Shuttered Sky

should be wearing lead under­wear,” he quipped, “or maybe a radiation suit altogether.”

“Yeah,” said Winston, “That won’t draw any attention to us.”

It wasn’t that Drew was looking ill. After all, in their presence—and with Tory there—he couldn’t be. His eyes appeared sharp, indeed, his senses must have been piqued. But too much of any good thing was never good. When one’s entire being was sharpened to a rapier edge, it was hard to handle; bound to leave unexpected incisions.

“It burns like holy hell,” he told them, finding no other way to describe the sensation. Yet he dutifully skewered his attention to driv­ing, until the moment they parked, then he bolted from the driver’s seat, just to gain a few feet of distance.

They were at a clutch of roadside motels, and, exhausted from the ordeal of prospecting the winds for Tory, Dillon chose to take a room, if only to have a few short hours to close their eyes. It irritated Okoya no end, as he was constantly berating the human body for its never-ending need for rest. “Lourdes has sailed out of range,” he insisted. “She’s probably crossed into the Mediterranean by now, and you’re just going to sit here?”

But Okoya was not in charge—and Dillon made sure he was re­minded of that. “If this battle we’re facing is what you say it is, this may be the last chance we have to recuperate.”

Okoya grumbled acquiescence, and went off to sit on a fencepost, facing stalwartly toward the horizon, like an Easter Island statue.

“Did you say battle?” asked Tory, who was still in the dark about all of it. “Haven’t we had enough of those? Can’t we just lie out on some beach for a while?”

“Haven’t you heard?” said Michael. “Lying on a beach these days can be lethal. Ask the people in Daytona.”

Drew lingered in the parking lot, checking international airline schedules on his cell phone, happy to leave the Shards to themselves. They retired to a cheap motel room, and the moment the door closed—the moment they relaxed, and allowed themselves a moment of down time—the gravity began to take hold. The four of them began in separate corners of the room: Dillon in the desk chair, Winston sitting up in the solitary bed, and Tory and Michael on the floor, leaning back against the wall—Dillon had a disquieting sense of the distance between them; he felt he could measure it down to the mil­limeter, and wondered why such a thing should cloud his thoughts. “We need to bring Tory up to speed,” he said, then scooted his chair a bit closer to Michael and Tory.

“I was dead, wasn’t I?” Tory said. “I’ve figured out that much. And most of the license plates I’ve seen are from Texas, so I take it we’re a long way from Hoover Dam.”

“You weren’t just dead,” Winston told her. “You got yourself cremated. You were harder to put together than Humpty Dumpty. It was a real bitch.”

Tory grinned. “I’m a bitch, even post-mortem.”

By now Michael had come up behind her, and began massaging her neck. “That’s not the worst of it. You did a little sky-diving, and got dumped out over half of Texas.”

“So what are you saying? You pulled me back out of thin air?”

Michael pulled her closer, wrapping his arm around her. “Hey, we’re Houdini, babe.”

By now Winston had migrated across the bed, closer to where Tory and Michael sat on the floor, and Dillon once more found himself pulling his chair toward the three of them, closing the distance between them.

Together they tried to deliver for Tory, in as small a capsule as possible, all that had transpired, and what they were called upon to do. By the time they were done, Dillon noticed that Michael and Tory were all over one another, taking turns massaging each other’s necks, or backs; a hand on a thigh, an arm over a shoulder, touching in as many ways as they could.

Dillon found himself leaning forward on his chair toward them, almost to the point of losing his balance, as if the floor itself were tilted. “If Okoya is telling the truth, and we provide the only immunity against this . . . this invasion, infection, whatever you want to call it, then we have no margin for error. Everything we do from this moment on is crucial. Like strategy in a war.”

“If Okoya is telling the truth,” said Tory. “That’s a big ‘if.’ '

“It feels true,” said Winston, who now lay across the bed, letting his hand dangle down, gently touching Tory’s shoulder.

“What if it’s only because we want to feel it’s true?” Tory suggested. “Because we’re so desperate to know why we got spat out into this world with these powers. What if Okoya knows how desperate we are for an answer, and is using us again?”

“What if what if what if,” said Michael. “I never wanted to know ‘why,’ so that theory doesn’t hold with me; I just wanted to survive— live my life in spite of the power. I don’t want this responsibility,” he said, “but I’m with Winston; it feels true.”

Winston slipped off the bed, and sat on the floor beside Tory, leaning against her. Without realizing what he was doing, Dillon had shifted from his chair, to the ground as well, even closer to the others.

“What troubles me,” said Dillon, “is that to fight a disease, anti­bodies have to die.”

Only now did Dillon realize that something was happening. That they were pulling toward one another with an unconscious magnetism as irresistible as gravity itself. Winston clasped Tory’s hand, Michael had his arm over Winston’s shoulder, and Dillon ached to close the distance between himself and them.

“Let’s not talk about dying now,” Tory said. “Not when I’ve just been brought back.”

Dillon found he couldn’t resist the pull. He reached out and touched the closest bit of exposed flesh he could. His hand wrapped around Michael’s ankle, and in an instant he felt himself pulled in. Tory lifted a hand to receive his, Winston reached out to grab him as well, pulling him into this awkward four-way hug. Dillon found him­self, as he always did, at the center; the linchpin that kept them con­nected.

The sensation of the four of them in physical contact was over­whelming, but it was more than mere contact—it was an irresistible yearning to meld with each other’s spirits and to be as they had once been: a single soul in the heart of a brilliant star. The powerful yearning defeated any concept of personal space. When they were touching, they were one.

“Do you remember when we held each other like this?” Tory asked Dillon. “In that field in Iowa—in that open corn silo, looking up at the stars?”

“He wasn’t there,” Winston reminded her. “It was the three of us and Lourdes.”

“I never knew . . .” was all Dillon could bring himself to say. It was, for Dillon like nothing he had ever experienced before.

No, that wasn’t true. There was one time he had felt this.

One fraction of a second more than two years ago. All six of them were falling through a portal in space. Holding one another. Touching. Connected. Complete. They had never once come into physical con­tact since then —certainly not during their tenure at Hearst Castle, or in the Nevada desert—Okoya had made sure to keep them divided against one another.

Although Dillon was losing a sense of his boundary between him­self and the others, he forced himself to pull away.

“Not yet.”

“Stay here.”

“Stay together,” the others pleaded, still clinging to him. But now Dillon was sure there was something off about this; something he couldn’t quite place.

“No,” Dillon told them, and tried to put his feeling into words. “There’s a . . . a perfect joining,” he said. “A perfect pattern—that we haven’t found . . . ' He stood, pulling free from them, feeling their fields fall slightly out of alignment as they individuated once more. He turned to them as they stood from the floor, and regarded them, trying to see beyond sight. He was the great seer of patterns, and he could sense that their pattern was more than just a random intertwining. They fit like a crystal—like a molecule. There had to be a physical form to match the pattern by which their spirits connected.

He held up his right hand, thought for a moment, then put it down again. Then he held up his left hand and stretched it toward each of them. He felt the greatest gravity toward Michael.

“Michael,” he said. “Hold up your left hand.” Michael did, and it seemed that his hand pulled Michael forward almost against his will. Their hands touched, their fingers intertwined, their knuckles became white with the strength of the grip.

“Where do you feel Tory?” Dillon asked Michael.