Shattered Sky

“There were six of us,” he began. His body showed none of the bruises from the ordeal he must have endured. Not a strand of his wavy red hair was out of place, his clothes were immaculate—not even the seams of his jeans showed wear. “Six when it all began. Now there are only three left. Winston, Lourdes, and me.”

The man across the table took out a pad, and began to take systematic notes. He wrote down his impressions, as well as the things the redheaded kid said. That’s all he was, thought the man: a kid. Couldn’t be any older than seventeen. Then why am I so frightened? The man pushed the thought out of his mind, and concentrated on his subject, whose name had been seared into the world’s collective consciousness in a matter of months. A young man by the name of Dillon Cole.

“What happened to the other three?”

Dillon didn’t answer right away. He just sat there in the hard, heavy wooden chair. He didn’t move his arms, but then he couldn’t; they were both firmly bound to the arms of the chair with tempered steel handcuffs. The man noted Dillon’s hesitation—that it was either the prelude to a lie . . . or perhaps brought on by the pain of memory. Then, something changed about the boy. He seemed to stop his introspection, and instead turned his gaze outward. The man could almost feel Dillon’s eyes dragging across him as Dillon sized him up.

“You’re a psychological profiler,” Dillon said.

The profiler grinned. “Figured that one out, did you?”

Dillon frowned as if at an insult. There was the touch of Dillon’s eyes again, like silk moving across the profiler’s flesh. “You graduated from Yale,” Dillon told him. “You’re married, no children. You live in a townhouse, and drive a Lexus—or maybe an Infiniti. Eggshell white.”

Now it was the inquisitor’s turn to falter. The boy could have picked up some of it from the profiler’s gold band and class ring—but the rest? Just shots in the dark. Except for the fact that they were right.

“I see you’re quite a profiler yourself,” he told Dillon.

Dillon shrugged. “Not professionally. It’s just a hobby.” Dillon grinned, and the profiler looked away, then silently cursed himself that he hadn’t kept eye contact with his subject. “I thought they saved you guys for serial killers, and stuff like that,” Dillon said.

“If you’re responsible for drowning 400 people in the Colorado River, then you’re a mass murderer. I would say that falls within my job description.”

Dillon shifted in his seat, and looked down at the heavy cuffs on his hands. There was a moistness to his eyes. Was it remorse? the profiler speculated. Then, from Dillon: “Something has to be alive before you can kill it.”

“An interesting philosophy.”

Dillon tugged half-heartedly on his bonds, then looked at the profiler. “Yeah . . . I’ve done some unspeakable things in the past. But believe me, the punishment has fit the crime. There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t already been done.”

The profiler tapped his pen on the table, the clicks echoing in the cold interrogation room. “Let’s talk about your three dead friends,” he said. Now that he had regained control of the conversation, he was going to keep a tight rein on it.

“Deanna was the first to die,” Dillon said. “Her body lies trapped in the place between worlds.”

“A place between worlds,” repeated the man. Making a mental note of this delusional construct. “Is this a place you created?”

Dillon grinned. “You seem to think I’m all-powerful.”

The profiler found the grin far more unsettling than he expected. “Didn’t you claim to be a god?”

“I never made the claim—others called us gods. We just got tired of cor­recting them.”

“Alright, then. What are you?”

“The six shards of the Scorpion Star.”

“The Scorpion Star? You’re saying this has something to do with the supernova?”

Dillon didn’t move, didn’t break eye contact. His eyebrows did not rise in the reflexive twitch of a lie. “Our souls are the six fragments of the soul of that star, which went nova at the moment each of us were conceived.”

“How lucky for you.” The profiler had to hand it to him; the kid’s delusion was distinctively grandiose.

“Lucky? For years each of us was plagued by parasites that leeched onto our bright souls . . . but we purged them. Then we were manipulated and used by a spirit predator. . . but we defeated it. There’s nothing ‘lucky’ about what we suffered.”

“Soul parasites and spirit predators,” said the profiler, with calculated con­descension. “Sounds like some nasty business.”

“It was,” said Dillon, becoming annoyed. “And why are you here any­way? I haven’t quite figured out the purpose it serves. It’s not like your report is going to make any difference. Those notes of yours will never see the light of day—you know that, don’t you? They’ll be locked up so tight there won’t be anyone with high enough security clearance to read them.”

“Never mind that. Let’s get back to the other two who died. The other two ‘shards,’ as you called them.”

Dillon took a deep breath, attempting to regain his composure. But it was more than that. The profiler sensed . . . something else. Something that had been there since he had arrived in the room, just on the threshold of perception. Now as he concentrated on it, he was certain it was there—a slow, rhythmic pulse that he could feel resonating through his bones and aching joints. Im­possible, the profiler thought, but the pulse seemed to emanate from across the table.

Am I feeling Dillon’s heartbeat?

Dillon twitched his nose, and looked down at his shackled hands. “I have an itch on my nose. Could you scratch it for me?”

“There’s a standing order than no one is to touch you under any circum­stances. "

“I see. Are they afraid you’ll pick up whatever disease I’ve got?”

“Tell me about the others who died.”

Dillon sighed, and tried to rub his nose unsuccessfully on his shoulder, then gave up. “Michael and Tory,” Dillon said. “They were the other two. They died in the rubble of Hoover Dam . . . in the Backwash.”

“Ah . . . your so-called miracle!”

“It wasn’t supposed to be a miracle. I guess I just can’t help myself.”

Again that unsettling grin. It was even more troubling than the things Dillon said. That and the pulse of his heartbeat like an electric charge throbbing through the room. “A thousand years ago,” the profiler said, “if a man prayed to the heavens, and it just happened to coincide with an eclipse, he was pro­claimed a prophet. Does that make him one?”

“That depends. Was the moon anywhere near the sun at the time?”

“There’s a logical explanation for what happened at Hoover Dam, and someday we’ll find it. You just happened to be caught in the circumstance of coincidence.”

“Then I suppose I have a talent for coincidence.”

“And now you’re having nightmares.” The profiler sat back, his eyes steady, taking the tiniest sadistic pleasure in the discomfort his mention of it brought Dillon.

“Just one,” Dillon corrected him. “It keeps coming back.”

“Tell me about it.”

Dillon grinned. “It’s not in your files?”

“I’d like to hear it in your words.”

Dillon slipped into himself for a moment, then he seemed to return, and his eyes became sharp and focused again. “Three figures, standing on the edge of some sort of platform. A man, a woman, and a child. The smell of perfume.”

“Go on.”

“There’s someone else in the dream as well. A man. Balding. He’s in a leather chair, but it’s a strange color. Sort of pink, or purple. It’s a recliner, and he’s leaning back.”

“Images from your past.”

“No,” he said, “from my future. They’re bringing something horrible— something unimaginable, but of course you won’t believe me. You won’t believe anything until it’s too late.”

“I didn’t say a thing.”

“You don’t have to. Everything you are—everything you think and feel is in the way you move, the way you breathe, the way you blink.”

The balance had shifted, like a ship listing from starboard to port. Without moving an inch, without flexing a muscle, Dillon had seized control of the interrogation. It angered the profiler how easily he was able to do it.

Dillon’s eyes probed him again, this time even deeper than before, as if he were reading a biography in his clothes and body language, in the care lines of the profiler’s face. “You took early retirement,” Dillon divined, “but you were called back for this one last interrogation. You didn’t want to come—but you did it as a favor.”

The profiler lifted his arms from the armrests, just to assure himself that he wasn’t the one shackled to the chair. “There are a dozen ways you could have known that. You could have heard someone talking—"

Dillon wasn’t listening. “What I’m wondering is why you were called in, and not someone else?”

Again, the invasive look: a radar scan that left the profiler feeling naked and vulnerable. “We’re here to talk about you,” he said impotently.

Then all at once Dillon drew a breath, and beamed as if suddenly infused with a powerful new awareness. “You’re not well!” he said, excitedly. “Worse than that—you’re dying, aren’t you?!”

The profiler threw a sudden gaze at the two-way mirror on the right wall. He regretted it instantly. It was on par with an actor looking at the camera. Entirely unprofessional, but his subject had chewed through his professionalism like a chainsaw. Dillon never took his eyes off of him—gray, unreadable eyes except that they seemed charged both with youth and weariness, as of an in­nocent who has seen too much evil in the world for his own good.

The profiler was determined not to break eye contact. A million ways he could have known. A million ways. “So now you’re telling me you read minds.”

Dillon scoffed. “I don’t have to. It’s written in the patterns of everything you do. The way you breathe, the way you sit, the inflections of your voice. It’s a blood disease, isn’t it? AIDS? No . . . No, leukemia. How many months do they give you?”

“I can’t see how it’s your business.”

“How many?” Dillon demanded. Then when he didn’t get an answer, Dillon sniffed the air, and cocked his head slightly, as if listening for some resonant frequency beyond that intolerable pulsing of his heart. “Six months,” Dillon said. “You’ve been in remission before. Twice . . . maybe three times. This time you’re refusing treatment. You plan to die with dignity.”

The profiler pushed back from the table, infuriated by his own lack of restraint. “What is it you want?!”

Dillon was as composed as his counterpart was agitated, and calmly said, “I want someone to scratch my nose.”

The room suddenly seemed too small, and the table too meager a barrier between them. “This session is over.” The profiler tried to maintain a sense of professional control as he stood from the table, but his voice betrayed how shaken he was. “You will be locked away, and believe me, your friends will be caught!”

“Only if they want to be caught.”

“We caught you.”

“Exactly.”

The interrogator reached for his notepad on the table—forcing temper to his trembling hands—and as he did, Dillon jiggled his hands. All he did was jiggle them, and the cuffs snapped open, and clattered off. “Your old boss didn’t send you here to do a profile,” Dillon said, “he sent you here for this.” Then Dillon thrust an arm forward and grabbed him by the wrist, tightly. The profiler could feel his ulna pressing toward his radius—and the concussive power of that terrible heartbeat. But it wasn’t the beat of the boy’s heart at all, was it? It was something else. It was more like a blast of radiation, luminescence from some unknown reach of the electromagnetic spectrum. It resonated through the profiler’s body now, and he could feel the change within his bones and joints. Something inside him was coming to order! He could actually feel genetic order returning to his mutated marrow!

Then the boy let go. And scratched his nose.

“There. Don’t say I never did anything for you.”

A bruising crunch of guards exploded into the room, grabbing Dillon, forcing him back down into the chair, Dillon offered no resistance, but the guards still struggled as if he had. The profiler backed away. He had thought his training and experience had prepared him for any madness he’d come in contact with. But what if the boy’s touch coincided with a complete and total remission of his disease? Would that be madness? Would he still call that coincidence?

“You’re going to need more than handcuffs,” he told the guards, and he ran out, hurrying home where he could cry in the arms of his wife.

1. Tessic

The nuclear reactor never went on line.

The entire plant was beset by such incredible bad luck and untimely mishaps, it precipitated a storm of rolling heads from Michigan Power and Light, leaving a trail of blood all the way up to the Nuclear Reg­ulatory Commission. Inferior bolts from questionable vendors, leaks in the coolant system, pipes that seemed to do nothing but terminate in solid concrete. No one with an ounce of sense was bringing uranium within a mile of the place.

For years the stillborn power plant stood dormant and cold in the rural community of Hesperia.

Then, one day, the plant came to life.

The towers remained silent, but a flurry of clandestine activity gave that silence added sonority. Locals knew no power was being generated at the plant. The swarms of guards, and dark sedans that flowed in and out of the electrified gates, coupled with dismissive denial from all official sources, made the truth very clear; the Hesperia plant was now some sort of top-secret facility retrofitted by the government for a greater but undisclosed purpose.

Bobby’s Eat-N-Greet Diner, which stood at the crossroads a half mile from the plant’s outer gate, was the closest civilian establishment, and was where residents gathered over coffee to trade and distort un­substantiated rumors. Though not a local, Elon Tessic was becoming something of a regular at the Eat-N-Greet, having popped in once a month since that spring. It was always his first stop whenever he visited the plant. He could have arrived at the plant directly by helicopter, but Tessic much prefered the feel of the road and had instructed that his Jaguar be waiting for him at the airport. Eccentric? Maybe. Besides, it afforded him the opportunity for unauthorized side trips.

On an overcast afternoon in late September, Tessic breezed into the diner, setting off the jingle-bells above the door, alerting the owner that he had a customer. The owner, an elderly man named Bobby, was leaning over, wiping down the counter with a damp rag. When he saw Tessic, he straightened and smiled, “I’ll be damned! Good to see you, Mr. Tessic.”

Tessic opened his overcoat, revealing a white suit hopelessly out of season for fall. But then, when you were Elon Tessic, you could wear anything you pleased. “Hello, Bobby. My travels bring me your way again.” Tessic looked around. It was three in the afternoon—an off hour. Only a couple of truckers sat in a corner, talking about wives and misery. Either they didn’t know who he was, or they didn’t care. Just as well. In these out-of-the-way places, Tessic often found himself the center of suspicious attention. It wasn’t only his clothes, but the prominent way he held himself, and his Israeli accent, so rich and exotic to the ears of the American heartland. As he had no talent for being inconspicuous, he rarely tried. Still it was nice to go unnoticed from time to time.

Bobby, however, gave Tessic his full attention, fumbling with spot­ted hands to get together a place setting.

“My waitress took sick this morning, so it’s just me and the cook today. I’ll have a booth ready for ya’ lickety-split.”

Tessic noted yet another colloquialism he did not know; a re­minder that his command of English was still less than perfect. “No need, Bobby,” he said. “Do you mind if I just sit at the counter?”

Bobby looked at him as if it might be a trick question. Tessic laughed and clapped him warmly on the shoulder. “It’s alright. Ac­tually, I prefer it. I dine alone way too often.”

Bobby shrugged. “Suit yourself.” he said. Tessic slid onto a stool. The old man sounded apologetic. “I was sure you’d be used to more highfalutin black-tie kinds of establishments.”

“Highfalutin bores me. That’s why I come here.”

Bobby smiled.

Tessic ran a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair, just a tad too long to be corporate. Like his clothes, it was genteelly defiant. He was a mote in the eye of the system, liked it that way, and as the twelfth richest man in the world, by the reckoning of Fortune magazine, he was one splinter that wouldn’t easily be removed.

“So will it be the usual then?” Bobby asked.

“Of course!”

Bobby went off to his pastry display case. “Lucky I even have it. If I woulda known you was comin’ I coulda baked it up fresh. As it is, I only got a couple of pieces left.” He took out a plate and a pie server, then gently lifted a piece of chess pie onto the plate. Even chilled, the thick filling oozed out over the plate, its chunky surface of nuts and chocolate slowly slipping on the rich nougat like a rock slide. Tessic dug in, took a mouthful, and savored the sweetness. Tessic considered himself a man who could appreciate the finer things in life—and knew they didn’t always come with a hefty price tag. It was this appreciation that balanced him, and kept him at ease in most any situation.

As Tessic ate, Bobby leaned in closer and whispered. “I got myself a nice piece of Tessitech stock last month.” He said it as if it were a classified secret. “Made me five hundred bucks already. Guess I oughta thank you for helpin’ me get my granddaughter through college!”

“I didn’t know you had a granddaughter that old.”

Bobby nodded. “Got accepted to Princeton, and is hell bent on going. We’re working out some financial aid. But if Tessitech stock keeps climbing the way it’s been it might be the only financial aid she needs!”

