Shattered Sky

The Old Woman of Majdanek pulled her broom across the weed-choked pavement of the square. Beyond the leaves and dust, there was never usually much to clean. Few of the candy wrappers or bottles that plagued other tourist spots littered the ground here. But then, the visitors here never came for their pleasure—either then, or now.

The snows were late this year. They would usually come in November, first dusting the concrete slabs of the square with a white quilt that would soon thicken into a pearlescent blanket, far too beautiful for a place such as this. A shroud of snow to hide a multitude of sins.

When the snows would come, the old woman would lay down her broom until the spring. There would be much to do then, for the square would be filled with the layers of fall leaves entombed in the drifts, now decayed into a sinewy mud that the rains would not wash away. For that she used a stiff whisk broom, spreading the mud out until it dried into a thin silt that she could sweep into the April winds. The dust and chaff would then be carried back to the town of Lublin and the forest beyond. She fancied herself an active partic­ipant in the cycle of life, and it was a comfort to her.

No one paid her for her labors in the square. She was not part of the grounds crew, and yet she predated anyone else who worked there. She was simply there, like the barracks and statues. Like the fences and the ashes, moving her broom across the square every morning her joints allowed.

Visitors would take notice of her on their way to view the memorial and the crematoria. They would snap pictures. She would neither pose for nor demur from their cameras. Occasionally people would approach her in the square to ask her why a woman of such advanced years would labor so to clean a vast concrete square. They would ask in many languages. Although she spoke only Polish, she understood the question in most languages now, and could answer in a few of them as well.

“You see that house there,” she would tell them, pointing to her small home just beyond the outer fence of the camp. “I lived there sixty years ago, watching from my backyard, and I did nothing. So now I sweep.”

A stroke of her broom for every time she closed her window to the stench of the smoke. For every time she pulled vegetables from her garden, and ignored the sounds from the death chambers. For every time she took Sunday com­munion, and went to bed in silence. For each of these things there was a stroke of her broom. And she could only hope that the millions who visited Majdanek would see the respect she now gave the dead . . . and perhaps they in turn might once again find the respect for her and her people that had also burned in the death camps of Poland.

The leaves of fall had gone through their spectrum of color, and now, brittle and brown in these early days of December, they longed for their grave of snow as they tumbled on the concrete, pulverizing as they cartwheeled in the wind. The sky was a cloud of gray, pulled from horizon to horizon like a faded linen. It was a snow-sky. But no matter. If it snowed, then it snowed. She would not leave her task this morning until the flurries multiplied into a true fall of snow. So she pushed her broom, churning up leaf fragments and bird droppings, pushing back the tide of disorder to the edges of the square. When the sun struck her cheek, she thought it was something imagined, until she looked to the southern sky.

A hole had opened in the clouds to the south.

An elliptical spot of blue opened before the sun, spreading wider. Her sight and hearing had peaked long ago, and it took a few minutes until she heard the heavy beating of blades against the air, and saw the approaching shapes that soon resolved themselves into three helicopters descending toward her. They were shiny and white—nothing like the military monstrosities she had seen before, They came down in the square, creating a down-draft that cleaned the square far better than her broom. But she held her ground, holding her kerchief on her head, and watching in the center of the square, beside the stone monument to the Holocaust. In all her years of tending to the square, she had never seen activity such as this. Instinctively she knew that she was about to be a witness to something wonderful, or something horrible—she did not know which.

An hour later, she found herself on her knees in the church she had fre­quented all her life, bowed in dire supplication, her broom abandoned forever in the square.

30. Majdanek

As the Shards stepped down from the helicopter in Majdanek, Dillon could feel their influence settling upon the stark place of death. The evil of so many years ago still lingered here like an oil slick, permeating the rocks, coating the leaves, worming into the lungs with every breath. Yet Dillon could swear the evil receded with their presence, leaving the Earth prepared to give back what it had stolen.

“We should not be here,” Winston said. He had been repeating it like a mantra since he regained consciousness and learned their desti­nation. “We should not be here at all.”

Back in the plane Dillon had stated the case quite simply. They were hijacked. They were captive, and that, if nothing else, made them obliged.

“Do you believe we should do this?” Tory had asked. “Instead of seeking out the Vectors?”

Dillon found himself borrowing some of Tessic’s faith for his own. “If there’s a God,” Dillon said, “then I refuse to believe Okoya is his messenger.”

Now, as they stood on the concrete square, a sense of foreboding took root. Up ahead stood a concrete dome that, for more than a generation, held a mound of ashes raked from the ovens when Maj­danek was liberated. Now those ashes were being hosed down into a silty mortar for them.

“Instant resurrection,” said Michael. “Just add water.”

“We should not be here,” said Winston.

Tessic led them as far as the dome’s entrance, where a team of triage workers waited—but Tessic and the workers remained outside, Tessic deeming the act of creation inviolate, not to be seen. And so Dillon, Tory, Winston, and Michael went in alone, while Tessic and his workers waited for a sign of the miracle.

Faith had brought Elon Tessic to this precarious pinnacle of his life, but to propel it to completion, that would take business acumen. This, he knew, was why he was chosen for the task. Who but one of the most successful businessmen in the world could orchestrate such an event? Everything was a clockwork now; a massive, interconnected machine fitted by Tessic, and powered by the divine gifts of Dillon Cole and his three friends. More than thirty thousand were in Tessic’s employ, clearing, building, setting the stage. Most workers knew noth­ing. They received their paychecks and went home, the knowledge that their families were fed was enough for them. Others knew bits and pieces—saw a corner of the grand design—but only Tessic saw how it all fit together, and as he watched his great machine of revival grind into motion, even he was stunned by how precisely the gears turned.

He had begun a year ago—the day after the Colorado River Back­wash—the event that introduced Dillon to the world. He knew Dillon could not have died, and, once he was found he maneuvered himself into a position as Dillon’s jailer. Then he put much of Poland’s builders to work, constructing the first of Tessic’s personal megapolis. The na­tion was more than happy to lay the infrastructure at their own ex­pense—including the very roads that would connect the complex with the rest of Poland.

Tessitech had placed an order with a German bus company for three hundred coaches, with plush velour seats. They were the kind of tour buses that moved millions in and out of tourist attractions around the world. The bus builder’s simple assumption was that Tessic, who dabbled in everything from art collecting, to construction, was planning to open some sort of travel enterprise. He hired three hundred bus drivers. They had been collecting salaries for weeks now, and had yet to be called to work. Until today.

Once it began there could be no turning back. The clockwork would grind to its inexorable conclusion; a final solution to the Final So­lution—and now Tessic knew why the Almighty, in his wisdom, had seen fit to make Tessic into a manufacturer of weapons. He had at his disposal enough firepower to decimate anyone who tried to stop him.

It was nothing short of hell.

A pit of muddy ash soon became for the Shards a place beyond the reach of nightmare.

It began even before they stepped over the railing that separated the living from the dead. Then, as they stepped into the pit, they lost their balance, sliding down the slick concrete slope until they were waist deep in the wet, ashen soup.

Things began to move.

The homogenous mixture began to differentiate, bubbling like a brew in a massive cauldron, turning brown, then red, and taking on the smell of blood.

“Syntaxis!” shouted Dillon, for to be alone and disconnected now would be unbearable.

“Hurry, hurry!” cried Tory.

Dillon reached his left hand out to Michael’s. Tory pressed herself against Michael, thrusting her hand to Dillon’s chest. Winston insin­uated between Dillon and Tory, and syntaxis swept through them. They thought it would shield them, but as their power magnified, their perception expanded, as if they had a dozen new senses at their grasp.

It happened quickly.

In a matter of minutes the wet ash began to transubstantiate, and they were immersed in bones and blood; a crucible of flesh consuming its own decay, swelling, soaking up the moisture.

Dillon didn’t know if the others screamed for he could only hear his own as that first hand grabbed at his leg; a woman as terrified now as she had been at the moment of her death. Then there was another, and another, until their wailing voices drowned out his own. The resurrection of flesh was not a glorious process, gilded in sacred light. It was bloody, and violent. It was like birth itself; traumatic and painful until the cry of life filled the room.

The living differentiated themselves from the dead, pulling them­selves from the pit, staggering toward the light at the entrance, where Tessic’s workers would clean them, and spirit them away—their lives processed with the swift efficiency that their deaths had been.

Soon the tangle of desperate arms and legs pulled the Shards down, and Dillon felt something within himself give way. He felt his mind drop through a trap door like a snail pulling into its shell, around and around, spiraling deeper into itself, until reaching the center of his soul, where time and self mercifully vanished into sweet nothingness.

A steady stream of the awakened flowed from the monument dome. They were rinsed with warm water, and wrapped in plush robes. “You’ve been liberated,” was all the workers were allowed to tell them. Explanations, Tessic knew, were secondary. That they were alive was all they needed to know; enough to grapple with for now. Their names were taken down, and they were walked to the line of buses that would shuttle them three hundred miles to the Ciechanow complex.

After four hours the line of the awakened slowed, then stopped. Only then did Tessic go into the dome. There he found the four Shards lying in a vascular miasma that was not quite alive, not quite dead. A dense membrane thick with blood vessels had grown up from the pit and onto the walls; flesh that could not find its form, but was obliged to find some form. It became a womb that filled the cavity of the monument from the bottom of the pit to the apex of the dome. Some of the workers who followed Tessic in became ill, but Tessic began to pray, reciting the Sh’ma. It was the same prayer he had uttered when his plane hit clear air turbulence and took a five-thousand-foot dive. The same prayer he had intoned when terrorists put the muzzle of a pistol to his head, then capriciously spared his life. It was a prayer he said daily, but only on certain occasions did it become a lifeline to sanity.

Three others followed Tessic down into the center of this terrible womb, where the four Shards lay unconscious, almost fully encased by the membrane, their bodies touching in what seemed a very specific way. He tore them from it, and blood spilled from the membrane. It was already beginning to peel from the walls and drop from the dome as it died. He left, carrying Dillon in his arms, focusing all his attention on Dillon’s catatonic eyes, refusing to look at the dying walls of the womb, for he could swear within the veiny patterns of flesh, he could still see faces.

It was deep into the night by the time Dillon spiraled out of himself, coming back from wherever it was he had gone. When he did return from that void, he returned slowly, expanding his perception in in­crements. First he was aware of his own heartbeat. Then he felt the shape and form of his body. His extremities. Fingers and toes. He knew that he was covered in some thick fabric. A quilt, warm and comfort­able.

He had never quite lost consciousness. Some part of him was aware of all that happened, because even in his state of detachment, he re­membered being pulled from the pit. He remembered that he was in Tessic’s private dacha on the outskirts of Ciechanow. He knew that five thousand had been brought back from a death camp known to have snuffed almost half a million.

And he knew that their powers had given out before the rest of the job was done.

The Shards had simply shut down, emptied. Now it took a great measure of his will just to move his arm. He wanted to sleep—truly sleep, but he could not. He wondered if he’d ever be able to sleep again.

“You’re back with us, then?”

Dillon pulled himself up enough in his bed to see Tessic keeping a vigil beside him.

“Is it still Monday?” Dillon asked.

“Barely. You slept for more than twelve hours.”

Dillon shook his head. “I didn’t sleep.”

“No,” Tessic admitted. “Your eyes were open.”

“Where are the others?”

“Resting, like you.”

“Things didn’t go the way you had expected.”

“Things rarely do. But all in perspective. Today five thousand mur­dered souls have a new claim on life.”

“You expected more.”

Tessic stood and paced to the window.

