Shattered Sky

34. The Shell Of Atlantis

Ninety nautical miles due north of Crete, the island of Santorini fought a losing battle to return to its traditional name of Thira. The crescent form of the island and its huge circular bay came by no ordinary means. Had the Minoans survived to tell it, there might be more records of the rumored isle where wondrous things oc­curred—where the god Zeus and his compatriots spent their summer through the harvest, because its beauty rivaled Mount Olympus. Had the Minoans survived they might have told of the day the earth ripped open and tore the heart of Thira from the world along with the gods themselves. They might have told, but so great was the cataclysm on Thira, that a wall of water a thousand feet high washed halfway across Crete, killing every last Minoan and leaving little more than broken pots, tumbled walls and the legend that was stretched and chewed like a piece of gum until truth, rumor, and miscommunication molded it into a legend now called “Atlantis.”

Of course modern science knows that the volcanic mountain that once stood where Thira’s bay is blew stratosphere-high in an explosive eruption; a somewhat rare thing, but not so rare when you take into account the grand sweep of time. One might think the evidence of this explosion would litter the floor of the Aegean Sea; massive chunks of volcanic rock blown from Thira. But no such mountain fragments exist. Perhaps because the center of Thira didn’t blow up. It was sur­gically removed from the world. It had plunged through a tear in the foundation of the universe, and now had the distinction of being the only mountain on the endless red plain of that lonely place that existed between the walls of worlds.

There was a palace on that displaced mountain, and in that palace were the dusty remains of twelve Star Shards born to the Greek isles three thousand years ago, who had grown too arrogant to be allowed to live. And also in that castle rested another Star Shard, her remains not quite as well seasoned, but her untimely death just as unpleasant. Her name was Deanna Chang, and her death, by the unwitting hand of her love, was a valiant one. For in her final days, the fear that had enveloped so much of her life had given way to a faith so over­powering, it had to be taken with her when she died. A faith that all things would run their proper course, and that time would balance the tide of unhappy circumstance to her brief life, and to the world.

Okoya had not devoured a single human soul, as he had promised.

He had instead suffered through hideous airplane food in a ridic­ulously cramped seat between fat businessmen, whose throats he would have slit on a better day. It disgusted him how in this absurd world of matter, the small-minded inhabitants were forced to burn the distilled remains of previous inhabitants just to power unshapely, cumbersome objects that carried them uncomfortably from point A to point B. Ridiculous. Had his own survival not been in question he would have thought nothing of someone obliterating this world with a well-placed comet.

His first flight ended in Amsterdam—as far as the money Drew gave him could get. He found however, that a hermaphrodite could earn money in various ways in the back streets of the debauched city. By the end of the second night he had earned enough for first-class travel to Athens and then on to Thira. He found himself both satisfied and yet disappointed that he got there using human guile alone, and didn’t have to kill anyone to do it.

Once there, he knew he need not do anything but wait. He was in the epicenter now; the focal point of all things to come. So he took himself a hotel room overlooking the stark white hillside buildings and sat out on a terrace, looking out over the near-bottomless bay, and waited for the Vectors and the Shards to converge.

On December fifth, while Dillon and Winston faced Birkenau, a wave of influence swept slowly across the Greek Island of Crete. It began on the northwest shore, then penetrated deep into the hills and mountains, saturating the cities, towns and farms. It was a call to action that refused to be ignored, and took all prisoners.

Believing in the autonomy of their own free will, people stepped from their homes and workplaces, all the while believing that it was their choice to do so. Cars, bicycles, and buses made their way north. Boats sped around the coast. Those who could not squeeze into a vehicle walked, greeting friends on the way, as if this dawn were any other moment in time. What a nice day for a walk; a run; a drive, they would say. Doors were left open and livestock left unattended as the population of Crete impelled toward the northern shore.

By the time rural dwellers reached the north shore town of Hania, they knew that their hearts and minds had been seized by something they could neither explain nor fight. Here, so close to the source, the force of this gravity that pulled them from their lives was so strong, they could feel it like a tone in their ears—a frequency oscillating just above their hearing, creating unbearable pressure deep in their limbic systems; a place that knew only instinct and impulse. On the rare occasion that a man, woman, or child was willful enough to buck the spirit that controlled them, they found that their arms and legs still obeyed the marching orders, their bodies following the silent tune of this pied piper that sucked them all from home and hearth.

Why are we here? they asked. Where are we going? And they laughed at the incomprehensibility of their own answers as they grabbed their loved ones so they were not lost in the raging mob moving toward the shore.

We’re here for the ferry! Which ferry? Any ferry—and in Crete there were many to choose from. Come, all! Today all ferries are free, and when the ferries are packed to an inch of sinking, there are fishing boats and sailboats and barges. Today everyone is welcome.

They could not know that their bodies and their wills were under siege by one girl who had forced a powerful syntaxis upon her two comrades in chains. It was this link between the three of them that allowed her to create this moving wall of leverage, every bit as dev­astating as the tidal wave that had wiped out the Minoans. Although the skies above churned with resistance, it made no difference. Not even the heavens could escape.

When every last ferry, boat and barge had set sail, leaving thousands still on the shore, those thousands now pushed eastward along the shoreline like a swarm of locusts, plundering every town in their path for anything that would float so they could join the growing fleet that swept east across the coastline.

By the time the call came to the city of Rethimno that evening, Hania was empty save for the stray dogs wandering in and out of abandoned restaurants. By midnight, when the call reached further east, to Heraklion, Rethimno was burning, with no one left to put out the fire. And by the next morning, when the odd armada was complete, and sailed due north across the Aegean from Heraklion, it contained more than half the population of Crete. Nearly three hun­dred thousand were jammed into every floating vessel the island had.

Bit by bit as the fleet sailed north, the impulse lifted from the land, leaving thousands left behind to mourn—not for the loss of so many sons and daughters of Crete, but for themselves, and the fact that they had been too crippled, too infirm or just too slow to be a part of this great rapture that was surely headed for some kind of glory somewhere across the Aegean, at a place just off the edge of the horizon.

Winston wondered why his life suddenly seemed to revolve around airports—and each time he found himself in one, he couldn’t help but notice how much worse things were. These terminals had become a yardstick for him to measure the state of the world.

Athens-Ben Epps Airport was in a state of complete disarray.

“Things will fall apart,” Dillon had promised. Here, as in the airports in the United States, squatters had taken up residence in the hallways. The stench of urine permeated every corner of every gate. Travelers who still had enough sanity and sense of direction only kept it by turn­ing a blind eye to the chaos around them, pretending that it was nor­mal, or that it didn’t exist. That it was somebody else’s problem.

When they had landed, Winston had caught sight of a burned out wreck of a plane abandoned on a taxiway. No one had bothered to remove it. The edge of the tarmac was crowded with derelict planes— so many it was almost impossible to maneuver. Airlines that had shut down; jets without enough fuel to go anywhere else. This great Eu­ropean hub had become an airplane graveyard. A flood of arrivals, but fewer and fewer departures. “The planes just keep coming in, but there’s not enough jet fuel left to get them out,” Dillon explained. “Airports in this part of the world are seeing more arrivals than they ever did, because of what’s going to happen here.”

“Because of what’s going to happen here?” Winston asked. “How the hell does anyone know what’s going to happen here?”

“Foreshocks,” said Dillon. “Intuition. People feel their attention drawn to a place and they don’t know why. Pretty soon people start to feel the need to come. To see the ruins, they think. To walk on the Acropolis, but that’s just their mind trying to make sense of a feeling they can’t understand.”

The Athens airport, notorious for slipshod security, for some mys­tical reason had chosen this, the twilight of time, to detain all suspicious-looking persons. Of course, these days everybody was suspicious looking so they had a wealth to choose from. On the morn­ing of Tuesday, December sixth they chose Winston and Dillon. Had Winston any sense of humor about it, he might have laughed. To think they had survived and triumphed over all they had, only to be harassed by yet another cast of rent-a-cops. The fact was, Athens Airport had become a hot spot of activity, intrigue and violence over the past few months, and so, naturally, two teens arriving in a corporate jet was bound to catch someone’s attention. Security collared them immedi­ately, shunting them to a 10 X 10 windowless room with bad fluores­cent lighting that flickered like a disco strobe.

The walls were peeling institutional green that clashed with the faded maroon linoleum floor that peeled up in the corners. Two guards stood by the door like fixtures, theoretically waiting for someone to come and interrogate Winston and Dillon. The one to the left had given Dillon a black eye, smashing Dillon as soon as they got here. He claimed that Dillon had resisted arrest, but the truth was he hit him because he was American.

“Winston watched the floor for a few minutes waiting for it to renew like everything always did in Dillon’s presence. It took him a moment to realize that Dillon’s field was so well contained that the room remained unchanged. Containing themselves was, Winston re­alized, like holding one’s breath. Saving his own powers for a better purpose was both exhausting and invigorating at once, and just when he thought he couldn’t hold it in anymore there always came that second wind, like a burst of adrenaline giving him the strength to pull back, suck in and keep his own skin the boundary between himself and the world.

“You’re so calm,” Winston commented. “Like you expected this.”

“I didn’t expect it,” he said, “but I understand the pattern. It doesn’t surprise me, that’s all.”

“You have a plan for getting us out?”

“My plan is to watch and listen,” Dillon said.

The two guards in the room with them didn’t speak English. As Greek was one of Winston’s many languages, he thought that by con­versing with them in their native tongue it might make things go more smoothly. But a black kid who was an American, and flew in on a private jet of Israeli registry, became even more suspect when he started spouting perfect Greek.

Finally, the security chief who had been so good as to put them in this comfortable, well-appointed cubicle came back in, smoking a cig­arette, which he held turned in, in a European way. He was gray with thinning hair. His lips were pursed in a perpetual smirk, earned through years of interrogation and professional disbelief.

“Don’t worry,” Dillon whispered to Winston. “Interrogation rooms are my specialty.”

Their interrogator dispensed quickly with any niceties.

“So your plane is owned by Tessitech, as you said.”

“Took you long enough to find out,” Winston said.

Dillon said nothing.

“Your pilot tells us you were coming from Poland.” His smirk broadened. “You must be rock stars on a world tour.” Winston so wanted to punch that smirk away.

“We’re meeting our parents here,” Dillon said. “For a vacation.”

“In a Tessitech jet?”

“My father,” Dillon said patiently, “is Vice-President of Interna­tional Relations for Tessitech.” He nodded toward Winston. “And his mother heads the Greek office.” Then Dillon imitated the man’s smirk. “And they’re going to make sure you lose your job.”

The security chiefs expression took a turn toward sour. He pulled out the fake ID he had confiscated from Winston. “You should know better than to fly without a passport, Mr. Stone,” he said, and turned to Dillon. “And you without any ID whatsoever.”

“Listen,” said Winston. “Our parents are waiting for us on Thira. Let us go and we won’t cause any trouble.”

“Thira,” said the officer. “A popular vacation spot these days. I’m glad to hear you call it by its traditional name. Most just call it Santorini.”

“What is it you want?” Dillon asked.

And the officer dropped something on the table. “What I want,” he said, “is for you to explain this.” It was a plastic bag containing a sizable amount of white powder. Dillon saw it and snickered. Winston just let his jaw drop. “We found this in your jacket,” the officer said to Winston. “The inside pocket.”

“What kind of bullshit is this?”

“The most severe kind,” the officer said. His smirk narrowing into a frown. “Do you know what the penalty is for bringing drugs into this country?” he asked. “It starts with twenty years in prison and goes up from there.”

And still Dillon snickered, but Winston was in no mood to laugh. “You planted that! What, did you see it in some old TV movie? What kind of morons are you?”

The officer snatched up the bag. “You two boys have yourself a problem. I suggest you think of how it might be resolved.” And he left the room, closing the door, leaving with them the mute, Greek guards.

When the door had shut and the silent guards resumed their Green Giant positions, Winston turned to Dillon. “Any more of this and I’m going to start siding with the Vectors,” he said.

To which Dillon responded, “We’ll call our parents; they’ll bail us out.”

Winston looked at him about as dumbfounded as he had been when the bag of white powder had been dropped on the table before them.

“Run that one past me again?”

This time, Dillon stepped on Winston’s foot. Firm pressure on his toes—a signal—and spoke deliberately. “I said, our parents will bail us out.”

Winston looked at the silent guards; they didn’t appear to speak English, but that didn’t matter, did it? The room could have been wired. Hell, there was probably a hidden camera. They were left there to stew and give information.

“Our parents,” said Winston. “Yes, my mom will get us out of this. She’ll get us out easy,” and then he added, “I don’t know which is worse though, a Greek prison or facing your dad.”

Dillon laughed, a fake laugh, but real enough to anyone who might have been listening.

Winston laughed, too. “You do know what you’re doing?”

Dillon nodded, but Winston noticed that he wasn’t laughing any­more.

A few minutes later, their grand inquisitor came back in, conven­iently porting a cellular phone. “It’s an American custom to grant you one phone call, is it not?” he asked. “I think we can do that for you.”

