Shattered Sky (19 page)

“Easy, easy!”

He opened his eyes to see Maddy looming over him. Above her head hung a gathering of lobsters.

“You were dreaming,” Maddy told him.

He closed his eyes again. “I still am,” but when he opened his eyes, the crustacean menaces were still there. Large red claws—hundreds of them hung from above. They were nailed to the posts, they were crawling on peeling wallpaper. They were almost as unpleasant as the pigeons. “Where are we?”

“Somewhere between nowhere and nowhere else,” she said. “State Route 93. I forget which state. Arkansas, I think.”

Dillon sat up.

They were in a restaurant, or what was left of one. The place had been deserted for years. Lakes of rainwater had
formed on the warped linoleum floor, beneath holes in a termite-tattered ceiling. The smell of mildew saturated the air with such intensity, Dillon could taste it like aspirin in the back of his throat. Although the rainstorm had ended, droplets still trickled through holes in the roof, plinking an irregular rhythm in the puddles below.

“Welcome to ‘The Crawfish Maw,' ” Maddy said. “The sign said ‘always open,' so here we are.”

She was dressed in dark sweats—probably the same clothes she was wearing when she shot him and spirited him away from the Hesperia plant, but he had been too busy convalescing to notice what she wore. Having never seen her in anything but her uniform, it struck him how much younger she looked.

The humidity was thick enough to swim in, and his own clothes clung to him, pulling in the moisture from the air with the same voracity with which it had drunk the blood from his body. Now the blood had dried, and the holes in his shirt had woven themselves closed. There was no evidence on his body of the wounds. The pain in his knee and gut was gone, and the wound to his chest had closed, resolving into a faint ache when he breathed too deeply. But his face didn't feel right. It felt as if a spider had woven its web across his nose.

Maddy touched his shirt, where the wound had been. “I've never seen anything so amazing,” she said. “The wounds closed themselves while you slept.”

“How long was I out?”

“About twelve hours. I didn't know where you wanted to go, and until we got that straight, I thought it best to find a place to lay low, so Bussard won't find us.”

Dillon stood up and looked out of a foggy window. Beyond some overgrown trees, he could see cars passing on the highway. “Bussard's not a problem anymore.”

Maddy hesitated, but didn't ask how Dillon could be so sure. She just accepted it. “Still, they're not going to let you disappear.”

“I'm no stranger to being a fugitive.” Dillon threw her a grin, but found that one side of his mouth didn't quite rise to the occasion. He reached up to touch his face, and felt a jagged network of troughs and crags in his skin.

“The scars will go away soon, too, won't they?” Maddy asked.

Dillon didn't answer her. “This place have a bathroom?”

She pointed him to a cramped little washroom that had long since lost its door. “I promise I won't look.”

“Your loss,” he said, then immediately regretted it. He was not beyond blushing, and so he left before she could see.

The toilet was dry and ringed in filthy strata. He relieved himself in the dry bowl, then turned to view himself in the mirror above the sink. He wasn't quite ready for what he saw.

Deep canals cut across his face. The web of knotty scars that wove across his cheeks and nose was even worse than he had imagined. He hardly recognized himself, and had to take a few deep breaths to get over the shock of his new appearance. When he touched his face, there was no tenderness to the flesh, only stiffness, which meant there was no more healing going on there—whatever healing there would be had happened while he slept. He ran his tongue on the inside of his mouth and poked at his teeth. Several of his molars were missing. The raw holes had healed over, as if the teeth had been pulled long ago.

Maddy appeared behind him. “How long till they're gone?” she asked. “The scars, I mean.”

He took a moment to consider how he should answer, then decided on the simple truth. “The scars won't go away,” he told her.

She shook her head, not getting it. “But . . . you heal . . .”

“That's different from regenerating. If you give me a broken glass, I can put it back together again without a crack, but if a piece of that glass is missing, the glass will have a hole where that piece would have gone.”