“So much faith you have in my company!”

“Well, I figure the world’s going to hell in a handcart. Weapons technology’s got to be a growth industry.”

Tessic grinned dreamily around a mouthful of pie, then said: “I have challenged a dozen chefs to make a pie this good. None have succeeded.”

“No one will. Call it my little contribution to humanity.”

“I would very much like the recipe.”

“So would half the county.”

“If half the county comes in here, business must be good!”

Bobby sighed. “Business comes and goes. Mostly goes. I thought I’d start seeing some military men come in once they took over that plant and all. But it’s only been you. The others rarely come in or out. And when they do, they speed past this place like it don’t exist.” Bobby paused, and pretended to clean a glass, but his attention never left Tessic. “Y’ever gonna tell me what goes on in there?”

Tessic grinned. “Is that the price of your recipe?”

“I suppose we could swap national secrets, huh?”

“Secrets are secrets, eh? The government can buy my silence, but they can’t buy your recipe. I, on the other hand, would like to do just that.” He reached into the pocket of his overcoat, and produced a checkbook. Bobby waved it away.

“Hell, no! I was gonna give it to you anyway. You don’t have to pay me.”

“I insist.” Tessic scribbled in the checkbook. “You can put it to­ward your granddaughter’s tuition.” He folded the check and slipped it into Bobby’s apron pocket.

“Aw hell. Well, then that piece you just had is on the house.” He took a napkin, writing down the recipe from memory. “It don’t take a brain surgeon to make.” When he finished he handed it to Tessic. “You ain’t gonna sell it to Sara Lee, now, are you?”

“I give you my word.”

Tessic stood, straightening his overcoat.

“I suppose you won’t need to come here anymore, now that you got the recipe.”

“And miss your company?” Tessic pulled open the door. “Rest assured, you’ll see me again.”

Tessic left and drove off in his silver Jag. At the diner, Bobby cleaned up Tessic’s plate and then almost as an afterthought slipped the check from his pocket, suspecting that Tessic had given him a digit or two more than the recipe commanded. But the number that stared back at him was so laden with zeros it almost seemed to gain weight in his hand. It was enough to send all his grandchildren to Princeton. His wind stolen from him, he sucked a deep breath, and leaned on the counter to steady himself.

“Hey, Pops,” called one of the truckers at the far booth, “you gonna fill up this coffee or what?”

“Yeah, yeah, be right there.” He looked at Tessic’s check again, blinking as if the number might disappear. The man’s crazy! he thought. I can’t accept this.

But as he went back to pour coffee for the griping truckers, he realized yes, I most certainly can.

Half a mile away, Tessic’s sound system blasted Vivaldi as he was waved through the guard gate of the plant. He was the only civilian granted unrestricted access. One of the perks of having friends in high places, and a vested interest in the facility. With the gate closing behind him and the winding, forested road to the plant up ahead, Tessic changed his personal audio soundtrack to the Rolling Stones, to re­mind him that, at 56, he wasn’t quite as old as he sometimes felt. He looked at the recipe-scribbled napkin that lay on the seat next to him and smiled. No recipe was worth what he had paid, but then, a mitzvah was not measured in dollars and cents. Besides, altruism was the best kind of business investment.

He shifted into a higher gear, singing along to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” feeling quite pleased with himself as he sped down his own particular path of enlightenment.

2. Maddy

Transcription excerpt, day 193. 13:45 hours

“They drug me when they take me out, now. Problem is I metabolize the stuff so fast, they gotta give me elephant doses. Can’t be healthy.”

“Open wide. I can’t see your mouth through the hole.”

“I feel like a slot machine.”

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

“Naah. Suckers’ game.”

“Not with you around. Everyone knows how you closed Las Vegas.”

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

“Is it?”

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

“Haven’t you heard? You are.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that one, too.”

“Would you give your life for your country, Lieutenant Haas?” General Bussard had asked. “Would you give your soul?”

The second question caught her off guard. But as always, she had answered unhesitatingly. “Without pause, sir.” Bussard had shown no reaction, but apparently she had shown the right level of commitment, because she had been chosen for posting to the elite staff of Project Lockdown. Now, however, months after the interview, she remained in the dark as to what exactly the project was. Even as a freshly minted Army Lieutenant she knew better than to ask too many questions. But even by Army standards the silence was deafening.

“It’s Area 51 all over again,” her sister Erica mused, as they sat saying good-byes at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. “Why would you ask to be assigned to the Hesperia plant?” Her sister nursed a Starbucks decaf latte. The drink was so like Erica, Maddy thought: all style and no bite. Like the way she drove her Porsche—always on cruise control. Maddy, on the other hand, liked her coffee no-nonsense black, and hot enough to cauterize a tonsillectomy.

Maddy glanced around, brushing a hand through her dark hair, short enough to be military, but long enough to keep her as feminine as she cared to be. The airport coffee house had a full complement of harried travelers. Everyone was too absorbed in their own transit ennui to care about Maddy and Erica’s conversation. Still Maddy was careful not to raise her voice.

“I didn’t ask,” she told Erica. “Assignments are handed out. We go where we’re told.”

Erika snorted. “Oh, please! Spare me the party line. You can’t tell me a West Point cum laude doesn’t get courted by half the military— even the ones who don’t expect to get into your pants.”

Maddy gulped her coffee, and relished its scalding sting. “It’s still a boys’ club.” But, of course, Erica was right. Even in spite of the boys’ club fraternity she did have quite a lot of options available to her. But rumors of an informational black hole in Hesperia, Michigan, had piqued her curiosity. Mystery was Maddy’s nemesis, and she had be­come obsessed with knowing what they were hiding, or building, or dismantling in that dead power plant. Rumors had abounded in the halls of West Point—rumors that the Hesperia plant was housing some new Manhattan Project. After all, with the state of the world disinte­grating at such an exponential rate over the past year, there was no telling where the next threat would come from. Some even believed the plant was the entryway into a series of subterranean tunnels built for an elite few to survive whatever dark age they were all spiraling towards.

Maddy went up to the counter for a second cup, but was brusquely reminded that, among a thousand other things in the crumbling world economy, there was a shortage on coffee, and even Starbucks was rationing. She settled for some hot water with lemon, then, disgusted, dumped the whole thing into the trash before returning to her sister, who was craning her neck to catch sight of the departure boards, look­ing for a flight that might or might not actually happen. Her sister was headed to New York to some ex-boyfriend, who had decided that pigs had, indeed, flown and he was deeply ready for commitment.

“All those freaks on street corners proclaiming the end of the world finally got to him,” Erica had told her. “He probably just wants to get laid before it happens.”

Maddy’s flight was just a short hop to Grand Rapids, where she would finally be briefed on her assignment at the Hesperia facility.

“Maybe you get to babysit little green men,” Erica suggested.

“More likely gray,” Maddy informed her. “Haven’t the Roswell lunatics taught you anything?”

Erica gave the obligatory chuckle, and gulped the dregs of her latte. “Roswell freaks, Backwash communes—maybe you’ve got the right idea. Lock yourself behind a fence. At least you won’t get nabbed by some damn Colist cult.”

Maddy had to admit she had been, for the most part, shielded at West Point from the aftermath of the Colorado River Backwash. But even so, she knew it was the defining event in people’s lives. Like so many of those who had flocked to the spot where Hoover Dam once stood, she had wanted to witness it as well—to watch the waters of the Colorado River flow upward, in a rising backwash against the pull of gravity, into Lake Mead, if only to prove to her doubting spirit that it ever really happened. Then maybe she, too, might have joined so many others, searching the waters for the body of the martyred Dillon Cole.

Maddy knew it was more than Hoover Dam that had shattered that day. The very nature of creation was shaken to its foundations. If they had suddenly discovered that the world was flat, its consequences could not have been more far reaching than the physical impossibility of a mighty river crashing uphill at a thirty-percent grade. In a matter of days cults began to spontaneously generate on society’s fringes and had quickly germinated into the mainstream. Maddy had found it both frightening and wondrous.

A United 747 came in for a landing and Maddy watched idly as its tires squealed to earth, setting off a tiny puff of smoke on the tarmac. In a moment the jet was a beast of the ground again, ponderous metal that seemed too impossibly heavy to fly. But here was a case of mind over matter—science over perception, mused Maddy. No matter how heavy a plane appeared, Bernouli’s principle assured flight every time a mechanically sound jet sped toward the dead end of the runway. There had always been some comfort in the fact that some natural laws could never be repealed. Slim comfort now.

“Dare I ask what you think about all that business? The Backwash and all?” Erica asked.

“Three generals came to West Point just to tell us not to think about the Backwash.”

“So why do you?”

“Contrary to popular opinion,” Maddy said with a smirk, “cadets, and even we pissant fledgling officers, do have minds of our own. I just wish I could have seen the Backwash with my own eyes before it dried up.”

“Not me,” Erica said. “I have a problem with miracles.”

There was no use pressing this with Erica—she had never been plagued by images of the Big Picture. Fact: Dillon Cole had shattered the law of entropy before he died in the Backwash. But how? Even now, in the places Dillon Cole had trodden, order still flowed from disorder, defying the most basic law of physics. With the law of entropy suddenly removed from the foundation, what, at the end of the day, would be left standing?

You think too much, Erica was fond of reminding Maddy. “You know what I did the day the dam broke?” said Erica. “I had a Backwash party. We poured Vodka into Kahlua until we couldn’t tell which way was up, so it didn’t matter where the hell the water was going.”

“That’s what I love about you, Erica. The only proof you need is 180.”

A team of junior executives hurried past. One of them caught Maddy’s eye. He was no older than herself, twenty-two or so, tops. He noticed her gaze, and held eye contact just long enough to ac­knowledge it before vanishing into the crowd.

“Roll in that tongue, Madeline,” Erica said with a smirk. “What would Mom say?”

“She’d say to bring one home for her.”

Maddy thought back to her tally of distracting, if not quite fulfill­ing, relationships at the academy, and wondered what opportunities her new assignment might provide. She shouldered her carry-on. “I’d better go or I’ll miss my flight.”

“Hah—fat chance of that!” Erica nodded toward the departure screens. In spite of good weather, most flights were interminably de­layed, several were canceled, and those flights that actually did make it out did so on dubious jets in desperate need of maintenance. Even now, the DC-10 pulling up right outside their window looked weak and world-weary.

“Look at that thing,” said Maddy. “It’s like the poster child for metal fatigue.”

It was amazing to think that Americans—so smug in their pre­eminence—had once scoffed at the shoddy state of air travel in Third-World nations and—most desolate of all—Eastern Europe. Maddy smiled ruefully. Now every airline was Aeroflot.

If it were only air travel, the ailment could have been cured, or at least treated—but it seemed every other world system was infected as well. Pundits waxed rhetorical day in and day out about a volatile global economy. Conservatives lamented the loss of traditional values. Liberals attacked greedy corporate interests. Zealots and zanies pre­dicted the coming of, or the death of, God. There were a thousand other reasons why that thin veneer of civilization was suddenly being stripped to the grain. But the answer was clear to Maddy: If the power of one person’s thought could shatter the world’s greatest dam and turn back the massive flood that followed; if there were someone in this world who could do that—then where was the validity of science and reason? Who wouldn’t lose interest in their job and the petty ins— and—outs of their own life? And since civilization depended upon six billion docile and compliant cogs keeping the Grand Clockwork run­ning smoothly, how could the system function with hundreds of thousands of mutinies and desertions, as workers suddenly left their jobs, abandoning their old lives? It didn’t take an economic sage to figure out that everything from airlines to food lines would soon come grinding to a halt.

It was the great irony of civilization—that in the end it wasn’t a bomb, or terrorism or some other global cataclysm that brought down the curtain on this modern world. It was lack of interest.

They both stood, taking deep breaths, preparing to launch into the frenetic stream of anxious travelers. “Once I get to Brooklyn,” Erica said, “I’m swearing off the friendly skies for good and staying put. Because if I gotta live through the fall of the American Empire, I might as well do it where they never had civilization to begin with.”

Maddy hugged her sister, perhaps for the last time in the foreseeable future, then turned away, forcing her feet in front of her, marching toward her overcrowded gate with disciplined military cadence. Re­fusing, as always, to look back.

The massive vault sat in the cold, seven-story dome of the power plant, a square peg in a round hole. This, reasoned Maddy, was where the plant’s nuclear core would have been, but any machinery had long since been disassembled to make room for this cubic concrete egg in the cold womb of the containment dome. The cube was thirty feet on each side, and the only thing that gave away the fact that it was not solid was a silver titanium vault door on its face—a door which, by the way, was currently wide open. Looking around, Maddy could see no gateway into the dome large enough for this massive, incongruous object to fit through—which meant it must have been built right here.

General Bussard, a slab of a man in both appearance and person­ality, studied her reaction to the cube. “Not what you were expecting, Lieutenant?”

“Just observing, sir,” Maddy answered truthfully. “I didn’t know what to expect.” The cavernous dome was lit dimly from above like the unpleasant half-light of a partial eclipse. The walls around them were filigreed with pipes, conduits and catwalks casting intersecting shadows. Maddy counted four armed guards posted on high catwalks, giving them a full view around the cube. Otherwise there was no one else present. She had anticipated that, whatever the purpose or nature of the installation, there would be swarms of personnel. Their absence did not bode well with her. Neither did the open vault door.

“This is my show,” Bussard announced. In the cavernous space his voice rang with a hollow echo. Maddy assumed he had saved the reading of his riot act for this moment, when his voice would be most imposing. “You are not to discuss your work with anyone, either civilian or military. I am your sole confidant in all matters concerning this facility. Any comments or questions are to be directed to me, and me alone.”

Somehow, Maddy couldn’t imagine discussing anything with her superior, but she nodded and said, “Yes, sir. Could you please advise me on the nature of this facility?”

The general shot her a freezing glance. “Information is on a need-to-know basis.”

Why was she not surprised? Bussard strode toward the open vault door with Maddy a pace behind. “You’ll find this a very cushy assign­ment if you take to it with the proper enthusiasm,” Bussard told her. “Plenty of downtime. But, like everyone else, you’ll have to spend it within the gates of the plant. I’m sure you’ll find yourself some rec­reational activities.”

Maddy followed him up to the open door but couldn’t quite make herself move beyond the threshold.

Bussard asked, “Is there a problem, Lieutenant?”

He stood in a door frame that was five feet deep, layered in lead and concrete. Beyond the extended threshold lay darkness. Maddy hesitated, and cursed herself for her failure of nerve. She took a breath to keep herself from stammering. “With your permission, sir, I request a verbal briefing to prepare me for whatever I am about to see.”

The general chuckled, showing a set of perfect teeth. " ‘Verbal briefing?’ " He stepped up to her. “Where did you spend the night after arriving in Michigan, Lieutenant Haas?”

The question caught her off guard. “I . . . uh . . . The Grand Rapids Marriott, sir.”

“Good. Consider yourself briefed.” Then he stepped deeper into the vault and flicked on a light switch.

If the cube was incongruous with its surroundings, the cube’s in­terior was stranger still. It was, in fact, a hotel room. A queen-sized bed, a desk, a chair. The only difference was the absence of windows.

