Scorpion Shards (11 page)

Then Lourdes gently squeezed Michael's hand, which rested so calmly in hers; Michael focused his eyes on the distant stars. “When I was thirteen,” he said, “my friends dared me to talk to this high school girl who I had a crush on. She was three years older, and a head taller than me, but the crush I had on her was out of control, so I just had to talk to her. I went up to her, but before I could open my mouth to say anything, she looked at me and WHAM! I felt there was some sort of weird connection, like I was draining something out of her, right through her eyes—and I knew right then I should have stopped and walked away, but I didn't, because I liked the way it felt. It was cold out, but suddenly the whole street began to feel hot like it was summer. I asked her out, and she said ‘yes.' Ever since then no girl has ever said ‘no' to me, and no guy has wanted to be my friend.”

Winston moved his Nike against Tory's shoe and shifted his head against the comfortable pillow of Lourdes's sleeve, making sure not to break the circle.

“My mother used to get these swollen feet 'cause she stood all day long working at the bank,” Winston began. “It was always my job to massage her feet when she got home. We already knew I had stopped growing, but that's all we knew. Then one day, I'm massaging her feet, and she tells me how good it feels, 'cause she can't feel the pain no more, so I keep on massaging. And then, when she tries to get up, she can't. She tries to feel her legs, but she can't feel nothin'. Doctors said it was some kind of freak virus, but we all know the truth, even if Mama won't say it. I paralyzed her legs. A few weeks later, we knew for sure that I was growing backward, too.”

Winston wiped a tear from his eye, and Tory began to speak. “There was this blind boy in my neighborhood, with allergy problems so bad a skunk could have walked into the room, and he wouldn't have smelled it. Once I started breaking out, he was the only boy who liked me. Then one day he brushed his fingertips across my face. He pulled his hand away and turned white as a ghost, then he ran off to wash his hands over and over again, trying to wash the feel of my face off his fingers. He came down with pneumonia a few days later and was in the hospital for weeks. He was the first one to get sick from touching me. And that's how I knew it wasn't just zits.”

No one spoke for a while. They rested their voices and minds, listening to the singular
whoosh
of their breaths, feeling each other's parallel heartbeats, and it seemed to make everything okay. They needed no more words to express how they felt.

I want to forget who I am.

I never want to leave here.

I want to stay in this tight circle of four forever.

But they couldn't stay like this, could they? They would freeze to death. They would starve to death. And they would
never solve the mystery of who they were, and why they were dying these miserable deaths.

Yes, they were dying. Although they never dared to say it out loud, they all knew the truth. Tory's disease would eat away at her until there was nothing left. Michael's passion would consume him like a fire, Lourdes would become so heavy her bones would no longer be able to hold her, and Winston would wither until he became an infant in search of a womb to return to, but there would be none.

Better not to think about that.

I want to forget who I am . . .

While the others seemed content to shut their minds down, Tory could not. Mysteries did not sit well with her and she despised riddles of any sort. From the moment they had come together, she, more than the others, had struggled to understand the truth behind their shared vision, and their shared journey, but all she had were half-truths.

She knew they belonged together, but why?

The vision told them that two were missing, but who?

They must have known each other from somewhere, but how?

The vision had been so contorted, confusing, and overwhelming that it only left more questions in its wake. Questions—and this collective state of blissful shock.

“The truth is bigger than any of us want to know,” Lourdes had proclaimed.

“The truth is something we're not supposed to know,” Winston had declared.

“What we don't know can't hurt us,” Michael had decreed.

But those were all just excuses. Cop-outs. Tory could not accept that.

Up above, a crescent moon was coming into view within
the circle of stars . . . but something was missing, thought Tory. What was it? Of course! It was the nova on the edge of the horizon. She could not see it, but she knew it was there. The dying star.

The dying star?

