Shuttered Sky

there was a silence on the inhale, leaving the shouts to come in a strange wave pattern.

The horses came out of the clubhouse turn, and flew down the backstretch. A bay horse named Eagles Dare had the lead by a length. With tight attention on the distant pack of horses, no one noticed as the American girl closed her eyes, finding her center in the midst of turmoil. The horses went into the far turn, the lead horse falling back, surpassed on the outside by a spotted stallion with an aggressive jockey, whipping his horse into the lead.

That’s when Lourdes Hidalgo lashed out, imposing herself on the crowd.

It began with the people immediately around her; a man waving his racing form in the air suddenly found his arm heavy by his side; a woman screaming for Calliope to move up from last place suddenly found her mouth no longer forming the words; a man with a cigar stub in his hand found he couldn’t discard it even as it began to sear his index finger.

The horses came out of the turn, hoofs pounding, dirt flying. By now the crowd at the rail had fallen eerily silent, and the grandstand quickly followed suit. Even the announcer, who barked the race like an auctioneer, found himself, for the first time in his career, speechless as the horses came into the homestretch.

A powerful impulse swept through the crowd, latching onto each nervous system, usurping control. It was an impulse to move. To gather. The spectators found themselves turning from the race, becom­ing a circle pushing inward toward the girl who had suddenly become their center of gravity.

For Lourdes, it was like screaming into darkness, for the place was so dense with bodies, she had no clue what the response would be. She feared her bid for control would be so diluted, it wouldn’t take hold. But as more and more faces turned to her, she realized she had succeeded in seizing them, just as her three “angels” had instructed her to do. She thought it a victory, until she realized that the crowd wasn’t just focused on her. They were pressing toward her, tighter and tighter—and it wasn’t just the crowd standing by the rail.

On the track, as the horses tore past the tote board, they veered from the finish line, bearing right, following a new command. Lourdes could see the wild eyes of the animals; neither the horses nor their jockeys able to control their tons of flesh. Like the curl of a breaking wave, the horses hurdled the rail and came down on the crowd. Spec­tators were trampled beneath their hooves, and crushed beneath the weight of their falling bodies.

Lourdes panicked, struggling to release the crowd from her grasp, but she had gripped them so tightly, she could not release them. A woman in front of her pressed up against her. Squeezed by the crowd behind her, the woman began working her mouth, trying to draw a breath of air, but her chest had collapsed under the pressure of the crowd. Lourdes, constricted and unable to move, craned her neck toward the grandstand, where people found themselves climbing down over rows of seats against their own will until reaching the front. Doz­ens upon dozens of people hurled themselves from the upper level like lemmings, their bodies obeying the command to draw close to Lourdes, even if that command resulted in death.

This was not what she wanted. She had meant to call the mob to crisp attention, but instead they were moths drawn to her flame.

“Stop!” screamed Lourdes, her voice a faint warble. She could barely breathe now within the growing pressure of the crowd. “Help me!” She knew the angels were somewhere watching, but if they heard, they did not lift so much as a finger to help her.

The woman who pressed painfully against Lourdes’s breast now showed no signs of struggle, and although her eyes were open, there was nothing there. She was dead. The man to her left and right were dead. She was surrounded by a minion of corpses crushed by the press of the crowd, unable to fall. In less than five minutes a simple day at the races had become an ordeal surpassing her worst nightmare, and although she tried to scream her terror, she found her own breath squeezed out of her.

Then she realized there was a way to stop this. She had pulled the crowd to her, and she couldn’t simply turn off that physical impulse: it had to be replaced by another impulse equally persuasive. So she closed her eyes and pushed forth to every one under her control a simple physiological imperative: the irresistible urge to sleep.

It took hold immediately, and bodies began to drop. Soon the pressure around her eased, and the dead pressed so tightly against her slid to the ground, like petals falling from a flower. She gasped a deep breath, filling her lungs over and over again until she was dizzy from hyperventilation.

In the orange glow of sunset, Lourdes regarded her personal Ar­mageddon. The grandstand was almost clear, bodies piled beneath, too deep to count. A dozen yards away, the head of a jockey protruded from beneath the carcass of his horse. Eagles Dare. The favorite. The lethal weight of the horse had forced a deluge of blood from the jockey’s nose and mouth.

Only three figures remained standing. A man, a woman and a child. Cerilla, Carlos, and Memo, or at least those had been the names of their human hosts. They waited in the winners’ circle.

Lourdes stepped over the carnage. It was impossible to know how many slept, and how many were dead— trampled by horses, or suf­focated by the press of the crowd. She leapt over the obstacle course of flesh, crying at the magnitude of the disaster.

“I can’t do it!” she screamed at her mentors. “I can’t—look at this, I can’t do it!” The boy came forward and dispassionately smashed the back of his small hand across Lourdes’ face. It came as a shock, and hurt more than she expected.

“She’s a disaster,” said Carlos.

“Worthless,” said Cerilla.

But Memo said, “She’ll do better . . . won’t you, Lourdes.”

She had once flawlessly controlled half a dozen people on a vol­leyball team. She had turned a group of twenty into a kick-line for her own amusement. She had forced dozens to dance, and kept a shipload of beautiful people emotionally dependent on her, irresistibly drawn to her magnetic personality. But all that was child’s play. She had never stretched her self as thin as this task required.

“There were too many people!” she told them. “I’ll never be able to do it!”

“You’ll practice.” Memo said calmly. “You’ll get better. You will master your control of fifty, then a hundred, then five hundred, then a thousand.”

“But why?” she demanded. “Why have you asked me to do this? How many people do you need me to control?”

“When you succeed, you will understand,” Memo told her. “And once you understand, you will revel in it.”

Cerilla shook her head, her chilly look made arctic by the grimace of her cleft lip. “She won’t succeed. We need to find another way.”

Carlos nodded his agreement, but little Memo waved them both off dismissively. “That’s for me to decide,” he said.

The other two nodded in reluctant acquiescence. If it had not been clear to Lourdes who was in charge among them, there was no longer a question.

Faint groans and cries around them indicated that Lourdes’s sleep was wearing off. “We should do something,” she said. “People are dying.”

“Since when did you care about human suffering?” asked Carlos.

She had no answer for him. For a year now, Lourdes had cultivated insensitivity and indifference. Compassion was never her strong point, but she still had to work hard to purge it, clothing herself in an attitude of disdain. It took a calamity such as this to remind her that she was human, or at least once had been. Perhaps it was easy for these creatures to see humans as nothing more than fodder, but it wasn’t so easy for Lourdes.

There were other people approaching now—people who were blessedly beyond the rim of her event horizon, and were not under her control; late arrivals, and curiosity-seekers who had heard the com­motion and came to investigate.

Memo glanced at the people wandering in, then turned to Lourdes. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Gather us some dinner.” Then he left with the two others, heading toward their limousine waiting behind the grandstand.

Lourdes took a deep breath, and released it. For days she had watched these angels dine, trying to desensitize herself to it, trying to see their feast of souls as something other than awful. There was a higher purpose to all this—or if not a higher purpose, a practical one. Why align herself with humanity, she reasoned, when she could align herself with something higher on the food chain? If the universe was indifferent—even hostile—what