Shuttered Sky

only the movement of the maze as the dial turned. When Dillon picked such locks, he didn’t look at the numbers. He reached his mind into the mechanical maze, solving it from the inside out, and when the bolts sprung, he never looked to see what the combination had been.

This lock was very much the same—but the mechanical casters had been replaced by electronic ones; binary charges layered upon one another, negative and positive creating a digital encryption matrix. That meant that the solution could not be mechanical. No pushing or pulling, or stroking or tapping would bring the casters into position.

The solution has to be electrical.

When the answer came to him, he laughed aloud at its simplic­ity . . . but then why should simplicity surprise him? He had once cast a stone that begat an avalanche on the slopes of Lake Tahoe. He had whispered into a single ear, and detonated the sanity of an entire town. He had touched a spot of flesh, and seen the wave of healing spread out from a single point of contact. Perfect simplicity of action had always been the hallmark of his power; it only followed that his escape from an electronic prison could only begin with the simplest of elec­trical phenomena.

Dillon paced the room faster, moving his sock-feet along the dry carpet. Like much of the room, the carpet was plush for his comfort—a gilded cage for their golden boy.

He recalled how, when he was a child, his father had once amused him by rubbing a balloon against his shirt, and sticking it to the wall. His mother had a trick, too. She would take Dillon into the laundry room, and turn off the light, then pull the sheets from the dryer. They clung to one another, and as they pulled them apart, lightning would flash in the ripples of the linens. “Dream lightning,” his mother called it. “It fills the sheets and sparks your dreams.”

1:39. He shuffled his feet like a boxer, building the charge, then approached the vault door, slowly extending his index finger toward the jamb.

Open sesame.

Even before his finger touched the door, static sparked from his fingertip—a healthy shock—but he could feel that this was not a ran­dom static blast. It was controlled, and prolonged, as if the gap between his finger and the door was just another synapse, and the lock was simply another appendage to flex.

In that protracted instant he could actually feel the mechanism as a part of himself, the gears, the deadbolts—but more than that, he could feel the pattern of the digital combination within the shock pulsing through his fingertip. The sensation was automatic, but what he did with that sensation was an act of will. In the instant it took for the static to discharge from his finger, he shaped it to match the series of charges of the digital combination, and by the time his hand flinched back from the shock, the job had been done. The most sophisticated security system in the world had just been undone by a carpet shock.

The mechanism engaged, and the triplet of huge deadbolts began to pull back. An alarm sounded immediately, no doubt reaching to the far corners of the plant. In any normal plant, it would be the panic signal of a meltdown.

But the blare of the alarm was nothing compared to the blast of perception that flooded Dillon as the door began to swing its long arc to the open position. It was the same wave of awareness that sent him into convulsions when he had been confined to his chair. But now, instead of clogging his mind, it activated it—galvanizing him beyond a mere adrenaline rush, filling him with determination. If he could not have Deanna’s faith, he thought, at least he had the brute force of his will, and perhaps that would be enough. He peeled off his socks, and without even glancing back to say a final farewell to his cell, he squeezed through the widening slit of the opening door, and into the expanse of the containment dome.

With the alarm mounting into a ghastly echo in the great stone chamber, Dillon cut a jagged, serpentine path toward Corridor A— the only corridor he knew. His zigs and darts were perfectly choreo­graphed to defeat the efforts of the sharpshooters stationed on the cat­walks above. He heard the crack of one rifle, then another. Were they ordered to kill him, he wondered, or just to disable him? The bullets nicked the ground, setting off coughs of concrete dust just a few feet away. Then, as he lunged for the closed door of Corridor A, one of the shots hit the mark. It caught Dillon behind the right knee, and its exit blew his kneecap to shreds.

He collapsed in excruciating pain, and almost succumbed to it—but he told himself not to look, not to consider the damage, because the moment he did, it would be over. He could not give up—he would either escape, or die trying; there could be no in between. So he reached his hand up, and grabbed onto the knob of the locked door to Corridor A, hoping the sharpshooters would hesitate, seeing he was wounded. They would assess before firing again, and that moment of assessment would give Dillon the advantage.

The door to Corridor A had a simple mechanical lock. He focused his will, forcing it into the keyhole, jiggling the knob with his hand, with just the proper torque and rhythm to make the mechanism spring. Then his leg took a second shot; this one in his calf, just beneath his shattered knee. He screamed, but let the sound of his own pain fill him like a war cry. He turned the knob, and fell forward into the corridor, pulling himself along by his hands until he was out of the sharpshooters’ sights.

“Face down! Now!” a voice screamed right beside him. It was the Corridor A guard, who held his pistol at point-blank range, aimed at Dillon’s head. If the other guards were instructed to merely take Dillon down, this one was definitely planning on taking him out.

“I am face down,” said Dillon, pushing himself up on his hands.

“You know what I mean.”

He put his boot on Dillon’s back, pushing him into a prone po­sition, cheek against the concrete floor. Dillon took a deep breath. There was a trail of blood to the door behind him, but the blood had stopped flowing. The sharp pain of his wounds was already beginning to subside.

Dillon pushed himself up again, defying the guard’s direct order, then turned to him, catching his gaze. There was not enough time to unlock the guard’s mind and find the perfect thing to say that would make him lower the weapon, so Dillon played a dangerous angle.

“If you shoot me, the gun will backfire,” he told the guard with calculated calmness, “and the blast will blind you.”

“Don’t move!” shouted the guard. “I’m warning you!”

“A piece of shrapnel will wedge in your temporal lobe,” Dillon continued. “You’ll lose the ability to speak. To read. To communi­cate.”

The guard’s finger was still firm on the trigger, but his hand was shaking the slightest bit.

“Your misery will be so great that in three years you will take your own life,” Dillon told him. “If you pull that trigger—'

Dillon’s leg still ached, but he knew his ruse would only sustain him another moment, so he bolted upright, and ran down the corridor. His healing power that had done so much for so many, had already pulled enough of his bone and cartilage back together so that he could limp away, his pain still intense, but bearable—but if this guard shot, there would be no mending. Dillon knew a blast to the heart or brain would kill him before he had the chance to heal.

He didn’t look back to see what the guard would do, instead he just impelled himself forward. Only when he turned into a side cor­ridor did he know his ploy had worked. It was a bluff, of course. Nothing he had said to the guard was true, but it had the semblance of prophesy, and coming from Dillon Cole, even the most disciplined of soldiers would have paused for thought. For once, his celebrity had saved him.

The corridors he traveled through had no windows—no hint of any connection to a world beyond the plant, and the sound of the alarm kept him from hearing any approaching guards. His only advan­tage was the skeletal nature of Bussard’s crew. It had served the general well while Dillon was imprisoned, but had no contingency for the complete breakdown of the security system. It was a big plant, and as long as he kept out of the visual arc of the videocams mounted on the ceiling, they couldn’t pinpoint his position.

He burst through a double door, hoping it led to the outside, but instead found himself in the empty cafeteria. It was an open space, and open spaces weren’t good . . . but on the other hand, kitchens usually had service entrances. He leapt over the service counter, knocking several metal pans to the ground, and although he heard someone hanging through the cafeteria doors behind him, he didn’t wait to see who, or how many of them there were. A cold draft flowed past his ankles, and, following the direction of the draft, he located the kitchen’s back door. He pushed his way through it, and found himself standing on a loading dock, in freezing rain.

He took an instant to get his bearings, and see the best route of escape. The entire plant was flooded in