“We like to keep our guest comfortable,” said Bussard. He walked around the room like a bellhop, pointing out the room’s features. “TV with DVD library. Extra linens. Bathroom with shower.” Then he got down to business. “Your assignment is very specific. It is your job to deliver three meals at seven hundred, thirteen hundred, and nineteen hundred hours precisely. You will have no contact with our guest, as he has therapy sessions at those times, and will not return until after you are gone. With each meal you bring, you will remove the tray from the previous meal. With the morning meal you will change the linens. With lunch you will clean the bathroom. With dinner . . . "

Bussard went on and on, but Maddy found herself unable to listen. Rage was rising in her. She was a cum laude cadet—top five percent of her class at West Point. She had come through officer’s training with commendations from everyone that mattered, and now the mil­itary saw fit to turn her into a chambermaid.

Bussard droned on as if reading her Miranda rights. “You will wear gloves at all times in this room, and dispose of them immediately after each use. You will find a detailed description of your duties in your quarters. Is there any part of your assignment you do not understand?”

“No, sir. Permission to speak freely, sir.”

“Permission denied.” He escorted her out of the chamber, and once they were back in the expansive void of the dead plant, he turned to her again. “There are only six people in the world with security clearance to be in that room—including the two of us. Consider your­self honored.”

“I’ll remember that, sir, while I’m cleaning the toilet.”

“I’ve been here since the beginning, and Bussard hasn’t seen fit to tell me anything,” Lt. Gerritson told Maddy over a cafeteria pot roast filled with more salt than meat. The cafeteria, like the plant itself, was a dinosaur that never saw the light of day. It was designed to seat about 100 employees of Michigan Power, but now there were never more than ten military personnel at peak hours. By Maddy’s second week, a meal with Lt. Vince Gerritson was a welcome relief to the oppres­siveness of a large table and a solitary dinner. Maddy was quick to discover that Gerritson was the only person bold enough to discuss what little he knew about their shadowy purpose there.

“It’s the lack of oversight that scares me,” Gerritson said. “They let Bussard run this place any way he sees fit. Tessic’s the only one Bussard doesn’t control.”

“They let civilians from Tessitech in this place?”

“No,” Gerritson said. “I mean Tessic, himself.”

“No shit!”

“He had something to do with the design of the vault. But now I think he pops in every once in a while just to piss off Bussard.”

Tessic was a name well known in the military ever since Tessitech beat out every competitor for a dozen military contracts over the past five years. His name was synonymous with cutting-edge technology; a former wunderkind who, now in his fifties, was on his way to being the richest man in the world. Maddy judged that his presence here was an exception to protocol and not to be taken lightly.

“When did this whole operation start?” Maddy asked.

Before answering, Gerritson glanced around to scan their present company. A few tables away were three men in lab coats discussing sports scores. Maddy didn’t know them, but had seen them at meals. The plant had a contingent of about ten Coats, as Gerritson had called them. Scientists, or technicians, or physicians—no one seemed to have a clue what their profession actually was. They didn’t associate with military personnel, undoubtedly by Bussard’s order.

“The plant was retrofitted for Project Lockdown about eight months ago,” Gerritson told her. “I was about to get a disability dis­charge, but instead they assigned me here.”

“Disability?”

“Long story.” Gerritson shoved a piece of grizzly meat in his mouth, and worked his jaws like it was an oversized piece of chewing gum. Maddy hoped he might elaborate, but no dice. Whatever the story, he wasn’t telling it.

“And exactly how do you fit into all of this? What’s your job here?”

Gerritson smirked. “Now, come on, Lieutenant Haas. That kind of information is on a need-to-know basis.”

Maddy volleyed back the smirk. “I need to know.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so?” Gerritson glanced around again. It was almost a tick. A habit developed from being too long under Bussard’s scrutiny. He leaned over his plate, confidingly. “Security detail,” he whispered. “Right wing of team zero.”

“OK. Now in English.”

“There are three of us who escort our ‘guest’ to his so-called ‘ther­apy’ sessions. Three times a day; before breakfast, lunch and dinner. The rest of our time is spent on facility maintenance.”

“And our guest is . . . ?

Gerritson grinned. “Didn’t quite hear that. You’ll have to ask me some other time.”

“You heard me perfectly,” Maddy whispered, both irritated and appreciative of their little game of intrigue. Gerritson said nothing more, just grinned away. Maddy found herself taking a mental snapshot of that grin. His smile—his face—was worth remembering. Unfor­tunately her shutter speed was too slow. He knew he had just been scanned into her long-term memory, and he held the grin a moment too long, as if posing for her Kodak moment. There was, she knew, a danger couched in this sustained moment. Danger and opportunity.

“You hang around long enough,” Gerritson said, “and you won’t need me to give you ideas about our guest. You’ll have plenty of your own.”

“Well, can you tell me what he looks like?”

“Can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Can’t,” he told her. “Ever read The Man in the Iron Mask?”

Maddy took a moment to let the casters click. “Oh,” Maddy nod­ded. “I see.”

“No, that’s the point. Nobody sees. Bussard makes sure of that.”

That was true enough. Maddy wasn’t even allowed into the con­tainment dome until their guest was removed, and, true to Bussard’s word, he never returned until long after Maddy completed her room service detail. Whoever it was, he ate all his meals cold.

The cafeteria door banged open. Another member of “team zero,” Gierritson told her. He grabbed a cellophane-wrapped sandwich from the counter, then left.

“So would Bussard rupture a sphincter if he knew we were talking like this?”

Gerritson laughed. “The man’s been holding it in since his diaper days. I don’t want to be there when he blows.”

Maddy shrugged it off, feigning indifference. “I’m a military brat— I’ve been around men like him all my life. I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad if he ran this place with more than just a skeleton crew. Then maybe he’d spread his good will a little thinner.”

“Bussard’s a minimalist,” Gerritson explained. “He figures the fewer the bodies—"

“—the fewer the graves?”

“The smaller the staff, the easier it is to control. The fewer chances for leaks, and snafus.” Gerritson looked down, and plowed a spoon around his mashed potatoes before giving up on them entirely. “Does it bother you that you’re the only woman in this place?”

“No,” she told him. “Why? Would you prefer it if I had a penis?”

Gerritson laughed. “Well, shut my mouth,” he said, slipping into a stagey southern drawl. “Guess you don’t got the plumbing, but I reckon you’ve got yourself a nice set of balls.”

Maddy laughed. “You’re wrong, you know—about me being the only woman. There are at least three Coats.”

“The Coats don’t count. They might be here with us, but they’re not on the same deep dive.”

Maddy looked Gerritson over, not quite catching his meaning. “Deep dive?”

Then Gerritson got serious. Too serious for Maddy’s taste. “This place is a submarine, Lieutenant Haas. And whether you like it or not, your reputation precedes you.”

Maddy scrubbed the toilet with a vengeance, and washed down the shower in the armored guest room that never even had a hint of soap scum. Still, she couldn’t strip away the filthy feeling she had taken with her from the cafeteria. She had stormed away from Gerritson, without giving him the satisfaction of a second glance before she banged her way through the double doors. What had he meant? She had never thought of herself as having a “reputation” among her social circle at West Point. She was attractive, she liked men, and that left her in quite a power position. She could pick and choose her liaisons, always the one to decide the length of any lover’s tenure. But a rep that followed her halfway across the country cast everything in a new light. It made her wonder if her sense of control had been nothing more than a convenient delusion.

She dined alone in her quarters, then sought Gerritson out. He, too, was alone—in the expansive complex it was hard not to be. He played pool against himself in the rec room.

“Want me to rack ’em up?” Gerritson asked. “Or did you bring your own?”

Maddy refused to take the bait. “From now on, Lieutenant Ger­ritson, I suggest we limit our conversation to topics that do not com­promise the security of this installation. Any deviation from that mandate, and I’m afraid I’ll have to report it immediately to General Bussard.”

Gerritson racked up the balls. “Are you going to break, or shall I?”

Maddy pulled a cue from the wall, refusing to back down from the challenge. She broke, and sank the number one ball. “I graduated fourth in my class at West Point. Did you know that?”

“I do now.”

“With honors, and high commendations. If that’s the reputation you were referring to, I’m glad it preceded me.”

“It’s not.”

She shot the cue ball, and sunk the number two ball, although she was aiming for the seven. “In that case, I have no idea what you were talking about.” But her lie had neither conviction nor substance, and he knew it. She shot again, nicking the cue ball. It zigged wildly, but managed to find the number three ball, which dropped cleanly into a corner pocket.

“Nice shot.”

It was, of course, luck—but she wasn’t about to admit that to him. She made a play at scanning the table for the optimum shot.

“It doesn’t matter where you aim,” Gerritson sighed, hands in his pockets. “The pattern won’t change. You’ll sink the four ball next.”

To spite him, she deliberately aimed at that pesky seven ball, only to have it ricochet away from the corner, sideswiping the fourteen, which careened into the nine, which tapped the four ball just hard enough for it to drop into a side pocket.

“See? No sense playing pool when our guest is still out of his cage,” he said. “The game just doesn’t work.” And although Maddy didn’t quite catch the meaning, it made her feel that the more balls she sank, the greater Gerritson’s victory. So the next time, she tapped the cue hall just lightly enough to move it a few inches, clattering into a cluster of balls, but without enough momentum to send them anywhere. She stood back, and let him have at the table.

“There are twenty-two men sequestered in this tomb,” Gerritson said, taking his time about shooting. “No contact with the outside world, no phone calls or visitors allowed. Morale gets low under those conditions.” He shot, and sank one of her balls. Number five. He sighed, and backed away from the table.

“Are you suggesting that I was brought here just to provide you boys with a little recreation?”

“No. You were brought here because of your qualifications. But all it takes is one man who knew you at West Point to spread rumors about your social skills. For all I know Bussard planned it that way.”

She gripped her cue, half believing she would bring it down across the top of his crew-cut head, but she restrained herself.

“And why would he do that?”

Gerritson shrugged. “Who knows. Maybe just to make things in­teresting around here, maybe to raise morale. Or maybe he’s interested in you himself.”

She dropped her cue to the table, decidedly disgusted. She was not a whore, but neither was she a saint. She had chain smoked her way through men like they were a carton of Camels—and apparently that was common knowledge. Had she been a man, her appetite and con­quests would have been lauded. But she was a woman.

“If it is intentional, I think Bussard’s way out of line,” Gerritson said, sauntering closer to her. “But the world’s not the place it was a year ago. And when things go crazy, there’s always men like Bussard who’ll take advantage of that.”

Although she was admittedly attracted to Gerritson, she knew there was more danger in it than opportunity now. She laughed bitterly. “If Bussard plans to put me on poontang duty, he’s in for a surprise. There are some parts of me the Army doesn’t own.”

“I hope that’s true.”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

Only now did she notice how close to her he stood. Had he moved into her space, or had she stepped into his? It troubled her that she didn’t know.

She finally pushed away, gathered herself and headed for the door, but she couldn’t make herself leave. And if he stepped up to her again, what would she do? She knew what she would do. She would go to him. She would move into his arms, and if they weren’t open, she would force them open to receive her.

Gerritson kept a respectful distance now, but there was an honesty to his voice that made him feel much closer. “I’ll defend your honor here, Maddy. And anyone who wants a piece of you is going to have to go through me. Even Bussard.”

She laughed out loud, not wanting or needing his protection.

“All of us were assigned here not just for our strengths, but because of our weaknesses as well,” Gerritson said. “That’s how Bussard con­trols us. But here, within these walls, there’s a way to fix things that are broken.”

“And what’s your weakness, Gerritson? How are you ‘broken’?”

He hesitated a moment, keeping a poker face. “I’m deaf,” he said, with deadpan seriousness. “All the members of Zero Team are. Part of the requirement.”

Her initial response was more laughter, believing that this was a joke at her expense. But Gerritson wasn’t laughing.

“Last year I got too close to a land mine that wasn’t even supposed to be armed. It was the concussive shock that did it. But instead of a disability discharge, I got plucked up by Bussard for this assignment.”

Maddy found herself reviewing their conversations in her mind. There was no sign in any of them that his hearing was gone, or even diminished.

“If you’re deaf, then how did you know what I was saying when I turned my back?”

Gerritson grinned. “Careful,” he said. “All information is on a need-to-know basis. And some things Bussard doesn’t need to know.”

The events of the days that followed seared themselves into Maddy’s mind no less powerfully than war itself. But this war was a small one, contained by the thick concrete walls of the dome.

It happened four days later, at lunchtime. Hers and Gerritson’s paths had barely crossed over those four days, and when they had Bussard was always within earshot, there was no conversation. Maddy had to admit she was in no hurry to speak with Gerritson again. In a couple of weeks maybe she’d force some perspective and take him on in another game of pool, but for now silence and solitude were her new best friends. If nothing else, there was the satisfaction of Bussard’s dissatisfaction with her. Not with her job, but with her lack of contact and socialization with the rest of her submarine mates. To Bussard’s chagrin, she became a source of tension, rather than its relief. It was a small victory, but a victory nonetheless.

Then came the day when the guard at Corridor A was not at his post. This was the path prescribed for Maddy when she entered the containment dome. She would wheel the tray from the cafeteria through the lower access way, then down Corridor A, where an armed guard would prevent her passage until their Honored Guest had been spirited from the dome through another corridor by Gerritson and the rest of Zero Team. But today the corridor guard had left his post, and gone into the containment dome, leaving the door ajar. Beyond that door, Maddy could hear shouting in the dome. Leaving her cart, she pushed the door wide to see what was going on. It was Gerritson. Apparently, he had gone mad.

He had taken the other two members of Zero Team by surprise. One was already sprawled on the floor, and the other he hurled over something that looked like an armored wheelchair which sat at the threshold of the open vault. The chair was occupied: their Honored Guest.

The Corridor A guard was next—Gerritson used the guard’s own momentum to slam his head into the edge of the open vault door, and he collapsed in a heap at the threshold.

Up above, one of the sharpshooters took aim.

Maddy ran toward Gerritson, scrolling through all the possible ways she could disable a battle-trained, adrenaline-pumped officer be­fore a bullet could do the job first.

Seeing the gunman above, Gerritson rolled, and the bullet rico­cheted off the vault door. Then in a second Gerritson was moving again. This time he was behind the wheelchair, his legs sprinting as he pushed the wheelchair in an erratic serpentine path toward Corridor A.

A second shot cratered the concrete beside him, but the third shot caught him in the shoulder. Still it did not slow his momentum, or dampen his determination.

“Stop! They’ll kill you!” Maddy yelled, standing in his path—but as he approached, she realized it wasn’t madness or rage in his eyes. It was peace. A calm transcendence funneled into action.

“Out of my way, Maddy! I know what I’m doing!” He knocked her out of his path with the strange wheelchair.

“Stop him!” She couldn’t see Bussard, but recognized his voice. His footsteps clattered down a metal staircase on a catwalk up above.

The Corridor A guard, his head still bleeding, got up, then raised his pistol with the practiced calm he had been trained for, and fired. The bullet whizzed past, inches from Maddy’s ear, and entered the base of Gerritson’s skull, detonating the right side of his head. A spray of blood left a red arc across the mouth of the corridor, and splattered across Maddy’s face.

He was dead before he hit the ground, and the wheelchair careened forward, smashing into the food cart before skidding to a halt.

Maddy reacted with a directed wrath that arrived too late to make a difference. As the corridor guard ran past her, she grabbed his arm and snapped it at the elbow, then jabbed her fist into his epiglottis, so he couldn’t even scream from the pain of the broken arm—only gasp for air as he collapsed to the ground. Now that Maddy’s own adren­aline had shot into the red, she would have gone on decimating the guard for what he had done, had not Bussard’s voice begun to boom in the space around her.