The color of her face took a turn toward green. “So you're telling me that I left . . . part of you . . . back on the loading dock?”

“Couldn't be helped, I guess.”

Her eyes turned away, suddenly looking everywhere, except at Dillon. “Listen, I think there's some food in the store room,” she said. “Old cans of beans, tuna—you know, stuff that'll survive the next ice age. I'll check it out.” She couldn't move away from him fast enough.

M
ADDY HAD WATCHED
D
ILLON
as he slept, marveling at the power he had to undo the damage to his flesh. The wounds on his face sewed themselves closed at a speed just below her ability to see it—like shadows beneath a slowly arcing sun—but if she looked away for a few moments, his face would be different when she looked back. Seeing his miraculous healing made her believe he could do anything, and deep inside her, in a place that knew no reason, she was beginning to believe that Dillon was, indeed, a new incarnation of God, as so many in the world now believed.

But he could not be, because by his own admission, his scars would not heal. It was a relief to know that he was less than perfect, because it made him human, and yet a profound disappointment as well. But far more disturbing to Maddy was the strained, crooked smile her bullet had left him. She had singlehandedly maimed the closest thing to God on earth.

So she turned from him, unable to face him in that
ridiculous, lobster-ridden wreck of a diner. When she reached the storeroom, she only wished the room had a door that would close behind her, but like most every other door, its hinge was broken, and the door sloped at a lazy angle to the floor. She tried to busy herself with the rusting cans of food. Jalapeños, tomato paste—whatever vagrants hadn't already scavenged. That was all right. She hadn't come here for the food anyway. She fought back an unwanted barrage of tears by getting angry at herself for such an emotional display, but this time the anger was no barrier. She had always been aware of that vague sense of inadequacy that had been subtly instilled in her long before she could build a defense against it. She liked to think she had triumphed, finding inadequacy to be one of the best motivators toward overachievement. Most of the time her bold accomplishments were more than enough to fill her cup.

Dillon sidled up cautiously on the other side of the door, peering in. She saw him through the corner of her eye, but wouldn't turn to face him.

“Guess I was wrong,” she said, moving the cans purposelessly on the shelves in an aluminum shell game. “Nothing here but junk.”

Dillon looked at the unbalanced door; he hefted it a bit, and the broken hinge rehooked itself to the frame. Abracadabra. Then, when Maddy looked once more to the cans on the shelf, they were no longer rusty. “Guess you're getting your strength back,” she said. Her hand was shaking now, and when she reached for the cans, she knocked several of them over; they fell onto her toes.

Dillon swung the door open all the way. It didn't even squeak. “Maddy, don't worry about my face. You didn't know.”

“I disfigured you. I tried to save you and I permanently disfigured you.” She finally turned to him, knowing it was useless to hide the tears, because he saw through her anyway; it's what he did—and no matter how deeply he had reached into her to change her, he couldn't change how she felt in his shadow. Now she understood why men like Bussard had to chain him, lock him down, suppress him. They simply could not bear their own insignificance in his shadow.

“You did what you had to do,” he told her. “I understand.”

But it wasn't just the scars. “I'm in over my head here,” she admitted.

“Weren't you trained to deal with extreme situations?”

“Not this extreme! Not with something like you!”

“Some
thing
?” She could feel his anger and frustration, and although her own frustration felt normal and justified, she was not expecting his. “I'm the same person I was when you spoon-fed me!”

“But
I'm
not. Back then I was taking orders—doing my job.”

“And now you're a human being.”

He stared her down, and it took all of her strength to pull away from that gaze. Yes, she was now more human than she had ever been and that made her more vulnerable. She wondered if she'd even be here now if Dillon hadn't violated her soul the way he had; seeing through her. Knowing her. “Damn you, Dillon, I didn't need your little ‘birthday gift'! I enjoyed being clouded just fine.”

Dillon gave her his new crooked grin. “Looks like you're still partly cloudy.”

She stormed past him, but he grabbed her wrist. “Let go.”

