Shattered Sky (53 page)

They set down in a clearing beside the Auschwitz guard tower, the downdraft of the helicopter blasting away the snow, which scattered like ghosts from a grave. When the other copters had landed, Tessic opened the door to let in the bitter cold. But it wasn't only the cold that came in. There was a presence, almost sentient, that peered in through the open door.
When you look into an abyss
, thought Dillon,
the abyss looks into you.
It was the eye of old murder.

“Dillon,” Winston said in a panicked whisper. “I'm scared. I'm so scared.”

“So am I,” he admitted.

“Why don't we just leave? Why don't we just—”

“Shhh,” Dillon said. “It's going to be all right.”

“But you don't know that, do you? You don't
know
anything, do you?”

Dillon closed his eyes. Even that vile sense of the vectors was gone here, obliterated by the static field of earthly evil that now enveloped them.

“Why are we here?” Winston whined.

Why are we here?
thought Dillon. The easy answer would have been to blame Tessic—but Dillon could have delayed this visit. He could have detoured them to any number of sites, but he hadn't, because deep down he
wanted
to come here. Could Tessic be right? Could they have been meant for this? Was this his own intuition telling him so?

“We have to face Birkenau,” Dillon told Winston. “We have to face it.”

“Why?”

“I don't know yet.”

T
ESSIC WALKED THEM THROUGH
the oppressive Auschwitz gate—the wide brick arch through which a thousand trains of the condemned had once passed. Tessic pointed to red posts marking the ground. “We've used sonic imagery to locate the”—he broke off, his mind tripping over the thought—“to locate the spots most likely to yield new life. Begin wherever you wish.”

But Dillon did not need sonic imagery to know where the dead were. He could feel them, and they were everywhere. He could read their history in every inch of ground he crossed. There had been so many ashes, so many bones, there had been no way for the Nazis to dispose of it all. It was spread into creeks until the creeks choked. It filled ponds until the ponds were dry gray sores on the face of the countryside. And toward the end, the Nazis didn't even try to conceal it. Within the camp and in the surrounding countryside were unnatural ash mounds that in the summer would sprout with weeds and wildflowers, but now in winter were as bald as granite, revealing their true nature.

They were led by Tessic and his entourage through the double fence, and into Auschwitz. Maddy was there supervising teams of workers that waited to assist. Dillon thought to say something to her, but changed his mind. What was there to say now? She had, in a strange way, fulfilled her military destiny, becoming a key cog in Tessic's machine. He felt an intense pang of regret as he caught her gaze, but it was quickly taken under the cold waves of death rolling in all around him.

“Begin wherever you wish,” Tessic repeated.

Dillon turned from Maddy, and picked up his pace rather than slowing down. He could sense the dead already beginning to gather around him—but not like in the other places he
had been. Here, it was unfocused—diluted. A million souls, each grasping a tiny, tiny fraction of his power all at once. Not one had yet been revived, and already he felt drained.

This place will swallow us.

He felt himself a single grain of salt dissolving in a sea. So he didn't slow his pace, for fear that he would dissolve entirely.

The rear gate of Auschwitz opened to a road that led to Birkenau, three kilometers distant, its guard towers clearly visible through the flurries of snow. To the right, in the open fields, were storehouses of stolen memory. “The Fields of Plenty,” the Nazis had called them. Each structure was still filled to the brim with eyeglasses, photographs, shoes, watches. Anything and everything that could be stolen from the victims, down to the hair on their heads, shaved and awaiting shipment to German textile mills.

They made their way down the snow-dusted path. One kilometer. Two. With each step, the overwhelming presence of Birkenau grew stronger, making his knees feel weak with burden. There was a veil of darkness surrounding Birkenau that went beyond a mere absence of light. Dillon could feel this palpable pall of oppression—he could see it when he closed his eyes, darker than pitch; a pigment of black that could not be manufactured anywhere else on earth. Birkenau Black. It robbed the color from the countryside, washing everything in shades of gray.

