Shattered Sky

24. Sins Of Omission

There was only so much recreation Maddy could take, and although she knew she was free, in theory, to leave the building, both she and Dillon had grown accustomed to the security of Tessic’s high sanctuary. She found herself losing track of the days, and feeling more and more a prisoner of the tower.

Dillon on the other hand luxuriated in his new-found freedom. With all of Tessic’s resources left completely at his disposal, Dillon was like an overstimulated kid in a toy store. Much of his days were spent in Tessic’s media room, scouring five hundred some-odd stations for news of the world, analyzing patterns and trends of the decline, but now from a detached, enlightened distance.

Maddy found herself absorbed in Tessitech’s computer network. Tessic had given her enough access to his computer system to tempt her to look, and enough restrictions to tempt her to look deeper. In two weeks she had racked up enough information about his organi­zation, in both R&D and trade secrets, to be either a substantial threat, or qualify for a high corporate position. It annoyed her no end that she was beginning to fantasize about the latter, and she wondered whether or not Tessic had planned it that way.

Toward the end of the second week, Dillon called Maddy down to Tessic’s sixty-second-floor workshop.

“This is great, you’re going to love this!” Dillon told her as he led her down three flights of stairs, not patient enough to wait for the elevator.

Tessic had been gone for three days, jetting abroad to take care of business, but had left Dillon a whole arsenal of gadgets to toy with. Today’s objects of fascination were two glass cylinders filled with brown sand, which he pulled out of a heavy metallic container. Both were about a foot high, on a heavy base, like two high-tech blenders. A closer inspection revealed that the sand was, in fact, colored granules blended into a homogenous muddy melange.

Maddy crossed her arms. “So what am I looking at?”

Dillon set them at the two ends of a large work desk. “Tessic had me working with these before he left.” He grabbed a remote control, backed away then positioned himself about five paces away from the table, equidistant from both cylinders. “Watch.” He clicked the re­mote and the two glass cylinders began to vibrate in unison. The sand shifted, and the blend of colors began to separate from one another until what remained were two cylinders filled with rainbow strata of sand that would no longer blend, no matter how much the cylinders vibrated. Dillon hit the remote to shut them off.

“I came down to watch you do sand art?”

“No—see, look.” He pointed to a timer at the base of each cyl­inder. “This measures the time of separation. It’s a way to quantify the strength of my field. The closer I am to the device, the faster the color separation occurs. I can place myself behind different objects, and test what inhibits my field, and what amplifies it!”

“Interesting,” she said with a smirk. “A Dillonometer.”

“But here’s the really exciting thing.” Dillon pointed out the two timers again. “The right one is two-point-three seconds slower than the left.” Dillon looked at her proudly.

“And?”

“Don’t you see? I was able to control it. When I first started, both times would be identical, but I’ve been able to alter that. I’ve been able to control and focus my field.”

There was something unpalatable about Dillon’s enthusiasm, and even though Maddy was impressed, she found herself downplaying it. “It’s just sand, Dillon; sand in a perfectly controlled environment. It has no bearing on the real world.”

“It’s a start.” Dillon grabbed the colorful cylinders, returning them to their metallic case, which was no doubt some shielded material that would allow the sands to mix. “Before, it took a damned vault to contain me. This is one step closer to containing myself.”

“If that’s what you want, I hope you succeed.”

Dillon took a good long look at her, his enthusiasm overripening into irritation. “What’s wrong with you lately?”

She shook the question off. “Maybe I’m just tired of watching you puttering your days away.”

“What would you rather have me do? Live in shadows, playing hide and seek with the FBI?”

Maybe, she thought. There was an intensity to him then; a wildness that had now been tamed. But then, wasn’t it she who told him to slow down and accept Tessic’s hospitality?

Maddy sighed and turned to see how far she was from the stairs. “Listen, just forget it. Forget I said anything.” She kissed him on the cheek, and made her way toward the stairs, hoping to get there before Dillon spoke, and knowing she wouldn’t.

“You need me helpless,” he said.

She found her feet slowing in spite of herself.

“You prefer me locked in a chair, or running from the Feds, or tormented by thoughts I can’t control. It’s the only way you can deal with me. If I’m helpless.”

“That’s not true,” she said, forcing herself to turn to him.

“Of course it’s true.” Dillon scoffed. “I know you—don’t forget that. I can see right through you.”

“Well maybe I don’t enjoy being transparent.”

The back door to the workshop opened with a conspicuous squeak. They turned to see Tessic standing there, feigning to have just arrived. There was no telling how much he had heard, and Maddy wondered why she cared.

Dillon spared one more look to Maddy before hurrying to Tessic as if he were Daddy home from work.

“Elon! I’ve had some breakthroughs while you were gone.’

“How was Poland?” Maddy asked, flatly.

“Cold.” Tessic pulled out a stack of pictures from his pocket. “The Ciechanow construction site. Would you like to see?” Tessic spread the photos out methodically on the work table. The images showed a swarm of more than one hundred buildings all much closer to com­pletion than Maddy had assumed. Little more than landscaping re­mained.

“The first twenty buildings are ready for occupancy. The rest will be done in a matter of weeks. Then we repeat the process at identical sites in Belarus and Lithuania.”

“Any takers?” asked Dillon. “Anyone moving in?”

“Not yet.” Tessic finished laying out the pictures. Maddy noticed how he avoided looking Dillon in the eye. “Marketing has not matched the pace of construction, but I’m confident Ciechanow will fill quickly.”

Maddy wondered why, if she could read Tessic’s evasiveness, Dil­lon could not. Or perhaps he did read it, and chose to ignore it.

“I’d very much like you to join me on my next trip,” Tessic told Dillon. “Photographs do not do it justice.”

Maddy watched Dillon’s response closely. He took his time before answering, studying an aerial view of the sprawling complex that looked eerily similar to the model across the room.

“Sure,” Dillon said, tossing it off like it was nothing. “Sure I’ll go.” Then he turned to her as an afterthought. “Maddy?”

“Well, since a winter coat magically appeared in my wardrobe a few days ago, I assume I’m to go as well.”

Tessic put an arm around both of them as he led them to the stairs. “I assure you, you will both be better for the experience.”

Tessic joined them for lunch, listening avidly as Dillon went into detail describing the various tests and experiments he had done in Tessic’s absence. Then, while Dillon buried himself channel-surfing for news of the world, Maddy took to her own analysis, delving once more into Tessitech’s mainframe. Tessic called this Polish construction project a “sideline,” but from what she could see it was, aside from Dillon, his primary concern. It didn’t bode well with her that such a shrewd businessman would put all his attention into a money pit, and leave the rest of his business on auto-pilot.

In the computer, she found that Tessic’s personal jet was scheduled for another trip abroad in two weeks—but it wasn’t what she found that surprised her; it was what she didn’t find. It brought things into a sharp focus.

Late that afternoon, she approached Tessic on the roof garden. He was having what appeared to be a heated conversation in Hebrew with himself, but as Maddy got closer, she could see he was talking into a cellular phone headset. A man who spoke with his hands, Tessic’s motions resembled a kind of kinetic art. A corporate t’ai chi.

When he saw her, he cut the conversation short, and removed his headset, but his anger remained. He grabbed a glass of iced tea from the nearby table. “It’s falling apart, you know. In corporations every­where, there are executives resigning at the highest levels, nightmares in productions, funds disappearing.”

“Thank goodness for ‘sidelines.’ "

“Yes.” Tessic took a sip of his drink, and then another, calming down.

“It’s amazing those buildings of yours still go up with all that’s going on in the world.”

“Eastern Europe is used to chaos,” he answered. He poured her a glass, and offered her a seat, but did not pull it out for her, as he knew her aversion to such social niceties. “I can’t help but notice the trouble between you and Dillon,” he said.

Maddy gulped, and grimaced. “Not everything can be as sweet as your tea.”

“Our roles are rarely what we want them to be,” Tessic said, slip­ping from businessman into philosopher mode. “Have you considered that perhaps your place in each other’s lives lies outside of the bed­room?”

Maddy laughed at his audacity. “Are you trying to provoke me, or are you always this callous?”

“Do not misunderstand, Miss Haas. I think what you and Dillon have is wonderful. But a relationship requires a joining of mind, body and soul. If you can live with two of the three, my blessing to you. But if you find your own soul lacking, overwhelmed by his . . .”

Tessic hesitated, reconsidering his words. “I don’t mean to of­fend . . . but for both of your sakes, please be certain of your purpose in Dillon’s life. For when you are certain, your choice of action will be as clear as it was on the day you rescued him.”

“I like to think I make my own purpose,” she told him, cooly.

Tessic sighed. “There I go again,” he said. “I give you another reason to hate me.”

Maddy considered that, and shook her head. “I don’t hate you, Elon.” And then, with more sincerity than she thought she had in her, she said, “The truth is, I think you’re a great man, with more vision than I gave you credit for.”

The admission caught him by surprise. “Such a change!” he said, gloating a bit in the new light she cast him in. “What brings this about in a skeptical young woman like you?”

She looked down to the table preparing herself, then returned her gaze to Tessic. “Over the past two weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time studying your business dealings.”

“Really,” he said, crossing his legs, knee over knee. “Perhaps you found something interesting?”

“Oh, it’s all interesting,” she said. “But what I found most re­markable is your marketing plan for the Ciechanow project.”

“Oh, that.” He attempted to conceal a grin behind his tea. “And what interested you most about it?”

“The fact that there is no marketing plan. None whatsoever.”

Tessic sipped his tea, neither confirming nor denying it. He always said he was a man of honesty. She supposed that was true—she had never caught him in a lie. His were all sins of omission.

“All that living space, in the middle of nowhere,” Maddy said, “and no one invited to the party.”

Tessic didn’t try to hide his grin anymore. He leaned in closer to her. “I anticipate a need,” he said. “But you’ve already figured that out, haven’t you?”

“I wish I hadn’t.”

“And do you approve?”

Maddy deliberated on her response, and answered truthfully. “I think it’s brilliant. I think it’s terrifying.”

“A powerful combination.”

“And when were you going to tell Dillon what you’re planning?”

“I’m not planning anything,” Tessic insisted. “It will be Dillon’s idea, and he will plan it himself. I am merely laying the groundwork for when he does.”

“What makes you so sure he will?”

Tessic put his glass down, and studied her. “You’re not a woman of faith, are you Miss Haas?”

“It’s hard enough to believe what I see, much less what I don’t see.”

Tessic took a long draught from his glass, until the tea was gone, and the color drained from the ice, leaving it clean and clear. “Time will ease your doubts.”

“I can live with doubts,” she told him, “and once in a while even do the right thing. But it’s your lack of doubt that frightens me.”

25. Body Builders

Tessic got a call at eight o’clock the following morning that Security was detaining two visitors. The security officer apol­ogized profusely for disturbing him in his private penthouse, and the intruders would have been summarily expelled, had they not claimed to be relatives of Tessic’s guests. Since building security had not been informed that Tessic even had guests, it warranted his attention.

He found the two teenage boys in the security office, double-teamed by four guards. The guards were all unsettled—it was in their eyes and their stances; discomfort in the way they looked to one an­other, scratched their arms, necks and heads, complaining about the heat regardless of the fact that the air was overly conditioned with a breezy freon chill. Tessic knew the reason for their discomfort. There was a field of presence here, like the one Dillon exuded, but this one was different. A variant flavor, a different charm.

“Are you Tessic?” said the black teen, all attitude. It only aggra­vated the suspicions of the good ol’ boys with security badges.

“Get out!” Tessic said. The lead guard promptly advanced on the two teens, just as Tessic knew he would. “No,” Tessic said, stopping the guard in his tracks. “You and your men. Get out.”

The men looked to one another, clearly suffering some testicular trauma at their dismissal. The guards began to slink out, and Tessic took guilty pleasure in watching them go. When he was seventeen, all long hair and torn jeans, he would have been cast out of an establish­ment like this as well.

“In the future,” he told the exiting guards, “I expect you to treat visitors with common courtesy and respect—even the ones you ex­pel.”

Once the door had closed, Tessic turned to the black teen. “Do I have the honor of addressing Winston Pell?”

Winston cracked the slightest smile. “Expecting me?”

“Not at all—but your presence is a welcome surprise.” The fact was, Tessic had an entire staff of private detectives searching for Winston and Lourdes, and they had come up empty-handed. That Winston had just fallen into his lap was just further indication of how bashert his endeavor was. Tessic could feel the hand of the Al­mighty in this. He offered Winston his hand, and Winston looked at it for a moment before committing to shake it. As their hands clasped, he felt Winston’s current move through him, making the hair on his arms and neck stand on end. Tessic laughed, a bit giddy from the sensation.

“So how come you dress like that,” Winston said, pointing to Tessic’s white suit. “I’ve always wanted to ask that.”

“Image is everything,” Tessic answered, “or at least my public relations staff tells me.”

The blond kid stood up behind Winston. “Excuse me,” he said, “the non-entity requests an introduction.”

“Drew Camden, Elon Tessic,” Winston said.

Tessic raised his eyebrows. “The biographer!”

Drew’s eyes lit up. “You know about that?”

“With the amount of airplay your video of the Shards received over the past year, you should have been a rich man.”

Drew sighed. “Yeah, too bad I left all the tapes in the desert, for some low-life from Vegas to find. He hit the jackpot, I got nothing.”

“Ah, well, I imagine living it was worth all the money in the world.”

“Give me all the money in the world, and I’ll tell you which I like better.”

“So,” said Winston. “I’ve heard it from a reliable source that you’ve got Dillon locked away like Rapunzel in your tower.”

Tessic considered his response, and said, “The Talmud says a man’s own chains are the strongest.”

To which Winston responded, “A man’s own chains might be the strongest, but the Talmud also says, ‘A man who puts his brother to the test is not to be trusted.’ "

Tessic shook his head, impressed. “Extraordinary! Your gift of growth has turned your mind into a sponge for knowledge.” Tessic laughed with pleasure, in spite of all of his attempts to maintain a cool, suave demeanor. “I only ask one thing: that I be in the room for the reunion.”

Winston shrugged. “Hey, it’s your tower.”

Dillon was awakened by what he thought was an alarm clock, but when morning replaced his dreams, he realized nothing was ringing. Still, there was some energy in his room he could not name, just at the edge of perception.

Maddy had left the room at dawn for her regimen of exercise, and Dillon found himself relieved that she was gone before he awoke. They had shared a bed but not each other the night before. He didn’t know who was to blame, and he wondered if their relationship had become so fragile that a single change in their pattern could cause the fabric to unravel.

He scratched an annoying itch on his lip and cheek. Maddy still needed to come to terms with the fact that Dillon had found himself again. He was no longer a boy who needed rescue, but a man, more comfortable with himself than he had ever been. If Maddy truly did love him, she would come to accept that.

There was a knock at the door, and Dillon opened it to Anselm, Tessic’s valet, a good-natured Swede who had suffered to learn He­brew. He had pledged himself into Tessic’s service after Tessic led a campaign to find the man’s daughter a marrow donor.

“Mr. Tessic asked that I should bring you this.” He gave Dillon a hand-held mirror. When Dillon looked up for an explanation, Anselm only shrugged. “It is my understanding that it is a gift to you.”

Once Anselm had left, Dillon turned it over to see if it said anything on the back, but it did not. Well, Tessic was nothing if not enigmatic. Dillon had come to find the puzzles he posed entertaining.

Dillon put the mirror down, and dressed for breakfast. As he pulled on his polo shirt, he felt the smooth flow of the fabric over his face. There was something different about it, and it registered only faintly in his mind. It was as he slipped on his socks that it occurred to him that the shirt wasn’t different at all, it was his face. Then he looked down to the mirror he had left on the edge of the dresser.

In an instant he knew, even before he picked up the mirror to look.

The face he saw reflected in the oval was not the face he had gone to bed with. That face had been shredded and paved with scars from one cheek to the other, across his lips, down to his chin. Those scars were mere shadows now, and as he touched his face, he could feel them dissolving as good skin regenerated to replace it. There was a growing ache in his mouth as well. Blood began to spill from the corners of his mouth, and by the time he reached for a towel to wipe it away, new molars had sprouted from the empty sockets left from Maddy’s bullet.