“Next time there will be. Today you flexed your muscles. You were bound to exhaust yourself. This is how we build ourselves up. Next time you’ll be twice as strong.”

“This isn’t a marathon.”

“I think that perhaps it is.” Tessic crossed the room to a familiar device Dillon hadn’t noticed in the room before; two canisters of col­ored sand.

“The Dillonometer.”

“When we brought you here,” Tessic said, “the sands took half an hour to differentiate. Now it’s down to five minutes. Tomorrow it will be back to ten seconds—maybe even less.” He let out a confident sigh. “You see? The Majdanek dome was only an auspicious begin­ning.”

He waited for Dillon’s reaction, but when Dillon gave him none, he said, “Maddy should be back soon. Shall I send her in?”

Dillon shifted in his bed—feeling every joint, every tendon. “What makes you so sure I want to see her?”

“Do not be so hard on her,” Tessic said. “You owe her your life a dozen times over.”

“I know that.”

“She is in love with you.”

Dillon looked away from him. “I know that, too.” After what his mind had been exposed to that day, he didn’t know why sorting out his feelings for Maddy should seem such a monumental task. He did care for Maddy deeply; this girl who had the strength to fire into his face to save him; this girl who threw away all that she had to be a companion to him, longing for a syntaxis of their own that would never come.

“I don’t want her to see me like this,” Dillon said. A blanket escape, he thought, from having to think about it any further.

But Tessic replied, “She’s seen you worse.” He turned to leave, but before exiting, he turned back to Dillon, and smiled as if in ad­miration. What’s to admire? thought Dillon, right now I’m a helpless lump on a featherbed.

“I know you don’t feel it yet, but this day in Majdanek has made you stronger. It has given you stamina. Soon you’ll have enough sta­mina to face Birkenau.”

Dillon had never been a student of history, but he knew that when people spoke of Auschwitz, they really meant Birkenau; Auschwitz’s back-factory of death. Dillon closed his eyes, feeling his lids weighty as a sunset.

Maddy went in at about midnight. She expected—almost hoped— she’d find Dillon asleep, but his eyes were already fixed on her when she cracked open the door.

“You missed the first game of our little World Series,” Dillon said.

She stepped in, her ambivalence preceding her. “I was in the out­field,” she told him. “I was in Ciechanow, making sure everything went smoothly when the buses arrived.”

“And did it?”

“Like silk.” And in that, there was no exaggeration. For eight hours she had helped to supervise the handing out of apartment keys and groceries. Four people per apartment, one bag per person, families kept together when possible. These refugees were not ones to look this mysterious gift horse in the mouth. “Three buildings are at 100% oc­cupancy.”

“A hundred and nine to go,” said Dillon.

“At least at this site.” She leaned forward and kissed him gently on his lips. He didn’t return it, and she couldn’t tell whether it was a judgment on her, or if he simply found himself too weak. She found her spirit wilting and it angered her that her feelings for him could affect her so.

“I suppose not everything can go like silk,” he said. When she looked at his eyes, she could tell he had just read her. But why should she care? What could he learn now that he didn’t already know?

“I never thought I’d get caught in that old romantic loophole,” she said, “wanting what I can never have.”

“I never thought of you as a romantic,” said Dillon.

“No. Until recently, I thought of myself as a realist.”

He tried to smile, but it came out slim. “I guess now you’re a surrealist.”

She looked at him a moment more and then shook her head quickly, trying to break the spell he cast even at his weakest moments. “Here we are in the middle of undoing the greatest crime in recorded history and I’m going on about broken hearts.” She stood from the edge of the bed. She had no illusions about her purpose in his life anymore. She was nothing more than a facilitator. She trusted that her disciplined mind would force her to accept this, and if not, she’d simply endure the pain like a good soldier. “Winston and the others are in the living room, warming themselves around the fire. You should join them. As I’m not quite so superhuman, I’m going to bed.”

“You can stay here,” Dillon offered, but it came out as an offer of mercy. Lukewarm compassion.

“Tessic gave me the best bedroom in the place,” Maddy told him. “Even better than yours.”

Maddy retreated to her room, thankful for her mental and physical exhaustion, for it hammered her into sleep and kept her from dwelling on the things she could not change.

The fireplace glowed an eerie blueish-green, and the logs were not consumed by the flames. Dillon found Michael, Tory and Winston around the fire, drinking from mugs as if this were some sort of cozy retreat—but the worn looks on their faces were anything but cozy.

Winston saw Dillon first as he entered the room and threw him that we-should-not-be-here kind of gaze.

“Don’t say it,” Dillon said.

“I ain’t saying nothing,” Winston answered, too tired to sublimate his Alabaman drawl. “I’m just gonna sit here and sip my egg nog and pretend like it’s Christmas.”

Dillon got close to the fire to find its blue glow gave off no warmth. Instead, what little warmth there was came through the furnace vents around the room. This cold could not be kept outside. Dillon glanced out of the window. The fog was cotton dense, and showed no sign of lifting. A mirror of Michael’s state of mind.

“At first,” said Michael, “I thought Tessic was bringing us to lower Manhattan.” The fog outside grew a bit dense. “It scared me to think so big. But Tessic thought bigger.”

Dillon couldn’t help but think that was also somewhere in Tessic’s plans. Where others saw sacred ground, Tessic saw opportunity.

“At least Okoya will know where to look for us now,” Dillon said.

“How can you be sure he’s even looking?” Tory asked.

“I doubt that Okoya is biting his nails in Texas,” Dillon said. “And no matter how much of a media blackout Tessic tries to impose on this, Okoya will know where we are—and remember we’re closer to the Island of Thira than we were two days ago.”

“You have a thousand reasons to stay, don’t you, Dillon?” Michael grumbled. “A thousand reasons why we should keep dragging up the dead.”

“You say it like it’s something terrible. It’s not like we’re bringing back empty shells—these people are coming back complete, in perfect health, with their souls intact. What we’re doing is incredible! It’s important.”

“It’s immoral!” Tory moved closer to the fire, “Hell, everything we do is immoral because we’re unnatural.”

“No we’re not,” Dillon insisted. “We’re just a side of nature that’s rarely seen.” He watched Tory rub her arms for warmth, but now the flames had turned from blue to green and were actually drawing heat from the room. Dillon knew it was his presence. As his own power recovered, the logs were unburning, adding to Michael’s chill.

Winston put down his mug with a shaky hand. “We’re outside of morality now.”

“Careful Winston,” Tory warned. “We put ourselves above mo­rality before, and you know what happened.”

“Not above morality,” he explained, “outside of the framework entirely. I mean, is bringing back people who should never have died an ultimate justice, or an ultimate wrong? Morality’s got no answer for the things we do. It’s got no answer for us.”

Michael spat out a resigned laugh. “And you know what they did to the last person who brought back the dead.”

Dillon shivered at the thought. There was a time a year ago that he might have felt up to the comparison, but not anymore. “I don’t want to be crucified or worshiped.”

“Oh, I think we’re gonna catch ourselves a whole lotta both,” Winston said.

“Yeah,” added Michael. “I’m sure a thousand years from now they’re going to have whole universities and seminaries devoted to studying every stupid little thing we did.”

Tory paced to the nearest heat vent, giving up on the fire. “Can we not talk about a thousand years from now and just get through today?”

“You have to understand how it is for Tory and me,” Michael said. “For both of us, the disaster at Hoover Dam is just a few days old. We never had time to recover from that, and now we’re in the middle of this. I don’t know about Tory, but we’re working my last thread of sanity here.”

“I wouldn’t worry, Michael,” said Winston. “You gotta have a mind to lose it.”

“Yeah, yeah, so I hear.”

“I feel like everything’s resting on Okoya and I don’t like it,” Tory said. “’Is Okoya going to find us?’ ‘Is Okoya going to show us what we’re supposed to do?’ The more wired in he becomes, the more likely he’ll turn on us again, trying to use us like he did before.”

“He already has,” Dillon told them. It was a wrinkle none of them wanted to hear, but still they turned to him, waiting uneasily for an explanation.

“We need Deanna to defeat the Vectors,” Dillon told them, “but Okoya won’t bring Deanna back. Not unless we give him free rein to feed his appetite.”

Winston put down his egg nog. “This is gonna be one helluva holiday season.”

“I told him we would never agree to it,” Dillon said. “I told him I’d rather let Deanna stay where she is.”

He expected them to be just as adamant as he, but Michael shook his head, and laughed bitterly. “With all that moral fiber, you’ll never need a laxative—the crap never stops flowing.”

Dillon looked to Winston, then Tory. Neither of them would meet his eyes. “So you think we should give him our blessing and let him devour as many souls as he wants?”

“No,” Michael said. “I think we should give him our blessing and then renege the moment Deanna is back.”

“Cheat the devil and the devil gets mad,” Tory warned.

Michael stood and paced to the window, watching the fog as it thinned ever so slightly. “What’s he gonna do? Hurl us into some bloody abyss? We’ve already been there today. Sorry, but this devil doesn’t scare me anymore.”

“Tessic scares me more than Okoya,” Tory said.

Dillon waved the thought away. “Tessic’s a good man.”

“So was Oppenheimer before he built the bomb,” Michael said. “Just because what we’re doing here is good, that doesn’t mean it’s right. We’ve got a power that’s raging out of control—and just because he’s got money and an idea doesn’t mean he’s got all the answers.” The window rattled with a sudden gust, punctuating his point.

“Actually,” Tory said, “Oppenheimer was a creep.”

“No,” Winston corrected, “he was a romantic. A man in love with the beauty of his own power. Just like Tessic.”

Tory joined Michael at the window, apparently finding in him the warmth that the room failed to give. “It’s our power, not his.”

“It’s his,” said Michael, “as long as we give it to him.”

Tory looked around to the corners of the room. “For all we know, he’s got bugs and cameras everywhere, listening to everything we’re saying, laughing at us.”

Tory lowered her voice. “Why does he want to do this, anyway? Yes, we can bring these people back to life, but we can’t give them the lives that they had. We can’t undo the aftermath of the Holocaust. We can’t take away the pain of those who survived it.”

Then Dillon saw an expression crossing Winston’s face; something so unsettling, he could almost see it like a shadow.

“What if we succeed,” Winston said. “What if we succeed in bringing them all back . . . and we undo the effect the Holocaust had on the world?”

It was something Dillon, and most certainly Tessic, had never con­sidered. If they bring back the dead, will the world eventually forget it ever happened? What if that’s more devastating than the Holocaust itself, because without the pain of that memory, the next time it might take a billion lives?

“In the end which is more important,” posed Winston, “the mil­lions of lives lost, or the memory of the atrocity?”

The question lingered and no one even attempted an answer.

“I don’t want to sit here discussing this like we’re in some high-school debate class,” Tory finally said. “We’re neck deep in something real, in case everyone’s forgotten where we were today.”

Michael pulled away from her. “You know what? I’m not big enough to face what we did today, so yeah, maybe we should play high school for a while—I just want to pretend that I’m a normal guy, and that the whole universe doesn’t rest on my bad decisions.”

“What decisions?” said Winston. “We’re not makin’ any.”

And that, Dillon knew, was the trouble.

Winston directed his words right at Dillon. “All this time we’ve been afraid to, so we let everyone else go makin’ our decisions for us. First Okoya, now Tessic.”

“Tessic’s got us trapped!” insisted Dillon.

“Keep telling yourself that, Dillon, and you’ll never have to make a decision.”

Michael sat back down, holding his temples between his hands as if they were the only things keeping his head together. “All I know is that if we were meant to revive the victims of the Holocaust, then we wouldn’t be coming out of it feeling so drained.”