“And what if we wanted to call the American Embassy?” Winston taunted.

“Very busy time of day there,” he answered suavely. “Best if you made a call of a more personal nature.”

Winston wondered if this corruption had always been here or whether this was nouveau sleaze brought on by these crumbling times. Things will fall apart.

Dillon took the phone and dialed something totally random. Then he turned and smiled at the big cop that had given him the black eye. Winston watched as Dillon released the tiniest fraction of his immense power, which he had so successfully contained within himself since Birkenau. The puffiness around Dillon’s eye shrank and the motling faded until it was gone completely, all the while he was smiling at the green giant who suddenly didn’t seem so smug. Dillon then turned to the security chief.

“By the way,” Dillon said, “see that guard over there?”

“He wouldn’t have hit you if you didn’t resist arrest,” the inquisitor said, defensively.

“It’s not what he did to me that I’m worried about,” Dillon said, “it’s what he’s doing to you.” And Dillon leaned forward to the in­quisitor, cutting the distance between them in half—and although they were still about two feet apart Winston could swear that in some way Dillon was closer; pressed against his face, deeper still, into the man’s brain.

“He’s been sticking it to your wife when you’ve been working late,” Dillon said casually.

His eyes were locked on Dillon’s now. He couldn’t move if he wanted to.

Dillon continued. “And you know what,” Dillon said, “she does things with him that she would never do with you.”

The man’s cheek twitched. A strange whine came from the back of his throat like the death cry of a small animal. When he broke Dillon’s gaze Winston could see how the pupil of one eye had spread, voiding out the iris completely, and how the other pupil had collapsed to a pinpoint. All at once the light above stopped flickering and shone bright. The walls became a brighter green and the scuffed floor re­newed. Then Dillon pulled his field back into himself once more, and he and Winston watched as the shattered security chief reached with a shaking hand for the gun beneath his jacket coat and turned to the green giant guard, who spoke no English and had no idea what was about to happen to him.

In two minutes Dillon and Winston were hustling down the ter­minal building. The melee that had followed Dillon’s surgical strike had left not one, but two guards dead and their grand inquisitor putting the barrel of the gun in his own mouth pulling the trigger over and over and over again, refusing to believe that he hadn’t left a single bullet for himself.

Winston had passed through the wake of Dillon’s destructive power before—but had never witnessed it firsthand until now. It was as horrible as his power of creation was beautiful. Now Dillon had drawn in and contained his power once more, just as Winston had, but it didn’t change what Dillon had unleashed in there.

“You enjoyed that, didn’t you?” Winston asked after they disap­peared into the milling mob of the failing airport.

“I did what was necessary.”

“You still didn’t answer my question.”

“Yesterday I told Tessic that we were weapons,” Dillon said. “I believe that’s true. We were put here to save the human race with the violence of our power. No, I don’t enjoy it, but I’ve come to accept it, and all that comes with it.”

They reached a baggage claim so stuffed with luggage the carousel flatly refused to turn. People had crawled into some of the larger lug­gage and made them into nests, their faces turned into a stranger’s clothes, their bodies curled up so tightly, as if they were trying to implode upon themselves. Things were falling apart at such an accel­erated rate, there’d be no telling what this place—what any place might be like tomorrow. Here before him minds were shattering before his eyes. Perhaps not with the detonating flash with which the security chiefs mind had shattered, but the end result was the same. The spirit of man was losing its integrity in the face of a coming “infection.” But was preventing that infection enough to justify what Dillon had done in there? Blowing out that man’s mind?

“Some things can never be justified,” Dillon told him, “but we have to do them anyway. In the past few years, I’ve managed to kill at least a thousand people—some of them intentionally. Does the fact that I brought back ten thousand stop me from being a mass mur­derer?” Dillon asked.

“Are you asking for forgiveness?”

“Not anymore. There was a time when all I wanted was to be forgiven, doing penance, longing for redemption. And then I wanted to be damned—because I was certain it was the only way to save the world. Now all I want is the one thing I can give everyone but myself.”

“And that is?”

“Completion.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Let’s get to Thira, Winston. Let’s kill who we have to kill, resurrect who we have to resurrect to get there, and make our stand against the Vectors. And then, win or lose, we can finally rest.”

They found the owner of an amphibian plane and although they had no money to speak of, they persuaded him to drop everything and fly them across the Aegean sea. The only hazard Dillon and Winston could see was how clouded the man’s eyes were with tears as he took off. It was a small plane, a four-seater. Just enough room for Dillon, Winston, the man and his wife. His wife was thoroughly confused— too confused, really, to question much of anything—and with good reason. Until about a half-hour before takeoff she had been dead. Dead for about fifteen years. She still wore the dress she had been buried in; a teal gown the man had bought her for their tenth anniversary just weeks before she had died. He would have given his plane, his house, as many pounds of flesh as Dillon would have exacted, but all Dillon wanted was a ride.

Three hours later, Thira loomed in the distance, pushing up from the horizon’s edge like Atlantis rising. Its jagged, striated cliffs, tinged in maroon and violet, gave the eerie impression of the Grand Canyon submerged. So, I’m back in the Grand Canyon, Dillon thought. Half a world away, but he was still waging the same battle—only this time he understood what he was expected to do. Perhaps not how to do it, but that, he had to believe, would come.

The sun hung low this late in the afternoon, beneath troubled clouds, turning the jagged burnt purple of old lava into red flames, as if the island reflected the sulfuric fires of Hades itself.

“Beauteous, no?” asked the pilot. Perhaps under other circum­stances it would have been beautiful, but not today.

As they neared the island, the air became rough, and Dillon chose not to give them a capsule of order in which to fly. Letting the slightest bit of his power escape now would signal the Vectors that he was here. And besides, the roughness of the flight was a healthy dose of reality in an existence that had turned so surreal. Let me feel the reality of this place, he thought. Let me feel the harshness of what happened here before, and what is yet to come. Let it stir me into action; let it harden my resolve.

The clouds directly above Thira were high, and broiled with in­ternal lightning. They bubbled and bled like a living thing, and the small amphibious plane pitched with the tempestuous wind.

Michael’s wind, thought Dillon. He was somewhere nearby; this unsettled sky was his doing, and by the look of it, Michael wasn’t doing well. What did a sky like this betray of Michael’s feelings? Anger? Despondence?

“Soon,” the pilot said. “Soon Thira. Down wet.”

“He means we’ll land in the water,” Winston offered.

“I figured that one out, thanks.”

The woman looked at them and smiled awkwardly like a hostess with nothing to offer her guests, while up above them, the sky boiled.

As they approached the crescent-shaped island, Dillon could see that the center of this violent sky wasn’t over the island—it was a few miles beyond it, to the south.

“Tell him to take us around the island to its south side,” Dillon said. Winston translated, and the pilot turned to the right.

Beneath them now was the massive bay, almost closed into a circle by the curve of the land. Then without warning the plane took a violent, bolt-wrenching jolt. Anything loose in the cabin hit the ceil­ing, the woman cried out in Greek, and the plane dropped a few hundred feet before the pilot wrestled the plane under control.

“Air bad; boom boom,” the pilot said. His best translation of tur­bulence. But that batch of turbulence had nothing to do with air con­ditions. Dillon had felt it even before the plane did. He felt it within him, not around him.

“Winston?”

“I felt it, too.”

They will tear open an old scar, Okoya had said. Could this have been a vein of the scar they had passed through? A malformed thread of space that wove like a snake in and around Thira?

“Tell him to take us wide around the island,” Dillon said, not wanting to experience another tendril of the ancient scar.

As they rounded the island, the ocean in the distance glowed white. At first it appeared to be a particularly violent patch of whitecaps, until they got close enough to see definition within the many specks filling this corner of the Aegean. These weren’t waves, they were boats! Thousands of them, large and small, forging a wedge across the rough sea.

Forging a vector.

Dillon’s teeth clenched at the thought.

This wedge of ships seemed endless. It stretched to the horizon. The pilot looked nervously to Winston and Dillon for an explanation.

“Lourdes?” asked Winston.

Dillon nodded.

“She can’t be that powerful to control so many.”

“She can, if she’s in syntaxis with Michael and Tory.”

Winston shuddered. “Then she’s turned them.”

“If she has, we’ve lost before we’ve started.” But he knew Michael and Tory. They’d die before they were turned. So what was going on here?

“She’s forcing them. That’s why the sky is so rough—that’s the reason for the winds. Michael’s fighting it.”

“And he’s losing.”

Dillon had the pilot turn around before she pulled them from the sky.

They headed back toward the bay, the pilot panicking as he tried to land on the surging waves. And although Dillon had the power to calm and order a strip of ocean for a smooth landing, he did not. He remained contained.

The plane survived the landing, and when they had taxied close enough to shore, Dillon opened the door and hopped out. Dropping chest deep, he waded for shore with Winton close behind. The pilot shouted to them before he closed the door and powered for take off.

“What did he want?” Dillon asked.

“He wanted to know why we didn’t just walk on water.”

On a hill sloping up from the bay, they found a shack ineffectively guarded by two emaciated dogs that barked in perfect counterpoint. The grassy hillside around the shack was strewn with rusted objects. Bent bicycle wheels, washer tubs, a car engine on blocks—so many, in fact, Dillon had to fight his natural urge to glint just the tiniest bit, repairing and restoring them all. The man who lived there was a tinker of sorts, salvaging parts from anything and everything, leaving the rest aesthetically abandoned in the tall grass. Winston bartered his watch for room and board for the night.

With the last rays of the setting sun, the first of Lourdes’s fleet began to enter the bay. Dillon watched them from the tinker’s window with uneasy vigilance. He was exhausted, and as he peered at the boats sailing into the bay, the watchful eye of the full moon gleaming off the water hypnotized him. He fell into a deep, anaesthetic sleep.

35. Gate Of The Rising Moon

The Thiran Gate stood at the head of a cliff, at the apex of the lagoon—a place where the crescent of the island stretched out on either side like a pair of arms engulfing the bay.

The gate was a simple rectangular stone arch, freestanding, thirty feet high, framing the sky. During the day, the gate stood like an empty picture frame, and at night, the gate was lit in dramatic green and red with spotlights strategically placed around the site. It was built thousands of years ago to frame the rising moon—and was originally meant to be just an entrance to a much larger structure—a temple of Apollo—but the temple itself was never built. Legend was that anyone who worked on it died of an unexplained malady; and thus the arch was believed to be cursed. Local tour guides still contended that tourists who stood beneath the arch for lengthy photo opportunities always came down with dysentery in the evening. For those who did dare to stand in the arch, even for a moment, they would never forget the eerie sensation it gave; a sense of disconnection—of muddled thought and disturbed equilibrium. Those who were particularly sensitive would even speak of a vision the place gave them; a knotty, gnarled tree with twisted branches spreading far into the sky, and roots worm­ing deep into the earth.

As the tree image had deep significance to just about every deity that had inhabited the isle over the ages, the place had a long history of religious significance—most recently the Greek Orthodox Church, which had added its own flourish to the sight, if only to dispel any pagan connection. The church had erected a small chapel nearby, and along the thousand steps that led from the gate down to the sea, they had constructed a dozen small shrines, each one dedicated to a different patron saint, of which there was no shortage in Greece. Religious significance had waned in recent years, except around holidays, but the tourist trade kept the offering tin full.

The novice priest who lived behind the chapel substituted for a night watchman, as it was less expensive, and frankly more effective. Local youth were far less likely to vandalize the gate with the prospect of a Man of God casting his eye, and an accusing finger, at them.

On this night, however, the gate’s visitors were of a very different ilk.

At about nine in the evening, the young priest was disturbed by voices coming from the gate. When he went to investigate, he found a woman and a child exploring the structure. Tourists, no doubt. At night the splendor of the gate was to be observed from a distance, but tourists were drawn to its light like moths. He was always amazed by their audacity and tenacity, making pilgrimages to every spot in their Fodor’s guide, regardless of weather or posted hours.

“We’re closed until morning,” he told them. “Please come back at nine.”

The woman and child stared at him with the blank expression of foreigners, so he tried it again in German, and then English. The third apparently worked.

“Please. It’s late. Come back tomorrow.”

“Forgive us our trespasses,” the woman said. Then the boy smiled at him, but it didn’t appear right. It wasn’t the smile of youth, but of wizened, jaded age. Had he not been pondering that grin, he might have heard someone coming up behind him, but as it were, he didn’t hear a thing—only felt the palm cup around his chin from behind, and then the snap of his own neck as a strong arm wrenched his head one hundred and eighty degrees around. His dying thought as he hit the ground was that the woman had something hideously wrong about her face.

They left him lying in the dirt, not caring to bother with his dis­posal. Memo turned to the man who had come out of the darkness to dispatch the priest. “We were worried that you wouldn’t show up,” he said, in Spanish.

“English, please,” the man said. “This host does not speak Span­ish.”

Apparently his new host didn’t speak English very well either, and spoke it with a strong accent that Memo did not recognize, for he too was limited by the memories and experience of his host body.