It began as a single thought, that suddenly grew until it became the key to the vision . . . but not just the vision . . . the key to everything! It was so simple, yet so staggering, she didn't know whether to believe it or just crawl up into a ball and disappear.

She broke the circle of four, and the moment the connection was broken, the world around them became cold and hostile once more. The ruined silo was no longer a haven, it was just a lonely, forgotten place where they could all die and no one would ever find them.

As they all sat up, they began to shiver. It was like coming out of a dream. “What's wrong?” Winston asked Tory. Now that they were apart, they moved away from one another, withdrawing to the walls of the silo, as if, now that their senses had returned, they were ashamed of the words they had spoken and the heartbeat they had shared.

“You sick or something?” he asked.

Tory just shook her head, still reeling from the thoughts playing in her mind.

“You figured something out, didn't you?” asked Lourdes. “Tell us.”

Tory began to shake and tried to control it. “I'm afraid to tell you,” she said, “ 'cause what I'm thinking is crazy.”

“We won't think you're crazy,” said Lourdes.

“I'm not afraid of that . . . . I'm afraid you'll think I'm right.”

Winston looked at Lourdes, and Michael just looked down. A wind now breathed across the open silo above them, and
the heavy stone ruin began to resonate with a deep moan, like someone blowing across the lip of a bottle.

“Tell us,” said Lourdes.

Tory took a deep breath and clenched her fists until her knuckles were white. She forced her thoughts into words. “We know that all of this started when that Scorpion Star blew up last week, right?”

The others nodded in agreement.

“But . . . that star didn't
just
blow up, did it?” continued Tory. “We're just seeing it now, because of the speed of light, and stuff, but it really blew up sixteen years ago.”

Winston shifted uncomfortably. “What are you getting at?”

“Winston, you believe we have a soul, don't you?” asked Tory.

“Yeah, so?”

“So does every living thing have a soul?”

He took a moment to weigh the question. “I don't know—maybe.”

“How about a star?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” said Michael. “A star's not a living thing!”

Tory looked him right in the eye. “How do you know?”

“Because it's just a ball of gas.”

“So? When it comes right down to it, we're all just piles of dirt, aren't we? Dirt and a whole lot of water.”

Michael zipped his jacket as high as it would go, but it wasn't just the cold he was trying to keep out. “Speak for yourself,” he said.

“Let her talk!” demanded Lourdes.

“I know this sounds wild,” said Tory, “but the more I think about that vision we had, the more it makes sense . . . because it wasn't a vision at all. It was a memory.”

Tory took a deep breath and finally spat out what she was thinking. “What if the Scorpion Star was alive? What if it had a soul, or a spirit, or whatever you want to call it . . . and when it blew up all those years ago, its soul blew up, too . . . into six pieces that flew through space a zillion times faster than light, and ended up right here on earth. What if it became
our
souls? What if it became us?”

Lourdes heaved herself closer to Tory. “And sixteen years later,” added Lourdes, “when we saw the light of the explosion, it reminded us . . . and we started to move toward one another like it was an instinct.”

“No!” Winston shook his head furiously. “No, you're crazy.” He put his hands over his ears and pulled his knees up. “And anyway,” he said, “if it's true, we'd all have been born on the same day, wouldn't we? The same day the star exploded.”

Tory hesitated for a moment. She hadn't thought it through that far yet.

“When's your birthday?” Winston asked her.

“May twenty-third?” she offered.

“Ha!” shouted Winston. “My birthday's June fifteenth! You're wrong!”

“Maybe not,” said Michael, and all eyes turned to him. “I was born on April twentieth,
but
I was six weeks premature. I was
supposed
to be born at the beginning of June.” He turned to Tory. “Were you early or late?”

Tory shrugged. “Don't know. My mother and me . . . we didn't talk much.”

“I was right on time,” chimed in Lourdes. “June second.”

Everyone turned to Winston.

“June fifteenth, huh?” said Michael. “I'll bet you were two weeks late, weren't you?”