Dillon sat beside him, all but melting into the plush sofa. Drained was not the word. Poured out, spent—but drained? That was too mild. Tessic believed it would make them stronger, but what did Tessic know, really?

Winston gently put down his mug with a shaky hand. “We’re being used up. You know that, don’t you?”

It was a simple statement with a bitter ring of truth. Could they be “used up”? Dillon wondered if there was some conservation of energy when it came to their powers. Nothing came from nothing— how much more life and limb would the Shards renew until their power was drained? Or was it a bottomless wellspring, fed from some infinite source, with no reckoning ever due? Dillon suspected that Winston was right. Someday very soon, they might turn up completely empty. And then what would become of their “great purpose”?

“Michael’s right,” Tory said, coming back to his side, sitting beside him, rubbing his back. “Whether it’s right or wrong to resurrect the dead here, we’re meant to do something else, and we’ve been afraid to take responsibility for it.” Then she added. “If we really wanted to get away from Tessic, we could. But what do we really want?”

Dillon paced across the room, knowing it all came down to him. He was the fulcrum on which they all turned. But abandoning Tessic’s dream? The man was so certain about it, and it was so easy for Dillon to use Tessic’s faith as his own anchor—but was it an anchor keeping him grounded, or one that dragged him down? “Tessic feels he’s on a mission from God. He feels it so strongly, it makes me wonder myself. How do we know he’s not?”

And then Tory asked. “Do you believe in God, Dillon?”

Dillon found himself stumbling over the question. “Since I found out about my own powers the question scares me too much to answer. I believe we have a purpose. I believe it’s unique in the history of mankind.” Then he turned to Michael—an easy target to cast the question off of himself. “How about you, Michael? What do you be­lieve?”

Michael kept his head in his hands, and didn’t look up. “I believe it’s time to go to bed.”

Tory shook her head. “You’ll never get a straight answer out of him.”

“Because he doesn’t believe in anything,” scoffed Winston.

But Michael looked up and surprised them all. “That’s not entirely true,” he said. “Three years ago if you told me we’d have proof of human souls, I would have laughed, but now I know there are souls and that they can be robbed from us. So maybe I believe in a lot more than I used to. Or at least I don’t disbelieve.”

It was sobering to hear Michael voice something other than sar­casm. Perhaps too sobering.

“Our faith in our decisions has to be as strong as Tessic’s,” Tory said, “if we’re going to defeat the Vectors.”

The Vectors. Dillon had tried so hard put them far from his mind. That was the reason he went along with Tessic, wasn’t it? Anything so that he didn’t have to consider those dark, inscrutable spirits. “Faith was Deanna’s gift,” Dillon reminded. “Not mine.”

“And that’s where we’re lacking.” Winston stood up, gathering himself some energy for the first time all evening. “We’ve got every­thing but Deanna’s faith, and so we’re clinging to everyone else’s. If Deanna were here . . . "

“But she’s not,” Michael was happy to remind him.

“But if she was, that faith of hers would leave us with no question of what it is we’re meant to do. We’d have the conviction to carry it out and everybody around us would trust enough to let us.”

Winston was right. This is what had been missing all along—this was why everything they did misfired, blowing up in their faces. One element was missing. In this new light, there was no question in Dil­lon’s mind the direction their actions had to take. “Then we have to get Deanna back at all costs.”

“Yes,” the others agreed, “at all costs.”

So, if it meant bargaining with Okoya—if it meant deceiving him into cooperating—it had to be done. It wasn’t the right thing, but it was the necessary thing, and if their integrity had to be a casualty of this war, then so be it.

“What about Lourdes?” asked Tory.

“We’ll get to her, somehow,” Dillon said, finally finding a sense of self-determination that he hadn’t felt for a very long time. “I’ll make sure of it.” Now he didn’t care if Tessic was listening. No matter what Tessic heard, it would not change things now. “We have five days to get to Thira,” Dillon said decisively. “I’ll come up with a plan to get us there.”

“Better get cracking, Entropy Boy,” Michael said. “Open us a magic door, because we sure as hell can’t find our own way out of this fun house.”

Tessic was awake before dawn. He was a man who required little sleep, his mind so busy, even his dreams were productive. That night he dreamt himself at the right hand of God. The Almighty’s most beloved.

He had awoken from barely three hours of sleep feeling as invig­orated as a child. His office in his dacha was identical to his offices in his various other residences, down to the paperwork on the table. There was an assistant whose job it was to make sure that, wherever Tessic went, his desktop went with him. For a man who worked and traveled as much as he did, he deemed that if his office could be consistent, everything else could be transitory.

There was much work to be done this morning. Pages and pages of reports to pore over from the various teams. Polish police had pulled over several of the buses, but each bus had its own private slush fund for such unfortunate occurrences. Polish police were not entirely un­familiar with bribes, and even if it only kept them quiet for a day, the money will have served its purpose. By the time the serious questions would start being asked, they would be further along in this great revival and Tessic would have a dozen other smoke screens to throw at them, keeping the authorities as confused and divided as the Nazis had kept the Jews.

His four special guests needed at least one more day to recuperate. That was unfortunate. He would have to repace the operation. He could only hope their recovery time would be quicker with each suc­cessive reveille his four musicians played.

He was surprised to see Dillon at his office door, soon after sunrise. Tessic quietly motioned for him to come in. Dillon sat down across from him and Tessic showed him what he was looking at.

“These pictures are from our next endeavor,” Tessic said, fanning out the photos before Dillon. They were pictures of a road; an old one, no longer used. It had almost disappeared in the undergrowth and towering oaks. “A service road that leads to Treblinka,” Tessic explained. “Portions of it were built using the ashes of the dead.”

Dillon raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything.

“I have workers crushing the road into gravel for you,” Tessic told him.

Dillon put the pictures down and shook his head. “Pointless. I’ll end up pulling the road back together before I pull anyone out of it.”

Tessic took a moment to process what Dillon had said. “Yes, of course.” He was surprised. Not at what Dillon had said, but by the fact that he hadn’t recognized this himself. “I’ll have them stop the demolition at once.”

“It can wait, we have something more important to discuss.”

Tessic smiled. “More important than what you and I are doing here in Poland?”

“Something that’s important, because it’s crucial to our success.”

Tessic leaned back in his chair, feeling its springs comfortably buffer him. “I can’t wait to hear.”

Dillon put down the photos. “I know something that can maxi­mize our efficiency and increase our output.”

“Go on.”

“I know a way to turn the five thousand we revived today into fifty thousand tomorrow.”

“Go on.”

Dillon leaned back in his chair almost mirroring Tessic’s relaxed demeanor. “Her name is Lourdes,” he said. “Lourdes Hidalgo.”

Tessic found his balance failing and leaned forward putting both hands on the desk. “Hardly plausible at this moment in time.”

“But worth the effort?”

Tessic stood and moved to the window—fading back, hoping not to be read too quickly by Dillon on this matter.

“Something wrong?” Dillon asked. “Why would Lourdes make you uneasy?”

He turned back to Dillon, but kept his distance. “Yesterday, the Italian Navy sank a cruise ship just off of Sicily. The Blue Horizon.”

Dillon did not react as Tessic had expected. He greeted this news with a wicked grin. “I didn’t know Italy still had a navy.”

“She went down quickly. None of my sources talk of survivors.”

Still Dillon was unperturbed. “So you’ve known about Lourdes’s whereabouts all along?”

“I knew she was on a ship. I suspected it was the Blue Horizon. I sent three operatives to find it. None of them came back.”

Dillon picked a candy from the dish on his desk, and slowly un­wrapped it, popping it into his mouth. “She’s not dead,” he said.

“You’re so sure?”

“If she were dead, I would know. We all would. We’d feel as if part of ourselves had died with her.”

“Then I’ll send a team to find her.” Tessic was already eying the telephone. “A team professionally trained for—" But Dillon put his hand over the phone, keeping Tessic from lifting the receiver.

“No,” Dillon said. “You’ll send us. All four of us.”

“Out of the question.”

“This isn’t a negotiation,” Dillon said. “We’re asking you as a courtesy.”

As a man whose marching orders were rarely challenged, Tessic found his anger taking hold. “I released you from your security chair,” he said, “because I thought you had become reasonable. Perhaps, I was premature.”

And then Dillon did something.

Tessic wasn’t sure if it was in his gaze or in his voice. Maybe it was just in his focus; the lens of his spirit brought to a burning convergence on Tessic.

“It stems from your mother,” Dillon said.

And Tessic was transfixed.

“Everything about you—your will to succeed; your faith; your anger. Everything.”

“So Freud would say,” Tessic answered, with less deflective aplomb than he wanted.

Dillon shook his head. “This goes even deeper than that.” He cocked his head, taking in the pace of Tessic’s breath; the set of his jaw; the almost, but not quite, dominant position of his stance. “There was a child before you. Your mother’s child, but not yourfather’s. A child that died in a death camp years before you were born.”

“This you could have learned from many places,” Tessic snapped, but his voice was weak and wavering. He knew Dillon hadn’t learned it; he had divined it. Tessic had always thought he was somehow immune to Dillon’s invasive power. He was now well aware that that had been his own arrogance at work. In the end, he was an open book to Dillon, just like everyone else.

“I believe it was a sister,” Dillon said. “This is the spirit you want to bring back more than any other—this innocent child . . . and yet, the camp where she died is our last destination. You see her as your reward when all others have been revived. No one knows this but you.”

Tessic could barely move or breathe. “Stop,” he tried to say, but his lips wouldn’t form the word.

“Shall I go on?” Dillon asked.

Tessic had no idea what Dillon was about to say. Until this mo­ment, he didn’t think there was anything that could make him vul­nerable, but now he instinctively knew that the next words out of Dillon’s mouth, whatever they were, would either make him whole or destroy him. He did not know which it would be. Then he realized that it didn’t matter. Either way, Dillon would win. Nothing in Tes­sic’s own personal arsenal could defend against this weapon Dillon now wielded. Until now Tessic had not truly understood this power of Dillon to affect the world with a whisper. Simple words, nothing more. But from Dillon’s mouth even the simplest of words could be devas­tating.

“M . . . M . . . Michael and Tory,” he said, stunned to find himself stuttering—something he hadn’t done since the earliest days of his youth.

“Michael and Tory, what?”

Tessic forced volume into his voice. “Michael and Tory may go seek out Lourdes. But I need you and Winston to stay. You two are the ones crucial to this effort.”

There was a hesitation on Dillon’s part. Perhaps the first since he came into the room.

“Please, Dillon. I need you.”

Dillon considered his plea for a moment more, then nodded. “Al­right. But I want them to leave immediately.”

Tessic let his shoulders relax. So, it was a negotiation after all. “Yes. Of course—with an escort, a jet—whatever they need.”

“Make those your first calls.” Dillon stood handing Tessic the tele­phone receiver, then glanced at the pictures on the desk. “Once they’re on their way, Winston and I will be ready to take on that road.”

Dillon left and Tessic collapsed into his chair, forcing a few deep breaths to regain his composure. Perhaps it was worth losing Michael and Tory temporarily in a gambit to bring back Lourdes. He quickly got a paper and began to jot down notes. Their progress would be slower without Michael and Tory, but Michael’s moods and weather patterns were more of a hindrance than a help. And although Tory’s was a medicinal presence, they could do without her; there were med­ical supplies enough to treat anything the dead brought back with them.

