Shattered Sky (45 page)

“I will not be used against my will.”

“It won't be against your will. You'll choose what's right. I have faith in your choices.”

Dillon wondered what choices Tessic could possibly be referring to. His choice to leave Tessic's protective bubble? His choice to listen to Okoya, and get a glimpse, however fragmentary, of why he and the others might be on this earth? No matter how far the aura of Dillon's spirit extended out beyond the fuselage of the plane, how much choice in anything did he have when he couldn't move as much as an inch?

“I could shatter you,” Dillon threatened. “It would only take me a moment to look inside you and find the words to destroy you.”

“But you won't,” Tessic said, so unconcerned it infuriated Dillon. “You won't because deep down you know I have a perspective that you lack. You, with all your power of life and death are blinded. You needed Maddy to help you escape from your cell. You need me to help you escape from yourself. Because I see a larger picture that you've yet to grasp.”

Dillon thought to the duplicitous Okoya. Okoya, too, had a larger picture. A picture so large, it was beyond Dillon's scope of comprehension. But Okoya was self-serving to the last. Everything he told them might be nothing more than a well-conceived lie. If, in the end, his fate was to be used by someone, would he rather be used by Okoya, or Tessic?

“What do you want with me, Elon?”

Tessic offered him a joyless smile. “Have I been so good at hiding myself from you, Dillon? Or is it that you never wanted to see?” He knelt deeper until his eyes were level with Dillon's. “Look at me now, Dillon. Tell me what you see in the patterns of my life. I've been keeping something from you. Holding it until it was ripe for you to know. I open for you now, my friend. See into me and you'll know where we are going, and what is to be done.”

Dillon's vision was filled with the aspect of his eyes; the
care lines and crow's feet. A world weariness beneath a muscular mind built by the wielding of heavy power. Dillon probed deeper, finding genuine intentions, sullied by the pain of something lost. Not something but someone. A person. People. Many people. On Tessic's shoulders rested an unbearable weight, that levied itself upon him the moment Tessic became aware of Dillon's existence. Because Dillon could undo unspeakable crimes. Now Tessic's weight became Dillon's, and he understood.

Tessic backed away. Perhaps he, too, had some level of clairvoyance and saw into Dillon's mind as well. Dillon's fury of being kidnapped left him. What remained was a spiritual vertigo, and a heady fear, like skydiving into a storm.

Tessic hit a button and the shell of the chair split open. Dillon didn't move. Barely dared to breathe.

“I can't do what you're asking.”

Tessic laughed and clapped his hands together in sheer glee. “Of course you can. It's why all of you are on this good earth. You must know this by now.”

Dillon closed his eyes. Although the chair no longer embraced him, he felt every bit as enslaved—not by Tessic, but by himself—because Tessic was right. Just as they had sifted Tory from the dust, they could do it again. It was simply a matter of scale.

Dillon shuddered.

If you could save a life, was it a crime to let that life end? If you could restore a murdered life, was it a crime to walk away? What if it were more than one life? What if it were millions?

“When the others awake, you will explain,” Tessic told him. “And they will come to understand, just as you have, this glorious thing you have all been called to do.”

Yes, thought Dillon. There was a glory in this, but there
was also infamy. There was something right and holy, and yet something almost profane. The violation of a violation. He no longer knew what was right or wrong, all he knew was that somewhere out there the “vectors,” as Okoya had called them, were using Lourdes toward a disastrous end. He had to stop them, but how could he turn from this?

Dillon found no yardstick to measure his choices. Then he realized he didn't have to; Tessic had mercifully left him with no choice. Because nothing short of the world's end would stop them from soaring across the Atlantic, toward places whose names had become synonymous with death.

Treblinka . . . Buchenwald . . . Auschwitz. The death camps of Europe.