There was only one explanation for this, and now he could put a name to the presence he had felt upon waking. Forgetting about Maddy and Tessic, he raced out of the room, his shoes barely on his feet.

He hurried down the hall toward the winding staircase that led down to the penthouse living room, hearing voices down below. But as he neared the stairs, his enthusiasm took on a flavor of apprehension.

He took the stairs slowly, letting the room below move carefully into view. Maddy was there, and Tessic. Neither had seen him yet. He was surprised to see Drew Camden there, and finally Winston. Drew, the first to notice Dillon, rapped Winston on the arm, and Winston turned toward the stairs.

Dillon found himself frozen on the last step as Winston saw him. Things were changing again for him. This controlled equilibrium Tes­sic had so painstakingly prepared would be violated by that final step into the room. Dillon opened his mouth to speak, but found nothing to say, and he could read the same uneasy ambivalence in Winston as well. This long-awaited reunion had brought with it an unexpected fear.

“Where the hell have you been for eight months?” Winston asked, the first to break the silence.

Dillon shrugged. “Out of sight,” he answered. “And out of mind.”

And then Winston gave him the hint of a smile. “No surprise there—you’ve always been out of your mind.”

Dillon took that final step down into the room, and crossed the floor to Winston, as Winston came toward him. Caught off guard by their own momentum, they nearly toppled one another in a bruising hug. Dillon felt a charge within the embrace—a surge of energy as Winston’s power added to Dillon’s, their harmonics fitting together like a major fifth. The tingling sensation in Dillon’s face peaked, then vanished, and he knew that the last of the scars were now gone. “I was starting to think I’d never see you again,” Dillon said.

Winston pulled away at the precise moment Dillon expected he would. “Alright, let’s not get all touchy-feely about it.”

Dillon laughed. Whatever else might change, some things would always stay the same. He turned to Drew, offering a quick greeting, then returned his attention to Winston. “The army had me in lock-down like King Kong,” Dillon said, and went on to explain his months of captivity. Then Winston filled him in on his travels, but it was obvious that he was dancing around the things that were really on his mind, as was Dillon. Finally Dillon said, “Okoya’s back.”

Winston looked away for a moment. “I know.” Dillon sensed there was more he knew, but Winston just said, “We’ll talk about it later. Tell me how you wound up here.”

Maddy watched the two of them in the center of the large room, feeling uncomfortably voyeuristic. This was a relationship she had no place in. For as long as she had known Dillon, he had been alone and unique. But now the dynamic had changed. He and Winston now spoke as if no one else in the world existed—as if the two were part of their own private universe. They belonged with each other, and Maddy wondered if it would be this way if they came together with Lourdes, too. Would their confluence serve only to push Maddy fur­ther and further away? It was small and selfish, this kind of jealousy, but she couldn’t purge herself of it.

Make sure you know your purpose in Dillon’s life, Tessic had said. Now, as she watched Dillon and Winston, she wondered if she had any place in Dillon’s life at all. Tessic however, didn’t appear to have any doubts of his own tenure among the Star Shards. Across the room, he watched in silence, content, for the time, to be an observer.

Drew, who apparently shared the curse of the periphery, came over to introduce himself to her.

“Do you live here with Tessic?” he asked.

She wanted to be angry at the suggestion, but what was the point? “No. I’m a friend of Dillon’s.”

“Ah,” said Drew. The two watched Dillon and Winston for a few more moments. Winston was relating an encounter he had had with Lourdes. Something about a cruise ship. Dillon hung on his every word. Then Drew said to her, “You can’t get close to them, you know?”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s like you’re always on the outside. Believe me, I know. I tried to get close to Michael once—it got me killed.”

Maddy turned back to Winston and Dillon, both connected to the exclusion of everything else around them.

“They started as a star,” Drew said. “And I figure in lots of ways they still are. They catch people like you and me in their orbit. We can’t get away, but we can’t get too close, or we burn. Best we can do is keep our orbit stable.”

Drew’s ruminations tugged enough of her focus that she missed something key in Dillon and Winston’s conversation, because Dillon now showed an expression of surprise, and suddenly turned from Win­ston, shooting a look to another body currently in orbit: Tessic.

“You mean here?” Dillon asked Tessic. “In this building?”

“In the infirmary,” Tessic said. “We’ll go, when you’re ready.”

“I’ve been ready for months.”

Maddy turned to Drew. “What are they talking about?”

Drew paused before answering. “What have you seen Dillon do?”

“Everything,” she answered.

“You haven’t seen this,” Drew answered. “No one has.”

Among Tessitech’s various employee perks was an infirmary and small medical clinic on the mezzanine. But today the clinic was closed and guards were posted at the doors.

In radiology, several leaded X-ray aprons covered an undefined mass on the X-ray table.

“He’s in pretty bad shape,” Winston said, as he and Dillon peered in through the window of the X-ray room. “And I suppose being around me didn’t help. Bacteria, algae from the lake—anything that was still alive in that footlocker grew out of control as we drove here.”

“Jeez, do you hear this conversation?” said Drew, to no one in particular. “I gotta find myself some new friends.”

The door opened, and two medical technicians who had the grim task of preparing the body exited the room. “What are we, friggin’ forensic examiners now?” one grumbled to the other. He stifled him­self when he saw Tessic, who had them led out, never to know the nature of their task.

“One thing I learned from Bussard,” Tessic told Dillon. “Don’t let anyone see the whole picture.”

“Does that include me?” Dillon asked.

“You? Who do you think is painting the picture?”

Dillon thought to the first time he had repaired the ravages of death; the recomposition of flesh, the reanimation of spirit. It had been so difficult at first, taking such a profound focus of his will. It had always been a lonely, solitary act, both selfless and self-indulgent at once. But things had changed. Now his will was secondary, his presence dragged order from chaos whether he chose to or not. Yet even in the graveyard, a victim of his own power, he knew his limitations. He knew there were those among the dead who did not revive—those whom he could never reanimate alone. Organ donors, perhaps, and others who were buried incomplete. Dillon could not give them new kidneys, eyes, or a heart any more than he could fill the scarred gaps in his own bullet-torn face.

But Winston could.

And no matter how little of Michael remained on that table, if they could somehow get the teeth of their curious gears to mesh, he could be restored. It would require more than their simple presence in the room. This task would require precision and control.

Dillon pulled open the door, and the stench hit him instantly, registering in his gut. Tessic quickly tugged out a handkerchief, hold­ing it over his nose.

“You weren’t kidding, were you, Winston?” Maddy said.

“You don’t have to come in,” Dillon told her, but as he and Win­ston entered the room, Maddy, Drew, and Tessic followed in their wake.

Three video cameras had been positioned in the room, their tapes already running, no one at the controls.

“What are we, on satellite feed to the world?” Winston asked.

“I wish to keep a record of this,” Tessic explained. “To document what you both accomplish here.”

“Like a videotape at a birth,” suggested Winston.

“Exactly.”

Winston scowled. “I hate people who videotape births.”

Dillon shuddered as he approached the table. The mass on the table had so little definition beneath the lead aprons, it was hard to believe there was anything remotely human there.

“Ready to rock?” Winston asked.

“Only if you are.”

It began the moment they pulled back the lead radiation aprons.

The broken frame on the table before them was a collection of brittle human bones, caked with rancid mud, and glistening with a dense hair-like pelt of green lake algae. That algae was the first thing to start growing again in Winston’s presence, appearing to slither around the bones. Winston, having not actually seen the body before this moment, launched off into a full scale panic.

“That’s not Michael!” he said. “It’s not him! We got the wrong body, it’s not him!”

“Shh.”

Dillon put his hand on a broken thighbone, half of which was missing. The bone, a dead gray beneath the algae, began to blanch to an eggshell white. “Winston!”

Winston shuttered his panic and reached out, touching the bone as well. Its jagged end began to stretch, marrow bubbling up from the hollow within, until it became enclosed within the smoothly curved end of the bone. The algae peeled away and slid to the table.

The process picked up speed, the two of them matching each other’s rhythm. Dillon touched the skull, healing its many fractures. Winston moved the jaw into place, teeth growing to fill the empty sockets.

“Yes, I see it now!” said Winston. “It is Michael!”

They moved to the midsection. Crushed ribs rose into place, de­fining a chest cavity. From the decay that clung to the bones, Dillon was only able to re-integrate bloody fragments of organs—but with Winston’s touch, those fragments cultivated, cells dividing into com­plete structures, until Winston and Dillon both found themselves wrist-deep in it.

They now moved at an accelerated pace, time dilating itself around them. To those behind them, their hands moved with the agility and grace of virtuosos: four hands at the same instrument, perfectly syn­chronized.

All at once blood began to pulse, splattering the walls, a heart now beat at the center of an open circulatory system. Connective tissue sprouted like spider webs from joint to joint, and muscle mass thick­ened the legs and arms, rising like dough, encasing the bones beneath. Winston pressed his fingers on empty eye sockets, and when he pulled his fingers away, a pair of eyes filled the space, lids growing closed over them. The bleeding stopped and on the flayed, red figure before them, islands of translucent skin began to grow like clouds in an empty sky, growing denser, thicker, joining one another. A scalp grew back from the forehead, darkening with hair follicles. Skin stretched to cover the body, pushing the last of the algae away, until only the midriff remained open, like a gaping abdominal wound, but dermal tissue rushed in to fill the void until the gap became a crevice, became a crack, became a navel, leaving the fully realized body of Michael Lip­ranski, his chest rising and falling in slow, metered breaths.

Then Tessic suddenly bolted, flying from the room with unchar­acteristic speed, but he was barely noticed as all eyes were on the body before them that had formed in less than a minute’s time.

Covered with blood, Winston backed away, but Dillon did not, for there was still one thing left to do. Although Michael’s body was there, there was an emptiness within. Calling back the spirit of others had been an instantaneous and automatic result of bringing life to the flesh. But Michael was a Shard; a soul with such huge inertia that he had to be ignited like a furnace. Dillon pushed his thoughts forward, seeing Michael’s being in his mind. Into Michael’s flesh, into his cells, deeper still to the space between molecules, Dillon forced his own spark, and finally felt Michael ignite! A wave of intensity imprinted itself on every cell of his renewed body, aligning the life within into the service of a single consciousness.

Michael felt his own ignition.

Void of thought or reason, knowing nothing but his own exis­tence, he was a bullet flying down the barrel, suddenly in motion, exploding forward into a body. He felt every bit of himself at the same instant, from the tips of his toes to the tips of his fingers. He felt his shape, settled into it, and seized control of a familiar mind, remem­bering who he was, accepting all that went with that knowledge.

Michael opened his eyes, feeling as if he had just been hurled from a carnival ride. He didn’t know whether it was he who was spinning, or the room. Dillon stood over him, out of breath and flushed as if he had just climbed a long flight of stairs. Michael tried to speak, but only gasped at first, coughing until he hacked up a bitter, foul-smelling green wad that only slightly resembled mucous. In fact, he was lying in the stuff; green muck mixing with blood, like some bizarre birth caul. And he was naked.

Reflexively, he rolled to his side, away from Dillon, floundering in the slippery mire.

“Easy, Michael.” Dillon grabbed his shoulders to keep him from sliding off the table. Dillon took off his own shirt and handed it to Michael to cover himself. Then Michael heard Winston speak. Until he heard his voice, Michael hadn’t even known there was anyone else in the room.

“The temperature’s dropped ten degrees in thirty seconds,” Win­ston said. “Yeah, Michael’s back alright.”

Back? Back from where? Michael closed his eyes tightly, searching for a memory of the moment before, but there was none. He had no idea where he had just been, or how he got here. The past was piecing itself together now, bit by bit like the present. He remembered the dam collapsing around him and Tory. He remembered their terrified leap into the updraft which had carried them both into the sky. But Michael’s control of the wind had broken down. The updraft failed them, and gravity dragged them down through the thin, icy air. Al­though he had clung to Tory, the force of the wind had torn her away. The last half mile he had tumbled alone. Brief pain. A blackout. And now this. It seemed many hours had passed since his last memory.

Shivering, he sat up, and turned around on the table, to see there were even more people present. Standing further away stood a woman Michael didn’t know, and Drew. Drew had an odd, lobotomized ex­pression on his face.

“Hey,” said Drew.

“Hey,” Michael answered.

The woman beside Drew stood wide-eyed and rigid against the wall, staring at him. Michael suspected if the wall wasn’t there to hold her up, she’d be on the ground.

Michael felt the temperature continue to drop as his uneasiness grew. “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Vegas anymore.”

“You’re in Houston,” Dillon answered, with more deadpan seri­ousness than Michael cared for.

“I survived the fall?”

Dillon hesitated. “Not exactly.”

Only now did his mind allow him to see that both Winston and Dillon were covered in blood. The sticky mess coated their arms to their elbows, and had splattered on their clothes.

Alright, thought Michael, I can handle this. It was, after all, what he had hoped for. That Dillon would find his broken body in the Nevada desert, and bring him back.

He shuddered in the cold, his breath now coming in puffs of steam. “So what’s this stuff I’m lying in? Some kind of ectoplasm?”

“More like pond scum,” Winston answered.

Across the room, the girl wouldn’t stop staring at him. Even with Dillon’s shirt clasped over himself, her stare was seriously unnerving.

“What’s the matter? You’ve never seen a resurrected naked guy lying in green shit before?”

“Sorry.” She turned her eyes away.

“Hey, where are my clothes anyway?”

Winston offered him an apologetic shrug. “Animals got ’em long before they buried you. Tough break.”

“Buried? Holy shit, they buried me?”

Dillon turned to the girl. “Where’s Tessic?” he asked. Michael was sure he didn’t hear him correctly.

“Gone,” she answered. “I’m amazed he actually got his legs to move. I couldn’t.”

Michael struggled to capture more of his bearings. He was on an X-ray table. Was this some sort of hospital? Dillon said they were in Houston—how did he get all the way here?

“I must have been offline a few weeks, huh?” he asked.

No immediate answer. Then as he regarded Winston and Dillon, it struck him how much different they both looked. A bit taller; a harder edge to their facial features. Suddenly he knew the gist of what they were about to tell him.

“Oh crap . . . " Thunder rolled ominously outside. He wanted to deny it all. If only for a few moments, he wanted to believe that it was just a joke.

“It’s been over a year, Michael,” Dillon said.

He didn’t even try to consider all the ramifications of it now. It was so overwhelming all he could do was ride it, like a wave. “Damn. Now my video rentals are really gonna be overdue.”

Drew had scrounged up a hospital gown for him, and approached with it.

“What happened at the dam?” Michael asked Dillon. “Did you hold back the water? What about Okoya?”

“You’ll get cleaned up, and we’ll get you some clothes,” Dillon said, trying to wipe the blood from his own arms with a paper towel. “Then we’ll talk.”

Dillon turned but Michael grabbed him before he could go. “How about Tory? Did you find her, too?”

Dillon slid out of his grasp. “Like I said, we’ll talk later.”

Dillon left with the girl. Winston caught the door before it closed.

“Good to have you back, Michael,” Winston said, and left as well.

Now it was just himself and Drew. Drew held out the hospital gown to him. “You know the drill; slip this on, open to the back.”

Michael forced a grin. “So they left us to play doctor, did they? You gonna grab my balls and ask me to cough?”

“Ooh,” Drew said. “That’s low, even for you.”

Michael stood up, and let Drew help him into the gown. The moment was uncomfortable, but then, how could it be otherwise? Whatever else had been resolved between them, it didn’t change the fact that Drew, Michael’s closest friend, had wanted to be more than just friends. Michael hadn’t handled that well, and the year gone by hadn’t changed Michael’s discomfort. To him it had only been a few hours. The temperature in the room continued to fall, telegraphing Michael’s apprehension better than words or body language. He didn’t want to start his new life by treading on eggshells, so Michael chose to smash the shells with the bluntness that had always typified their friendship. “So what’s the deal with you?” Michael asked. “You still after me? And if so, would that be considered necrophilia?”