Within five minutes he had retuned his thinking to this new busi­ness environment. He was nothing, if not adaptable. And he put out of his mind how, for a moment, Dillon had extracted the fragile core of his existence, and pinched it between his fingers.

Michael and Tory were more surprised than anyone that Dillon had negotiated their release.

“I could have forced him to let us all go, but I sensed that it would shatter him,” Dillon told them.

“And why is that such a bad thing?” Winston grumbled.

Certainly Dillon had many reasons, not the least of which was admiration, and some level of love for this man who had, in a strange way, become Dillon’s surrogate father. But these weren’t the reasons he gave them. “You don’t want to shatter the richest arms manufac­turer in the world,” he told them, and the others were quick to agree— after all, Tessic probably had more fingers on more buttons than all of NATO put together.

Dillon had played the situation, just as they knew he could. He let Tessic believe he had negotiated, but in truth, this was the arrangement Dillon wanted all along. Michael and Tory would be their ambassadors to the Vectors. “Yeah, because we’re expendable,” Michael com­plained—but they knew why it was best this way. Dillon could not be allowed to face the Vectors until they were at their strongest— because if they defeated him, then all was lost.

Michael and Tory were gone, spirited to Katowice International Airport by helicopter before breakfast was served, bound for Sicily, and the cold embrace of Lourdes Hidalgo, who they all agreed was more than merely AWOL.

If they were shards of the Scorpion Star, then she had become the venom in the tip of its tail.

31. The Dead Sea

Scores of rotting fish washed up against the cliffs of Taormina, Sicily, sending up an uncompromising stench to the Cliffside Greek Theater. It was a constant reminder to Lourdes of her many mistakes and missteps under the tutelage of her three Angels of Death.

The disaster at the Jamaican racetrack had only been the beginning. Following orders from Memo, thinly veiled as suggestions, Lourdes had gripped and controlled one hundred people in Miami, then three hundred further up the Florida coast, marching them this way and that like a cracker box army. There had been no major mishaps. Then when their ship reached Daytona, she had tried to commandeer five hun­dred—and had succeeded, her skill sharpening with practice, as Memo had said it would. She was able to grip their bodies and their wills, propelling them in an orderly and efficient manner to the beach. But their inertia proved too much for her. The wave of their motion had direction but no destination. They couldn’t stop moving. They drowned.

For the media, it became just one more nasty event in a disinte­grating world—and although it would have been analyzed ad infinitum by the public a year ago, there were so many unconscionable events from one day to the next, it was quickly submerged in the collective consciousness. Lourdes thought she would feel worse about it—tor­mented by the helplessness her victims must have felt, and yet she was amazed at how well she slept that night.

“You’ve grown beyond caring about them,” Memo, the child-demon had told her. She didn’t know whether to be pleased or hor­rified by her ability to dissociate from a human context. Did it make her a cold-blooded killer, or transcendent?

Still packed with her hedonistic throng, the Blue Horizon had cut a course to Bermuda. There, she had gripped ten times as many—but this time did not leave her impulse open-ended. She clipped it, fo­cusing her attention on the shoreline. Five thousand fell under her control, impelled to the edge of the surf, where they stopped at her command, holding themselves at attention until she released them. Success—and yet in this success there was still no satisfaction.

“Five thousand, or fifty thousand,” the bat-faced woman, Cerilla, had said. “It doesn’t matter. It isn’t anywhere close to what we need.”

“Give her time,” Memo had insisted. But time was running out—yet they wouldn’t tell Lourdes why this needed to be accomplished on a predetermined schedule.

“If you are leading this invasion,” she had asked, “why can’t you decide when it will happen?”

“The water must boil,” Memo told her, “my abuela used to tell me, you can’t put the spaghetti in until the water boils. But if you wait too long, the water boils off.”

When they crossed through the straight of Gibraltar into the Med­iterranean, that water began to simmer. That’s when she sensed two revivals, falling only a day apart. They were distant—back in America. She could only assume that Dillon had brought back Michael and Tory, as Deanna was unreachable. At both moments, it had evoked in her old feelings of an unbreakable connection between all of them, but those feelings were quickly snuffed by the vacuum in which her spirit now dwelled.

So, the Fantastic Four were together again. Well, good for them. Let them obsess and confer over the fate of the world. She had no interest in being part of that. She knew her three new malefactors must have sensed their revival as well. Perhaps that’s why they continued to be so displeased with her progress.

Then, on December first, with only seven days left until the greatest performance of her life, their pleasure cruise became the Voy­age of the Damned.

It was the Captain’s fault. He had chosen to take the ship north of Sicily rather than south, forcing them into an ambush in the Strait of Messina. Perhaps he was in collusion with the ships that attacked them. She could not be sure, and she could not ask him because he had died in the attack, along with most of her guests.

Three warships had attacked the Blue Horizon without warning, under cover of darkness. One torpedo would have done the job, but apparently they weren’t taking any chances. After the third torpedo shredded the hull, Lourdes’s little floating oasis was sent to the bottom of the Mediterranean in less than twelve minutes—not long enough to launch more than a handful of half-empty lifeboats.

But this wasn’t the loss that weighed on her. It was the loss of her brother and sisters. They had not made it through the smoke-filled hallways to the lifeboats before the Blue Horizon coughed up her ghost in a greasy spill of diesel fuel.

She thought she was impervious to that kind of pain, and found her sorrow quickly putrefying into fury, as she foundered in a flooded lifeboat with her three angels, who were content to hurl others off the boat to keep them afloat.

Lourdes could kill the entire population of Italy for what they had done. Every village, every town, every beggar on every lousy cobble­stone street. She could kill them all—and made a conceited effort to do so from her lifeboat, sending an angry impulse across the surface of the waters.

This was perhaps her worst mistake of all. It was stupid. Unpro­ductive. Because when the impulse of her anger faded, there was si­lence in the waters around them. Silence, and bodies. That silence sat in stronger accusation even than her victims in Daytona. She knew what she had done. She had gripped every beating heart within her reach, and shut them all down. Not only were the seamen on the three attacking ships killed by her anger, but the survivors of her own ship were extinguished as well; those in the water, those in the lifeboats. All of them.

Only she and her three “Angels” were immune. Even more, she sensed death in the sea beneath her, running to its very bottom. How far had her impulse gone? Five miles, perhaps, until it fell beneath a lethal threshold? She knew her influence would be felt for many miles beyond that. A sudden spasm in the chest of every living thing for a hundred miles in every direction. For those far enough out of range the spasm would pass. Maybe. She didn’t know her own strength any­more, and until that moment, she had never considered herself a weapon of mass destruction.

Her angels were quick to remind her that the sinking, which they could have turned to her advantage, was only a disaster because of her rash action. She could very easily have commandeered one of the naval vessels and continued their crusade, but now without a living crew to manipulate, they were just as dead in the water as those ships.

They made shore just before dawn. Then Carlos and Cerilla took some rope from the lifeboat, and tied her to a tree. She tried to stop them, but their anger was more powerful than her ability to fight them off.

“This,” Carlos told her, “is something you’ve earned,” and then they both beat her with their bare hands, until their fists were as bruised as her face, relieving their anger on her the way she had relieved hers on the world. Lourdes tried to counterattack, by gripping their muscles with her mind, but their immunity to her was complete. Just as they could not devour her, she could not injure them. There was a balance of power, delicate though it may be.

All the while, Memo sat nearby not lifting a finger to stop it. He was the leader of this trio of wolves—one word from him could have ended their beating, but he let it go until his cohorts’ human bodies were exhausted, and their inhuman spirits satisfied.

Memo came to her when the other two left, untying her bonds while whistling a pop tune dredged from his host-body’s memory. Once one hand was free, Lourdes pushed him hard enough to send him flying across the beach on which they were marooned. He stood up looking at her with hurt and surprise.

“You let them torture me, and you expect me to follow your orders?”

He came back to untie her other hand. “Using your power against those warships was a bad thing,” he said, sounding more the child than the demon. “They are angry.”

She had grown used to his manner now, but still it unsettled her the way the personality of the child host-body had merged with the seriousness of the creature who commandeered it. At times almost innocent, and at other times evilly calculating.

But there is no evil, she reminded herself. The angels had taught her that. Was the fisherman evil for catching fish? Was the hunter evil for feeding his family? There is no evil, the angels had told her, only power and weakness. The weak see power used against them as evil.

If I see them as evil does that make me weak?

It was simply easier to ignore the question than to answer it.

“Mama and Abuelo are very angry,” Memo said as he untied her. “But if they hit you enough now, they won’t kill you tomorrow.”

“I thought you didn’t suffer from human emotions,” Lourdes snapped.

“We feel what these bodies feel,” Memo answered. “Me, I find anger the most useful, don’t you?”

Lourdes rubbed her swelling face. She couldn’t find the use in their anger or in her own. It had landed them on this wretched shore.

“Anger must be used, though. Directed,” Memo said.

“And what if I direct it at the three of you?”

Memo stood on his tip-toes looking closely at her swelling face. “More of the same,” he answered, then he kissed a bruise above her eye. “A kiss will make it better, verdad?’

She pushed him away again. “Not that easy.”

“Still, you will do the things we ask of you.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because,” he said quite simply, “you wish to be with greatness. And we are the only greatness there is.”

She grunted but refused to admit how well he had her pegged. For months she had taken all this world had to offer and found it flavorless. Then to learn that everything the world perceived as divine was merely the work of these predators had crushed her. Crushed her, then freed her. This new, bleak view of creation left her unencumbered by trou­blesome human ethics.

But your brother and sisters are dead, her atrophied conscience whis­pered from its hiding place. They are at the bottom of the Mediterranean because of you.

She would have cried, but refused to let Memo and the other two seraphic ghouls see the depth of her sorrow. These creatures did not care about her sorrow. They simply needed her to accomplish their goal. To know that beings greater than herself needed her was its own reward—and in spite of their constant disapproval, she would serve them, because they were, as Memo had said, the only embodiment of greatness she’d ever know. She longed to be party to the power they would soon unleash. How odd, she thought, to finally find fulfillment in the slavery of “Angels.”

She set up court in nearby Taormina, in the ruins of the Greek Theater, because it reminded her of those spectacular, but brief, golden days beneath the faux Greco facades of the Neptune pool at Hearst Castle. But these ruins were real, from a time before Sicily became a kicking toy for the toe of Italy. It had once been claimed by Greece, and in some fundamental way, Lourdes felt connected to it.

The view from the theater was stunning: snow-capped Mount Etna to the south, and to the east, the tranquil, azure waters of the Medi­terranean—but as they made preparations for the next leg of their journey, it was the north that drew Lourdes’ attention. Something happening to the north.

The other Shards. They were closer. They were . . . doing some­thing. Now they were not just together, but connected in some new way, and the sense of their connection deepened her own sense of isolation. She closed her eyes, hating them for making her feel this way, but longing to know what it was they were doing. She closed her eyes, trying to feel more clearly what they felt. Whatever they were up to it was both wonderful and horrible at the same time.

“Forget them,” Memo said, seeing this new direction of her at­tention. “Come look at the sea. We are not that far from Thira.”

When she looked across the ocean, she imagined she could see the Island of Thira out there, waiting for her arrival, and it chased the irritating sense of the other shards out of her mind.

“There is a scar running through Thira, from the sky to its bowels,” Memo told her with childlike enthusiasm. “We get to tear it open again.”

Lourdes knew if they succeeded, it would mean a slow and painful end to the human condition, as if afflicted by some terminal disease.