“Stand down, Lieutenant!” He crossed the floor toward her. “I said stand down!”

Maddy forced her arms to her sides. Damage control, she thought. While Bussard did his, she would effect her own. Gerritson was dead. Nothing could be done to change that. Now she had to divorce her mind from the context—belay the emotional imperative, and talk her way out of a court martial. Damage control now. Assess later.

“Yes sir. Protecting the guest, sir. The guard’s aim could have been off and—"

“Enough!” Bussard turned to one of the recovering members of Zero Team.

“McCall! Get Gerritson out of here. Take him to the loading dock for now. We’ll deal with him after this situation is under control.”

“Yes, sir.” The officer turned briskly and ran off.

“Wait!” shouted Bussard. The officer halted, then turned hesi­tantly. “You heard my order, McCall?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then carry it out.”

The exchange baffled Maddy, until she realized something. He wasn’t supposed to hear the order. No one in Zero Team was. They had begun their jobs deaf.

“Haas, get the prisoner. Bring him back to his cell.”

“Don’t you mean guest, sir?”

“Just do it!”

She followed McCall, realizing with a swell of horror that she would have to step over Gerritson’s body to get to the wheelchair. The cement floor was slick with blood and brain tissue. A gurgling sounded bubbled in Gerritson’s throat. Maddy felt herself getting sick, and silently scolded herself. She stepped over the body. All at once Gerritson’s hand shot out and coiled itself around her ankle. She turned to find there was life in his eyes, that seemed to be growing stronger, rather than weaker.

“W . . . w . . . wonderful,” bubbled Gerritson’s voice through bloody lips.

“Jesus!” McCall turned to retch on the lunch cart.

Half of Gerritson’s cranium was gone, and still he spoke. “Won­derful, Haas. Wonderful.” But didn’t that gaping fissure above his right eye seem smaller than it had just a moment ago, Maddy thought. Wasn’t his cortex now showing a maze of convolutions where there had been nothing but pulp? And didn’t the blood seem to be soaking back into him, instead of spilling out?

Bussard grabbed her and turned her away from the sight. “Secure the prisoner! Now!”

Following orders was suddenly the easiest, most appealing thing to do. Her military training bypassed her conscious mind, and before she knew what she was doing, she was back in the dome, pushing the heavy wheelchair toward the open door of the vault. On her way, she passed the corridor guard, who was flexing his arm absently, as if she had done little more than tweak his funny bone. But she had broken it—she knew she had. Still there was no sign of the damage.

She crossed through the vault’s threshold, into the cubic cell. Only once she was inside the claustrophobic chamber did she dare to look down at the mysterious guest.

The first thing she noticed was the true nature of his conveyance. It was less a wheelchair and more an Iron Maiden. Heavy steel bars came across his arms and legs. A plate molded to conform to his chest covered his whole upper body, and was welded to the chair. And yes, he did have a mask, but it was hardly iron. The alloy was a polished titanium composite, like the vault door. It covered his entire head, and the holes for eyes, nose and mouth gave him the eerie semblance of a somber jack-o’-lantern. The entire apparatus had a fine seam right down the middle, as if it could be cranked open, but there was no sign of a release or keyhole anywhere. She thought she had never seen anyone quite so helpless.

And then he spoke.

“He was trying to free me,” the voice said, much younger, much gentler than she expected it to sound. “I’m sorry. He meant something to you, didn’t he?”

“I . . . I barely knew him.”

Then she caught his eyes in the small sockets of the face-plate. They were piercing gray, and seemed to float before his hidden face, rather than reside within it.

“Don’t torture yourself,” he whispered. “This isn’t your pain to bear.”

The words reached right through her, and her reeling mind came clear. It was as if he had reached into her soul, removed the shrapnel and sutured up the wound left by the day’s nightmare. And then, in a quiet twinkling of revelation, it occurred to her who he was—who he had to be! It was there in his eyes, and in the flush of presence that steeped the room. It was the same atmospheric charge described by those who had stood on the rim of Black Canyon, and watched as Dillon Cole stood on the canyon floor, and shattered the great dam with the mere force of his will. More than four hundred perished in the canyon before the Backwash began, carrying their bodies back up into Lake Mead—But his body was never recovered. Now Maddy knew the reason why. And the reason for this fortress within a fortress.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” she asked.

Silence for a moment, and then a gentle response. “You could scratch my nose.”

And so she reached in through the small breathing hole, and did.

Once Haas was escorted out and the vault sealed, General Benjamin Bussard cleared the area of all other personnel. Then, standing alone in Corridor A, he fired a full clip of hollow-tipped bullets into Ger­ritson’s face until he had no eyes to see, nor mouth to speak; until his body held neither memory nor a glimmer of life. And when he was done, Bussard stood there watching and waiting, to make sure his death took.

3. Winston

Transcription excerpt, day 197. 19:25 hours

“I’ve been thinking about the way we fit together. The Shards, I mean.”

“I thought you hated each other.”

“Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. It’s a complex relationship. There were things we learned at Hearst Castle, when we were doing all that healing. I could set broken bones, and break down tumors, but when there was someone suffering from a virus—nothing. And then Tory—she was better than antibiotics when it came to bacterial infections, but again, no luck on viruses. But when we were in a room together. When we touched someone at the same time, the virus washed clean.”

“And you think that means something?”

“I don’t know. When you mix the colors of the spectrum, you get pure white, right?”

“Or mud—it depends on whether you’re mixing light, or pigment.”

“So which are we?”

Two time zones away, Winston Pell dozed during an in-flight movie, into a dream that was no different at thirty-five thou­sand feet as it had been at sea level. He was sitting in a lavender lounge chair, floating in the air at a dizzying height, and gagging on the sickly sweet smell of some floral perfume. There was a building before him, and standing on the ledge were three figures. A man, woman, and child. They watched impassively as Winston’s floating chair lost buoy­ancy and he plunged to the earth below.

Winston awoke with a start, and got his bearings. The flight atten­dants were collecting trash, and final credits were rolling on the in­flight movie. He blinked, trying to clear his eyes—the three figures in his dream had left an afterimage on his fovea. The dim spots in the center of his vision took a few moments to fade along with the residual sensation the dream left behind; the sensation that he needed to do something. The dream always brought with it a piercing call to action, but with no direction. He had no idea what he had to do, only that there was a burning need to do it. So he had hopped on a plane to pay his respects to Michael Lipranski’s father—because if he had to do something, it was as good a thing as any.

Now he peered from his window to see nothing looming outside but unimpressive variations of normal as he descended into Orange County toward John Wayne Airport. The weather pattern in Southern California was back in control. Or out of control, depending on your point of view. There would be no hoarfrost at dawn on the sands of Newport Beach. No inexplicable downpours, or bubbles of sunshine defying the grim blanket of the marine layer. Outside Winston’s plane, the clouds blew untethered, with no memory of Michael Lipranski, the boy who, for a time, had controlled them. His death had set the skies free.

Winston glanced at his watch, and adjusted it three hours back, to noon. Then he reached over and checked his carry-on—a black leather backpack that rested in the seat beside him.

“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to put that back under the seat for landing,” the flight attendant intoned in a practiced voice. It almost sounded recorded, like the White-Zone Nazi, whose voice resounded in every airport in the world.

“I know the drill,” Winston said. He shifted it gently to the ground, as if to slide it under the seat, but when she was gone, he hoisted it back up. He needed the legroom, FAA regulations be damned. The nervous traveler across the aisle threw him an anemic miffed look, as if this baggage infraction could trigger a mid-air collision.

Winston returned his gaze. “You need a shave,” Winston told him.

The man looked away, and mumbled under his breath. “I shaved this morning.”

“Still need one.”

Confused, the man absently passed his hand over his cheek and found stubble that could have been a week old.

Winston grinned. It was a guilty pleasure harassing the people within his sphere of influence. One of the few pleasures he allowed himself lately. Hair growth, nail growth—anything that could grow or regenerate did so when caught within Winston’s field. Such was his unique talent; different, yet somehow connected to the various abilities and effects of the other shards. No doubt there would be several people on today’s flight who would be making unexpected trips to Supercuts this afternoon.

After a bumpy descent, the plane pulled in five minutes late. “Santa Ana condition,” the pilot had said; the periodic off-shore flow that brought hot, dry winds from the desert, and forced planes to land from the west.

Once in the terminal, Winston suffered the ordeal of a 17-year-old black kid under an assumed name renting a car in a lily-white airport, trying to look as old as his fake ID claimed he was. Thaddeus Stone, 21, a combination of his brother’s name, and his nickname. The clerk handed him the keys, then Winston waited for his luggage to come shuttling down the baggage claim carousel.

As he waited he caught sight of a security guard trying unsuccess­fully to roust a clutch of Colists that had camped out like squatters.

“Incredible,” grumbled one of the passengers. “It’s the sixties all over again.” Which was true to an extent—and yet in some ways this was markedly different. Back then it had been a generation that chose to tune in, turn on and drop out in full view of a gawking silent majority. But this time, there were no generational boundaries. Nor were there racial or socioeconomic boundaries to the phenomenon. People of all walks of life had surrendered themselves to something too large to be called a cult, and too disorganized to be called a religion. It could only be called a movement. In this case it was a movement that rivaled the motion of the tides in its scope and pervasiveness.

This particular group was a melting pot of strange bedfellows. At least four generations were represented, white, black, hispanic, and Asian. There were at least thirty people engaged either in prayer or in accosting travelers as they passed. More security guards were called in. Although Winston usually avoided the many gatherings of self-proclaimed Colists, this time he ventured closer, drawn by the sight of a black man in a wrinkled Armani suit and bare feet. The man had clearly been a professional before walking this strange path. He re­minded Winston of his own father, who had died much too young.

“Hello, friend,” the gentleman said, as Winston approached. “Do you know Dillon Cole?”

Winston had to smile at the question. “Yes. Yes, as a matter of fact I do.”

“He died for you.”

“I thought that was Jesus.”

The man grinned, knowingly. “History is a mirror, my friend.”

Winston was sure the man had a pat response for any comment thrown at him. Responses that were paradoxically as obtuse as they were wise. “Buzz off,” Winston told him.

The man grinned like a leprechaun. “I saw the Backwash!” he told Winston. “It was real! I stepped in the flow of the river, and my dead pancreas was reborn. You’re looking at a diabetic who hasn’t needed insulin for a year!” He put an avuncular hand on Winston’s shoulder. “Son,” he said. “Say what you like, but I know I was touched by God.”

“It’s human nature to see divinity in anything greater than oneself,” Winston said, recalling the prophetic words from his troubled past.

“In the coming days, there will be wonders.”

And horrors, thought Winston. A world full of horrors, if Dillon’s dire predictions were true. Winston wondered how much truth had filtered down the chain of rumor to these people. True, the Backwash, for as long as it had lasted, had been a quantifiable “miracle,” but most everything else was subject to distorted word of mouth. How much did any of these people really know? And what would they do if they knew that he was the Winston Pell? Did they even acknowledge that there had been five others beside Dillon Cole, whose souls shimmered with the powerful light of the Scorpion Star?

“What about the others,” Winston dared to ask. “The other great souls, whose powers rivaled Dillon’s?”

“Servants,” said the man dismissively. “Servants only.”

lt was a slap in the face, but, thought Winston, a deserved slap. It had been their unbridled hubris that had created this mess to begin with. The brief time he and the others had walked the ways of Gods had set the world teetering off its balance. This man was prime evi­dence of that.

And now, in spite of how hard Dillon had tried to prevent it, he had become a religious icon of the highest order, with the speed of a satellite transmission—not like in the old days where it took genera­tions to spread the word. There was a time when Winston had hated Dillon, until Winston finally came to realize that this destroyer/creator was neither god nor demon. Dillon was, in the end, just like Winston; a kid with no clue how to rein in his own powers, much less handle the affairs of a rapidly failing world. Dillon, who had once been a hated enemy, was now a friend. The only one he had left.

“Dillon brings life from death.”

“So I’ve heard.” Winston couldn’t decide whether talking to this man was mental masturbation or more like picking at a sore. Either way, Winston had had enough. He reached into his pocket to hand the man a dollar, if only to shut him up. The man smiled indulgently, but he wouldn’t take it.

“It’s not your money we want,” the man beamed. “It’s your soul.”

Winston shivered in the hot wind.

As Winston drove toward Newport Beach, he could see that the Santa Ana winds had already done their damage this year. The winds had ripped over the mountains, tearing up overwatered trees in the Stepford-green neighborhoods of Orange County, and sending a bar­rage of plastic trash barrels rolling in and out of traffic, because the Santa Anas invariably blew in on trash day.

Michael’s beach house was easy to find. It was the one with the big “Sold” sign staring across the beach to the Pacific. He heard some noise from the rear of the home and made his way to the alley behind.

He’d expected he’d be paying his respects to Michael’s father, but instead he saw Drew Camden laboring with some boxes toward a U-Haul truck.

Seeing Drew brought back too many memories he’d just as soon forget, so he took his time, and waited before stepping into view. Drew had been Michael’s friend—Winston didn’t know him well. Drew had been their biographer, deep under Michael’s nature-changing influ­ence in some unsettling way. Although Drew was not one of the Shards, he was currently the closest thing to an ally.

Winston had only seen Drew once since the collapse of the dam. It was back in July. Drew had sought out Winston that time, finding him in the remains of his overgrown Alabama neighborhood, where few people lived anymore and the wrecks of homes stood over­whelmed by vines, like a Mayan ruin. Winston’s effect in action.

“I want to put some closure on all of this,” Drew had told him on the buckling boards of Winston’s front porch. No longer under Mi­chael’s influence, Drew’s nature seemed . . . well, much more natural. He had come all the way to Alabama to tell Winston how Michael and Tory had died, for he felt Winston deserved to know. According to Drew, they were caught in the dam the moment it gave way, most likely buried under thousands of tons of rubble. So it was a shock when Drew called weeks later to tell him that Michael had, indeed, been discovered—and in the desert, no less—almost ten miles from the fallen dam. How he got there was a mystery that Michael had taken to his grave. As for Tory, her remains were still unaccounted for.

The muffled sound of pounding waves resonated in the narrow Newport Beach alley. Winston stepped out into full view as Drew approached the U-Haul with a box. Drew saw him and set down the heavy box in the back of the open truck. If he was surprised to see Winston, he didn’t show it.

“You missed the funeral,” Drew said.

“I’ve got a problem with cemeteries.”

Drew considered that. “They grow on you.”

Winston dredged up a grin. “Yeah, that’s the problem.”

Winston found himself gazing off at some bermuda grass poking through the cracks in the pavement. It was already growing fast and furious like the kudzu back home, new shoots sprouting before his eyes. Most of the time he chose not to look. He had long since dis­pensed with worrying about the things that were beyond his control.

Michael’s father came out carrying a lamp in each hand. He was a man of forty-five, prematurely gray but in good physical condition, as Michael had been. He seemed to be bearing up well under his grief. He nodded a hello to Winston, and looked to Drew. “Friend from school?”

“Yeah, you could say that,” Drew said.

Mr. Lipranski put the lamps in the back of the truck. “Take a break if you want, Drew. We’ve got all day.” He went back inside.

