Shuttered Sky

Winston.”

Her voice was both compelling and comforting enough to ease the maddening static hum in his mind. Find Winston. Finding him wouldn’t be the solution, but it was a positive step toward something. “I wish my mind could be as clear as yours,” he told her.

She smiled. “You forget that you made it that way.”

Maddy kept her hand on his arm, gently stroking it. Since he had first touched her two nights ago in the derelict diner, she found herself taking every opportunity to touch him again. There were no words to express the way Dillon had changed her. Bitterness had always been the fuel propelling her. Her wounds had become comfortable friends, but Dillon had exposed them for what they were, took her into his arms and excised them. In one intimate moment, her entire past was healed. The clarity he had brought her weeks ago was just a prelude, for far beyond the clarity was a grand sense of connection. She un­derstood what Dillon had meant when he talked about being beyond himself, for she now felt a shadow of his connection to the world around him, and in his moments of self-doubt Maddy took the initia­tive, moving them toward their goal of finding Winston.

“Nothing’s ever easy for us,” Dillon griped, and chastised himself once more for having a mind that could decipher every pattern and code in the world, but couldn’t remember something simple like Win­ston’s pager number.

“Now I have to rely on my senses, but I don’t get much of a feeling from Winston, or Lourdes,” Dillon told her, as they passed on a tangent to Birmingham. “There’s too much interference, too much static out there. I mean there are moments that a sense of one of them comes to me, kind of like a scent on the wind, but it passes too quickly for me to get a fix on the direction.”

Maddy felt the car accelerate, and wondered if Dillon even realized that his foot had become heavy. Although Maddy trusted Dillon’s instincts implicitly, she did have her reservations about his choice of destination. Winston’s home town was an hour south of Birmingham. Dillon figured that if he wasn’t there, his mother and brother would be. Perhaps they might know where he was.

“But, as you’re public enemy number one, that’s the first place they’ll look for you,” Maddy had been quick to remind him even before they left the old diner the day before.

“Maybe not,” Dillon had said. “They’ll think I’m too smart to head there.”

She wondered whether his naivete would save him or destroy him. “The military has no illusions about human intelligence. It thrives on the assumption that the world is full of imbeciles, so everything the military does is filled with redundancies and contingencies. You can bet the entire town where Winston lived is under twenty-four- hour surveillance by multiple teams, in case one or more screw up.”

“What do you want me to do,” Dillon had answered, his frustration building. “Sit around and wait for something to happen? I might as well be back in my cell at the plant.”

And so, a day and a half later, just around noon, they barreled past Birmingham and into a fresh danger zone.

She reached over and touched his leg. “Slow down,” she said. “We don’t want to be pulled over.”

She left her hand gently on his thigh, feeling that sense of connec­tion again. She had grown used to the sensation of simply being beside him, her cells infused with his aura, neither aging nor decaying. It was a sense of being at the peak of her own existence. But touching him closed a circuit, making her not just a recipient, but a participant.

“We’re not exactly Bonnie and Clyde,” he told her. “You’re not obligated to come with me.”

“Three days ago, I made the choice to give up everything to set you free,” she reminded him. “Do you really think I’d stay with you now just because I felt obligated?”

“Then why are you with me?”

She took her hand away, the question stinging. “Aren’t you the one who told me you knew me? If you can see into my soul, why do you have to ask?”

He turned to look at her, but his gaze wasn’t penetrating as it so often was. Instead it was a gentle caress. For an instant she felt schoolgirl bashful. She was both irritated and appreciative of the feeling. “Shouldn’t you be watching the road?”

He immediately turned his eyes forward, but she knew that his attentions still remained on her.

Twenty minutes later, they pulled into an old filling station with pumps decades shy of automation, that still clanged bells as gears spun up the price. That and the attached general store was all that survived of a crumbling hotel which, by the looks of its remains, must have been an old plantation home. Maddy figured they had better get out of there fast, before the building succumbed to Dillon’s presence, and the South rose again.

“I don’t like this place,” Dillon said as they stepped from the car. “I feel . . . unsettled here.”

While Dillon pumped, she went in to pay and pick up sandwiches and drinks. The woman at the register was obviously a fixture of the place. She had pallid, liver-spotted skin that almost camouflaged her with the faded, whitewashed wall behind her.

“Will that be all for ya’?” she drawled.

Maddy’s attention had been snagged by the last newspaper on the counter, and the photo smack in the center. Her own face stared up at her from beneath the headline. Next to her picture was a photo of Bussard.

She snatched up the paper, angling it so the cashier couldn’t see the front page. “This, too.”

Maddy watched the woman’s rheumy eyes, which already seemed far less rheumy than they had only moments ago. Their fog had faded with her liver spots in less time than it took Dillon to fill up. The woman studied the items and the register, giving no indication that she recognized Maddy from the newspaper photo. “Cash or charge?”

Maddy paid in cash, and left with all godspeed. She couldn’t resist taking a closer look at the paper the moment she was out. The mili­tary’s official story came right out in the headline. According to them, she had murdered Bussard after an affair gone bad. She didn’t know whether she was more infuriated or disgusted. There was, of course, no mention of Dillon at all—which meant that she had gotten it wrong. She was public enemy number one, not Dillon. They could never admit they had Dillon, admit his escape, so instead the military spin-doctors had made her the enemy.

Dillon was not at the car. She quickly surveyed the area to find him slipping through a hole in the chain-link fence that surrounded the dilapidated hotel. Damn! If anything, he was consistent in his dis­tractions, like a hound in search of a lost scent.

She ran to the fence and found that the hole had healed as soon as Dillon passed through, so she climbed it, following a path of flattened weeds until coming into a clearing behind the building. The tall grass behind the condemned hotel was filled with the rotting remnants of wooden lounge chairs surrounding the concrete shell of a pool built in a time they truly made them deep. Dry brown leaves clogged the drain.

Dillon was nowhere to be seen. She tried the back porch, peered in the dark windows. It was as if he had vanished—but there was evidence that he was here, right on the peeling wood of the building. The spots of paint that hadn’t peeled now had a freshly painted look. I can’t put back what’s no longer there, Dillon had told her. Where the paint was gone, it was gone, but the exposed wood looked brand new, leaving an effect of strangely mottled rejuvenation.

The sound of footsteps on metal made her look up. Above the deep end of the empty pool, there was a high-diving platform. Dillon stood at the edge of the platform, silhouetted against the sun. This was strange, even for him, and she had no idea what business he had in mind. It wasn’t until she moved, and the sun was out of her eyes, that she saw a second figure standing behind him. She raced toward the ladder.

* * *

Unsettled.

There were so many things out there agitating Dillon, he hadn’t known why this place should stand out. Maybe it was that they were only thirty miles from Winston’s home, and he had absolutely no sense of his presence there. Then he had seen the diving platform through the trees, and it had given him a sudden flashback to the vague visions and dreams that had been plaguing him.

Now he stood on the end of the platform, the tips of his sneakers an inch over the edge. He could see the old hotel, the gas station, Birmingham in the distance. He grew more unsettled by the moment, but there was nothing here.

He held his hands out to balance himself on the edge, and closed his eyes, trying to recall details from the