A disease, thought Lourdes, is that what these creatures are? She couldn’t shake the thought, and yet when she dug down to mine her feelings about it, she found she did not care. To her, the human race was already dead. In that, perhaps she was not all that different from these creatures of darkness posing as light—for if she was a luminous spirit, why did she feel so black at her core?

Up above a reconnaissance plane flew past, toward the three dead warships that had run aground ten miles up the coast.

“Tearing open the sky . . . " Lourdes said. “I can’t wait.” Then she effortlessly gripped the hands of the pilot in the low-flying plane, forc­ing them forward, and she and Memo watched as the plane plunged into the sea.

32. Web Of Shadows

Michael and Tory’s flight to Sicily was a lesson in Eu­ropean geography. What Michael expected to be a brutally long flight aboard Tessic’s jet was a mere puddle jump. Two hours from Warsaw to Palermo and by late afternoon they were received at Tessic’s villa on the north shore of the Island.

“Is there a place where this guy doesn’t have a villa?” Michael had asked as the housekeeper walked him and Tory through, pointing out the many amenities. There was no fog here—and although a chill filled the air when they had arrived, it had become a sullen breeze. Now that the weather was permitting, the glass wall of the living room was slid open, leaving a vast Mediterranean view as their fourth wall, and the distant shore of Italy to mark the horizon.

Michael and Tory sat out on the verandah, taking a late lunch, feeling guilty about it—but not too guilty. This was, after all the first real reprieve they had—not just since being revived, but since the nightmare at Hoover Dam, and the heady hell of being addicted to their own power. “Who says we have to find Lourdes,” Michael said, devouring some delicious Italian dish he could not name. “Let’s just stay here, sponging off of Tessic, and watch the world end from our balcony.” He was only half kidding.

“Won’t work,” Tory told him. “World’s ending to the east; the balcony faces north.” Tory wasn’t eating. Instead she was still exam­ining the silverware, too embarrassed to complain to the help about the spots, but too obsessive to use them. Well, thought Michael, our experiences left us all with some quirks.

“Lourdes is on the island, east of here,” Tory told him. “Not all that far.”

Michael did not want to be reminded.

“She’s up to something horrible,” Tory went on. “I can feel her like a short circuit.”

Michael had to admit her presence did feel different. One of them, and yet not. Winston had warned them about her—that she was not the girl they remembered—that she had let herself become evil. He thought to when he had first met Lourdes. She had been a bitter outcast, so frighteningly obese, she inspired fear rather than sympathy. Hatred and anger were not new emotions to her—she had hated with a riveting, heart-stopping intensity even back then. She could have killed any number of classmates and teachers with the intensity of her hatred. But then, for a time, anger gave way to self-indulgence, as it had for all of them. What then of Lourdes’s self-indulgence? Had that matured into something worse? Had it fused with her anger into some­thing even more lethal than the gluttonous parasite that had once en­slaved her?

“They say she kills people,” said Tory. “Hundreds at a time. For pleasure.” She shivered at the thought. “I can’t imagine it.”

“Keep talking and you’ll ruin this wonderful warming trend.” And indeed, Michael could feel the temperature dropping. It wasn’t just the presence of Lourdes that bothered him—it was the Vectors. Every­thing inside him was screaming panic—but he was strong enough now to box those emotions. He’d be damned if he’d let them ruin his moderate mood. And so, when sunset came, he streaked the sky with wispy cirrus—a trick he had perfected back at San Simeon for his adoring throng a week—no—a year before. The swatches of clouds soaked in the colors of sunset, painting the whole sky in vivid oranges and blues, resolving to violet. When the spectacle was done, Tory led him to the bedroom for a syntaxis of two.

“We’ll set out to find her in the morning,” Tory said. “But we owe ourselves this one night.”

They lay down on the bed fully clothed at first. Michael had hoped that the right set of circumstances would ignite his scarred libido, but it wasn’t happening, and as she pressed against him, slipping her hand into his shirt to feel his heartbeat against her palm, he grew uneasy.

“I want to be with you,” she whispered to him, and although he felt his heart pouring out, the passion moved no lower.

“I can’t,” he told her, taking her hand from the lip of his jeans. “I used up all my lust a long time ago. Didn’t save anything for a rainy day . . . or a starry night.”

She giggled, as if she were drunk. Is she drunk on me? he thought.

“I still want to be with you,” she said.

“I don’t think you understand.”

“Yes, I do.” Then she undressed herself, and undressed him. He was glad it was dark, so she couldn’t see the humiliation in his face at his own flaccidness.

“I told you,” he said. “DOA.”

“And I told you, I don’t want it anyway.”

She moved her hand up his thigh, and although it brushed past his groin, it continued past, never her destination. She ran her hands across his chest, his neck and shoulders. She sifted her fingers through his dark hair, and in a moment his hands were on her as well. Like her, he found his hands had no destination; the path itself was the pleasure. It was as if she were teaching him how to touch a woman all over again—and he who had seduced more girls than he could count from the earliest days of his volcanic pubescence. Those were days of a dark fire—when he was enslaved by his own parasitic beast, feeding on a lust that consumed him, drove him. His whole being had wired itself to feed that lust, and everything he did and thought was filtered through the beast’s glowing turquoise eyes. When he had finally killed it, it exacted a heavy price. It stole from him not only his lust, but his passion, leaving him an emotional eunuch. Seventeen, and never to be a whole man.

But here he was, naked in Tory’s arms, and somehow she had found a way to turn his impotence into a virtue. Love without lust. She made his jaded spirit feel clean and pure.

She kept running her hands over him until there was not a spot on his body left untouched. Her touch coated him now like a second skin, and although he could still feel the looming threat of Lourdes and the Vectors, for this brief moment, they felt muted and distant.

“I love you,” he told her. He could not remember ever telling anyone that.

She kissed him and rested her head on his chest. “Hold me,” she whispered. “Hold me like you did when we died.”

He did, and this time he was determined not to let go.

The first indication that something was amiss was the state of traffic. The main Sicilian highway that lead east toward Taormina was flooded with traffic heading west. It seemed to Tory that she and Michael were the only ones going against the trend. Their driver stopped to ask what the trouble was, but everyone had a different story. Some said a battleship had run aground and was leaking radiation. Funny, because battleships were not nuclear powered. Another spoke of disease—smallpox, Ebola, and even a new invention; il Morte Aspettare—the standing death—something downright medieval for this new dark age. Yet another spoke of poisoned earth. She’s become poison. Isn’t that what Winston had said, Tory thought. Apparently the driver, who was on Tessic’s payroll, was not paid enough for this. He aban­doned the car and thumbed his way in the other direction, leaving Michael to take the wheel. The weather stayed clear, but the winds blew chilly.

“I’m not ashamed to tell you that I’m scared,” Tory said. Which was probably not what Michael wanted to hear. After all that had happened between the two of them, she knew he considered her the brave one.

“Come on,” said Michael. “It’ll just be like any other family re­union. Blood; violence; medical triage.”

“So what we do when we find her?”

“We’re in Sicily,” Michael said, and put on his best Vito Corleone. “I’ll make her an offer she can’t refuse.” Tory laughed in spite of herself.

By the time they could see Taormina in the distance, both sides of the road were deserted. Then once they hit the town, the situation became far clearer than they wanted it to, for while homes and busi­nesses in the outskirts of town were deserted, there was a point halfway into town where the population remained, but they weren’t talking much.

Michael slowed the car for a man crossing the street, only to find the man stuck in mid-stride, not moving, like a toy whose batteries had died halfway across the street. On the sidewalks, too, people were as frozen as the mannequins in the store front windows.

“Lourdes . . .” said Tory. This time Michael had no quick retort. Lourdes had seized control of these people—but there had apparently been an event horizon. Those who had seen the immobile victims from just outside that horizon could not have understood what they were witnessing. Some would have crossed over and been caught themselves, like insects on flypaper, until enough had gotten the gen­eral idea, and would run, beginning that panicked exodus. Michael wove them around static figures until reaching a very literal tourist trap; a spot in the road clogged with frozen pedestrians. From there, they continued on foot. Although they were not subject to Lourdes’s field as these people were, they could still feel it, making it a chore to move their own muscles as if the air were thick and gelatinous.

Tory stopped to examine one woman. Although she wore a hat, her arms and shoulders were exposed by a strapless dress. Most of the exposed flesh was red and peeling with a sunburn that went down to second degree. Tory took off her own sweater and covered the woman’s shoulders.

“Lourdes must have grabbed them in the middle of the day yes­terday,” she said, “and just kept them here.” For what purpose? Tory wondered. She was holding them in abeyance, in a sort of psychic stasis, but for what?

Then the woman suddenly started moving, and Tory yelped and jumped back, stumbling on the uneven street. This woman wasn’t the only one moving, the others on the street were as well. They came out of shops and galleries, villas and flats, adding to the numbers on the street. Although their footfalls fell at different paces, they seemed to be of one mind when it came to their direction—east, downhill, toward the sea.

“Looks like we’re just in time for the brunch of the living dead,” Michael said. But these people weren’t exactly zombies. The marching throng had more grace than Tory and Michael expected.

“Shall we join the party?” asked Michael. And so they did, for today, in the town of Taormina, all roads led to Lourdes.

At the bottom of the winding street was a marina, quaint, but sizable. People made their way down the docks and boarded boats. Some were just passengers, others seemed to own the boats and have keys. Other keys were pulled through the smashed ruins of the marina office. This made it clear that Lourdes’s power had gained a new so­phistication; she wasn’t merely controlling their bodies, but she had commandeered their wills like a pervasive post-hypnotic suggestion. In every way, these people now belonged to her.

“Those people who got away weren’t all that wrong,” Tory said. “I can feel her hatred like radiation.”

Tory saw her first. She was at the entrance to a small gazebo, in a park overlooking the marina. She stood there watching her private civilian navy take shape, but Tory knew she was also watching them.

“Remember,” Michael reminded, “we’re just as strong as she is.”

“Except that she has the Vectors on her side.”

“They’re like Okoya,” Michael said. “They can manipulate, but they have no direct power over us, except the power we give them.”

But it did nothing to ease Tory’s sense of dread, as they climbed the hill.

Lourdes leaned on the railing of the gazebo, her arms crossed and her eyes fixed on them as they came across the park toward her. The latticework of the gazebo cast weblike shadows across the floor. She stepped back into the gazebo letting the web of shadows fall across her clothes and her face. They would have to enter into this open-air lair. They would not want to get that close, but she would make them.

“Hello, Lourdes,” Michael said, stopping just a few feet short of the gazebo. Tory stepped forward first. Coward, thought Lourdes. He’s a coward. What did she ever see in him? She remained toward the back of the structure, making no move toward them. Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly. “What a surprise,” she said, making it clear she was not surprised at all.

And then her eyes shot down to Tory’s hand. It had clasped Mi­chael’s. Even in their apprehension, their hands came together with such casual ease, she knew there was something more between them now than there had been before. As they stepped into the gazebo, Lourdes found her jealousy, which had seasoned so many of her days, was now bitter arsenic in the back of her throat.

“Where’s loverboy?” she asked Michael, with such enmity in her voice, she barely recognized it as her own.

“Excuse me?” said Michael.

“Drew,” she said. “Your lover.”

Tory turned to Michael more curious than shocked.

“You’re mistaken, Lourdes,” Michael told her. “Drew and I were never lovers.” And then he added, “Any more than you and I were lovers.”

She felt the barb twist in her gut. “I know what I know,” she said. In fact she knew nothing—only suspected, but she was loathe to admit it.

“Would you mind telling us what you’re doing here?” Tory asked.

