Shattered Sky (40 page)

“They were only two parasites,” Michael said. “That's not exactly an infestation.”

“You saw the damage they did when they were here,” Winston reminded him.

“They infested
us
,” Michael said, “not our universe.”

“Such limited thinking.” Okoya turned to Dillon. “When I escaped, you caught a glimpse of the place I came from. What do you remember of it?”

Dillon closed his eyes, trying to find a way to put it into words. It wasn't so much what he saw, it was more a feeling spilling through the breach. “Like you said, there was nothing solid; everything was light and shadows. It seemed to me that the light was somehow alive . . . and not just the light. The darkness was alive as well.”

“The living void,” Okoya said. “Sentient darkness. It fills our universe like water fills an ocean. It's what my kind thrives on. We move through the living void, consuming the darkness.”

“I think we have a name for this place,” Winston said. “We call it hell.”

Okoya turned to Winston, considering his little insight. “Very well,” said Okoya. “Then consider yourselves warned that the gates of hell are about to open.”

Dillon's body gave in to the cold, and he began to shiver uncontrollably. “And why would the gates open?”

“The moment I returned with the parasites, they left me, and inhabited the living void. Their host became the void itself, and it became rancid. The void was alive now with
destruction and fear, feeding on itself, consuming itself until our universe could no longer hold, and began to collapse. As great as we are, my kind cannot survive the death of our universe.” Okoya kept his eyes fixed on Dillon. “And so they've chosen to come here.”

Dillon pulled his overcoat tighter, and clenched his teeth to stop the shivering. A malevolent species facing its own extinction. Dillon wasn't sure how to feel about that.

“The arrival of the vectors is a prelude to a mass migration,” Okoya said, “for where the vectors go, my species will follow. It is a physical law of my universe.”

“We could coexist,” Dillon suggested. “We could offer them—”

“
You can offer them nothing!
” Okoya stood, and paced the frozen corner, his voice growing angrier. “They have neither compassion nor patience for humanity. You are vermin to them—
less
than vermin—and nothing will change that. Rest assured they will come; they will steal almost three hundred thousand of your bodies to use as hosts. Then they will enslave you, then they will devour every soul on earth, and when they are done they will burn your bodies, keeping only enough of humanity alive to breed a new generation of souls. This is the fate of your precious world.”

Dillon shut his eyes, wishing he could erase what he had heard. This was the face of his dread, and it was hideous. “No,” he said, “you've lied to us before. I won't believe this.”

“Disbelieving it won't change the truth.”

An icicle the size of a human leg plunged from the ceiling in the center of the warehouse. It shattered, radiating a vibration that shook sheets of ice from the walls, like the calving of a glacier. When the room fell silent again, the silence remained for a good long time before anyone spoke.

“Why,” mumbled Michael, “couldn't I just be left at the bottom of Lake Arrowhead?”

And although no one expected an answer, Okoya said, “Winston knows why.”

Dillon and Michael turned to Winston, who had said very little during Okoya's revelation. “What else is there, Winston?” Dillon asked. “What other secrets have you been keeping?”

Winston couldn't look up at them. He kept his eyes lowered to the ground. “It's no secret. It's something Drew and I came to understand.”

“Enlighten us, O wise one,” said Michael.

Winston took his time before he spoke. Finally he said, “For years we've wanted to know the reason behind our lives. Why did the Scorpion Star explode? Why did we inherit its fractured soul? Why have our powers been growing? What are we?” Winston looked to Dillon, then to Michael, then back to Dillon again. “How ready are you for the answer?”

Suddenly Dillon found himself no longer wanting to know.

“Okoya talks about his universe being a living thing,” said Winston, “but what if ours is alive as well? Not a living void, but a lifeform of matter and energy stretching across space—a single organism, thirty billion light-years wide?”

Michael threw up his hands in exasperation. “Oh, gee, that's just wonderful. So what does that make us? Universal sperm?”

Winston ignored him. “If we see the universe as a complex organism, how do you think it might protect itself from invasion—from
infection
?”

