Shuttered Sky

“That you did, Elon.” And indeed Dillon knew that there was credit due. And who’s to say that had Dillon not been put through Tessic’s unusual boot camp, he would have had the fortitude to fill his role in the stand against the Vectors?

“I even provided the means for imprisoning that creature you al­lowed to remain.”

The reminder unnerved Dillon, but he didn’t let it show. “How is Okoya taking to lockdown?”

“Far better than you did. He is content to stay in the cell—he actually seems to like it there.”

Dillon was not surprised. The containment dome of the Hesperia plant wasn’t exactly like being chained to a mountainside and left for the birds. This was a cushy exile, and in it, Okoya finally could find what he always wanted. He was the center of his own private universe with an entire facility devoted to his personal maintenance. He was out of sight, but never out of mind.

The path down which Tessic led Dillon came to a place where grass had not been sown, and the buildings before them were barren and bleak. Although Dillon slowed, Tessic seemed to know where he was going.

“There is a park around this next building. Another island in the ghost town. You will see.”

“Do you still think of what might have been?” Dillon asked, as he looked around at the vacant buildings.

“Of course,” he answered. “But then I look around and see what is. There are almost eleven thousand here—a single one brought back from the death camps would have been a miracle—and we have eleven thousand! I look at these faces around me, and know that I will go to my grave a happy man,” he said. “Although, I hope it’s not in the too near future. I intend to enjoy my retirement.”

“What could you possibly do that you haven’t already done?”

“I have a goal, remember,” Tessic answered. “I intend to die broke. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get rid of my kind of money?”

“It’s not easy being the twelfth richest man in the world,” Dillon scoffed.

“Twenty-third,” Tessic corrected. “Building this place was quite a blow to my standing.”

“Is that why you called for me, Elon, to see this place?”

Tessic hesitated. “My pilot—Ari—he was my nephew. You didn’t know that, did you?”

Dillon looked away. “No.”

“He was my only real family.”

“I’m sorry,” Dillon said. He wasn’t certain if Tessic knew the cir­cumstance of Ari’s death. How he’d been taken as a host by the Tem­poral Vector. “I hope you’re not considering making me an heir— that is, if you can’t lose all your money.”

“Certainly not, but I would care to see you from time to time. Like me, you have no family.”

The thought never hit him without a pang of regret, and loneliness. Far too few of the Shards had anyone to go back to. With Tory’s mother dead, she had gone with Michael and they were staying with Michael’s father. Both were facing the ridiculous prospect of going back to high school—which might as well have been preschool, con­ sidering what they’d lived, died, and relived through. Still, their re­integration into the world had to start somewhere.

Winston, even with his gift exhausted, managed to retain quite a lot of his supernatural learning in his natural brain and blew the top off of entry exams into Harvard. No sooner did he return to his family, than he left them again.

And then there was Lourdes. Her family dead by her own hand, her deeds an anchor on her spirit—she had not landed with quite the same grace. Even there on Thira, when the six of them had broken off their syntaxis, and realized that their powers were spent, Dillon had known her path would be a hard one, for even then, she would not look any of them in the eye. Then when they had all parted company, she had slipped away without even so much as a goodbye.

“I had a dream about her,” Winston had told him. “She was flip­ping burgers in some fast food place, in a town too small to be on the map.”

“Hell on Earth?” Dillon had suggested, but Winton had said, “Maybe it’s her new idea of heaven.”

No, Dillon was not the worst off. After all, he had Maddy. She was waiting for him now, at her sister’s in New York.

“Will you and Maddy marry?” Tessic asked.

Dillon laughed. “Come on, Elon, I just turned eighteen—let me be legal for a while first. Let me at least vote!”

“Forgive me,” Tessic said. “You were robbed of your childhood—I only wish for happiness in your adult life. This is why I ask.”

They rounded the empty building and came upon a park. As Tessic had promised, it was a crowded pocket of life. Old men played chess on built-in tables carved from only the finest Italian marble, and chil­dren played in a brightly colored jungle gym. Dillon found himself amused that, even though these children were speaking a language he didn’t understand, their stylized gestures and battle postures gave away the nature of the game.

“They’re playing Star Wars,” Dillon said. Apparently, these chil­dren had already filled in their massive gap of time and culture, adapt­ing to their own rebirths, as if they had done nothing more than oversleep the morning.

Dillon wondered how they—how everyone—would adapt to what was coming next. He had high, but reserved hopes, considering the progress made over the past four months. Since the Shards made their stand, the world that was in such a steady state of decline found the capacity to heal itself. People who had lost their ambition returned to work. The unnameable sense of dread and dysfunction resolved into a fresh sense of direction. Hell, even the airports were starting to clean up. Pundits were already labeling the troubling time “the Occipital Recession,” and called it “a collective psychosis of informational over­load.”

People were doing their best to forget about the Backwash, and all the documented feats of the Shards, not realizing that those events were merely a taste of things to come. The age of science, the age of reason, was coming to an end after all, but not in a great collapse. Instead it would come in the form of a birth. Of many births.

“When I wrote to you, Elon, I told you about the vision that I had—that the six of us had—when it was all over; stars all exploding at once, thousands of light-years away.”

“The way the Scorpion Star went supernova when you and your six friends were conceived?”

“But this time it was millions of stars. Maybe billions.”

“That’s still just a tiny drop in the bucket, when you consider how many stars are out there,” Tessic mused. “A billion stars could go supernova, and God would barely blink.”

“I was hoping you’d have an opinion.”

“I always have an opinion.”

“That’s what I figured.”

Tessic leaned against a light post and crossed his arms. “I believe there are three possibilities,” Tessic said. “One: You and I are both entirely insane, your vision was a hallucination, and all these un­documented people around us are, as the Polish government claims, ‘refugees from war-torn Lithuania’ that I smuggled in over the border.”

Dillon smiled. “I’d buy that.”

“Or, two: The universe truly is a living thing, as you say, and the bursting of stars is an immune response. Therefore, by allowing those nasty little dybbuks to survive, you triggered an even greater immune response to protect us against them in the future.”

“And the third?”

“The third is simply this: By benefit of your mercy to creatures who deserved no mercy, the Almighty saw fit to gift humanity with a spiritual evolution.”

“And which do you believe, Elon?”

Tessic grinned mischievously. “I keep my answer close to my heart,” he said. “Between me and my creator.”

Tessic looked around the many benches of the park, as if looking for someone or something. “If your vision was a true one, we’ll know soon enough—the first premature ones will be born as early as next month—but I think people are beginning to have suspicions.” Finally he spotted who he was looking for. “Ah, there she is. You see her?”

He pointed to a woman who sat throwing crumbs to a gathering of birds, with her husband beside her.