Alright, she thought. They were no more interested in small talk than she. “My vacation came to an unexpected end. I’m here making myself some new friends.” She gestured toward the marina, where tourists as well as locals flooded the docks, squeezing themselves onto whatever boats still had room. Lourdes noticed their progress had slowed since her attention had shifted to Tory and Michael. This gath­ering required focus, and she resented that her focus had been pulled. She had thought she was supposed to be stronger in the presence of other Shards, but their fields were working against her own, hopelessly out of sync.

“I suppose I should thank you,” she said to Tory. “The stench from the beach has been unbearable in this heat. But the second you got here, the smell went away. Now the whole place is minty fresh.”

She took a step toward Tory. " ‘The Goddess of Purity,’ isn’t that what Okoya had called you? Is that why you like her, Michael? Because her shit doesn’t smell? I’ll bet she doesn’t even have morning breath, does she?”

“You’re one sick bitch,” said Michael.

Lourdes laughed, and the laugh was echoed back a hundredfold by the mob in the marina, sounding like the cackling of geese.

“Did it feel good to kill all those people in Florida?” Michael went on. “Is it a thrill to pull planes out of the sky?”

She thought to tell them that Florida was an accident—and that she had to pull the reconnaissance planes from the sky to keep them from finding out what happened to the three warships. But telling them this would serve no one. Their disgust, on the other hand, was something she could relish.

“We know about the Vectors,” Tory said. “We know what they plan to do.”

" Vectors? Is that what you call them?”

“Why are you helping them?” Tory grabbed her, and for a moment she felt that long lost connection between them.

Lourdes pushed her away, not wanting to feel it. “Because there’s nothing and no one in this world worth saving.”

“So you’d rather fill it with demons?”

“They’re not demons!” She turned away. “They’re not angels ei­ther. But they’re the closest thing there is. If I have to choose sides, I choose them.”

Michael looked at her, not with disgust, or horror, but with pity. It was a look Lourdes could not abide. “What have they been telling you?” he asked.

“Only the truth,” she said. “That there is no God—there are no miracles—there is no meaning to anything we do; that the universe isn’t just indifferent, it’s hostile, trying its damnedest to get rid of us.”

Again that look of pity from Michael. “And you believe this?”

Lourdes felt her hands close into fists, and she knew if she wasn’t careful, she’d send another lethal pulse of anger out through the crowd she had gathered.

Just then, the three “Vectors,” as Tory had curiously called them, stepped out from their hiding places; behind a tree, behind a shed, behind a truck. They converged on the gazebo in a steady but un­hurried pace.

“They’re going to kill you,” Lourdes told Michael and Tory. “You must have known that when you came here.”

And indeed Michael and Tory did know. They knew these crea­tures were formidable enemies. They knew they would most likely have their own brief candles snuffed once more—perhaps this time for good, but they also knew they had to come.

If we die together again, thought Michael, then it will be okay.

But Tory, on the other hand, was not thinking about dying. She was running through her mind every possible way they might live.

She and Michael said nothing, only took in the faces of the three approaching creatures. A child, an old man, a cleft-lipped woman with witch-long hair. Tory could laugh at the hosts they had chosen to inhabit.

Temporal

Lateral

Leading

The identities of the Vectors were projected into her mind. Not so much names, as assignments. Three axes of dimension. The child— he was the leading Vector, and most powerful. The old man was Tem­poral, the woman Lateral. Then as they approached, they changed. They drew out from their hosts their true being, letting the false light flow around their bodies.

Tory almost fell to her knees with a very personal revelation of glory. “What do you see?” Michael asked. Tory couldn’t answer, the image was so vivid. It was a child with flaxen hair running through a cotton field. The young girl kicked up wisps of cotton that drifted high into the air, as if pulled toward the sun. “I see myself as a child,” she said. She saw the same image in all three of the Vectors. It surrounded her no matter where she looked.

Michael, on the other hand, saw his mother, who had walked out of his life when he was ten. The woman Michael saw now, however, was not as he remembered her, but as he wished he remembered her. Not the cold, bitter woman she was, but a woman with such inner warmth it could fill any needy child. This was a fun-house mirror distortion that took the ugliness of his memory and bent it into some­thing so desirable, he could not resist. It was something he didn’t realize he needed until now.

“They’ll make it easy for you,” Lourdes told them. “They will make you feel fulfilled. Complete. It will be the most wonderful mo­ment of your life.”

“And then they’ll kill us,” said Tory, unable to reconcile the thought with the visions of happiness the Vectors put into her head.

“You’re Shards,” Lourdes said, “so they can’t devour you like they devour others. Your souls will go . . . wherever the souls of Shards go. Where you went before, the first time you died.”

But they had no memory of where that might have been.

The Vectors came closer. They were at the entrance to the gazebo now.

“Come,” Michael heard them say deep within his mind in that gentle voice of his fantasy mother. “Come and I’ll rock you to sleep. Come, and I’ll make you believe once and forever that I loved you.”

“Come,” they said to Tory. “Come play in the field the way you used to. This is your heaven.” So innocent and so compelling were the youth­ful images they put forth, that the blade they each held in their sweet little hands hardly seemed to matter at all. “Just let me bring this across your neck and you can stay here forever.”

Both Tory and Michael wanted to, so overwhelming was the lure—but a lure was all it was. Tantalizing, enticing—irresistible. But a lie.

“Hold on to me, Michael,” Tory said. In an instant she felt Mi­chael’s hand around her, linking her to him. Then Tory reached out toward Lourdes.

“You should feel this,” Tory said, “before we die.” Then she grabbed Lourdes by the shoulder.

Syntaxis was sudden and powerful. At last their mismatched fields fell into place. This was a new variation for Michael and Tory—a different harmonic than syntaxis with Winston and Dillon, but every bit as satisfying.

For Lourdes, who had not experienced this before, she found her mind had no way to interpret the feeling. Time seemed to cease as all the darkness within her nurtured by the Vectors soaked in this new light. She could feel her own field multiplied by theirs. She could feel at once the beating of every heart within her sphere of influence. Not just in Taormina, but miles beyond, to the countryside; to the north shore; to the distant slopes of Etna. Her influence stretched halfway across the Island of Sicily. Finally when she could stand no more, she broke free to see Cerilla taking Tory into her arms then turning her around, bringing the knife to Tory’s neck.

“Wait!” Lourdes shouted.

The woman looked at her as if she might turn her blade on Lourdes instead.

“These two can help us!”

“They’d much rather die,” said Carlos. “And I’d much rather kill them.”

“Kill them and you’ll never gather enough hosts,” Lourdes told them. That stopped them and got them to listen.

“When I connect with them I can seize the wills and bodies of a thousand times what I can on my own.” Then Lourdes smiled. “Take them with us, and we can use them to gather the three hundred thou­sand you need.”

The pity Michael had shown before transformed into disbelief and horror. Good, thought Lourdes. That was an expression she could live with.

Free of the Vector’s spell, Tory and Michael tried to run, but Lourdes turned a dozen people at the marina against them. They were tackled and tied with such unceremonious ease, she almost wished the Vectors had killed them. At least in that, there would have been some dignity.

The fleet of ninety-three boats—everything from sailboats to speed boats, fishing boats to yachts—set out from Taormina. After more than a year of unbridled luxury, Lourdes took a curious liking to a well-seasoned fishing boat. The fact that it was named La Fuerza del Destino, after the Verdi opera, clinched it for her. She wasn’t much for opera, but how could she not sail on The Force of Destiny?

With more than eight hundred bodies and souls trained into her gravity, they sailed east from Sicily to the southern shore of Italy, the sole of Italy’s boot. As the fleet grazed the shoreline, Lourdes let her influence drag along the fishing communities they passed like a rake pulling up leaves. In each town a dozen new boats were added to their number as their owners were impelled to join them. However, as they set off across the Gulf of Taranto, trouble set in—not with the power of Lourdes’s control, but with the boats themselves. The Gulf of Taranto was ninety miles wide and many of the boats simply didn’t have enough fuel to cross it. Engines stopped; dozens were set hopelessly adrift in the water—and the fact that Michael kept the winds raging against them didn’t help. By the time Lourdes reached the far side of the gulf, all but the largest boats were running on fumes, and they had lost more than half their number.

Of course, the Vectors were furious. For all the acuity of their grand spirits, there were some simple things they could not grasp about this world of matter.

“The boats need fuel,” Lourdes explained to them.

“So get them fuel,” they insisted.

But the town of Gallipoli, where they had landed, did not have enough fuel for a fleet the size of hers, and even if it did, the logistics of bringing in each boat for fueling would take half a day. What then when her fleet grew to be thousands? How would she move them to the Aegean sea? When connected to Tory and Michael she could pull an army of three hundred thousand and more, but she could not make them fly. Ultimately, they were all bound by the limitations of terres­trial mechanics.

“If we use sailboats. . .” Carlos suggested.

“I can’t direct the wind,” she replied.

And in fact, Cerilla’s hair was a wispy mess from the capricious winds blowing up from the Ionian Sea. “He can direct the wind,” Cerilla said pointing down to the aft cabins of the fishing boat. There was so much animosity in her voice, it could have doused the sun.

“Michael won’t do it.”

“You’ll make him do it,” insisted Carlos.

“I can’t make him do anything,” she had to admit to them, and to herself. Then she added, “And if you kill him for not obeying you, you’ll cut the number of your army in half.”

The two older Vectors turned away from her, casting their frus­trations over the side.

Memo approached her. “We will get them there if they have to swim.” Unlike the others, there was no vitriol in his words. It was simply a statement of intention, but intention or not, no human being could cross the five hundred miles from Italy to the Island of Thira. Such an attempt would only make her death count multiply again. But she didn’t tell him this.

“I’ll work on it,” she said. She left the boat and paced the dock, returning all her focus to the fractionated control it took to move her masses into fueling for the next leg of the trip across the strait to Corfu and the western shores of Greece.

The gas was already running out, as she knew it would, but those under her control had their wills so completely supplanted by her own, that they continued to pump from empty tanks in a bizarre collective compulsive consciousness. It was getting dark when she returned to her fishing boat. The Vectors were nowhere to be found and that was just as well with her.

Every inch of the boat, from top to bottom, smelled of sea salt, diesel and fish, but the rancid odor that used to permeate the corners had vanished the moment Tory had arrived. This would all be sparkling new if Dillon were here, she thought. It was the first time she could ever remember thinking of Dillon in anything but the most negative terms.

Then, as she stepped onto the boat, she heard Carlos scream. It was a horrid sound that went on and on, then ended with sudden silence. Lourdes went down below into the narrow, dimly lit hallway of the worn fishing boat.

Carlos wasn’t in his cabin, only Memo was there sitting by himself. Blood had splattered on the walls, and lay in pools on the floor. When he saw her, he ran into her arms and cried.

“Abuelo is dead,” he cried. “Abuelo is dead.”

Lourdes caught sight of Cerilla, who peered at her ferally from a dark corner.

“Abuelo is dead,” wailed the boy-thing. She pulled him away to see that his hands had left red prints on her blouse. The boy’s palms were covered in the old man’s blood. As for Carlos, his body was nowhere to be seen, but there was a small open porthole. Lourdes shivered. “You killed him! You killed the host.”

“He was weak,” Memo said, wiping away the tears, as the Leading Vector forced control over the host-child’s emotions. “Abuelo was too weak to hold the Temporal Vector.”

“So you killed the old man, and found a better host?”

But the Vector refused to answer; instead, he shielded again behind the child’s distress, allowing the host-body to bawl. It was an effective tactic, because Lourdes comforted him in spite of herself. This is not a child, she tried to convince herself. This is a monster that murders without hesitation or remorse. But then, how did that differ from herself now?