“Like hell I'm going in there,” Winston said, but they both knew that he would walk through the gaping maw of the guardhouse arch right beside Dillon. A wind blew against them now, through the arch, and it was hard for Dillon to shake the feeling that the place was breathing.

Places had personalities. Dark deeds and cruel intents lingered, soaking into the porous soil, leaching into the rocks,
until the place became permeated with it. This, Dillon knew, was the most evil place on Earth, where even the blades of grass that grew in the spring had an unnameable malevolence about them. This place was indeed alive, not with any kind of life Dillon understood, but with a living shadow. Darkness that consumed light. A place not full of the souls that had died, but filled with the shadows cast when they were murdered.

The living void.

And as he neared that horrible guardhouse gate, Dillon finally knew. He understood why he and Winston had to come here. This was a place as close to the living void of the vectors' world as there could be on Earth.

If they could face this then maybe—just maybe—they could face the vectors! But what did facing Birkenau mean? Did they have to complete the task Tessic set before them? They would not be able to—it was too great. They would truly be swallowed if they tried. It had to be something else they needed to do here.

The gates of Birkenau were swung open before them to reveal the ruins beyond. As he stood there beneath the entry arch, Dillon could feel himself pulling together the molecules, the atoms that once made up those who had died here. They were beginning to resonate with the powerful call of his own soul as if his body were an instrument—Gabriel's trumpet—the horn of the ram blown long and loud, awakening the dead.

He clenched his teeth as he and Winston stepped through the gate, twenty yards in, and no one followed. No one would cross that border into that horrible place now. Dillon closed his eyes, feeling the weight of death encroaching on his soul, and the ground around them began to change; the broken concrete healing, the crumbling bricks of the massive crematoria pulling themselves back into place. This place of horror would rise
again. Its gas chambers and ovens would renew before the dead could be brought back—and the thought of restoring Birkenau made him so sick to his stomach that he leaned over, gripping his gut. He strained to rein in his power so that he didn't lose everything that he was to this field of death. He felt he would shatter like a vessel in a vacuum, his soul exploding like a supernova once more, leaving only smithereens spreading out across these fields, giving the tiniest hint of life to these million souls; their bodies never brought back from dust, their spirits held intact only long enough to be faintly aware of their own existence before fading. This time Dillon and Winston would fade with them, both lost in the blackness of Birkenau. If he let his power go. With his eyes still closed he heard a desperate whisper from Winston, who had doubled over on the ground.

“Syntaxis,” he whispered. “Please, Dillon, please. Take my hand. Join with me.” Anything so he didn't have to face this bitter place alone.

“No,” Dillon said. Even as he lost control of his body, feeling his bladder release, saturating his pants, running down his leg. Even then he refused to touch Winston. For he knew if he did, there would be no containing themselves. They truly would shatter.

“Contain yourself, Winston,” he said. For to give in to the need this place had for their life energy would surely mean death, and their only defense was to hold their power back, within themselves—something they had never been able to do—but before now their lives had not depended on it.

“Syntaxis will kill us—we have to face this place alone,” he told Winston. If they could contain themselves, they'd survive this place—and if they did, it would prime them to face those black creatures that would soon come spilling through the dying void. Dillon had to believe that.

Tessic was right about one thing—this foray into death
would
make them stronger, but it wasn't their strength of resurrection that needed to be tempered and reinforced. It was their fortitude in facing the darkness.

They both held on. They held on until they knew they had the strength to hold on as long as they had to. To hold on forever.

Something deep within Dillon changed, and for the first time, Dillon miraculously felt his field pulling back! Finally, after all these years his powers obeyed his will, drawing into his flesh, instead of radiating outward!