Dillon fought his own resistance, and let the idea begin to sink in. When he finally spoke, he found his own voice cold and hollow. “You're saying we're some sort of defense? A kind of metaphysical immune system?”

“Dillon gets a gold star,” Okoya said.

Dillon considered it. The idea was too large to grasp, and yet simple at the same time. He found himself looking at his hands—which he had always seen as an interface for his powers. Healing hands; hands held up to hold back a flood, or to release one. Instruments of creation and destruction. If Winston's conjecture was true, it would reify what was always just a vague sense of purpose. It would explain why the shards were so attuned to one another, and to rifts in the “skin” of space. All the questions he posed now had obvious answers when factored through this new equation.

“If this is all true, then why would you help us?” Dillon asked Okoya. “What could you possibly have to gain?”

“My kind views me as a hated fugitive,” he answered, far too casually for Dillon's comfort. “If their plan succeeds, what do you think will happen to me?”

“You would sacrifice your entire species for your own survival?”

The question gave Okoya pause. His demeanor clouded, bitter and resentful, as if the question were an insult. “Loyalty is as foreign a concept to us as compassion.”

Dillon held his astringent gaze, more comfortable with Okoya's hostility then with his congeniality.

Winston leaned closer to Dillon. “Okoya agreed to give up his appetites, in return for a kind of political asylum.”

Michael let loose a cackling laugh. “Asylum?” he said. “I agree. Let's all find an asylum. We can tell people how we're actually T-cells in disguise, and they can tell us how they're really Queen Victoria, and Alexander the Frigging Great.”

Dillon thought to say something to shut him up, but noticed that the frost around Michael's chair had melted. In spite of Michael's derision, the truth was setting him free.
Dillon turned his attention back to Okoya.

“So if we face this ‘infection' the moment it happens . . . you think we'll be able to stop it?”

Okoya raised his eyebrows, and shifted in his seat. “Sometimes an immune response succeeds, sometimes it fails.”

“Where will it happen, and when?” Dillon asked.

“Yes, are you ever going to tell us that?” said Winston. “Or don't you know?”

“I suspect they will tear their way through a very large, very old scar, in the last moments of their universe,” Okoya said. “My best guess is the Greek Island of Thira, on the seventh of December, 7:53 a.m.”

Winston gasped. “Pearl Harbor! The same date and time as the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

“And the Mongol invasion,” said Okoya, “and the siege of Troy, and the fall of Jericho. Even before your calendar, and the measure of hours, all these events took place on the same date, at the same time.”

Winston nodded in an understanding Dillon had yet to grasp. “Each fraction of creation is a reflection of the whole,” Winston said.

Okoya nodded. “But you'll need more than a fraction of a response to stop it. The three of you alone will fail; all six of you must come together again.”

Winston looked at him in surprise. “You never told me that!”

“Until you had Dillon, there was no point in discussing it.”

Winston shook his head. “Impossible. Even if we somehow won Lourdes back, there's Deanna . . .”

Okoya smiled. “Leave Deanna to me.”

The suggestion sent a surge of adrenaline through Dillon's body, warming his chilled extremities.

“And how about Tory?” Winston said. “You know what they did to her. There's no way.”

Okoya seemed more sure of himself than Winston did. “The vectors have made a critical error in underestimating you, just as I did a year ago,” Okoya said. “Don't make the same mistake, and underestimate yourselves.”

“Winston—what did you mean by ‘win Lourdes back,' ” Dillon asked. “Don't you think she'll help us once she knows?”

Winston looked to Okoya, then back to Dillon. “We believe the vectors have turned her to their side.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Don't you get the news up there in Tessic's tower?”

“Of course I do—I've been keeping track of everything.”

“Well then, you should already know what happened in Daytona.”

But Dillon hadn't heard a thing, so Winston explained.

“Ten days ago, hundreds of people in Daytona Beach, Florida, suddenly left their beach blankets and drowned themselves,” Winston said. “As if an irresistible force took them over, and they had no control over their bodies—how could you not have heard about this?”

“I don't know.” The truth was, with the hours he spent scanning the news, he should have known. He could only assume that some events—events that might pull him away from Tessic's comfortable sanctuary—were screened out. “There's no question it's Lourdes, but what the hell is she doing?”