The woman stepped forward with a slinky gait. “Your new host,” she offered, “is much more attractive than the old man.”

“And yours is still as ugly.”

She whipped her hair around indignantly. Memo felt deep within his host body a pang of human sorrow at the mention of the old man. “Abuelo,” the child mind said. “I have killed Abuelo.” But he handily crushed the emotion. Such feelings were useful in manipulating Lourdes, but had no purpose now.

“I see that you failed,” Memo said to the Temporal Vector.

“Not entirely,” he answered. “I have now—how do you call it—an insurance policy.” He explained how his last few days had unfolded, and Memo listened, weighing what he heard, pondering all the con­tingencies.

“Less than we wanted,” Memo concluded, “but it will do.” Then he looked to the gate. While his human eyes could not see the scar, his inhuman spirit could. The central vein of the scar ran directly through the gate like a jagged bolt of lightning piercing a window. Human eyes couldn’t see it but they had sensed enough of it to build this frame around it. Here is where the Vectors would tear open the hole to their own dying world; a hole so massive that it would allow passage of the entire complement of their species in a matter of seconds. Then, once they were through, they would inhabit the hosts that Lourdes had collected for them.

“You see,” Memo said, looking out over a bay so packed with vessels there was no room to maneuver. “Lourdes did the job.”

Then he turned to the Temporal Vector, noting the muscular phy­sique of his new host-body. “Kill Michael and Tory, but first kill Lourdes,” Memo ordered. “This new host of yours is stronger than the old man, so you will not need our help.”

The Temporal Vector pulled the lips of his host into a sinister smile and said, “This I will enjoy.”

Lourdes set up camp on the shore of the bay, at one of the few places where the cliffs receded far enough to allow for a rocky beach.

The clearing she created for herself was a perfect circle, and at its edge a ring of people stood at rigid attention, shoulder to shoulder. Pressed against them from behind was another row, and another, and another; twenty concentric rings that provided Lourdes with a dense protective layer of human flesh. Things had come full circle for Lourdes—once again she was surrounded by flesh, only now the flesh was no longer beneath her skin. They stood there, her private army, jaws locked, bodies and wills under seige. She did not see or acknowl­edge their faces. She didn’t care. To her these were no longer people and they hadn’t been for quite some time. They were cattle. Meat to herd and manipulate.

In the center of these protective layers, Lourdes had built a fire, and now stared across it at Michael and Tory, who lay unconscious, still bound in heavy handcuffs. This journey—this gathering of meat— had exhausted the two of them more than Lourdes, for they had re­sisted every mile across the sea. But even against their wills, their power had added to her own, sweeping across Crete, pulling together ‘the army she had promised the Vectors. Such power she had wielded! Such intensity! She had thought that having such power would fill her in some fundamental way, but like the food she ate, it only left her with a deeper void, craving more and more.

So she stared at Michael and Tory, hating them for fulfilling each other. Lourdes might have been thrust into this world as a broken fragment of a star, intricately intertwined with them, but she was not part of them anymore. She was part of no one. She looked around at the circle of standing bodies. This is my universe, she thought. A circle of flesh, with me at the center. There is nothing outside the circle.

But the Vectors lie. Michael had reminded her of that. It’s what they were; lies transmuted into spirit. But still, their words had cut Lourdes too deeply to heal. Out there was emptiness, held together by threads of hatred and hostility. The universe at large. She could feel that emp­tiness in her bones like a hollow where her marrow should be. Hope­lessness. Futility.

There came a shifting of bodies to her right, and she turned to see someone pushing through her meat-barrier. A man forced his way into the clearing; then her infantry closed the gap, shoulder to shoulder once more.

Lourdes stood to face him. No one should have been able to get through.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Do you not recognize me?”

She looked him over. He was tall, with closely trimmed, dark hair. A moustache. Early thirties, fairly attractive, and well built. His accent was markedly Mediterranean—maybe even Arabic, she wasn’t sure. No, she had never seen him before, nevertheless she knew who he was. It was there in his eyes.

“The Old Man.”

“I’m much better dressed now.” He held up his arms and showed off the muscular curves of the new human body he wore. “You like?”

“I’ve done what you and the others wanted. Now leave me alone.”

He took a step closer. “I was wrong about you, Lourdes. Memo was the smart one.” Lourdes noticed that he wore a coat, even though the dead air was a sultry, salty balm. He glanced at Michael and Tory who lay inert beyond the fire. “It was wise of you to use the two of them as you did—adding their power to yours. Your cleverness sur­prises us.”

“Enough to regret the way you beat me?”

He took another step closer. “A Vector moves forward always,” he told her. “No grudges, no regrets.” And then he reached his hand forward to her. “Come. We celebrate your success.” With his other hand he casually reached into the shadows of his coat.

What happened next came in a single fluid motion, like a step from a ballet. Something dark and shiny slid out of his coat, gripped in his right hand. Eight other hands reached from behind, taking him down to the ground. A bullet pierced the eye of one of Lourdes’s minions, and although he fell limp, there was another behind to wrench the gun from the Vector’s hand. In an instant the Vector was under a tackle of Lourdes’s puppets, and with a single thought she had them rip off his coat, revealing a second gun and a knife. Further exploration re­vealed another knife strapped to his leg. Lourdes stood over him while he struggled beneath the hands and bodies of her minions. “Is this how we celebrate my success?”

“You misunderstand!” he shouted. “Please! It was for them!” He pointed across the fire to Michael and Tory, still unconscious on the dark pebbles of the beach. “I come to kill them—not you!”

“Come on, say it like you mean it.” By now all of his weapons had been stripped from him, along with his jacket and shirt. Each weapon was trained on him now by her minions, poised at his head, his chest, his throat. “I suppose if I kill you, you’ll just slip into another host.”

“Believe me. Your two friends are the enemy—not you.” He let out a pained little laugh. “What purpose is killing you for? None. No, we let you live, and you keep to help us.”

Keep helping them? Would they have her do that? Was that the true definition of hell?

“You rule all people.” The handsome Vector tempted. “Control them. We want this from you.”

“The Queen of Cattle.”

He looked up at her quizzically. “I do not know this expression.”

“Never mind.” She took a step back, and loosened the hands that held him. He pulled free, but his weapons were gone, passed back through the crowd. He made no move to attack her, but she knew better than to turn her back.

“Your two friends—they must die—you know this. Let me do it now.”

“I’ll kill them,” she said. “They deserve to be put out of their misery by one of their own kind.”

He considered this and finally nodded acceptance. Then he looked her over, showing some amount of admiration. “This host has desire for you,” he said puffing out his chest. “Now we celebrate. Just you and me. This I will enjoy.”

“Get out of here.” With a wave of her hand her crowd advanced, engulfing him, pushing him back, layer by layer away from her inner circle. Then she pulled the mob even tighter together so that he could not squeeze between them again. Once she was sure he had been pushed completely out, she went around the fire to Michael. Dear, sweet Michael, who had once told her he loved her. Who had stroked her cheek, and looked into her eyes when no one else would as she lay on a stone floor, too fat to move. It was that lie that had destroyed her, even before the Vectors snared her on their line.

She knew what she had to do.

She found a smooth stone about the size of a skull, so heavy she needed two hands to lift it. Then she knelt beside Michael, and raised the stone above his head.

I’ll do this quickly.

Michael’s eyes fluttered open then closed.

Quickly before I change my mind.

And she brought the heavy stone down with all the force in her soul.

36. Sudden Death

It was deep into the night when Dillon awoke. The tinker was nowhere to be found, and as Dillon looked out over the bay, he could see the moon had traversed the entire sky. There were voices—many voices coming from the shore below. He tried to see through the window what the commotion was about, but saw only the dim shapes of the tinker’s mechanical graveyard.

Winston had fallen asleep as well, having crawled up onto the floor displacing the dogs from their mat—which was a better spot than Dillon’s, which was nothing but a wobbly chair and a window sill for his head. It was a far cry from Hearst Castle or the plush trappings of Elon Tessic. So now they were lying with dogs. Dillon couldn’t decide whether there was something wrong with this, or if such humility was a good thing; something to dilute their own innate arrogance that had always gotten them into such trouble. He woke Winston, and they left.

Outside, the sound of voices was a dense, white noise of people murmuring their excitement and confusion.

“Looks like we’ve got ourselves a Greek Chorus,” Winston said.

The shoreline was packed, and for each one who made it to shore, there were hundreds still stranded on boats in the middle of the bay—so many boats you could hardly see the water.

“Do we really want to go down there?” Winston asked.

“I can’t see as we’ve got a choice.”

They descended the steep slope toward the crowded shore, un­noticed, unquestioned as they moved through the crowds. It was clear to Dillon what was happening here. “Lourdes let them go . . .”

“She must have broken off syntaxis with Tory and Michael.”

Dillon nodded. When she broke off, her field would have gotten smaller. These were the ones who now fell outside of her influence. It would make sense—she only needed an expanded field long enough to get them here. And now, with the bay clotted with vessels, no matter how free these people were, they had nowhere to go. They went from being Lourdes’s captives, to captives of the island itself, and they’d all be here at dawn, when the Vectors tore open the sky.

Of those who had reached the shore, some had climbed up the hillside, toward homes, or the lights of towns around the bay, but most just lingered on the shoreline, sharing with each other the experience of a journey they did not understand.

“The poor bastards—they think they’re waiting for something wonderful. A second coming. The opening of heaven.” Dillon could see the way they trembled with wonder and anticipation. No! Dillon wanted to shout. Get out of this place! Something’s going to happen alright, but it’s not wonderful. It’s more horrible than death—more terrible than the flames of hell. You will see a glow of heaven, you will think it’s something glorious—but they will devour you, for they are the only beings in creation that can kill an immortal soul. He wanted to tell them this, but what good would it do? If they knew, where would they run?

“I feel Lourdes,” Winston said.

Dillon pointed. “Somewhere across the bay.” But there was an­other feeling as well; a dark, visceral stirring. Intuitively, his eyes turned toward the source; a square arch atop a nearby cliff, lit an eerie green and red against the dark sky.

“The Vectors are up there,” Winston said. “That’s where it will begin.”

“If the Vectors are there, then they’re not with Lourdes.” Dillon scoured the shoreline until spotting a small powerboat, and made his way toward it.

“What have you got in mind?”

“I won’t believe Lourdes has turned completely to their side.”

“Believe it,” Winston said. “Even before they got here, she had rotted all the way through. Remember, she threw me overboard.”

“She’s got Michael and Tory—we’ve got no choice but to face her.”

“And if she kills you?”

“If it comes to that,” said Dillon, “I’ll kill her first.” He tried to sound decisive, but still his voice quivered with the thought. They didn’t have Deanna—if Lourdes was too far gone to be brought back—if he was forced to kill her to save himself, and to save Tory and Michael, what would happen then? Would four Shards be able to hold back the sky?

“You go,” Winston said. “I want to get a better look at that arch. Maybe get a closer feel of the Vectors.”

“If they catch you—"

“They won’t.”

“We need to stay together!”

“We need to know what we’re up against!” Winston said. “The Vectors have got to have a weakness—I know I’ll be able to sense it.”

Dillon knew better than to argue with Winston once his mind was made up. “I’ll meet you back here in an hour,” Dillon told him. “Be careful.” Then he started the small motor boat, and took to the water, taking a long look at Winston before he left. Like every parting glance he gave these days, it was laden with finality, as if he might never see Winston again.

Dillon wove the small motorboat in and out of the logjam of vessels filling the bay. The sea was calm now, the air hung still. Dead air. It was more troubling than a windy sky, because it meant Michael’s emo­tional affect was completely flat. Has he contained himself? No, that was too much to hope for. More than likely he had fallen into a dead sleep the way Dillon had, too exhausted to emote at all.

As he made his way between the overloaded crafts, the sounds of the crowds began to soften until all the voices came from behind him. He looked to the nearby vessels to see that they were just as crowded, but no one moved. People just stood, or sat poised, as if waiting their turn in a halted conversation. He knew he had crossed into Lourdes’s field of control. Bit by bit he crossed to the far side of the bay, where a huge mob pressed inward—an atmosphere of flesh around a hidden singularity. He left the motorboat, and tried to force his way through, but the crowd was defiantly dense. In the end, he had to hurl himself upon their shoulders and stumble over them, until finally tumbling head first into the circle at the center. When he looked up, he saw Lourdes standing there, holding a rock in her fist, ready to throw it at him.

The anger in her eyes almost made him look away, but he didn’t. She was surprised, even shocked, to see him, but in the end she re­gained her composure, and put the rock down.

“I thought you were the Vector,” she said.

He looked around him. A fire burned at the center, casting shifting shadows on the stone faces of her army.

“Why couldn’t I sense you?” she asked. “Did you lose your pow­ers?”

To answer her, he took a glance at the fire, and it began to burn blue, pulling in warmth, rather than releasing it; unburning. “You knew I had to crash this party.”

“The Vectors knew you’d come. I hear they have something very special planned for you. Where’s Winston?”