Drew laughed, tying the strings to his hospital gown. “To tell you the truth, Mikey-boy, dragging around your moldering bones wasn’t exactly a turn-on. Sorry to disappoint you, dude, but couldn’t we just be friends?”

Michael smiled. He had to remember that Drew had had a whole year to heal from old wounds. It suddenly struck Michael that Drew was a year older than him now. They all were.

“Fine with me,” Michael said, then pointed to Drew’s short, un­evenly shorn hair. “But as your friend, I gotta tell you, I don’t like the do.”

“Yeah, well, wait five minutes,” Drew answered.

Wrapped in a silk prayer shawl, Elon Tessic offered prayers to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Prayers that he could retain the courage of his convictions. Prayers that he might regain his composure. He had called for a minyan of ten from among his employees to pray with him, but could not wait for them to arrive, so he began alone, reciting the Sh’ma and the Amidah, two seminal prayers of his faith. Surely today would be a day to humble himself in prayer, for he had already been humbled by what he witnessed just a short time before.

It was one thing to know the scope of Dillon’s and Winston’s powers, but another thing entirely to witness dust become flesh. It was nothing short of the creation. The way it must have been when God breathed life into man.

His Judaica study, filled with artifacts from all eras in history, was a sanctuary within a sanctuary for him. But today the framed parch­ments and silver adornments that had always brought him comfort and connection to the past held only accusations. Condemnations. Who was he to take such miraculous beings into his own hands? But then, who was any man called upon to do the will of the Almighty?

Maddy Haas, as perceptive as she was, had been wrong about one thing. Tessic had doubts. Not about Dillon’s purpose, but about his own ability to complete his role in it. And so Tessic had removed himself from the sight of the revived Michael Lipranski, retreating to his library, and cloaking himself in his talis. He had bought the ancient silk prayer shawl at an auction, authenticated to be more than seven hundred years old. Until Dillon arrived it had been kept in a climate-controlled case, but now the crumbling yellowed silk had a fresh, white sheen, renewed like everything else that fell into Dillon’s presence.

The door opened behind him. He expected it to be members of the prayer minyan he had called for, and was surprised to see that it was Dillon. Tessic put his prayer book down and hid his hands beneath the prayer shawl so that Dillon could not see how they were shaking.

“My jeans are a little long on Michael,” Dillon said, “but they’ll do until we can get him his own clothes.”

“Yes. Good. We’ll take measurements and whip him up a ward­robe right away.”

Dillon was bathed and clean, but he still smelled faintly of blood. He took a few steps closer. “Are you alright? You left the infirmary in a hurry.”

Tessic couldn’t meet his eyes. “The job was done, I saw no reason to linger.”

A gesture of his hand knocked the prayer book from the table. Dillon quickly bent over to pick it up. He handed it to Tessic, and Tessic brought the book to his lips, kissing the spine. “Customary,” Tessic said. “When something holy falls to the ground.”

Dillon looked around at the artifacts and parchments on display around him. “These things mean a lot to you, don’t they?”

Tessic looked to the artifacts he had been so proud to have amassed. “They are only things,” Tessic answered. “What matters are the hands that shaped them. Poor men, mostly. I expect when all this is over, I shall be a poor man as well. What then will I have but my faith?”

The door creaked open, and a gaggle of businessmen entered, awk­wardly pulling folded yarmulkes from their suit pockets. Tessic sighed. “What is the value of a minyan when they come at my beck and call? It should be a gathering of devotion, not a gathering to please one’s employer.”

The men respectfully greeted Tessic. And went to retrieve a set of prayer books across the room. Dillon became uncomfortable, clearly troubled that he might somehow be recognized. Tessitech’s employees were not the trustworthy cadre that typified Tessic’s personal staff. Before the men returned with their books, Tessic gently led Dillon to the door, and spoke so that the others could not hear. “You must convince Winston to join us in Poland.”

“Winston goes nowhere Winston doesn’t want to go.”

“I trust in your ability to persuade him.” Tessic gently closed the door, and returned to the nine other men that had gathered in the center of the room. He could already feel his composure returning.

26. Inertia

Winston: No one expected what happened when the dam collapsed.

Dillon: I thought it would all end right there. I was wrong.

Michael listened. He didn’t judge, he didn’t think, he didn’t try to make an emotional connection to the things Winston and Dillon told him. He had only “arrived” an hour ago, was quickly stuffed into some of Dillon’s ill-fitting clothes, and now sat shell-shocked in the suddenly overgrown roof garden of industrial icon Elon Tessic. He found it all too surreal for comment. As he sat there, Winston and Dillon spouted the year-in-review in matching couplets.

Dillon: I could have held the water of Lake Mead back, but I didn’t.

Winston: He let it flow, hoping it would become a disaster that would heal more than it destroyed.

The way they explained it, sending a flood sweeping down the lower Colorado River was the only way to stop the world from seeing the five of them as gods. Dillon’s death would paint him in ignominy, and the scope of the disaster would shock the world back into stride, like a broken bone being set. Thousands would die, but civilization would go on, back on its steady track, as it had been before. The only thing that would collapse would be the dam.

Dillon: But I didn’t die, and the flood waters never reached Laughlin.

Winston: Instead, Dillon’s presence reversed the river’s entropy. The flood slowed, and began to flow backwards.

Apparently, in the wake of the Backwash, the Shards were feared, revered, and worshiped on a global scale. The world believed them to be dead, which elevated them into martyrdom. In the face of that, everything rational and reasonable fell into decline. It was, in effect, the shattering of civilization, just as Dillon had feared from the begin­ning. The Shards had been the agents of the shattering—not the so­lution.

Dillon: I was imprisoned and used by the government for almost a year.

Winston: I lived like a fugitive, hiding my face, afraid I’d be rec­ognized.

In a way, Michael was grateful for his hiatus, having never had to witness all this with his own eyes. They told him how Lourdes had abandoned them, taking refuge in her own bitterness, setting sail on a hedonistic voyage of excess. Michael could hardly blame her. Had he been alive, he might have done the same, isolating himself on some island in the calm eye of a perpetual hurricane.

Winston: There are three spirits out there now. Their arrival is the beginning of the end.

Dillon: But we’re safe from them here.

Michael caught the look Winston threw Dillon, belying some un­spoken tension. Even before he was told of the three spirits, Michael had sensed something. Even now, within the supposedly shielded con­fines of the penthouse, Michael knew there were three—but he didn’t sense them so much as spirits. They were more like living coordinates. Markers of dimension; the axis of a three-dimensional grid. He might have shared his take on these creatures with Dillon and Winston, but they began to tell him about Tory, and how her ashes were dumped out over the skies of Dallas.

It was this news of Tory that finally reached him. Sorrow mush­roomed within the numbness, a cumulus threatening rain. Acoustics in the garden dampened as the air pressure lightened in a sympathetic response. Although the sky over the rest of Houston remained clear, a single cloud now lingered above the Tessitech building. Apparently Tessic’s shielding had a unique effect on Michael’s power, focusing his mood into a narrow beam, sending it skyward, like a search light. In the rooftop garden, and nowhere else, it began to drizzle.

Michael knew a remedy to this mournful little cloud. It would be simple first aid, temporary and superficial, but it would hold him, if only for a little while.

“There’s a year’s worth of new music I haven’t heard,” Michael told them, as they stood from their chairs. “Get some for me.”

The drizzle became a downpour before they reached the elevator.

Winston didn’t tell Michael everything.

He kept his secret, the same way he kept it from Dillon. Dillon had not yet asked how he and Drew had found him. Winston still didn’t know how to answer without telegraphing a lie. But eventually both Dillon and Michael would have to be told about Okoya’s part in this. He intended to keep the secret as long as he could.

Dillon disappeared after Michael’s little emotional outburst, and Michael had since returned to the garden, stationing himself on a lounge chair in the rain. Equipped with a portable CD player and a mood-altering armada of tunes, he used the sky above him as biofeed­back, determined to either disperse the cloud or suffer in the storm.

Winston found himself exploring the multi-level residence, losing track of why he was there. Tessic’s penthouse was a tall drink on an empty stomach. Refreshing, inebriating, addicting. Dillon was already hooked, and that made Winston’s task all the more difficult.

He came across Drew in the workout room, pounding a rapid pace on a treadmill.

“Dillon’s acting normal,” Winston told Drew. “I don’t like it.”

“He’s not entitled to be normal?”

“You know Dillon—he’s all gloom and doom.”

Drew hit several buttons on the high-tech treadmill, but failed to find the off switch, so instead he let the momentum of the conveyor belt carry him off the back. “The change in Dillon could be a good thing. Maybe he’s starting to feel all his dire predictions are wrong.”

“Or maybe he’s just running away from them.”

Winston looked at the treadmill. It was, like everything else here, state of the art, with a curved screen that projected a path through a lush sequoia forest, or whatever environment you felt like jogging through. Simulated progress, when all you’re doing is looking at a wall.

“He’s even got this girlfriend now,” Winston said. “Could you ever imagine Dillon with a girlfriend?”

“Well, there was Deanna . . .”

Winston waved it off. “That was different. The two of them . . . they . . .”

“Completed each other?” offered Drew.

“Yeah, something like that.”

Winston looked out of the window, which, like every window in the penthouse, offered a view of downtown Houston, and the flat suburbs beyond. It would be so easy to remain here, aloof, and above. “Now that we have Michael back, I’m beginning to worry if we’ve lost Dillon. If we lose him, we lose everything.”

“Now who’s gloom and doom?”

“I’m just picking up the slack,” Winston said. “And it’s pissing me off.”

And then a voice from the doorway. “You didn’t show up at lunch.”

It caught them off guard, jarring Winston’s train of thought. They turned to see Maddy Haas. “I was hoping we could actually be intro­duced,” she said.

“I know who you are,” said Winston. She was, as far as Winston was concerned, part of the problem. Until this morning, he had only known her from news reports. The papers all featured the same pale headshot that didn’t do her justice. She was, in fact, a beautiful woman. But wasn’t that requisite for a femme fatale?

She strode into the room with a confidence Winston found un­nerving. “You should know that Tessic has an intercom system that could pinpoint the location of a mosquito from its buzz.”

“Tessic’s been eavesdropping?” asked Drew.

“No. I’ve been eavesdropping.”

Winston wasn’t surprised. “Did Uncle Sam train you in surveil­lance?”

“I’m trained in a lot of things.” She flicked off the treadmill, the hum of the belt died, and the sequoia forest resolved to a flat, neutral gray. “As a matter of fact, I got straight As in bullshit detection. And you’re standing in one hell of a dung hill.”

“Dillon’s usually the one who detects bullshit,” Winston said. “But for some reason his antenna’s offline. Any idea why?”

“Dillon only sees what he wants to see. What he’s ready to see.”

“And so you’re an advocate of these blinders he’s got on?”

“I never said that—but I don’t think just ripping them off is going to help him. Dillon’s fragile right now.”

Winston laughed. “Fragile? Dillon could be at ground zero at Hi­roshima, swallow the whole goddamned bomb, and walk away from it with mild indigestion. I can think of lots of words to describe Dil­lon—fragile isn’t one of them.”

“Then you don’t know him as well as you think.”

Drew pushed his way between them, putting his arms on their shoulders. “Can’t we all just get along.”

“Sure,” Winston said. “We’ll all put on a big purple Barney smile. I love you, you love me.” Winston shrugged out of Drew’s grip.

“I see why Winston needs you to travel with him,” Maddy told Drew. “Nice of you to be his referee.”

“Yeah, well, the pay sucks, but there’s a good medical plan.”

Winston threw an annoyed look at Drew, but said nothing, since anything he said would just make her point.

Maddy strode over to the wall, and turned off the intercom, then came back to Winston, speaking to him quietly, a little too close for his personal comfort. “There’s something you’re keeping from Dil­lon,” she said. “I want to know what it is.”

He only had one thing to say to that. “Go shave your legs.”

Drew laughed. “Can’t argue with that logic.” He reflexively scratched the itch of his own uneven beard stubble.

“You know, we don’t have to like each other,” Maddy told Win­ston, “but it would sure help if we could be civil. After all, I’m a part of this now, too.”

The suggestion made Winston bristle. “Getting a piece of Dillon doesn’t make you a part of anything.”

It must have stung, because she took a sizeable step into his airspace, balling her hand into a fist. For a moment he thought she might hit him, but in the end, she backed off. “You’re a real disappointment, Winston. The way Dillon always talked about you, I expected more than this. I thought you were supposed to be the wise one.”

She strode off with much more dignity than Winston felt at the moment. Once she was gone, Drew turned to Winston, wearing one of his best smirks.

“It didn’t take her long to find your secret ‘shithead’ button, did it,” Drew said.

“Ah, shut up.”

Dillon had not expected the others to warm too quickly to Tessic’s overtures of friendship. The events of their lives had inscribed for each of them the same boilerplate of distrust that Dillon carried. He had hoped, however, that when they saw Dillon at ease in Tessic’s com­pany, they might soon relax their defenses, but they were far from disarmament.

Dinner that night was an exercise in strained civility. Dillon and Maddy sat on one side of the table, Drew and Michael on the other, with Winston and Tessic facing each other from either end, like op­posing goalies.

“Have you ever flown on a private jet?” Dillon asked just after the main course was served.

Winston stared at Dillon as if he were speaking in tongues. “Excuse me?”

“We’re flying to Poland next week,” Dillon told him. “There’s room for everyone.”

“Cool,” said Michael, then gauged Winston’s eyes, and hedged. “Isn’t it?”

Winston crammed a large piece of steak into his mouth, and worked it, effectively dodging a response.

“You shall all be my guests,” Tessic said with a gesture of his fork. “Friendlier skies you will not find.”

“Well, Mr. Tessic,” Drew said. “I can’t speak for Winston, but after almost getting sucked out of a DC-10 two weeks ago, air travel and I have ended our relationship.”

“Perhaps seeing another part of the world would lend you some perspective.” Tessic’s comment was directed specifically at Winston.

Winston swallowed his meat, and Dillon braced for the response. “If I need someone to loan me perspective, I’ll let you know.”

Tessic deflected it with a laugh, but then threw a grin at Dillon, as if the two of them shared some secret, although Dillon wasn’t certain what that secret might be.

Winston excused himself just as dessert arrived. “I can’t remember the last time I ate so well,” Winston said, then chased the compliment with, “I can see how one could grow complacent with fine food like this.” Winston left, and his exit opened the door for Drew and Michael to follow.

After dinner, Dillon considered Winston’s departing barb. Had Dillon grown complacent? Well, perhaps—but Dillon had a hundred reasons why complacency was exactly what he needed in this place, in this moment. To be a body at rest was a luxury he could never afford, and as Tessic had predicted, Dillon had found clarity in this hiatus from anguish. He felt, for the first time in many years, simply human. Here, his power was neither feared nor worshiped. He need not concern himself with its effect on the world around him, or the world’s effect on him. Such contentment deserved to be prolonged, and so he told himself it was all part of some positive metamorphosis and he would emerge from this cocoon far better than he arrived. I’ll leave after we get back from Europe, Dillon told itself, or at least he’d consider the possibility of thinking about leaving.

Winston however, had no such moratorium on desertion.

At nine in the evening, Dillon found Winston alone in the living room, punching combinations into the digital lock on the residence elevator.

“Going somewhere?”

Caught in the act, Winston did not try to hide what he was up to. “I thought you said Tessic had an open-door policy.”

“Maybe he got tired of the draft.” Dillon punched in the code, which Tessic had given him on his first day there, although he had never chosen to use it. The elevator door opened to a cherry wood interior, then closed again, empty. “I’m sure he would have told you himself, if you hadn’t skipped out during dinner.”

Winston looked around, making sure they were unobserved. Even so, he spoke in a whisper. “You can’t stay here, you’ve got to realize that.”

“I’ll leave when I feel it’s time,” Dillon told him. “And it’s not time.”

“Like hell it’s not! You, Michael and I don’t get the cushy way out—there’s things we’ve got to do.”

“And you have no clue what those things are.”

“I know a lot more than you think,” Winston said. He hesitated, then took a breath. “I know who the three spirits are. And I know why they’re here.”

That caught Dillon completely off guard. He had been arrogant enough to think his was the clearest vision of all the Shards. “Then why haven’t you told me?”

