Shuttered Sky

directed specifically at Winston.

Winston swallowed his meat, and Dillon braced for the response. “If I need someone to loan me perspective, I’ll let you know.”

Tessic deflected it with a laugh, but then threw a grin at Dillon, as if the two of them shared some secret, although Dillon wasn’t certain what that secret might be.

Winston excused himself just as dessert arrived. “I can’t remember the last time I ate so well,” Winston said, then chased the compliment with, “I can see how one could grow complacent with fine food like this.” Winston left, and his exit opened the door for Drew and Michael to follow.

After dinner, Dillon considered Winston’s departing barb. Had Dillon grown complacent? Well, perhaps—but Dillon had a hundred reasons why complacency was exactly what he needed in this place, in this moment. To be a body at rest was a luxury he could never afford, and as Tessic had predicted, Dillon had found clarity in this hiatus from anguish. He felt, for the first time in many years, simply human. Here, his power was neither feared nor worshiped. He need not concern himself with its effect on the world around him, or the world’s effect on him. Such contentment deserved to be prolonged, and so he told himself it was all part of some positive metamorphosis and he would emerge from this cocoon far better than he arrived. I’ll leave after we get back from Europe, Dillon told itself, or at least he’d consider the possibility of thinking about leaving.

Winston however, had no such moratorium on desertion.

At nine in the evening, Dillon found Winston alone in the living room, punching combinations into the digital lock on the residence elevator.

“Going somewhere?”

Caught in the act, Winston did not try to hide what he was up to. “I thought you said Tessic had an open- door policy.”

“Maybe he got tired of the draft.” Dillon punched in the code, which Tessic had given him on his first day there, although he had never chosen to use it. The elevator door opened to a cherry wood interior, then closed again, empty. “I’m sure he would have told you himself, if you hadn’t skipped out during dinner.”

Winston looked around, making sure they were unobserved. Even so, he spoke in a whisper. “You can’t stay here, you’ve got to realize that.”

“I’ll leave when I feel it’s time,” Dillon told him. “And it’s not time.”

“Like hell it’s not! You, Michael and I don’t get the cushy way out—there’s things we’ve got to do.”

“And you have no clue what those things are.”

“I know a lot more than you think,” Winston said. He hesitated, then took a breath. “I know who the three spirits are. And I know why they’re here.”

That caught Dillon completely off guard. He had been arrogant enough to think his was the clearest vision of all the Shards. “Then why haven’t you told me?”

“Because we can’t talk about it here.”

Dillon turned at the creak of footsteps on the stairs. Drew and Michael. Drew carried their travel bags. Seeing Dillon there, Drew stopped short, looked to Winston, then completely misread the situ­ation.

“Glad you decided to come with us,” Drew told Dillon.

“No one’s going anywhere,” Dillon said. “Especially not Michael. He’s not ready to leave here.”

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” Winston said.

And suddenly Michael was the center of attention. He stood on the bottom step of the winding staircase, just as Dillon had that same morning when he first saw Winston.

“You’re staying, right Michael?” Dillon said. “You know you need time to adjust.”

Michael offered Dillon a half-hearted shrug. “I figure it’s best to dive in before I really know what the hell is going on out there. Be­cause once I know, I might be too scared to go. Like you.”

Dillon started to protest the suggestion that he was afraid, but was cut short by the sound of the elevator door sliding open. Winston had remembered the code.

“Could you just stop for a minute and think!” insisted Dillon.

“I already think too much.”

Drew and Michael pushed past them into the elevator. “Sorry, man,” Michael said. “Tell Tessic I like his place.”

Winston followed them in, and Dillon found himself stumbling over his words. “There’s no point in leaving— nothing makes sense out there; it’s full of images and noise for us now. What we feel out there is panic—the only sanity is here.”

Winston wedged his foot against the open elevator door to keep it from closing. “Has it ever occurred to you that sanity is our worst enemy? That maybe we need a little insanity, or we’ll never be pushed to do what we need to do?”

“And what might that be?”

Winston responded by handing him a slip of paper with an address. “This is where we’ll be. Meet us there later tonight, and I’ll tell you everything I know.”

“I’m not leaving here!”

“I’m not asking you to. Just slip away for a couple of hours.”

Dillon looked at the piece of paper. A three digit address and a cross street.

“You want us to come back, that will be your last chance to con­vince us,” Winston said. “Promise me you’ll be there.”

“I can’t promise anything.”

Winston nodded and back-stepped into the elevator with the oth­ers. He said nothing more as the elevator door slid quietly closed.

Dillon closed his eyes. The sensation of being robbed of Michael and Winston’s presence as they dipped out of Tessic’s insulated domain almost made him physically ill. He waited for his own sense of self and autonomy to return, but it was slow in coming. Their exit was sudden, unexpected, but Dillon knew he should have expected it. He should have sensed the pattern leading up to this. It was after all, his talent. It troubled him how easily he could unconsciously snuff his own intui­tion and he wondered what else he might be preventing himself from seeing.

When he finally turned from the elevator, Tessic was coming up the stairs from his workshop.

“Did you give them the code, or did Maddy?” Tessic asked.

“You heard them leave?”

“I didn’t have to. Security informs me when there’s unauthorized use of the express elevator. My door may be open, but no one leaves without my knowledge, one way or another.” Dillon expected him to be furious, but he wasn’t.

“You could have them stopped in the lobby,” Dillon said.

“What kind of host would I be then? I told the officer on duty to open the door for them, with my regrets that I couldn’t see them off personally.”

Tessic went over to the wet bar, stocked with Amaretto, Creme de Menthe, and a dozen other sweet liqueurs, crystalline decanters glistening in every color from orange to violet. Tessic once told him he couldn’t abide alcohol without a healthy dose of sugar to go with it. But Dillon suspected there was no sugar in the world sweet enough to make this medicine go down.

“I’m sorry,” Dillon said. “I showed Winston the code. I thought by showing them they could leave, they’d no longer feel they had to.”

Tessic poured himself an amber liqueur, then poured a second snifter. “Would I be contributing the delinquency of a minor if I asked you to drink with me?”

“Probably.”

Nevertheless Tessic brought the second glass to Dillon. “It’s called Benedictine. I’ve been to the monastery in France where it is distilled.”

Dillon took the glass, and sipped it; the sweetness overwhelmed his taste buds, the sharpness burned his lips. The smallest sip left a whole series of subtle aftertastes.

“The recipe is five hundred years old, and is flavored with twenty-seven different botanicals that you would never expect to find together. Cinnamon and saffron, lemon and myrrh. Whenever I feel troubled by circumstance, I have a glass of Benedictine to remind me that the greatest things are forged from the most disparate of elements.” He swirled the snifter, watching the way the Benedictine coated the glass. “Life is much the same. Events both