T
HE OLD WOMAN OF
M
AJDANEK PULLED HER BROOM ACROSS THE
weed-choked pavement of the square. Beyond the leaves and dust, there was never usually much to clean. Few of the candy wrappers or bottles that plagued other tourist spots littered the ground here. But then, the visitors here never came for their pleasure—either then, or now.

The snows were late this year. They would usually come in November, first dusting the concrete slabs of the square with a white quilt that would soon thicken into a pearlescent blanket, far too beautiful for a place such as this. A shroud of snow to hide a multitude of sins.

When the snows would come, the old woman would lay down her broom until the spring. There would be much to do then, for the square would be filled with the layers of fall leaves entombed in the drifts, now decayed into a sinewy mud that the rains would not wash away. For that she used a stiff whisk broom, spreading the mud out until it dried into a thin silt that she could sweep into the April winds. The dust and chaff would then be carried back to the town of Lublin and the forest beyond. She fancied herself an active participant in the cycle of life, and it was a comfort to her.

No one paid her for her labors in the square. She was not part of the grounds crew, and yet she predated anyone else who worked
there. She was simply there, like the barracks and statues. Like the fences and the ashes, moving her broom across the square every morning her joints allowed.

Visitors would take notice of her on their way to view the memorial and the crematoria. They would snap pictures. She would neither pose for nor demur from their cameras. Occasionally people would approach her in the square to ask her why a woman of such advanced years would labor so to clean a vast concrete square. They would ask in many languages. Although she spoke only Polish, she understood the question in most languages now, and could answer in a few of them as well.

“You see that house there,” she would tell them, pointing to her small home just beyond the outer fence of the camp. “I lived there seventy years ago, watching from my backyard, and I did nothing. So now I sweep.”

A stroke of her broom for every time she closed her window to the stench of the smoke. For every time she pulled vegetables from her garden, and ignored the sounds from the death chambers. For every time she took Sunday communion, and went to bed in silence. For each of these things there was a stroke of her broom. And she could only hope that the millions who visited Majdanek would see the respect she now gave the dead . . . and perhaps they in turn might once again find the respect for her and her people that had also burned in the death camps of Poland.

The leaves of fall had gone through their spectrum of color, and now, brittle and brown in these early days of December, they longed for their grave of snow as they tumbled on the concrete, pulverizing as they cartwheeled in the wind. The sky was a cloud of gray, pulled from horizon to horizon like a faded linen. It was a snow-sky. But no matter. If it snowed, then it snowed. She would not leave her task this morning until the flurries multiplied into a true fall of snow. So she pushed her broom, churning up leaf
fragments and bird droppings, pushing back the tide of disorder to the edges of the square. When the sun struck her cheek, she thought it was something imagined, until she looked to the southern sky.

A hole had opened in the clouds to the south.

An elliptical spot of blue opened before the sun, spreading wider. Her sight and hearing had peaked long ago, and it took a few minutes until she heard the heavy beating of blades against the air, and saw the approaching shapes that soon resolved themselves into three helicopters descending toward her. They were shiny and white—nothing like the military monstrosities she had seen before. They came down in the square, creating a downdraft that cleaned the square far better than her broom. But she held her ground, holding her kerchief on her head, watching in the center of the square, beside the stone monument to the Holocaust. In all her years of tending to the square, she had never seen activity such as this. Instinctively she knew that she was about to be a witness to something wonderful, or something horrible—she did not know which.

An hour later, she found herself on her knees in the church she had frequented all her life, bowed in dire supplication, her broom abandoned forever in the square.

A
S THE SHARDS STEPPED DOWN FROM THE HELICOPTER IN
Majdanek, Dillon could feel their influence settling upon the stark place of death. The evil of so many years ago still lingered here like an oil slick, permeating the rocks, coating the leaves, worming into the lungs with every breath. Yet Dillon could swear the evil receded with their presence, leaving the Earth prepared to give back what it had stolen.

“We should
not
be here,” Winston said. He had been repeating it like a mantra since he regained consciousness and learned their destination. “We should not be here at all.”