“Because we can’t talk about it here.”

Dillon turned at the creak of footsteps on the stairs. Drew and Michael. Drew carried their travel bags. Seeing Dillon there, Drew stopped short, looked to Winston, then completely misread the situ­ation.

“Glad you decided to come with us,” Drew told Dillon.

“No one’s going anywhere,” Dillon said. “Especially not Michael. He’s not ready to leave here.”

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” Winston said.

And suddenly Michael was the center of attention. He stood on the bottom step of the winding staircase, just as Dillon had that same morning when he first saw Winston.

“You’re staying, right Michael?” Dillon said. “You know you need time to adjust.”

Michael offered Dillon a half-hearted shrug. “I figure it’s best to dive in before I really know what the hell is going on out there. Be­cause once I know, I might be too scared to go. Like you.”

Dillon started to protest the suggestion that he was afraid, but was cut short by the sound of the elevator door sliding open. Winston had remembered the code.

“Could you just stop for a minute and think!” insisted Dillon.

“I already think too much.”

Drew and Michael pushed past them into the elevator. “Sorry, man,” Michael said. “Tell Tessic I like his place.”

Winston followed them in, and Dillon found himself stumbling over his words. “There’s no point in leaving—nothing makes sense out there; it’s full of images and noise for us now. What we feel out there is panic—the only sanity is here.”

Winston wedged his foot against the open elevator door to keep it from closing. “Has it ever occurred to you that sanity is our worst enemy? That maybe we need a little insanity, or we’ll never be pushed to do what we need to do?”

“And what might that be?”

Winston responded by handing him a slip of paper with an address. “This is where we’ll be. Meet us there later tonight, and I’ll tell you everything I know.”

“I’m not leaving here!”

“I’m not asking you to. Just slip away for a couple of hours.”

Dillon looked at the piece of paper. A three digit address and a cross street.

“You want us to come back, that will be your last chance to con­vince us,” Winston said. “Promise me you’ll be there.”

“I can’t promise anything.”

Winston nodded and back-stepped into the elevator with the oth­ers. He said nothing more as the elevator door slid quietly closed.

Dillon closed his eyes. The sensation of being robbed of Michael and Winston’s presence as they dipped out of Tessic’s insulated domain almost made him physically ill. He waited for his own sense of self and autonomy to return, but it was slow in coming. Their exit was sudden, unexpected, but Dillon knew he should have expected it. He should have sensed the pattern leading up to this. It was after all, his talent. It troubled him how easily he could unconsciously snuff his own intui­tion and he wondered what else he might be preventing himself from seeing.

When he finally turned from the elevator, Tessic was coming up the stairs from his workshop.

“Did you give them the code, or did Maddy?” Tessic asked.

“You heard them leave?”

“I didn’t have to. Security informs me when there’s unauthorized use of the express elevator. My door may be open, but no one leaves without my knowledge, one way or another.” Dillon expected him to be furious, but he wasn’t.

“You could have them stopped in the lobby,” Dillon said.

“What kind of host would I be then? I told the officer on duty to open the door for them, with my regrets that I couldn’t see them off personally.”

Tessic went over to the wet bar, stocked with Amaretto, Creme de Menthe, and a dozen other sweet liqueurs, crystalline decanters glistening in every color from orange to violet. Tessic once told him he couldn’t abide alcohol without a healthy dose of sugar to go with it. But Dillon suspected there was no sugar in the world sweet enough to make this medicine go down.

“I’m sorry,” Dillon said. “I showed Winston the code. I thought by showing them they could leave, they’d no longer feel they had to.”

Tessic poured himself an amber liqueur, then poured a second snifter. “Would I be contributing the delinquency of a minor if I asked you to drink with me?”

“Probably.”

Nevertheless Tessic brought the second glass to Dillon. “It’s called Benedictine. I’ve been to the monastery in France where it is distilled.”

Dillon took the glass, and sipped it; the sweetness overwhelmed his taste buds, the sharpness burned his lips. The smallest sip left a whole series of subtle aftertastes.

“The recipe is five hundred years old, and is flavored with twenty-seven different botanicals that you would never expect to find together. Cinnamon and saffron, lemon and myrrh. Whenever I feel troubled by circumstance, I have a glass of Benedictine to remind me that the greatest things are forged from the most disparate of elements.” He swirled the snifter, watching the way the Benedictine coated the glass. “Life is much the same. Events both serendipitous and unfortunate combine together in the end.”

“There’s always a chance they’ll come back,” Dillon offered.

“Of course they’ll come back.” Tessic appeared so unconcerned, Dillon wondered whether or not it was a facade. Although he did sense turmoil in the man, it didn’t seem to be about this particular point.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Their presence is required, and therefore I trust it will be pro­vided.”

“Required for what?”

Tessic smiled. “For the greatest of works, Dillon. The greatest of works.”

A heavy downpour began to pelt the living room windows. Now that Michael was out in the world unprotected and unconstrained, the skies over Houston resonated his turbulent state of mind.

Tessic held up his glass. “To the return of old friends,” he said, and touched his glass to Dillon’s. Behind them, a silent flash of light­ening lit the room, chased quickly by a slow roll of thunder filled with as many haunting flavors as the Benedictine.

Maddy shaved her legs in the shower, disgusted by the effect Win­ston had had on her body, and the effect Michael had had on her mood. There was no way to tell how much emotional tension was her own, and how much was projected upon her by Michael. Even in isolation, she felt she could not be alone, irradiated—violated—by their strange incandescence.

When she stepped out of the shower, the sound of thunder caught her by surprise. Wrapped in a plush robe thick as a parka, she stepped into the bedroom suite. The room had grown warmer than it had been all day, while outside, rain sheeted down the glass wall, obscuring the lights of the Houston night.

“They’re gone.”

The sound of Dillon’s voice made her jump. She turned to see him in bed, sitting up against the pillows, halfway beneath the covers. “You must be disappointed.”

“Are you coming to bed?” he asked.

“I have to dry my hair.”

She retreated to the bathroom and set the blower on low. All day she could get by with attributing her mounting sense of discomfort to events outside of herself. First there was the shock of witnessing Mi­chael’s resurrection, and then there was the pervasiveness of Michael’s emotional presence. But now Michael was gone, outside of their shielded world. Her emotions were now her own, and she didn’t like what she felt.

When she stepped out of the bathroom again, she found the lights off. Dillon was a flow of satin contours lit only by flashes of distant lightning. She hoped he’d be a asleep, but knew he was not.

She slipped on a nightgown, and slid beneath the covers on her side of the bed. Dillon’s hands were on her instantly, stroking her shoulders and back, urgently importuning. She fought her own body’s reflex to open to his touch. His hands were colder than usual. His caresses mechanical and forced. When she didn’t respond, he became more insistent. Maddy knew that tonight this was not about love. It wasn’t even about passion.

She rolled toward him, but grabbed his wrist, moving his hand away from her.

“What is it?” he asked.

He sounded so young when he said it, it made the five-year gap of their ages seem like a canyon. Yet even as she considered it, she knew that wasn’t the reason for her discomfort. It was her “orbit,” as Drew so incisively put it, which so dismayed her. The expanse was unbridgeable. They could be together, holding one another, and still she would be in a distant orbit. Maddy would never truly be with him, and that knowledge was getting harder to bear each time she felt Dil­lon’s body against hers.

“Do you think of her when we make love?” She found the words were out of her mouth before she knew she would say them.

“Who?” Dillon asked.

“Who do you think?” There was something she had heard over the intercom earlier in the day. Drew and Winston talking about how Dillon and Deanna “completed” each other. Maddy knew she did not complete him in this way, for even in their most fulfilling, most pas­sionate of moments, she sensed a depth of longing in him that her spirit was not large enough to fill. “Well, do you?” she asked again.

He reached over again to touch her, gently stroking her hair, which had grown longer in Winston’s presence. “Only sometimes.”

She spat out a laugh at his response, hating him for the answer, yet loving him for being incapable of a lover’s lie.

“Please, Maddy,” he said. “It’s been awful today. I need you to be there. Nobody else is.”

A flash of lightning lit his eyes, pupils wide, pleading. It was con­solation he wanted. She was nothing more than his consolation prize. And she did want him, as she always wanted him—but now she knew what it was she truly wanted. Stifling her own tears, she reached up to his face, gently tracing the curves of his cheek and nose. She kissed his lips, for the first time feeling his kiss free from the scars she had given him.

“Alright,” she said in a whisper. “But you have to do something first.”

“What?”

“Tell me that I complete you,” she said. “Tell me, and make me believe it.”

She knew how Dillon could find words to heal hearts and minds. Surely he could cut through the truth, and make her believe a lie. Please Dillon, she prayed. Lie just this once, and shatter the truth. The truth that I can never be the companion you need.

But Dillon said nothing. And in time, he took his hands from her. She rolled over, facing away from him, and let her tears soak silently into the pillow. For the first time, she found herself truly wishing they were back in the Hesperia lockdown. Back then she could be exactly what he needed. A human contact. The hand that fed him; the source of his survival. In those days they could cling to the wonderful illusion that titanium and steel were the only obstacles keeping them apart. Maddy would have done anything to have that illusion back.

Some time later she felt him get out of bed, and heard him dress. She watched him move in the shadows and the strobing flashes of lightning as he opened the closet door, pulling out the designer over­coat Tessic had given him for their trip to the cold northern reaches of Poland.

“Going out?” she asked.

“Something I need to do. I won’t be long.”

He opened the door to their suite, letting in the hallway light. He lingered there for a moment before he left, silhouetted against the door frame, looking toward her.

“I love you, Maddy,” he said.

“I know you do,” she answered. But it was only a shard of what she needed to hear.

27. The Dying Void

The windshield wipers metered out the time in Dillon’s taxi like a metronome.

“I hate storms like this,” the cabby said. “They make me nervous.”

Dillon had taken the stairs down sixty-seven flights rather than alerting Tessic by using an elevator. As soon as he had descended away from the penthouse, a sudden sense of the outside world hit him. Dread and paranoia, a panicked call to action, with no hint of what action to take. Do something, his spirit cried. Do anything. He immediately real­ized that his time convalescing under Tessic’s protection had changed nothing. He was no more equipped to face things now than he had been when he first arrived. If anything, the sense of panic had inten­sified.

Already drenched by the downpour, he had called a taxi from an all-night coffee shop three blocks away.

“Got caught in a flash flood once,” the cabby said as they drove to the address scrawled on the slip of paper. “Sumbitch washed my car away. Lotta power in them there things.”

The taxi was brand new. Dillon was certain it hadn’t started that way. He wondered how long it would take for the cabby to notice the change. Hopefully not until after Dillon left the cab.

Halfway there, the rain turned to sleet, pummeling the roof in a metallic clatter. “Yeah, this is a weird one,” the cabby went on. “Pat­tern of a hurricane, but it ain’t got no eye. Stretches all the way to San Antonio.”

That was almost two hundred miles. A year ago the radius of Mi­chael’s influence was only ten, maybe twenty miles at its peak. This knowledge only added to Dillon’s sense of foreboding.

“I don’t like it,” said the cabby. “Don’t like it at all.”

The address was a warehouse in a deserted industrial district. “Sure this is where you want to be?” the cabby asked, obviously nervous, yet not knowing why.

Dillon double-checked the address. It was right, and he could feel Winston and Michael close by. Having no money to speak of, Dillon told the cabby to wait, knowing he would not. Michael’s icy sphere of emotional influence would repel anyone from its epicenter—and sure enough, as soon as Dillon stepped out into the sleet-filled street, the cabby spun off, his back end fish-tailing until it found traction.

Dillon took in his surroundings. The place would have been dismal even in bright summer sunshine. Up ahead, a red Durango straddled the curb, as out of place in this bleak circumstance as he. The headlights of the Durango flashed on and off, and as Dillon approached, the driver’s-side window rolled down. Drew sat behind the wheel of the otherwise empty car.

“They’re inside,” Drew told him, pointing to the warehouse en­trance.

“How come you’re out here?”

Drew hesitated before responding. “Hey, ignorance is bliss, right? Some things I don’t want to know. Some company I’d rather not keep. Go on, they’re waiting for you.”

The window closed before Dillon could question him any further. Dillon went to the door of the warehouse, and pushed it open.

Inside, the warehouse had been plunged into a deep freeze. Ice coated the walls; it hung in massive icicles from the high ceiling, like stalactites. The few lights that worked flickered in and out, casting the ice cavern in shifting shadows. Dillon lost his footing on the slick floor, and fell to one knee.

“He’s here,” he heard Winston say.

Carefully rising to his feet, Dillon followed the direction of the voice to a far corner, where several chairs sat. Three were occupied, one awaited his arrival.

Three? Was Lourdes there, too? Was that Winston’s secret? But as Dillon approached, hopefulness gave way to apprehension, and then to despair. Even before he saw the mystery guest, he knew who it was.

“The prodigal son returns,” Okoya said. “So happy you could grace us with your presence.”

Dillon felt his feet threaten to slide out from under him again so he stood still, holding his distance. The sense of betrayal was more overwhelming than the cold.

“It’s not what you think,” Winston said.

“I’m not sure what I think.”

“Winston says we have to listen to him,” Michael said. “I don’t like it any more than you do.”

Every human instinct told Dillon to turn and run . . . but, like Mi­chael’s ice storm, Dillon knew it was a reaction of fear. He would let Okoya have his say. And when he was done, Dillon would leave. Alone, if he had to.

He took his place with Michael and Winston on either side, across from Okoya—who looked less emaciated than when Dillon had last seen him, but just as depraved. Speckles of frost dotted his long dark hair, and he wore heavy layers of old clothes like a vagrant, but the clothes were quickly renewing, their colors brightening, their tattered threads redarning.

“I want to talk to you about destruction,” Okoya told Dillon. “It’s important that you understand the level of devastation you’ve caused.”

“I already do understand.”

“No,” Okoya said. “It goes beyond anything you’ve witnessed— anything you’ve imagined. But within that destruction lies your sal­vation.”

If Okoya had bitterness and vengeful intents, they were no longer evident. In fact, Dillon sensed a hopefulness in the dark creature. And so he forced himself to suspend judgment, listening to everything Okoya had to say. He began by talking about home.

“As I’m sure you’ve surmised, the place I come from has a different reality than this universe, with its own natural laws.” Okoya said, “There is no physicality; all is spirit and energy. And in our dimension, my kind is supreme.” Dillon shifted, irritated by Okoya’s species’s arrogance. “The best way I can describe our existence to you is that of a single pod of interconnected spirit-beings—about three hundred thousand in all. We exist on a grid of three dimensions, moving in unison along simultaneous Vectors of depth, width and time, but these three vectors, like everything else in my universe, are alive. They are three powerful entities—the greatest of our kind. The Vectors deter­mine the course and momentum of the pod, as our species impels through the universe.”

Michael laughed nervously. “Great. Extra-dimensional off-roading. Why do we have to know this? Will we be tested on it?”

Dillon considered what Okoya had said. “I think I know why. These three ‘Vectors’—are they the spirits we’ve been sensing?”

Okoya nodded. “They are.”

Dillon felt his own vector of fury building within him, and it took all his control not to launch himself at Okoya. “Why did you bring the leaders of your soul-sucking species here?” Dillon hissed.

Okoya met his scorching gaze with ice enough to douse the flame. “It was your actions that brought them here, not mine.”

Dillon turned his gaze to Winston, who only looked away.

“This world of yours,” Okoya said. “This entire universe has al­ways been insignificant to us, but we do occasionally make ourselves known, angling for sport or amusement. In our natural form, we are, to human eyes, whatever those eyes wish to see. Glory and wonder; lost loves; sacred memories. Wherever your emptiness—wherever your need—that is how we appear. Call it the natural lure of a species of hunters. The problem is that humans are too weak to resist the lure, and so there’s no challenge to the hunt. Fortunately for you, the effort it takes to break through to your universe is rarely worth the reward.”

“Then why did you come?” Dillon asked.

“The lure of power can be irresistible as well,” Okoya admitted. “But trying to elevate myself in this world earned me immediate con­demnation by my own kind. I was therefore a pariah from the moment I first arrived here.”