“Where is he?” Lourdes asked. “The . . . Temporal Vector?”

“He seeks his new host on the shore,” Cerilla answered. “He’ll return once he’s found the best one.”

“Tell him not to hurry back.”

She left them to their blood bath, lingered at her own cabin door momentarily, then passed it by and went into Michael’s—who was kept on the opposite end of the boat from Tory. He knelt in the center of the room, but then, all he could do was kneel; his hands were handcuffed above his head to a hook in the ceiling. The ceiling was too low for him to stand, but the chain of the cuffs did not allow him the comfort of sitting, so he was forced to find this compromising position in between. The Vectors had done this to him.

No, thought Lourdes, I was the one who bound him at their request.

“Where are we now?” he asked weakly.

“Southern Italy,” she told him. “A small town called Gallipoli.”

“Gallipoli,” said Michael. “There was a massacre there in World War I. The British kept sending waves of soldiers into enemy gunfire. Another low point in human history.”

“Now you’re starting to sound like Winston,” Lourdes said. “A walking encyclopedia. Or should I say kneeling.”

“Nope,” said Michael. “Can’t accuse me of knowing anything. I just saw it in a movie once.” And then he hesitated. “So is history repeating itself today?”

She didn’t answer him. She didn’t know. “I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry things turned out this way.”

“But not for anything you’ve done?”

Lourdes shook her head. “I swore to myself I’d never live to regret the things I do.”

Michael offered her an ironic smile. “You probably won’t.” Then his expression became serious. “You never answered my question.”

Lourdes turned from his gaze. “Which one?” although she knew precisely which one he meant.

“Why do you accept their bleak view of the universe? That every­thing’s pointless; that everything’s hostile?”

“What happened, Michael?” she snapped. “Did you die and find God? You were never one to believe in anything.”

“I believe in keeping my options open.” Then with uncharacter­istic patience, he waited to hear what Lourdes had to say. For a long bloated moment Lourdes said nothing. The sense of the boat rocking on the water, and the sound of it shouldering against the dock, filled the gap between them until Lourdes could no longer stand the silence.

“I’ve seen the Vectors pose as angels,” she said. “I’ve felt that glow of glory they put off before swooping in for the kill, dozens of times.” Lourdes felt her cheeks redden from anger as she thought about it. “I’ve seen them take people into their arms, making them believe they were raptured to heaven, and then suck their souls right out of the marrow of their bones.”

She realized she did hate these creatures for being what they were, but she hated human beings more, for believing these monsters were something divine. Lourdes thought to her childhood. All those years under her parents’ wing—church every Sunday, Midnight Mass at Christmas and Easter. She had once felt the residue of holiness. She had believed in miracles back then, and knew in her heart that the blood and body of Christ fed her when she took communion. But now these shadowy creatures made her believe it was a lie.

Then Michael said: “If everything they do is built on lies . . . how do you know they’re not lying to you now?”

The very suggestion took the wind out of her. It unlocked a door that had always been right in front of her, but hiding in her blind spot. “What?”

“They’ve told you that faith is a sham—that it’s a tool they’ve invented with their visitations for thousands of years. But how do you know it’s not just another lure—something to lure you into their serv­ice?”

Lourdes found she couldn’t answer. Could it be true? They were false light. Deception was their art by their own admission.

“And even if what they say is true,” Michael went on. “Even if every ‘divine intervention’ in the history of the human race has been them trying to consume our souls . . . How do you know that they are all there is? How do you know there’s not something out there greater than them? Something beyond them that they hide with their darkness?

Lourdes found herself stumbling over her own thoughts, wanting to close her mind to Michael’s voice but unable to.

“They want your faith to be in hopelessness,” he said, “because you’d never surrender to them unless you had no hope.”

Her cheeks red from anger and confusion, her head pounding, she latched onto her anger, the only companion that was stalwart and consistent, and spat her words at him. “When you died, Michael, did you see the face of God? Did you get lifted up to heaven or dragged down to hell?”

Michael looked away. “I don’t know.”

“HOW COULD YOU NOT KNOW?!”

Michael took his time in answering. “Maybe memory is something stored in our flesh. We don’t take our memory with us when we die, and nothing comes back with us when we return.”

“Wishful thinking!” she shouted. “You remember nothing, be­cause there is nothing.”

“I didn’t bring anything back from death,” Michael finally admit­ted, “except for this: I’m not afraid to die anymore. Maybe that’s because my soul knows something my memory doesn’t.”

She tried to dismiss the thought, but found that Michael’s words lingered. Lourdes was no stranger to death. She was, in fact, its jaded comrade now. But she recalled her first unhappy introduction to it. It was when her grandmother died. Lourdes was all of seven. Her mother had put her to bed that night, and told her how Grandma was in a better place. Reunited with Grandpa. Lourdes had pictured them there together running through the clouds; the old woman free of her crip­pling arthritis, still the same person she had been, only somewhat more transparent.

Then, when Lourdes had become fat, pitied, and hated, she had dismissed heaven out of hand. People dressed in white, playing harps in the clouds. Ridiculous! A Bugs Bunny cartoon without a punch line. That’s all folks. With heaven gone, God wasn’t far behind. It was harder to dispense with hell, however. That idea lingered until she decided her own life fit the description.

The thought was so hideous it forced something out of Lourdes— something she had no idea she would say. “You were the only damned thing I ever really wanted. Why couldn’t you have just loved me?”

“Because we don’t connect to each other, Lourdes,” Michael told her with far too little passion one way or the other. “You connect to Dillon, and to Tory, but you don’t connect to me.”

In defiance of his words she reached out to him. She intended to grab his neck in her hand, but found herself cupping his cheek gently in her palm. And although she felt some connection between them it was only an echo of what she wanted to feel.

When Lourdes went back on deck night had fallen. The moon was a full blue beacon overhead. She could see the hills painted in subtle indigo tones, and in the harbor, her minions continued to hope­lessly pump invisible gas from empty tanks. Lourdes closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then released it . . . . . . and let go.

It took every ounce of her own will to do it.

It was harder letting go than it was grabbing these people and holding them.

She watched in the moonlight as the disoriented masses found their bodies and spirits under their own control once more. For a minute, there was quiet confusion, and then the fear that should have gripped them in the beginning, gripped them now. They ran from the docks; they leapt from the boats. Anything to get away from Lourdes Hidalgo.

“What are you doing?” Memo’s voice was so commanding it was hard to imagine it came from the body of an eight-year-old boy.

She turned to him. In this dim light, she could imagine him for what he was. An ancient spirit that moved in a singular, relentless, trajectory. Self-serving, manipulative, but never changing course. It was this she so admired in the Vectors. And hated in them as well.

“We can’t bring these people to Thira,” she told him. “It’s too far away. We’ll travel south to Crete, and I’ll collect your army on the shores there. From Crete’s north coast it’s only eighty miles to Thira.”

And for the first time Memo deferred to her judgment. She won­dered if he noticed that this was also the first time she called the army his, and not her own.

33. Birkenau Black

Auschwitz was no longer run by the Third Reich. Now it was administered by the Polish Ministry of Parks.

It was preserved as a museum; hundreds of barracks, the execution wall, Mengele’s chamber of death. But Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau, was a different story. The heart of darkness where more than a million and a half people were murdered was left exactly the way it was found, untouched—untouchable. Crumbling barracks stretched further than the eye wanted to see, behind the remains of the three massive crematoria and gas chambers, now no more than skeletal fac­tories of death. Although the SS tried to blow the crematoria up before the liberation, they were not entirely successful. The twisted rubble that remained still testified to the atrocity.

The current curator was a middle-aged man who had not lived through the horror, but was born in its aftermath. His deepest personal connection was the coldness of his childhood winters, because his par­ents refused to burn wood in their fireplace, the stench of the smoke reminding them of the stench that blew across the miles from Auschwitz-Birkenau for four long years.

On the morning of December fourth, the curator ate his standard ham and eggs breakfast, kissed his wife and children good-bye, then headed out in his aging Citroen over the snow-dusted road connecting the town to Auschwitz, twenty miles away.

The “Facility,” (which was the accepted euphemism among the administrators) did not open until ten o’clock, but he found the road already crowded with buses. There were always buses on the road. Buses coming, buses leaving and on his weaker days the curator often wished that the abandoned railway that had once brought so many across the border from Hungary to their death, could be used now for the shuttling of tourists back and forth.

It was only after riding between two buses for ten minutes that he realized that they both were empty. In fact—they all were. Drivers, yes—but no passengers.

This did not bode well. A fleet of empty buses was unnerving in and of itself, but that coupled with bizarre rumors from some of the other memorials left him in a deepening state of dread. Rumors that they had been seized by foreign forces. Rumors that mystics were disturbing the bones and ashes of the dead.

He now recalled that several weeks ago some workers had come to his Facility from the Ministry of Public Works, with high-tech divining equipment. They claimed to be checking the state of the watershed, but when he phoned the Ministry they denied sending a team of workers. He hadn’t been concerned at the time—he knew that when it came to government, the right hand rarely knew what the left hand was doing.

But now, as he drove into the parking lot, he suspected that those workers had not been state workers at all. Buses already filled half the lot—at least thirty of them. All identical. All empty. What’s more, there were teams of laborers waiting at the gate. Their beige uniforms suggested some utility, but was nondescript enough to defy any defin­itive association.

“We were sent by the Ministry of Health,” the curator was told by a young woman as he approached the gate. “We believe your aquifer is contaminated, creating a risk to public health.”

“Funny that a representative from the Ministry of Health would talk to me in English,” he told the young woman, whom he took to be an American even before she had opened her mouth, by the way she held herself.

“Would you like to see our permits? I think you’ll find everything in order.”

She held out some official looking documents. “No doubt,” he answered and waved the papers off. She folded them and put them away.

The night guard, who had his own unspoken suspicions, had re­fused to let them in. Now the guard meandered behind the protection of the double fence, refusing to get any closer to these visitors.

Other workers, who should have been inside by now, lingered in the parking lot, smoking, making small talk, but keeping one eye on the curator, waiting to see what he would do.

“Do these buses have anything to do with decontaminating our aquifer?” he asked.

“The buses must be for tourists,” the young woman said without changing the stone in her expression. “Isn’t that what tour buses are for?”

By now the entire lot was full, and more buses were forced to pull off to the side of the road. Every one of them empty, save for the drivers.

The curator thought to say something about it, but instead just motioned to the day guard, who was waiting patiently to unlock the gate. He did so with shaky hands that dropped the keys twice, before the lock came undone.

The American woman passed some instructions to a team leader, who then translated them into Polish for the others in their company. The curator grabbed her before he went in. Maybe all the rumors he had heard were unfounded, but he felt compelled to know the truth. She shook his arm off, but waited for his question.

“The American boy,” he said. “That Cole boy—the one who did things.” He hesitated almost afraid to ask—almost afraid to know. “Ev­eryone says he died, but he survived the breaking of the dam, yes?”

He thought he caught a glimmer of something in the young woman’s face, but he couldn’t be sure what it was. “Why, yes,” she said. “I believe he did.”

“And he is coming here?” the curator asked, but it wasn’t really a question at all. He knew. He knew without her saying anything—and her silence was deeply intimidating.

Finally she said, “Stay and find out for yourself.”

It was the most compelling invitation to leave he had ever heard. He stood there as her teams of workers flowed around him and in through the gates as if he were a stone in a fast moving river. Once they had gone inside he was left with his staff who looked at him, wondering what to do.