“I’m helping him move,” Drew said. “He could afford it back when Michael was selling his services, but not now.” Drew leaned against the side of the rental truck, wiped some sweat from his brow, then reached into a cooler and handed Winston a Dr Pepper. “Any word from Dillon or Lourdes?”

“Still AWOL.”

“Both of them?”

Winston nodded.

“Do you think they’re together?”

Winston popped his tab, feeling the fine spray graze his face. He shrugged, “I doubt it. I’ve got some hunches where Lourdes might be, but no clue about Dillon.”

While Lourdes had ridden into the sunset the day the dam broke, Winston had kept in close contact with Dillon . . . until the day Dillon just up and disappeared six months ago, leaving Winston alone to watch all of Dillon’s prophetic predictions come true. Shifting alli­ances; breakdown of communication; a plague of apathy, the disso­lution of reason. And where are you now, Dillon? We’ve found Michael’s body—where the hell are you?

Since the old times were not worth catching up on, Winston got to the point. “I’d like you to show me where Michael is buried.”

Drew put down his empty can. “Why? You gonna fill out his ivy?” Winston frowned, scalded by the remark. “I’m sorry,” said Drew. “I didn’t mean that. It’s just—" He reached up and flicked a droplet from his eye that could have been sweat, but was most likely a tear. “It’s not far from here. Let me finish up, and I’ll take you.”

Corona Del Mar Memorial Park was a piece of land with a gor­geous ocean view.

“It’s up here,” Drew said as they trudged up the gentle slope. “There weren’t many plots left for sale. It’s a popular spot.”

It struck Winston as odd that such a view would be wasted on residents with no windows to appreciate it. Best to be entombed like Snow White, in a casket of glass facing west to catch the rays of the setting sun.

They stopped by a rectangular patch of earth surrounded by other occupied graves—older ones with well-trimmed hedges and low gran­ite headstones. Michael was buried among strangers. It was a modest grave. Still unmarked, with sorry plugs of ivy that had yet to take root.

“No gravestone yet?” questioned Winston.

“Not yet. And his father isn’t even sure he wants one.”

“Why not?”

“Ever been to Paris?” Drew asked. “Ever see Jim Morrison’s grave?”

Winston had never seen it, but he knew enough to get Drew’s point. It was a counterculture shrine, the area around it defaced by graffiti and spoiled with litter. The names of the Shards were known now in just about every corner of the world, and whether or not they were considered mere servants of Dillon, fanatics were everywhere. For the same reason Winston had to travel under an assumed name, the marked grave of Michael Lipranski would never see any peace.

He noted the sad, forlorn way Drew looked at the grave. For a moment he wished he had Dillon’s skill at divining a person’s thoughts and feelings. “Were you and Michael lovers?” he asked.

Drew shook his head. Even without Dillon’s power, Winston could read a whole canvas of emotions there. “More of an unrequited love thing,” Drew said. “At least for me. He wasn’t into it.”

“I shouldn’t stay too long,” Winston said. “I’ve got to follow a lead that might bring me to Lourdes.” Winston gave Drew his pager number. “If you find Dillon, let me know.”

“I won’t find him,” Drew said. “I’m not looking.”

Winston lingered a few moments more.

“Did you just want to pay your respects?” asked Drew, clearly uncomfortable to be at his friend’s grave so soon after he was laid to rest. “Or is there another reason why you came?”

Winston knelt down to the grave. “I don’t know.” He reached his hand down to touch the earth, and for an instant the dream flashed though his mind again like a static shock.

A lavender lounge chair.

A ledge.

Three figures.

Why have I come here, Michael? I’m not Dillon, I can’t give you back your life. What is it I’m supposed to do? But Michael’s grave, like all graves, gave its answers in variations of silence. His only course now was south, following the solitary lead that might take him to Lourdes.

By the time they left a few minutes later, Michael’s Ivy was green and lush, and Winston’s mind was still a dry heave, willing him to action against a painful absence of purpose.

4. Lost Horizon

Transcription excerpt, day 202, 13:51 hours

“I’m worried about Lourdes. Winston’s fine out there—But I don’t think things are right with her. I think she got pushed off the brink, and never came back.”

“How much damage could she do on her own?”

“Lots, if she chose to. When I last saw her, she could put a room of people to sleep, or turn them into a kick-line, hopping in time against their will. We called her the puppeteer, and she hated it. But now there’s no telling how many she’s got on the end of her strings.”

“If she hasn’t surfaced, maybe she won’t. There’s a good chance the gov­ernment has her, like they have you, and are hiding her in some other secret installation.”

“No. When I’m out there in the tower I can feel her somewhere out there. And it scares me.”

The cruise ship was never actually reported missing.

Monarch cruise line simply listed the S.S. Blue Horizon as out of serv­ice, but rumors abounded. Rumors that it had vanished in the Ber­muda Triangle; that it broke apart in a storm; that it was torpedoed by friendly fire. The truth, however, was much simpler, and slightly more embarrassing to Monarch Cruises. Simply put, the eighty-thousand-ton cruise ship had been seized by pirates.

Winston Pell had kept his ear to the ground for many months in search of such anomalous events, which was no easy task, because over the past year, daily life had evolved into one anomalous event after another. Riots springing up unprovoked, stocks fluctuating so violently analysts were jumping out of windows. There was a surge in the num­ber of militant religious zealots, as well as rampant hedonism popping up in the most straight-laced of bible-thumping towns.

And all because everyone could sense that the world had suddenly become a sinking ship. What began with the Backwash had taken on a momentum all its own, metastasizing to the far reaches of the globe. There was a prevailing, unnameable sense that something immense and terrible was about to occur. Winston suspected people had a kind of species instinct about it, the way dogs could sense a coming earth­quake.

And so on the police bands, and in the media, and in the chat rooms, Winston searched for any anomalous event that was simply too anomalous to be anything but Dillon, or Lourdes.

Finally he narrowed his sights down to the S.S. Blue Horizon. As maritime industries were not immune to the decay of social structure that marked these days, the Blue Horizon was not the first large vessel to fall victim to latter-day pirates. Everything from freighters to river boats had gone missing. What made the Blue Horizon different, how­ever, is that it was the only ship that defied being brought to justice. The ship would come into various ports, from Juneau to Jamaica, in the middle of the night for fuel and supplies, appearing like the flying Dutchman, only to be gone by morning—which was theoretically impossible, because every port was manned with a night crew. Yet every port gave the same story—no sooner had the ship arrived, than the night crew fell asleep at their posts. When they awoke, the ship was gone.

As Lourdes had a very special knack for rendering whole groups of people unconscious, news of this particular ghost ship was of special interest to Winston.

It was on a Saturday in October that Winston drove a rented car across the Mexican border to Ensenada. The word was that the Blue Horizon had anchored offshore, staying put for the first time in many months.

As he drove along the coast, past a smattering of Ensenada resorts, he could see the great ship, half a mile off shore. He parked by the docks amidst a bazaar of trinkets and curios, where tourists from the two other ships in port bargained for deals. Most locals and tourists, fairly oblivious to the Blue Horizons presence, went about their busi­ness. It was when Winston tried to get a tender to take him out to the ship that he began to encounter resistance. The fishermen and boatmen would shake their heads when he asked, but offered no explanation, until he finally found one who would talk; the driver of a glass-bottom boat, docked too far from the ships in port to see any action.

“No, my friend,” the boatman said. “I don’t go out there. She is La Llorona—the wailing woman. A ghost ship.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I know all the ships that come in: Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Celebrity. But this one. She not supposed to be here.”

Winston pulled out his wallet and fanned out the corners of several bills. “Dime lo que sabes,” he said in perfect Spanish,"y te pagare por la informaçIón.” The boatman was caught off guard. Not necessarily by the money, but by the accent. Winston smiled knowingly. People were always surprised when he spoke their language, whichever language that happened to be.

The boatman then gazed forlornly at his glass-bottom boat. Busi­ness had obviously been slow. The man stared at the money in Win­ston’s hand, then sighed. He shoved the bills in his pocket. “Yesterday, four men from the cruise line come in by helicopter,” he explained. “Fancy suits, very important-looking. A friend of mine, he takes them out there, and as soon as they get near the ship, three of them pass out cold, like someone poisoned them or something. The one man left—he is the one they let on the ship. My friend waits and waits in his boat, but the man doesn’t come back, and the other three, they don’t wake up. Then he hears the man screaming on the ship, he doesn’t wait anymore. He comes back, goes home.”

“And the other three men?”

The old man shook his head. “The hospital. Still they don’t wake up.”

Winston pulled out a roll of bills, and handed the boatman a twenty, but kept his billfold out. “How much for you to take me out there?”

The boatman shook his head. “I told you—I don’t go out there.”

Winston slowly began flipping twenties. “You’re telling me you’re afraid?”

The boatman began to scratch his beard stubble, thoughtfully at first, and then nervously, as the number of bills increased. “It’s drugs. Some drug lord took over that boat. You go out there, he cuts your throat—maybe mine, too.”

“I thought you said it was haunted.”

“That, too.”

Winston had flipped four bills, he flipped a fifth to make it an even hundred. The boatman began to sweat. “¿Estas loco, eh?”

Winston flipped another bill. The boatman took one more glance at his passengerless boat, and sighed. “Ai, mierda.” He took the money, and let Winston on board.

They pulled away from port, leaving behind the commotion of tourists. The sea was calm, and although the glass-bottom boat wasn’t the fastest vessel, Winston was grateful for the time it gave him to prepare for what he might find. As they got closer and closer to the white behemoth, Winston could hear music growing louder as they drew nearer. Upbeat salsa. Cruise music. The kind of music that sum­moned images of streamers and balloons, and drunk couples sweating a hot lambada. He could see people on deck now, leaning on the guard rails. Bathing suits, sun hats, and everyone seemed to have a drink in their hand.

“If that’s haunted, the ghosts must be having a hell of a time,” said Winston. The boatman reserved judgment.

The ship loomed before them now, a massive thing that just kept growing as they got closer. The anchor was down, but the lower gangway doors were all closed. “No way on, my friend,” said the boatman.

“Go around a few times.”

Reluctantly the boatman turned the wheel, and began to circle the great ship.

Winston moved out to the center of the boat, where he could be seen from the Horizon’s deck. It also made him a target, but he was willing to take that chance. The boat circled twice, and by the time they came around to the starboard side for the second time, the aft lower gangway door was opening.

“Now they kill you,” said the boatman. He set his engine to an idle, and they coasted to the gangway door. Just inside, two unusually corpulent crewmen greeted them with disapproving frowns.

“She says you’re not welcome here,” barked one of them.

Winston grinned in triumph. So he was right—it was Lourdes! “Tell her she owes me five minutes of her time.”

“I suggest you turn your boat around, and go back where you came from.”

The boatman looked first at the guards, then at Winston. His eyes were pleading.

The men wore earpieces. Winston guessed that they must have been getting their orders straight from the horse’s mouth. He won­dered if Lourdes could hear him as well.

“Tell her,” said Winston, raising his voice, “that she’s a stubborn bitch without a shred of sense.”

The boatman took a deep breath and crossed himself. The crew­men hardened into a battle stance, and then a voice came down from heaven.

“Fine. Let him on.”

Winston looked up in time to catch a glimpse of Lourdes looking down on him from the railing seven decks above, before she backed out of view.

The two-man welcome wagon wasn’t thrilled about it, but they obeyed their orders, reached out and helped him aboard.

Winston turned to tell the boatman not to wait, but he was already pulling away.

The two overweight crewmen led him to a glass elevator in a six-story atrium of brass rails and polished marble. He passed several stew­ards on his way, noticing the air of despair that pervaded their eyes. They, too, were obese—so much so that they bulged painfully out of their uniforms. He looked at the ample gut of one of his escorts. “Cruise food?”

The escort said nothing.

As soon as they stepped out onto the pool deck, the weighty sense of oppression permeating the lower decks was blasted away by a party that stretched from stem to stern on the ship’s open-air decks. It was a fiesta of slim, beautiful people. The pool deck was a contagion of indulgence. On a dance floor past the pool, at least a hundred people sated their senses to the beat of the brightly frilled band, which, in spite of a cool ocean breeze, kept insisting it was “hot-hot-hot.” Gor­geous women in designer bathing suits that left nothing to the imag­ination sipped tall cocktails in every color of a neon spectrum. The beat of the music pulsed in the teak wood of the deck, and whoever wasn’t dancing was luxuriating on lounge chairs, or partaking of a sumptuous buffet. The atmosphere was so intoxicating, Winston forgot for a moment why he had come. Until he saw her.

Lourdes sat on her own private verandah one deck up, with a grand view of the partying pool deck below.

Pushing past the gyrating bodies on the dance floor, he made his way toward her, noticing that among the perfect physiques on this pleasure cruise were reminders of that other class that inhabited this ship. A towel boy with an unpleasant bloat about him, lumbering like a troll on the perimeter of the deck. A worker polishing the brass railings with turgid limbs and fleshy folds, his body drenched in acidic, malodorous sweat. These were members of a bizarrely obese servant class that greased the machine, and kept Lourdes’s movable feast afloat.

Winston climbed to Lourdes’s private deck perch. She reclined on a plush lounge, and was attended by two topless men with pectoral muscles the size of turkey breasts. Although she saw Winston approach, she made no attempt to acknowledge him. She simply waited for him to come to her. She had never looked better. Not exactly svelte—her frame would never allow that—but shapely, and well-contained within the smooth blue satin of her bathing suit. He now noticed that the two dark-haired, dark-eyed glamour boys who attended her were, in fact, twins. They threw him a disinterested gaze before returning to their duties. One rubbed Lourdes with tanning oil, the other dipped shrimp in cocktail sauce and held them to her lips.

“Cleopatra, I presume?” Winston said.

Lourdes bit the dangling shrimp off at the tail, and her shrimp boy dropped the tail into a silver bowl already brimming with them. “She was just Queen of the Nile,” Lourdes said. “I’ve done a bit better.”

A few feet away was a very large man in an expensive suit that was four sizes too small. Like the crew, he had that bloated look, but instead of being flushed, his face was a pallid shade of green.

Winston indicated her twin studs. “I see you’re into matching lug­gage these days.”

“Only way to travel.” Lourdes ate another shrimp. The fat man in the fancy suit moaned.

“Lourdes, what the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m on vacation,” she said, coldly. “Is that so hard to grasp?”

“And when does this ‘vacation’ end?”

“That’s the best part, Winston; it doesn’t.” And then she gestured to the pained man in the bulging suit. “Meet Mr. Peter Marquez,” she said. “Monarch Cruise Line’s Vice-President of Operations. He just joined us yesterday.”

The man seemed only able to move a pair of pleading eyeballs set deep within his porcine face.

“What did you do to him?”

“We’re in the middle of negotiations,” Lourdes said. “After test-driving the Blue Horizon these past few months, I’ve decided to buy it, and redeem my outlaw status.”

“And how can you afford a cruise ship?”

“We’re negotiating a steep markdown.” Her shrimp boy hung another cocktail shrimp before her and she took it in her mouth, chew­ing slowly. “Very steep.”

The cruise executive moaned. “Please,” he said. “No more.” His voice came from deep in his throat, sounding as Lourdes’ voice had once sounded in the throes of her own obesity.

Lourdes licked her lips. “Recently, I’ve found a depth to my ap­petites I never knew I had.”