“Parking the car.” There were two figures on the other side of the fire, but Dillon couldn’t see them clearly.

“Go on,” Lourdes said, deep bitterness in her voice. “They’re wait­ing for you.”

Dillon rounded the fire to find Michael and Tory. They sat up, groggy and weak. Drained. On their hands were handcuffs, but the chains had been broken.

“The rocks here are soft,” Lourdes said. “I almost couldn’t break the chains.”

He thought for a moment that Lourdes might have taken a turn for the better, but the icy expression on her face said otherwise.

“It’s good to see you alive,” Dillon said.

Michael slowly looked up. “Are we?”

Dillon turned to Lourdes again. He had played this moment over in his head a hundred times, so sure he would know the words that would snap her spirit into place, but now, standing before her he had no idea what to say. For all her posturing and poisoned barbs, her actions here spoke louder than her words. She could have killed Mi­chael and Tory, but had not. If that meant there was some hope veiled within her, Dillon had to find a way to access it. He had to plant a seed; a single thought that could take root and attack the battlements she had built around herself. He had once shattered a mighty dam with the tiniest of blows. Surely he could find a way to break through to Lourdes.

“It’s not too late,” was all he could offer her at first, and of course she laughed.

“It was too late the moment I was born,” she told him. “That is, if you believe in fate, and I know you do.”

“Do you remember,” asked Dillon, “when we first met? I mean really met? It was right after you had killed your parasite. You were still fat, but losing pounds by the minute.”

“What’s your point?”

“I had just helped my parasite of destruction kill thousands of people. In the end, it tricked me into killing Deanna. I thought I’d die from the weight—that there was no redemption for me—but I was wrong. I made it back. So can you.”

She was silent for a moment, mulling the memory.

“These creatures are going to destroy everything human,” Dillon said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Name me one thing human worth preserving.”

“That’s not you speaking, Lourdes. You think they’ve turned you into some kind of demon, but it’s not true. It’s just another lie.”

The frown on her mouth twisted. “I’ve killed people for pleasure— not because I was tormented by a parasite, but because I chose to. I’ve even helped the Vectors devour souls.”

“Did you let them feed you?”

Lourdes faltered. “What?”

“Did you let them feed you on souls?”

Lourdes turned away, and hurled another log on the fire. “What difference does that make?”

“You didn’t, did you? Because you’re not like them. You’ll never be. You’re still one of us, and we want you back.”

Lourdes looked to Michael and Tory. “I think they can tell you how likely that is.”

Michael shook his head. “It’s no use.”

“Then why did you set them free?”

Lourdes shrugged, as if it were nothing. “I’d rather see you all die fighting. More interesting that way.”

“When the Vectors find out you released them, they’ll kill you.”

“They need me to help herd and process the world’s masses.” But Dillon could hear doubt in her voice; doubt that they would truly need her and perhaps a deeper doubt of her own capacity to stomach such a terrible mission. Dillon focused his thoughts on this minute crack in her facade, searching for a seed to sow in that fine fault of doubt. He took a step closer. “Will you watch?” he asked. “When we make our stand, will you at least be a witness to what we tried to do?”

“It’s SRO,” she said, “But I plan to have a front-row seat.” She waved her hand, and her circle parted to the left and right, revealing two miles of empty shoreline. This part of the bay, all the way to the arch on the cliff, was under her stringent control. No one was coming ashore without the captain’s leave.

Michael and Tory struggled to their feet, helping each other up, gaining strength from each other as they touched. Lourdes watched them, disgusted. “Go before I change my mind and have you torn to pieces instead.”

Dillon concentrated for just an instant more, and finally found the words he needed to plant.

“I’m not surprised this is what you’ve become,” he told her in a precise, matter-of-fact tone that bordered on pity. “You always were the weakest of us.”

It appeared to have no effect; she was as recalcitrant as when Dillon arrived.

“Don’t slam the door on your way out.”

Dillon turned from her and left with Michael and Tory. The mob closed the gap once they were outside of Lourdes’s little world.

Dawn was already hinting on the horizon. He had told Winston an hour, but how long had it been? It had taken at least that long to cross the bay. He looked at the uneven shoreline. It would be slow going, but the powerboat would be even slower, winding through the crowded bay. “There’s an arch on a hillside a few miles away. That’s where we have to go, and we have to move.”

“And what do we do when we get there?” Tory asked. “Look for this ‘infection’?”

“I don’t think we’ll need to look for it,” Dillon told her. “It’ll be about as easy to miss as a hydrogen bomb.”

A cold and unforgiving breeze began to blow, pulled by Michael’s fear. Michael gripped his arms. “I can already feel the nuclear winter.”

But Dillon was shivering even before he felt the wind.

Winston kept low as he made his way through the shrubs around the stone arch. This close, he could feel the scar slicing through it, filling him with a discordant energy that felt like ants crawling through the hollow of his spine. Feeling the Vectors so close did not give him a sense of their weaknesses—only their imperviousness.

Something lay in the dust a dozen yards away and with no sign of the Vectors he stepped out into the open to take a closer look. It was a twisted body in the dust, left in complete disregard.

He turned to leave, but then a voice spoke out.

“Winston Pell.” It was a child’s voice, with a slight Latin accent. “Lourdes has told us so much about you.”

He turned to see two figures step out of a doorway of a small church. He turned to run, but a third one stepped out from behind the arch.

“You give people back their lost arms and legs,” the boy said. “For you, things grow; people grow in any way you want. But not today. You see, nothing grows in this rocky soil.”

The largest of the three Vectors rushed him, tackled him, and ef­fortlessly wrenched him into a choke hold as if he had been trained to do just that. Although Winston couldn’t see his face, there was a smell—a stringent and musky cologne. He knew that smell. Why did he know that smell? Then it struck him that this same aroma had been aboard Tessic’s plane that had first brought him to Poland. It had been aboard the helicopter that spirited them to Majdanek and Auschwitz. How could that be?

The Vector pushed Winston through the door of the church, and as Winston finally made the connection, he discovered that the sickly sweet aroma wasn’t the only thing that had been dragged here from Poland. The Vectors had brought a prisoner.

It had taken many deaths to transport the Temporal Vector to Po­land. The first had been the Old Man. Once freed from that host body, the Vector had leapt from the boat to the Italian mainland, where he covered as much distance as he could before inhabiting a woman, who slept while he devoured her soul. He quickly realized that traveling within a physical body would not grant him the speed he needed, but neither could he travel discorporate for more than a few miles at a time. His solution, he felt, was most inventive. He forced this new body to drown itself, and it freed him for another leap. He found his range to be about twenty miles as a discorporate spirit, before having to take another host, which he immediately forced to take its own life. In this way he hopscotched across Europe, leaving a trail of death behind him, until reaching northern Poland just as Dillon and Winston stepped into Birkenau.

In the body of Ari, Tessic’s pilot, he tried to lure them, but was obstructed by Maddy Haas—a woman who, by the memory of the pilot, wielded some power over Dillon Cole’s heart.

Before he could bypass her, Dillon was already skyborne for Greece—but he had an alternate plan. He already knew what it would take to render Dillon impotent. He had a secret weapon—an insurance policy now. He brought it with him all the way from Poland. Beating her into submission had been some heavy task, as she was well-trained in defensive arts—but then so was his own host’s body. She was almost his match. Almost. And for Maddy Haas, almost was the difference between freedom and being bound and gagged in the pulpit of a small Thiran chapel.

Winston couldn’t look Maddy in the eye—couldn’t bear to see the woman who had meant so much to Dillon so brutally subdued. Her face was bruised and her mouth gagged, but her eyes were alert and more furious than frightened.

“What did you do to Tessic?” Winston asked the Vectors.

“He served us no purpose,” answered the ugly woman. Did that mean they killed him or left him alone? Winston wondered. They were just as likely to have done either.

The chapel was in a state of disrepair, windows broken, weeds growing between the earthen tiles. Ari brought Winston down the aisle and forced him down on the altar. The child just stood by and watched, but Winston could see in this child’s eyes that there was nothing childlike about him. He thought back to the days when he was growing backwards—when he had “the stunt” on him, as his mother had called it. Fifteen, but trapped in a body of a seven-year-old, growing younger day by day. Did he look like this child looked now? Winston now noticed that the woman held a steel pole in her hand.

“These bodies—they feel so many interesting things,” the boy said. “Pain is something we are just starting to explore.”

The woman brought the pole down across the middle of Winston’s spine. He felt the pain shoot out from his solar plexis to his brain like his soul exploding within him. He screamed.

“Why do humans scream?” the. boy asked. “Doesn’t it just make the pain worse?”

The boy told Ari to let him go. Winston wasn’t going anywhere now. “Take the girl to a place where Dillon can see her,” the boy said. “I want to play with Winston some more.” And so the pilot left, dragging Maddy struggling through the door.

Once they were gone, the woman brought the pole down again on Winston’s back, a bit higher, and twice as hard. Winston heard it whistle through the air before making contact, and this time he not only felt the fracturing of bone, but felt his spinal column sever like a sheared cable. In an instant he could feel nothing beneath his waist. She swung again, his shoulder blades taking the blow, but the next blow came at his neck. The pain exploded in his neck, but went no lower. Now he felt nothing below the neck, and he opened and closed his mouth like a fish gasping for air, unable to work his lungs.

The woman stopped and watched.

“Does it hurt real bad?” the boy asked—not out of malice but curiosity, which was worse. Then the boy giggled. “Most things on earth have no backbone—I learned that in school. Now neither do you.”

They were silent for a moment, waiting.

Then Winston felt the pain come back along his spine, first to his shoulder, then to his mid back, then exploding again through the small of his back, to his legs and feet which he could feel once more. He lost containment—his power spread forth from his soul. The weeds between the tiles grew denser.

The boy pressed his finger against Winston’s spine, prodding the broken vertebrae. “You can regrow your nerves, but you can’t fix the bones,” he said. “You need Dillon for that, verdad?”

Winston’s answer was another wail. His own body was the enemy now, forcing him to feel every ounce of pain, long after any other nervous system would have been rendered useless. He had never longed for death before through all he had experienced, but now he cared about nothing but ending the pain.

“We can’t leave him like this,” the boy said.

The woman agreed. “Dillon could still repair him. Even if he dies, Dillon could bring him back.”

The boy got closer to Winston, looking into his eyes. “Cut off his head, and take it with us,” the boy said. “Dillon can’t do a thing if we take that away.” And then the boy bounded out, playtime over.

The woman produced a stubby dagger that would make the job slow and sloppy.

As he watched her approach, Winston wanted the pain to end, and if death was the only way to end it he would accept that—but he would not let himself die at their hands. And so, as the woman ap­proached with the blade, Winston reached out and gathered his power, narrowing it and focusing it on a single greening crack between the floor tiles.

Maddy Haas, beaten and bruised but still full of fight, struggled against Ari all the way to the Thiran Gate—her struggles were enough to pull her legs free from the ropes but not her hands.

It was maddening to not know why she was taken or what this was all about—only to know that she was some key variable in what­ever equation these creatures were working. The first thing she saw as he brought her to the gate was the stunning mass of boats in the bay, and the crowds on the shore that kept their distance. She felt a strange force in the air pressing on her, trying to usurp her will, force her to be still. Perhaps she might have caved into it had she not felt so amped up, and had the source of that power not been so distant. Below, three people crested the rocks of the next cove. Even in the dim dawn, she recognized them right away. It was Dillon, Michael and Tory.

Ari ripped the tape off her mouth. “Call to him,” he demanded, but Maddy would not help him in any way, and so in the end, it was Ari who called out.

“Dillon!”

Dillon looked up, then stopped dead in his tracks. She could only imagine what he felt when he saw her there.

“We saved her soul for breakfast,” Ari yelled. “Shall I eat it now?”

She struggled, but his grip only grew tighter. Did he say soul?

“She’s not a part of this!” Dillon screamed. “Let her go!”

“You come to me now. You come to me and I leave her soul where it is. We make good trade. We trade you, for her soul.”

Dillon hesitated, but only for a moment. He bounded toward the base of the stairs. Tory grabbed for him, but he shook her off, and pushed Michael out of his way.

“That’s right, you come to me now.”

“No, Dillon!” Maddy shouted. Dillon was filled with rage, and it blinded him. He would lose this fight. Ari would kill him.

Ari then put his lips against her ear. “You the lucky one,” he said, planting a kiss on her neck. “He dies, you keep your soul. For an hour at least. Not bad.”

She would not accept this. All her life was not going to come down to her being a bargaining chip. She would not be the reason that Dillon failed—she could not allow it!

All at once an explosion of glass and stone shook the Earth. Maddy caught a glimpse of it. The small chapel behind them had buckled outward and its stained glass windows had exploded from the pressure of a green mass which had swelled from within. Spiny limbs and mustard-yellow flowers still spread from the ruined structure like the tentacles of an octopus. It drew Ari’s attention and he loosened his grip. Not much, but it was all Maddy needed. She jerked herself free, swung her tied arms like a broadsword, and knocked him down against the stone of the arch. When he tried to get up, she kicked him in the chin, shattering his jaw, and took off down the steps.