“And the three Vectors, as you call them—are they lured by power as well?”

“They came here out of necessity.” Okoya tossed his long hair which had become caked with white rime, and the flakes fell from him like dandruff. He turned to Michael. “I’d wish you’d warm up to me, Michael; this frosty welcome gets tedious.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Michael said. “Maybe I should broil you instead.” But the temperature retained its deep freeze.

“You still haven’t explained why the Vectors are here,” Dillon said.

Okoya turned back to Dillon, pointing an accusing finger. “It all comes back to what you did last year. Your cunning ploy to get rid of me.

“It couldn’t have been too cunning if Okoya came back,” Michael said. “So what did you do, Dillon?”

“I . . . infested him,” Dillon explained. “Okoya had confronted me, and offered me a bargain. He offered me the chance to reclaim and revive Deanna . . . in return for my servitude. Then he punched a hole to the place where we left Deanna’s body.”

“The Unworld?” Michael said. “Okoya can get to the Unworld?”

Dillon nodded. “I agreed to his terms, but when I crossed into the Unworld, I never went after Deanna. Instead I went looking for our parasites—the two that were still left alive, but trapped in the Un­world.”

Dillon had tried to put it out of his mind, but now brought the vile memory back. He explained to Michael how, in order to defeat Okoya, Dillon was forced to invite those two unclean spirits into his soul. His own parasite had evolved into a winged gargoyle that still hungered for destruction, and Deanna’s was a vermiform serpent that thrived on fear. They were as complementary and co-dependent as he and Deanna had been—and far too powerful, for they had been nur­tured well. While the other Shards had faced and killed their parasites, these two had survived, trapped in that place between worlds, waiting for a soul to crawl into. A soul that could take them out.

“I stood on the sands of the Unworld until they came,” Dillon said. “Then I took them into myself, letting them leech onto my soul. And I brought them back into this world.”

“I was not expecting it,” Okoya said. “The moment Dillon came through, the creatures leapt from him, and burrowed deep into me. I could not free myself from them, and in a panic, I punched a hole into my own universe. I withdrew back to my own world, taking the two parasites with me. And in so doing, infested my entire universe.”

“They were only two parasites,” Michael said. “That’s not exactly an infestation.”

“You saw the damage they did when they were here,” Winston reminded him.

“They infested us,” Michael said, “not our universe.”

“Such limited thinking.” Okoya turned to Dillon. “When I es­caped, you caught a glimpse of the place I came from. What do you remember of it?”

Dillon closed his eyes, trying to find a way to put it into words. It wasn’t so much what he saw, it was more a feeling spilling through the breach. “Like you said, there was nothing solid; everything was light and shadows. It seemed to me that the light was somehow alive . . . and not just the light. The darkness was alive as well.”

“The living void,” Okoya said. “Sentient darkness. It fills our uni­verse like water fills an ocean. It’s what my kind thrives on. We move through the living void, consuming the darkness.”

“I think we have a name for this place,” Winston said. “We call it hell.”

Okoya turned to Winston, considering his little insight. “Very well,” said Okoya. “Then consider yourselves warned that the gates of hell are about to open.”

Dillon’s body gave in to the cold, and he began to shiver uncon­trollably. “And why would the gates open?”

“The moment I returned with the parasites, they left me, and in­habited the living void. Their host became the void itself, and it be­came rancid. The void was alive now with destruction and fear, feeding on itself, consuming itself until our universe could no longer hold, and began to collapse. As great as we are, my kind cannot survive the death of our universe.” Okoya kept his eyes fixed on Dillon. “And so they’ve chosen to come here.”

Dillon pulled his overcoat tighter, and clenched his teeth to stop the shivering. A malevolent species facing its own extinction. Dillon wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

“The arrival of the Vectors is a prelude to a mass migration,” Okoya said, “for where the Vectors go, my species will follow. It is a physical law of my universe.”

“We could coexist,” Dillon suggested. “We could offer them—"

“You can offer them nothing!” Okoya stood, and paced the frozen corner, his voice growing angrier. “They have neither compassion nor patience for humanity. You are vermin to them—less than vermin— and nothing will change that. Rest assured they will come; they will steal almost three hundred thousand of your bodies to use as hosts. Then they will enslave you, then they will devour every soul on earth, and when they are done they will burn your bodies, keeping only enough of humanity alive to breed a new generation of souls. This is the fate of your precious world.”

Dillon shut his eyes, wishing he could erase what he had heard. This was the face of his dread, and it was hideous. “No,” he said, “You’ve lied to us before. I won’t believe this.”

“Disbelieving it won’t change the truth.”

An icicle the size of a human leg plunged from the ceiling in the center of the warehouse. It shattered, radiating a vibration that shook sheets of ice from the walls, like the calving of a glacier. When the room fell silent again, the silence remained for a good long time before anyone spoke.

“Why,” mumbled Michael, “couldn’t I just be left at the bottom of Lake Arrowhead?”

And although no one expected an answer, Okoya said, “Winston knows why.”

Dillon and Michael turned to Winston, who had said very little during Okoya’s revelation. “What else is there, Winston?” Dillon asked. “What other secrets have you been keeping?”

Winston couldn’t look up at them. He kept his eyes lowered to the ground. “It’s no secret. It’s something Drew and I came to un­derstand.”

“Enlighten us, o wise one,” said Michael.

Winston took his time before he spoke. Finally he said, “For years we’ve wanted to know the reason behind our lives. Why did the Scorpion Star explode? Why did we inherit its fractured soul? Why have our powers been growing? What are we?” Winston looked to Dillon, then to Michael, then back to Dillon again. “How ready are you for the answer?”

Suddenly Dillon found himself no longer wanting to know.

“Okoya talks about his universe being a living thing,” said Win­ston, “but what if ours is alive as well? Not a living void, but a lifeform of matter and energy stretching across space—a single organism, thirty billion light-years wide?”

Michael threw up his hands in exasperation. “Oh, gee, that’s just wonderful. So what does that make us? Universal sperm?”

Winston ignored him. “If we see the universe as a complex or­ganism, how do you think it might protect itself from invasion—from infection?”

Dillon fought his own resistance, and let the idea begin to sink in. When he finally spoke, he found his own voice cold and hollow. “You’re saying we’re some sort of defense? A kind of metaphysical immune system?”

“Dillon gets a gold star,” Okoya said.

Dillon considered it. The idea was too large to grasp, and yet simple at the same time. He found himself looking at his hands—which he had always seen as an interface for his powers. Healing hands; hands held up to hold back a flood, or to release one. Instruments of creation and destruction. If Winston’s conjecture were true, it would reify what was always just a vague sense of purpose. It would explain why the Shards were so attuned to each other, and to rifts in the “skin” of space. All the questions he posed now had obvious answers when factored through this new equation.

“If this is all true, then why would you help us?” Dillon asked Okoya. “What could you possibly have to gain?”

“My kind views me as a hated fugitive,” he answered, far too casually for Dillon’s comfort. “If their plan succeeds, what do you think will happen to me?”

“You would sacrifice your entire species for your own survival?”

The question gave Okoya pause. His demeanor clouded bitter and resentful, as if the question were an insult. “Loyalty is as foreign a concept to us as compassion.”

Dillon held his astringent gaze, more comfortable with Okoya’s hostility than with his congeniality.

Winston leaned closer to Dillon. “Okoya agreed to give up his appetites, in return for a kind of political asylum.”

Michael let loose a cackling laugh. “Asylum?” he said. “I agree. Let’s all find an asylum. We can tell people how we’re actually T-cells in disguise, and they can tell us how they’re really Queen Victoria, and Alexander the Frigging Great.”

Dillon thought to say something to shut him up, but noticed that the frost around Michael’s chair had melted. In spite of Michael’s de­rision, the truth was setting him free. Dillon turned his attention back to Okoya.

“So if we face this ‘infection’ the moment it happens . . . you think we’ll be able to stop it?”

Okoya raised his eyebrows, and shifted in his seat. “Sometimes an immune response succeeds, sometimes it fails.”

“Where will it happen, and when?” Dillon asked.

“Yes, are you ever going to tell us that?” said Winston. “Or don’t you know?”

“I suspect they will tear their way through a very large, very old scar, in the last moments of their universe,” Okoya said. “My best guess is the Greek island of Thira, on the seventh of December, 7:53 AM.”

Winston gasped. “Pearl Harbor! The same date and time as the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

“And the Mongol invasion,” said Okoya, “and the siege of Troy, and the fall of Jericho. Even before your calendar, and the measure of hours, all these events took place on the same date, at the same time.”

Winston nodded in an understanding Dillon had yet to grasp. “Each fraction of creation is a reflection of the whole,” Winston said.

Okoya nodded. “But you’ll need more than a fraction of a response to stop it. The three of you alone will fail; all six of you must come together again.”

Winston looked at him in surprise. “You never told me that!”

“Until you had Dillon, there was no point in discussing it.”

Winston shook his head. “Impossible. Even if we somehow won Lourdes back, there’s Deanna . . .”

Okoya smiled. “Leave Deanna to me.”

The suggestion sent a surge of adrenaline through Dillon’s body, warming his chilled extremities.

“And how about Tory?” Winston said. “You know what they did to her. There’s no way.”

Okoya seemed more sure of himself than Winston did. “The Vec­tors have made a critical error in underestimating you, just as I did a year ago,” Okoya said. “Don’t make the same mistake, and underes­timate yourselves.”

“Winston—what did you mean by ‘win Lourdes back,’ " Dillon asked. “Don’t you think she’ll help us once she knows?”

Winston looked to Okoya, then back to Dillon. “We believe the Vectors have turned her to their side.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Don’t you get the news up there in Tessic’s tower?”

“Of course I do—I’ve been keeping track of everything.”

“Well then, you should already know what happened in Daytona.”

But Dillon hadn’t heard a thing, so Winston explained.

“Ten days ago, a few hundred people in Daytona Beach, Florida, suddenly left their beach blankets and drowned themselves.” Winston said. “As if an irresistible force took them over, and they had no control over their bodies—how could you not have heard about this?”

“I don’t know.” The truth was, with the hours he spent scanning the news, he should have known. He could only assume that some events—events that might pull him away from Tessic’s comfortable sanctuary—were screened out. “There’s no question it’s Lourdes, but what the hell is she doing?”

“I would guess she’s flexing her muscles,” Okoya said. “Preparing herself.”

“For what?” Dillon wondered, but Okoya didn’t answer.

By the time they left the warehouse a few minutes later, the sleet had turned to rain and Dillon had to ask Michael how their little summit could possibly have affected his mood for the better.

“If I have to be hit by a train, I’d rather see it coming,” was all Michael said of it.

They piled in the Durango, waking Drew, who slept across the front seat. Dillon wondered how much of the picture Drew knew, and concluded that he was smart to ration his own awareness.

“Still want us to drop you off at Tessitech?” Winston asked.

Dillon searched for the Houston skyline, but it was obscured be­hind the clouds. A gilded cage waited for him high in those clouds. He could imagine himself sneaking back in, sliding into bed with Maddy, forcing himself to ignore everything he had learned tonight. Then morning would come, Tessic would greet them for breakfast, and life would be as sweet, and as intoxicating, as Tessic’s liqueurs. It would be easy to give in to that temptation. So easy that he knew he could not return, not even to say good-bye to Maddy. If they suc­ceeded, she would come to understand why he had left. And if they failed, well, it wouldn’t matter anyway.

“If we leave now, we’ll reach Dallas by nine,” Dillon said, and slid into the front passenger seat. As they drove off, Dillon closed his eyes, and warded off his regrets by counting the metronome beats of the wiper blades, until they were far out of Houston.

The following morning, five thousand miles away on the island of Bermuda, an accountant and his wife were escaping from it all. These were unpalatable times, and it didn’t take a number cruncher to see the unlucky numerology of the days. As he lay there poolside, beside the cellulitic form of his wife, who burned a mottled pink be­neath the ultraviolet rays of a midday sun, he ogled the more shapely figures on the beach, longing for his slimmer youth. He dreamed of himself surrounded by a harem of such beautiful women—not so far­fetched a thought, he concluded. These were, in fact, strange days. The unusual had become commonplace; inexplicable mischief and miracles were rules rather than the exceptions. Take that bizarre mass suicide in Daytona Beach. Five hundred people, without forethought, without reason, suddenly plunged themselves into the ocean. The Coast Guard was still fishing out the bodies. The accountant had laughed and his wife had been angry.

He yawned, and tried to roll over to sun his back, but found that gravity had shifted. No, it wasn’t gravity; it was him. He was no longer lying on the lounge chair, instead he was standing in front on it. He did not remember getting up. When he turned, he found his wife standing as well. In fact, everyone around the pool was beginning to stand like a reluctant ovation.

At first he found this merely curious, not threatening, for his life experience gave him no way to distill a threat from this aberrant oc­currence. He didn’t realize he was walking until his third step, because he had not told his feet to do so—yet they were impelled to move. Soon he was jostled by the bodies around him—a mob as surprised by their sudden migration as he. He tried to crane his neck to see his wife, but he couldn’t move his neck at all; the most he could gain control of was his eyeballs and they darted back and forth with growing con­cern. He smashed his shin on a chaise lounge and tumbled over, hitting his head on the concrete. He couldn’t even scream from the pain, for his vocal chords were locked as tight as his jaw.

The man moved from the pool and down a set of stepping stones to the beach, where he realized it was more than just those lounging at his hotel caught in this wave of motion. They were coming from all directions—from all the Bermudan resorts within his line of sight. They ran from restaurants and lobbies, they abandoned their cars, and now in this moment of absolute helplessness, the terror and panic truly set in, for he was on the beach now, marching with thousands of others toward the surf.

And he was in the front line.

Now he understood the terror of the mob in Daytona—under­stood how their limbs could be torn from their control—how their bodies could rebel and drown them, leaving no survivors to tell how it had been. His feet sank into the wet sand at the edge of the surf, but he kept on moving, the mob pushing behind him. The water rolled across his toes, churning a cloud of foam and sand. He knew the bot­tom dropped off suddenly a few feet out and although he could swim, he knew his body would continue walking even as his lungs filled with water. He would die and no one would understand.

But then his feet stopped as quickly as they had begun moving, and he stood at attention with the water lapping at his toes, and there he stayed. The sun beat down on his bald head for more than half an hour that way. He felt the sunburn on his forehead, nose and shoulders. He felt it would burn him through, but still he could not move. And then came a different kind of radiance; a type of magnetism tugging at his being. He knew, even before she moved into his line of sight, that she was the one who had seized control of his body and the thousands of other bodies lining the beach, as far as the eye could see. She strode before him, ankle deep in the surf surveying the crowd. Not as if looking for someone, but rather taking it in as a whole. Like a general, he thought. A general appraising his troops.

She was a young woman, attractive and formidable in both stature and presence. She caught his gaze for an instant and in that instant he could feel her heartbeat. It was his own heartbeat. He could feel the pace of her breath; it was his own. And he knew this powerful girl could end his life; shut down his heart with a single errant thought. But in an instant her eyes moved on, and he knew he was nothing to her—not even worth the thought it would take to kill him. He didn’t know which was worse—the pain of his will usurped, or the pain of his insignificance.

Ten minutes more and he was released. The entire beach was re­leased. People fell to their knees, crying, whimpering, but still alive. She had brought them to the edge of the surf and had stopped them, then released them. For what reason he didn’t know.

Could she have been one of the—but he cut the thought short. No. That freakish gaggle of teens all died when Hoover Dam fell. But now he wasn’t so certain, for he could still feel a hint of the girl’s presence like static in the air.

He went to find his wife, so they could tend to each other’s sun­burns, and they did not speak of it. Not even that afternoon, when they chanced to see a cruise ship heading east across the Atlantic, and felt the girl’s pervasive aura fade as the ship fell off the horizon.

