Shuttered Sky

hear. After all that had happened between the two of them, she knew he considered her the brave one.

“Come on,” said Michael. “It’ll just be like any other family re­union. Blood; violence; medical triage.”

“So what we do when we find her?”

“We’re in Sicily,” Michael said, and put on his best Vito Corleone. “I’ll make her an offer she can’t refuse.” Tory laughed in spite of herself.

By the time they could see Taormina in the distance, both sides of the road were deserted. Then once they hit the town, the situation became far clearer than they wanted it to, for while homes and busi­nesses in the outskirts of town were deserted, there was a point halfway into town where the population remained, but they weren’t talking much.

Michael slowed the car for a man crossing the street, only to find the man stuck in mid-stride, not moving, like a toy whose batteries had died halfway across the street. On the sidewalks, too, people were as frozen as the mannequins in the store front windows.

“Lourdes . . .” said Tory. This time Michael had no quick retort. Lourdes had seized control of these people —but there had apparently been an event horizon. Those who had seen the immobile victims from just outside that horizon could not have understood what they were witnessing. Some would have crossed over and been caught themselves, like insects on flypaper, until enough had gotten the gen­eral idea, and would run, beginning that panicked exodus. Michael wove them around static figures until reaching a very literal tourist trap; a spot in the road clogged with frozen pedestrians. From there, they continued on foot. Although they were not subject to Lourdes’s field as these people were, they could still feel it, making it a chore to move their own muscles as if the air were thick and gelatinous.

Tory stopped to examine one woman. Although she wore a hat, her arms and shoulders were exposed by a strapless dress. Most of the exposed flesh was red and peeling with a sunburn that went down to second degree. Tory took off her own sweater and covered the woman’s shoulders.

“Lourdes must have grabbed them in the middle of the day yes­terday,” she said, “and just kept them here.” For what purpose? Tory wondered. She was holding them in abeyance, in a sort of psychic stasis, but for what?

Then the woman suddenly started moving, and Tory yelped and jumped back, stumbling on the uneven street. This woman wasn’t the only one moving, the others on the street were as well. They came out of shops and galleries, villas and flats, adding to the numbers on the street. Although their footfalls fell at different paces, they seemed to be of one mind when it came to their direction—east, downhill, toward the sea.

“Looks like we’re just in time for the brunch of the living dead,” Michael said. But these people weren’t exactly zombies. The marching throng had more grace than Tory and Michael expected.

“Shall we join the party?” asked Michael. And so they did, for today, in the town of Taormina, all roads led to Lourdes.

At the bottom of the winding street was a marina, quaint, but sizable. People made their way down the docks and boarded boats. Some were just passengers, others seemed to own the boats and have keys. Other keys were pulled through the smashed ruins of the marina office. This made it clear that Lourdes’s power had gained a new so­phistication; she wasn’t merely controlling their bodies, but she had commandeered their wills like a pervasive post-hypnotic suggestion. In every way, these people now belonged to her.

“Those people who got away weren’t all that wrong,” Tory said. “I can feel her hatred like radiation.”

Tory saw her first. She was at the entrance to a small gazebo, in a park overlooking the marina. She stood there watching her private civilian navy take shape, but Tory knew she was also watching them.

“Remember,” Michael reminded, “we’re just as strong as she is.”

“Except that she has the Vectors on her side.”

“They’re like Okoya,” Michael said. “They can manipulate, but they have no direct power over us, except the power we give them.”

But it did nothing to ease Tory’s sense of dread, as they climbed the hill.

* * *

Lourdes leaned on the railing of the gazebo, her arms crossed and her eyes fixed on them as they came across the park toward her. The latticework of the gazebo cast weblike shadows across the floor. She stepped back into the gazebo letting the web of shadows fall across her clothes and her face. They would have to enter into this open-air lair. They would not want to get that close, but she would make them.

“Hello, Lourdes,” Michael said, stopping just a few feet short of the gazebo. Tory stepped forward first. Coward, thought Lourdes. He’s a coward. What did she ever see in him? She remained toward the back of the structure, making no move toward them. Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly. “What a surprise,” she said, making it clear she was not surprised at all.

And then her eyes shot down to Tory’s hand. It had clasped Mi­chael’s. Even in their apprehension, their hands came together with such casual ease, she knew there was something more between them now than there had been before. As they stepped into the gazebo, Lourdes found her jealousy, which had seasoned so many of her days, was now bitter arsenic in the back of her throat.

“Where’s loverboy?” she asked Michael, with such enmity in her voice, she barely recognized it as her own.

“Excuse me?” said Michael.

“Drew,” she said. “Your lover.”

Tory turned to Michael more curious than shocked.

“You’re mistaken, Lourdes,” Michael told her. “Drew and I were never lovers.” And then he added, “Any more than you and I were lovers.”

She felt the barb twist in her gut. “I know what I know,” she said. In fact she knew nothing—only suspected, but she was loathe to admit it.

“Would you mind telling us what you’re doing here?” Tory asked.

Alright, she thought. They were no more interested in small talk than she. “My vacation came to an unexpected end. I’m here making myself some new friends.” She gestured toward the marina, where tourists as well as locals flooded the docks, squeezing themselves onto whatever boats still had room. Lourdes noticed their progress had slowed since her attention had shifted to Tory and Michael. This gath­ering required focus, and she resented that her focus had been pulled. She had thought she was supposed to be stronger in the presence of other Shards, but their fields were working against her own, hopelessly out of sync.

“I suppose I should thank you,” she said to Tory. “The stench from the beach has been unbearable in this heat. But the second you got here, the smell went away. Now the whole place is minty fresh.”

She took a step toward Tory. ' ‘The Goddess of Purity,’ isn’t that what Okoya had called you? Is that why you like her, Michael? Because her shit doesn’t smell? I’ll bet she doesn’t even have morning breath, does she?”

“You’re one sick bitch,” said Michael.

Lourdes laughed, and the laugh was echoed back a hundredfold by the mob in the marina, sounding like the cackling of geese.

“Did it feel good to kill all those people in Florida?” Michael went on. “Is it a thrill to pull planes out of the sky?”

She thought to tell them that Florida was an accident—and that she had to pull the reconnaissance planes from the sky to keep them from finding out what happened to the three warships. But telling them this would serve no one. Their disgust, on the other hand, was something she could relish.

“We know about the Vectors,” Tory said. “We know what they plan to do.”

' Vectors? Is that what you call them?”

“Why are you helping them?” Tory grabbed her, and for a moment she felt that long lost connection between them.

Lourdes pushed her away, not wanting to feel it. “Because there’s nothing and no one in this world worth saving.”

“So you’d rather fill it with demons?”

“They’re not demons!” She turned away. “They’re not angels ei­ther. But they’re the closest thing there is. If I have to choose sides, I choose them.”