Winston wouldn't look him in the eye. He pulled his knees up to his chest again.

“Well, Winston?” said Tory.

Winston picked the ground with a twig and finally said, “My mom always said I was too stubborn to come into this world when I was expected. I came in my own time . . . two weeks late.”

Tory gasped. “Then we were all
supposed
to be born on the same day!”

Michael nodded. “Not just the same day . . . but the same second, I'll bet.” He looked down, and found in the debris of the silo the shattered remains of an ancient Coke bottle—he picked it up and pieced the shards of the bottle together. “Check this out—sixteen years ago, our parents conceived each of us at the same instant in time . . . and at that same moment . . . BOOM!” He dropped the bottle, and the shards scattered as they hit the hard earth. “. . . The star died . . . and we got ready to be born.”

Winston stared at the broken glass, looking a little bit sick. He didn't say anything—just closed his eyes and held his knees tightly to his chest. Tory could tell that he was trying desperately to make this information go away. The way he looked at things—it's like he wanted all of creation to fit nice and neatly in a little box, and whatever didn't fit he just ignored. Well, this time Tory knew he couldn't ignore it—he'd have to stretch that little box.

“C'mon, Winston, you can deal with it,” said Tory. “Make the stretch.”

“I ain't no bungee cord, okay? I don't stretch that way.” Winston shut his eyes even tighter, and Tory could hear him grinding the last nubs of his teeth in frustration.

The soul of a star,
thought Tory.
How big—how powerful was
the soul of a star?
Even one sixth of it must have been brighter than any other on Earth. “We must be the most powerful human beings in the world!” she told her friends.

“Then why are we dying?” Winston looked at her coldly and left the silo. Since no one had an answer, they silently followed him out.

Why were they dying?
thought Tory.
Not just dying—but suffering hideous afflictions. Why would the brightest lights on earth be so consumed by darkness?
This answer she had found was only half an answer, and it made her furious.

Outside the silo, the ground was covered by a thick fog that swirled around their ankles, and the air smelled rich with the decaying remains of an early harvest. A hint of blue on the eastern horizon told of the coming dawn, and although they had not slept, they were too tightly wound to sleep now.

“Yesterday when I closed my eyes,” said Michael, “I could almost see the faces of the others . . . but now they feel further away.” And then he dared to voice something they were all too afraid to admit might be true. “I don't think they're coming,” he said. “Something's gone wrong.”

“We have to go to Nebraska,” said Tory. “To Omaha. I'm telling you some astronomer at some school there predicted the explosion of the star; he has to know something that can help us.”

They
did
have a sense that they had to move northwest, and although Omaha didn't leap out at them as a must-see town, it wasn't out of their way, either—and it was the closest thing to a lead that they had, so Tory got her way. Omaha it was.

By now Lourdes had squeezed her way out of the stone entrance to the silo and joined them. Winston, however, was standing by himself, pondering the glow of the nova, which was quickly being overcome by the light of dawn. Tory
reached out to touch Winston gently on the shoulder, but Winston quickly pulled away.

“Don't!” His sleeves fell over his hands, and he had to fight to stick his arms through them again. The jacket seemed much larger on him than it had yesterday, and his boyish voice seemed a little bit higher. “Just don't touch me, okay?”

“Winston . . .”

“I like being one person, okay? I don't want to be one sixth of something, or even one fourth of something.”

“But, Winston, if what I've said is right, it could mean so many things—look at the possibilities!”

Winston's face hardened into the expression of a stubborn old man or a very small boy. “I don't care to,” he said. Winston's hand began to twitch at his side, and he turned away from Tory, but Tory still watched. He brought his hand up a little, then forced it back down, as if fighting some inner battle—but it was a battle he lost. Tory could only stare in growing dread as Winston Pell, the incredible shrinking boy, brought up his hand, slipped his thumb into his mouth, and kept it there for a long, long time.