Scorpion Shards

warily, then turned the entire deck over and spread the cards face up.

The cards were in perfect order; ace through king, spades through diamonds! They stared, not sure whether to be aghast or amused.

“Pretty good trick, huh?” said Dillon. His eyes be­trayed the truth: this was much more than a mere trick.

“So what’s the big deal?” asked Michael as he exam­ined the deck.

“Entropy,” said Tory.

“Entro— what?”

“Entropy,” she repeated. “Newton came up with it— it’s one of the basic laws of the universe, just like gravity.”

“What is?!” demanded Michael.

Tory rolled her eyes. “That things go from a state of order to disorder. You know —mountains erode, glass breaks, food rots—'

“Cards get shuffled,” said Lourdes.

“Right,” said Tory, “but Dillon here . . . he’s breaking that law.”

They all stared at him. “Is that true?” asked Lourdes.

Dillon quivered a bit, and said, '‘Go directly to jail, do not pass ‘Go.’’ ”

While Michael chuckled nervously, and Lourdes just stared at the cards, Tory scoured the area for a way to test her theory. She finally settled on Carter, who had long since drowned all his sugar cubes, and was just staring into the bucket of water. She took it from him, and he hardly seemed to notice it was gone.

“The law of entropy says that sugar dissolves in water,” said Tory, bringing the bucket over to them. “Right?”

Everyone looked into the bucket. The water was clear; not a granule of sugar left.

“Dillon, put out your hands,” asked Tory.

Dillon did, and Tory slowly poured the water through his fingers.

What they saw, didn’t appear spectacular . . . at first . . . it just seemed . . . well, weird. As soon as Tory began to pour the water, granules of sugar appeared in Dillon’s hands, out of the clear water. The water kept spilling through his fingers, and his palms filled with the white powder . . . but it didn’t stop there. The grains seemed to be pulling themselves together as Dillon concentrated, and once the water had poured through his fingers and the bucket was completely empty, Dillon was left with not just a handful of sugar . . . but a handful of sugar cubes.

They stared at the cubes, stupefied.

“That’s awesome!” said Michael. “It’s like reversing time!”

“No it’s better,” suggested Lourdes. “It’s reversing space.”

Dillon put his handful of sugar cubes down, and they slowly dissolved into the mud.

“What do you do with a talent like that?” wondered Michael.

“What can’t you do with it!” said Tory. “It’s better than all of our talents put together. . . . It’s like . . . creation.”

The very thought made Michael pale. A chill wind blew and somewhere in the distance a small cloud began to darken.

“Don’t mind Michael,” Tory said to Dillon, “he gets a little bit moody.”

But it wasn’t just a matter of Michael’s being moody. He had something else weighing on his mind.

“So what happens now?” asked Michael.

The question had hung heavily in the air since dawn, but had gone unspoken. What now? Any urge they had felt to come together had long since faded away just as the light of the supernova had dimmed in the night sky. If anything, the urge was to drift apart. They all turned to Dillon for an answer—as if somehow he were the one now holding them together like crystals of sugar, and they needed his permission to go their separate ways.

“We do,” said Dillon, “whatever we want to do.”

It was a quiet declaration of independence, but seemed as profound a moment as when the exploding star first filled the night sky.

“I want to go home.”

It was Winston who spoke. They all turned to see him there, a fraction of an inch taller than he was just moments before. “I gotta fix things—change things, get my life moving,” he said, then he wiped a tear from his eye before it had a chance to fall. “And I miss my mom and brother.”

No one could look each other in the eye then. Thoughts of home that had been locked away all this time now flooded them.

“By the time I get home,” said Lourdes, “they won’t even recognize me. . . . It’s all gonna be new. . . .”

The shifting wind blew cold again. “What if we don’t go home?” whispered Michael.

“You will,” said Dillon.

Winston crossed his arms. “How the hell do you know?”

Dillon shrugged. “I can see the pattern,” he said. He studied the four of them—the way their eyes moved, the way they breathed, the way they impatiently shifted their weight from one leg to the other.

“You’ll leave here not sure of anything; not even the ground beneath your feet,” he told them. “But the further you get away from this place, the saner it’s all going to feel . . . and every place you stop, there’ll be people coming out of the woodwork talking to you—wanting to be near you, and not even knowing why. Waiters will tear up your checks—strangers will open up their homes to you; every­one will think you’ve gotten your lives all together, and you’ll laugh because you’ll know the truth. And each per­son you come across—they’ll take away something they didn’t have before—something pure, or joyful, a sense of control, something to grow on. At least one of those peo­ple will get on a plane. And then it’ll spread to places you’ve never even heard of.”

They stood there aghast. Michael stared at Dillon, slack-jawed. “You can see all that?!”

Then Dillon’s straight face resolved into a wide grin. “Sucker!!” he said.

Tory burst out with a relieved guffaw, and soon the others were laughing and razzing Michael, as if they hadn’t fallen for it as well.

Dillon’s grin faded quickly and that solemn melancholy returned to take its place. “You’d better all go,” he told them, “You’ve got a whole country to get across.” Then he glanced at Carter. “You can leave him with me.”

Somehow it didn’t seem fitting to say good-bye, so Tory reached out her hand to Dillon and introduced her­ self.

“I’m Tory,” she said. “Tory Smythe.”

Dillon smiled slightly, and shook her hand “Dillon Benjamin Cole.”

The others were quick to follow.

“Michael Lipranski.”

“Lourdes Maria Hidalgo-Ruiz.”

Winston kept his hands in his pockets refusing to shake Dillon’s. “Winston Marcus Pell.”

Then the four who had come together turned and headed toward Michael’s van, dissolving away from Dil­lon, the way they would soon dissolve away from each other.

Winston was the last to go. He stood there, a few feet from Dillon, a scowl well-cemented on his face. He looked Dillon over head to toe.

“You know you’ll never be forgiven for the things you’ve done. There ain’t enough grace in all the world to cleanse you of that.”

Dillon had to agree. “You’re probably right.”

Winston studied Dillon a few moments longer, and his scowl softened. He shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to be you,” he said.

Far behind them, they heard the others piling into the van. Winston took a step back, but before he turned to leave, he reached out and tapped Dillon on the arm, the closest he could bring himself to a friendly gesture. “Stay clean,” said Winston. “Don’t let the bugs in.”

Dillon nodded, and Winston ran off to join the others. In a moment their minds were far away, their voices growing with joy and anticipation. Then Michael started the engine, and the four great souls ventured forth into the