“And yet it’s the crew that gets fat,” observed Winston. “Not you.”

Lourdes shrugged. “I eat quite a lot; all that fat has to go some­where.”

Winston shuddered. There was no end to the way they could abuse their powers, when they chose to—here was the proof. First it was just Lourdes’s ability to control metabolisms; put people to sleep, change the pace of their body functions. Then she found she could manipulate their muscles, as if they were puppets. And now this; she stayed slim by imposing her weight on others. A perverse conservation of matter. Winston wondered how many times her own body weight she consumed in food a day. Did she ever stop eating?

“What happened to you, Lourdes?”

She sat up, pushing away the hand of her shrimp boy. “I grew up, Winston. I finally realized that the only person I owe in this world is me.

“What about Dillon?”

“To hell with Dillon! He’s the one who screwed things up. Whether he meant to or not, he set the world on auto-destruct, and if the world is falling apart, I intend to suck every last drop out of it.”

Winston regarded her pretty-boy twins. The dark hair and wan expression on their faces was uneasily familiar. “Your matching luggage both look like Michael,” he goaded. “Should I ask what that’s about? Or do I already know?”

Her tanned cheeks began to flush at having been so easily read. He could feel her anger, and perhaps a hint of shame, charging the air between them. Her feelings for Michael had been no secret—but en­listing these surrogates into her harem was a desecration of Michael’s memory, and she knew it.

She stood suddenly, and like a petulant child grabbed the platter of shrimp and hurled it at Winston. It bounced off his chest and clat­tered to the ground, rolling down the steps to the pool deck.

“This is MY ship!” she screamed. “MY life, and MY reward for the hell I’ve been through!” On the dance floor, the music stopped and all eyes turned to Lourdes. “And if you had half the brains you claim to have, you’d stop taking your marching orders from Dillon, or it’ll kill you like it killed the others!”

Then her eyes darted around to the spectators, as she realized she was, as always, the center of attention, but this time in an unflattering light. As if to add to her embarrassment, several gulls winging high over the ship cawed in the silence like mocking laughter from above. Lourdes turned her eyes to the sky, the birds’ wings went limp, and they plunged, dead, into the sea. Then she turned to her profligate partiers.

“Dance!” she ordered. Suddenly their arms began to jerk and their bodies undulate, involuntarily pulled by their puppeteer’s unseen strings. Flustered, the band quickly kicked into another number. Sat­isfied, she released the dancers with the slightest flick of her head, and although their steps missed a couple of beats, they quickly took over for themselves, regaining the rhythm, and not daring to leave the dance floor for fear of what Lourdes might do.

“Don’t look at me like, like I’m a monster,” she told him. “All of my guests are here by choice, because they appreciate me, and the pleasures I have to offer.”

“What about the crew?”

She hesitated before answering. “They know their place.” Then she turned and walked to an open-air bar further back on her private deck, while her Michaelesque boys both hurried to clean the shellfish scattered on the ground. Even before she arrived at the counter, the bartender had mixed her a red and white “Miami Vice,” heavy on the Bacardi.

“Aqui tiene, Seňorita Lourdes,” said the bartender, stuffing a paper parasol and a pineapple wedge into the drink. He took a quick glance at Winston, “¿Uno para su compaňero?”

“No—apenas es un niňo,” Lourdes said, irrespective of the fact that she, too, was underage. She sat on a stool, ignoring him as she sucked down her drink, its daiquiri head flowing like blood into the Pina Colada beneath.

What troubled Winston most was how easily Lourdes had seized control of her guests’ bodies on the dance floor. Used to be it took incredible concentration for her to control such a large group of peo­ple, but, like himself and Dillon, her powers were still exponentiating toward an end he still didn’t know. It frightened Winston to think what Lourdes might do if she ever really got angry.

Maybe it was best after all for her to be queen of her own little ship, her dominion limited to the souls on board, slaves and followers who were resigned to subjugating their will to hers. Let her have her ship, so that she might be satisfied, and extend her grasp no further.

Leaving her to vanish again to the horizon would certainly be the easiest thing to do, but for the Shards, the path of least resistance always led to disaster. Winston knew that if Lourdes slipped off of his radar again, it would be a dangerous step backwards.

He came up behind her, waiting for her to turn around, but she didn’t, so he sat beside her at the bar. “There is something we need to do, Lourdes. You, me and Dillon. I’m not sure what it is, but it keeps me awake at night, and when I do sleep, I dream about it. You have to be feeling it as much as I am.”

She slurped down the bottom of her drink. “I don’t feel a thing.”

“You’re lying.”

She turned to the bartender. “Gerardo, una mas, por favor.” Winston dimly recalled that she had a brother named Gerardo, and Winston found himself not wanting to know if she had put her whole family to work here. The bartender mixed her another drink, but by the time he slid it onto the counter, Lourdes had lost interest. She sauntered past Winston to the railing, looking out at the Ensenada shoreline.

“You’ve been dreaming, too, haven’t you Lourdes? About some­one in a purple chair. And three figures on the ledge of a building.”

Lourdes sighed. “It’s not a ledge, it’s a stage. Three performers taking bows at the edge of a stage, surrounded by the flowers thrown by the audience. I can smell them. And the chair’s not purple, it’s lavender.”

“I thought it was perfume,” Winston said. “What do you think it all means?”

“I don’t care.” That was a lie, too, but this was one she was sticking to. She had almost softened, almost shown a hint of her old self, but now the expression on her face solidified to granite. She strolled back to her lounge, and, resuming her position of leisure, she called to her boy toys. “Paul, Eric, it’s time for our visitor to leave. Throw him overboard.”

The two brawny men advanced on Winston.

“What?!”

“No—wait!” said Lourdes. “After all this is a pirate ship. Make him walk the plank!”

Gerardo brought her the drink she had left at the bar, and she began to suck it down gleefully.

While the boy toys held him, two fat crewmen bounded off, re­turning with a long table from one of the decks below, and cantilevered it out over the side. By now the event had drawn the attention of Lourdes’s guests and they crowded the rail, chattering and laughing as if this were just another bit of entertainment.

They prodded Winston onto the makeshift plank.

“Lourdes, don’t do this!”

“Oh, please,” she said. “We’re barely half a mile from shore, and the water isn’t that cold. Humor me.”

Winston stood at the end of the plank, seven decks above the Pacific, being cheered on by Lourdes’s hordes. No, thought Winston, the fall wouldn’t kill him, and neither would the swim. But it was not his death he was considering. It was Lourdes’s. She was dead—or at least the girl he once knew. They had all been affected by the events of their lives, misshapen in many ways by what they had been through. Lourdes was broken, and he doubted even Dillon could fix her now.

“Good-bye, Lourdes.”

With the cheering crowd behind him, and without looking back, he jumped into the sea.

The fall seemed to stretch on for a sickening eternity, and then the sting as he hit the water was quickly numbed by the chill. He surfaced beside the great ship, still hearing the cheers from above. The water was cold but not frigid, and although half a mile was a long way for an untrained swimmer to go, Winston stroked, finding his desire to put distance between himself and Lourdes enough motivation to pro­pel him to shore.

5. Catching Rays

Transcription excerpt, day 193. 13:45 hours

“Pigeons pray. Did you know that, Maddy?”

“I never noticed.”

“They did a study. Take a pigeon, put it in a cage, then feed it at random intervals regardless of its behavior, and pretty soon it starts to do some weird things—like hopping on one leg, or spinning in circles, or bowing its head over and over, as if that’s what brings on the food. ‘Religious behavior’ they call it.”

“The prayers of pigeons.”

“Exactly.”

“What makes you think their prayers aren’t answered?”

“You know, Maddy, sometimes you remind me of someone.”

“Do I remind you of Deanna?”

“She also would have championed the prayers of pigeons. And she’d make you believe they were answered.”

“I’m a poor substitute for the goddess of faith.”

Today Dillon was faced with a dead horse on a veterinary gurney.

Flies buzzed in a hazy cloud about its body and in and out of its nostrils. By the stench that filled the cylindrical expanse of the cooling tower, Dillon could tell the beast had been dead for quite some time.

Zero Team had been replaced by a single “zeroid,” as Dillon called him. A few minutes earlier, the zeroid had assiduously wheeled Dillon from his cell, through the connecting corridors, and out to the now familiar spot in the center of the cooling tower. The only difference was that Bussard attended his transit now to make sure that Dillon did not speak to this man. Once positioned in the center of the cooling tower floor, the zeroid exited to his ready room, to wait in an infor­mational void, never knowing what went on in his absence. Then Dillon would be alone with Bussard—an unpleasant circumstance, even if he hadn’t been locked down in an exoskeleton of tempered titanium. Sometimes Bussard would take the time to brief him on the nature of the “therapy session.” Other times he wouldn’t bother, since it was Dillon’s presence, and not his comprehension, that mattered. Then from his custom-built remote control, Bussard would open the door to the guest waiting area, and the circus would begin.

Usually it was dignitaries and statesmen of any and every nation­ality. Some walked in under their own power, others were so weak from the ravages of disease they needed to be wheeled in. Bussard would then show off Dillon like a trophy to those conscious enough to care. They would be allowed the honor of basking in Dillon’s pe­culiar incandescence for up to an hour. Then, regardless of how they came in, they would walk out under their own power, their vitality restored. They would then go for blood tests and MRIs elsewhere in the plant, tests administered by military physicians who, like everyone else, were insulated from the purpose of their task, never seeing those test results, or knowing their significance.

“Funny that people come to a nuclear plant to get cured,” Dillon had once commented during a well-attended session. Bussard didn’t find it funny, however, and when the guests were gone, he had hit the red button on the side of his remote, sending a surge of raw elec­tricity through him. Now Dillon didn’t say anything during the ses­sions. He saved his comments for those times he was left alone with Bussard.

“What do you get from these people?” Dillon once asked him, for it was obvious that this kind of operation was not an altruistic en­deavor—but Bussard merely invoked the “it’s a matter for military intelligence” clause, and left it at that. But Dillon really didn’t have to ask—he knew; he could read the pattern in the parade of visitors. Thanks to Dillon, life was now a bankable commodity. Every second spent in his presence was a quantum of health doled out with due diligence to those whose health best served the interest of American security. What diplomat or world leader would not mortgage their nation for a shot at eternal life?

And now there was the dead horse; a lump of flesh and bone not ten feet away from Dillon’s exoskeletal chair. Not even Bussard could stand the stench, covering his mouth and nose with a handkerchief drenched in cologne. But the stench quickly faded, and a cold wind swooped down the wide throat of the cooling tower to clear its residue. It only took but five minutes, and the horse whinnied in terror. Bussard quickly called in a team of wranglers as the animal flipped itself off the gurney, sending it clattering against the concrete wall.

“Subdue it,” Bussard instructed, “and bring it to the loading dock.” No doubt there was a horse trailer waiting. The men set themselves to the task. By the unremarkable look on their faces, it was obvious that these men did not know the horse had been dead just minutes before; they were only given orders to remove a horse. And the zeroid never knew there was a horse at all.

Once the animal was removed, Dillon spoke.

“Why? Why this, of all things?”

He half expected Bussard to ignore him, but today Bussard deigned to give him a response, perhaps more out of embarrassment than any­thing else. “It belonged to the daughter of the senior senator from Texas. We were asked to give it treatment, as a special favor.”

“I didn’t know you took requests.”

Bussard considered the punishing red button on his remote control, but didn’t depress it. Instead, he hit the button that unlocked the ready room, where the zeroid waited to wheel Dillon back to his plush little cell. His dinner would be waiting for him there, cold as always. But at least now he knew the face of the one who delivered it. She was young—only a few years older than he. Twenty-three, perhaps. But then Dillon didn’t know if she was even on that detail anymore. After all—the entire zero team had been replaced; Bussard could have re­placed her, too.

That Dillon was responsible for Gerritson’s death weighed on him heavily. With all the death he had seen and had caused over the past two years, he thought he would have become desensitized to it. The fact that he hadn’t was some comfort. He had not been robbed of his compassion, nor would he let this imprisonment numb his spirit now. He would pick the lock of this fortress. He had to believe that he would. And once he was free—even being out there in a world he had set on auto-destruct was better than being Bussard’s instrument.

As they traversed the access way toward the containment dome, Bussard sneezed, and the zeroid dutifully offered him a “God bless you, sir.”

Dillon grinned behind his mask. This guard at least had not begun deaf as the first Zero Team had. Bussard had specifically brought in deaf guards, because it was already well known how Dillon’s words could be the key to a man’s soul. The right word whispered in the right ear would fix the most damaged mind. And the wrong word could take that same mind and shatter it in a psychotic detonation. All Dillon had to do was divine the right thing to say by studying the patterns of a person’s behavior. Damage and repair, destruction and creation; all facets of Dillon’s formidable gift. But it wasn’t Dillon’s willful acts Bussard was interested in. All Bussard cared about were the effects that Dillon could not control; the incandescence of his presence, which renewed life, and had once reversed the flow of a mighty flood.

And so Bussard assigned deaf men, his thinking too narrow to realize that they would not remain deaf for long in Dillon’s presence. The fact that they had kept their audition a secret from Bussard was a victory Dillon wished he could share with them.

“There will not be a repeat of last week,” Bussard had told him, and vowed to personally walk Dillon’s little Via Dolorosa each day, to make sure Dillon didn’t find the key to the new man’s soul and win him over. This man was chosen for his absolute lack of physical ail­ments, so that he would have no evidence for guessing Dillon’s iden­tity. Dillon suspected Bussard would have caddied him himself, if his ego had allowed it.

Bussard got a few strides ahead of them and glanced back to look at him. For a moment, Dillon got a rare glimpse of Bussard’s face. The shape of his care lines, the knit of his brow, some discolored skin on his neck. Enough for Dillon to divine something from his history, but not much.

“There was a fire when you were very young!” Dillon said. Bussard stopped in his tracks.

“What did you say?”

“A fire, and something awful about a younger child. A baby sister, I think.” Dillon gloated. “One of these days, I’ll read you down to the bone, Bussard. You can count on it.”

Bussard didn’t spare the rod this time, and zapped Dillon so sud­denly the zeroid got a brief jolt of the shock as well before he could pull away. Dillon’s jaw locked with the jolt, biting a gash in his tongue. By the time the painful current subsided, there was blood filling the inside of his mouth. He held his mouth closed, the pain sharp and severe. He then swallowed the blood, and pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, bearing the pain as it diminished, and the gash zipped itself closed, perfectly healed.

I’m a sadist’s dream, thought Dillon. Torture with no down time.

His eyesight cleared, revealing a figure standing halfway to his cell. Dillon recognized him right away. He was a hard man to miss. Elon Tessic sauntered forward in his signature white suit and black T-shirt.

“Hello, General,” Tessic said, with the hint of an Israeli accent.

Bussard stopped in mid-stride.

“Sir?” questioned the zeroid, decidedly confused as to why a ci­vilian was strolling around the most secure installation since Alcatraz—and a foreigner, no less. Bussard summarily dismissed the zeroid, and Dillon heard the clip of his shoes exiting the way they had come.

Tessic casually strode forward. “I want you to know, Dillon, that shock treatment was not in my original design of the chair. This was a modification added by the general.”

Bussard pushed Dillon anxiously toward his cell. “What’s your business here, Tessic?” Dillon knew he should have hated Tessic—after all, Tessictech had conceived and built Dillon’s beyond state-of-the-art prison. But Tessic was a fly in Bussard’s ointment, and for that reason alone Dillon couldn’t help but appreciate the man.