“Maddy!” Dillon had reached the base of the stairs more than a hundred yards below, and began racing up—but not fast enough, be­cause Ari was already rising to his feet behind her, beginning his pur­suit.

She picked up the pace, but with her hands still tied she couldn’t balance herself and went tumbling down the stairs, hitting the steps as she passed the altars of the patron saints. When she got control of her fall and wrestled herself back to her feet, there was someone standing beside her. Not Dillon; not Ari; someone else. Someone who grabbed her and pulled her close to him. It was a face she had seen once before and had never wanted to see again. Long black hair; a face both mas­culine and feminine at once. Okoya.

“No!” Dillon screamed from below. “Stay the hell away from her.”

But Okoya ignored him. Holding her tightly he looked into her eyes. “It is your choice,” Okoya said to her.

She didn’t know what he meant until she looked up the hill to see Ari bounding down toward her. Dillon was much further away and there was no question that Ari would reach her first. What then? Dillon would sacrifice himself to save her soul. His own virtue would destroy him.

And then it all fell into place. There was something she could do. She could remove herself as a variable and stack the equation in Dillon’s favor again.

“You could save him,” Okoya said. “It is your choice.”

He was right. With Okoya’s help, she had the power to turn every­thing, and what an awesome power it was!

Would you give your life for your country? Bussard had once asked her. Would you give your soul?

For her country, perhaps not—not anymore. But for Dillon? For the world? There was only one answer; without pause.

“Do it!” she ordered Okoya, pressing herself into his embrace. “Do it now.”

There was no time for second thoughts. She steeled herself as a red light shot from Okoya’s eyes and nostrils. She didn’t wait for him to find her soul, she opened up her soul for him, practically hurling her essence out of her body into those hungry, groping tendrils. She felt her spirit leaving her flesh and for the briefest of instants felt Ari pulling her body away from Okoya, but it was too late, for she was free from her body—and there was joy, immense joy in the knowledge that she had bested him! That she had won! But in an instant her thoughts and memories were tugged from her as her soul discorporated and discon­nected from her mind. She was a spirit without a name, without mem­ory and she was moving down a dark path. She was being swallowed. And although there should have been terror as Okoya devoured her, she had none, because there was one thought she was able to take with her, that silenced all fear. It was an unvanquishable sense of victory. She held on to that victory as long as she could, content in that singular knowledge until her soul met eternity and perished.

Dillon saw everything.

He saw Okoya grab her. He saw him hold her close. He saw the tendrils of light vomited up from the pit of Okoya’s being, and he felt her soul pulled from her body and disappear into Okoya. He felt her die, and there was nothing he could do about it. How could he have let this happen? How could he have not seen the Vector lurking inside of Ari back in Poland? Now Ari grabbed Maddy’s empty shell, pulling her away from Okoya.

“Try bargaining now,” he heard Maddy say to Ari, but it wasn’t Maddy speaking, not anymore. It was just her empty shell that spoke; her dead, soulless shell, still mimicking life.

Another Vector was descending the stairs; a boy, but his gaze wasn’t on Dillon, it was fixed on Okoya. There was so much hate in that gaze that Dillon now knew everything Okoya had told them was true. Okoya was hated by his own kind. He truly had sided with the Shards to save himself. But there was no salvation for Okoya. Not now; not ever, for he had devoured Maddy and no pit in hell was deep enough for him now.

With tears of fury blinding him, Dillon grabbed Okoya and hurled him down the steps. He lost his balance, and together they rolled down towards the bay.

“I’ll kill you! You son-of-a bitch! I’ll kill you!” Dillon began pounding Okoya’s head against the stone, not wanting to stop; never wanting to stop.

“The Vectors are the enemy,” Okoya insisted. “I had to do it. The Vectors are the enemy.”

Dillon couldn’t help himself. He so much wanted to be the de­stroyer again and in that moment he longed for the spirit of destruction to return to him, allowing him to feed its hunger, creating waves and waves of destruction as he had done two years ago, so he could share his despair with the world.

It was Maddy’s shell that pushed him off of Okoya, having pulled her hands from the bonds. He looked up to see her. It. Maddy undead.

“Don’t be a fool,” It said. “Get out of here.”

He looked up at it, but didn’t see Maddy’s face—all he could see was the vacancy of her eyes.

“I chose this,” It said. “Now make it mean something.”

Okoya grabbed Dillon’s hand. “They’re coming for you,” Okoya said, and spirited him away down the shoreline, toward Michael and Tory, leaving Maddy’s undead husk behind.

“I’ll kill you!” Dillon told Okoya, but it lacked conviction.

“Later,” Okoya told him.

They ran to the rocks where Michael and Tory were waiting, and scrambled over them, to the next cove.

“What happened back there?” Tory asked, and threw a harsh gaze at Okoya. “What’s he doing here?”

Dillon didn’t want to answer—didn’t want to think about it. Okoya urged them on, and they kept moving down the shore, until they were sure the Vectors no longer pursued.

“Now that the Vectors know I’m here, we have very little time,” Okoya told them. “My presence makes the threat far more serious to them.”

“What about Winston?” Michael asked. “Something happened to him—you felt it, didn’t you? We all must have felt it.”

“It’s possible that the Vectors had him—but I think he’s gotten away.” Okoya pointed to Tory. “You go look for him.”

Tory scowled. “I don’t take orders from you.”

“Go, Tory,” Dillon told her. “Michael, you go, too—there’s no telling where he’ll be.”

Tory opened her mouth, as if to say something, but thought better of it and left. Michael lingered a moment more, taking in Dillon’s distraught expression.

“Don’t choke in sudden death, man,” Michael said, clapping him on the shoulder. “We’re counting on you to hold things together.”

When they had gone, Okoya turned to Dillon. “Once they find Winston, you must all summon up your strength. Time is short, and all five of you must be ready.”

“Four,” Dillon spat at him. “Lourdes won’t help us.”

And Okoya said, “I wasn’t talking about Lourdes.”

Winston crawled out of the ruin of the shattered chapel, forcing his way through the thorny trunks of the weed he had cultivated. The ugly woman screamed her fury behind him, hacking the stalks of the monster weed with the knife that had been meant for his decapitation. Although the pain in Winston’s broken spine was more than enough to tear him from consciousness, he forced himself lucid, for this, he knew, was the most pivotal moment of his life. Dragging himself across the road, his legs and arms barely working, he brought himself to the cliff. There were no stairs at this ledge; it was a sheer drop all the way down to the rocks below, but the woman was running behind him now, swinging the knife angrily at her side as she ran, cutting her own legs in her fury to get to Winston.

It was his mother’s voice that came to him then. He had barely thought of her for weeks, but now she rose to the forefront of his mind and sang to him a gentle song of faith; the gospel that had always comforted her. It used to comfort him as well in his childhood, before he had become this strange and wondrous changeling.

“I hear you,” he whispered. Whatever darkness these Vectors brought with them, whatever portents of despair, he had to have faith. No matter how unlikely, no matter how foolish, he had to believe that something larger than himself, larger than the Vectors, would cradle him and catch him when he fell. With the woman only a few feet away now, he forced his body over the edge and let gravity take over.

37. Scar And Spirit

Less than a quarter mile from the steps where Maddy’s spirit had died, Dillon waited with Okoya for Michael and Tory to return.

The Vectors had not followed them here. They had completely dispensed with Okoya and the Shards. Dillon could see the boy, and the man who had once been Tessic’s pilot standing in the stone arch at the head of the cliff, staring out over the bay, ignoring him.

“If we’re such a threat to the Vectors, then why haven’t they come after us?”

“Because they ran out of time,” Okoya said. “They can’t pursue you anymore; they must begin working the scar, and that means we’ve won our first battle. You’ve all survived their attempts to destroy you. Now you will get to face them.”

On the ridge, the third Vector took her place beside the other two framed in the arch, and the moment she did something happened. They began to push out waves of energy; pulses of light that danced across the sky filled with color like a shimmering aurora—beautiful, but Dillon understood its dark purpose. The Vectors were working the scar, caressing it, slowly tearing it open.

As the waves of energy passed, Dillon felt them resonate within him. He felt his own powers begin a new surge, rising like adrenaline. An autonomic reaction to the Vector’s pulses. He held containment, but only barely. If he let loose now, he felt his power would cover the entire Mediterranean, and beyond.

“You are enabled,” Okoya said.

It left him breathless, and yet he knew, even with all that power he held inside, he was powerless to bring back Maddy. A devoured soul was gone—irretrievable even to him.

Dillon turned on Okoya sharply, his hands balled into fists. Tears of anger flooded his eyes. “When this is over—if we survive—I will shatter you,” he said. “I will find a way to make you feel the pain she felt when you devoured her.”

He expected Okoya to lash out and vehemently defend his inde­fensible act, but he didn’t. Instead he extended his hand and said, “I have a gift for you, Dillon.”

Dillon felt a slight change in the air pressure around him and his ears popped. The light of dawn changed.

He had felt this before. He knew what it meant.

He spun on his heels to look out over the bay, but he did not see the bay. Instead he saw a jagged hole in space, only a meter wide. A portal to the Unworld.

But even as he saw it, he knew that this portal came with a heavy price—for Dillon knew Okoya was using the energy he had gleaned from Maddy’s soul to open the portal.

There were no red sands and icy skies beyond this hole; Okoya had chosen his point of entry with much greater precision. Through the hole, Dillon saw a place that had been burned into his memory, revisited a thousand times in his nightmares. A vast throne room of an ancient stone palace, the cathedral roof held up by what few pillars had not fallen.

And there in the center was a throne.

But the throne was facing the wrong way—Dillon could only see the back of the carved stone chair. Hanging over the side was a corner of blue fabric—the royal robe that had become her shroud. And the edge of a white shoe. Her shoe. Deanna’s.

His mind reeling, his eyes shot back to Okoya. Okoya strained to hold the portal. A vein bulged on his forehead, his face turned a vir­ulent shade of crimson.

“Can’t hold it—" he said through gritted teeth.

Dillon made a move to step through the portal, but Okoya grabbed him, his nails digging into Dillon’s shoulder.

“No time—" Okoya spat. “Seconds left.”

Seconds? Even if he pushed his spirit out before him, and revived Deanna from here, she was too far away, even if she ran, she would not make it to the portal in time. This was just another gift from Okoya’s bottomless bag of cruelties. He offered a pained glimpse of Deanna, without enough time to bring her back.

“Not her flesh!” Okoya hissed. “Draw her. Draw her now!”

And Dillon finally understood.

With the portal already collapsing, Dillon pushed forth a single impulse through the breach. He called to her. With every ounce of his soul, he called to her, and his call became an imperative that no spirit could resist. His call bypassed the corporal part of her that lay motionless on the throne, and reached to the far corners of the Unworld, until finding her soul.

As the portal collapsed to a pinhole, he felt her coalescing—moving toward him. And in the last instant before the portal sealed, he felt her—he actually felt her pass through him, like a bullet, in through his chest and out through his spine! But to where?

The portal was gone now, and Dillon searched around him as if expecting to see her there, like a ghost—an apparition before his eyes, but she was nowhere to be found.

“Where is she?” Dillon demanded. “What happened to her?”

Okoya had fallen to his knees, exhausted from his effort, barely able to catch his breath.

“How can you be so luminous, and yet still be so dim?” Okoya took a deep breath, and then another. The crimson left his face. “A discorporate spirit,” Okoya said, “seeks a dispirited body.”

Deanna ignited into consciousness.

She shot through the void, seeking something to grab on to, a body to join with her spirit, but there was nothing to give her purchase. Finally a vacuum drew her in, at last connecting her spirit with flesh. Now, out of the darkness and into light, only one thought filled her mind. It was a name. Her name— such a powerful thought she had to speak it aloud—but the name she heard was not the name she expected. An instant of fear. Uncertainty. But the instant passed and now the name she spoke—the person she was—no longer seemed foreign, it seemed right, and she forgot altogether why it shouldn’t feel right. She was Maddy Haas. Why on earth would she think she was anyone else?

Sitting alone on a boulder by the shore, Maddy turned to see Dillon running toward her, but as he neared, he slowed his pace. She could feel his trepidation as if the feeling sprang from inside her, and not him. She felt strangely radiant.

“Deanna?” he said.

“Don’t be stupid, it’s Maddy.”

“M . . . Maddy,” Dillon stuttered. “But. . .”

She slid down the boulder and slowly came towards him, feeling so calm, so in control, as if she had all the time in the world. No . . . more as if the world was in perfect time with me.

“I’m . . . different,” she said. “Have you done something to me again, Dillon?”

“Your soul,” Dillon said. “Okoya devoured your soul.”

She looked at her hands as if that might betray something about her current nature.

“I don’t feel like an empty shell,” she said. “In fact, I feel. . .” She didn’t finish the sentence. She looked up at the sky that radiated the pulses of the Vectors. She was feeling it the way Dillon must have felt it—the way a Shard would feel it, deep within her. She spun to him, filled with intense excitement. “I’m beyond myself,” she said, as Dillon had once said to her. “I don’t know where I end and the rest of the world begins. I feel the sky. I feel the depth of the ocean.”

