Shuttered Sky

survived, trapped in that place between worlds, waiting for a soul to crawl into. A soul that could take them out.

“I stood on the sands of the Unworld until they came,” Dillon said. “Then I took them into myself, letting them leech onto my soul. And I brought them back into this world.”

“I was not expecting it,” Okoya said. “The moment Dillon came through, the creatures leapt from him, and burrowed deep into me. I could not free myself from them, and in a panic, I punched a hole into my own universe. I withdrew back to my own world, taking the two parasites with me. And in so doing, infested my entire universe.”

“They were only two parasites,” Michael said. “That’s not exactly an infestation.”

“You saw the damage they did when they were here,” Winston reminded him.

“They infested us,” Michael said, “not our universe.”

“Such limited thinking.” Okoya turned to Dillon. “When I es­caped, you caught a glimpse of the place I came from. What do you remember of it?”

Dillon closed his eyes, trying to find a way to put it into words. It wasn’t so much what he saw, it was more a feeling spilling through the breach. “Like you said, there was nothing solid; everything was light and shadows. It seemed to me that the light was somehow alive . . . and not just the light. The darkness was alive as well.”

“The living void,” Okoya said. “Sentient darkness. It fills our uni­verse like water fills an ocean. It’s what my kind thrives on. We move through the living void, consuming the darkness.”

“I think we have a name for this place,” Winston said. “We call it hell.”

Okoya turned to Winston, considering his little insight. “Very well,” said Okoya. “Then consider yourselves warned that the gates of hell are about to open.”

Dillon’s body gave in to the cold, and he began to shiver uncon­trollably. “And why would the gates open?”

“The moment I returned with the parasites, they left me, and in­habited the living void. Their host became the void itself, and it be­came rancid. The void was alive now with destruction and fear, feeding on itself, consuming itself until our universe could no longer hold, and began to collapse. As great as we are, my kind cannot survive the death of our universe.” Okoya kept his eyes fixed on Dillon. “And so they’ve chosen to come here.”

Dillon pulled his overcoat tighter, and clenched his teeth to stop the shivering. A malevolent species facing its own extinction. Dillon wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

“The arrival of the Vectors is a prelude to a mass migration,” Okoya said, “for where the Vectors go, my species will follow. It is a physical law of my universe.”

“We could coexist,” Dillon suggested. “We could offer them—'

“You can offer them nothing!” Okoya stood, and paced the frozen corner, his voice growing angrier. “They have neither compassion nor patience for humanity. You are vermin to them— less than vermin— and nothing will change that. Rest assured they will come; they will steal almost three hundred thousand of your bodies to use as hosts. Then they will enslave you, then they will devour every soul on earth, and when they are done they will burn your bodies, keeping only enough of humanity alive to breed a new generation of souls. This is the fate of your precious world.”

Dillon shut his eyes, wishing he could erase what he had heard. This was the face of his dread, and it was hideous. “No,” he said, “You’ve lied to us before. I won’t believe this.”

“Disbelieving it won’t change the truth.”

An icicle the size of a human leg plunged from the ceiling in the center of the warehouse. It shattered, radiating a vibration that shook sheets of ice from the walls, like the calving of a glacier. When the room fell silent again, the silence remained for a good long time before anyone spoke.

“Why,” mumbled Michael, “couldn’t I just be left at the bottom of Lake Arrowhead?”

And although no one expected an answer, Okoya said, “Winston knows why.”

Dillon and Michael turned to Winston, who had said very little during Okoya’s revelation. “What else is there, Winston?” Dillon asked. “What other secrets have you been keeping?”

Winston couldn’t look up at them. He kept his eyes lowered to the ground. “It’s no secret. It’s something Drew and I came to un­derstand.”

“Enlighten us, o wise one,” said Michael.

Winston took his time before he spoke. Finally he said, “For years we’ve wanted to know the reason behind our lives. Why did the Scorpion Star explode? Why did we inherit its fractured soul? Why have our powers been growing? What are we?” Winston looked to Dillon, then to Michael, then back to Dillon again. “How ready are you for the answer?”

Suddenly Dillon found himself no longer wanting to know.

“Okoya talks about his universe being a living thing,” said Win­ston, “but what if ours is alive as well? Not a living void, but a lifeform of matter and energy stretching across space—a single organism, thirty billion light-years wide?”

Michael threw up his hands in exasperation. “Oh, gee, that’s just wonderful. So what does that make us? Universal sperm?”

Winston ignored him. “If we see the universe as a complex or­ganism, how do you think it might protect itself from invasion—from infection?”

Dillon fought his own resistance, and let the idea begin to sink in. When he finally spoke, he found his own voice cold and hollow. “You’re saying we’re some sort of defense? A kind of metaphysical immune system?”

“Dillon gets a gold star,” Okoya said.

Dillon considered it. The idea was too large to grasp, and yet simple at the same time. He found himself looking at his hands—which he had always seen as an interface for his powers. Healing hands; hands held up to hold back a flood, or to release one. Instruments of creation and destruction. If Winston’s conjecture were true, it would reify what was always just a vague sense of purpose. It would explain why the Shards were so attuned to each other, and to rifts in the “skin” of space. All the questions he posed now had obvious answers when factored through this new equation.

“If this is all true, then why would you help us?” Dillon asked Okoya. “What could you possibly have to gain?”

“My kind views me as a hated fugitive,” he answered, far too casually for Dillon’s comfort. “If their plan succeeds, what do you think will happen to me?”

“You would sacrifice your entire species for your own survival?”

The question gave Okoya pause. His demeanor clouded bitter and resentful, as if the question were an insult. “Loyalty is as foreign a concept to us as compassion.”

Dillon held his astringent gaze, more comfortable with Okoya’s hostility than with his congeniality.

Winston leaned closer to Dillon. “Okoya agreed to give up his appetites, in return for a kind of political asylum.”

Michael let loose a cackling laugh. “Asylum?” he said. “I agree. Let’s all find an asylum. We can tell people how we’re actually T-cells in disguise, and they can tell us how they’re really Queen Victoria, and Alexander the Frigging Great.”

Dillon thought to say something to shut him up, but noticed that the frost around Michael’s chair had melted. In spite of Michael’s de­rision, the truth was setting him free. Dillon turned his attention back to Okoya.

“So if we face this ‘infection’ the moment it happens . . . you think we’ll be able to stop it?”

Okoya raised his eyebrows, and shifted in his seat. “Sometimes an immune response succeeds, sometimes it fails.”

“Where will it happen, and when?” Dillon asked.

“Yes, are you ever going to tell us that?” said Winston. “Or don’t you know?”

“I suspect they will tear their way through a very large, very old scar, in the last moments of their universe,” Okoya said. “My best guess is the Greek island of Thira, on the seventh of December, 7:53 AM.”

Winston gasped. “Pearl Harbor! The same date and time as the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

“And the Mongol invasion,” said Okoya, “and the siege of Troy, and the fall of Jericho. Even before your calendar, and the measure of hours, all these events took place on the same date, at the same time.”

Winston nodded in an understanding Dillon had yet to grasp. “Each fraction of creation is a reflection of the whole,” Winston said.