“Go home,” he told them, then he went to his old Citroen, and started it up, thankful that the engine was still warm enough for him to drive off without lingering.

Perhaps he would visit his children’s classrooms today. Perhaps he would take the family off on a winter holiday. But whatever he did, he knew that he would not be returning to the Facility anytime soon.

Still ten miles out, a wedge of helicopters beat across the belly of the clouds.

Without Michael, the skies over Poland slipped back to their nat­ural state, which was not all that different from the atmosphere Michael had imposed upon them. The fog had lifted to become a colorless blanket that stretched from horizon to horizon, as if God had created the Earth, but had forgotten to create the heavens. Flurries of snow dusted the ground and all eyes looked to the blank sky that was blizzard-heavy and ready to burst.

Dillon and Winston maintained their silence in the lead helicopter with Tessic, who watched them as if they might leap out of the heli­copter at any instant. He was, in fact, pondering the tally of days ahead, and portents the past few days held for the future.

The road to Treblinka had yielded only thirty-seven hundred souls over a two-day period. This time Tessic’s curiosity had gotten the better of him, and he had watched the making of the miracle. As Dillon had predicted, the road that had been broken down for his benefit mended the moment he arrived. Gravel became chunks of asphalt, chunks became slabs. The cracks zipped closed, and the worn texture of the road darkened, unseasoning into a black slurry as new as the day it was paved. Only then did the real work begin. Dillon had gotten down on all fours, slowly rocking back and forth, moaning, feeling the pain of the dead, resonating with it until the road began to break apart again—not in random chunks, but in a perfect pattern. An octagonal grid. The road kept dividing and dividing, until the fragments were no larger than grains of sand. Water trucks had already saturated the roadside and now the moisture seeped back into the black sand. Tessic had watched as Dillon sank into it about six inches. Still on all fours, grunting, bearing down, Dillon sent ripples of force out through the thick tar. He had called for Winston in a guttural voice, and Winston came up, kneeling as well, grabbing him around the waist. They looked like two wrestlers in starting position, and the moment they made contact, Tessic, who was only twenty feet away, felt a surge shoot through his body beginning in his feet, and exiting his eyes, ears, and mouth, like an electric current.

I’m feeling their life, he thought. I’m feeling their souls called back into flesh.

And all this time Dillon was sobbing, absorbing the pain and hor­ror. Like a sponge he leached death from the earth, and with death gone, life had no choice but to replace it and find its form. The black quicksand turned deep maroon, growing brighter; bubbling. Then when distinct shapes that could only be bones began to appear, Tessic turned away.

Hour by hour, Dillon and Winston had inched their way forward through that road-turned-river, the revived peeling away in their wake into the arms of Tessic’s retrieval crew. But it was different than at Majdanek. After four hours, Dillon and Winston got up and left. They demanded a bath. They demanded food. They demanded privacy. And then four hours later, they returned to continue their task. For two straight days it went on like this; they pulled six shifts at the road of death and although they revived fewer and fewer with each shift, they never reached a level of exhaustion they had at Majdanek. Then after the sixth shift, Dillon came to Tessic.

“We’re done here,” Dillon said.

Tessic shook his head. They had barely covered a mile of the road and what remained was a river of organic debris. Bones that had fused in misshapen unnatural ways in a red river as thick as a lava flow.

“No,” Tessic told him, and quoted Frost. “We’ve miles to go until we sleep.”

“Not today,” Winston said. “Today this is the road not taken.”

He could sense that they were holding back—that if they stayed, there was more life they could squeeze out of this place. Perhaps, thought Tessic, the drawing of life was like the pressing of olives. The first pressing yielded the purest of oils, but each pressing beyond it became harder and harder to accomplish. Still, if it could be done, why not do it? Why not double the effort and press the road for all the life it could deliver?

But Dillon refused, with no further explanation. It infuriated Tessic.

“Do you think you can just indiscriminately choose where, when and who to resurrect, on a whim?”

And Dillon had laughed aloud in his face. “This has all been on a whim,” he had said. “But now it’s our whim, instead of yours. And besides, isn’t it your plan, to hopscotch from one site to another and back again, to keep the authorities confused.”

Tessic wanted to push it, but held his tongue. With Dillon as well, there was a point at which pressing yielded less and less. Dillon was there by his own grace, and by Dillon’s grace, Tessic remained in charge. Tessic was a lion tamer now, in the ring with no protection. He was in charge, only because his lion allowed it. Tessic knew not to push, for the fangs could cut deep.

In the end, Tessic ordered bulldozers in to bury the undifferentiated remains beneath darker earth, gathered a minyan to recite the mourners’ kaddish, and left. Now, in the helicopter, he stared across at Dillon and Winston, making sure his prize lions made no unexpected moves.

Dillon, on the other hand, had no interest in studying Tessic. He had to put all his attention into coming to terms with the new desti­nation toward which their helicopter inexorably flew. Dillon had put the gruesome nature of the past few days out of his mind. He found dispensing with the past a powerful defense mechanism to keep him moving forward and not spiraling down into himself, as he had in the Majdanek memorial dome.

I will not dwell on whether this is right or wrong, he told himself. I will not make that judgment. I will bide my time, performing these miracles, until the time is right to stop.

He felt sure he’d know when that time would be. He’d feel the pattern of cessation in everything around him. He’d know when it was enough. And perhaps this is what Tessic was most worried about.

“We’ve heard nothing from Michael and Tory,” Tessic told Dil­lon, which was no news to him.

Dillon didn’t answer. Didn’t even shrug. He waited to see where Tessic would go with this.

“Are they still alive?” Tessic asked.

Dillon nodded. “Yes, they are.”

“You’d tell me if they had died?”

“Yes,” Dillon said honestly. “I would.”

“Then why have they not returned?”

This time Winston answered him. “Maybe they’ve decided to go and resurrect the Minoan Civilization.”

This piqued Tessic’s interest, and Winston grimaced, realizing the information he had just leaked.

“Minoans,” said Tessic. “Why would they be going to Crete?”

“No reason,” said Winston, poorly covering. “I just hear the Ae­gean Sea is beautiful this time of year.”

“Thank you, Winston,” Tessic said, miming a tip of the hat. “Not only do I know where they are, but now, thanks to you, I know where they’re going. I’ll be sending a search and rescue mission by sea plane. A whole squadron if necessary.”

“I wouldn’t,” Dillon said. “Lourdes can pull them out of the sky.”

“So I’ve been hearing.”

“If they are meant to be back—they will be back,” Dillon told him. “What’s fated is fated. Bashert, isn’t that what you call it?”

But Tessic’s smile was forced.

“Your faith has given way to your ego, Elon,” Dillon told him.

To which Tessic answered, “Faith only goes so far.”

Their helicopter turned, and Dillon gripped his gut, feeling their destination before he could see it. When he looked out of the window, he could see down below, among the low, barren hills, two huge square patches, about two miles apart. The work camp of Auschwitz and, looming behind it like a tidal wave, the massive death camp called Birkenau. He could hear Winston hyperventilating—he could feel the presence of death, too; even from a distance it was exponentially worse than Majdanek or the road of the dead.

“So cold,” Winston said. “So cold.”

Dillon tried to speak to him, to calm him down, but found he had no wind in his lungs. It was as if the atmosphere had been sucked away from the planet, leaving beneath them this barren moonscape of gray rubble. Death was already screaming out to them and they were still miles away.

“We won’t be able to control this,” Winston hissed. “Once we’re there, once it begins, it’s going to swallow us like the millions it swal­lowed before.”

From here they could see that the road leading there, and the visitor’s parking lot were clogged with buses. Since many of the bus drivers had deserted after that first day, a fair number of the drivers were now men and woman raised from Majdanek. Tessic took pride in the poetic justice, for just as these masses were forced to assist their own extermination, now they were given the chance to assist in their resurrection.

They set down in a clearing beside the Auschwitz guard tower, the down-draft of the helicopter blasting away the snow, which scattered like ghosts from a grave. When the other copters had landed, Tessic opened the door to let in the bitter cold. But it wasn’t only the cold that came in. There was a presence, almost sentient, that peered in through the open door. When you look into an abyss, thought Dillon, the abyss looks into you. It was the eye of old murder.

“Dillon,” Winston said in a panicked whisper. “I’m scared. I’m so scared.”

“So am I,” he admitted.

“Why don’t we just leave. Why don’t we just—"

“Shhh,” Dillon said. “It’s going to be alright.”

“But you don’t know that, do you? You don’t know anything, do you?”

Dillon closed his eyes. Even that vile sense of the Vectors was gone here, obliterated by the static field of earthly evil that now enveloped them.

“Why are we here?” Winston whined.

Why are we here? thought Dillon. The easy answer would have been to blame Tessic—but Dillon could have delayed this visit. He could have detoured them to any number of sites, but he hadn’t, because deep down he wanted to come here. Could Tessic be right? Could they have been meant for this? Was this his own intuition telling him so?

“We have to face Birkenau,” Dillon told Winston. “We have to face it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Tessic walked them through the oppressive Auschwitz gate—the wide brick arch through which a thousand trains of the condemned had once passed. Tessic pointed to red posts marking the ground. “We’ve used sonic imagery to locate the—" he broke off, his mind tripping over the thought—“to locate the spots most likely to yield new life. Begin wherever you wish.”

But Dillon did not need sonic imagery to know where the dead were. He could feel them, and they were everywhere. He could read their history in every inch of ground he crossed. There had been so many ashes, so many bones, there had been no way for the Nazis to dispose of it all. It was spread into creeks until the creeks choked. It filled ponds until the ponds were dry grey sores on the face of the countryside. And toward the end, the Nazis didn’t even try to conceal it. Within the camp and in the surrounding countryside were unnatural ash mounds that in the summer would sprout with weeds and wild flowers, but now in winter were as bald as granite, revealing their true nature.

They were led by Tessic and his entourage through the double fence, and into Auschwitz. Maddy was there supervising teams of workers that waited to assist. Dillon thought to say something to her, but changed his mind. What was there to say now? She had, in a strange way, fulfilled her military destiny, becoming a key cog in Tessic’s ma­chine. He felt an intense pang of regret as he caught her gaze, but it was quickly taken under the cold waves of death rolling in all around him.

“Begin wherever you wish,” Tessic repeated.

Dillon turned from Maddy, and picked up his pace rather than slowing down. He could sense the dead already beginning to gather around him—but not like in the other places he had been. Here, it was unfocused—diluted. A million souls, each grasping a tiny, tiny fraction of his power all at once. Not one had yet been revived, and already he felt drained.

This place will swallow us.

He felt himself a single grain of salt dissolving in a sea. So he didn’t slow his pace, for fear that he would dissolve entirely.

The rear gate of Auschwitz opened to a road that led to Birkenau, three kilometers distant, its guard towers clearly visible through the flurries of snow. To the right, in the open fields were storehouses of stolen memory. “The Fields of Plenty,” the Nazis had called them. Each structure was still filled to the brim with eyeglasses, photographs, shoes, watches. Anything and everything that could be stolen from the victims, down to the hair on their heads, shaved and awaiting shipment to German textile mills.

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

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

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

The living void.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are we there yet?” Winston asked.

Dillon nodded. “I think we are.”

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

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

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

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“We’re leaving now,” Dillon told him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Their weight is off your shoulders.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will not be a victim of this.

She had to find the opportunity here.

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

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

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

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

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

She reached Ari before Dillon and Winston did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What will you do now?” he asked.

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

“And then?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go,” she said. “I’ll clean up.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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