“What do you remember?”

Maddy tried to put her thoughts together. She closed her eyes. She remembered everything from the life of Maddy Haas. The way she rescued Dillon and captured him again. The work she had done for Tessic. She remembered her childhood, her sister, her parents; but she knew these weren’t the memories Dillon was asking about, so she pushed harder, and suddenly gasped at an unexpected, unconnected thought.

“I remember a snake. It had no eyes. It was wrapped around me.”

“Go on.”

But as quickly as the thought had come to her, it was gone, like a dream she could no longer remember. But it had lingered long enough for her to know. She turned to Dillon in amazement. “I was Deanna Chang.”

Although Dillon laughed with joy, Maddy forced down her own emotion.

“But that doesn’t matter. I’m Maddy Haas now.”

“Yes,” said Dillon. “You are.”

Dillon reached out his right hand toward her. “No Shard takes this hand but you.”

Maddy looked at the hand, hesitating—almost afraid that all this wasn’t real, but in the end she touched him. She held his hand. The syntaxis that flooded both of them was so powerful, so perfect, she almost lost herself in it. His eyes were locked on hers, and hers filled with tears. For Maddy this was an answer to a prayer. All the times they had touched, shared each other’s thoughts, shared each other’s bodies—it paled compared to this.

Some things you can never share, Tessic had told her. You can never be what he needs. You can never be his true companion. Tessic had been right—and yet he had also been wrong.

“I didn’t know,” she said, filled with the joy of being one with Dillon; of being a part of each other; two shards of the same star. “I didn’t know . . .” Yet at the same time she cried in mourning, know­ing that the true soul of Maddy Haas had to die to make this possible. She was a tenant in someone else’s mind, in someone else’s body, and in that moment she vowed she would no longer seek the memories of Deanna Chang. Out of respect for Maddy’s sacrifice she would live this life of Maddy Haas and cherish it.

Let the flesh of Deanna Chang be dust.

Let her memories disappear with her.

It was a fair payment for the life she now claimed as her own. She gently let go of Dillon’s hand, their connection flickering away, but only for now.

“Tell me what you feel?” Dillon asked.

“Peace,” she answered. She felt the earth in balance with the sky, life in balance with death. Without her, life had been out of balance for so long, hadn’t it? As she reached her spirit out she could feel it touching hundreds of thousands of souls, leaving a calming sense of peace, an indominable sense of trust, and an absolute conquest of fear. Dillon had told her that Deanna’s gift had been faith, but she never understood it until now. How could she? So much of her life—so much of everyone’s lives—was built on fear. It was the guiding prin­ciple of survival. To call what she felt now faith was an understatement. It was beyond that. It was a feeling of absolute acceptance and under­standing that had no word to describe it. She looked up to the sky to see the waves of force flowing out from the three Vectors who still stood in the gate.

“Those three creatures,” she asked. “What are they, and what are we suppose to do to stop them?”

Even before the Vectors took their place in the Thiran Gate, Tory put all of her attention into finding Winston. Winston’s sudden burst of energy somewhere on the top of that cliff had taken Tory com­pletely by surprise—because until that moment she hadn’t even felt his presence there at all. Now as she searched for him, she realized how that could be. “Containment,” Dillon had called it. An ability to cloak oneself from detection, and reserve one’s energy until it was needed. It was a skill she would have liked to have learned, but there would be no time for lessons today.

The growth spurt Winston had incited had quickly tapered, fading even before they left Dillon to find him, and although she could now feel Winston’s uncontained presence, it was faint—dangerously faint. Tory had thought she had seen a shadow drop through the corner of her vision, but she wasn’t certain until she climbed an outcrop of rocks, and saw him wedged deep in a crevasse.

“Winston!” She tried to ease her way down into the crevasse, but lost her footing and slid to the narrowest point, where Winston was wedged. His body was mangled in an unnatural serpentine twist, and through his torn shirt, she could see terrible ridges poking from his back like a stegosaurus spine. His eyes were open, but only barely. A weak moan escaped him—the only hint that he was still conscious.

“Hurts . . .” he murmured.

“We’ve got to get you out of here,” but there was no way she could see to do it.

“My Mama . . . " he said. “Damned if I don’t hear my Mama’s singing, you hear her?” He grinned faintly in his delirium.

“Yes, Winston,” she said, doing everything she could to placate him, “I hear her.”

“That witchy woman up there’s got to be even uglier than you.” Then his eyes opened from slits to half mast, and he looked at her. “Hey, swamp thing—you ain’t ugly no more.” He reached up to touch her face, but didn’t have the strength.

Her affection blossomed into tears. “I haven’t been that way for a long time, Winston.” She thought back to the oozing mess she had once been in the days when the strange light from the supernova had filled the sky. Had that been her? “I’m not ugly, and you’re not shrink­ing.”

“Wish I was,” he answered lazily. “Wish I was back home . . .”

“So do I, Winston. So do I.” Being outcasts in rural Alabama had been horrible, but simple. Did she ever dream back then that she would have the fate of the world in her hands—back in the days when every­one in that same world was her enemy? When her only thought was surviving through the night without being eaten alive by the sores that covered her rancid, unclean body.

She saw Winston’s eyes fluttering—fading, and she spoke to him to keep his thoughts focused, as she tried to shift her position enough to get a grip on him. “I wish we were back there, you with your Mama, and that silly little brother of yours.”

Winston sighed. “Thaddy.”

“Yes. Thaddy. Screaming bloody murder about some bogey-man coming to steal him through his window.”

“Taily-bone,” Winston mumbled, then rattled in a sing-song voice. " ‘Taily-bone Taily-bone all’s I want’s my Taily-bone.’ I used to tell him Taily-bone was coming for him if he didn’t shut his mouth.” Winston let out a wheezy laugh, then grimaced. “Damn fool Thaddy don’t know enough to run from a train.” He grew solemn for a mo­ment, tears filling his half-shut eyes. “They gonna kill him, Tory. They gonna eat Thaddy from the inside out. Taily-bone comin’ for him after all.” He coughed a splatter of blood onto her shirt.

“We’ll stop them, Winston.”

“I’m gonna sleep first,” he said. “You tell me if I dream.”

And he closed his eyes.

“Winston, no.” She tapped his face, and lost her footing, wedging deeper in the crevice.

And then something happened.

A pulse of heat passed through her body. But it wasn’t heat—not exactly—it was something else. Then again, and again. She looked up to see waves of color expanding across the slit of sky above the crevice. Whatever this was, it touched her deep within, scraping against her, like the flint of a lighter flicking, flicking, flicking, to ignite the flame.

And suddenly she did ignite!

She felt her power explode from her in a breathtaking rush, cleans­ing, purifying. Not just the island, but the ocean beyond, for miles and miles.

A sterile field, she thought. I’m setting up a sterile field. My part in this has already begun!

And if these strange waves of light had affected her so, it must have affected the others as well; she could feel that it did, and Winston, as weak as he was, even in this unconscious state, was pushing out his greening waves of growth. Ragweed above them grew to maturity and broke open, sending loose a mad flurry of airborne seeds, like a child blowing a dandelion, and those seeds took root in the stone, their roots breaking the stone to bits. Something was moving down below. Something was alive in the darkness of the crevasse.

She heard them before she saw them—the awful clicking and scraping, then they rose into the light. Insects. A horde of insects— millions of them—spawning, reproducing like a plague beneath them. She screamed as they bubbled up from the depth of the chasm like living magma, but as the mass of insects grew closer, Tory realized that this was no plague, but their salvation. As the wellspring of insects reached their feet, she grabbed Winston in her arms. He moaned, but didn’t open his eyes. That’s alright, Winston. Keep dreaming.

She closed her eyes, trying to ignore the sensation of them crawling in her clothes, against her skin. They began to rise, carried by this living eruption, until they were lifted out, the insectoid eruption surg­ing over the edge of the crevasse, running down the hillside to the shore.

“Tory? Winston? Jesus—what the hell is this?”

With Winston still in her arms, she stumbled against Michael, and he caught her.

“What happened to him?”

She opened her mouth to explain, but again her breath was taken away—not by the surges of light but by something entirely different. A feeling within as comforting as those waves of light were disturbing. It was the sense of something falling into place—something that they had gone so long without, they had grown accustomed to its absence.

Tory knew at once.

“Deanna?”

Michael pushed his hair back from his face with a shaky hand. Up above, the clouds shredded, not knowing which way to blow. “Son of a bitch, I think you’re right!”

Further down the shoreline, in the midst of all that was going on, Dillon was holding someone’s hand.

“That’s not Deanna! What is he doing?” Michael said.

With Winston’s weight divided between the two of them, they hurried down to the shore toward them. Winston was still as broken as he had been back in the crevice, which meant Dillon still kept containment. Now, when they needed his power more than ever, he still held it back.

When they arrived, Dillon turned to them from Maddy, his eyes glazed in a sort of puppy affection totally inappropriate for this dire moment.

“Dillon, Deanna’s back,” Tory informed him. “I don’t know how, but she’s here somewhere. Somewhere close—can’t you feel it?”

Dillon only smiled. “She’s right here,” he told them. “Only you’ve got the name wrong.”

Their minds stumbled, trying to grasp what the hell he was talking about.

“Her name’s not Deanna,” he said. “It’s Maddy. Maddy Haas.”

As they grappled with the incongruous suggestion, Winston flinched in pain, and they lost their grip on him. He fell to the ground.

Maddy, who they could now sense was somehow the very essence of Deanna, glanced down at Winston. “What happened to him?”

“The Vectors happened to him.”

Dillon shook his head. “He went looking for trouble and found it.” Dillon took a step closer. “C’mon, Winston. We don’t have time for this.” His eyes flashed like the shutter of a camera, opening for a fraction of an instant, then closing again, releasing a directed quantum of his peculiar radiance. Winston’s broken spine transformed, the jag­ged bulges receding, the serpentine curve straightening. He opened his eyes to see them all looking down on him.

“Aw crap—did I get buried?” he asked. “What year is it?”

Tory helped him up. “You weren’t even dead.”

He took in his surroundings and deflated. “Damn—you mean I still gotta do this thing?”

The waves were pulsing out from the top of the cliff with greater intensity now. From this angle, Tory could see all three Vectors stand­ing side by side beneath the huge stone arch.

“The scar is weakening,” said a voice behind them. “Can you feel it? In few minutes it will tear wide.” They turned to see Okoya. Tory still could not accept that he was on their side. She stepped aside, keeping distance between herself and him. There had been too many betrayals, so she watched him with distrustful vigilance, waiting for the next one.

Dillon looked down from the Vectors, his eyes following the path of stairs leading down to the sea. “We’ll make our stand there,” he said. “At the base of the stairs.”

There was a round platform there. A stone zodiac. A clock that measured superstition instead of time. Well, thought Tory, what better place for spirits conceived of the Scorpion Star to fight for humanity than a zodiac circle; that hopelessly human attempt to define an in­conceivable cosmos—a task almost as impossible as the one they were charged with.

Yet now that they were in the presence of the long lost Spirit of Faith, this task before them no longer felt so impossible.

As the pulses from the Vectors continued to intensify, the Shards gathered on the Zodiac circle with Okoya, the unlikely coach, standing off to the side.

“What now, Okoya?” Dillon asked.

“At any second the sky will tear open and when it does, you’ll have to stop the Vectors from drawing the others through.”

“Oh, is that all?” said Michael.

“You have a power that is beyond even my understanding,” Okoya told them. “I can’t guide you in its use.”

“How the hell are we suppose to know what to do?” shouted Winston.

But Maddy put up her hand. “We’ll know,” she said, with such certainty it calmed everyone’s fears.

Meanwhile, standing in the Thiran gate, the Vectors continued to emit their waves of sibilant, spatial discord. Space itself began warp­ing, twisting, stretching the knotty scar until it could no longer hold. It tore apart with such force that the sky shattered.

38. Fusion

The force of the fracturing sky sent a powerful earthquake rumbling across the island. It splintered the Thiran gate. The top of the rectangular arch fell, instantly crunching and killing the host bodies of the three Vectors, and those deaths freed the Vectors to fly to the edges of the hole and call to their kind. They were more than mere guiding beacons; they were impellers, pulling their dark species from the dying void of their universe along the axes of length, depth and time toward this new place of plenty. Now above the island of Thira was a gaping hole to the Unworld and a second hole beyond that; like smashed double panes of glass. Through the first hole were the red sands and ice sky of the Unworld. And through the second hole was darkness so absolute it dimmed the light of the rising sun.

To the masses that crowded the bay, which now rolled with a violently shaking earth, it appeared as if heaven itself had rended and they opened their minds and hearts, ready to receive whatever glory was about to be bestowed on them.