Winston curled into the fetal position, and Dillon stood there, arms by his side, fists clenched. He held within him now the wellspring of his luminous soul, and the sensation was different from anything he had ever felt—as if his senses and emotions were charged to a new high, and he could at last sense the boundary between himself and the world. He still felt the horror of this place, but now he was aware of something bright beyond the darkness, something eternal, that fueled in him a compassion for those who died here as immense as his power. But rather than stir them with the depth of his compassion, he would hold it.

When he opened his eyes he saw that the buildings had ceased their renewal. Nothing had renewed to the point of making a difference in the bleakness of the death camp, but the difference was in him. Something wonderful would be taken from this horrible place, and he marveled that the souls he had intended to bestow the gift of life upon had given him a gift instead. They had given him the ability to contain himself, and a knowledge that there was something beyond the dark places.

It took Winston a few moments longer, then the look of
pain and fear dissolved from his face as well. He took a few deep breaths and struggled to stand. He, too, had triumphed. Mind over matter. Will over wonder. He, like Dillon, was finally contained.

“Are we there yet?” Winston asked.

Dillon nodded. “I think we are.”

T
HE AIR OF THIS
place was getting to Tessic as it had every time he made a pilgrimage here to mourn for his people, and for his family that could have been. Today the hope, the fear, the expectation and the desperation roiled in him, churning up unexplored places within his mind. Had he been Michael, he thought, his storm would rage all over Europe.

Tessic waited outside the gate with growing dread. Then, not five minutes after walking in, Dillon and Winston came back, and they brought no one out with them. The look on Dillon's and Winston's faces was unreadable and something felt different about them, too. It took a few moments before Tessic knew what it was.

It's that my hair isn't growing,
Tessic thought.
It's that my bones are once again subject to the slow decay of age. Dillon and Winston have shut down their own powers.
Tessic found this more frightening, more distressing, than anything he had seen or felt before.

“What do you think you're doing?”

“We're leaving now,” Dillon told him.

Tessic found himself stammering as he had several days before when his lion first defied the whip.

“You will go in there,” Tessic demanded. “You will wake them.”

“They're not asleep,” Dillon reminded him. “They're dead. They've been dead a very long time.”

“Why should that matter to you? To you death means nothing!”

Dillon's calm stood in harsh relief against Tessic's growing agitation. “I won't invalidate their suffering. Let them rest.”

Tessic grabbed him by the shirt, practically lifting him off the ground.
He's just a boy
, Tessic thought.
A scrawny child, stupidly naive.
“Do you think they
want
to rest here in this place?” Tessic screamed. “Is there justice in that?”

And then Winston spoke, his voice as calm as Dillon's. “The evidence of injustice is sometimes as important as justice.”

Tessic let Dillon go, pushing him away. “Rhetorical garbage,” he sneered. “You two will be the criminals if you leave this place untouched. Hitler's accomplices.” Tessic wanted to hit them, hurt them, to smash into their brains the importance of this. The
necessity
of it. How could they question the validity of his cause—of his
calling
, and of their own place in this glorious undertaking? How could they do this to him?

“I will lock you in your chair,” Tessic yelled, a froth of spittle building in the corner of his mouth. “I will lock you in your chair and force you.”

“No you won't,” said Dillon with such unexpected empathy in his voice, it derailed Tessic, sending his thoughts flying for cover from his own anger. He stomped the ground like a child, he threw his hands up. He screamed to the colorless sky. Tessic's entire life had been for this moment. Building up to it only to have the prize torn from him just inches from his grasp.

And then Dillon reached out and put his hand on Tessic's shoulder, speaking again in that tone of understanding so deep, Dillon's voice could have been the voice of God himself. “Listen to me, Elon: it was never your responsibility to bring back the lost. You truly were meant to be a maker of weapons;
defensive
weapons, that would protect. Today you've made your great work in me, and in Winston. We were never meant to be tools for the undoing of this Holocaust,” Dillon told him. “We're weapons to defend the world against a coming one.” And then he leaned forward and whispered gently to Tessic, like a kiss upon the ear.