28. The Memory Of Dust

The empty fields five miles north of Dallas/Fort Worth airport had browned and died more than a month ago. Al­though the weather was clear, the temperature stayed a brisk thirty-five. At one o’clock in the afternoon, a red Durango turned off a sparsely traveled two-lane road, churning up dust. Then it stopped at no place in particular, letting out its five occupants. Three of them walked further out into the field, the dead brush beneath them turning green and growing denser beneath their feet. Wild mustard bloomed yellow around sudden pockets of bluebonnet and red cosmos.

Drew and Okoya stood beside one another back at the Durango watching the greening of the field—and although Drew swore he’d never allow himself to be left alone with Okoya again, neither did he want to be out in the field with Dillon, Winston and Michael. Getting here had been an undertaking in and of itself. While the storm over southeastern Texas had ended, so many roads were washed out be­tween Houston and Dallas, that a four-hour drive had stretched into eight.

Up above, a United jet screamed its way heavenward against the pull of gravity. When Drew looked back from the ascending jet, the field before him was almost entirely green.

Dillon was quite aware of the field renewing around him. He also knew there would be no disguising it from anyone who cared to no­tice, so he didn’t worry himself with it. Like smash-and-grab robbers, they would accomplish this deed by brute force, rather than subtle scheming. There was no time for anything else.

Dillon looked around, realizing that he was in between Winston and Michael, a pace ahead of them. As had been the case so many times before, they were following him.

Winston realized this as well, and knew he could have taken the lead. A part of him wanted to, but there was something very natural about being a wing to Dillon’s center. Winston had long since learned that whatever came naturally to the Shards was not to be fought.

Michael, on the other hand did not care who took the lead. He had no time for such thoughts, because his task had already begun. He knew what he had to do, and kept telling himself that he was up for it, bolstering his confidence, and thereby bringing clarity to the skies. Compared to Winston and Dillon he felt like a novice, for their skills were so exact and precise; fine brush strokes to Michael’s sloppy finger-painting. Every few moments a doubt would invade his confidence, reminding him that what they were about to attempt was like seeking a single grain of sand in a hundred miles of beach. Such negative thinking was a formidable enemy for him now, because everything depended on his ability to manipulate his own emotions on cue, like an actor.

Dillon stopped about two hundred yards away from the car. “This is as good a place as any.”

“So what do we do now?” Winston asked. “How do we begin this?”

“It has to start with Michael,” Dillon said.

“No pressure.” Michael closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “How far away do you want it to start?”

“I don’t know,” said Dillon. “Fifty miles? Can you do that?”

“Let’s find out.” He took off his jacket and held his hands out wide as if to receive an embrace, but kept his eyes closed. In the cold, it was easy for him to feel the fine hairs on his arms and legs rise, tightening into gooseflesh. He concentrated on the feeling, bringing his attention to his extremities. Then he began to generate turbulence. He thought of bad times and brutal fights from his past; arguments at home; acts of violence directed at him, and acts he directed out at the world. Some were memories, others fabrications, but they had the desired effect. He could feel his finger tips and toes begin to tremble with anxiety, and slowly, slowly he let the anxiety sweep inward.

Two hundred yards away, Drew and Okoya watched and waited. Drew couldn’t feel the slightest change in the breeze. All he felt was . . . unsettled. “Nothing’s happening.”

“It would seem that way,” Okoya agreed.

After fifteen minutes, Drew saw Michael put his hands down, too tired to hold them up any more. Now he just stood there, with Win­ston and Dillon pacing behind him through an ever-increasing tangle of brush. At twenty minutes Drew was close to panic. “It’s not work­ing,” he said. “He’s not ready, it’s too soon!”

“It’s his anxiety you’re feeling, not your own,” Okoya reminded him. “Which means it is working. Why don’t you turn on the radio.”

Desperate for any diversion, Drew powered up the Durango, and turned on the radio.

“Now find a local news station.”

Drew searched the AM band until finding one. The big news of the hour was a weather advisory. A wind storm. Gale force gusts had already swept west through Dallas, east through Fort Worth, and ap­peared to be zeroing in on the airport in between. Callers from the north and south reported the winds as well, again moving in converg­ing directions. The winds and accompanying dust storm had shredded signs, torn down traffic lights, and brought the twin metropolitan areas to a standstill. Drew turned to see Okoya smile.

“Michael doesn’t know his own strength.”

Now when Drew looked toward the horizon, he could see it had taken on a strange amber shade in all directions.

Meanwhile, out in the field, Michael concentrated. He didn’t look to the horizon, he didn’t open his eyes. He focused on his anticipation and turmoil, letting his heart rate increase, feeling his heartbeat in his fingertips, then his wrists, then his elbows. Tension bubbled within him. He had no idea how far away the wind was, until he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Michael,” Dillon said. “Get ready to brace yourself.” Dillon’s voice cracked as he spoke.

Then Michael opened his eyes, and saw his creation. A tumbling wall of dust, hundreds of feet high. A brown tidal wave bearing down on them from all directions. Michael closed his eyes again, his anxiety closing in on his heart.

Back at the Durango, Okoya laughed with glee at the sight, and Drew could only stand with one hand on the open door of the car staring at this mountain rolling toward them, engulfing the earth.

A jet, perhaps the last one with departure clearance, fought its way heavenward on a trajectory taking it directly toward the dust storm. It looked as though it might clear it, but then the plane disappeared into the cloud’s roiling head. Drew didn’t know what became of it, because now there was a roar in the air, and the ground began to shake like an earthquake.

Suddenly Drew realized they were out in the middle of nowhere. There was no structure they could run to. No place they could go.

In the distance a farmhouse vanished beneath the dust. A string of telephone poles disappeared one by one, measuring the distance. It was five poles away.

“Oh shit!”

Drew practically threw Okoya into the car, and threw himself in after him. When he turned to reach for the door, the leading edge of the dust storm was upon them. He pulled the door closed just as it hit.

Two hundred yards away, Winston saw the Durango disappear and he panicked. “Slow it down!” he screamed at Michael, “it’s coming too fast!”

“I can’t!” he screamed back. “I’m trying, I—"

It hit them from all directions at once, banging them into one another, lifting them off their feet and tumbling them through the shredding brush.

Michael felt his flesh abrading away and regenerating. He could have died a hundred times in those first few seconds, before self-preservation kicked in. He bore down, held his breath and found, in the middle of it all, a seed of peace in which he now centered his awareness. Almost instantaneously the wind pushed outward, leaving a gap in the center of the maelstrom; a ten-foot bubble of still air, an eye in his storm in which the three of them now huddled, coughing and trembling.

Dillon was the first to stand and assess the situation. The violent sands that raged around their air pocket kept shifting and changing— but it wasn’t random—nothing in Dillon’s presence ever was. The dust now swirled in shifting moire patterns. Spirals within spirals, like galaxies revolving.

Now the burden was on Dillon.

This was by far the most difficult task Dillon had ever been asked to perform. It was not just reconstructing a life out of cinders, but sifting out those ashes from a trillion particles of dust—and although Okoya told them this was possible, Dillon’s own faith was sorely lacking.

To Dillon’s right, Michael hunched on all fours, straining to keep the winds churning around the low-pressure eye. To Dillon’s left, Winston tried to tell him something, but Dillon couldn’t hear a thing over the roar of the wind.

The particles of dust churning in the air were already coalescing into a rougher grit, taking on texture and color. Particles of leaves, bits of bark and feather down. The memory of the dust over Dallas.

Dillon reached a hand out of their protective bubble, feeling the grit sift through his fingers, and he began to concentrate his thoughts on Tory; the way she looked, the sound of her voice, the feel of her cleansing presence—every memory he could find. The patterns of the wind changed as he thought of her; slim dust flares snaked down through the swirling clouds.

And when Dillon pulled back his hand, his palm was ashen gray.

He brushed the dust from his fingers onto a spot he cleared in the brush, then thrust both hands into the maelstrom, and repeated the process, again and again, each time brushing the milligrams of dust from his hands until the dust became a small pile. How much would it take to substantiate her? How much of Michael’s body had they needed for Winston to bridge the gaps? Dillon knelt down to Michael and screamed in his ear. “I think we’re going to need water!”

Michael nodded. He didn’t open his eyes or change positions, but in a moment the air around them fogged and the brush grew heavy with dew.

Dillon reached his hands into the dust cloud again, thrusting them up to his elbows, while on the ground, the pile of fine ash condensed into tiny particles of bone.

In the Durango, Drew and Okoya waited the better part of an hour in the swirling winds, isolated, with only static from the radio. Okoya was hardly a comforting presence. He made no conversation, and spent much of the time grooming himself, brushing his hair and admiring his reflection in the vanity mirror, obviously pleased with the effect Dillon’s presence had on his tartared teeth and mangy hair. His motions were so feminine, it reminded Drew that he was in fact both genders at once—that their subjective designation of Okoya as a “he” was for convenience. He recalled that Tory and Lourdes had both considered Okoya a woman.

Finally Drew heard the sound of the wind diminish; a long, slow exhale, and the direction of the wind changed, blowing back to the north. Dust flowed across the windshield but the dust began to thin, giving way to something else entirely. A storm of leaves and flower petals of every color now blew across their line of vision, until the wind died, leaving the car draped in a floral blanket. To the north Drew could see the wind storm retreating, trailed by a swarm of leaves and petals. The telephone poles reemerged from the cloud, then the farm house and the trees beyond it.

He opened his car to a fresh organic aroma pervading the air. Sap and chlorophyll, magnolia blossom and rose.

Out in the field a small oasis had bloomed. Saplings and shrubs were woven together by ivy and brightly colored trumpet vines. A shock wave of rats, rabbits and field mice exploded outward, while up above every bird from blue jay to crow took to the sky. A menagerie of life drawn back from the dust.

Drew took to the field, stomping through the thick dew-covered brush, kicking up swarms of insects, anxious to see with his own eyes what was now hidden within the heart of the oasis.

She was aware. She was aware, but only barely.

She could hear several people asking questions, voicing exclama­tions, but her mind had not congealed enough to attach any meaning to the words. The voices were ones she recognized; their timbre and rhythm familiar enough to set her at ease. She tried to open her eyes, but a grit of sand beneath her eyelids made opening her eyes painful, so she kept them closed. She felt hands brushing dust from her and she laughed at their touch, a bit intoxicated by the unexpected tactile sensation. She did not even attempt to dredge up how she came to be here. For once, if only this once, she was content to be in the inebri­ating now.

She tried to open her eyes again, and this time found it a bit easier, although her vision was still clouded. Someone had slipped a robe around her, and now she was being carried through a lush field.

Michael was the first face she locked onto and identified. “Hey,” he said gently, when he saw her gazing at him. “How’ve ya’ been, Tory?” His voice sounded tired, strained, as if the simple phrase took great effort to push out. She opened her mouth to speak, but found her throat clogged. She coughed, spouting a flurry of flower petals. How odd.

Her legs and arms were still exposed to the cold day, and she could feel her fingertips and toes chill. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. She wiggled her toes, to find a fine grit between them; indeed, the fine sand covered her body, as if she had been rolled in the white sands of a gulf beach. But it wasn’t just on her, the grit was in her—deep in her, but migrating outward, expelled in a powdery smoke with her breath, exuded through her pores.

Up ahead was a red car. An SUV. She was pushed in, and by the time everyone else had piled in and the doors had closed, her level of awareness had tuned itself enough to start formulating the fundamental questions of where, how, and how long.

She knew all the faces around her. Michael to her left, Winston to her right. Drew and Dillon in the front seat, and behind her—

Okoya!

She flinched, throwing Michael a panicked glance. “No! We have to tell the others! Warn them about Okoya.”

“Easy.” Michael said. “Okoya’s not the problem now.”

“Okoya’s not the problem now,” she repeated, trying to make the absurd suggestion stick. “Then what is the problem?”

Dillon spoke up next. “Ask again later,” he said flatly, as if she had hit the null response of a Magic 8-Ball.

She accepted his advice, not really caring to know what could be worse that Okoya. “I’m hungry,” she told them.

Winston chuckled. “Death must be like sex,” he said. “Makes you hungry.”

“How would you know?” teased Michael. Winston burned him a glare, and Tory grinned. Just like old times. But the times weren’t old, were they? And did someone say death?

Drew started the car and the heater came on. In a few moments it was pouring warm air over her. The SUV rocked uneasily over the dirt, then climbed a slight embankment up to the road. As Tory’s lucidity continued to grow, she did remember the collapse of the dam, and the way she and Michael had tumbled through the sky.

She turned once more to glance at Okoya, who offered her a nod, and the faintest of smiles. Her downy sense of contentment almost completely gone now, she found the questions mounting faster than she could process them.

“Where’s Lourdes?” she asked. “Why isn’t she here, too? Is she dead?”

“Might as well be,” grumbled Winston.

Drew pulled from the narrow shoulder, and onto the two-lane highway, accelerating to sixty-five. He took his eyes from the road for a moment to scan through local stations. No stations are programmed, Tory thought. Does that mean we’re far from home? When did Drew get a Durango? When did Drew start driving?

Michael put his arm around her, and she found herself sliding deeper into his grasp, wanting to be up against him. She looked at him, and he only smiled. Were we in love? She thought. No, but perhaps they should have been. Tory closed her eyes, and forced the questions away, allowing herself to enjoy her growing sense of well-being.

Dillon expected their powers would surge again with the addition of Tory. What he didn’t expect was what Okoya called “syntaxis.” It began as a subtle thing; none of them really noticed the visceral pull toward one another at first. There were too many things to think about as they drove from Tory’s birthing place. Drew, for instance, who suffered to sustain himself within their spiked fields of power, his hands shaking as he gripped the wheel. “I should be wearing lead under­wear,” he quipped, “or maybe a radiation suit altogether.”

“Yeah,” said Winston, “That won’t draw any attention to us.”

It wasn’t that Drew was looking ill. After all, in their presence—and with Tory there—he couldn’t be. His eyes appeared sharp, indeed, his senses must have been piqued. But too much of any good thing was never good. When one’s entire being was sharpened to a rapier edge, it was hard to handle; bound to leave unexpected incisions.

“It burns like holy hell,” he told them, finding no other way to describe the sensation. Yet he dutifully skewered his attention to driv­ing, until the moment they parked, then he bolted from the driver’s seat, just to gain a few feet of distance.

They were at a clutch of roadside motels, and, exhausted from the ordeal of prospecting the winds for Tory, Dillon chose to take a room, if only to have a few short hours to close their eyes. It irritated Okoya no end, as he was constantly berating the human body for its never-ending need for rest. “Lourdes has sailed out of range,” he insisted. “She’s probably crossed into the Mediterranean by now, and you’re just going to sit here?”

But Okoya was not in charge—and Dillon made sure he was re­minded of that. “If this battle we’re facing is what you say it is, this may be the last chance we have to recuperate.”

Okoya grumbled acquiescence, and went off to sit on a fencepost, facing stalwartly toward the horizon, like an Easter Island statue.

“Did you say battle?” asked Tory, who was still in the dark about all of it. “Haven’t we had enough of those? Can’t we just lie out on some beach for a while?”

“Haven’t you heard?” said Michael. “Lying on a beach these days can be lethal. Ask the people in Daytona.”

Drew lingered in the parking lot, checking international airline schedules on his cell phone, happy to leave the Shards to themselves. They retired to a cheap motel room, and the moment the door closed—the moment they relaxed, and allowed themselves a moment of down time—the gravity began to take hold. The four of them began in separate corners of the room: Dillon in the desk chair, Winston sitting up in the solitary bed, and Tory and Michael on the floor, leaning back against the wall—Dillon had a disquieting sense of the distance between them; he felt he could measure it down to the mil­limeter, and wondered why such a thing should cloud his thoughts. “We need to bring Tory up to speed,” he said, then scooted his chair a bit closer to Michael and Tory.

“I was dead, wasn’t I?” Tory said. “I’ve figured out that much. And most of the license plates I’ve seen are from Texas, so I take it we’re a long way from Hoover Dam.”

“You weren’t just dead,” Winston told her. “You got yourself cremated. You were harder to put together than Humpty Dumpty. It was a real bitch.”

Tory grinned. “I’m a bitch, even post-mortem.”

By now Michael had come up behind her, and began massaging her neck. “That’s not the worst of it. You did a little sky-diving, and got dumped out over half of Texas.”