At the base of the stairs, the five Shards were barely able to stand. The granite Zodiac circle beneath their feet cracked and heaved. Dillon stepped to the center. His whole life, all of their lives, had been meant for this moment. He looked to Maddy. “No fear,” he said, and reached out his right hand. She took it and instantly the others were there as well. Michael took his left hand, Tory wrapped in Michael’s arm; and pressed against Dillon’s chest. Winston moved in, finding his place, and a syntaxis of five exploded within them.

Dillon let loose everything, detonating his own containment. He felt his soul, his power stretching beyond the island to the shores of the mainland, to the coast of Africa, to the heights of heavens and the depths of the earth. He could feel life being pulled from death every­where. The island greened, and the bay filled with kelp from Winston’s powerful surge of growth. The clouds burned away to the edge of the horizon. All was scoured by Tory’s purifying presence, and Deanna’s peace, which now resided in Maddy, flooded every heart more pow­erfully than the shattering sky. They could feel all these things raging wildly out of control but all these wonders still did not overwhelm the darkness of the breach, and all their efforts had no effect on the Vectors.

“It’s not working!” Dillon shouted. “We’ve done something wrong!”

Dillon could feel the full contingent of creatures—thousands upon thousands of dark spirits moving towards the breach from their world of living shadows—an infection that would poison this world, this universe, for all time to come. What have we done wrong? Okoya, some­body, help us! What have we done wrong?

Lourdes had moved to the nearest cove, her controlled crowd now standing behind her. She had promised Dillon she’d have the best seat in the house, and now she watched in an ambivalence that was turning into deep dread as the sky tore apart and the darkness beyond made itself known.

She had felt Deanna’s return only moments before. There was no mistaking it. So connected were they still that a birth registered within the core of her soul just as a death would. Lourdes could feel Deanna’s conquest of fear whittling away at the stone of her own heart. It was almost enough to move Lourdes, but not quite. So she stood there and watched as the sky split open, revealing a demonic womb, hell crown­ing in the breach, ready to push through. And now the only thought she could find within her was this:

I have brought this about.

Not the Vectors. Not Okoya. Me.

Because of her, Dillon was failing. They all were failing. Their mighty powers stretched beyond the horizons, but had no effect on the Vectors and the darkness. She was responsible for the failure of the Shards, and that was a weight she could not bear.

You were always the weakest of us.

Dillon had planted that thought into her, and she could not tear it free. Those words of Dillon’s echoed within her, fracturing her resolve. She was the weak link. This was not happening because she chose the Vectors, but because she was not strong enough to resist them—and in this moment when she should have shared triumph with the Vec­tors, she could feel nothing but defeat, loss, and her own sense of inadequacy. With a single thought, Dillon had stolen her victory.

I hate him, she said to herself. I hate them all for making me responsible. I hate them for needing me. I hate myself for needing them. For loving them still.

She raced towards them across the pebbles of the beach. The earth shook and boulders fell from the mountainside. The stairs leading to the gate crumbled, but she avoided the falling stones until finally reach­ing the five of them, frozen in that perfect connection. She knew her place there. She felt it without having to be told. The Vectors would kill her for her betrayal, but what would that matter now? They would kill her anyway. She pressed her way between them, cupped her hand gently around Dillon’s neck, pressed up against Deanna, and reached out to put her hand on Tory’s shoulder.

The moment she closed that final circuit, the world she knew, the life that she knew ended with an explosion of light and sound as her spirit fused with theirs, and she added to their powers the one thing they were lacking; absolute and perfect control.

The world heaved against the flow of entropy and eternity for a single sparkling moment, feeling the touch of the fused shards of the Scorpion Star like an embrace:

In Africa, a brown, barren plain grew green and fertile.

In India, the last vestige of smallpox bacteria quietly extinguished from the bloodstream of a carrier who had never known what he was on the verge of passing on to his friends and family.

In the halls of Oxford, a random number generator that for years had spat out chains of randomness, now put forth a growing series of sequential numbers in bold defiance of reason.

In a South American convalescent hospital, a paraplegic man stood from his wheelchair without even realizing he had done it, and crossed the room to turn down the heat.

In a fresh grave in Arlington, Virginia, Lt. Vincent Gerritson be­came aware. Not aware enough to know or understand his final dis­position, but enough to acknowledge that he existed—enough to lend the force of his spirit to the wind of life flowing through him.

In Southern California, where the sun had just set, Drew Camden had a sudden jolt of connection as he sat in his bedroom. A satori filled with joy, and hope. As he looked out of his window to the clear, dark sky, a vine slithered across the pane like a garter snake, sprouting leaves, budding with red trumpets. It took his breath away, because in that instant he knew. Without a doubt he knew that the Shards, whose lives had, for a short time, been so intertwined with his own, had finally received their destiny.

And in Poland, Elon Tessic, sequestered in his dacha, felt a blast of such enormous hope and light that he knew it could only be the finger of God.

Dillon was at the center.

The moment Lourdes touched him, he could feel himself the core of something infinitely powerful and intense. He—they—were no longer Shards; his own power of completion had reversed the entropy let loose in the death of the scorpion star, and their souls forged into a single great soul, with six minds. He was no longer just Dillon—he was the sum all of them—and he could hear their thoughts as clearly as his own.

As their spirits ignited, it burned away their bodies, incinerating the shore, the island, and miles of the Mediterranean, penetrating deep into the earth’s mantle and beyond the ionosphere. They were as a star igniting on the surface of the earth, and yet even as he felt it all burn away, Dillon held the patterns in a mind now so powerful and vast, it could remember every molecule, every cell, every soul caught within the fusion flame. He held the memory of every pattern with the ease he could remember a name, a face, a feeling.

In that glorious moment, the soft swirl of clouds dissolved around the globe, leaving the earth a naked, unblinking eye in the cradle of the heavens, and a wave of spirit swept out across the globe, encom­passing it, penetrating the dust and revitalizing the spark of every soul that had ever lived. Dillon held the history and essence of life together in this instant of resurrection, linking every spirit drawing on their energy, making them one with himself. It only lasted for an instant—but that instant had the essence of eternity.

A moment of enlightenment and ascension.

A moment of unmitigated faith;

of singular will;

of untarnished purity;

of unclouded joy;

pulled together and fused into a single force of life.

This was their weapon against the Vectors; not six beacons, but a single spirit at the center of billions of points of light all focused on a wound in the flesh of space!

Dillon wanted to relish this grand expansion of their spirit—but—

“—The Vectors.”

“Yes, the Vectors.”

“I see them.”

“I sense them.”

“At the breach.”

Lourdes thought, “Move toward them.” And their spirit impelled towards the breach at her command. As they moved, they now ex­perienced the world no longer with senses of the flesh, but with a vision of spirit; a mind’s eye that saw in all directions at once, altering their perceptions of everything around them. The space they moved through was not a sky—not an atmosphere, but a thick, gelatinous plasma; a living plasma that mere fleshly senses could not perceive. Now that plasma was violated by the breach, and at the edge of the breach they saw the true form of the Vectors; not angels, nor beings of light, but beings of living darkness cloaked as light. Soullessness swallowing souls.

They approached the Temporal Vector, immobile now like an animal caught in their light.

“I feel its fear,” Maddy said. This creature had been encapsulated in flesh long enough to gain a rudimentary arsenal of human emotions. Terror, fury, and hatred enough to level a city. They enveloped the creature, cutting it off from the others.

Now it was up to Dillon.

He knew that his power of creation and life was only half of what he needed to do. Each of their lights cast a shadow and Dillon’s shadow was destruction. With that in mind, Dillon pushed forth a single thought into the Vector’s tumultuous, furious mind:

Cease to exist.

It was the most horrible, most devastating act of destruction he had ever wished upon a living thing. The creature screamed, fighting the power of Dillon’s terminal directive, straining against his will, but it had used too much of its power tearing open the hole. Michael injected it with fear, it panicked, and its spirit finally succumbed to Dillon’s will. The Temporal Vector shattered, breaking into smaller and smaller fragments of anti-life until its consciousness was gone and its fragments imploded into nothingness.

The Shards moved on to the Lateral Vector—the one who had abided within the woman. They surrounded it. Imploded it. Their light swallowed it.

“Like antibodies.”

“An immune system,”

“surrounding,”

“isolating,”

“devouring it the way it meant to devour us.”

As their spirit crossed the breach to the leading Vector, they caught a glimpse of the infection. Thousands of dark entities spilled into the Unworld, crossing the outer breach from their own dying universe, all ready to cross the chasm to the inner breach. The Leading Vector was calling to them, reeling them in. This had to be stopped—but this last, most powerful Vector tried to elude them. There was nowhere it could run from their light; it was caught in their gravity, spiraling towards them until it reached the center of their spirit. It was the strongest, this creature that had hidden within a child. It lashed out now, probing its tendrils into their weakest points, trying to tear them apart, break them into pieces once again—and Dillon thought it might succeed, that their spirit would detonate from the pressure, separating into shards once more. If that happened, it would be over. The Vectors would triumph and the Shards’ deaths would light the path for these infecting entities. The infection would take root and spread from this point to the rest of the earth and beyond. Dillon felt weak with the thought, and that weakness gave the Leading Vector the upper hand. He felt himself losing concentration, losing this battle of wills . . . but then Dillon felt Maddy in his heart.

“Trust,” was all she said.

Not the voice of Maddy, not the voice of Deanna—but both at the same time soothing his panicked mind. Her touch stabilized him, strengthened him enough to bear down with the force of all the souls he held in his grasp, and the leading Vector could not withstand it. It imploded and its final death wail was stifled, stolen before it could even begin.

“We’ve killed them! The Vectors are gone!”

“But not the infection.”

“I see them!”

“Hundreds of thousands!”

“Shadow spirits.”

“Thieves of Souls.”

“Crossing over.”

“Escaping.”

“Too many!”

Now without the Vectors, their orderly grid had dissolved, and they crowded the edge of the inner breach like ants, gripping onto the jagged edge of the sky, fighting to get through.

Then, beyond the Unworld, beyond the outer breach, the Shards witnessed the death of a universe.

The living void Okoya had told them about was completely gone, consumed by two spirits—two parasites; one of destruction, the other of fear. They were Dillon’s old friends—the spirits he himself had unleashed upon that dark place a year ago. Now those insatiable beasts had consumed the full volume of space itself. And finally, when the last of that universe was gone, with nothing left to consume, the par­asites turned to one another. The blind snake of fear and the black-winged demon of destruction, now larger than constellations, wrapped around one another in an impassioned, but deadly embrace, and then began to devour each other. They grew smaller and smaller, their spirits disappearing into each other like a moebius strip, twisting fearfully, angrily, destructively, until they had devoured one another completely, and the universe that gave birth to Okoya and the Vectors blinked out of existence forever.

And now the soul-devouring shadow-creatures lingered at the breach, lethal refugees of that lost place. Dillon felt the magnitude of their presence, and knew that the power of the Shards was the only thing keeping them from crossing through. Dillon could hear the thoughts of his soul-mates as this infection loomed on the lip of the wound.

“Kill them.”

“Destroy them.”

“Every last one of them.”

“For what they have done,”

“for what they could have done,”

“for what they might still do someday.”

But a voice of wisdom rose above them all.

“No.”

Winston was the single voice of dissent. “No,” he told them. “It’s not our place. Our task is to stop the infection, not to wipe out a species.”

It was Winston’s wisdom in the face of their own fury that they listened to, for if ever there was a time to trust Winston’s judgment, it was now.

Hold them back. Keep them out. Let them live.

With their own power beginning to fade, Maddy held back their panic, giving them a final burst of courage. Lourdes moved them across the breach. Winston restored the gaps in space, Tory purified it, Mi­chael cauterized it. Dillon repaired the damage, pulling back the edges of the wound until the sky was whole, and the creatures were sealed out, trapped forever in the Unworld, condemned to haunt the walls between worlds.

When it was done, Dillon finally let go. He let go of his grip of the world, he let go of the five who were a part of him, and as he did he pushed forth the patterns he held through the battle. Patterns of the sea, and of the island and of the thousands of boats in the bay and of every soul in every vessel in those boats. He pulled it all back from the smithereens, restoring it all, until he could feel his own body again. Tory pressing his chest, Winston on his waist, Lourdes holding the back of his neck, Michael at his left hand and Maddy at his right. He thought that beyond what they had just experienced there could be nothing left to feel—but then came a final gift, the reward for what they had done, for what they had chosen.

It was as if an eye opened somewhere beyond the sky and projected forth for them from a perspective too vast to comprehend, a billion pinpoints of light that were not stars, but entire galaxies. This was their universe in its entirety, thirty billion light years across, alive, and puls­ing with living light. It was a glorious vision of life, of majesty, and a sense of their own wonderful, terrible, insignificance in the vastness of creation. Then, within that soup of swirling stars there came a sudden series of explosions. Not just a few, but countless stars began to det­onate, and with those blasts of light, billions of shards of life traversed the universe instantaneously towards them! Towards earth!

The vision faded and they pulled apart, separating into six separate spirits, their powers spent, used up once and for all—but the power of their final vision remained.

“What was it?” Maddy asked. “What was that we just felt?”