“I would guess she's flexing her muscles,” Okoya said. “Preparing herself.”

“For what?” Dillon wondered, but Okoya didn't answer.

B
Y THE TIME THEY
left the warehouse a few minutes later, the sleet had turned to rain and Dillon had to ask Michael how
their little summit could possibly have affected his mood for the better.

“If I have to be hit by a train, I'd rather see it coming,” was all Michael said of it.

They piled in the Durango, waking Drew, who slept across the front seat. Dillon wondered how much of the picture Drew knew, and concluded that he was smart to ration his own awareness.

“Still want us to drop you off at Tessitech?” Winston asked.

Dillon searched for the Houston skyline, but it was obscured behind the clouds. He could imagine himself sneaking back in, sliding into bed with Maddy, forcing himself to ignore everything he had learned tonight. Then morning would come, Tessic would greet them for breakfast, and life would be as sweet, and as intoxicating, as Tessic's liqueurs. It would be easy to give in to that temptation. So easy that he knew he could not return, not even to say good-bye to Maddy. If they succeeded, she would come to understand why he had left. And if they failed, well, it wouldn't matter anyway.

“If we leave now, we'll reach Dallas by nine,” Dillon said, and slid into the front passenger seat. As they drove off, Dillon closed his eyes, and warded off his regrets by counting the metronome beats of the wiper blades, until they were far out of Houston.

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING, FIVE
thousand miles away on the island of Bermuda, an accountant and his wife were escaping from it all. These were unpalatable times, and it didn't take a number cruncher to see the unlucky arithmetic of the days. As he lay there poolside, beside the cellulitic form of his wife, who burned a mottled pink beneath the ultraviolet rays of a midday sun, he ogled the more shapely figures on the beach,
longing for his slimmer youth. He dreamed of himself surrounded by a harem of such beautiful women—not so farfetched a thought, he concluded. These were, in fact, strange days. The unusual had become commonplace; inexplicable mischief and miracles were rules rather than the exceptions. Take that bizarre mass suicide in Daytona Beach. Five hundred people, without forethought, without reason, suddenly plunged themselves into the ocean. The Coast Guard was still fishing out the bodies. The accountant had laughed and his wife had been angry.

He yawned, and tried to roll over to sun his back, but found that gravity had shifted. No, it wasn't gravity; it was him. He was no longer lying on the lounge chair, instead he was standing in front of it. He did not remember getting up. When he turned, he found his wife standing as well. In fact, everyone around the pool was beginning to stand like a reluctant ovation.

At first he found this merely curious, not threatening, for his life experience gave him no way to distill a threat from this aberrant occurrence. He didn't realize he was walking until his third step, because he had not told his feet to do so—yet they were impelled to move. Soon he was jostled by the bodies around him—a mob as surprised by their sudden migration as he. He tried to crane his neck to see his wife, but he couldn't move his neck at all; the most he could gain control of was his eyeballs and they darted back and forth with growing concern. He smashed his shin on a chaise lounge and tumbled over, hitting his head on the concrete. He couldn't even scream from the pain, for his vocal cords were locked as tight as his jaw.

The man got up and moved from the pool, then down a set of stepping stones to the beach, where he realized it was more than just those lounging at his hotel caught in this wave
of motion. They were coming from all directions—from all the Bermudan resorts within his line of sight. They ran from restaurants and lobbies, they abandoned their cars, and now in this moment of absolute helplessness, the terror and panic truly set in, for he was on the beach now, marching with thousands of others toward the surf.

And he was in the front line.

Now he understood the terror of the mob in Daytona—understood how their limbs could be torn from their control—how their bodies could rebel and drown them, leaving no survivors to tell how it had been. His feet sank into the wet sand at the edge of the surf, but he kept on moving, the mob pushing behind him. The water rolled across his toes, churning a cloud of foam and sand. He knew the bottom dropped off suddenly a few feet out and although he could swim, he knew his body would continue walking even as his lungs filled with water. He would die and no one would understand.