“I was in the neighborhood,” Tessic said, “so I thought I’d make a social call.”

“Your unannounced visits are becoming a nuisance.”

“Then ask me to leave.”

“Leave,” demanded Bussard.

“No!” Tessic burst out in hearty laughter at the sheer joy of being the only person in the entire installation who could tell Bussard no. Dillon snickered too, knowing that Bussard would not jolt him again while Tessic was here. Bussard had to suffer Tessic’s insubordination because he was the crucial linchpin in the loop. And besides, Tessic had more friends on the highest rungs of the military ladder than Bus­sard did. Enough to get him a season ticket to the greatest show on Earth. Having designed the chair, the cell, and half the military’s high­tech weaponry, Tessic’s perk was the right to come and go here as he pleased.

Tessic surfaced every once in a while for a few days at a time, sitting in on Dillon’s therapeutic sessions, even though he had no dis­cernible ailments himself. And when there was no one scheduled for Dillon’s time, Tessic became his only audience, engaging Dillon in conversations of politics, technology, baseball. Supervised small talk, really. Then he would leave, and Bussard would develop a heavy thumb, bearing down on the red button at the slightest provocation, punishing Dillon because he could not punish Tessic.

Now, as Bussard jostled Dillon over the heavy threshold of his cell, Tessic followed them, to Bussard’s further irritation.

Inside, Tessic sat down in the chair. “Why don’t you go?” he said to Bussard in a casual tone calculated to raise the general’s blood pres­sure. “I’ll lock up.”

“I don’t think so.” Bussard set Dillon in the center of the room. “I might have to stomach you, but I don’t take your orders. You stay, I stay.”

“Suit yourself. Pull up a chair.” But of course, there was no other chair.

Tessic leaned forward, peering into the eye slits in Dillon’s mask. “You surely must despise us all,” he said. “But you must remember, you asked for this seclusion. You wanted your power contained.”

“I’ve changed my mind.”

“Too late for that,” boomed Bussard from the threshold.

Tessic ignored him, and squinted his eyes to peer in the face mask, as if looking at Dillon through a fish tank. “The thin holes in the mask were designed to limit your perceptions of the people around you—and to prevent them from seeing your eyes. But still I see them. Perhaps nothing could close those eyes completely.”

“The door is due to close,” insisted Bussard, his impatience grow­ing.

“Who are you trying to fool, general? It won’t close until we have left.” Tessic turned to Dillon again, peering in through the metallic shell his Research and Development department had designed. “I want to know you,” Tessic said. “It is important to me that I do. I wish to know your hopes and your dreams. Your nightmares.”

Nightmares? thought Dillon. How about his waking visions? There was only one now, snared within the white noise the world offered him whenever he was out of his cell. It would unexpectedly swoop down the throat of the cooling tower with the wind. Suddenly he would see himself in a ruined room, standing beside a man in a plush leather recliner, a light shade of purple. There was a TV before them, with a bright image. A diving competition. The Olympics, perhaps. Three figures on a high diving board. A man, a woman, and a child. The absurdity of the vision could only be matched by its intensity, and a certainty that he should not be trapped in the Hesperia plant. That he needed to escape at all costs.

But he didn’t tell Tessic this, nor would he ever share it with Bussard.

“My nightmares?” Dillon said. “You’re in them. Everyone is.”

“Really. So we are all part of your nightmare?”

“No . . . but you’re all subject to it.”

“I see. That explains why you searched for sanctuary.” There was neither judgment nor doubt in Tessic’s voice—just a desire to under­stand. Perhaps, thought Dillon, so he could build an even more effec­tive prison for him. But to be honest, Dillon had never read that in Tessic’s intentions. “You cannot contain the breadth of your powers,” Tessic said. “But here, we do it for you.”

“I would rather learn to contain them myself.”

“What if you cannot? What if, like radiation, you forever need concrete and lead to rein you in?”

Dillon was uneasy with the thought. “Radiation doesn’t have a will. I do.”

Tessic chuckled. “Very Zen of you to think the power of your will can control a field of energy. But I’m more of a Western thinker.”

“It’s more than just an energy field. I can focus my powers when I need to. There are things I do by choice.”

“Yes, so the world has seen.”

The world. One benefit—perhaps the only one—of being here was that he was cut off from the world. He didn’t have to witness the ongoing effects of the choices he had made.

“What’s it like out there?” Dillon asked “How bad has it gotten?”

Tessic shrugged. “More than a depression, and less than Armaged­don. I still wonder why you set out to do this to the world.”

Why? Should he tell him about the parasite that hungered for de­struction? That the fall of Hoover Dam was intended to stem the destruction, like dynamite at an oil-well fire? That the attempt failed, and only made things worse? He might have told Tessic, but Bussard was listening intently to the whole conversation, and Dillon didn’t want to dish out any more information for him to broker.

“I didn’t intend it. . . but it comes with the territory,” Dillon said.

To Tessic’s credit, he accepted Dillon’s answer.

Dillon thought once more of the vision, and the uneasy feeling it gave him. He shifted his eyes, hoping to see how far away Bussard now stood, but all he could see when he moved his eyes was the dark blur of his own mask. He spoke quietly, hoping only Tessic would hear. “I can’t be kept here. There’s something I need to do.”

“What?”

“I would know if I were set free.”

Tessic sighed. “That’s impossible. You know that.”

Bussard moved into view. “Tessic, I’m losing my patience.”

“You never had any, General.” Tessic leaned closer to Dillon. “If there’s anything I can do to make your confinement more bearable, you let me know.”

A dozen things went though Dillon’s mind, but it was no use. Anything Dillon asked for would be vetoed by Bussard—because al­though Tessic could walk freely through the compound, that was really all he could do. A fly in the ointment—and all the power of one.

Dillon looked past Tessic to his tray of food. “I’d like someone to eat with,” Dillon said.

Bussard snorted at the suggestion, but Tessic nodded. “A dinner date, then.”

Dillon smiled and wondered if Tessic could see it though the small mouth slit. “I’ll see what I can do.” He left, and Bussard lingered a moment longer to scowl, then exited as well.

As soon as the sensors registered their exit, the vault door began its closing sequence, electrostatic pistons pulling it sealed. Dillon waited until he heard the familiar sound of the triple lock mechanism, then counted to five, and his exoskeletal chair popped open at the seam, releasing him at last. Such was the failsafe Tessic had designed—only one lock could be open at a time, and the vault door would not open again unless Dillon was seated and sealed in his chair.

Dillon stretched and shook his legs, forcing circulation to return. Tessic was a complicated man. A genius with far more going on inside than Bussard knew. Dillon longed to read him, and figure out what Tessic was about—it had to be more than money and power. But the mask muffled sounds and limited Dillon’s view. He could barely read anyone now.

He thought back to his first encounter with Tessic six months ago, when he had first been interned here. Dillon had been cocky even within the shell Tessic had forged for him. “You know, I can get out of this place any time I want,” he had told Tessic.

The man had just raised his eyebrows. “In that case I look forward to your escape.”

At that time, Dillon was arrogant enough to believe there was no security in this world he could not breach, pulling order out of chaos until all locks flew open. Tessic had proved him wrong.

And yet the man didn’t gloat over Dillon’s imprisonment the way Bussard did. He was neither proud nor ashamed of his accomplishment.

Dillon took a deep breath. There was one thing to be said for his confinement. Not only did it keep his powers contained like a genie in a bottle, but it kept the outside world from getting in. Once that vault door was closed, he could not feel the withering of the world around him. There was no white noise, and no visions. There was only himself, a singularity, separate and apart.

He pushed the shackling wheelchair to the far corner of the room, out of his sight, then sat in the armchair, and pulled the tray closer to him. Everything seemed in order there: something brown, something green, something else obscured by gravy. Then he noticed the curious pastry. A fortune cookie. His first thought was that it came from Tes­sic—but Bussard’s eyes had never left the man—he couldn’t have slipped it onto the tray. The cookie must have been left by the female officer who brought his meals. There was a fortune sticking out from the edge of the cookie, and Dillon slid it out without breaking the delicate shell. The fortune held two words, handwritten. It read:

“Favorite food?”

Smiling, Dillon found a pen in the scant supplies of his desk, and on the blank side of the fortune scribbled “Veal Parmesan.” Then he slipped it back into the cookie.

6. 9906753

Transcription excerpt, day 199. 13:49 hours

“Do you think we have a purpose, Maddy? Or are we just like those praying pigeons, picking out patterns in something that’s totally random?

“You’re the master of patterns, aren’t you? If anyone would know, it would be you.”

“Some patterns are too complex for even me to see.”

“Or maybe it’s just so simple, you keep looking past it.”

Maddy found General Bussard’s office to be as spartan and cold as the man himself. Only his own chair was plush and pad­ded—the chairs on the other side of the desk were so rigid, they cut off circulation to one’s legs.

“I’ll make this brief, Lieutenant Haas.”

Maddy had been expecting some sort of dressing-down. It was clear that Bussard was not happy with her performance and her integra­tion—or lack thereof—into the team. After Gerritson’s death, she had remained cold and aloof.

Bussard tapped a lead pencil on his blotter, not making eye contact, which was unlike him. It was the first clue that this meeting wasn’t going in the direction she had assumed. “Apparently our efforts to see to our guest’s comfort have not gone far enough,” he told her. “Or at least that is the opinion of General Harwood, and the Joint Chiefs.”

It was all Maddy could do to suppress her grin. So even the führer had a master. Now she realized that if Bussard was going to be brief, it was to minimize his own embarrassment at having to actually admit that he had superiors. She was, in effect, watching him squirm, and she had a front-row seat.

“General Harwood feels our guest might need some human con­tact—and that we might be able to use such contact to get information from him that he has been unwilling to share.”

“They don’t consider contact with you human enough, sir?”

He read her smirk, and chose to relent rather than retaliate, chuck­ling slightly. “I suppose my bedside manner is not my strongest point.”

“I sincerely hope, sir, that you’re not calling on me for my ‘bedside manner.’ "

This time Bussard held her in eye contact. “He’s restrained, Haas. And by my observations, so are you.”

Maddy gave him the slightest nod.

“You will continue with your current duties, but now, when you bring your meals to him, you will bring your own as well, and wait there until he has been returned to his quarters. As his chair won’t release him while you’re there, you’ll have to feed him. You will be wired with a video surveillance device, and in this way you will de­velop a supervised rapport with him. Then, once you’ve gained his trust, you will ask him the questions we provide you.” Bussard took a breath, weighing how much information he should ration out, then finally he said: “Our guest is none other than Dillon Cole.”

And although Maddy already knew this, she reacted with requisite shock. “My God!”

“God has nothing to do with this,” snapped Bussard. “Remember that, Lieutenant Haas. And also remember that if you repeat his name or the details of your assignment to anyone else in this facility, you will be severely dealt with.”

On the morning of her new assignment, Maddy left her quarters just after dawn, wearing a sweatsuit. A daily run was one of the few liberties military personnel were allowed at the plant; it was one of the few activities not under intense scrutiny, and therefore Maddy’s fa­vorite time of the day. Maddy fell into stride by the time she rounded the north side of the reactor building, and followed the path into a patch of woods corralled within the facility’s inner fence. Occasionally there were others on the path, but they always kept a respectable dis­tance, like planes in a holding pattern. Today, however, she was joined by an unexpected companion. A golf cart pulled up alongside her from a connecting path, as if the driver had been waiting there for this ambush. Maddy moved to the side to let him pass, but he did not. He instead matched her speed.

She recognized him right away. Tessic. His overcoat was layered upon an expensive white suit that bespoke more pleasure than business. He looked as if he had walked right out of a fashion magazine.

“I’ve come to congratulate you, Lieutenant Haas.”

The thought of the Elon Tessic pursuing her in a golf cart was ludicrous. Here was a man whose company built everything from sur­veillance satellites to fighter jets. What possible business could he have with her? “Congratulate me on what, Mr. Tessic?”

“On your new assignment.”

Maddy slowed her pace down to a walk, taking a moment to size him up. His hair was only slightly graying, and his skin seasoned by the Mediterranean sun. Somehow she had thought he would look older. His smile seemed pleasant but unrevealing. “Why would you care about my assignment?”

“I not only care about it, I helped arrange it.”

Maddy chuckled. “You? You convinced Bussard?”

“I don’t bother with Bussard. His superior is far more reasonable.”

“You met with General Harwood?”

He waved the thought away. “It wasn’t a meeting, it was a lunch­eon. We both had the salmon special.” He pulled his cart to the side and stepped out, abandoning it. “May I walk with you, Lieutenant?”

“From what I gather you can walk anywhere you want.”

He chortled, but didn’t deny it. “I called in many years’ worth of favors to gain a high security access here. I assure you I don’t take that for granted. Bussard, however, takes everything for granted.” A fellow officer jogged up behind them. Tessic didn’t speak again until the man had run past and the sound of his footfalls had faded. “The American military has in their possession the single most powerful person ever born to our humble little race. And what do they do? They bring him dead horses and aging politicians. Clearly his purpose is greater than this—but they squander him on petty, small-minded tasks. Just as they’ve squandered you.”

He waited for a reaction from her, but she chose not to give one. Maddy didn’t like this. No one—particularly a man like Tessic—spoke so candidly without expecting something from it. What did he want?

“Bussard is a very limited man,” he continued. “With limited per­spective. He can’t see the big picture, like you or I.”

“I see no picture, Mr. Tessic. I have a job to do, that’s all.”

“You say that now—but there may come a time when the picture you see and the orders you are given contradict one another. I wonder what you’ll do then.”

“Orders are orders.”

The path was coming toward the end of the wood, and the bare gray walls of the plant loomed between the thinning pines. Tessic stopped, and turned to her.

“Do you believe in God, Lieutenant Haas?”

She hadn’t expected the question. “I can’t see how my beliefs are your business.”

“The way I see it, there are only two possibilities,” Tessic said. “Either there is purpose and meaning to our lives, or there is not, and everything is random and meaningless.”

“I’m not surprised you see everything in binary.”

Again he laughed. “That’s all everything comes down to, isn’t it? Zeros and ones? The separation of light from dark on the first day of creation.”

“And which do you believe in Mr. Tessic? The zero, or the one?” Oddly, she found herself actually caring about his response.

“I’m a practical man. The way I see it nothing can be gained by believing in a meaningless world. No accomplishments would be worth celebrating, no comfort in success. When you see life as mean­ingless, no amount of money in the world can buy the joy you desire. I’ve always found it practical to hold to the other alternative: that there is meaning and greater purpose to life.” He casually brushed some pine needles from his vicuna overcoat. “And so my trappings of success do not trap me. For that same reason, I believe there must be a purpose for the existence of Dillon Cole—and I can assure you it is not to rejuvenate livestock and despots.”

“I wouldn’t have pegged you as a spiritual man.”

He nodded. “9906753,” he said, and at first offered no explanation. A phone number, she thought. Was this all just an elaborate come-on? His offhand demeanor darkened then, become a shade more sol­emn, “My mother was a survivor of the death camps. Did you know? The rest of her family died in the gas chambers.”

“I’m sorry.”

“A few years ago, I arranged for her to undergo laser surgery to remove the number on her arm, but she refused. For her it was a battle scar. 9906753. A badge of courage and a reminder of those lost.”