“A billion stars,” Winston said, his voice faint and wondrous. “A billion stars going supernova.”

“Did we do that?” Tory asked.

Dillon shook his head. “Unless I’m mistaken,” he said, “I believe that was God hearing the prayers of pigeons.”

They said no more of it, but each held in their own heart the knowledge that, from this moment on, nothing on earth would ever be the same.

39. Luck Of The Draw

Spring came early to Poland in slow increments after the winter thaw. For a brief time in December, grass had sprouted and trees had greened, but such an instant of growth could not last long. In a day, the leaves had fallen and the grass had withered under the numbing cold of northern winds. In April, when the snows had gone, the hills filled with green at a much slower pace, undetectable to the human eye, but steady enough to cover the countryside in a few short weeks. Ash mounds in and around Birkenau filled with wildflowers and rye, as if nature were somehow pining to ease the mind, without taking away the shape of the horror.

Ciechanow, which had once been a very small town, now had on its outskirts a pinwheel of 112 buildings. With each building thirty stories high and as long as a football field, the complex was twice as large as the rest of the town. Few of the brand new buildings were occupied—in fact, most of them had been donated by Tessitech to the Polish government, and now an entire wing in the Ministry of Housing was filled with bureaucrats working to fill them.

However, one small corner of the complex was occupied. Six buildings and part of a seventh, a drop in the bucket really, but a community nonetheless; close knit and still a little bit wary of the outside world, but that was only to be expected.

It was on a temperate day in April that Elon Tessic walked the paths of this towering apartment community with Dillon Cole.

“I did feel your joining,” Tessic told Dillon. “Your ‘fusion,’ as you call it.”

Dillon shrugged. “Everyone felt it.”

“Yes,” Tessic said. “But I understood what I was feeling.”

Dillon grinned. “I suppose now you’ll claim you were responsible for saving the world.”

Tessic smirked. “Well, you said it yourself. I did help to develop the world’s greatest defensive weapon, did I not?”

“That you did, Elon.” And indeed Dillon knew that there was credit due. And who’s to say that had Dillon not been put through Tessic’s unusual boot camp, he would have had the fortitude to fill his role in the stand against the Vectors?

“I even provided the means for imprisoning that creature you al­lowed to remain.”

The reminder unnerved Dillon, but he didn’t let it show. “How is Okoya taking to lockdown?”

“Far better than you did. He is content to stay in the cell—he actually seems to like it there.”

Dillon was not surprised. The containment dome of the Hesperia plant wasn’t exactly like being chained to a mountainside and left for the birds. This was a cushy exile, and in it, Okoya finally could find what he always wanted. He was the center of his own private universe with an entire facility devoted to his personal maintenance. He was out of sight, but never out of mind.

The path down which Tessic led Dillon came to a place where grass had not been sown, and the buildings before them were barren and bleak. Although Dillon slowed, Tessic seemed to know where he was going.

“There is a park around this next building. Another island in the ghost town. You will see.”

“Do you still think of what might have been?” Dillon asked, as he looked around at the vacant buildings.

“Of course,” he answered. “But then I look around and see what is. There are almost eleven thousand here—a single one brought back from the death camps would have been a miracle—and we have eleven thousand! I look at these faces around me, and know that I will go to my grave a happy man,” he said. “Although, I hope it’s not in the too near future. I intend to enjoy my retirement.”

“What could you possibly do that you haven’t already done?”

“I have a goal, remember,” Tessic answered. “I intend to die broke. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get rid of my kind of money?”

“It’s not easy being the twelfth richest man in the world,” Dillon scoffed.

“Twenty-third,” Tessic corrected. “Building this place was quite a blow to my standing.”

“Is that why you called for me, Elon, to see this place?”

Tessic hesitated. “My pilot—Ari—he was my nephew. You didn’t know that, did you?”

Dillon looked away. “No.”

“He was my only real family.”

“I’m sorry,” Dillon said. He wasn’t certain if Tessic knew the cir­cumstance of Ari’s death. How he’d been taken as a host by the Tem­poral Vector. “I hope you’re not considering making me an heir— that is, if you can’t lose all your money.”

“Certainly not, but I would care to see you from time to time. Like me, you have no family.”

The thought never hit him without a pang of regret, and loneliness. Far too few of the Shards had anyone to go back to. With Tory’s mother dead, she had gone with Michael and they were staying with Michael’s father. Both were facing the ridiculous prospect of going back to high school—which might as well have been preschool, con­sidering what they’d lived, died, and relived through. Still, their re­integration into the world had to start somewhere.

Winston, even with his gift exhausted, managed to retain quite a lot of his supernatural learning in his natural brain and blew the top off of entry exams into Harvard. No sooner did he return to his family, than he left them again.

And then there was Lourdes. Her family dead by her own hand, her deeds an anchor on her spirit—she had not landed with quite the same grace. Even there on Thira, when the six of them had broken off their syntaxis, and realized that their powers were spent, Dillon had known her path would be a hard one, for even then, she would not look any of them in the eye. Then when they had all parted company, she had slipped away without even so much as a goodbye.

“I had a dream about her,” Winston had told him. “She was flip­ping burgers in some fast food place, in a town too small to be on the map.”

“Hell on Earth?” Dillon had suggested, but Winton had said, “Maybe it’s her new idea of heaven.”

No, Dillon was not the worst off. After all, he had Maddy. She was waiting for him now, at her sister’s in New York.

“Will you and Maddy marry?” Tessic asked.

Dillon laughed. “Come on, Elon, I just turned eighteen—let me be legal for a while first. Let me at least vote!”

“Forgive me,” Tessic said. “You were robbed of your childhood—I only wish for happiness in your adult life. This is why I ask.”

They rounded the empty building and came upon a park. As Tessic had promised, it was a crowded pocket of life. Old men played chess on built-in tables carved from only the finest Italian marble, and chil­dren played in a brightly colored jungle gym. Dillon found himself amused that, even though these children were speaking a language he didn’t understand, their stylized gestures and battle postures gave away the nature of the game.

“They’re playing Star Wars,” Dillon said. Apparently, these chil­dren had already filled in their massive gap of time and culture, adapt­ing to their own rebirths, as if they had done nothing more than oversleep the morning.

Dillon wondered how they—how everyone—would adapt to what was coming next. He had high, but reserved hopes, considering the progress made over the past four months. Since the Shards made their stand, the world that was in such a steady state of decline found the capacity to heal itself. People who had lost their ambition returned to work. The unnameable sense of dread and dysfunction resolved into a fresh sense of direction. Hell, even the airports were starting to clean up. Pundits were already labeling the troubling time “the Occipital Recession,” and called it “a collective psychosis of informational over­load.”

People were doing their best to forget about the Backwash, and all the documented feats of the Shards, not realizing that those events were merely a taste of things to come. The age of science, the age of reason, was coming to an end after all, but not in a great collapse. Instead it would come in the form of a birth. Of many births.

“When I wrote to you, Elon, I told you about the vision that I had—that the six of us had—when it was all over; stars all exploding at once, thousands of light-years away.”

“The way the Scorpion Star went supernova when you and your six friends were conceived?”

“But this time it was millions of stars. Maybe billions.”

“That’s still just a tiny drop in the bucket, when you consider how many stars are out there,” Tessic mused. “A billion stars could go supernova, and God would barely blink.”

“I was hoping you’d have an opinion.”

“I always have an opinion.”

“That’s what I figured.”

Tessic leaned against a light post and crossed his arms. “I believe there are three possibilities,” Tessic said. “One: You and I are both entirely insane, your vision was a hallucination, and all these un­documented people around us are, as the Polish government claims, ‘refugees from war-torn Lithuania’ that I smuggled in over the border.”

Dillon smiled. “I’d buy that.”

“Or, two: The universe truly is a living thing, as you say, and the bursting of stars is an immune response. Therefore, by allowing those nasty little dybbuks to survive, you triggered an even greater immune response to protect us against them in the future.”

“And the third?”

“The third is simply this: By benefit of your mercy to creatures who deserved no mercy, the Almighty saw fit to gift humanity with a spiritual evolution.”

“And which do you believe, Elon?”

Tessic grinned mischievously. “I keep my answer close to my heart,” he said. “Between me and my creator.”

Tessic looked around the many benches of the park, as if looking for someone or something. “If your vision was a true one, we’ll know soon enough—the first premature ones will be born as early as next month—but I think people are beginning to have suspicions.” Finally he spotted who he was looking for. “Ah, there she is. You see her?”

He pointed to a woman who sat throwing crumbs to a gathering of birds, with her husband beside her.

“They met shortly after they arrived here. A whirlwind romance,” Tessic explained. “She is yet to show, but she expects a child. She is three months along now.”

“Three months,” Dillon said. “Lucky her.”

“What caught my attention were the rumors. You see, there is an old custom; you hold your wedding ring on a string before your un­born child. If it swings side to side, it will be a girl. If it spins, it will be a boy. Do you want to know what the ring told her?”

“What did it tell her.”

“Absolutely nothing,” Tessic said. “But it turned from brass to silver before her eyes.”

“Silver, huh,” said Dillon. “Not exactly the golden touch, is it?”

“The child is yet unborn—give it time.”

“It won’t be the same as it was with us,” Dillon told him. “There were only a handful of us. But in a few years’ time—"

“—in a few years’ time,” Tessic said, “we will all be obsolete. Cro Magnon men in a world of Star Shards.” And yet he didn’t say it with downtrodden finality, but with a strange effervescence.

“It doesn’t bother you?” Dillon asked.

“Why should it? Ascension is not extinction, my friend. I’m sure our knuckle-dragging ancestors would be thrilled to know what they have become, through us.”

Dillon tried to imagine what the world would be like a hundred years—even ten years from now, with every child born a Star Shard, but with his own powers of insight gone, he had a hard time envi­sioning it. Hundreds of thousands who could control weather and moods—just as many who could regenerate flesh, or bring life from death. And other powers as well—powers he had not even imagined.

“It’s going to be a wild world,” Dillon said. “At least until that first generation gets a handle on how to make it all work.”

Tessic shrugged. “Every great change has its growing pains. I can’t help but think that the ones gifted with wisdom will be able to see us through the change.”

The pregnant woman stood and left, arm-in-arm with her husband. Others glanced at them and whispered. They didn’t seem to mind.

“I have something for you,” Tessic said. “You only turn eighteen once. For you, I did not want to miss it.” Tessic reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small gift-wrapped package, handing it to Dillon. “Forgive me for not getting a card to go with it,” he said. “But all the cards around here are in Polish.”

Dillon removed the bow, and peeled back the shiny paper to reveal a box of blue Bicycle playing cards. An odd gift to anyone else, but not to him. Tears began to fill Dillon’s eyes in spite of himself. In his life there had been so many simple joys that were denied him. Tessic understood. Perhaps better than anyone.

“Thank you, Elon.”

Tessic glanced at the sky, then at an unoccupied table. “It’s a fine day for a game. Shall we?”

They sat across from each other, and Dillon pulled the cards from the deck, removing the jokers.

“Your shuffle,” Tessic said.

Dillon’s hands were shaking, but he forced them still enough to separate the deck in half, then glanced up at Tessic.

“Go on,” he said.

Dillon flicked the left hand cards into the right hand cards, and wove them together again, and again and again, until the motion felt natural.

“What’s the game?” Tessic asked.

“Five card draw,” Dillon decided.

“And the stakes?”

Dillon shrugged. “If I win, I get to keep that jet of yours that brought me here—how’s that?”

“Agreed. And what if I win?”

“If you win, I’ll name my first kid after you.”

Dillon dealt the cards face down. Tessic picked his up first, glanced at Dillon, but kept a fine poker face. Dillon could not read him at all.

Then Dillon reached for his own cards, hesitating. He had done this many times before, back when he still had his powers, and the burden of responsibility that came with them. He never needed to look at his hand then. A two-handed deal from a well-shuffled deck would always reveal for him the same cards: the deuce, four, six, eight, and ten of spades; the direct consequence of dealing alternating cards from a deck in perfect order.

Now Dillon fanned out his cards to reveal: an ace, a five, a king, a nine and a jack; two of them diamonds, two clubs and a heart. Although all his powers had been gone and he had been a “normal” human being for four months, this was the first time he truly felt it. His spirit was not only contained, but comfortable within his flesh. His sphere of influence was no longer defined by the gravity of his pres­ence, but a function of his words and deeds.

“I’ll take two cards,” Tessic said.

Dillon dealt Tessic his cards, then looked to the randomness of his own hand once more. He had always been order in the face of chaos—but here chaos was looking him in the eye, and he had no weapon against it beyond the luck of the draw. Until this moment he never knew how beautiful not knowing could be. In his cards—in the world, there was an unmarked future out there. He would be a participant, but only a participant, like everyone else in the world. He would play, but would no longer bear the burden of redesigning the rules. Which meant that no matter what cards were dealt him, he had already won.

“What do the cards tell you?” Tessic asked.

“Everything I want to know.”

Dillon kept only the ace of diamonds, and with all his soul threw caution to the wind.