“So what are you saying? You pulled me back out of thin air?”

Michael pulled her closer, wrapping his arm around her. “Hey, we’re Houdini, babe.”

By now Winston had migrated across the bed, closer to where Tory and Michael sat on the floor, and Dillon once more found himself pulling his chair toward the three of them, closing the distance between them.

Together they tried to deliver for Tory, in as small a capsule as possible, all that had transpired, and what they were called upon to do. By the time they were done, Dillon noticed that Michael and Tory were all over one another, taking turns massaging each other’s necks, or backs; a hand on a thigh, an arm over a shoulder, touching in as many ways as they could.

Dillon found himself leaning forward on his chair toward them, almost to the point of losing his balance, as if the floor itself were tilted. “If Okoya is telling the truth, and we provide the only immunity against this . . . this invasion, infection, whatever you want to call it, then we have no margin for error. Everything we do from this moment on is crucial. Like strategy in a war.”

“If Okoya is telling the truth,” said Tory. “That’s a big ‘if.’ "

“It feels true,” said Winston, who now lay across the bed, letting his hand dangle down, gently touching Tory’s shoulder.

“What if it’s only because we want to feel it’s true?” Tory suggested. “Because we’re so desperate to know why we got spat out into this world with these powers. What if Okoya knows how desperate we are for an answer, and is using us again?”

“What if what if what if,” said Michael. “I never wanted to know ‘why,’ so that theory doesn’t hold with me; I just wanted to survive— live my life in spite of the power. I don’t want this responsibility,” he said, “but I’m with Winston; it feels true.”

Winston slipped off the bed, and sat on the floor beside Tory, leaning against her. Without realizing what he was doing, Dillon had shifted from his chair, to the ground as well, even closer to the others.

“What troubles me,” said Dillon, “is that to fight a disease, anti­bodies have to die.”

Only now did Dillon realize that something was happening. That they were pulling toward one another with an unconscious magnetism as irresistible as gravity itself. Winston clasped Tory’s hand, Michael had his arm over Winston’s shoulder, and Dillon ached to close the distance between himself and them.

“Let’s not talk about dying now,” Tory said. “Not when I’ve just been brought back.”

Dillon found he couldn’t resist the pull. He reached out and touched the closest bit of exposed flesh he could. His hand wrapped around Michael’s ankle, and in an instant he felt himself pulled in. Tory lifted a hand to receive his, Winston reached out to grab him as well, pulling him into this awkward four-way hug. Dillon found him­self, as he always did, at the center; the linchpin that kept them con­nected.

The sensation of the four of them in physical contact was over­whelming, but it was more than mere contact—it was an irresistible yearning to meld with each other’s spirits and to be as they had once been: a single soul in the heart of a brilliant star. The powerful yearning defeated any concept of personal space. When they were touching, they were one.

“Do you remember when we held each other like this?” Tory asked Dillon. “In that field in Iowa—in that open corn silo, looking up at the stars?”

“He wasn’t there,” Winston reminded her. “It was the three of us and Lourdes.”

“I never knew . . .” was all Dillon could bring himself to say. It was, for Dillon like nothing he had ever experienced before.

No, that wasn’t true. There was one time he had felt this.

One fraction of a second more than two years ago. All six of them were falling through a portal in space. Holding one another. Touching. Connected. Complete. They had never once come into physical con­tact since then—certainly not during their tenure at Hearst Castle, or in the Nevada desert—Okoya had made sure to keep them divided against one another.

Although Dillon was losing a sense of his boundary between him­self and the others, he forced himself to pull away.

“Not yet.”

“Stay here.”

“Stay together,” the others pleaded, still clinging to him. But now Dillon was sure there was something off about this; something he couldn’t quite place.

“No,” Dillon told them, and tried to put his feeling into words. “There’s a . . . a perfect joining,” he said. “A perfect pattern—that we haven’t found . . . " He stood, pulling free from them, feeling their fields fall slightly out of alignment as they individuated once more. He turned to them as they stood from the floor, and regarded them, trying to see beyond sight. He was the great seer of patterns, and he could sense that their pattern was more than just a random intertwining. They fit like a crystal—like a molecule. There had to be a physical form to match the pattern by which their spirits connected.

He held up his right hand, thought for a moment, then put it down again. Then he held up his left hand and stretched it toward each of them. He felt the greatest gravity toward Michael.

“Michael,” he said. “Hold up your left hand.” Michael did, and it seemed that his hand pulled Michael forward almost against his will. Their hands touched, their fingers intertwined, their knuckles became white with the strength of the grip.

“Where do you feel Tory?” Dillon asked Michael.

Now that he understood what Dillon was after, he didn’t even have to think know the answer. “I feel her pressed against me, my right arm wrapped around her.”

Tory stepped forward, and folded into his grasp, then she looked at her own right arm, and at Dillon, then smiled. “Have I ever told you, Dillon, that I’ve often had a strange urge to spread my fingers across your chest?”

“Do it.”

She reached forward, her hand connecting with Dillon’s chest at arm’s length.

“Winston?” Dillon asked.

“I . . . I don’t connect directly with Michael,” he said.

Michael laughed. “That’s nothing new.”

Winston took a step closer, examining the tableau in which the three of them now stood, trying to find his place within it. “I think I connect to Dillon . . . Tory . . . and to Deanna.”

“I connect to Dillon, and Tory,” Michael offered.

“I connect to Dillon, Michael, Winston and Lourdes,” Tory said.

“And,” said Dillon, “I connect to everyone.”

Winston approached Dillon’s right hand, but Dillon pulled it back, curling his fingers away from him.

“That’s not for you.”

Winston nodded. He came up behind Dillon, knelt, put a hand around his leg, then with his other hand stretched out toward Tory. Michael shifted to allow them contact, and Winston’s hand landed on her hip.

The moment he completed the circuit, a memory exploded within them, crisp, clear, and timeless.

Thought before words.

Consciousness before flesh.

A memory of eternity.

This was what Dillon had been seeking! If they had felt connection before, now it was perfect. Their heartbeats, their breaths came not in unison, but in succession; a living arpeggio. Their power was magni­fied now, their own unique harmonics resonating in tune so that the walls themselves bowed inward as space visibly curved around them, stretched by the same gravity that had impelled them to one another. Their intensity was surely lethal. If anyone came too close now, they would suffer death a thousand times and yet be unable to die.

They could have stayed like that forever. They would have—for in this joined state only Dillon had the power to dissolve the pattern. It was the bareness of his empty right hand that did it. He was perfectly connected to the others, yet still disconnected from the one whose bond with his own was the strongest. Deanna. Her absence was a wound, and this great linking meant nothing without Deanna, so he broke contact, pushing the others away.

For a moment they looked at him in a hurt anger that quickly faded as their individuality asserted itself once more. Still, they lingered within a few feet of one another, not wanting to let it go. They stood silent—words seemed to have little point in the wake of this com­munion. Finally Michael spoke.

“Wow,” he said. “If we could bottle that, we’d be richer than Tessic.”

Okoya was facing east, appearing to stare through a berm that obscured the view. As Dillon approached, Okoya’s stalwart resolve infuriated Dillon, but then anything would infuriate Dillon now.

The alignment between him and the others had filled him with contentment, but had left him in a state of spiritual withdrawal once they had separated. He wanted more, feeling less complete now than before they had touched.

As Dillon approached, Okoya turned to him, looking him up and down. “I see you’ve achieved syntaxis,” he said. “Good for you.” The tone in Okoya’s voice was both congratulatory and disgusted at once; a sentiment as ambivalent as his gender.

“Syntaxis—is that what you call it?”

Okoya returned his gaze east. “Your alignment with one another will give you the strength you need to defeat the Vectors. Without that syntaxis you won’t stand a chance.”

Annoyed by the way Okoya looked off, Dillon moved into his line of vision. “It’s time to bring back Deanna.”

That got Okoya’s attention. He pulled his focus back from the unseen vanishing point, and trained his owlish eyes on Dillon, studying him, not responding.

“We’ve got Tory,” Dillon said. “We’ll soon be on our way to tackling Lourdes. Now’s the time. Open a portal. I’ll go and bring her back.”

“Do you assume that’s a simple matter? Opening a portal?”

“Isn’t it?” Dillon had seen Okoya rend a hole in space before. Twice, Dillon had crossed through himself, into the desolate buffer-zone that existed between the walls of worlds. The first time Deanna had died there. The second time Dillon was too busy trying to defeat Okoya to bring Deanna back. And each time the portal to the Unworld closed, Dillon could feel the infinite distance fall between him and Deanna. Once that doorway was gone, she was further from him than the furthest star in the universe. But having Okoya here, as much as he despised and distrusted the creature, put Deanna within tantalizing reach.

“Not now,” Okoya told him dismissively. “Another time.” He tried to return his gaze to the hidden horizon, but Dillon grabbed him tightly by the shoulders.

“I want a reason!” he demanded.

Okoya shook him off. “Your syntaxis is a beacon for the vectors. They will know Tory has been gathered back.”

“All the more reason to bring back Deanna!”

“All the more reason not to! They know you’re not capable of tearing a hole to the Unworld. If they sense Deanna’s presence here, they will know I’m helping you, and will alter their strategy. Bring back Deanna, and we lose the element of surprise.”

But Dillon knew Okoya well enough to know the deeper reason. “Once she’s back, we have no more need of you. And you’ll have no control over us.”

Okoya regarded him with enough hatred to fill an abyss. It was the same deep hatred Dillon sensed in Okoya back on the diving plat­form, when Dillon refused to have any part in his plans. Now Dillon wondered if that was the better decision. Tory was right. There was no proof that anything he said was true—and as long as he held the key to Deanna’s prison, he held Dillon hostage as well. He thought back to his incarceration at the Hesperia plant. He would much rather be held captive in his own body than to have his soul shackled by Okoya.

“Do it now!” Dillon demanded.

Okoya smiled. “You ache for her, don’t you. For both her, and Lourdes, but especially for her.”

Dillon didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to—it was obvious. It was the syntaxis—it had made Deanna’s absence unbearable to him. So close to completion, their spirits yearned for the consummation that could only come when they were all together. The craving was over­powering. He felt he would do anything to sate it. Anything.

“You knew this would happen!” Dillon shouted. Okoya must have known the longing would become maddening. Then Dillon realized that this had been Okoya’s strategy all along. The more unbearable it became, the higher Okoya’s ransom could be.

Dillon would not allow it. He would not allow this wretched router of souls to hold them hostage one moment longer. “Open the portal, or I’ll kill you with my bare hands and find a way to make it stick.”

And to Dillon’s surprise, Okoya said, “Very well.”

Okoya sighed, then closed his eyes, concentrating. Dillon felt adrenaline begin to flood his capillaries, turning his fingertips warm.

It began as it always began; a twinkle in the air like an ember, then a sucking of wind, as atmospheres tried futilely to settle the differential. But there was no change in the light, as there always had been before—because this portal was less of a doorway, and more like a peephole. Okoya had opened a hole only four inches wide, and when Dillon peered through it, it was like looking through a telescope.

Even in diminished tunnel vision, the Unworld was there, ever unchanged. He could see the crumbling palace carved into the granite of the mountain many miles away. The place where Deanna lay—the place Dillon was forced to leave her two years ago, alone and unreach­able. Until now.

The sight of the mountain through the small hole was enough to cloud Dillon’s judgment. He thrust his hand through the hole, thinking he could just stretch it wider, squeeze himself through. Then it snagged his wrist like a rabbit trap. With a sharp sting he pulled his hand back to reveal that his hand was gone! The portal had sliced shut with the unforgiving finality of a guillotine, taking his hand and three inches of his forearm with it.

He yelped in pain, staring at the raw, pulsing stump in disbelief— but the wound closed in an instant, scar tissue bubbling forth, pinching the veins and arteries, closing in the raw flesh, until it looked like he had lost his hand years ago.

“Pity,” Okoya said relishing his own indifference. “That was a nice watch, too.”

“Y . . . Y . . . You son of a bitch!”

Okoya stood from his fence post and approached Dillon, only so he could push him back like a schoolyard bully. “Do you think tearing a hole in your universe is an easy thing to do? It takes more energy than I can dredge forth from the pathetic greens and animal flesh you’ve forced me to eat.”

“What are you saying?”

“I think you know.”

As much as he wanted to deny it, Dillon did know. It had to do with an appetite. An old, ineffable appetite. So this was the wage for partnering with Okoya—this was the ransom: Deanna, in return for more souls to devour.

“I’ve let myself grow weak,” Okoya said, becoming more coy, more feminine. “In order to gain enough strength to punch a hole large enough, and hold it long enough for you to retrieve Deanna’s corpse, I’ll need a nice healthy feeding. A hundred souls, at least.”

“No. No, I won’t let you!”

“You’re a stupid child.”

Dillon gripped his wrist, feeling his whole being thrown out of balance by the absence of his hand. He tried to grab a fencepost, but found there was nothing to grip with, and he stumbled. Okoya ad­vanced on him again. “Compromise is the great constant—in your universe as well as mine. Deanna is worth a million common human souls. You’re getting the better part of the deal; all I’m asking for is a few thousand.”

“You said a hundred.”

“I’m entitled to a profit margin, am I not? After all I’ve done for you? And then there’s fair restitution for the trouble you’ve caused me.”

“I’ll kill you before I let you take a single soul.”

“Then everyone will be devoured, and you’ll die along with the rest of your kind.”

“You’ll die with us!”

“Perhaps not. After you’re dead and the infection takes root, the vectors can afford to take pity on me, and allow me some sort of existence.”

Dillon looked away. Above everything, Okoya was a master of manipulating his options.

“The choice is yours,” Okoya said. “Souls in exchange for sal­vation . . . or the spirit-death of humanity.”

Although the pain in Dillon’s arm was little more than a memory echoing through his nervous system, the pain of this choice lingered. It had been one thing to flood Black Canyon, and kill the soulless shells of the four hundred Okoya had already devoured—but to give this dangerous demon his blessing to devour more innocents? He couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Okoya reveled in Dillon’s anguish. “Decision decisions. Your moral integrity, or the survival of your species.”

Dillon could only stand there, impotent within his own power.

Okoya sauntered away, as always without any hint of conscience.

“Better have Winston see to your hand. I suspect you’ll be wanting it back.”

Dillon strode back toward the hotel room, wondering which would be worse, telling the others, or bearing the burden himself.

Winston’s sphere of influence was now such that the strip of motel rooms was already being forced off its foundation by undergrowth. Dillon didn’t even have to look down to know that his hand had fully regenerated even before he reached the room. He simply used it to open the door.

As he joined the others again in a tightly bound syntaxis, he silently wished for some godsend—a monkeywrench that could plummet from the heavens into Okoya’s plan—for that could be the only way they could scrape back some self-determination within the events un­folding around them. He now knew they were no match for Okoya—either joined, or separate—they never had been. Dillon could see the pattern of their future now. If they did the job Okoya set before them, and defeated the coming “infection,” then Okoya would be the last of his kind. He would then find a way to dominate the Shards, rising to power over them. In the end he would seize control of this world.

If, as Winston was fond of saying, everything was just a reflection of the larger whole, then Dillon had to concede that scripture could wind up being an accurate mirror; for Okoya was most certainly a Prince of Darkness, and, if he had his way, would be the star of Ar­mageddon.

As with so many things in the Shards’ lives, the monkeywrench Dillon asked for fell heavy and hard. It happened as they left the motel, and pulled on the deserted highway late that night.

Tory was the first to see it.

Dozing in the back seat, peering out of the window, she thought she saw a ghost of a car veering over the double yellow line just ahead of them. She hesitated a moment, and never had the chance to warn the others.

The car sideswiped them hard, threw their back end into a fishtail, and then the Durango flipped. The earth and sky revolved around one another for a long graceful moment, and then the world exploded.

Drew and Winston, who were in the front seats, were killed once, then again, and again with each flip of the car, but thanks to Dillon’s presence behind them, death never lasted long enough to be anything more than flickers in their persistence of vision.

