Shuttered Sky

“Ah,” said Drew. The two watched Dillon and Winston for a few more moments. Winston was relating an encounter he had had with Lourdes. Something about a cruise ship. Dillon hung on his every word. Then Drew said to her, “You can’t get close to them, you know?”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s like you’re always on the outside. Believe me, I know. I tried to get close to Michael once—it got me killed.”

Maddy turned back to Winston and Dillon, both connected to the exclusion of everything else around them.

“They started as a star,” Drew said. “And I figure in lots of ways they still are. They catch people like you and me in their orbit. We can’t get away, but we can’t get too close, or we burn. Best we can do is keep our orbit stable.”

Drew’s ruminations tugged enough of her focus that she missed something key in Dillon and Winston’s conversation, because Dillon now showed an expression of surprise, and suddenly turned from Win­ston, shooting a look to another body currently in orbit: Tessic.

“You mean here?” Dillon asked Tessic. “In this building?”

“In the infirmary,” Tessic said. “We’ll go, when you’re ready.”

“I’ve been ready for months.”

Maddy turned to Drew. “What are they talking about?”

Drew paused before answering. “What have you seen Dillon do?”

“Everything,” she answered.

“You haven’t seen this,” Drew answered. “No one has.”

* * *

Among Tessitech’s various employee perks was an infirmary and small medical clinic on the mezzanine. But today the clinic was closed and guards were posted at the doors.

In radiology, several leaded X-ray aprons covered an undefined mass on the X-ray table.

“He’s in pretty bad shape,” Winston said, as he and Dillon peered in through the window of the X-ray room. “And I suppose being around me didn’t help. Bacteria, algae from the lake—anything that was still alive in that footlocker grew out of control as we drove here.”

“Jeez, do you hear this conversation?” said Drew, to no one in particular. “I gotta find myself some new friends.”

The door opened, and two medical technicians who had the grim task of preparing the body exited the room. “What are we, friggin’ forensic examiners now?” one grumbled to the other. He stifled him­self when he saw Tessic, who had them led out, never to know the nature of their task.

“One thing I learned from Bussard,” Tessic told Dillon. “Don’t let anyone see the whole picture.”

“Does that include me?” Dillon asked.

“You? Who do you think is painting the picture?”

Dillon thought to the first time he had repaired the ravages of death; the recomposition of flesh, the reanimation of spirit. It had been so difficult at first, taking such a profound focus of his will. It had always been a lonely, solitary act, both selfless and self-indulgent at once. But things had changed. Now his will was secondary, his presence dragged order from chaos whether he chose to or not. Yet even in the graveyard, a victim of his own power, he knew his limitations. He knew there were those among the dead who did not revive—those whom he could never reanimate alone. Organ donors, perhaps, and others who were buried incomplete. Dillon could not give them new kidneys, eyes, or a heart any more than he could fill the scarred gaps in his own bullet-torn face.

But Winston could.

And no matter how little of Michael remained on that table, if they could somehow get the teeth of their curious gears to mesh, he could be restored. It would require more than their simple presence in the room. This task would require precision and control.

Dillon pulled open the door, and the stench hit him instantly, registering in his gut. Tessic quickly tugged out a handkerchief, hold­ing it over his nose.

“You weren’t kidding, were you, Winston?” Maddy said.

“You don’t have to come in,” Dillon told her, but as he and Win­ston entered the room, Maddy, Drew, and Tessic followed in their wake.

Three video cameras had been positioned in the room, their tapes already running, no one at the controls.

“What are we, on satellite feed to the world?” Winston asked.

“I wish to keep a record of this,” Tessic explained. “To document what you both accomplish here.”

“Like a videotape at a birth,” suggested Winston.

“Exactly.”

Winston scowled. “I hate people who videotape births.”

Dillon shuddered as he approached the table. The mass on the table had so little definition beneath the lead aprons, it was hard to believe there was anything remotely human there.

“Ready to rock?” Winston asked.

“Only if you are.”

It began the moment they pulled back the lead radiation aprons.

The broken frame on the table before them was a collection of brittle human bones, caked with rancid mud, and glistening with a dense hair-like pelt of green lake algae. That algae was the first thing to start growing again in Winston’s presence, appearing to slither around the bones. Winston, having not actually seen the body before this moment, launched off into a full scale panic.

“That’s not Michael!” he said. “It’s not him! We got the wrong body, it’s not him!”

“Shh.”

Dillon put his hand on a broken thighbone, half of which was missing. The bone, a dead gray beneath the algae, began to blanch to an eggshell white. “Winston!”

Winston shuttered his panic and reached out, touching the bone as well. Its jagged end began to stretch, marrow bubbling up from the hollow within, until it became enclosed within the smoothly curved end of the bone. The algae peeled away and slid to the table.

The process picked up speed, the two of them matching each other’s rhythm. Dillon touched the skull, healing its many fractures. Winston moved the jaw into place, teeth growing to fill the empty sockets.

“Yes, I see it now!” said Winston. “It is Michael!”

They moved to the midsection. Crushed ribs rose into place, de­fining a chest cavity. From the decay that clung to the bones, Dillon was only able to re-integrate bloody fragments of organs—but with Winston’s touch, those fragments cultivated, cells dividing into com­plete structures, until Winston and Dillon both found themselves wrist-deep in it.

They now moved at an accelerated pace, time dilating itself around them. To those behind them, their hands moved with the agility and grace of virtuosos: four hands at the same instrument, perfectly syn­chronized.

All at once blood began to pulse, splattering the walls, a heart now beat at the center of an open circulatory system. Connective tissue sprouted like spider webs from joint to joint, and muscle mass thick­ened the legs and arms, rising like dough, encasing the bones beneath. Winston pressed his fingers on empty eye sockets, and when he pulled his fingers away, a pair of eyes filled the space, lids growing closed over them. The bleeding stopped and on the flayed, red figure before them, islands of translucent skin began to grow like clouds in an empty sky, growing denser, thicker, joining one another. A scalp grew back from the forehead, darkening with hair follicles. Skin stretched to cover the body, pushing the last of the algae away, until only the midriff remained open, like a gaping abdominal wound, but dermal tissue rushed in to fill the void until the gap became a crevice, became a crack, became a navel, leaving the fully realized body of Michael Lip­ranski, his chest rising and falling in slow, metered breaths.

Then Tessic suddenly bolted, flying from the room with unchar­acteristic speed, but he was barely noticed as all eyes were on the body before them that had formed in less than a minute’s time.

Covered with blood, Winston backed away, but Dillon did not, for there was still one thing left to do. Although Michael’s body was there, there was an emptiness within. Calling back the spirit of others had been an instantaneous and automatic result of bringing life to the flesh. But Michael was a Shard; a soul with such huge