Carlos thankfully found himself peering out across the lake from his little verandah at the mouth of the garden path, eating salted jicama as he watched other pilots maneuver the familiar contingent of ships up and down the Pedromiguel Lock—but not fast enough, for seven ships clogged the waters of Miraflores now. Four cargo, three cruise ships. Music blasted from the cruise ship decks, resounding from the hills and blending into an arrhythmic cacophony that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Such had be­come the soundtrack of Carlos Ceballos’s life. His life was filled by the sounds from the ships, the taste of salted jicama, and the smell, that luxurious smell of plumeria blooms that swept up from the garden path, reminding him so much of his late wife. There was something missing, however. A feeling that nagged at him even in his quietest of moments. Unfinished business. It would wake him at night, and when his mind was idle, it would pull him to the front door, as if he were heading out for an errand, only to find that there were no errands to be run. Each Sunday he would sit on the verandah, wondering what this unfinished business might be.

The gate swung open. The gate swung closed. Another ship was already approaching from the Miraflores locks to take the place of the one that had been dispatched.

Cerilla Ceballos tended flowers just past the second turn of the switchback path. Cerilla had never married. A badly cleft lip had warded off most suitors. She was twenty-five now, resigned to her lot—which included an eight-year-old son. She had him at sixteen, by a schoolmate who apparently didn’t care about her face, as long as he got what came with it. But he had quickly found someone else, then disappeared into the crowded workforce of Panama City, and now she had little Memo.

She had always believed that her face was a judgment for something she had done, or would someday do. The priest said she had more than done her penance for having Memo out of the sacrament of marriage, but she was never quite sure. So it became her way to turn her thoughts to God as she pruned and planted flowers, tending the garden path her mother had so loved. Fragrant lilies, and bright, gold-petalled plumeria. An hour among the rich plumeria would perfume her skin with its sweet fragrance. It made her feel beautiful, and so she lingered there, waiting for forgiveness or damnation. Waiting for something to happen that might define her life in terms as vibrant as the flowers around her.

The gate labored open, admitted a ship, then labored closed.

Eight-year-old Guillermo “Memo” Ceballos often sat on the rocks by the edge of the lake, his palm spread across the stone. If you touched the stones by the shore, you could actually feel the gate closing before you heard it. Feeling the resonance of the gates through his bones connected him to this place, and he secretly longed to pilot the canal like his grandfather Carlos, although his mother wanted more for him. It’s why she made him learn English, and always spoke of his uncles, and how successful they were in far-off places.

He didn’t argue with her. So for now, he was content to sit at the end of the little dock and fish, watching the great ships pass, imagining himself piloting them through the canal gates. Imagining that they weren’t mere oceangoing vessels, but spaceships in disguise, bound for starports far beyond the Atlantic or Pacific.

There was power in being an observer; knowing the cycle of the ships, each returning on their own schedule, but yet as regular as the phases of the moon. The ships always came back to him, on his lake. There was satisfaction in knowing that his little fishing dock sat smack in the middle of the greatest crossroads of the world.

His feet dangling over the edge of the dock, he reeled in his line to reveal that his bait was gone.

“There are no fish in Miraflores,” Abuelo Carlos often told him when he spent such long hours with his line in the water. It wasn’t true, of course. Certainly fish were harder to come by than in the larger Gatun Lake, but they were here. They were not good to eat, though, what with the oily sheen that covered the overtraveled lake.

“Sometime I’ll take you out in the Pacific,” his grandfather end­lessly promised. For those were waters rich in porgy and striped tuna. This was the “abundance of fish” for which Panama was named, not the troubled waters of Miraflores.

Memo cut a juicy bloodworm in half, then wove it onto the hook, which stuck out from the end of his lure: a silver, tear-shaped sparkler.

The shiny lure had been made from one of his late grandmother’s old earrings. He knew she wouldn’t have minded. Some fish smell the blood, Abuelo Carlos had taught him, others were drawn to the shine of the lure. The important thing was to give them what they want. Memo knew if he offered them what they couldn’t resist, even the lonely fish of Miraflores could be caught. So he threw in his line, dreaming of cruise ships and starships, and waited with an anticipation that never waned.

The gate opened. The gate closed.

A point of light appeared in the air just beyond the end of Memo’s dock.