Tory felt herself an observer, out of body, watching the car flip away from her, over and over again, tumbling through the field, send­ing glass and gears and hubcaps spinning free. Then she realized she was an observer, lying in the mud, thrown from the car. The pain only now registered in her body—but it faded almost as quickly as it had come. The Durango came to rest upright, wheels deep in the gouged mud of the field, a mangled ruin—but when she cleared her eyes and looked again, the damage didn’t seem quite as bad. Still lying in the mud, she forced her head around to see that the car that had struck them had never left the road. Several of its passengers were now run­ning out into the field, no doubt to assess the damage, and help them. A woman approached her, and stopped a few feet away.

“So you’re Tory,” the woman said.

Before Tory could ask how this person came to know her name, the woman raised a rifle. “I hope we can be friends.” Then she fired.

As for Dillon, his experience was different. The initial impact jolted another memory into his mind. A grand piano crashing down through a crystalline roof. It had been annihilated by its own weight when it finally hit the floor, leaving behind splintered wood, with its last atonal gasp. It was a moment from his destructive days almost forgotten, but as the car tumbled to rest, he saw that his life had always been echoes of that moment. Unmanageable, disastrous, absurd.

And he laughed.

Even before he saw Maddy shoot Tory; even before Maddy pulled open the car door, and trained the rifle on Dillon, he laughed—because he knew that he was, once again, that erratic instrument plummeting toward its end.

29. Gabriel’s Trumpet

A truck rattled by at dawn, jarring Drew awake. He opened his eyes to find the light hitting them triggered an explosion in his head, translating down to his gut. His stomach constricted, forc­ing him into a dry heave. When the wave of nausea ebbed, he opened his eyes again, forcing himself to bear the migraine pain. He was in the driver’s seat of his Durango. For a hazy moment he remembered an accident. Squealing tires. The shrieking of metal on metal. The car wasn’t damaged in the least. In fact, it was sparkling new, right down to the new-car smell. There was a pain in his left side, and he looked down to find a serrated blue flag protruding from a small brown blood­stain on his shirt. He tugged it out, grunting at the pain as a large needle slid out from between his ribs. It was the kind of tranquilizer dart they used on animals, and no one had bothered to remove it.

It was dawn. He was alone in the car. Okoya was outside leaning on the bumper. Drew opened the door and stepped out into a muddy field, about thirty feet from a two-lane road. The last thing he remem­bered for certain was driving that road, but now the car was in the field, which was scarred with deep gouges between himself and the road. Drew felt his stomach begin to contract again but this time he fought the nausea down.

Okoya spared him a quick look, then returned his gaze to the Eastern horizon, where the sun had yet to make an official appearance. “I was wondering when you’d come out of it.”

“What happened?”

“You died, but it didn’t take,” Okoya said. “So they tranquilized you.”

“Who?”

“They knocked me out also, so I can’t be sure.”

“And the others?”

Okoya pointed. “That way.”

Drew squinted, but saw nothing but the road and fields beyond.

“Don’t bother trying to see them, they’re too far away for that, and moving quickly. I can barely detect their presence at all.”

“We’ll go after them,” Drew said.

Okoya slowly turned, his head rotating with the eerie smoothness of an owl. His eyes were dilated. “We won’t do anything.”

“What do you mean?”

Okoya advanced a step, and Drew took a step back. Those eyes were more than just dilated, they were piercing and predatory. Drew had seen Okoya take on this countenance before. When he was hun­gry. Okoya came even closer, and Drew backed up against the car. Drew could see a flash of red deep within Okoya’s dark pupils. He wanted to run, but the sedative had turned his legs to rubber.

“Dillon isn’t here to protect you,” Okoya said coldly. “And the next time you die, he won’t be there to bring you back.” Suddenly Okoya’s hand was at Drew’s neck, holding him pinned against the car. Paralyzed by fear, Drew couldn’t move. “Therefore you will get into your shiny new car, you will drive me to the airport, and then you will drive yourself back to your beautiful home on your beautiful beach.”

“I . . . I can’t do that,” Drew said.

“You can and you will.” Okoya tilted his head slightly, studying the apertures of Drew’s face, almost as if he zeroed into the pores of his skin. “The consequences of not leaving now, Drew, could be . . . severe.”

Okoya sniffed the air around Drew, as if smelling the scent of Drew’s soul on his breath. And then he backed off, his demeanor changing, his hunger reined in. “You’ve helped them all you can. You can only be a hindrance to them now.” Okoya opened the driver’s side door for him, “Go home, Drew. Put your affairs in order.” Then he went around the car, sliding into the passenger side, and waited.

Drew didn’t know whether his fear or his anger was more powerful at that moment. He wanted to bail on the entire thing. Leave Okoya and his car, and run. But he didn’t. Instead he got in the car, and started it up, riding the rough course back to the road.

“You’ll find them?” Drew asked as they turned onto the road. “You’ll help them do whatever it is they need to do?”

“As my survival depends on it, I assure you, I’ll do my best.”

“You’ll need cash,” Drew said.

“I can find what I need.”

“What are you, so powerful that you have to make things hard on yourself? Open the glove compartment.”

Okoya pulled open the glove box to a clatter of cassette tapes.

“Now find the one labeled ‘Eddie Money.’ "

Okoya pulled out the Eddie Money cassette box and opened it to reveal a roll of bills instead of a tape.

“There’s more than a thousand dollars there,” Drew told him. “Take it.”

Okoya considered the roll of hundreds, and slipped it into his pocket, saying nothing.

As they got on the Northwest Parkway, heading toward DFW, Drew dared to ask the one question that had been on his mind since he stepped into the car. “Tell me one thing; you had every opportunity to take my soul back there. Why didn’t you?”

Okoya chuckled bitterly. “Are you worried I’ve acquired a human conscience?”

“Have you?”

Okoya’s voice grew cold again. “Your friends know the look of me when I’m well fed. They are more likely to trust me if I stay hungry. Otherwise I’d be here talking to your soulless shell.”

He said nothing more. And after Okoya was left at DFW curbside, Drew took the first highway west, flooring his accelerator to 95, openly daring any cop from Texas to California to pull him over. But none did.

Dillon’s sense of hearing was the first to return. A high-pitched hiss and a deep rumble in his ears resolved into the atonal groan of an engine. He was wrapped in a cocoon. No. Not a cocoon; a shell. It was a sensation familiar and unpleasant. Deja vu washed through him, leaving him nauseated. He opened his eyes to a narrow swatch of vision; a horizontal strip of light, and when he tried to turn his head to see more, he found his head would not move.

He was back in the chair.

After all he had endured, he was seated once again in the infernal device that had held him in check in the Hesperia plant. For a moment he felt he was back in that awful place, but in a moment he realized that this couldn’t be the same chair—it was a duplicate—and the slim image before him was not that of his cell. There were several plush leather chairs in his field of vision. One held Winston, another Tory. No doubt Michael was there as well, somewhere out of his limited range of sight. They were slouched, unconscious, their hands and an­kles in shackles—bonds far less elaborate than Dillon’s chair, but then the others didn’t need the complex restraints that Dillon did. Beyond the chairs were several small oval windows in a curved wall. They were on a plane. A private jet.

Someone moved into his line of vision. A pair of familiar eyes peered in at him, heavy with sympathy, and Dillon looked away, not wanting to meet those eyes.

As Maddy crouched, looking in on Dillon through the face-plate of the restraining chair, she was filled with a strange aggregate of emo­tions. He was once again helpless, a victim of circumstance, unable to effect his own destiny. But this time she was not his lifeline to the world, she was one of his captors. There was sorrow in this, and yet it was seasoned with a comfortable sense that things were as they needed to be. Things were best this way with her outside of his face­plate, looking in. He would need her now. Need her to explain, need her to calm his angers and fears. Dillon, she had decided, was at his best in chains.

“You’re awake,” she said. “Good. We were hoping your tranks would wear off first.”

She got down on her knees to stay in his line of vision, and when he closed his eyes, she took his hand, gently, lovingly massaging his fingers. She could feel him try to pull away, but his wrist was shackled to the chair.

“Listen to me, Dillon,” she said. “This is not what it looks like.”

“No? You’ve kidnapped us, and locked us up. That’s what it looks like. Is there something I’m missing?”

Maddy sighed, still holding his hand. “We had to. You were . . . you were out of control.”

“Out of whose control?”

Maddy found herself angry at his bitterness. “Don’t throw this back on me. You were the one who left without a word.” He had promised to be back, hadn’t he? Instead he left, abandoning both her and Tessic, forcing them to become allies in corralling him again. She looked to Tessic, who stood silently behind Dillon, out of his view. Yes, Dillon had brought this on himself by his own irresponsibility.

“Are you going to tell us why you left?” she asked. “What could you possibly have been thinking, going out there alone?”

“I wasn’t alone. And if I left, then I had reason to.”

“You have no idea how dangerous it is for you out there, do you? You have no idea how many people want to use you—the way Bus­sard did.”

“Don’t pretend I’m here for my own protection.”

Maddy wanted to argue with him—to tell him that, yes, he was here because he was incapable of taking care of himself—incapable of giving direction and purpose to his own powers.

“I’ll talk with him now,” Tessic said, making his presence behind him known.

Before leaving them, Maddy asked Dillon if there was anything she could do for him. To which Dillon answered. “You could scratch my nose.”

And so she did.

The cockpit was the only place she could go to get away from Dillon, and as much as she wanted to be with him, she wanted to be miles away. It was the strange nature of Dillon’s charm that it repelled almost as much as it attracted. Or maybe it was that she had no way to deflect his anger. Let Tessic talk him down and enlighten him as to why they were halfway across the Atlantic ocean. It was, after all, his inspiration, not hers.

She closed the door, and although it shut out their voices, it didn’t close out the strength of the field that surrounded each of the Shards. She was used to it by now—eventually she could tune it out like the background drone of the jet engine, but never, never when Dillon was close enough to touch.

“Come sit,” the pilot offered in an Israeli accent even stronger than his cologne. His name was Ari, and he had also piloted the helicopter that spirited her and Dillon from the graveyard a few weeks ago. From what Maddy knew, he was once the most decorated pilot in the Israeli air force. Now he served as Tessic’s own private aerial chauffeur. Only the best for Tessic.

“Come, the co-pilot takes a shit. Sit down, I teach you to fly.”

Maddy ignored the invitation. She looked through the windshield to see darkness. Flying east, the sun had plunged behind them quickly. Now there was nothing before them but night. “How much longer?”

“Four more hours.” He looked her over. “Teach you to fly some other time then? Just two of us? This I will enjoy.”

Maddy wasn’t sure if he was serious, or whether flirting was his only lexicon for communicating with American women. “Do you have any idea what’s going on here?” she asked.

Ari shrugged. “The big man says ask no questions, I ask no ques­tions, and I sleep at night. The ones who do ask—they don’t sleep so well.”

Maddy had to laugh. Ignorance was indeed bliss where Dillon was concerned. Still, she caught Ari pondering the hairs on his arm; the way they had grown denser since picking up their new passengers. Dillon’s effects might have been more pervasive, but they were subtler among the living; the straightening of teeth, and a sort of cellular de­tox—but you couldn’t miss what Winston did to those who hung around him too long. Ari caught her watching him. He brushed his hand across his arm. “I make a hairy man today,” he said, confident in his mis-spoken English. “Like a wolfwere. You like wolfwere men? Hair give you something to grab onto. This you will enjoy.”

Maddy laughed, and he laughed as well, feigning that he was only joking. “Do me a favor,” she told Ari. “Ask me no questions, and I won’t throw you the hell out of the plane.” To think only a few weeks ago, Maddy might actually have entertained such a panting proposi­tion. Dillon had undone in her that need. But he hadn’t truly undone it, had he? He had merely redirected her wandering desires, focusing them all toward him. There was the cruelty in the kindness. But better not to consider that; momentous things were happening here. If she kept that at the center of her focus, perhaps she could find a bliss that was somewhat closer to ignorance.

“You’re here because you fell victim to your own folly,” Tessic told Dillon, back in the cabin of the plush jet. “Consider this an in­tervention.”

Dillon found Tessic uncomfortably close to his face mask. “Not exactly a divine intervention, is it?” Dillon said.

“No—that would be presumptuous. But time will tell.”

Dillon strained against the titanium exoskeleton, knowing it would not give. “You told me I could come and go as I pleased—that I was not a prisoner.”

Tessic leaned away and sighed. “You and I were not meant to travel the easy path,” he said. “God has a vision for you, Dillon. You must come to accept this. If it takes me locking you down long enough for you to come to your senses, then that is what I must do.”

“I will not be used against my will.”

“It won’t be against your will. You’ll choose what’s right. I have faith in your choices.”

Dillon wondered what choices Tessic could possibly be referring to. His choice to leave Tessic’s protective bubble? His choice to listen to Okoya, and get a glimpse, however fragmentary, of why he and the others might be on this earth? No matter how far the aura of Dillon’s spirit extended out beyond the fuselage of the plane, how much choice in anything did he have when he couldn’t move as much as an inch?

“I could shatter you,” Dillon threatened. “It would only take me a moment to look inside you and find the words to destroy you.”

“But you won’t,” Tessic said, so unconcerned it infuriated Dillon. “You won’t because deep down you know I have a perspective that you lack. You, with all your power of life and death are blinded. You needed Maddy to help you escape from your cell. You need me to help you escape from yourself. Because I see a larger picture that you’ve yet to grasp.”

Dillon thought to the duplicitous Okoya. Okoya, too, had a larger picture. A picture so large, it was beyond Dillon’s scope of compre­hension. But Okoya was self-serving to the last. Everything he told them might be nothing more than a well-conceived lie. If, in the end, his fate was to be used by someone, would he rather be used by Okoya, or Tessic?

“What do you want with me, Elon?”

Tessic offered him a joyless smile. “Have I been so good at hiding myself from you, Dillon? Or is it that you never wanted to see?” He knelt deeper until his eyes were level with Dillon’s. “Look at me now Dillon. Tell me what you see in the patterns of my life. I’ve been keeping something from you. Holding it until it was ripe for you to know. I open for you now, my friend. See into me and you’ll know where we are going, and what is to be done.”

Dillon’s vision was filled with the aspect of his eyes; the care lines and crows feet. A world weariness beneath a muscular mind built by the wielding of heavy power. Dillon probed deeper, finding genuine intentions, sullied by the pain of something lost. Not something but someone. A person. People. Many people. On Tessic’s shoulders rested an unbearable weight, that levied itself upon him the moment Tessic became aware of Dillon’s existence. Because Dillon could undo unspeakable crimes. Now Tessic’s weight became Dillon’s, and he understood.

Tessic backed away. Perhaps he, too, had some level of clairvoy­ance and saw into Dillon’s mind as well. Dillon’s fury of being kid­napped left him. What remained was a spiritual vertigo, and a heady fear, like skydiving into a storm.

Tessic hit a button and the shell of the chair split open. Dillon didn’t move. Barely dared to breathe.

“I can’t do what you’re asking.”

Tessic laughed and clapped his hands together in sheer glee. “Of course you can. It’s why all of you are on this good earth. You must know this by now.”

Dillon closed his eyes. Although the chair no longer embraced him, he felt every bit as enslaved—not by Tessic, but by himself—because Tessic was right. Just as they had sifted Tory from the dust, they could do it again. It was simply a matter of scale.

Dillon shuddered.

If you could save a life, was it a crime to let that life end? If you could restore a murdered life, was it a crime to walk away? What if it were more than one life? What if it were millions?

“When the others awake, you will explain,” Tessic told him. “And they will come to understand, just as you have, this glorious thing you have all been called to do.”

Yes, thought Dillon. There was glory in this, but there was also infamy. There was something right and holy, and yet something almost profane. The violation of a violation. He no longer knew what was right or wrong, all he knew was that somewhere out there the “Vec­tors,” as Okoya had called them, were using Lourdes toward a disas­trous end. He had to stop them, but how could he turn from this?

Dillon found no yardstick to measure his choices. Then he realized he didn’t have to; Tessic had mercifully left him with no choice. Be­cause nothing short of the world’s end would stop them from soaring across the Atlantic, toward places whose names had become synony­mous with death.

Treblinka . . . Buchenwald . . . Auschwitz. The death camps of Europe.