Shuttered Sky

Okoya nodded. “But you’ll need more than a fraction of a response to stop it. The three of you alone will fail; all six of you must come together again.”

Winston looked at him in surprise. “You never told me that!”

“Until you had Dillon, there was no point in discussing it.”

Winston shook his head. “Impossible. Even if we somehow won Lourdes back, there’s Deanna . . .”

Okoya smiled. “Leave Deanna to me.”

The suggestion sent a surge of adrenaline through Dillon’s body, warming his chilled extremities.

“And how about Tory?” Winston said. “You know what they did to her. There’s no way.”

Okoya seemed more sure of himself than Winston did. “The Vec­tors have made a critical error in underestimating you, just as I did a year ago,” Okoya said. “Don’t make the same mistake, and underes­timate yourselves.”

“Winston—what did you mean by ‘win Lourdes back,’ ' Dillon asked. “Don’t you think she’ll help us once she knows?”

Winston looked to Okoya, then back to Dillon. “We believe the Vectors have turned her to their side.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Don’t you get the news up there in Tessic’s tower?”

“Of course I do—I’ve been keeping track of everything.”

“Well then, you should already know what happened in Daytona.”

But Dillon hadn’t heard a thing, so Winston explained.

“Ten days ago, a few hundred people in Daytona Beach, Florida, suddenly left their beach blankets and drowned themselves.” Winston said. “As if an irresistible force took them over, and they had no control over their bodies—how could you not have heard about this?”

“I don’t know.” The truth was, with the hours he spent scanning the news, he should have known. He could only assume that some events—events that might pull him away from Tessic’s comfortable sanctuary—were screened out. “There’s no question it’s Lourdes, but what the hell is she doing?”

“I would guess she’s flexing her muscles,” Okoya said. “Preparing herself.”

“For what?” Dillon wondered, but Okoya didn’t answer.

* * *

By the time they left the warehouse a few minutes later, the sleet had turned to rain and Dillon had to ask Michael how their little summit could possibly have affected his mood for the better.

“If I have to be hit by a train, I’d rather see it coming,” was all Michael said of it.

They piled in the Durango, waking Drew, who slept across the front seat. Dillon wondered how much of the picture Drew knew, and concluded that he was smart to ration his own awareness.

“Still want us to drop you off at Tessitech?” Winston asked.

Dillon searched for the Houston skyline, but it was obscured be­hind the clouds. A gilded cage waited for him high in those clouds. He could imagine himself sneaking back in, sliding into bed with Maddy, forcing himself to ignore everything he had learned tonight. Then morning would come, Tessic would greet them for breakfast, and life would be as sweet, and as intoxicating, as Tessic’s liqueurs. It would be easy to give in to that temptation. So easy that he knew he could not return, not even to say good-bye to Maddy. If they suc­ceeded, she would come to understand why he had left. And if they failed, well, it wouldn’t matter anyway.

“If we leave now, we’ll reach Dallas by nine,” Dillon said, and slid into the front passenger seat. As they drove off, Dillon closed his eyes, and warded off his regrets by counting the metronome beats of the wiper blades, until they were far out of Houston.

* * *

The following morning, five thousand miles away on the island of Bermuda, an accountant and his wife were escaping from it all. These were unpalatable times, and it didn’t take a number cruncher to see the unlucky numerology of the days. As he lay there poolside, beside the cellulitic form of his wife, who burned a mottled pink be­neath the ultraviolet rays of a midday sun, he ogled the more shapely figures on the beach, longing for his slimmer youth. He dreamed of himself surrounded by a harem of such beautiful women—not so far­fetched a thought, he concluded. These were, in fact, strange days. The unusual had become commonplace; inexplicable mischief and miracles were rules rather than the exceptions. Take that bizarre mass suicide in Daytona Beach. Five hundred people, without forethought, without reason, suddenly plunged themselves into the ocean. The Coast Guard was still fishing out the bodies. The accountant had laughed and his wife had been angry.

He yawned, and tried to roll over to sun his back, but found that gravity had shifted. No, it wasn’t gravity; it was him. He was no longer lying on the lounge chair, instead he was standing in front on it. He did not remember getting up. When he turned, he found his wife standing as well. In fact, everyone around the pool was beginning to stand like a reluctant ovation.

At first he found this merely curious, not threatening, for his life experience gave him no way to distill a threat from this aberrant oc­currence. He didn’t realize he was walking until his third step, because he had not told his feet to do so—yet they were impelled to move. Soon he was jostled by the bodies around him—a mob as surprised by their sudden migration as he. He tried to crane his neck to see his wife, but he couldn’t move his neck at all; the most he could gain control of was his eyeballs and they darted back and forth with growing con­cern. He smashed his shin on a chaise lounge and tumbled over, hitting his head on the concrete. He couldn’t even scream from the pain, for his vocal chords were locked as tight as his jaw.

The man moved from the pool and down a set of stepping stones to the beach, where he realized it was more than just those lounging at his hotel caught in this wave of motion. They were coming from all directions— from all the Bermudan resorts within his line of sight. They ran from restaurants and lobbies, they abandoned their cars, and now in this moment of absolute helplessness, the terror and panic truly set in, for he was on the beach now, marching with thousands of others toward the surf.

And he was in the front line.

Now he understood the terror of the mob in Daytona—under­stood how their limbs could be torn from their control—how their bodies could rebel and drown them, leaving no survivors to tell how it had been. His feet sank into the wet sand at the edge of the surf, but he kept on moving, the mob pushing behind him. The water rolled across his toes, churning a cloud of foam and sand. He knew the bot­tom dropped off suddenly a few feet out and although he could swim, he knew his body would continue walking even as his lungs filled with water. He would die and no one would understand.

But then his feet stopped as quickly as they had begun moving, and he stood at attention with the water lapping at his toes, and there he stayed. The sun beat down on his bald head for more than half an hour that way. He felt the sunburn on his forehead, nose and shoulders. He felt it would burn him through, but still he could not move. And then came a different kind of radiance; a type of magnetism tugging at his being. He knew, even before she moved into his line of sight, that she was the one who had seized control of his body and the thousands of other bodies lining the beach, as far as the eye could see. She strode before him, ankle deep in the surf surveying the crowd. Not as if looking for someone, but rather taking it in as a whole. Like a general, he thought. A general appraising his troops.

She was a young woman, attractive and formidable in both stature and presence. She caught his gaze for an instant and in that instant he could feel her heartbeat. It was his own heartbeat. He could feel the pace of her breath; it was his own. And he knew this powerful girl could end his life; shut down his heart with a single errant thought. But in an instant her eyes moved on, and he knew he was nothing to her—not even worth the thought it would take to kill him. He didn’t know which was worse—the pain of his will usurped, or the pain of his insignificance.

Ten minutes more and he was released. The entire beach was re­leased. People fell to their knees, crying, whimpering, but still alive. She had brought them to the edge of the surf and had stopped them, then released them. For what reason he didn’t know.

Could she have been one of the—but he cut the thought short. No. That freakish gaggle of teens all died when Hoover Dam fell. But now he wasn’t so certain, for he could still feel a hint of the girl’s presence like static in the air.

He went to find his wife, so they could tend to each other’s sun­burns, and they did not speak of it. Not even that afternoon, when they chanced to see a cruise ship heading east across the Atlantic, and felt the girl’s pervasive aura fade as the ship fell off the horizon.