Shuttered Sky

Bussard. Dillon picked up on her anger, but was still too loopy to seize its direction.

“I’m sorry for being horrible, Maddy. It’s those shots. They make me horrible.”

Maddy wiped the orange spittle dripping from the mouth hole in the mask. “Nonsense. You’re beautiful when you’re sedated.”

“You’re beautiful when I’m sedated, too.”

Maddy smiled. “I may have to eat your dessert for that one.”

Dillon snickered behind his mask, and took a few moments to take deep breaths. Good, thought Maddy, he’s working his way out of the fog. She took the time to eat some of her own meal, then began to cut Dillon’s meat for him. When he had eaten alone in his room, he had been free from his chair, and could eat with his own hands. Yet he didn’t complain about this new arrangement.

“The shots keep getting bigger every time they take me out,” he said. “Problem is I metabolize the stuff so fast, they gotta give me elephant doses. Can’t be healthy.”

Maddy speared a potato scallop, and lifted it toward his mask. “Open wide. I can’t see your mouth through the hole.”

She slipped it through the hole, and his tongue took it the rest of the way. “I feel like a slot machine.”

Maddy laughed. “If you were a slot machine, I might get some­thing back.”

“Naah,” Dillon said. “Suckers’ game.”

“Not with you around,” Maddy noted. “Everyone knows how you shut down Las Vegas.”

Although Dillon’s arms were banded to the chair, there was some range of motion to his hands. Now he clenched them until his knuckles turned white. The influence of his presence in Vegas had altered the odds of every game—it had taken months for simple randomness to return. Even now there were pockets where the laws of probability were still in remission. “Stale house zones,” the casinos called them, and moved their gaming tables far, far away.

“To hell with Las Vegas,” Dillon said. “The slot machines all come up triple sevens, and a million people think it’s something biblical.”

“Is it?” Maddy found herself truly interested in his response.

“How should I know? If the wheels had sixes instead of sevens, they would say I was the Antichrist.”

Maddie smiled. “Haven’t you heard? You are.”

Dillon sighed. “Yeah, I’ve heard that one, too. So how about some more red meat for Satan’s spawn?”

She swabbed a piece of meat in some A-1 and fed it to him. Maddy knew this would be a line of conversation Bussard would be interested in. She could almost feel him slithering like a snake in the wire that ran through her uniform. She could feel his eye in the tip of her buttonhole video camera. At first there had been a strong sense of betrayal each time she stepped in to dine with Dillon, but she suspected that he was aware of the camera, and that he understood her unwilling complicity with Bussard. His knowledge would make it alright—be­cause then it would be a game the two of them were playing against Bussard.

Their ice cream had melted by the time they got to it, but rather than forming a puddle in their bowls, it held the shape of the scoop. Just one more little reminder that Dillon’s sphere of influence was ever present. Even molten ice cream stood at attention for Dillon, refusing to give in to entropy.

It was now, after Dillon had completely regained his faculties, that his hands began to tremble in a subtle full-body shiver. Maddy knew it wasn’t from the ice cream.

“Something out there?” she asked.

“There’s always something out there,” he told her. He took a few deep breaths and kept his panic suppressed. “It’s not so bad while I’m in here—but it doesn’t go away completely until they seal that door.”

Maddy didn’t pretend to understand what Dillon was sensing. Whatever it was, it was bad enough to send him into convulsions every time they wheeled him out of the room. But rather than seeking the source of the seizures, Bussard had chosen to just shut them down, knocking Dillon out whenever they took him from his cell. Apparently consciousness was not a necessary factor in his “therapy sessions.”

Dillon took a deep breath and moved his fingers, pumping his fists open and closed.

“Make Bussard understand, Maddy. Make him understand that he can’t keep me here.” Any sluggishness had completely drained from his voice, the last of the tranquilizers already gone from his system. “You don’t know what will happen if I stay.”

“Death and destruction,” she said. “No one preaches doom better than you.”

“But you don’t know. I’ve seen hundreds of people whose bodies lived while their souls digested in the belly of a creature I’m still afraid to think about. Destruction doesn’t begin to describe it. . . and now I know there are worse things than death.”

Maddy suppressed her own shiver, and forced herself to look at the unexpressive mask that didn’t quite hide his intensity. “If things are as bad as you say out there, why do you want to be in the middle of it?”

“Even a losing battle has to be fought.”

“But you don’t even know what you’re fighting.”

“I will know. I’ll know once I’m out there.”

A moment of silence, and Maddy found herself looking away, shift­ing her attention to the vanilla simplicity of her ice cream. There was no sense even considering the thought of his freedom. She certainly couldn’t set him free, and suggesting as much to Bussard would be tantamount to suicide. And yet, as much as she wanted to see him free, she had to admit there was a side of her that wanted him trapped here. There was something incredibly heady about being Dillon Cole’s sole link to the outside world. There was a sense of significance that nothing in her life could match. The best way to ensure her position was to do her job, and continue to solicit Dillon’s trust. As long as her per­formance was exemplary, and Bussard had no reason to doubt her allegiance, her tenure was intact.

She wondered how much of this Dillon had figured out through the intonations of her voice, and her body language. The eye-slits in his mask had been made so narrow to keep him from perceiving any­thing in the people he had contact with. Although it slowed him down, he was still able to discern quite a lot through his little peep holes; a thousand things about her, that, in a moment, became a thousand and one.

“It’s your birthday!” he said, pulling the fact right out of thin air. “Why didn’t you tell me it was your birthday?”

She sighed. “And how did you know that?”

“Easy,” Dillon said. “The way you moved your spoon through the ice cream—like you were the reluctant center of the room’s attention. The way you noticed the wrinkles on your knuckles. The way your breath is just a few cubic centimeters deeper each time you cast your eyes down to the table, like some funky old body memory of blowing out candles when you were a kid.”

Maddy shook her head. Of all of Dillon’s gifts, she was most im­pressed by his ability to divine truths in the patterns of minutiae. “Birthdays don’t mean much to me,” she said.

“Still I’d like to give you a present.”

Maddy grinned, nervously. “The slot machine’s finally going to pay off?” She could see that hint of his eyes now; feel them reaching through the metallic squint of the mask, like an octopus willing itself through the breach of its tank. Maddy tried to resist that intrusive gaze, but found she could not. She had once commented to him that sitting before him was like playing a game of strip poker, where he held all the cards. But until now he had kept his hand to himself.

“I see a maze of mirrors when I look at you, Maddy. You’ve spent a lifetime raising the mirrors, confident that no one will get to the center. That no one will ever truly know you. You find lots of power in reflecting everyone away, don’t you?”

She tried to speak—to say anything to deflect his gaze, but he would not let her.

“Listen to me carefully Maddy,” he said . . .

“I know you. I know you down to the thoughts you tell no one.

I know you down to the dreams you can’t remember. I know you.”

She tried to speak, to make light of his words, but found she couldn’t. She could only slowly exhale, feeling the last vestments shielding her soul fall free.

“There. Happy Birthday, Maddy.”

She knew at once that he had begun some work in her, and she didn’t know how to accept that. He was uninvited, and yet welcome.