The reflection off the shell of a beetle, Memo thought. Except for the fact that the pinprick of light didn’t move.

A sudden breeze moved across the surface of the lake. It hit the shore, then doubled back again, picking up petals and leaves, kicking up a sweet, earthy smell. The breeze danced like a living thing; Memo watched the path of leaves and petals circling the piles of the dock, then the breeze came to him, swirling around him, slithering like a snake about to constrict. Then all at once the breeze died, and the petals and leaves fell from him to the wooden slats of the dock.

The point of light was still there, a few feet out, off the end of the dock, ten feet in the air—but it was more than just a point now. It was growing. The light fed itself, billowing out from its center, until it was an orb the size of a soccer ball, shifting with colors so bright he feared they might blind him, but so beautiful he could not look away.

“Mama,” he called out, “Abuelo!”

They did not hear him call, but they were already running, for something had been stirred inside them.

Memo now stood, toes curled over the end of the dock, leaning forward as far as his balance would allow, reaching a hand toward the growing ball of light. He had heard of ball lightning, but knew this was something else. Like the wind, it was alive. And calling to him.

“Guillermo Gabriel Cuevas Ceballos,” they said—for there was more than one voice, more than one spirit within the ball of light. And then he realized it wasn’t a ball at all. It was a porthole, like on the many ships that passed. An opening to another place. “Guillermo Gabriel Cue­vas Ceballos,” they said. “It is you we seek.”

His mother heard it, too, but it wasn’t Memo’s name she heard—it was her own. And Carlos, bounding down the hillside, was certain these voices were calling to him. “I am here,” he shouted. “Gabriela, I am here,” for he was certain that the voice he heard first and foremost was that of his dead wife.

Cerilla, then Carlos came bounding onto the dock, for this hole of light had more than just pulled their focus—it filled the absence of focus that had been building in their lives. This uncanny visitation was Carlos’s unfinished business. It was his daughter’s defining moment. It was the tug at the end of Memo’s line that he had been waiting for all this time. How could it not steal their attention? How could they not drop everything for it?

And now the three of them stood there, side by side at the end of the dock, the shimmering hole of light filling all of their thoughts and senses, leaving no room for anything else.

The hole spread wider, the clouds in the sky beyond it distorting, straining as space stretched for the growing hole of light. Hairline frac­tures began to form in the space around hole, like the aged canvas of a medieval painting.

And in that bright light, three figures began to take definition.

There was no mistaking who stood within the breach, because the boy, the woman, and the old man saw them, if not with their squinted eyes, with their minds—with their souls.

It was undeniable to Carlos Ceballos that this was the spirit of his wife, flanked by two gossamer-winged angels of light.

It was undeniable to Cerilla Ceballos that this was God the Father, with the Son on his right hand, and the holy spirit to his left.

It was undeniable to Memo Ceballos that these were the aliens he had seen in the movies, come to take him away from a sedate, fatherless world.

There was no question who they were.

“We have come to you,” their voices intoned.

“To ease your pain.”

“To grant you salvation.”

“To take you away.”

“If only you open.”

“If only you invite.”

“If only you grant us admission to dwell in your world, your home, your flesh.”

“For we have come to you, and you alone.”

“Take us in.”

Their minds told them it was all they ever wanted. Their hearts told them that it was right, that it was true, and their flesh longed to be vessels for such extraordinary light.

“Yes,” they told them.

“Yes, fill me with your love.”

“With your glory.”

“With your strangeness.”

“Yes,” they said. “Enter in.”

A gate flung open. The sky shattered like a windshield hit by a bullet. A blast of living light blew them off their feet. And for an instant there was surprise, and the pain of the hook. A red tendril of living light snared them, ripping them free from themselves, and dragged them down a slick gullet where nothing awaited them but death.

The dock buckled from the sudden blast of energy. A shock wave expanded outward, and then silence. Then in a few moments, three figures stood, making their way from the ruined dock, to the shore. The man, the woman, and the boy. But those three human souls were gone; devoured. Something different resided within their bodies now.

With steady, determined strides, the three climbed the switchback trail, indifferent to its beauty, or the smell of its flowers. While behind them, in the air above the twisted piles and planks of the dock, the fracture in space left by their projectile arrival slowly healed itself closed.