Shuttered Sky

minyan of ten from among his employees to pray with him, but could not wait for them to arrive, so he began alone, reciting the Sh’ma and the Amidah, two seminal prayers of his faith. Surely today would be a day to humble himself in prayer, for he had already been humbled by what he witnessed just a short time before.

It was one thing to know the scope of Dillon’s and Winston’s powers, but another thing entirely to witness dust become flesh. It was nothing short of the creation. The way it must have been when God breathed life into man.

His Judaica study, filled with artifacts from all eras in history, was a sanctuary within a sanctuary for him. But today the framed parch­ments and silver adornments that had always brought him comfort and connection to the past held only accusations. Condemnations. Who was he to take such miraculous beings into his own hands? But then, who was any man called upon to do the will of the Almighty?

Maddy Haas, as perceptive as she was, had been wrong about one thing. Tessic had doubts. Not about Dillon’s purpose, but about his own ability to complete his role in it. And so Tessic had removed himself from the sight of the revived Michael Lipranski, retreating to his library, and cloaking himself in his talis. He had bought the ancient silk prayer shawl at an auction, authenticated to be more than seven hundred years old. Until Dillon arrived it had been kept in a climate-controlled case, but now the crumbling yellowed silk had a fresh, white sheen, renewed like everything else that fell into Dillon’s presence.

The door opened behind him. He expected it to be members of the prayer minyan he had called for, and was surprised to see that it was Dillon. Tessic put his prayer book down and hid his hands beneath the prayer shawl so that Dillon could not see how they were shaking.

“My jeans are a little long on Michael,” Dillon said, “but they’ll do until we can get him his own clothes.”

“Yes. Good. We’ll take measurements and whip him up a ward­robe right away.”

Dillon was bathed and clean, but he still smelled faintly of blood. He took a few steps closer. “Are you alright? You left the infirmary in a hurry.”

Tessic couldn’t meet his eyes. “The job was done, I saw no reason to linger.”

A gesture of his hand knocked the prayer book from the table. Dillon quickly bent over to pick it up. He handed it to Tessic, and Tessic brought the book to his lips, kissing the spine. “Customary,” Tessic said. “When something holy falls to the ground.”

Dillon looked around at the artifacts and parchments on display around him. “These things mean a lot to you, don’t they?”

Tessic looked to the artifacts he had been so proud to have amassed. “They are only things,” Tessic answered. “What matters are the hands that shaped them. Poor men, mostly. I expect when all this is over, I shall be a poor man as well. What then will I have but my faith?”

The door creaked open, and a gaggle of businessmen entered, awk­wardly pulling folded yarmulkes from their suit pockets. Tessic sighed. “What is the value of a minyan when they come at my beck and call? It should be a gathering of devotion, not a gathering to please one’s employer.”

The men respectfully greeted Tessic. And went to retrieve a set of prayer books across the room. Dillon became uncomfortable, clearly troubled that he might somehow be recognized. Tessitech’s employees were not the trustworthy cadre that typified Tessic’s personal staff. Before the men returned with their books, Tessic gently led Dillon to the door, and spoke so that the others could not hear. “You must convince Winston to join us in Poland.”

“Winston goes nowhere Winston doesn’t want to go.”

“I trust in your ability to persuade him.” Tessic gently closed the door, and returned to the nine other men that had gathered in the center of the room. He could already feel his composure returning.

26. Inertia

Winston: No one expected what happened when the dam collapsed.

Dillon: I thought it would all end right there. I was wrong.

Michael listened. He didn’t judge, he didn’t think, he didn’t try to make an emotional connection to the things Winston and Dillon told him. He had only “arrived” an hour ago, was quickly stuffed into some of Dillon’s ill-fitting clothes, and now sat shell-shocked in the suddenly overgrown roof garden of industrial icon Elon Tessic. He found it all too surreal for comment. As he sat there, Winston and Dillon spouted the year-in-review in matching couplets.

Dillon: I could have held the water of Lake Mead back, but I didn’t.

Winston: He let it flow, hoping it would become a disaster that would heal more than it destroyed.

The way they explained it, sending a flood sweeping down the lower Colorado River was the only way to stop the world from seeing the five of them as gods. Dillon’s death would paint him in ignominy, and the scope of the disaster would shock the world back into stride, like a broken bone being set. Thousands would die, but civilization would go on, back on its steady track, as it had been before. The only thing that would collapse would be the dam.

Dillon: But I didn’t die, and the flood waters never reached Laughlin.

Winston: Instead, Dillon’s presence reversed the river’s entropy. The flood slowed, and began to flow backwards.

Apparently, in the wake of the Backwash, the Shards were feared, revered, and worshiped on a global scale. The world believed them to be dead, which elevated them into martyrdom. In the face of that, everything rational and reasonable fell into decline. It was, in effect, the shattering of civilization, just as Dillon had feared from the begin­ning. The Shards had been the agents of the shattering—not the so­lution.

Dillon: I was imprisoned and used by the government for almost a year.

Winston: I lived like a fugitive, hiding my face, afraid I’d be rec­ognized.

In a way, Michael was grateful for his hiatus, having never had to witness all this with his own eyes. They told him how Lourdes had abandoned them, taking refuge in her own bitterness, setting sail on a hedonistic voyage of excess. Michael could hardly blame her. Had he been alive, he might have done the same, isolating himself on some island in the calm eye of a perpetual hurricane.

Winston: There are three spirits out there now. Their arrival is the beginning of the end.

Dillon: But we’re safe from them here.

Michael caught the look Winston threw Dillon, belying some un­spoken tension. Even before he was told of the three spirits, Michael had sensed something. Even now, within the supposedly shielded con­fines of the penthouse, Michael knew there were three—but he didn’t sense them so much as spirits. They were more like living coordinates. Markers of dimension; the axis of a three-dimensional grid. He might have shared his take on these creatures with Dillon and Winston, but they began to tell him about Tory, and how her ashes were dumped out over the skies of Dallas.

It was this news of Tory that finally reached him. Sorrow mush­roomed within the numbness, a cumulus threatening rain. Acoustics in the garden dampened as the air pressure lightened in a sympathetic response. Although the sky over the rest of Houston remained clear, a single cloud now lingered above the Tessitech building. Apparently Tessic’s shielding had a unique effect on Michael’s power, focusing his mood into a narrow beam, sending it skyward, like a search light. In the rooftop garden, and nowhere else, it began to drizzle.

Michael knew a remedy to this mournful little cloud. It would be simple first aid, temporary and superficial, but it would hold him, if only for a little while.