“Let me show you something.” His voice was no longer angry. What frustration he felt had dissipated—brought back
into order, like everything else. Still holding her wrist, he reached up his other hand, gently touching her cheek with his index finger. When he pulled his index finger away, one of her tear drops pooled on his nail.

“What about it?”

“Shh. Watch.”

His hushed tone made her feel like a child watching a butterfly break from its cocoon. So she watched, as crystals formed in the tear droplet, settling into his cuticle. Then he tilted his finger. The drop coursed across to the other side, leaving the tiny crystals of salt behind. Then he brought his finger to her lips. Almost reflexively she took the very tip of his finger in her mouth, tasting her own tear. Sweet. Not the slightest hint of salt. “There,” he said, smiling gently. “I've taken the bitterness from your tears.” Now that they were this close, Maddy couldn't help but see that in spite of the scars, his eyes were unchanged. His was the soul of a star, and indeed, she could see a universe when she gazed inside. A person could get lost in there.

“Do you know what it's like for people around you, Dillon? Do you know what it's like to feel so powerless and insignificant?”

“No,” he answered. “I wish that I could.”

She couldn't turn away from him now, and didn't know whether this locked gaze was his doing, or her own. All that she knew was that in this single moment, the insignificance he engendered in her was now more a comfort than a threat.

Time seemed to skip a beat, and she found herself kissing him, not remembering the kiss beginning, and not knowing who had instigated it. If this was another attempt to clarify her thoughts, it did the opposite, fogging her in, leaving her thoughts in a holding pattern, waiting for a place to land.

Dillon seemed even more flustered than she. Clearly, this had not been part of his plan. Even if this was a moment he could foresee, it was obviously something he was unprepared for. And she found to her unexpected delight, that the great Dillon Cole, in spite of his luminous spirit, was blushing.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “That was stupid. I'm sorry.”

“Don't be,” she told him gently. “Feel as stupid as you want.” In spite of all the darkness he had lived through—all the destruction he had willingly, and unwillingly, been a party to, there was still an innocence about him that rose above any guilt. The fact that she could offer him anything made her feel elevated. Ennobled. She brought her hand up, her fingertips tracing the pattern of the pale scars in his reddening face.

For Dillon, who had experienced a great many things in his life, this was a first. He had to admit he had considered this moment, but in a distant, disconnected way. The rigors of his past travels were more than adequate to suppress any appetites, and Tessic's chair, well, it was quite a chastity belt to say the least.

Maddy ran her fingers along the new ridges in his face, and he found it curiously erotic—and now he found his own hands moving to places—touching places he had never been close to before.

“I have to warn you that I have no idea what I'm doing,” he told her.

“I think I'd be disappointed if you did.”

He was awkward as he guided her to an oversized booth, the table scraping on the floor as his shoulders bumped it aside. He chuckled nervously. Then moved his hand through her hair. Although her hair was short, it had a thick, rich texture. With the caress of his fingers, he hair renewed, taking on a smooth, dark sheen.

Just like Deanna's.

But that was a thought he banished to a distant corner.

Maddy sensed the moment his kisses crossed from respectful to passionate, and it struck her that Dillon
did
know her. It was the first time since her first time that she let a man be the aggressor—and here, this young man moved from awkwardness to grace in a single breath. With his touch, she could feel herself changed by his spirit of creation, of
rejuvenation
. He undid the most soiled knots of her life with his body, and with each wave of sensation she could feel those old bonds tear free.

The sweaty, drunken face of the neighbor man, who had defiled her at thirteen.

The high school teacher she had chosen to seduce.

The scores of boys, then men she had conquered, and dismissed, taking from them, so they could never take anything from her. All her patterns, all her painful connections were smoothed by Dillon's embrace.

They shared a sanctuary from all their troubles in each other's arms, then as their tension released, Maddy saw that the dilapidated restaurant around them had been restored to the spotless moment it had been built. And she realized that, within her heart, the place where it truly mattered, she was a virgin once again.