Shuttered Sky

The na­tion was more than happy to lay the infrastructure at their own ex­pense—including the very roads that would connect the complex with the rest of Poland.

Tessitech had placed an order with a German bus company for three hundred coaches, with plush velour seats. They were the kind of tour buses that moved millions in and out of tourist attractions around the world. The bus builder’s simple assumption was that Tessic, who dabbled in everything from art collecting, to construction, was planning to open some sort of travel enterprise. He hired three hundred bus drivers. They had been collecting salaries for weeks now, and had yet to be called to work. Until today.

Once it began there could be no turning back. The clockwork would grind to its inexorable conclusion; a final solution to the Final So­lution—and now Tessic knew why the Almighty, in his wisdom, had seen fit to make Tessic into a manufacturer of weapons. He had at his disposal enough firepower to decimate anyone who tried to stop him.

* * *

It was nothing short of hell.

A pit of muddy ash soon became for the Shards a place beyond the reach of nightmare.

It began even before they stepped over the railing that separated the living from the dead. Then, as they stepped into the pit, they lost their balance, sliding down the slick concrete slope until they were waist deep in the wet, ashen soup.

Things began to move.

The homogenous mixture began to differentiate, bubbling like a brew in a massive cauldron, turning brown, then red, and taking on the smell of blood.

“Syntaxis!” shouted Dillon, for to be alone and disconnected now would be unbearable.

“Hurry, hurry!” cried Tory.

Dillon reached his left hand out to Michael’s. Tory pressed herself against Michael, thrusting her hand to Dillon’s chest. Winston insin­uated between Dillon and Tory, and syntaxis swept through them. They thought it would shield them, but as their power magnified, their perception expanded, as if they had a dozen new senses at their grasp.

It happened quickly.

In a matter of minutes the wet ash began to transubstantiate, and they were immersed in bones and blood; a crucible of flesh consuming its own decay, swelling, soaking up the moisture.

Dillon didn’t know if the others screamed for he could only hear his own as that first hand grabbed at his leg; a woman as terrified now as she had been at the moment of her death. Then there was another, and another, until their wailing voices drowned out his own. The resurrection of flesh was not a glorious process, gilded in sacred light. It was bloody, and violent. It was like birth itself; traumatic and painful until the cry of life filled the room.

The living differentiated themselves from the dead, pulling them­selves from the pit, staggering toward the light at the entrance, where Tessic’s workers would clean them, and spirit them away—their lives processed with the swift efficiency that their deaths had been.

Soon the tangle of desperate arms and legs pulled the Shards down, and Dillon felt something within himself give way. He felt his mind drop through a trap door like a snail pulling into its shell, around and around, spiraling deeper into itself, until reaching the center of his soul, where time and self mercifully vanished into sweet nothingness.

* * *

A steady stream of the awakened flowed from the monument dome. They were rinsed with warm water, and wrapped in plush robes. “You’ve been liberated,” was all the workers were allowed to tell them. Explanations, Tessic knew, were secondary. That they were alive was all they needed to know; enough to grapple with for now. Their names were taken down, and they were walked to the line of buses that would shuttle them three hundred miles to the Ciechanow complex.

After four hours the line of the awakened slowed, then stopped. Only then did Tessic go into the dome. There he found the four Shards lying in a vascular miasma that was not quite alive, not quite dead. A dense membrane thick with blood vessels had grown up from the pit and onto the walls; flesh that could not find its form, but was obliged to find some form. It became a womb that filled the cavity of the monument from the bottom of the pit to the apex of the dome. Some of the workers who followed Tessic in became ill, but Tessic began to pray, reciting the Sh’ma. It was the same prayer he had uttered when his plane hit clear air turbulence and took a five-thousand-foot dive. The same prayer he had intoned when terrorists put the muzzle of a pistol to his head, then capriciously spared his life. It was a prayer he said daily, but only on certain occasions did it become a lifeline to sanity.

Three others followed Tessic down into the center of this terrible womb, where the four Shards lay unconscious, almost fully encased by the membrane, their bodies touching in what seemed a very specific way. He tore them from it, and blood spilled from the membrane. It was already beginning to peel from the walls and drop from the dome as it died. He left, carrying Dillon in his arms, focusing all his attention on Dillon’s catatonic eyes, refusing to look at the dying walls of the womb, for he could swear within the veiny patterns of flesh, he could still see faces.

* * *

It was deep into the night by the time Dillon spiraled out of himself, coming back from wherever it was he had gone. When he did return from that void, he returned slowly, expanding his perception in in­crements. First he was aware of his own heartbeat. Then he felt the shape and form of his body. His extremities. Fingers and toes. He knew that he was covered in some thick fabric. A quilt, warm and comfort­able.

He had never quite lost consciousness. Some part of him was aware of all that happened, because even in his state of detachment, he re­membered being pulled from the pit. He remembered that he was in Tessic’s private dacha on the outskirts of Ciechanow. He knew that five thousand had been brought back from a death camp known to have snuffed almost half a million.

And he knew that their powers had given out before the rest of the job was done.

The Shards had simply shut down, emptied. Now it took a great measure of his will just to move his arm. He wanted to sleep—truly sleep, but he could not. He wondered if he’d ever be able to sleep again.

“You’re back with us, then?”

Dillon pulled himself up enough in his bed to see Tessic keeping a vigil beside him.

“Is it still Monday?” Dillon asked.

“Barely. You slept for more than twelve hours.”

Dillon shook his head. “I didn’t sleep.”

“No,” Tessic admitted. “Your eyes were open.”

“Where are the others?”

“Resting, like you.”

“Things didn’t go the way you had expected.”

“Things rarely do. But all in perspective. Today five thousand mur­dered souls have a new claim on life.”

“You expected more.”

Tessic stood and paced to the window.

“Next time there will be. Today you flexed your muscles. You were bound to exhaust yourself. This is how we build ourselves up. Next time you’ll be twice as strong.”

“This isn’t a marathon.”

“I think that perhaps it is.” Tessic crossed the room to a familiar device Dillon hadn’t noticed in the room before; two canisters of col­ored sand.

“The Dillonometer.”

“When we brought you here,” Tessic said, “the sands took half an hour to differentiate. Now it’s down to five minutes. Tomorrow it will be back to ten seconds—maybe even less.” He let out a confident sigh. “You see? The Majdanek dome was only an auspicious begin­ning.”

He waited for Dillon’s reaction, but when Dillon gave him none, he said, “Maddy should be back soon. Shall I send her in?”

Dillon shifted in his bed—feeling every joint, every tendon. “What makes you so sure I want to see