Shuttered Sky

book to Dillon, just like everyone else.

“I believe it was a sister,” Dillon said. “This is the spirit you want to bring back more than any other—this innocent child . . . and yet, the camp where she died is our last destination. You see her as your reward when all others have been revived. No one knows this but you.”

Tessic could barely move or breathe. “Stop,” he tried to say, but his lips wouldn’t form the word.

“Shall I go on?” Dillon asked.

Tessic had no idea what Dillon was about to say. Until this mo­ment, he didn’t think there was anything that could make him vul­nerable, but now he instinctively knew that the next words out of Dillon’s mouth, whatever they were, would either make him whole or destroy him. He did not know which it would be. Then he realized that it didn’t matter. Either way, Dillon would win. Nothing in Tes­sic’s own personal arsenal could defend against this weapon Dillon now wielded. Until now Tessic had not truly understood this power of Dillon to affect the world with a whisper. Simple words, nothing more. But from Dillon’s mouth even the simplest of words could be devas­ tating.

“M . . . M . . . Michael and Tory,” he said, stunned to find himself stuttering—something he hadn’t done since the earliest days of his youth.

“Michael and Tory, what?”

Tessic forced volume into his voice. “Michael and Tory may go seek out Lourdes. But I need you and Winston to stay. You two are the ones crucial to this effort.”

There was a hesitation on Dillon’s part. Perhaps the first since he came into the room.

“Please, Dillon. I need you.”

Dillon considered his plea for a moment more, then nodded. “Al­right. But I want them to leave immediately.”

Tessic let his shoulders relax. So, it was a negotiation after all. “Yes. Of course—with an escort, a jet— whatever they need.”

“Make those your first calls.” Dillon stood handing Tessic the tele­phone receiver, then glanced at the pictures on the desk. “Once they’re on their way, Winston and I will be ready to take on that road.”

Dillon left and Tessic collapsed into his chair, forcing a few deep breaths to regain his composure. Perhaps it was worth losing Michael and Tory temporarily in a gambit to bring back Lourdes. He quickly got a paper and began to jot down notes. Their progress would be slower without Michael and Tory, but Michael’s moods and weather patterns were more of a hindrance than a help. And although Tory’s was a medicinal presence, they could do without her; there were med­ical supplies enough to treat anything the dead brought back with them.

Within five minutes he had retuned his thinking to this new busi­ness environment. He was nothing, if not adaptable. And he put out of his mind how, for a moment, Dillon had extracted the fragile core of his existence, and pinched it between his fingers.

* * *

Michael and Tory were more surprised than anyone that Dillon had negotiated their release.

“I could have forced him to let us all go, but I sensed that it would shatter him,” Dillon told them.

“And why is that such a bad thing?” Winston grumbled.

Certainly Dillon had many reasons, not the least of which was admiration, and some level of love for this man who had, in a strange way, become Dillon’s surrogate father. But these weren’t the reasons he gave them. “You don’t want to shatter the richest arms manufac­turer in the world,” he told them, and the others were quick to agree— after all, Tessic probably had more fingers on more buttons than all of NATO put together.

Dillon had played the situation, just as they knew he could. He let Tessic believe he had negotiated, but in truth, this was the arrangement Dillon wanted all along. Michael and Tory would be their ambassadors to the Vectors. “Yeah, because we’re expendable,” Michael com­plained—but they knew why it was best this way. Dillon could not be allowed to face the Vectors until they were at their strongest— because if they defeated him, then all was lost.

Michael and Tory were gone, spirited to Katowice International Airport by helicopter before breakfast was served, bound for Sicily, and the cold embrace of Lourdes Hidalgo, who they all agreed was more than merely AWOL.

If they were shards of the Scorpion Star, then she had become the venom in the tip of its tail.

31. The Dead Sea

Scores of rotting fish washed up against the cliffs of Taormina, Sicily, sending up an uncompromising stench to the Cliffside Greek Theater. It was a constant reminder to Lourdes of her many mistakes and missteps under the tutelage of her three Angels of Death.

The disaster at the Jamaican racetrack had only been the beginning. Following orders from Memo, thinly veiled as suggestions, Lourdes had gripped and controlled one hundred people in Miami, then three hundred further up the Florida coast, marching them this way and that like a cracker box army. There had been no major mishaps. Then when their ship reached Daytona, she had tried to commandeer five hun­dred—and had succeeded, her skill sharpening with practice, as Memo had said it would. She was able to grip their bodies and their wills, propelling them in an orderly and efficient manner to the beach. But their inertia proved too much for her. The wave of their motion had direction but no destination. They couldn’t stop moving. They drowned.

For the media, it became just one more nasty event in a disinte­grating world—and although it would have been analyzed ad infinitum by the public a year ago, there were so many unconscionable events from one day to the next, it was quickly submerged in the collective consciousness. Lourdes thought she would feel worse about it— tor­mented by the helplessness her victims must have felt, and yet she was amazed at how well she slept that night.

“You’ve grown beyond caring about them,” Memo, the child-demon had told her. She didn’t know whether to be pleased or hor­rified by her ability to dissociate from a human context. Did it make her a cold-blooded killer, or transcendent?

Still packed with her hedonistic throng, the Blue Horizon had cut a course to Bermuda. There, she had gripped ten times as many—but this time did not leave her impulse open-ended. She clipped it, fo­cusing her attention on the shoreline. Five thousand fell under her control, impelled to the edge of the surf, where they stopped at her command, holding themselves at attention until she released them. Success—and yet in this success there was still no satisfaction.

“Five thousand, or fifty thousand,” the bat-faced woman, Cerilla, had said. “It doesn’t matter. It isn’t anywhere close to what we need.”

“Give her time,” Memo had insisted. But time was running out—yet they wouldn’t tell Lourdes why this needed to be accomplished on a predetermined schedule.

“If you are leading this invasion,” she had asked, “why can’t you decide when it will happen?”

“The water must boil,” Memo told her, “my abuela used to tell me, you can’t put the spaghetti in until the water boils. But if you wait too long, the water boils off.”

When they crossed through the straight of Gibraltar into the Med­iterranean, that water began to simmer. That’s when she sensed two revivals, falling only a day apart. They were distant—back in America. She could only assume that Dillon had brought back Michael and Tory, as Deanna was unreachable. At both moments, it had evoked in her old feelings of an unbreakable connection between all of them, but those feelings were quickly snuffed by the vacuum in which her spirit now dwelled.

So, the Fantastic Four were together again. Well, good for them. Let them obsess and confer over the fate of the world. She had no interest in being part of that. She knew her three new malefactors must have sensed their revival as well. Perhaps that’s why they continued to be so displeased with her progress.

Then, on December first, with only seven days left until the greatest performance of her life, their pleasure cruise became the Voy­age of the Damned.

It was the Captain’s fault. He had chosen to take the ship north of Sicily rather than south, forcing them into an ambush in the Strait of Messina. Perhaps he was in collusion with the ships that attacked them. She could not be