Back in the plane Dillon had stated the case quite simply. They were hijacked. They were captive, and that, if nothing else, made them obliged.

“Do you believe we should do this?” Tory had asked. “Instead of seeking out the vectors?”

Dillon found himself borrowing some of Tessic's faith for his own. “If there's a God,” Dillon said, “then I refuse to believe that Okoya is his messenger.”

Now, as they stood on the concrete square, a sense of foreboding took root. Up ahead stood a concrete dome that, for more than a generation, held a mound of ashes raked from the ovens when Majdanek was liberated. Now those ashes were being hosed down into a silty mortar for them.

“Instant resurrection,” said Michael. “Just add water.”

“We should not be here,” said Winston.

Tessic led them as far as the dome's entrance, where a team of triage workers waited—but Tessic and the workers remained outside, Tessic deeming the act of creation inviolate, not to be seen. And so Dillon, Tory, Winston, and Michael went in alone, while Tessic and his workers waited for a sign of the miracle.

F
AITH HAD BROUGHT
E
LON
Tessic to this precarious pinnacle of his life, but to propel it to completion, that would take business acumen. This, he knew, was why he was chosen for the task. Who but one of the most successful businessmen in the world could orchestrate such an event? Everything was a clockwork now; a massive, interconnected machine fitted by Tessic, and powered by the divine gifts of Dillon Cole and his three friends. More than thirty thousand were in Tessic's employ, clearing, building, setting the stage. Most workers knew nothing. They received their paychecks and went home, the knowledge that their families were fed was enough for them. Others knew bits and pieces—saw a corner of the grand design—but only Tessic saw how it all fit together, and as he watched his great machine of revival grind into motion, even he was stunned by how precisely the gears turned.

He had begun a year ago—the day after the Colorado River Backwash—the event that introduced Dillon to the world. He knew Dillon could not have died and, once he was found, Tessic maneuvered himself into a position as Dillon's jailer. Then he put much of Poland's builders to work, constructing the first of Tessic's personal megapolises. The nation was more than happy to lay the infrastructure at their own expense—including the very roads that would connect the complex with the rest of Poland.

Tessitech had placed an order with a German bus company
for three hundred coaches, with plush velour seats. They were the kind of tour buses that moved millions in and out of tourist attractions around the world. The bus builder's simple assumption was that Tessic, who dabbled in everything from art collection to construction, was planning to open some sort of travel enterprise. He hired three hundred bus drivers. They had been collecting salaries for weeks now, and had yet to be called to work. Until today.

Once it began there could be no turning back. The clockwork would grind to its inexorable conclusion; a final solution to the Final Solution—and now Tessic knew why the Almighty, in his wisdom, had seen fit to make Tessic into a manufacturer of weapons. He had at his disposal enough firepower to decimate anyone who tried to stop him.

I
T WAS NOTHING SHORT
of hell.

A pit of muddy ash soon became for the shards a place beyond the reach of nightmare.

It began even before they stepped over the railing that separated the living from the dead. Then, as they stepped into the pit, they lost their balance, sliding down the slick concrete slope until they were waist deep in the wet, ashen soup.

Things began to move.

The homogenous mixture began to differentiate, bubbling like a brew in a massive cauldron, turning brown, then red, and taking on the smell of blood.

“Syntaxis!” shouted Dillon, for to be alone and disconnected now would be unbearable.

“Hurry, hurry!” cried Tory.

Dillon reached his left hand out to Michael's. Tory pressed herself against Michael, thrusting her hand to Dillon's chest. Winston insinuated between Dillon and Tory, and syntaxis
swept through them. They thought it would shield them, but as their power magnified, their perception expanded, as if they had a dozen new senses at their grasp.

It happened quickly.

In a matter of minutes the bubbling brew began to transubstantiate, and they were immersed in bones and blood; a crucible of flesh consuming its own decay, swelling, soaking up the moisture.