Another officer jogged past them, this one a bit more interested in their presence than the first. He caught their gazes, but offered nothing more than a quick “g’morning” as he passed. It got them both moving again toward the plant.

“You see, Lieutenant, I must have faith that there is justice,” Tessic said before he left her. “Punishment for the wicked, and liberation for the innocent.”

And as Maddy went to prepare for her new assignment, she couldn’t help but wonder what Tessic was planning, the punishment or the liberation.

7. Slugger

Transcription excerpt, day 201. 13:29 hours

“Do you think I’m evil, Maddy?”

“That depends—are you going to share that sundae?”

“No, I’m serious.”

“Why should you care what I think?”

“People out there think I’m God or the devil, and they don’t leave room for anything in between. I want to know there’s someone who can see me as human.”

“I wouldn’t be here feeding you if I thought you weren’t human.”

“If the Shards are agents of evil, here to end the world, I wouldn’t be too pleased about that, but I’d understand it. If we were spat out here to be gods, I could understand that, too.”

“From what I hear, you’ve been both those places.”

“And so I know it’s wrong. There’s some other purpose, I just can’t figure it out.”

“You’ve been in lockdown for six months, and you still haven’t gotten over yourself?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just because you are what you are, it doesn’t ordain some grand purpose. Maybe it’s your purpose to sit here, and be fed by me. Have you ever thought of that?”

“You don’t believe that, Maddy. Any more than you believe it’s your purpose to feed me.”

Eighteen hundred miles away, a dentist with no future was called to service in a war against Dillon, and the Shards. Martin Briscoe was, in fact, the perfect candidate, as his mind had been sharp­ened and focused into a weapon by a single image that plagued him.

It was the image of his dead wife and son that obliterated most every­thing else in Martin Briscoe’s mind. He was particularly focused on the day he had been fired, and then saw the angels.

“How are things, Marty? Getting better?” His afternoon began in a conference. Banning, who sat at the head of the marble conference table, took the lead. He was a blowfish of a man with such bad breath that his patients preferred to be knocked out rather than endure his halitosis on novocaine. They all must have heaved a collective sigh of relief when he gave up the drill for dental administration. He was the type of officious asshole who would add an “a” in front of a patient’s name, as if their little dental factory wasn’t impersonal enough.

“Fine, fine. Couldn’t be better.” It was a rote response, geared at curtailing any further interrogation. It wasn’t anyone’s goddamned business how he was. Martin sat down, grinning at the half-dozen faces seated around the table. None of the associates of Eureka Dental had much of a poker face; they telegraphed their intentions long before saying them aloud. “Actually,” Martin added, “I’m having a marvelous day.”

The clutch of dentists looked to one another with that troubled, self-important gaze, like members of a secret society. Yes, Martin knew why they were gathered, and he was going to force them to go through the exercise in slow, tortured strokes. Let them be the ones to suffer the pain of this particular extraction.

Judith the Compassionate was the next to speak. “We’ve had even more complaints, Marty—from quite a variety of your patients.” She glanced down at a folder in front of her. “I have them right here— would you care to look them over?”

Martin grinned, imagining that they were all bobbing heads in a shooting gallery, and he was firing away with the disgruntled joy of a postal worker. “No thanks.”

Banning the Halitoxic snatched the folder away from Judith and Hipped through the pages.

“A Mrs. Susan Bernstein claims that you injected her daughter’s novocaine right through her tongue.

What’s the problem? The little bitch is pierced just about everywhere else. Martin only grinned. Banning continued.

“And a Tommy Watkins claims that you carved your initials in his molar.”

Just like he’s been tagging his initials all over town. The spray paint was still on his fingertips. Martin only grinned. Banning angrily flipped a page.

“And now, a Mr. Fisher claims that this very morning, you urinated into his rinse sink during your examination! I couldn’t believe it!”

“I could,” mumbled one of Banning’s minions.

Banning slapped the grievance folder on the table for emphasis “Good God, what were you thinking?!”

That Fisher was a prick in a power tie who deserved a little piss on his life. “Listen, I’ve got a pulpotomy in ten, are we almost through here?”

The tribunal of dental pharisees gave each other hot-potato glances, wondering who would deliver the bad tidings. Banning, of course took the initiative. “We know you’ve suffered great loss, Marty. No one should have to bear the death of a wife and child—God knows we all feel for you . . . but behavior like this. . . Well, whatever the reason, we just can’t tolerate it any longer.”

And then the potato went round.

“You’ve left us vulnerable to a dozen lawsuits.”

“We Could be closed down!”

“That’s why we’ve got to take action.”

“Quick action.”

“In everyone’s best interests.”

“Including yours, Marty.”

“You’ll agree with us.”

“In time.”

“In time.”

“And for God sakes, Marty, please get some help.”

It was a mighty fine ice-cream sundae of a dismissal, with all the fixings. Then someone—Martin couldn’t even remember who—came up with the cherry to top it off.

“We want you to know that we’re all here for you, if you need us.”

The building’s seventy-year-old security guard supervised the cleaning out of his desk, and his departure from the building five minutes later.

Martin didn’t drive straight home. Eureka was a small town and nothing was more than fifteen minutes away from anything else, so finding a slow, meandering route was difficult. He took in a matinee, then stopped at Chick’s Sporting Goods, picking out some baseball items his son would have liked, had he and his mother not drowned in four hundred million cubic yards of water. At the funeral, his pastor had lauded the mysterious ways of God. His golf buddies had shaken their heads, mumbling about life’s curveballs, before returning to their families and rejoicing in their own domestic torpor. Well, there were curve balls, and there were wild, skull-crushing pitches. This particular pitch had been thrown by a redheaded teenager, who Martin had once believed was God himself.

Coast highway, more than a year ago now. It was a road trip to Disney­land, just the three of them. Eddie was in the back seat of their Taurus, complaining about how boring the radio stations were in central California. It was ten at night when they were driven off the road just north of San Simeon. Three men came out of the other car, and from the very first, Martin knew this would only get worse, because all three of them carried baseball bats. They smashed the windows and dragged the Briscoes out kicking and screaming. The men didn’t take anything—they didn’t want anything. They just swung their bats, and shattered his son’s skull, and smashed his wife’s spine. Then they pinned Martin down, as a fourth man approached. This one had a chainsaw.

After leaving Chick’s Sporting Goods, Martin drove each street in his neighborhood, passing his house several times, then sat at the bar in T.G.I. Friday’s, drinking tequila shooters, and stuffing his gut with tacos al carbon. It was eleven o’clock at night when the place closed, and he left, heading back to his former place of business.

Martin remembered very little once the chainsaw began to roar. He merci­fully fell unconscious. When he awoke, he was in some sort of library . . . and he had no legs. There were just two stumps above where his knees would have been, crudely tied off with his own jumper cables. Around him were at least a dozen others in no better condition. His son lay sprawled, rasping an uncon­scious moan, his head a briused, swollen mass of flesh the color of eggplant. His wife was there, too, slumped in a corner, most definitely dead. He wanted to panic—but there was something gripping his spirit, containing his emotions. At first he thought it was shock, but he quickly discovered it was something entirely different.

Eureka Dental’s building only had one night guard, whose nar­colepsy was well known. Still, Martin wasn’t taking any chances. He came from behind and struck him with the Louisville Slugger he had gotten from Chick’s—the same brand of bat that had shattered his wife’s spine, and son’s skull on the last day that the world made sense. Only the night light was on in Eureka Dental’s waiting room, the sign in sheet waiting for the morning patients. On the wall was a framed poster of a popular comedian touting the merits of flossing. The glass shattered as the poster became the next casualty of the slugger.

The Library was filled with people clinging onto life, and there were only four standing. Teenagers. A bizarre triage Mod Squad. One boy was listening to a walkman in the corner, dancing to the beat, ignoring the pain around him. Then there was the blonde girl who pressed her hands on people’s sores. Another girl moved around the room wearing a beatific grin that Martin could swear was numbing his pain. Then the redheaded kid went to his dying son. “Don’t you touch him,” Martin screamed, but the kid ignored him. Just then the black teen named Winston came up to Martin, looking over his oozing stumps as if they were nothing out of the ordinary. “Welcome to Hearst Castle,” he said, then removed the jumper cables. Blood gushed instantly, and as weak as Martin felt, he became weaker, darkness closing in his peripheral vision . . . but the moment Winston touched his hands to Martin’s thighs, the blood stopped flowing. When he looked down, Martin saw flesh—his own flesh—folding out of the wound like the fabric of an inflating raft. He could feel the tingle of growing bone—actually felt his knee joint, then shin and ankle regenerate themselves. In less than five minutes toes sprouted from the end of his feet, and by the time Winston moved on to the next patient, Martin’s toenails needed a trim. Then he turned to see his resurrected wife and healed son standing beside him, just as awed and bewildered as he. After that, the men with the bats and chainsaws didn’t seem to matter.

Eureka Dental had fifteen dental stations, each room equipped with cutting-edge equipment. Indeed, they did not skimp when it came to technology. All that money gleaned from rich patients and fat insurance companies went right back into their facility. He was amazed at how quickly the overhead lights and chairs broke beneath the swing of his bat.

They called themselves Shards, great spirits whose souls were born of a shattered star.

He had never been a religious man, but in the face of what he saw over those next few weeks, it was no longer a matter of faith but one of certainty. There was a divine power greater than himself. There was a greater purpose, and it had revealed itself through these youths. He would have followed Dillon, and Winston, and the others to the end of the world. And that’s exactly what he did.

The porcelain rinse sinks were harder to break than he expected. So were the X-ray machines, their mantis-heads predatory in the way they parried and pivoted, their long-jointed necks taking the impact and bouncing back for more. It took him four or five machines until he discovered the proper trajectory to decapitate them with a single blow. He kept waiting for the scream of sirens, anticipating being caught in the act. That would make him news! The Associates would then have cameras and microphones crammed down their throats, forced to explain all this in the midst of the wreckage. It would be worth it. But when no sirens came, he only became angrier.

A few weeks after his legs were shorn and regrown, Martin stood on the rim of Black Canyon with a thousand others. He watched as Dillon hand-picked four hundred followers to descend into the canyon with him—the four hundred to stand with him as he would rupture Hoover Dam, then hold back the water with the force of his mind. His wife and son were among them, but Martin was not selected. Instead, Martin had stood there at the rim among the unchosen, saw the dam fall, and watched Dillon’s betrayal . . . for when the dam fell, he did not hold the waters back as he had promised. Instead Lake Mead spilled free, killing his wife and his son, and the rest of the four hundred. By the time the water reversed direction, and the undeniable miracle of the Backwash began, Martin was numb to it, wandering the desert until the police picked him up that night. His wife and son’s bodies were recovered days later, washed all the way back through the lake, and halfway through the Grand Canyon.

It took four swings to break the tempered glass window of the climate-controlled building, and that finally set off the pathetic alarm system. He hauled out the file drawers, dumping dental records out of the window until the parking lot below was yellow with manila folders. Then he went into the conference room, smashing his bat against the marble table over and over again until the table won, and the bat splintered in half.

No matter how powerful Dillon’s miracle was, he knew it could never offset the loss he had suffered. How did he think he could return home to Eureka and take up his old life? How could his associates ever expect him to devote his days to dentistry? Hell, in Dillon’s order there had been no cavities—no crooked teeth. So what was the point of his own pitiful attempt to correct flaws when he had already seen flawlessness in the shadow of Dillon Cole? And how could Martin feel anything but virulent contempt for the families who came to him? There were times he wished his drill could reach straight through to their hearts, leaving his happy patients as lifeless as his wife and son.

Exhausted he threw the broken bat handle down, and found a room where the dental chair was still intact—a room decorated for their younger patients, cartoons painted on the wall and a dental chair done in plush lavender leather. He threw himself on the lavender chair, and reclined in regal repose. This was station number eight. It had been his favorite in the old days. Ocean view and enough room to move around in. The ceiling was plastered with the disembodied smiles of celebrities—a regular grinfest, culled from popular magazines, and he could identify each and every mouth. There was a time that he had thought that was something to be proud of.

It was then, as he rested from his labors, that the reflector lamp above him began to glow. It should not have given off any light at all—the bulb was broken, but still it began to glow, its intensity in­creasing by the second. In a few moments it had become a spotlight. His eyes hurt from its brightness, but even when he closed his eyes, it didn’t fade—it was as if he had no eyelids to shield himself from this light. He gripped the arms of the chair. If this was a hallucination brought on by cheap tequila, it was a good one.

When he heard a voice resounding within his thoughts, he knew it was a violation from outside himself. “Martin Briscoe,” the voice said, echoing over and over, resonating louder and louder until he had to stop it by screaming aloud.

His mind rang in a sudden silence. And then the voice again, filled with such depth and disharmony, he couldn’t tell if it was one voice or a chorus. The voice, or voices simply said:

“We require your services.”

This made Martin laugh. To think that anyone who communicated in thought and blinding light could need a dentist was hilarious. But as his dance card was now open, he decided to entertain this delusion a bit longer.

“I’m a professional,” he said. “I don’t come cheap.”

A pause, and the voice spoke again with mind-splitting intensity. “Your task is one of retribution. Your reward will be forgiveness. Forgiveness and salvation.”

By now he was beginning to realize that this was neither halluci­nation nor dream—and that he could hear three distinct voices. Al­though spirituality had never been his strong suit, his brief service to the Shards had left him fertile for any seed of possibility. Right now forgiveness and salvation sounded real good.

“Who are you?”

“The beloved of heaven,” came the answer. “Those who dance on high.”

Again. Martin laughed wildly at the thought that angels, if that’s what they were, would actually suffer to speak in King James grandil­oquence. “How do I know that you’re real?” He asked through his laughter. “Will you make my palms bleed? Will you make my plastic Jesus weep?”

But the alleged heavenly hosts were not amused, and simply pro­ceeded with their agenda.

“Who do you despise most on this earth?” they asked Martin. “Who is the enemy of your soul?”

There was no hesitation on that one. “Dillon Cole.”

The hosts were pleased. “Dillon Cole,” they repeated. “He has taken away your family, and brought your life to turmoil. And still he lives.”

The thought that Dillon could still be alive was a thought he never wanted to entertain—but now that it was put into his mind, it awak­ened a fury that couldn’t be quelled by any amount of swings from the slugger.

He thrust his hand forward, reaching into the light to get a hold on these beings that lingered there, but he could not reach them. It was as if some membrane stood between their world and his. “You want me to find him?” Martin asked.

“We want you to defeat him,” they answered. “Defeat him, and prepare our way.”

“What do I have to do?”

“You cannot kill him . . . but death will be your tool for his defeat.”

“I don’t understand.”

And so the hosts explained. “Michael Lipranski and Tory Smythe are dead . . . " they began. Martin gave up any reservations now, and lis­tened to their orders, letting them plant in him a mission and give a purpose to his ruined life.

Five minutes later, Eureka police arrived to find a bruised, bewil­dered security officer and a dental office in shambles. There was no sign of the culprit, because Martin Briscoe was already speeding south on the freeway, his hate now focused toward a single goal. He played the final orders the hosts had given him over and over in his mind like a mantra. The words calmed him, giving peace and direction to his troubled soul.

“Michael Lipranski and Tory Smythe are dead,” they had told him. “Now you must seek out their bodies . . . and once you have found them, you will scatter their flesh to the ends of the Earth.”